We See the Stars

  I took the compass back, but the needle still wouldn’t behave when I held it. I put it in my pocket quick so that Jeremy wouldn’t see.

  ‘You’re not going to the city, are you?’ he said.

  I hesitated, then shook my head.

  ‘Did you find Hassett Creek on the map?’ I asked.

  ‘I found a creek called Hassett Creek, but it didn’t look like it had any properties on it or anything. It’s just a bit of water that runs into a bigger river a few kilometres further south.’

  ‘How far?’

  ‘Two hours’ drive, I think. Maybe more, I dunno. Do you reckon Cassie can even walk that far?’

  ‘Show me,’ I said.

  Jeremy unfolded one of the maps so that it covered his dad’s workbench. He counted out the little squares, then he pointed to one. It was mostly green with one road running through it, and a line of blue going down the centre from left to right.

  ‘It goes for a while,’ he said.

  I nodded.

  Jeremy traced the route directly on it with his finger, crossing over all the grids and lines.

  Mum lay on her belly on the ground and there was blood. We were half an hour from the nearest hospital. You could hardly hear Grandma yelling for Dad over the sound of Mrs Freeman standing on the porch and screaming over the edge of it.

  ‘Simon?’ Jeremy said.

  I put the map in my back pocket and I felt Ms Hilcombe’s photo with my fingers. Ms Hilcombe tapped out M-A-T-T-H-E-W on the kitchen table. I looked at Jeremy, and he was slapping his torch into his other hand.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘The torch is dead; tell Cassie she’ll have to use one of hers.’

  Jeremy looked over my shoulder. Headlights came down the street and flashed over the back wall. He lit up white from the bright of it.

  He started pushing me towards the door. ‘Hey, listen, tell Cassie to wear something warm, okay?’

  I turned to look at him standing in his garage with the door rolled only a little way up and his school shirt pulled out of his pants.

  ‘You too, Simon. You put on something warm, too,’ he said.

  ***

  If you put your ear to the wall and listened you couldn’t hear anything, not even the radio, and when I knocked on the bedroom window Davey got up from his bed but wouldn’t open it.

  ‘You’re in heaps of trouble,’ he said through the glass.

  ‘Is Grandma okay?’ I asked. I felt prickles all the way down to my toes, and I wiggled them in my shoes.

  ‘Yeah, she’s watching the news,’ Davey said. ‘She told me to stay in here till you come back.’

  ‘I’m not back yet,’ I said.

  ‘I know,’ Davey said. ‘You’re outside.’

  ‘Is Dad home?’ I asked. I felt the tingles in my fingers and I kept making a fist and letting go. My fingers felt swollen and heavy. I knew if I lifted them up to my ear I would hear the ocean.

  ‘Nah,’ Davey said. ‘He’s gone out to look for you.’

  ‘I have to get something from the shed. But don’t tell Dad you saw me.’

  ‘What do you want from the shed?’

  ‘A torch,’ I said.

  Davey opened the window and stuck his head out. ‘Are you going on an adventure?’ he asked. His eyes were big but you could only see the black bit in the middle, and none of the blue around the outside. He was wearing a T-shirt and his arms had goosebumps from the cold.

  ‘Get back inside,’ I said. ‘I’m going to get the torch and you can’t tell Dad I took it.’

  ‘What if he asks?’

  ‘Just don’t answer,’ I said.

  ‘But he’ll want to know,’ Davey said.

  Superman was standing by the window. He looked at his watch.

  ‘But you’re sure Grandma’s okay?’ I said. ‘She’s awake and everything?’

  ‘Can I come with you?’

  I shook my head. I felt the heat of the angry on my cheeks and moving up over my eyelids. I felt it push my arms up as I ran at Mum and Mrs Freeman. I imagined it was Davey, and that I’d twisted my arms around his neck and pulled.

  ‘You have to stay and look after everything here,’ I said.

  ‘Simon…’ Davey said.

  I put my hand up and held it to the window, and Davey put his hand up on the other side, and even though it was cold on the glass I took some of Davey’s warmth through it, and I sent it down my arms to pink up in the middle of my chest.

  I went around the side of the house. Dad’s shed is special because it’s his, but there’s nothing much in there except for his workbench, which he doesn’t use, and a couple of power tools that have got so rusty you can’t turn them on without giving yourself a shock. I looked under the bench but there wasn’t anything there except old paint tins from when we painted the bedroom, and rags which used to be Davey’s pyjamas when he was little. I felt the stone in my tummy start to shift and I thought about being sick on the concrete, but Dad might have smelt it if he went out onto the back porch to have a smoke.

  Superman pointed to the cabinet, and when I opened it there was a bag in the bottom. Dad used to take it to Davey’s cricket games because it fit all the gear in one go. You could fit the compass and the maps and a jumper in there, easy. There was even a water bottle, which was empty and smelt a bit like socks. I found the torch on the top shelf behind some extension cords, and when I pulled it down I also pulled the cords down on top of myself. They wrapped around my shoulders and neck, and I felt them tighten like a snake trying to squeeze out your air. I felt the breath go out of my lungs and into the dust and the darkness.

  I filled up the water bottle from the tap and went down to the side of the house and ducked down behind the back verandah. If I leant over and looked through the window I could just see Grandma’s feet sticking up over the edge of the couch where she was lying on it, and the TV on in the corner. When Grandpa first went to hospital he walked around more, and he liked to go to the room down the corridor where you could play cards and talk to the other old people. Sometimes when we visited we’d go to his room first but he wouldn’t be there, and we’d find him sitting in front of the TV.

  He’d be sitting up close enough to the TV that he could touch it, and he’d just be watching the fuzz you’d get when you weren’t on a proper channel. He didn’t like it if Davey tried to change it to something else, and he had to have it up really loud so he could hear. If the nurses came over to try and get him to move he wouldn’t let them, and he wouldn’t look up when we sat down, and sometimes he’d reach up and touch the screen where the fuzz was, and sometimes it would make him laugh. When he touched it the fuzz would go wet and ripply, and he’d get it caught on his fingers and it’d slip down under his sleeves, and if he didn’t wipe it off it’d keep spreading over him, until it had covered his arms and was halfway up his neck. If it kept going he’d get lost in the middle of it, until the fuzz was all that he could hear, and you’d look at him and see that his eyes were snowed over with it, and you couldn’t change the channel, and you couldn’t turn it down.

  I watched Grandma on the couch, and I knew that I should get going before Dad came home. I reached up and pinched my fingers, and I pulled some of the black and white from the TV out over the air and to me outside, and it crackled in my hands when I rubbed it over my chest. I held it there, so that the black and white spread out over my skin and through the cotton into my clothes, and so that the only sound was the rush of it in my ears. So that the fuzz rubbed me out and I was invisible. So that even if you strained your eyes there wasn’t any pattern you could see.

  ***

  The bag was heavy on my shoulder now that it had everything in it. Superman offered to carry it, but I didn’t want to let it go in case something got lost. After a while he fell too far behind me, and when I looked over my shoulder I realised he had gone.

  Out along the back paddocks there weren’t any streetlights, and you had to be careful to watch your feet. I didn’t want to use t
he torch yet in case I made the batteries go flat, but it meant that I didn’t see the hole coming until I was already in it. It was just the right size for me, and when I went into it I yelled a little but the noise got swallowed up into the black.

  I fell for ages, and when I landed the splash took all the voice out of my body, and the water got under my clothes and stuck little needles into my skin. When I looked up I could only just see the sky at the end of a long tunnel, and if I called out the echo came around and got caught inside my ears. I had to swim to keep my head out of the water, and when I breathed in the cold got into my lungs and they iced over. I was starting to freeze hard and solid in the water at the bottom of the hole, and when I sunk down to the ground there was just enough light to see Ms Hilcombe, and she was trapped in the water along with me, silent and white with her hair floating right over her face.

  After I fell over I brushed the dirt off my knees and checked but I wasn’t bleeding. A car came along the road and I ducked into one of the paddocks to hide from it, but the headlights lit up the road and I realised I wasn’t far from Cassie’s place. As I walked I put my hand out and touched the fence posts, because it meant I kept going in a straight line. After a while I could see Cassie’s driveway, and there were lights shining on the other side of the sheets covering the windows. Other than the wind in your ears it was quiet. I opened my fist and closed it again to try to get the prickles out.

  There was a hole in the ground where the Hills hoist had been, and the grass was mowed short enough that you could see patches of mud where it was thinnest. Cassie was sitting in her bedroom and if you stood on your tiptoes near the fence you could just see in. I knew she was listening to music because I could feel the lowest notes coming through the walls, and the sound of it travelled across the air in front of me and made little ripples like when you drop a stone in a dam, and when they got to me they went through me and out the other side and washed into the palings of the fence.

  Arnold came up behind me and put his hand on my shoulder. ‘You know what needs doing, then,’ he said.

  I nodded my head.

  ‘Did I ever tell you about my brother?’ Arnold asked. ‘Oh, he was a lovely lad; a good heart in him but thick as two short planks. Went off to fight the Turks in the war and never came back. Left a wife behind, could barely get a word out of her for weeks after.’

  Cassie stood up from the bed and stretched her arms up over her head. Her top rode up a little bit and you could see the ribs when she bent over. She swept the ground with her hands, then went back up again with her arms over her head. Her fingers curled into her palm on her bad hand. You could see the melted and the red.

  ‘Couple of months after we get the notification from the war office, a parcel comes with some of his things. Mostly her letters to him, but one that he never sent. Reckon it was the last one he wrote. Said he loved her and all that, of course, but also that no matter how scared he got he was proud of the fear because it meant he was alive. Meant he cared, he said, and he cared a lot—about her, and about the family. The more scared he was the more he knew he loved.’

  Cassie started moving her hips to the beat from the music, and then started tapping her feet as well. She put her hands in the air in front of her and it looked like she was waving around an invisible basketball. She moved around the room with her arms up and her feet following along, and even though you couldn’t hear the music you could feel it in your tummy and your chest.

  I reached back and pressed my fingertips into the fence behind me, so that the little lines cut across the skin. I held my fingers there until my heart sent blood out through my veins and along the skin, so that when I pressed hard enough my nails went white. I pressed so hard that a little bit of me caught on the paling, bits of my skin and some of my blood, a little bit of me that would always be there, down in the atoms and the wood.

  ‘Will you come and help me find her?’ I asked Arnold.

  He put his hand on his chest. ‘Leave the tree?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  I looked back at Cassie. She’d be an even better dancer once she got to the city.

  ‘I guess a change of scene would be nice,’ Arnold said. Bits of his voice got trapped on the wind, and some of them blew off into dust and powder in the air.

  Cassie still danced in her bedroom, and before I left I turned to face the window. I crossed one leg over the other. I stuck my arms straight out from my body. I bent over at a right angle so that I was looking at my knees, and as I pulled up from my bow I didn’t wobble, I just stayed steady on my feet.

  Twenty-five

  I wanted to keep off the street as much as possible until I reached the highway. Sometimes if you walked past a house with the curtains open you could look in and see someone watching TV, or someone reading a book. It was past dinner time, and Davey would be having his bath and getting ready for bed. I pulled my jumper forward and tried to wrap it around myself, and the weight of the bag on my shoulder was really starting to cut in, and if you crossed the railway line then went down towards the cricket oval, then overshot the lane by one street and came along the back way, you could go past Ms Hilcombe’s before you hit the main road.

  It smelt like rain again, and there were so many clouds that you couldn’t see any stars. By the time I got to Ms Hilcombe’s I could see my breath coming out in little white puffs if I walked under a streetlight, and I tucked my fingers in under my jumper to keep them warm.

  Ms Hilcombe’s house was dark, and there wasn’t anyone in it. Her driveway needed sweeping and her grass was too long. There was nothing in the letterbox, and I checked twice.

  The ground was wet and put mud patches on my knees when I knelt down. The dirt was cold when I put my hands down into the dark of it. I could feel mud jamming in under my fingernails, but I just kept going until my hand brushed up against the bulb. It was bigger than when I’d planted it, and when I pulled it out of the ground it was heavy and covered in dirt. The dry bits of skin on the outside were gone and there were little green shoots coming from the centre of it, from right down in the middle, from when I had planted it and it had been the most dead.

  ***

  If I walked down the back of the paddocks there wasn’t enough light to see, so as much as I could I walked along the gutters and close to people’s fences until I got to the highway. From there you could follow the road, and even though there weren’t any streetlights you could keep an eye on where you were if a car came along with its headlights on. I walked through the grass along the side of the highway, and when the trees got thicker I got off the road and went towards the left. I could see Arnold when I checked over my shoulder.

  ‘Do you want me to carry the bag?’ he asked.

  I kept it on my shoulder even though it still dug into the skin.

  Arnold sighed and stopped walking. ‘When I was your age we respected our elders,’ he said.

  When I looked back he was gone.

  The thing about it was that if you turned the torch on and looked at the map it made it hard to see again, because the light on the paper was so bright that it burnt little red fuzzes onto the back of your eyeballs and you’d have to be so careful walking until they’d faded enough to see. I was worried, too, that if I turned the torch on too close to the road people would see me, and I wasn’t exactly sure how close to the road I still was, because if a car came past I could still see the headlights even if I couldn’t hear the noise.

  I remembered from when Jeremy traced the route on the map that there was a lot of green, and that the mountains stayed on the left. I’d know that I was getting to the right spot when I found the creek bed, and then I’d follow that all the way to the farm. If I kept walking in the green, I would hear the water. It was so quiet that all there was to hear was my feet in the grass.

  My tummy rumbled, and when I put my hands on it the milk from Mr Justfield’s cow shifted so that I felt like I might be sick. I tasted the sour in the back of my throat, and the letters
from Matthew’s note started coming up so that I had to swallow them down again. They fell into my belly with quiet little thuds, and there wasn’t enough food in there to drown them. Ms Hilcombe put her hands behind her head and tied her hair up, but the frizzy bits still fell down around her ears. My tummy rumbled, and it echoed like when you yell out in the empty school hall, and I had to put my hands on my belly and rub them around and around in circles so that it would stop.

  Dad had rolled Mum over and got blood all over his hands, so he couldn’t go inside to call the hospital. He made Mrs Freeman do it, when she stopped howling. Mum had been pale and her eyes were closed, and she moaned and held her tummy. The blood was in the garden beds, and sinking into the grass.

  You had to be careful where you stepped because there were lots of little rocks and holes to fall into, and as the trees grew thicker it got harder and harder to see. I had to keep looking up to make sure I didn’t walk into a tree, then down to make sure I wasn’t stepping on anything, and there was scrub and grass up to the trunks that meant you couldn’t always tell either way. Superman walked beside me but he pulled his cape up around his armpits so that it wouldn’t get shredded. He didn’t look very happy about it. He sighed a couple of times, loudly, to make sure that I would hear.

  Mum had landed in the dirt of the garden bed, and the bricks from the step fell out all over the path. The rain and the blood made it slippery, and you had to be careful not to fall when you ran back into the house.

  I slipped when a couple of rocks moved under my foot as I was walking, and I landed on the bag and on my elbow. The heat shot up my arm and tingles went down my fingers, and for a second I couldn’t breathe in the darkness. I felt my tummy shift again, and the milk rolled over to the side, and I swallowed down the letters with the sour. I coughed a little, and I lay on my back in the dark. I put the stillness on like a blanket. My elbow felt heavy and burnt from the graze.

  ‘Careful,’ Arnold said.