A Penny in Time

by Anna Bartlett

  After his nanna left that night Yared lay curled up thinking of Robyn, and the way she’d been looking forward to seeing her dad again, just like he was waiting to see his parents. He wondered if things really did work out better than she’d expected after they’d moved to Goldsworthy. It made him feel happier to think that they might have.

  Tracy, the Loud and Unwelcome Visitor

  Yared lay on his side, his knees drawn up, and looked around the room at the empty bedside table, the tidy floor and his suitcase packed and ready for taking home the next day. His nanna switched off the light and came to sit on the bed beside him. She passed Yared the penny and he closed his fist around it. He didn’t want to think about tomorrow until he had to; there were going to be too many changes. He’d see his parents again, have to say goodbye to Nanna… and something else, to do with school, that he couldn’t quite remember.

  ‘This is the last story, isn’t it, Nanna?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, I suppose it is.’

  He opened his fist and stared at the copper coin through the dimness. ‘But how will I know what happens to the penny next?’

  ‘I… well… now that’s a good question.’ His nanna reached down, took the coin from his hand and held it up towards her. She turned it in her fingers for a few moments then smiled slightly. ‘Well now, perhaps I have a way.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Oh, I couldn’t tell you yet. It might spoil the plan.’

  She passed the coin back to Yared, who closed his fist around it once more and snuggled further under the covers.

  ‘Will you lie next to me, Nanna?’ he asked.

  Her eyebrows rose. ‘Lie next to you? Well… I suppose I could.’

  She shifted on the bed, making the mattress rustle, and slowly stretched out beside him, where Yared could feel her warmth.

  ‘I’ll have to be careful not to fall asleep here,’ she said and Yared laughed.

  ‘Then I’d have to go and sleep in your bed.’

  ‘Yes, perhaps you would,’ said his nanna. ‘And now, tonight’s story is set in the 1970s – when there were jumbo jets and fast food restaurants and colour television, which should please you.’

  Yared smiled and waited for the story to begin.

  Cathy lay in bed, her covers pushed back and her arms and legs spread wide, and listened to the rain drumming on the roof. She tried to imagine that she was outside feeling the rain against her skin, instead of inside in the heat and stickiness. Her teacher always told her she had an overactive imagination but right now Cathy didn’t think it was good enough.

  A scuffling noise came from the doorway and she turned her head to see the shadowy shape of her younger brother Michael tiptoeing into the room.

  ‘Cathy, are you awake?’ he whispered.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Do you think Santa Claus will still come, even though Mum and Dad aren’t here?’

  Cathy sighed. ‘Yes. Go back to bed.’

  ‘But if–’

  ‘He won’t come if you’re awake you know, Michael. Go back to bed.’

  The figure in the doorway lingered for a moment then turned and crept back out. Cathy flapped the baggy t-shirt she was wearing and rolled over to face the wall. Michael was too old to believe in Santa; he was probably just worried he’d miss out on presents because no-one was there to put them in his stocking. But that was Darren’s fault, Cathy thought, for having a croup attack just after dinner. Darren always got croup – their mother said he’d grow out of it as he got older. Usually steaming up the bathroom was enough to stop it, but sometimes, like tonight, he had so much trouble breathing that their mum had to take him to hospital.

  The repetitive noise of the rain on the corrugated iron roof was making Cathy drowsy. It wasn’t very late yet, but she was worn out from helping with Christmas preparations and spending hours in the pool with her brothers. Besides, darkness had fallen earlier than usual today, so it seemed later than it was. Before she fell asleep she slipped her hand under the pillow and felt for the old copper penny she kept there. It was her lucky penny; she’d found it down behind the sofa several years before. Now she rubbed her thumb across the face of the coin and thought of her dad out pearl farming up the coast. He’d originally planned to be home this morning but he’d set out later than he’d wanted, and now he wouldn’t be back until tomorrow. Cathy always rubbed her penny when her father was on one of his trips, and so far he’d come home safely every time. She drifted off to sleep imagining her dad sailing his boat steadily through the wind and waves towards them.

  When she woke it was still dark and a noise like a hundred semitrailers roaring down the highway was coming from outside. Cathy’s heart began pounding; she reached over to turn on her bedside lamp but when she flicked the switch nothing happened. It was pitch black until a brilliant flash of lightning lit the sky, and then she saw that her curtains were streaming out horizontally and the glass of her louvre windows was bending inwards.

  Everything plunged into darkness again and Cathy scrambled out of bed, her pulse racing, and began to stumble towards the door. The floor was wet under her feet and she could feel the house shuddering. Sheets of lightning filled the sky and Cathy used the flashes to make her way through the doorway and into the hall. She hurried round the bend in the hallway, her arms outstretched for balance, until she came to her twin brother’s room.

  ‘Shane,’ she called into the darkness. ‘Shane!’

  A burst of lightning showed him crouched beside his bed in a pair of old shorts, fumbling at his chest of drawers. Darkness came down again but then Cathy saw a thin beam of light appear, and Shane crossed the room towards her with his torch.

  ‘It’s the cyclone.’ He had to shout over the screaming of the wind. ‘Where’s Michael?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Cathy said, and began to imagine him lost and disoriented in the darkness.

  ‘Come on, we have to find him,’ Shane said and led the way down the hall towards Michael and Darren’s room.

  When they reached the boys’ doorway Cathy caught her breath; Michael was lying on his bed, completely still. What if the noise of the cyclone had scared him so much he’d stopped breathing? She raced across the room by the light of Shane’s torch and shook her brother’s shoulder.

  ‘Michael, wake up,’ she shouted. ‘Please wake up.’

  He stirred, sat up and looked around blankly. ‘What–’

  ‘It’s the cyclone,’ Shane said. ‘We have to find somewhere safe.’

  There was an explosion like a gunshot as all the windows in the room shattered, spraying glass into the air. The wind and rain swept in, whipping around them furiously. Shane dragged Michael to the ground and under the bed, and Cathy squeezed in after them.

  Huddled between the bedsprings and the floorboards, Cathy could hear things swirling round the room as though they were in a giant blender, and she wrapped her arms around her head to try to stop the noise. The floor was wet and the wind swept and screeched through the house; everything was so different from this afternoon that Cathy felt she must be in a dream. Only the memory of the cyclone warning she’d seen on TV, just after the news bulletin full of strikes and protests, made this feel at all real. But no-one had thought the cyclone was going to hit. The one three weeks before had turned away before it reached them.

  Cathy could hardly see her brothers crouched in the dark around her; Shane had turned his torch off and the frequent flashes of lightning didn’t reach very far under the bed. She could feel Michael quivering beside her though, and her own heart was pounding in her chest. She knew neither of her parents would be back until morning, and she hated the darkness and the noise.

  Clangs and crashes came from outside and the screeching of the wind went on and on as the children sheltered under the bed. None of them was wearing much and Cathy was shivering from the freezing rain driving across the room. She was curled on her side, hugging her knees, when there was a tremendous tearing sound from above them and the noise of
the storm suddenly became ten times louder.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Cathy yelled.

  ‘It’s the roof,’ said Shane. ‘I think the roof’s gone.’

  ‘We can’t stay here,’ Cathy said. If the wind was strong enough to blow the roof off, she knew it could blow them away too. ‘We have to move.’

  ‘Where?’ asked Michael.

  ‘The bathroom,’ yelled Shane. ‘It’s the safest place. Come on.’

  The feeble beam of light from his torch reappeared and the three of them crawled out from under the bed. Horizontal rain was pelting in through the smashed windows and the roar of the wind hurt Cathy’s ears. Gusts whirled around them, tearing at them, and they stayed on hands and knees as they fought their way across the room and into the hallway.

  Cathy was crawling last in line, behind Michael, and she thought she was about to be blown away. Something small and hard slammed into her shoulder and the floorboards around her were littered with broken crockery. There was a bang behind them and the house shook; Cathy heard Shane yell something but she couldn’t tell what.

  The hallway seemed to stretch forever to Cathy but eventually a flash of lightning showed the bathroom door to their right. She crowded in after her brothers and together she and Shane heaved the door shut. Now that the roof of the house had been blown off water fell steadily down on them through the plaster ceiling, but Cathy knew that the bathroom was still the strongest room in their house.

  The three of them crawled into the corner between the bathtub and the wall and huddled there while Cyclone Tracy raged around them. Cathy couldn’t help thinking of what the wind might do next, if it was strong enough to blow the roof off a house. She couldn’t believe the noise it made; it was louder than the planes starting their engines at the airport, louder than anything she’d heard before. She curled into herself as the plaster ceiling slowly sank in the middle then collapsed in pieces around them, the wind whipping the pieces about the room. If only it was daylight. If only the noise would stop. If only her mum and dad were there.

  Cathy’s teeth began rattling and she pulled her drenched t-shirt closer around her. She huddled there listening to the crashes and roaring of the cyclone until she noticed the noise of the wind dying down, and then all of a sudden there was stillness. Now the only sound Cathy could hear was a dog barking nearby, and the air seemed hardly to move. She unfolded herself and looked around cautiously; she knew this must be the eye of the cyclone.

  Shane was climbing to his feet beside her and Michael sat round-eyed. Shane’s torch seemed to have disappeared in the wind but lightning still flashed across the sky and Cathy could see debris all over the bathroom floor – pieces of fibro, roof tiles, a flattened bath boat of Darren’s. The football Michael had been given a month before for his ninth birthday was jammed into the basin; she wasn’t sure how it had got there.

  The bathroom had no windows, so none of them knew what had happened outside. Cathy and Shane picked their way to the door and pulled it open with Michael trailing behind.

  ‘Wow,’ Shane said. ‘Look at that.’

  Scattered down the hallway were broken chairs, glass and pieces of masonite board. Records, picture frames, plates and pot plants were smashed to pieces on the floor and the pavlova their mum had made for Christmas lunch was floating in a puddle of water.

  Shane ran a hand through his sopping hair. ‘What do we do?’ he asked.

  ‘Mum said to go to the Clarkes’ if we needed help,’ said Michael.

  ‘I don’t think we should,’ Cathy said. ‘The wind could come back anytime, and that’s halfway down the street.’

  ‘Then we’ll have to stay in the bathroom,’ said Shane. ‘If we go down to the laundry the house might fall on top of us.’

  Cathy shuddered. ‘Don’t say that.’

  They stood in the doorway for a few minutes, staring at the chaos in the hallway, then Cathy shook herself and said, ‘Shouldn’t we bring something into the bathroom with us?’

  ‘Like what?’ said Shane.

  ‘I don’t know. Some food, or something to hide under.’ She’d heard her mum’s mother, Grandma Ying, talk about the cyclone in 1937 once.

  ‘I suppose we could use mattresses,’ said Shane. ‘They might help.’

  They picked their way through the wreckage in the hallway to Michael and Darren’s room. Bursts of lightning lit their way but Cathy found the stillness eerie, when she knew the rushing winds would soon be back. In the boys’ room they found Michael’s bed lying on its side with the mattress propped against it. Cathy and Shane lugged the soggy mattress back to the bathroom then returned for Darren’s as well.

  ‘I think that’s all we can fit,’ Shane said once they’d dragged them both into the room. ‘We can put one on top of us to keep the rain off. The other one could go against the door.’

  Cathy sat on the cold tile floor with her brothers and waited for the cyclone to return. She couldn’t help thinking of what the wind had sounded like and how much damage it had done to their house. She wondered what her bedroom looked like now, and how many of her things had been broken. Did her shelf still have its books? Did her bed still have a mattress? And then she remembered the old penny she always kept on her mattress, hidden under her pillow.

  ‘I’ve got to get my lucky penny,’ she said, scrambling to her feet. If they were going to make it through the second half of this cyclone she thought they’d need all the luck they could get.

  ‘But what if the wind comes back?’ Michael asked.

  ‘I’ll be quick,’ Cathy said. She pulled the mattress away from the door and slipped out.

  ‘Be careful,’ Shane called after her.

  Cathy picked her way through the rubbish in the hall, past Michael and Darren’s room and then the doorway to Shane’s. As she came round the corner just before her bedroom she slowed to a stop. Her room was still there, minus its roof, but her parents’ bedroom and half the front sitting room had disappeared. Where they had been there was nothing but bare floorboards, stretching away until the sudden drop to the front yard. Through the huge gap where the walls of their house should have been Cathy could see the homes across the street, tattered and broken like theirs, and a car lying upside down in the road. Steel power poles were bent and twisted at strange angles, and all sorts of rubble littered the ground.

  She shivered, remembered that the second wind might hit any minute and walked carefully into her bedroom. Every louvre window in the room had been smashed and a fridge she didn’t recognise lay across her desk, but to Cathy’s relief her bed still sat in the middle of the room. When she picked her way across she found that the sheets were soaked and full of glass, and that her pillow was nowhere to be seen. She patted the top of the bed carefully, moving from left to right, and at last her fingers found the cold, hard metal of her special penny, tucked into a fold in the sheet.

  Cathy picked up the coin and rubbed her thumb across its face, and as she did she heard a rushing, roaring sound and realised the second wind was coming. She dashed across the room, her feet beginning to sting as they were cut by fragments of glass, and through the rubble in the hallway. By the time she reached the bathroom the wind was whipping and swirling around her, and it took all her strength to heave the door open. But at last she staggered through and her brothers shut the door and wedged the mattress against it again.

  As Cathy curled up in the corner of the bathroom and helped Shane and Michael pull the second mattress over them all, she could feel her heart pounding and the fear coming back. All three of them were soaked to the skin and shivering with cold, and the wind seemed even louder than it had been before. Cathy didn’t know how long the cyclone would last. What if it never ended? What if daylight never came? The whole front of their house had disappeared. What if the bathroom blew away too?

  She lay in the dark imagining all the things that might happen, with Michael’s arm quivering against hers. A crash like a thunderclap came over the screaming of the wind and the
house rocked and shuddered. Cathy gave a start and felt the edges of the penny dig into her fingers. Huddled under the mattress she couldn’t see the coin, but now she rubbed it with her thumb and thought of her dad, who often had to face raging winds and pounding seas but who always fought his way through them back to his family. She thought of the way she liked to imagine him sailing safely through the waves, then she tried to imagine her whole family celebrating Christmas together the next day. She tried to imagine the wind stopping and daylight coming and herself and Shane and Michael crawling out from under the mattress unhurt.

  Cathy took a deep breath and wriggled closer to her brothers, until she pressed against them on the wet floor. She wrapped her arms around Michael, who was covered in goosebumps.

  ‘We’ll be okay,’ she shouted. ‘We’re going to be okay.’

  There was no answer from her brothers.

  ‘Just imagine it’s over,’ she said. ‘Imagine it’s Christmas.’

  ‘It is Christmas,’ Shane said.

  Michael wriggled in her arms. ‘And Santa Claus hasn’t come yet,’ he yelled. ‘You were right, Cathy. You said he wouldn’t come if we were awake.’

  Cathy thought of the Christmas tree they’d set up in the sitting room, and all the presents they’d laid out under it. The sitting room had disappeared completely; she wondered where the presents were now.

  ‘Maybe he’s still coming,’ she shouted. ‘Maybe he just got blown off-course.’ The wind roared and screamed around the house and rain thudded down on the mattress, but Cathy tried her hardest not to think about it. ‘What do you want him to bring you?’

  ‘New footy boots,’ Michael yelled.

  ‘A fishing rod,’ said Shane.

  ‘And a spaceman robot,’ said Michael.

  Cathy just wanted Santa Claus to bring her family back home safely. She’d stopped caring about the little troll dolls and the candle-making set she’d been asking her parents for.

  A gust of wind swirled into the bathroom and ripped the mattress off them and into the night, leaving them unprotected in the freezing wind and rain. Cathy’s lucky penny was torn from her hand and thrown across the room.