We See the Stars

  ‘Don’t get in more trouble,’ I told her.

  I heard Cassie’s footsteps as she went back up the street.

  Davey shrunk down into my body, and when I put my arms around him he got in through my skin.

  There was a sound behind us and I turned to see Dad standing in the doorway staring out over our heads. I didn’t know if he had seen us there.

  ‘Don’t you bloody walk off when I’m talking to you,’ Grandma said.

  Dad closed his eyes. ‘I’ll do what I want in my own house.’ His fist was curled into a tight ball. He let it go and then squeezed it, and he let it go and then squeezed it.

  ‘I’m the one keeping this house together!’ Grandma said.

  Dad turned away from the door and went back down the hallway. We heard a door slam, then another one.

  ‘Do we stay out here forever?’ Davey asked.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘You go inside.’

  ‘Aren’t you coming with me?’

  ‘Later,’ I said. ‘I’ll come in later.’

  Grandma was still yelling, and Grandpa was all packed up in boxes, and the light in Mum’s room burnt your eyes if you looked right at it in the dark. I took the picture out from under my jumper and held it in my hand. I felt the bees in my arms with their stingers right down to the bone. I heard Mr Justfield’s cow cry in the wind, and I saw Matthew’s face smiling back at me, and the white of Ms Hilcombe’s skin like a ghost, and after a second I couldn’t look at it anymore, so I turned the photo over.

  ‘Simon?’ Dad said. He was standing in the doorway again. ‘You alright?’

  I looked down at the wrong-side-round photo in my hands.

  ‘Come in now,’ he said. ‘It’s okay. Grandma just needed to have a chat.’

  On the back of the photo, in the corner, something was written in pencil, the letters small enough to hide behind the back of a frame.

  ‘Come in, Simon, it’s freezing,’ Dad said.

  I folded the photo and tucked it into my back pocket and, being careful to avoid the loose brick on the step, I went inside.

  ‘See?’ said Grandma. ‘This is just what I was talking about.’ She was sitting on the couch and looking up at Dad, but her finger was pointing right at me. ‘The kids are all over the bloody neighbourhood at all hours!’

  ‘I have to work, Mum, unless you plan to win Lotto anytime soon.’

  ‘Your dad asked after you every day,’ Grandma said.

  Dad sighed and rolled his head back. I tried to get to the hallway but he kept his hand on my shoulder, and the burn of it went right through to the bone.

  ‘He had no idea who we were,’ he said. ‘And I was working. To pay for the food you now eat.’

  ‘To pay for the food I cook for your kids.’

  ‘For your grandkids,’ Dad said.

  Mum’s bedroom was quiet, and still. Dad took his hand off my shoulder and pushed the skin around his eye sockets, and my feet took me over to the other side of the room. I put my fingertips on the wall. If you pushed hard enough into them the creases in the wallpaper could make little red indents in your skin.

  ‘What’s going to happen when Simon gets older?’ Grandma said. ‘When he’s too strong for me? After everything with Amy—’

  ‘He’s been good,’ Dad said. He looked at me standing in the hallway.

  I decided to go invisible, and he looked straight through me to the wall.

  ‘Good?! He’s on detention for a week, and he—’

  ‘He’s been better,’ Dad said.

  I walked with my back against the wall down the corridor, the wallpaper blending into my skin, so that I was still invisible even as I moved. If I turned my head to the left I could see Superman, who was standing behind the curtain in the living room, with just his boots sticking out from underneath.

  When I got to the bedroom Davey was lying on his bed but he wasn’t sleeping. I sat on his bed and he flopped over.

  ‘What did Grandma say?’ I asked, but he just moved his arm to cover his eyes.

  ‘When?’

  ‘You said she was yelling about Mum.’

  Davey rolled over, and after a while I heard his breath go heavy. I went to my own bed and got under the doona but I didn’t lie down. I didn’t even get into my pyjamas before I turned off the light.

  I sat up for a long time. I felt the photo folded up in my pocket but I left it there. Ms Hilcombe tapped out M-A-T-T-H-E-W on the kitchen table and his photo wasn’t on top of the fridge anymore. If you listened you could hear the clock ticking in the kitchen, and Davey’s little snores from under the doona, and the branches from the trees brushing up against the side of the house. You could hear the sound of your heart beating in your ears, and the gentle buzz of the bees, who were never sleeping. You could feel the sting in your eyes, and your mouth all sticky with the honey in it, and when you closed them you could see Ms Hilcombe right in front of you, in a long skirt and with her hair all frizzy, holding Tink in a towel covered with blood.

  I got up, and I kept one hand on the wall as I walked down the corridor, and I walked real straight so that I could tell where I was. I felt the door to Grandma’s bedroom, then the door to the kitchen on the other side, then Mum’s room. The front door was right in front of me, and I could feel cold air coming underneath and onto my face. It felt cool and I was sweating, and I couldn’t hear any noise in Mum’s room.

  Superman sat on the good couch in the living room. He was bright and red in the dark.

  ‘You promised,’ he said.

  Twenty-two

  ‘Hassett Creek, 1968,’ Cassie read, and she turned the photo over to look again at Matthew and Ms Hilcombe.

  ‘Do you know where it is?’ I said.

  She shook her head. ‘Never heard of it.’

  ‘Dad has a map,’ Jeremy said. ‘Well, a book of maps. Is it a town or a farm, though? Or, like, just a creek nearby?’

  I shrugged. I wanted to take the picture back from Cassie, but she was turning it over and over in her hands.

  ‘Does it matter?’ she asked.

  ‘Might help to know what to look for,’ Jeremy said.

  There were clothes all over Cassie’s bedroom floor, and she had started taking down some of her posters, and there were boxes on her bed and down beside her chest of drawers.

  ‘Hey, do you reckon you could fit records in there?’ she asked, looking at a box already full of magazines. She sighed. ‘Probably not. I’ll see if Mum’ll post ’em. Dad doesn’t need them anyway, hey?’

  She bent down and picked up a top, folded it and put it in the box. ‘I’m gonna get all new clothes when I’m in the city,’ she said. ‘I’m sick of these ones, I tell you what.’

  Her window looked out onto the paddock, and the dead tree with branches going up into the sky. Arnold was leaning against the trunk with his arms folded across his chest, watching the long grass sway in the wind.

  ‘This is weird,’ Jeremy said. He sat down on the bed, and a box fell off onto the floor. He didn’t even look at it. I bent down to pick it up.

  ‘Reckon you’ll get in trouble for skipping school?’ Cassie said.

  ‘I don’t care,’ Jeremy said.

  ‘Might miss out on your pocket money, but,’ Cassie said.

  Jeremy blushed down to his collar. ‘At least I won’t have to buy you any more pies.’

  My tummy felt heavy and hard with stones.

  Cassie kept looking out the window. ‘I’ve still got a few days,’ she said. She picked up a top from the floor and folded it, then dropped it on the ground again. ‘Thought maybe Mum’d change her mind.’ Her voice was shaky, and she covered her face with her hands.

  ‘I need you to help me find Ms Hilcombe before you go,’ I said.

  Cassie looked up at me with her eyes all red.

  ‘Are you serious?’ Jeremy asked.

  Cassie wiped her nose on the back of her hand, then down along her pants. ‘Numpty, we already looked,’ she said. ‘Remember the whole br
eak-and-enter thing? I’m not going back there, no way. They probably already have our fingerprints on everything.’ She sniffed, and it made her nostrils flare like a horse’s, and she kept wiping at her eyes with her fingers. ‘She wasn’t there, okay? She’s gone, Numpty.’

  If you took a big bit of breath in through your nose it smelt like old lemons and washing powder. I felt the honey start to come up along my throat. ‘I promised,’ I said. I swallowed but I couldn’t get it to drip back down. The bees were trying to fix the hole in the honeycomb, but it was still leaking out if I moved or walked too fast.

  ‘We should tell the cops and that’s it,’ Cassie said.

  Behind her, Jeremy nodded, and I closed one eye to make him disappear.

  ‘I can’t,’ I said.

  Arnold left his tree and started walking towards Cassie’s fence. I looked away. When I looked back again, he was at the window, tapping on the glass. The collar on his pyjamas was pushed up against his chin in the wind.

  ‘You could hang someone real good from the top of that tree,’ he said, and he pointed to the paddock, and to the branches scratching holes in the sky. His voice sounded like old concrete and chalk dust, and I could only just make out the words.

  ‘Listen, this is weird—you gotta let it go,’ Cassie said.

  ‘Please come with me to find her,’ I said.

  Cassie shook her head. She put her hand on my shoulder, and the burn went through my clothes and down to the skin and the bone. ‘You gotta let it go,’ she repeated.

  She bent down and put some shoes in a box. Arnold hitched up his pyjama legs and walked back through the long grass.

  ***

  After I left Cassie’s, I walked out along the back way, across the railway line and down along the paddocks, and Superman walked behind me with his cape over his head to keep off the rain. The raindrops ran down the back of my collar and along my spine, and I couldn’t reach to rub them away.

  I thought about how Tink would like all the different smells up around the top of the paddocks, and it would be a good walk for her little legs coming this far out of town.

  I got to the end, where the road just stopped and turned into pebbles and stones, and an old fence had half fallen over, and the grass had grown long enough that it was nearly up to my nose. I wasn’t sure where we were, and when I looked at Superman he just shrugged at me and pulled his cape further over the top of his head. We looked up and the sky was dark grey, and when the raindrops fell onto our clothes they washed the colour out of them, then the colour out of our hair and our skin and our eyes. Then it washed away the lines of our hands and our heads and our bodies, so that we were rubbed out off the side of the road, and so that when the rain stopped we were empty. We were cleaned away. We were gone.

  We started to double back, and I heard Mr Justfield’s cow crying on the edges of the wind and turned towards the sound, and as we walked it got louder, and the paddocks turned more into trees, and eventually we were standing outside the last house before the highway, and Mr Justfield’s cow stood alone under an orange tree that didn’t have any fruit.

  ‘Simon?’

  I turned and saw Mrs Freeman standing out the front of her house. She had a big scarf wrapped around her shoulders and her feet were in socks and slippers. ‘I thought it was you,’ she said. ‘Why aren’t you at school?’

  Superman shrugged his shoulders and I shrugged mine, and it made more raindrops run down the back of my neck. I got goosebumps up and down my arms and I rubbed at them, and Mrs Freeman saw.

  ‘Are you cold?’ she asked. ‘Come in and I’ll get a towel. Come on, quickly.’

  Mrs Freeman’s house was so old that when you walked across the floor there were high bits under one foot and low bits under the other. Her kitchen was behind her couch and her fireplace, and over the top of the stove there was another Jesus on the cross, like the one at Cassie’s house. She saw me looking at it, and she smiled.

  ‘Do you want something to eat?’ she asked, and I shook my head.

  She put a towel around my shoulders and it smelt like the back of the medicine cupboard. It was thin, and it scratched at my face.

  ‘He’s mostly just there to remind me,’ she said, and she pointed back up to Jesus, who turned his head to look down at me from his cross with blood in his eyes. You could see his ribs, and there was blood coming from a cut on one of them. She walked underneath him to the kitchen and put the kettle on, and the windows were so high over the sink that you couldn’t see anything but sky.

  ‘They say he sees all, and I try to be as good as I can be, but who doesn’t need a reminder every now and then?’

  I saw her eyes going up from my feet to my head and back down again, and her mouth was turned up at the ends like she was smiling, but the light of it didn’t get all the way up to her eyes.

  ‘No secrets with Jesus,’ she said, and then she laughed.

  The kettle boiled and she took it off the stove. ‘Do you have any secrets, Simon?’ she asked.

  Jesus watched her pour herself a cup of tea, and when he turned his head, blood dripped from his cheek and landed by her foot.

  The smell of the tea came up in a swirl in the cold air, and I watched as it pushed its way towards me and into my nose. I thought about Ms Hilcombe’s kitchen, with the orange cupboards and the window looking into the backyard, and I thought about how when you sat on the couch in the living room and leant over you could see the edge of the sink and the benchtop just poking out around the corner, and you could hear Ms Hilcombe talking if she was on the phone.

  ***

  ‘Simon,’ Ms Hilcombe said, ‘that phone call—that was private, you know? Look, I’ll try to explain, but can you keep it a secret?’ she said.

  All the flowers in the wallpaper were wide open, with their petals stretched out to hear as much as they could. My tongue felt heavy and wrong in my mouth.

  ‘I promise,’ I said.

  ‘Sometimes people just guess things about you, and it’s easier not to correct them. Especially if it’s about things that hurt.’

  Even though it was dark I could still see Superman in the corner, and he had his cape wrapped around himself to keep warm, and he was listening, and I was too.

  Ms Hilcombe pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. Tink snored next to her on the floor. ‘I should have set them straight about Matthew, I guess. I know it was wrong of me not to. It just…it all got a bit scary towards the end.’ She took a long breath and I could hear the shakiness in it. ‘Do you still promise?’ she said.

  I cleared my throat, but it was so dry that it hurt when I tried to swallow. I nodded into the cold and the dark.

  ***

  Mrs Freeman’s car had one long slippery seat in the front. I had to hold onto the arm of the door so I didn’t slide into her. I could still smell the towel on my jumper and my skin. When she pulled up outside our house it was quiet, and I thought that maybe Grandma wasn’t home. Mum’s window was dark again.

  We went up the steps to the front door, and when we got to the top I rang the doorbell and we waited to see if anyone would answer it.

  ‘You don’t have a key?’ Mrs Freeman said.

  I heard steps coming down the hallway and I felt my tummy drop down to my toes. The bees put their heads up and listened, and for a second there was silence as they strained to hear.

  Grandma opened the door and looked at Mrs Freeman, then down at me.

  ‘What in the world?’ she said.

  ‘Found him round the back paddocks,’ Mrs Freeman said. ‘Thought he might be cold, but he didn’t want anything to eat.’

  Grandma grabbed me by the shoulder and pulled me into the house, and it happened so quickly that I nearly banged my arm on the doorframe as I went past.

  ‘This was what we worried about,’ Mrs Freeman said. ‘Remember?’

  ‘You’ve got some nerve coming around here,’ Grandma said. ‘Some bloody nerve.’

  ‘You said your
self you knew this wasn’t the right place for him,’ Mrs Freeman said. ‘That there might be somewhere else where he could get the care he needs. I was just trying to help.’

  Superman sat on the good couch in the living room and wouldn’t look me in the eye. My shoulder burnt from Grandma’s fingers, but it wasn’t anything compared to the burn on my face.

  ‘Jesus is on a cross. He knows what you think before you’re thinking it, and he’s bleeding from under his rib,’ I said.

  Grandma looked at me, and her face went red from the edges of the cheeks and in towards her nose. She turned back to Mrs Freeman.

  ‘You’re not welcome here,’ Grandma said. ‘Not you or your opinions about this family.’

  I looked at her arm holding the door open and saw that it was shaking. ‘I never should have listened to you.’

  ‘You know it’s true,’ Mrs Freeman said. ‘Even after everything that’s happened.’

  I felt the burn on my cheeks right up to my earlobes. I tasted sour in the back of my throat.

  Grandma slammed the door in Mrs Freeman’s face. The smack of the wood in the doorframe went up into my ears and around my skull, and the sound of it broke all the words trying to make shapes in my brain. I turned around to run down the hallway, but Grandma grabbed my arm before I could take a step. The burn of it gave me a fright and I yelled.

  ‘For God’s sake, Simon,’ Grandma said. ‘Now you’ve brought her back into our lives! For Christ’s bloody sake.’

  I pulled my arm away and her fingernails made little rips in the skin.

  ‘She’s right, you know. She was always right, as much of a cow as she is. I don’t give a shit what your dad says anymore—you’re going to the school in the city.’

  The bees swarmed in my arms and my legs, and their stingers punched little holes hard enough to get through the skin. They were in such a rush to get out that they ripped holes in the honeycomb.

  ‘I’ve had it!’ Her voice was high and loud and it shredded the air in front of it.

  ‘What school?’ I said. My voice was made of compost and shredded newspaper, and there was no spit in my mouth when I talked.

  ‘The special school, Simon; the school for boys like you.’