We See the Stars

by Kate van Hooft

  ‘Bingo,’ I said. Then I walked out of the room.

  ***

  Cassie caught up with me before I’d got across the road, and even though I could hear her calling, I waited until she pulled me by the shoulder before I turned around.

  ‘Numpty!’ she said. ‘What are you doing? Mrs O’Brien’s having a fit.’

  I looked over her shoulder to the front gate, but no-one else was coming. I waited for yelling, for a siren, for the bell. It was quiet.

  ‘She sent me to come get you,’ Cassie said. ‘But bloody hell that was unreal.’

  I felt heavy in my tummy, like the little bits of broken shell and feathers had all stuck together to form a rock. Cassie’s socks were matching, and I didn’t like it. I wanted to undo her shoelaces. I maybe wanted to cry.

  ‘Jeremy says he talked to you about Ms Hilcombe,’ Cassie said. ‘She’s just done a runner, Numpty, it’s no big deal.’

  I thought about Ms Hilcombe. She sat on the floor of her lounge room, and it was nearly too dark to see, but when a car came around the corner the headlights got in through the front windows, and her face flashed up all red and pale around the eyes. ‘Do you promise?’ she said, and I nodded into the cold and dark.

  ‘I never thought I’d say it, but I kind of miss her compared to O’Brien. What a moll.’ Cassie looked back over her shoulder but there was still no-one coming.

  My throat ached and I rubbed at it. It was hot under my shirt.

  ‘Jeremy said the police don’t know where she is,’ I said. The words tasted funny in my mouth, like they’d been left in the fridge too long.

  ‘Well, if they knew where she was they’d have found her, Numpty,’ Cassie said. Laughing, she slapped me on the shoulder. It stung, but not enough to burn. ‘They need to get it together, but. The longer they take, the more likely she’s not coming back.’

  I couldn’t hear for the sound of the bees in my ears, and honey leaked out of the honeycomb and around into my blood, and the sweetness of it made me feel sick in my tummy and I felt my heart beat up around my ears while my hands shook in my pockets.

  ‘Mum was all shitty yesterday because the coppers came in to her work to ask if anyone had heard anything,’ she said. ‘They’re scraping the bottom of the barrel now, she reckons, just asking anyone. She reckons the second you say something they’ll just think you’re suss.’

  Cassie leant down so that her eyes were level with mine. Her hair was growing in a little more even, and there were wispy bits hanging in her eyes. ‘You okay, Numpty? You look pale.’ She reached up and put her hand on my forehead, and it was warm like a hot-water bottle down the bottom of your bed, and her other hand was pink and mottled and melted. She took her hand off my forehead and held it against her own. ‘You’re hot,’ Cassie said. ‘Maybe you really should go home.’

  I thought about Ms Hilcombe. She pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them, and when she looked over at me she just shrugged her shoulders, and Tink snored next to her on the floor, and I promised her.

  ‘I don’t want to go home,’ I said. ‘Not home.’

  ‘Well then, let’s just get out of here,’ Cassie said. ‘Bugger it, let them find us.’

  We walked down the lane, but instead of going down the other lane we turned left and walked down the street. We went out towards the railway line, and when we got to the tracks we followed them. If you put your hands down you could feel them rumble when a train was coming down the line, and the electrical wires hummed so quietly that you could only just hear them underneath your thoughts.

  ‘Maybe we could just jump on the next one,’ Cassie said. ‘Sleep on it and stuff. Just get off wherever.’

  ‘What would we eat?’ I asked.

  ‘Well,’ Cassie said, then she went quiet for a bit. ‘You’re right, we’d have to get on one that has food.’

  ‘How would we know?’

  ‘I dunno, Numpty, jeez,’ she said. ‘We’d pick the one with the most people on it, the one that looked the fanciest. Those fancy trains definitely have food.’ She picked up a rock and threw it at the tracks, and it bounced off into the dirt. ‘For someone who doesn’t talk much you say a lot of crap,’ she said, but she was kind of smiling.

  ‘Better to hide in the back of a car,’ I said. ‘Or get in the boot.’

  ‘Could get cramped, though, hey?’ she said. ‘And dark.’

  ‘Bring a torch?’ I said.

  ‘Bring a torch,’ she said, and she nodded at me. The humming got louder until we walked past a little brick building by the side of the track.

  ‘That’s the substation,’ Cassie said. ‘Put your hands on any of that, you’re gone in a second.’ She looked down at her finger, all purple and curled into her palm.

  ‘Is that what happened?’ I asked.

  The sun went behind some clouds and suddenly it was real cold.

  Cassie looked at me, then sighed. ‘Nah,’ she said. ‘Would have been a good story, but nah.’

  A train came down the tracks and we ran off into some bushes, then we walked across the rails and back onto the street. It was getting cloudier, and it smelt like rain.

  ‘Hey, Numpty,’ Cassie said, ‘that was cool what you did before, in class.’

  I still felt sick and shaky from all the honey leaking out of the honeycomb, but I smiled a little bit anyway.

  ‘You just walked out! Even Nick would never have the guts for that.’

  We crossed the road and walked past some houses, and it took a little while for me to realise we were coming down the other end of Ms Hilcombe’s street.

  ‘The thing is, Numpty, you just shouldn’t care what others think about you. It’s hard, but you shouldn’t care…And you actually don’t. It’s cool.’

  We came up and over the hill and down around the corner, and the police cars were still all over Ms Hilcombe’s street. Some of them had their lights going, and they flashed red and blue right up into your face, and if you blinked at the same time you could see all the little spider webs lit up on the inside of your eyes.

  ‘Jesus,’ Cassie said. ‘There’s more of them.’

  We walked a little quicker, but we slowed right down as we went past the fence, and some of Ms Hilcombe’s neighbours were standing out in their front yards and watching from their letterboxes.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Cassie yelled to an old man still in his dressing-gown who was standing under a tree in his front yard.

  ‘Don’t know, love,’ he said. His voice sounded like old paper and dust. ‘They reckon there’s a bit of backyard that looks like it’s been messed around with. They brought the digger in this morning. Been loud as all bloody get-out.’ He coughed from deep down in his chest and spat out some phlegm, then wiped his nose along his sleeve.

  ‘Gross,’ Cassie said, but real quiet so that only we could hear.

  ***

  If you get right up in the back of the empty block, up into the branches of the tree along the back fence, and if you hang onto the trunk and kind of lean over a little, and if you hold your breath and try not to look down, you can see into the backyard of Ms Hilcombe’s house. Cassie was on the branch above me, so that if I looked left I could see her shoes, and every now and then she nearly kicked me trying to get into a better spot.

  ‘Got super numb-bum,’ she said. Up there the cold could get in under your jumper and down along your skin, and if you fell it was pretty far down to the ground.

  A bit of honey dripped from my ribs onto the bird’s head and woke it up. The honey was making a mess of its nest. It let out a squawk in my chest and I had to swallow to keep the noise in.

  ‘Jeremy said she’s probably just gone on holiday,’ I said.

  In the backyard policemen in big jackets were walking around, and some of them were standing all in a group under the tree, and the man using the digging machine was wearing a bright orange vest and that meant he was the easiest to see.

  ‘No way,’ Cassie said. ‘Why’d she
leave the door wide open? I’ve been thinking about it. If she’s just pissed off on holiday she would have called when she saw herself on the news.’

  ‘Maybe she’s gone somewhere without TV,’ I said.

  ‘No-one goes anywhere without TV. What’d be the point?’

  The bird tried to lick up the honey, but it kept getting feathers stuck on its tongue, and it couldn’t reach its mouth with its wings to pick them off again. It pulled its nest apart, starting with the top feathers and then working its way down. It used its beak to pull at them so that the nest all fell apart into a heap, and there was hardly any shape to see where it had been.

  ‘Do you still want to leave town?’ I said. A feather got caught in my throat and I choked on it, and my spit was all claggy and dry in my mouth.

  ‘Yeah, but how can I?’ Cassie said.

  The bird stamped down on the feathers, but there were more that were sticky with honey and caught in its throat, and when it opened its mouth the feathers fell out from behind its teeth and under its tongue.

  The man with the digger turned the machine off, and another policeman came over with a shovel. A couple of the other men came over to watch. They pointed a lot at the hole in the ground.

  I looked up at Cassie, and behind her the sky was gold and grey, and her hair was standing all up on end. ‘Maybe I don’t even want to be a dancer,’ she said.

  The men started yelling, and another came in with another shovel, and they looked like they weren’t digging as fast. Cassie leant over so that her foot nearly rested on my shoulder, and I reached up to wrap my fingers in her shoelaces.

  ‘This looks bad,’ she said. ‘They’ve got something for sure.’

  The men with the shovels held the dirt out of the way while another policeman bent down towards the hole.

  The bird kept squawking, and there was a squeeze in its chest because it couldn’t get enough breath, and it started to stretch its hollowed-out bone wings up and out to try to get some air in, but its chest just kept getting bigger and wider, and its bones kept stretching out so that its bones started rubbing up against mine, and the pain of it went out from my chest through my arms and my legs. It kept stretching, and the sticky feathers in its mouth kept scratching at its throat, and it stretched up and outwards until its bones ran right along where mine were, and when it flapped its wings I moved my arms too. Its legs went down into my legs, and its chest fit just right inside mine, and when I listened I could hear its heartbeat rushing blood around in our bodies, and my heart pumping just as hard underneath.

  ‘Can you see anything good?’ the old man yelled from the street. He coughed and spat onto the concrete.

  The policeman stood back up real slow, so that he wouldn’t drop what was in his arms, and it was covered in a towel but you could see what it was.

  ‘It’s a baby!’ Cassie said, and she got so excited that she kicked out her foot and pulled her shoe out of my hand.

  ‘Nah, I don’t reckon,’ the man said, but he stood on his tiptoes to try to see over the fence.

  ‘Can you see what it is, Numpty?’ Cassie asked, and the bird bent its head to look up at her, and when it squawked both of our mouths filled with feathers, and I felt the stretch in my chest as it reached up with its wings.

  I jumped, and the bird jumped with me, and we opened our wings so that we could catch the air. We flapped to push ourselves upwards, and we felt the burn in our chest and our backs, but when the wind came we got up on top of it, and it was easier once we were far enough off the ground. We dipped to the left and flew upwards, turning in a little circle away from the yard, and down beneath us the man and Cassie were watching, and they held their hands over their eyes to keep the sun out.

  We kept going, with our arms and our chests full of air, and if we swung around to the left again we could go backwards, out over the streets and then over the town, and when we were up among the clouds we were away, and it meant we didn’t have to remember it, when the policeman stood up holding the body in the towel that was coloured red from the blood. It meant we didn’t have to remember it, when the policeman standing next to him pulled back the towel to look underneath. It meant we didn’t have to remember it, when the towel fell away just enough to see the fur underneath it, and hanging down below that, the tail.

  Twenty

  Cassie and I sat close together on the detention step, because it wasn’t big enough for us to sit very far apart. We had detention for every recess and lunch that week, and the school had called Grandma to tell her what had happened and so she also drove me in the mornings and waited for me at the gate at home time. Mrs O’Brien put Cassie at another desk so we weren’t sitting near each other anymore.

  ‘This is such bull,’ Cassie said. Mrs O’Brien had given us work to do in our workbooks over recess, and I watched the kids playing kickball in the quadrangle while Cassie copied out of mine.

  ‘Ah, shit,’ she said, and rubbed out one of her answers and put what I had in instead. The little bits of rubber got all rolled into bits and stuck to the skin on her knees. ‘I mean, we’re not the problem—they’re the ones with the crap rules,’ she said.

  The night before, Tink had been on the news and they’d interviewed a policeman out the front of Ms Hilcombe’s house who said that it made things a bit more serious, but they would keep investigating. Ms Hilcombe’s desk was still full of her papers, and next to a mug full of pens there was an apple that was getting dimpled and a little brown, and if you stood by the board with your cheek against the black you could see the little ghosts of the words she’d put on there, with the chalk that she’d held in her hand.

  Jeremy came over to us and handed Cassie a Vita-Weat. It just had butter on, but she took it anyway.

  ‘Is it safe to talk to you guys?’ Jeremy said. ‘Don’t want to get busted sneaking food to the convicts.’

  ‘Piss off,’ Cassie said, but she bit into the biscuit and little bits dropped onto the ground.

  ‘How are you, matey?’ he said. He was looking at me, but my tongue was heavy in my mouth, and it felt dry when I tried to get enough spit to swallow. I shrugged my shoulders, and Jeremy frowned.

  ‘He’s having a quiet one,’ Cassie said. ‘We both are.’

  ‘You shitty with me?’ he said.

  ‘No,’ Cassie said. ‘I dunno. You give me the shits is all.’

  ‘Not my fault your nuff-nuff mate went walkabout,’ he said.

  Cassie stood up but I reached for her hand and pulled her back down onto the step beside me.

  ‘Don’t call him that,’ she said. ‘You sound like Nick, and he’s a bastard.’

  Jeremy looked down at his shoes. ‘You want anything for lunch?’ he asked. ‘Mum’s letting me do a tuckshop order today, and I’ve got some change left over.’

  Cassie thought for a second. ‘Get us a pie and sauce,’ she said. ‘Get us both one.’

  ‘I don’t have enough for him too,’ Jeremy said.

  Cassie looked up at him. I was still holding on to her hand. I felt the little melted bits with my finger. She squeezed back, just for a second.

  ‘We’ll share,’ she said. ‘Thanks.’

  Jeremy smiled at her and walked off.

  ‘You okay, Numpty?’ Cassie asked, and when I shook my head I thought maybe I could get some of the thoughts out of it, but they were still too caught up between my ears.

  ‘You’re being quiet even for you,’ she said.

  The door behind us opened. Mr Newman came out of the staffroom and looked down at us on the detention step. He nodded his head at Cassie, and she smiled back until he was gone again, and then she just rolled her eyes.

  ‘Once, when it was Davey’s birthday, Dad cooked up all these little cocktail frankfurts—about forty of them,’ I said. ‘He put them all out with a bowl of tomato sauce before the other kids got there, but when the party started they were already gone. Davey took them down to the back of the garden and ate them, the whole bowl of them, with the sauce as well,
and Dad was spitting chips right in front of the other kids and Davey started crying, and his sick was all pink and red on the porch.’

  Cassie handed me a Vita-Weat with butter on it, and I took it but offered it back to her. When Cassie scrunched up her nose and waved it away, I opened my fingers and let it drop down to the ground.

  ‘You feelin’ like you’ve eaten forty cocktail franks?’ Cassie asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. There was a leak in the honeycomb, and it meant honey kept dripping out into my blood, and it made my tummy swirly with the sweet of it, and I had to ball up my fists to keep the shakes out.

  ‘Did Davey ever eat another one?’

  Cassie looked down at the biscuit, which was still wrapped in Glad Wrap. I put my shoe over it, and when I pressed down it made a little crunch, and when I looked back again the butter was leaking out on the ground.

  ‘Never,’ I said.

  ‘Hey,’ said a girl. It was Nicole, with Sarah standing right behind her. ‘You heard from the coppers yet?’

  Cassie stood up. She was nearly a whole head taller than Nicole, so that Nicole had to look up at her.

  ‘Piss off,’ Cassie said.

  ‘We were just wondering when they’d come get you,’ Sarah said to me from behind Nicole.

  ‘What’re you on about?’ Cassie said.

  ‘Because of how Simon killed the dog,’ Nicole said.

  Cassie moved before I could stop her, and I heard the slap but I couldn’t see it, and then Nicole was standing with her hand to her face. For a second she just stood with her eyes so wide they took up half of her face, and she gasped in a breath that made her whole body shudder. Then she was crying, real loud, so that everyone could hear, and the other kids had stopped playing kickball and were trying to get a good look.

  ‘Oh my god, you slapped me!’ Nicole said, and she tried to back away, but Cassie grabbed her by the hair.

  ‘Say it again, you little shit,’ Cassie said. She held her hand up, the purple one covered in scars, and yelled. ‘You want the Cripple Slap? What if it’s contagious?’