We See the Stars

  Sixteen

  All the lights were on in the classroom, and it was quiet when Cassie and I walked into the room. Mr Wade, the principal, was standing at the front watching us. I felt the little hairs on the back of my neck stick up when I saw him. Overnight the bees had added another couple of layers to the honeycomb. I could hear them buzzing in my ears, and it got louder as the honeycomb came higher up my throat.

  Right after the bell went the principal gave a small cough and everyone went still. ‘Thank you,’ Mr Wade said. ‘I’d like to introduce you to Mrs O’Brien.’ He gestured to the woman beside him. ‘Mrs O’Brien is going to be taking your class until we…’ He stopped, and there was a silence that lasted for four and a half breaths, and Mrs O’Brien stared straight ahead, right over the top of us.

  ‘Children, who here likes to watch the news?’ Mr Wade asked. He smiled when half of the class put their hands in the air. ‘Good, such smart students we have,’ he said.

  There was another pause and Mr Wade took a step forward, until he was right there in front of my desk and I could have put my hand out and touched the little dents in the soft of his jacket, and the corduroy could have caught in the little grooves in my skin, and I could have shed it like a cicada right there on the floor. He looked like he wanted to say things, but the words were getting stuck on the way out of his mouth.

  ‘Children,’ he said finally, ‘Ms Hilcombe might be on the news tonight.’

  The bird flapped in my chest so hard that the feathers flew up and into my nose, and for a second I had to breathe through my mouth. None of the other kids were moving, and I felt Cassie go still at her desk behind me.

  ‘Ms Hilcombe is missing,’ Mr Wade said.

  The bird hit my ribcage with its beak, and the pain of it went up and out along my arms, and its nest was completely ruined as it crashed back down.

  Mrs O’Brien closed her eyes and I could hear the breath coming out through her nose.

  ‘But we needn’t worry,’ Mr Wade said. ‘We needn’t worry, because chances are she’ll turn up soon, and everything will be back to normal. We need to have hope, and keep that hope alive in each other.’

  I looked down at my workbook, and I felt the bird flying up hard against my guts, and I pushed my fingers down into the wood of the desk so hard my nails turned white.

  ‘We must have faith,’ Mr Wade said. ‘Faith that everything will be just fine.’

  I heard Cassie snicker at her desk behind me, but the other girls in class looked like they wanted to cry.

  I felt the bird rub its wing up and down inside my ribcage, and it was just bone on bone, and my guts swayed and swirled with the pain of it. I sucked in a breath and heard the rattle in it, and the squeeze across my chest was enough to make my eyes water. Davey had my puffer, so all I could do was hang on to the top of the desk while I tried to get in enough breath. The prickles reached up from along my elbows and got into my eyes, so that there were little pins of light just along the corners of them. The bird smashed its face against my ribs, and for a second there was quiet while it fell back down into my gut, but then it opened its mouth just when I opened mine, and its howl came out with both of our voices, so loud it smashed all the glass in the windows, and I was sick all over the floor.

  ***

  The pillowcase was made of thin paper, and if you turned your head you could hear it crinkle under your hair. The school nurse had left the window open so I could get some fresh air. I felt the cold air on my nose and along my forehead, and up across the skin underneath my hair.

  I tried to do some counting, but other than the big red cross on the cabinet door with the band-aids inside everything was mostly white, even the two beds and the lace curtains that made little holes of shadows on the wall beside me. Sickbay was next to the main office and I could hear the women in the front office if one of them answered the phone, and sometimes there’d be footsteps moving past the door. Typewriter lady wasn’t typing, so there wasn’t any clicking, and that made it easier to hear. Superman was on the other bed, but he wasn’t lying down, he was just watching, and every time someone came down the hall outside he stood up and held the door shut with his foot. I still felt the bird settling in my tummy and my mouth was dry from the taste of vomit, and even when I swallowed I couldn’t make it go away.

  I heard one of the women hang up the phone.

  ‘That was another one,’ she said.

  ‘From the radio or the paper?’ typewriter lady asked.

  ‘TV! From the city, this time. Wanted to speak to Gerald.’

  ‘Maybe next time we should ask them if they’ll pay for interviews,’ said a third woman. I couldn’t see her, but I knew from her voice that she was one of the teachers of the little kids.

  ‘I said Gerald’s a principal and therefore very busy, and I gave them the police number. That one they told us to ring if we knew anything.’

  My tongue was heavy and cracked from the dryness of it.

  The phone rang again, and the woman who’d talked to the TV people sighed. ‘Can you get it? I can’t do another one.’ There wasn’t any noise for just a second, and then there was a soft little cry. ‘Sorry, I just…I can’t believe it,’ she said.

  The other two started talking over the top of each other, and for a few moments it was hard to make out any of the words.

  ‘She’ll turn up,’ the little kids’ teacher said.

  ‘She’s probably just gone on holiday and forgot to say,’ typewriter lady added.

  ‘But the front door was wide open! It’s just not like her. Not at all,’ the first woman said.

  The phone was still ringing, and my mouth was so dry that I knew if I tried to swallow I would choke, and Superman stood by the door and held it open a crack to keep a lookout, and just let it close when anyone started to walk past.

  ***

  In the car on the way home Grandma didn’t bother with the radio. ‘Should have told me you were feeling peaky, love,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t have sent you in today.’

  We turned the corner that led to the roundabout that would turn into our street, and I thought about Grandma driving right past our house, and still driving even after we got to the end of the street, and still driving until we were clear of the town and the paddocks and the mountains, until we were clear of the city and the smoke and the roads, until there was just us and the car and Grandma’s hand in my hair.

  ‘Hope you didn’t make too much of a mess of the carpet,’ Grandma said.

  One summer Grandma got sick of the dead grass and paddocks, and drove us two and a half hours to the beach. The thing about the beach is that you can stand in the water just up to your ankles, and the wind can push your hair into your face, and you can stick your tongue out and taste the salt all over it, and the noise of the waves is always there and it’s always just enough that you don’t have to hear anything else underneath it. You can stand in the water right up to your ankles and not have to hear anything, except for the waves and the wind and your empty little breaths sneaking out of your chest.

  ‘I don’t want to watch the news tonight,’ I said. The words came out small and they almost got lost in the sound from the engine. The prickles came up on my arm, and I rubbed at them to try to make them settle down. I sucked in a breath so hard my skin got stuck under my ribcage. The bird tried to pick up some of the bits of its nest with its beak, but there were too many feathers and as soon as it picked one up another fell out behind it.

  Grandma looked at me for a long time, without watching the road, and didn’t say anything.

  We pulled into our driveway, but she kept the engine running. She held the steering wheel so tight that you could see the knuckles sticking up and stretching her skin.

  ‘He speaks,’ she said, but she just stared right in front of her, at the front steps with the bricks missing and the driveway that kept going around to the back of the house.

  ‘Grandma?’ I said, and my voice was tight and high, and I felt the ache
in my jaw when I moved it.

  Grandma looked over at me. ‘Yes, okay,’ she said. ‘No news tonight. Just go straight to bed, hey?’

  I looked up at Mum’s window, and it was dark inside. Grandma turned the engine off, and I heard it tick and grumble, and it let out a sigh as it went back to sleep.

  ‘Anything else you want to talk about?’ Grandma asked. She still had her hands on the wheel, but this time she was looking at me, and the sun was coming in through the windscreen and making the air real hot, and even when I swallowed, it still tasted like sick.

  ‘You know when you hold a shell up to your ear and you can hear the ocean?’ I said.

  Grandma nodded. She took her hands off the wheel. ‘Those are just hollow. It’s not the ocean, it’s just air trapped in it. It’s the blood going around in your head.’

  I opened the car door and got out, and I didn’t look back until I got to the back porch, and when I looked I saw that Grandma was still sitting, staring straight out through the windscreen, with her seatbelt still on and everything.

  Sixteen and a half

  Here is a list of good things that have happened:

  1. Once, when I was five or six and Davey was only four or five, we went to the city with Grandpa. We got to go on the train and we saw a movie, and even though Davey cried at the scary bit it was still a good day, because afterwards we got to have our pick from the lolly bar so long as we promised not to tell Mum, and Davey got some milk bottles but I got the teeth, and Grandpa put some under his lips so that it looked like he was smiling, and Davey laughed so hard that a bit of Coke came out of his nose.

  2. Once Grandpa brought a tent over and we put it up in the backyard and slept out there for the night, and Grandpa gave us a bag of chips for a midnight snack and let us eat them in our sleeping bags, even though we got told off a few days later because Grandma found the crumbs and figured out what had happened. It was cold in the tent, but I put my head on Grandpa’s shoulder, and I heard the snoring going up and down his chest and his nose, and I felt it rattle around in his bones, and the sound of it sent warm up my blood so I could sleep.

  3. After Grandpa started getting sick he didn’t come around much anymore, but we could still go and visit him at his house, and he’d let us climb over the couch while he sat in his easy chair, and we listened to his records and he read to us from some of his books, and Grandma would have made cupcakes for us and after we ate them you could see rings of icing around Davey’s mouth, and I’d wipe my mouth with the back of my sleeve and make my sleeve dirty, and until I had a bath that night I could still taste the sweet if I licked my lips.

  Here is a list of bad things that have happened:

  1. Dad wanted to listen to one of Grandpa’s records, but something must have fallen onto the box because when he opened it most of the records were bent and one on the bottom had even split in two. Dad got so angry he pushed the box over, and the records fell out onto the ground. Grandma yelled at him for making a mess and for wrecking Grandpa’s stuff, but it was hard to hear the rest once Dad had slammed the back door and started revving his car in the driveway, because the sound of the engine was so loud it made the walls shake a little bit, and Davey had started crying over the top of it all.

  2. When Davey was about seven we were in the backyard after school, and he suddenly started up a wheeze and he was holding his chest like there was pain in it. I put my puffer in his hand and showed him how to suck on it, and after a while the squeeze in his chest went away, but I had felt the squeeze in mine when I saw him breathing so hard it made the skin on his throat go tight.

  2.1 There was a boy at school who had a big brother who was going to go to the Olympics but couldn’t because he had to use a puffer and they wouldn’t let him in.

  2.2 Davey asked me not to tell anyone he had to use a puffer too.

  3. Dad had got me two puffers already, one for home and one for school. I gave Davey the home one. I didn’t tell anyone I’d already lost the one for school.

  Seventeen

  Whenever a car drove down the street, the driver would slow down near Ms Hilcombe’s house. You could see them pressing their faces to the glass to get a good look, and if they weren’t watching where they were going they could nearly hit one of the police cars. Cassie and me knelt behind the fence one house down and across the road from Ms Hilcombe’s. The fence was made of wood and had gaps that you could see through if you put your face right up to it. From there you could see the cars coming around the corner so that all the cameramen from the news had to scatter off the road. The funny thing about it was that even though all the people were there, and even though they were all standing facing Ms Hilcombe’s house and watching the policemen go in and out the front door, no-one spoke loudly enough to be heard from more than a few footsteps away. The quiet stuck in the air. It was cloudy so that everything was grey, and white, and black.

  There were no cars in the driveway, and there weren’t any lights on in the front room, but I still kept an eye on the house behind us so that if anyone came I could pull Cassie away. If a policeman turned his lights on, the red and blue flashed bright enough that you could see it on the inside of your eyes even if you closed them. The red and the blue were never on at the same time, they flashed back and forth, like they were fighting.

  A man with a camera came down the footpath and stood close to the fence. Cassie swore quietly, just under her breath.

  ‘Move, ya fat bugger,’ she said. She pulled her face back from the fence, and rubbed her eyes. ‘This is crap—you can’t see shit from here.’

  We’d already tried the tree in the empty block, but there wasn’t much to see from there except Ms Hilcombe’s backyard, and Cassie was scared a policeman would notice us watching.

  ‘Well, well, well,’ a voice said.

  I looked around, and Nick was standing at the letterbox. Jeremy stood beside him, looking up and down the street.

  ‘Come to turn yourselves in?’ Nick said, and he laughed.

  Jeremy didn’t say anything and Nick nudged him on the shoulder. Jeremy shrugged him away.

  ‘Did you see anything?’ Jeremy asked Cassie.

  ‘Nah, it’s a shit angle,’ Cassie said.

  ‘If we got closer we could see,’ Nick said. ‘Maybe we’d even get on telly. We could just, like, do a walk-by behind the news guy?’ Nick stuck his chest out and started to walk with his hands on his hips. He looked like the models from Grandma’s catalogues. Jeremy laughed and whacked him on the shoulder.

  Nick stopped then, and came over and put his face to one of the gaps in the fence. ‘Reckon we should wait till the cameras are on, but.’

  ‘This is boring,’ Cassie said. She stood up and brushed the dirt off her knees, and I stood up, too.

  ‘You got something better on?’ Nick said, but he pulled his face away from the fence. ‘Nah she’s right, this is shit.’

  ‘Did you wanna go to the milk bar?’ Jeremy asked. ‘Mum gave me my pocket money this morning.’

  ‘Pocket money?’ Cassie said, and she snorted.

  Jeremy went red right up to the top of his ears. ‘Yeah, well, it’s just a couple of dollars.’

  ‘You gonna go buy your girlfriend some lollies?’ Nick said, and he thumped Jeremy on the back hard. It sounded like it would have hurt, and Jeremy took a couple of steps forward. Suddenly everyone was watching him, and his face had gone bright red.

  ‘We should get going,’ Cassie said. ‘Mum’ll be spitting chips if I’m not home before her.’ She was already moving before she’d finished the sentence. She pulled me by the arm past the boys, and when I found my feet I looked up at her. She was blushing all the way up her ears, and even down her neck to her collar.

  ***

  Cassie was real quiet when we walked back to her place, but it didn’t feel bad. Superman walked a couple of steps behind us, and he liked the sound it made when the wind came through and blew across the top of the paddocks.

  ‘You don’t ha
ve to come with me,’ Cassie said, but she let me walk behind her anyway, and I kept my eyes on the back of her shoes until we turned into her street. I listened for Mr Justfield’s cow, and sometimes if the wind blew the right way you could just make out her crying over the rush of air in your ears. We passed a couple of sheep and I thought about wool right down to the skin.

  The wind was cold by the time we got to Cassie’s driveway, and I felt the sting on my skin from where the wind touched it, and I hadn’t even noticed until then.

  ‘Thanks for walking with me, but you probably shouldn’t come in,’ she said. The windows were dark behind the sheets. ‘I mean it, Numpty, thanks. But you can go.’

  She started to walk up the driveway, but halfway up she stopped. ‘You know, Jeremy’s alright,’ she said, and she looked at me with her eyebrows raised. I swallowed, and then I nodded. She turned back around.

  I waited at the end of her driveway until I saw the door close, and then I turned and walked towards the paddock next door. From the hill in the paddock you could see into Cassie’s backyard, where the Hills hoist still leant over, and if you turned towards the town you could see the lines of houses all curved around the railway line, and right up to the post office building with the tower that used to have the bell. If you put your hand on the bark of the tree you could feel the dry and the dirt of it, and you’d have to be careful not to pull it off when you let go.

  ‘Are you here?’ I said, and for a second I just waited. I could hear the wind pushing down into the long grass.

  ‘It’s a real good view, that’s for sure,’ the man said. His pyjamas were faded but you could see that they used to be yellow, and this close up you could see the little stripes of white. ‘You climb to the top of that tree and you can see nearly all the way to the dam.’

  There was a towel on Cassie’s clothesline, and when the wind came through it blew a little bit in the wind, and you could tell it had been there a while with the colour all washed out of the bottom, nearly all the way to white.