We See the Stars

  ‘Don’t recommend it, of course,’ he said.

  ‘You’d rip up the bottom of your pyjamas,’ I said.

  ‘That you would,’ he agreed. ‘That you would.’

  ‘Do you know where you are?’ I asked. I looked down at his house at the bottom of the paddock and across the road from Cassie’s place.

  ‘Easier to see when sun’s up,’ he said. ‘Not that it does me much good now.’

  The tree creaked if you leant on it, and there was dry grass all around the trunk. If you knelt down you could feel the prickles poking into your skin through your pants.

  ‘Arnold,’ he said, and he held out a hand that was covered in skin so grey and papery that I thought I’d rip a hole in it if I shook it too hard.

  ‘Is it cold being dead?’ I asked.

  The wind pushed and pulled on his pyjamas, and it sounded hollow and far away.

  ‘No, not especially,’ Arnold said.

  ‘Does it hurt?’ I asked.

  ‘Dying? Well…you get cold. You want to go to sleep.’

  ‘Sometimes, when Davey won’t go to sleep, Grandma comes and reads us a book, but it’s never the right book and she never does the voices, and really it’s not her fault, it’s because she’s not Grandpa.’

  Arnold rested his head on the trunk of the tree, and when he put his ear to it he could hear all the little ants running up and down the inside.

  ‘I like when people read me stories,’ he said. ‘You can hear the voices in your dreams.’

  ‘Is she with you?’ I asked.

  Arnold opened his eyes, and looked up and around the paddock. ‘Which one? Ms Hilcombe?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, as her name got carried off on the wind. It made it to the edge of the paddock, where it got caught on the barbed-wire fence and shredded down the middle.

  Arnold patted his pockets, and looked up and down the tree, and his feet were dirty down in the ground.

  ‘Just me, Simon,’ he said, and he bent down so that his mouth was by my ear, and so that he only had to whisper, and so that when he did it smelt like how it smells when you’ve forgotten to clean the fish tank. ‘Always just me, I’m afraid.’

  ***

  Ms Hilcombe wrote in to a special competition in a magazine, and the prize was to win a holiday. When they called her, they said she had to come to Sydney right away to collect the prize, and she left in such a hurry she didn’t even tell Mr Wade.

  When she got to Sydney she got straight on a plane to an island, way far away where they don’t even have a phone, and she went swimming each morning and ate ice-cream for lunch, and when she went to sleep she dreamt about going home again, to see the town and the school and the kids, who she loves.

  ***

  It was getting darker and Arnold wanted to have a sleep. I walked home the long way over the train tracks and down behind the main street past the cricket oval. If you stand right in the middle of it, right on the pitch where they bounce the balls, you can stand so that everything on one side is the same and equal to everything on the other, and everything in front of you is the same as behind, and right there in the middle is the centre of it, and that’s right where you are, and not even one step to the left or the right is where you’re supposed to be. If you close your eyes and go real quiet, and if you even kind of hold your breath, you can hear the wind getting caught up in the grass on the oval, and you can have the taste of rain on your tongue. Cassie said that they used to put the dead animals here after they killed them, and if you crouch down and put your ear right up to it, right down on your belly on the ground you can hear what it sounds like when the little spines and finger bones melt slowly into dirt.

  Jeremy was practising kicking the football against the sports shed, and when I saw that he’d seen me looking I tried to go invisible. The bird poked its head up over the top of its nest, and stretched out its wings when he started walking over. You could hear Mr Justfield’s cow if the wind blew the right way over the cricket pitch.

  ‘You alright, mate?’ Jeremy said, when he was still a few steps away, but close enough that I could see his freckles. ‘What are you doing on the ground? I thought you’d got sick again or something.’

  I looked up at him, and his face was dark against the clouds, and I dug my fingers into the dirt and felt it all bunch up under my fingernails.

  Jeremy looked up and back down the cricket pitch, then sat down beside me, so that when I opened my eyes I could see his shoelaces, which weren’t tied up very well.

  ‘Did Cassie go home?’ he asked.

  I sat up, and nodded my head.

  ‘She okay?’

  I nodded again. The sun got out from behind a cloud for just a second, and there was warm on the side of my face.

  ‘It’s weird how you don’t even notice the hand anymore, hey?’ he said.

  Jeremy sat for a long time just being quiet, and the dirt under my fingernails was real dark. It had mashed-up and melted bones in it. It would probably take Grandma’s special clippers to get them clean again.

  ‘It’s pretty weird with Hilcombe,’ Jeremy said. ‘I was talkin’ to Dad about it this morning; he reckons the coppers don’t know shit-all about it. He says you can tell when they ask them on the news.’

  A car came around the edge of the oval, and when the sun hit it the light shone right up into your eyes, and for a second you couldn’t see anything but the red and the blur.

  ‘I dunno,’ Jeremy said. ‘Maybe she’s just gone on holiday and forgot to say?’

  ‘Maybe she’s not coming back,’ I said, and the prickles ran up and around my elbow so that I scratched at it with my thumb.

  ‘Weirdest bit is I can’t stop thinking about it,’ Jeremy said. ‘Even when, y’know, I’m trying to sleep?’

  Jeremy was quiet again for a long time, and we sat together on the ground letting the cold get in under our jumpers.

  ‘You want me to tell Cassie I saw you?’ Jeremy asked. He stood up, and there was grass stuck to his knee. ‘I’ll just tell her,’ he said.

  When he walked away he kept looking over his shoulder at me, and I kept looking back at him. After a while it was silent again, and it was still. When I stood up there was a wet patch on my bum from the grass, and I had to brush my knees down with my hands. The sun got low and kept getting covered up by clouds, and each time it got darker I could see the bright of it burnt purple and brown in my eyes.

  By the time I got back to Ms Hilcombe’s it was dark, and the cameramen had gone. There was only one police car, and it didn’t have the lights on, so you could go right up to the house without anyone seeing. If you went up to the window and stood at the right angle, and if the streetlight was just behind you, and if you leant over on your tiptoes on your left foot, you could see the books all over the lounge room, and the chair where Ms Hilcombe sat so that it had a dent in the cushion, and the bit of the carpet that was always covered in hair from where Tink liked to sleep.

  I rested my head on the glass, and it was so cold that my forehead went numb and I had to rub my fingers over it to get the feeling back. My breath fogged up the window, and it made it harder to see, and when I reached up with my knuckles it made a smudge where it touched the skin. I tapped out I-P-R-O-M-I-S-E, and the sound of it went through the glass and into the inside, and it made little ripples in the air that mixed up with all the dust and the dog hair, and it left my little atoms down in the carpet and the curtains and the couch, and even after I went back home there were still leftover bits of me, in the patterns of the dirt on the ground and sitting on the windowsill, and it could be like I was always in there, and that was where I would stay.

  Eighteen

  Davey went to school but Dad let me stay home, even though Grandma said there wasn’t anything actually wrong with me, and I stayed in bed with the doona up to my nose for most of the morning. For lunch Grandma made me get up and sit at the table for a Vegemite sandwich, and I ate it after Superman pulled the crusts off for me. It had alread
y been a week since Ms Hilcombe had gone missing, and there were only two more weeks of term.

  Grandma spent most of the day on the phone to one of her friends in Manerlong, and she pulled the cord around the corner to sit in the living room so I couldn’t make out any of the words. Sometimes she laughed so hard it gave her a coughing fit. When she talked I let the words go up over my head and down the back of the couch, so they got stuck between the cushions with all the crumbs and ripped-off fingernail edges from when Davey pulled at them with his teeth.

  After dinner, Dad took me out on a lookabout, and I felt how heavy my tummy was with the bird and his nest, and it was hard to get my legs to lift up and move all the way to the car.

  That night Dad was wearing his old football jumper, and his back had his name on it and a big number 14. He kept jiggling his knee so that it hit the keys sitting in the ignition, and the noise of it pushed up and inside and behind my teeth.

  ‘Grandma told me you talked the other day,’ Dad said. His breath made little puffs in the air. ‘That’s great, mate. It’s been ages since I heard you speak.’

  He kept staring out the window, but if another car came past he’d put his hand up over his mouth and turn away from it, and sometimes press his face all the way into the back of the seat with his shoulders up tight around his ears.

  ‘Maybe now, we can just…the high school in Manerlong next year, what do you reckon?’ he said, and he looked at me with a smile that made the wrinkles on his face deep enough to put your fingers into. ‘You could go and see what their cricket team’s like—or maybe you could get into footy? You’ve got a ruck’s legs, mate, got ’em from me. Make some friends, too. That’ll be good, won’t it, hey? You can meet some new kids, and talk to them?’

  We’d driven out past the church and the graveyard, and we were parked away from the streetlight outside the same house as always.

  ‘If you don’t know what to say, just tell ’em a story,’ he said. ‘People like stories. But try and make them true.’

  In the house, the woman had come to the window and was looking up and down the street. Dad went real stiff again, and he froze so that his breath even stopped. I felt the prickles up and down my arm, and all you could hear was the little ringing noise in the bottom of your eardrums.

  ‘Shit,’ Dad said, with just the little bit of breath he had left. It puffed up and out and wiped itself all over the windows, and the swear stuck to the glass and started dripping down along the doorhandle.

  The woman in the window held her hand up and Dad grabbed for the keys and started the engine. She came out of her house and was at the end of her driveway by the time Dad was pulling out of the gutter.

  ‘Daniel!’ she yelled to Dad, but he kept looking forward and didn’t turn to see. ‘Daniel, you can come in!’ She called again. She had her arms up over her head and was waving them to us. I watched her in the mirror as we drove away.

  Dad didn’t say much on the way home, and while he drove I thought about Ms Hilcombe, and I looked out the window at the telephone poles all lit up in the bright from the headlights, and it was too cloudy to see any of the stars, even if I pulled my neck straight up and put my cheek so hard against the window that it went numb from the glass.

  I thought about lunchtime back in term one, when Superman and me were sitting in the classroom and counting the reds and greens and blues, and you could hear all the other kids outside playing kickball on the oval, and there was still heaps of time before the bell was supposed to go, and Ms Hilcombe sat at her desk eating a sandwich.

  ‘Simon?’ she said, and there was a little tickle up and down my back that made me sit straight up. ‘What should I do for the next lesson?’

  She was looking over my head out the window, and the tree outside was pushing its branch fingers up against the glass, and it made a scraping sound like someone was trying to get in.

  ‘I kind of just want to play games,’ Ms Hilcombe said, and she laughed.

  ‘You any good at bingo?’ she said. Superman shook his head, so I started to shake mine.

  ‘Ah, it was all we did when I was growing up,’ she said. ‘My mum played it during the war because it was cheap, and then we grew up playing it with her. Was it just us?’

  I shrugged and looked back at Superman, but he was gone.

  ‘Matthew took me to a proper bingo place on our first date, even though he hated it. Cheated like nothing else. None of the old biddies caught on but I made him confess and give back his prize.’

  I sat back so that her voice could hop onto the dust blowing around in the sunlight and float over to me, and it went in through my skin and up along my bones and around so that it washed away all the cobwebs.

  ‘I can’t remember what the prize was. Something small, it didn’t matter, and he pretended to be all upset that I made him give it back, but then when he dropped me home he said he didn’t care because I was prize enough.’

  She stopped talking for a second, and suddenly looked at me like she was a bit surprised I was still there.

  ‘I have no idea why I told you that,’ she said, and she laughed a little bit but she didn’t look all that happy. ‘Super unprofessional there, sorry.’ She smiled at me, and I reached up with my fingers and pinched the smile out of the air and swallowed it, and I carried it around in my tummy so that it was pink and warm against the inside of my skin.

  Above the noise from the kids playing kickball, and above the noise from the tree branch fingers at the window, and above the noise from the bees in my blood, I could hear Ms Hilcombe’s breath. I counted to seven before she spoke again.

  ‘Yeah, let’s not play bingo,’ she said, and swallowed down the rest of her words with the last little bits of her sandwich.

  ***

  After we got back from the lookabout, Dad settled down on the good couch in the living room to sleep. I wanted to say goodnight to Mum, but I worried Dad would hear the door creak if I tried to go in.

  Davey was in his bed but still awake when I got under the doona.

  ‘You were gone for ages,’ he said, and his voice sounded small and all caught up in his pillows.

  Superman sat on the end of my bed. He yawned and tucked his cape around his shoulders to warm himself up.

  ‘Did you miss us?’ Davey asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, and my own voice sounded little and quiet in the dark.

  ‘Grandma says you have to go to school tomorrow,’ Davey said. ‘She says you can’t get too comfortable sitting around here all day.’

  I felt my eyes get heavy and I could feel sleep gritting up under my eyelashes. If I tried to keep them open they started to sting.

  ‘I’ll walk with you to school tomorrow,’ Davey said. ‘It’ll be alright if we both go.’

  I heard him roll over to face away from me, and after a while I heard his little snores. I felt the bird settle down in my tummy, in its nest made out of its own feathers, but there weren’t any growing back on its wings yet, and he shivered unless I had the doona up over my nose to keep out the cold.

  ***

  Ms Hilcombe drove her car back to her place, with Tink beside her on the front seat, and when she pulled into the driveway she was real surprised to see all the police cars out the front. She went inside and told the policemen there that she’d only been shopping, but she’d forgotten her shopping list so she couldn’t remember what to buy, and she’d just been wandering up and down the aisles until she remembered, and it had just been spaghetti the whole time.

  Nineteen

  Mrs O’Brien’s back cracked when she walked, so that any time she went from one side of the classroom to the other it was like she was playing on a xylophone. She didn’t like it if you spoke without putting your hand up first, and if you weren’t listening when she was talking she’d come and thump her hand down real hard on your desk, and the whole class would jump at the sound of it. She’d already put Nick in the naughty corner for talking during reading time, and that was hardly the worst
thing he’d ever done.

  I kept looking at Ms Hilcombe’s desk. I waited for her to pop up from behind it and tell us that she’d tricked us, that she’d been hiding this whole time.

  Mrs O’Brien made us do show-and-tell, and we had to bring in something from home that we wanted to talk about to the class. Sarah brought in her new toy pony which had a saddle on and everything, and it was covered in fur. Nicole got up and showed off her ribbon for gymnastics, which she got when she came third. Jeremy showed a possum skull he’d found in his backyard, and the bones were bleached white and cream, and there was dirt stuck around and under the teeth.

  Mrs O’Brien stood at the end of my desk, and she put her hand on the lid and leant over it, and she smelt like old chalk and talcum powder.

  ‘And what do you have for us, Simon?’ she asked, and the whole class looked at me with their eyes all wide and bright. I looked down at the top of my desk where her hand was, and I traced the little patterns in the wrinkles of her skin, and the bird stretched its wings up against my ribcage so that it hurt even just to breathe.

  ‘Hmm?’ she said, and she leant in closer, so that all I could smell was talc and so that the pain went from my ribs and into my tummy, and I thought that I wanted to be sick on the floor.

  ‘He doesn’t have anything,’ Cassie said, and Mrs O’Brien stood up so fast that her back cracked twice as she moved.

  ‘I don’t believe I asked you,’ Mrs O’Brien said.

  I didn’t want to look around, but Superman stood at the front of the room and made a face at me, like it didn’t seem good.

  ‘He doesn’t have anything,’ Cassie repeated, and everyone in the class was still.

  ‘Another word from you and you’ll both have detention,’ Mrs O’Brien said. I got up from my desk and walked to the front of the room, and the bees stung so hard in my blood that their stingers broke off in my bones. I turned so my back was to the blackboard and all the desks were in front of me. Mrs O’Brien stood next to Cassie and waited. I swallowed down the honey. I choked on the wool.