House That Was Eureka (9781922148254)

by Wheatley, Nadia; Jordan, Toni (INT)

  (To be someone and do something, then Lizzie will love him.)

  Nobby slips up the stairs and hides himself under the big double bed in the upstairs front room. The counterpane hangs right down to the floor, so no one will see him. Looking up, he sees the criss-cross of the bed-wire, beneath the mattress. It might be a long wait. (What if it’s days?) Nobby wishes he’d had time for tea. He’s hungry already.

  Downstairs, Mr Dacey plays his tin whistle. Mick and Williams and Paddy plug up the gap. The others sing.

  8

  Roseanne was still raving on. Evie swung her legs back and forth as she sat on the dressing-table, and blocked her mind off from Roseanne. Evie heard the music, but only faintly. It was a jolly sort of tune that only made her lonelier, she wished she had a love. The tune sort of bounced along in time to the scrabbling. Scrabble-scrabble. In the cupboard. Evie often heard it, but since that first night she hadn’t looked in there. Hadn’t even opened the door. It had been open, that day Jodie had been in her room, but Evie had slammed it shut, not even looking. The cupboard was probably connected with the weirdness, and Evie didn’t want to know. A minute ago she’d even thought she’d heard the despot ringing, like the despot did all the time now when Evie went in to get her midday dinner.

  Ring, ring, and Evie would go running up the stairs, only to find that white face staring at her. Occasionally there’d be something on the magic-pad.

  ‘TELL’

  But it wouldn’t say what to tell, who to tell.

  ‘WHAT’S THE DATE?’

  It had said that on Monday.

  ‘The fifteenth of June,’ Evie had said.

  Then the despot had just looked, and said nothing.

  ‘I’M HUNGRY.’

  It had said that yesterday.

  ‘I’ll bring it up in a minute.’ But then when Evie had taken the food up, the despot had waved it away. That ring-hand ordering her. That bell ordering her, ring-ring.

  ‘What’s that scrabbling sound,’ Roseanne said, ‘in the cupboard?’

  Roseanne shuddered: probably rats. Roseanne’s dad had said something about Ted being down on his uppers. (‘Don’t breathe a word to Evie. I don’t even think he’s told his wife.’) Roseanne’s dad used to drink with Evie’s Ted at the Campbelltown Catholic Club. ‘You’ve even got rats!’ Roseanne said.

  Her shrill voice went through Evie, woke her up.

  ‘What, d’you hear something?’

  ‘In the cupboard.’

  Evie almost hugged Roseanne. If Roseanne heard it too, it couldn’t just be Evie off her brain.

  ‘No, of course I don’t.’

  Of course I don’t have rats.

  Pushed like this, by Roseanne there in her new pastel jeans that her mother had just bought her, with her packet of cigarettes that she smoked so expertly, Evie leapt to the defence of 203 Liberty Street.

  ‘Look, I’ll show you.’

  Evie flung open the cupboard door. Roseanne jumped onto the bed. Stood there precariously on the springy mattress in her high-heeled sandals, looking like the farmer’s wife in Sammy’s Three Blind Mice book.

  Nothing ran out of the cupboard. Evie laughed to see Roseanne, then bent and looked under the old copper, looked in the big gap where the fire used to go. There were no rats there. The scrabbling sound had stopped as soon as she opened the door.

  ‘It’s just the boy next door,’ Evie said, hearing the music a bit better now that Roseanne had stopped raving. ‘He spends half his life in the dunny.’

  As I was walking down the street

  A copper said to me:

  Do you belong to the doley-oh mob?

  Well come along with me…

  The music was coming easily to Noel, more easily than usual with new music he’d never seen before.

  ‘What’s that?’ Roseanne said from the bed. She started giggling. Could giggle now, now there were no rats. Standing upon the bed in her shoes made her feel silly and giggly after drinking two cans of Ted’s beer. She saw a heart that must be poor dumb Evie’s, poor dumb Evie scratching out a big heart inside the cupboard door on the paint, it must’ve taken her hours. ‘What’s that?’ said Roseanne.

  ‘I’ve never seen it before,’ said Evie.

  On the inside of the slatted wooden door was a large heart, picked out with a fingernail.

  Inside the heart was something that said:

  I

  Love

  N

  4

  Ever

  18/6/1981

  ‘Hello, I’m Noel.’

  A voice came in the door and addressed itself to a girl in pastel jeans bouncing giggling on a bed. A body accompanied the voice. Someone short and thin.

  ‘Oh, you’re Noel, are you?’ the giggler giggled. It made a big deal of it. ‘Evie, Noel’s here!’

  ‘What?’

  Evie wanted to be alone with the heart.

  To work the heart out.

  To work out the date: for that was today.

  Only just today, for it was only just Thursday. Just past midnight and becoming Thursday 18 June 1981.

  ‘Noel,’ said Roseanne.

  I have to be alone with the heart, to work the heart out.

  ‘Noel with the lovely hair, really clean, and a really good suntan,’ said Roseanne.

  I have to work this out.

  ‘Your boyfriend,’ Roseanne added. ‘Remember?’

  Evie remembered lots of things. Lights out there, crisscrossed neatly by the wire of the streets. That was one thing. I’m a flame. That was another.

  But getting in the way of that was Noel there at the door, pale and stupid, and Roseanne still bouncing and laughing.

  I love for ever, a feeling told Evie. A feeling that almost had a shape, it was so strong, a feeling that jumped through her mind, sharp as silver, bright as flame. Evie’s mind kept making sudden jumps these days and she got muddled.

  Roseanne laughed, and the flame flicked out, the feeling of the love was gone now, chased out of her mind by the embarrassment, the laughter.

  Noel was embarrassed too. Embarrass/embrace, he thought, the two words coming together as he watched Evie standing in front of the cupboard door. Her shoulder was pushed against it, so he couldn’t see the heart. The girl Noel had shot in the street was laughing on the bed in pink jeans. Noel was still carrying his mouth-organ, and it was real and comforting.

  Bang, Noel blasted but it didn’t stop anything. It didn’t even make a sound.

  ‘So you’re Evie’s love.’ Roseanne stopped bouncing and climbed off the bed. She felt sick, a bit. ‘Evie’s told me all about you. I should’ve clicked, when I heard the mouth-organ, that you were just the boy next door. Evie told me about you playing up at Newtown.’ Roseanne lit a cigarette.

  Evie looked at Noel, whose face was particularly pale tonight. Evie felt very sick.

  Noel felt sick. Evie had laughed with Roseanne about his secret landscape. He said nothing.

  ‘Piss off,’ said Evie. She screamed at him. ‘I’m sick of you creeps next door. Will you just bloody piss off and leave me alone! For ever!’

  Noel ran, and as he did, Maria came to the scullery door and said there was a man at the front door who’d been knocking and had woken her up.

  ‘It’s Roseanne’s dad and he says she has to go now.’

  9

  Evie lay on her bed for a long time after Roseanne had gone. Lay with her eyes open, her face flushed still at first with the shame of Noel, the fury; lay staring at the open cupboard door, concentrating her will upon the hatred so as to close her mind to the heart.

  I love for ever.

  Never never.

  It’s going to be a long hard night.

  Evie lay very still to make the time pass, to make the feeling go, and as she lay she felt the edges of herself dissolve into the place, so that there was no longer any line between the night, the room, and Evie.

  It was now she saw the girl with long black hair peer out from the triangle
of the cupboard, then snap shut the wooden door.

  Oh, you, Evie thought, as if the face was someone she knew from primary school perhaps, from way back anyway.

  I remember lots of things. But can’t now, can’t quite remember how Evie was seven weeks ago when I felt nothing in me.

  I know I know hate now, but I don’t know where it should go; know I know love, but that was gone before I ever had it. I know Evie’s changed since she moved to Newtown.

  Yet Evie still is Evie.

  So when Evie saw a face in her cupboard late that night she decided to clean the cupboard out. She’d been meaning to do it for ages.

  Getting up then, pulling the edges of her body back out of the night, Evie opened the cupboard again, and it was just a big, dirty, triangular closed-in space, containing only an old fuel copper and a broken push-mower and bike tyres and rusted paint tins and flagon bottles encrusted with sediments of poisonous-looking liquids.

  Turning her back on the heart, closing her mind to the heart, Evie started pulling all the junk out.

  10

  Crouching in darkness, for some reason underneath a bed, Noel heard singing.

  …A copper said to me:

  Do you belong to the doley-oh mob?

  Well come along with me!

  And he grabbed me by the collar,

  And tried to run me in.

  So I upped me fist

  And I knocked him stiff

  And we all began to sing…

  Then Noel heard silence, and it was the silence of hatred.

  An echo of the words Evie had screamed at him floated for a second, but as Noel lay there hearing his own breathing, hearing the despot’s breathing, he knew it was the hatred given out by the old woman and himself that made this silence that seemed to last for hours.

  Then suddenly there came the bullet bangs, and the voices, that even in this dream he recognized as being those customary bullet sounds and voices he was always dreaming. He could never make out what the voices yelled.

  Noel climbed out from under the bed. That was odd, because usually the dream stopped at this point: Noel in this dream knew he was dreaming, so expected his dream to end but it didn’t. He climbed out from under the bed, and that part, though dream, was also true this time, for earlier in the nightmare Noel had fallen out of his bed and rolled under it. Noel climbed out, and recognized his own room, and that was a shock, for he felt he should be in some other, but similar, room. That poster of Bob Dylan shouldn’t be there.

  As a child, Noel used to sleepwalk. He hadn’t done it for years, but this night he did.

  Noel was scared. His dream was full of running men but he was alone. They were out on the balcony, here in the room, he could hear them in the back room, hear them on the stairs, but Noel was scared stiff and quite alone.

  He ran to the balcony and crouched down, and there were men down there in blue uniforms shooting up at him; and so he pulled out his gun and shot down into the street at the men who were shooting at him. Only he didn’t shoot: he tried to, and the blood inside him became a thin tepid trickle that wasn’t strong enough to hold his arm up, to hold the gun up, but the trouble was it wasn’t a gun it was only his arm.

  Panic then seized Noel, wild panic, he was frozen inside this lump of noise and movement that surged around him and he jerked now, struggled, freed himself from the lump and on all fours he crawled through his bedroom, through running legs, past Mum’s room, down the stairs, through the legs of the others running up and down, blue legs suddenly as well as brown legs and bare legs, legs in long white underpants and blue serge legs too, past a bullet that flew past him hitting plaster that sprayed upon his hair, white chalk flying in clouds inside the darkness; pausing now, on the landing, he heard the despot breathing through the noise.

  ‘Noh!’ The sound the despot made for Noel’s name.

  ‘No!’ screamed Noel. ‘No!’

  Refused the call and crawled on down on all fours like a cringing dog, still holding his gun, his gun that wasn’t real, crawled down through the diningroom where men were hitting men and men were wrestling men and there were more blue men than other men and the blue men were winning easily now and Noel wanted to help one of the other men who was kneeling there, but Noel was terrified, and just a boy.

  In the kitchen a shadow loomed, thrown up by flickering candlelight, and the shadow went to snatch him but the boy scuttled now, fast, maybe a cockroach, close to the floor as low as a beast he scuttled out of the grab and through the half-open kitchen door, stood up and opened the scullery door and slipped in there to escape.

  In his scullery, Noel breathed, for the act of standing up had woken him. Noel stood there in his pyjamas, trembling from the effort, shaking still from the terror of the dream, from the fear that stayed in him still (that would stay in him for ever). And in him with the fear was a dirty feeling.

  Noel saw the wide green eyes of the young man who’d been kneeling in the diningroom, forced to his knees beneath the blows from a pistol-butt that rained down upon his head. Kneeling, the young man was, but trying to stand, his hands crawling up the wall, trying to get a leverage; and there was blood running freely from the man’s arm, and as the hands moved up they left their pawmarks, stamped in blood.

  Noel had seen the young man, and not helped. Noel could have risen up, taken the blue man by surprise, smashed his fists into the pistol-butt, pulled out his own arm here that was a gun, pulled this gun out and shot the blue man, at least hit him with the gun, but Noel was a cockroach running this way and that, mad-scared between the legs, look-after-his-own-skin.

  Noel stood, breathing. Taking in air to his lungs. Still only half-awake, shivering in June in pyjamas without his duffle-coat, hearing clunks next door that he didn’t recognize as Evie clearing out junk, but which drew him.

  Awake now but still a zombie, still stuck in his dream, Noel performed an action which made his arms and legs move in a familiar way, taking any mind that Noel had along with them.

  Noel walked shivering over to the corner of his scullery and crouched down near the old fuel copper, there in the corner. He felt under it, pushed in under the gap, and pulled out all the bricks that were loose, not mortared in, they’d obviously been shifted before. Then Noel’s body crept through the hidey-hole, till he was under 203’s copper, and next his body slithered out, while Evie just watched.

  Noel says nothing, he just gets up.

  Evie says nothing either.

  She’s accustomed by now to Noel popping from nowhere, and it’s dawn, and Evie’s exhausted, standing on the copper, keeping her balance despite tiredness as she tries to clean out this damned cupboard.

  Noel shivers.

  Evie has her arms up high, trying to straighten the rusting old tin chimney that Noel has dislodged in his crawling, and as she shoves the chimney, this thing falls out pat into her hands.

  Legs stiff, feet stuck to the top of the copper, fear cold, like time all around. A hurry and slowness. And suddenly his face. Thin and white around the dark eyes of his fear and hurry as he grabs from her the gun.

  ‘That’s my gun,’ Noel says, and disappears.

  11

  Evie lay down then, and didn’t get up till she’d heard Ted and Mum leave. The girls were in the kitchen, and everything was so noisy and messy and normal that Evie wondered if the night had happened. Then, as she went to put the milk back in the fridge, something about the fridge door caught her eye, and her stomach turned over, as if she’d just gone too fast in a lift.

  On the fridge door they had a set of those plastic magnetized letters, for Sammy to learn her alphabet with. Sammy played with them a lot, writing her name and everyone else’s names, and Maria and Jodie would sometimes write four-letter words.

  This morning there was a name there, but it wasn’t anyone Evie knew.

  noBby wesTOn

  Evie read, and felt her stomach lift and drop fast. ‘Who did that?’

  The girls giggled at her fiercene
ss.

  ‘Whose name’s that?’

  But the girls giggled more.

  Evie shook Maria, for she was sure from her face that it was Ree that had done it, but Maria just laughed and pulled away, then grabbed her lunch and was off out the front door, Jodie at her heels.

  Evie looked at Sammy. But Sammy couldn’t know. Was just laughing because the others had, because Evie being so wild looked so funny. Evie didn’t usually get wild like that.

  Surprised herself at her wildness, Evie paused, tried to think why the letters upset her, and then suddenly anger gripped her again, anger at living in this bloody place where, ever since they’d come here, things had kept pulling at her, making her feel. Evie swiped her forearm across the fridge door, sending the bright-coloured letters flying off into air, and then they fell upon the floor, a scattered jumble, spelling no name.

  ‘I’m going to tell on you!’ Sammy said.

  ‘Who’ll you tell?’

  ‘Mr Man!’

  ‘You and your Mr Men books!’

  12

  After the battle was over, Mrs Weston stepped out onto the street. She could do it now for they were gone now, vanquished, the feet of the children that skipped out their two-four time in crotchets upon the pavement, skipped to steal her son, to stop her living.

  She was hungry, it was four days now. Four days since anything but black tea. And hungry too was the boy in her house, a thin, white-cheeked boy who’d run in as a fugitive to lie upon her floor.

  ‘Get in here, boy,’ she’d said. Hiding him beneath her bed, knowing he’d be safe here because no police would question her, she was the policemen’s accomplice.

  ‘Scab, scab!’ screeched Job the parrot, ever quick to pick up new tricks. ‘Give her a stab!’

  Stepping out through her gate onto the pavement, her neat black shoes had been polished that morning as they were every morning, come fire, come hail, come revolution, whether she was going to step out that day or not. In her dizziness from the hunger she wondered who the thin boy was, but whoever he was he was the cause of her stepping out now to buy food for she wouldn’t have done it for herself.