We See the Stars

by Kate van Hooft

  ‘I can hear the wind whipping through the long grass,’ Arnold says.

  I close my eyes for a second, and when I open them again he’s standing up and has his back to me. When he turns to look at me his face is covered in mud, and his hair is stuck to his head with it. ‘Do you hear it, son?’ he asks.

  ***

  There’s light in front of my eyes but it still takes me a bit to open them, and when I do it’s later in the morning. If I try to stand up too quick the little pins come back into my eyes and I have to inch up slowly and push backwards against the tree. My bum’s gone numb from the ground and my legs are creaking and rusty. I stand up for a long time before I start moving. I keep touching my nose to feel that it’s there. I feel the milk curdling in my belly, but when I count, it starts to settle down.

  1. Ms Hilcombe is trapped in the basement and tied down to a post by Matthew, and he has a bunch of knives on his workbench.

  2. Ms Hilcombe is buried in a box in the bottom of Matthew’s garden, and the weeds are getting so close that they can wrap around her bones.

  3. Mum landed in the garden from the front porch, and there aren’t enough numbers to count all the red.

  I nearly tumble over but Superman catches me, and he realises that the ground has started sloping downwards and that we’re going into another valley. He cups his hand around his ear and listens. He puts his finger to his lips and I cup my hand around my ear. I hear the water, the little bubbles and the sound of it splashing on rocks, and we both take off so quickly towards it that Superman nearly trips on his cape and I nearly drop the bag. It gets louder, then softer, and we have to double back, but Superman sees another clear spot in the trees and we head towards it, and down in the bottom of the valley there’s so much water in the little stream that you can put your whole face in it. It’s cold on the back of my throat and it makes me choke a little, and there’s bits of dead leaves across the back of my tongue when I swallow.

  Arnold’s standing on the other side of the stream, up to his ankles in it. ‘I thought I heard her,’ he says, and he reaches into the water to pull something out of the reeds. He makes ripples in the water as he searches around on the bottom, and he grunts when his hands can’t find anything but sticks and mud.

  ‘I thought she was tapping something out in Morse,’ he says, and Superman is standing on the edge of the stream now, and leaning over to see what Arnold’s doing. His cape is getting wet on the edges, and I lean over and lift it out so it’ll dry.

  ‘Couldn’t make out all of it,’ Arnold says, and the water in my belly is starting to settle in with the sour milk, and as it drips down the leaves start to make the milk curdle, and there’s sour coming off it and up my throat.

  ‘Something about Matthew, something about the creek,’ Arnold says. He’s down on his knees and up to his elbows now, with his chin only just out of the water, and the stream has stopped running to let him try to find what he’s looking for.

  I can feel the letters of Matthew’s note sloshing around and getting jumbled up, and the sour is getting so strong I can smell it even if I swallow it down. There’s mud under my fingernails and along the bottom of my pants, and for a second I worry I’m having an angry until I touch the mud and feel that it’s cold. There’s sweat on my back and my jumper keeps sticking to me.

  ‘Ah!’ Arnold says, and he’s gripping something, and he’s trying to pull it out. ‘Caught on the bloody reeds,’ he says, and he keeps pulling, and Superman is going over to help him reel it in.

  The letters start to hit against the sides of my belly, and if I lean too far to the left I can feel the G bang into my ribcage, and the B and the O smack into each other. You can hear in the echo up behind your ears which letter it is. The B sounds like when you drop a book on lino. The N sounds like the crunching noise it makes when you break glass.

  I think I might be sick, and even if I swallow it down I can feel the letters bob back up to the top of the sour milk in my tummy, and the dead leaves are stuck in the back of my throat, and when I look up there’s only more trees, and sky that’s too bright, and no sound of anyone’s heart but mine.

  The thing Arnold is pulling out of the stream is wet and heavy. He holds it up to show me, and when he does it starts to come apart in his hands. It’s long, like it would reach all the way down to the ground, and if it were dry you could tell it would be flowy. She wore it mostly in summer, but if it was rainy she’d put gumboots on underneath and just lift it up to keep it out of puddles. It’s got a stretchy bit at the front for when your belly is getting bigger. Dad says she wore it when she was having Davey, and kept it just in case there were any more. Arnold looks at me, and his eyes are wide with shock.

  ‘That’s not hers, that’s Mum’s,’ I say, and when he holds it up to the light you can see the blood on it, and some of the dirt from the garden bed by the front porch.

  I heave, and the letters come out in the wrong order. The G comes out first, then the I and the N. The O and the B come out at roughly the same time, and they scrape my throat on the way through.

  ‘Oh,’ says Arnold and he’s standing just in front of me. I look up at him, and the sick is on my mouth and down the front of my jumper, and the mud taste isn’t strong enough to carry the sour out of my throat. Arnold leans down and brushes the hair off my forehead and his hands are cool on my skin. I feel the burn in it, but it’s from the sun and not from him.

  ‘Alright, lad, get it all out,’ he says, and I spit some sour onto the ground in front of me. ‘You taught her the Morse, didn’t you, son?’ he says, and I nod.

  ‘But you taught her to say his name, didn’t you?’ and I nod again. There’s a burn in my throat from where the letters scraped on the way back out again. I can feel my head swimming, and the sweat on my skin has turned cold. ‘You taught her Matthew’s name,’ Arnold says.

  I hold up the palm of my hand and I tap out Y-E-S on it. I have pins and needles in my toes and I squirm them around in my socks.

  ‘He heard,’ Arnold says. He sits down on a rock and looks right into my face. ‘When she tapped it out do you know what she did? She sent out little waves of sound with each letter, and each tap went out into the air and the atmosphere, and it went in search of Matthew, and he heard it call for him so he came to it. All of us heard it. Loud enough to wake the bloody dead, she made it. That’s how he found her. Because you taught her the wrong letters and sent the wrong name out into the air.’

  I’m sick again, down into the dirt just beside my feet, and it sinks into the ground in a second. There’s nothing in my tummy and I’ve turned myself inside out. I don’t even taste it anymore. I try to breathe but my tummy keeps heaving, and it takes me a bit to get my breath enough to stop.

  ‘What happens if I don’t save her?’ I say, and a sob gets caught up in a burp and there’s mud and grass stuck to the middle of it.

  ‘Enough, son,’ Arnold says. ‘Enough for now.’ And he leans over to put his hands over my eyes so that suddenly there’s darkness. I feel my head start to go light, but even so my shoulders aren’t strong enough to hold it, and I feel my chin hit the top of my jumper, where I can still smell the sick.

  ‘Put your head down,’ Arnold says, and he makes a pillow out of dry leaves and some grass, and pulls me down so I’m lying on my side. I close my eyes, just for a little bit.

  ***

  I’m not sure that I can last the whole fifteen minutes, and the rattle in my chest is getting louder, and I can feel the breath getting stuck and pushing out into my bones. If I keep pushing my fingers into the front seat I might rip the fabric, but I can’t keep my arms down even if Mum holds them. Dad’s gone quiet, and Mum’s holding my head up so I can see.

  ‘Look at that one,’ Mum says, and she points to three stars lined up in a row. ‘Is that the Big Dipper?’

  I keep coughing, and even though I can feel the squeeze in my chest let go a little I still can’t get enough of the air out.

  ‘Mum,’ I say, bu
t it’s drowned in too much breath.

  ‘Sssh,’ Mum says. ‘Close your eyes, Simon. Close your eyes.’

  ***

  I’ve been asleep so long that it’s afternoon again. The sick has dried on my jumper and there’s blood on the knee of my pants, and when I roll them up I realise I must have cut myself somewhere. I don’t have any band-aids, so I try to brush the blood off with some mud and some dead leaves, and I blow cold air over the top of it to get the sting out.

  I feel better now the letters are out. My jaw clicks and rolls and I don’t even feel the pain of it. I take the map out of the bag and trace the line through the green, but now I’m not sure if it’s mountains or flat. My hands are covered in dirt and I feel the blood in my sock and my legs are achey. I think about Davey in bed with the doona up to his eyebrows. I think about Mum and folding back the roof to see the stars.

  The trees are still, but when the wind comes through it makes them whistle, and if you’re not paying attention it could sound like words. I pull the bag over my shoulder and I stand up slowly, but everything stays mostly where it is. I can smell the sick coming out of the ground and I want to move away from it, and if I don’t keep moving I won’t ever get going again.

  ‘We have to go,’ I say to Superman, and he nods and stands up. There’s a rip in his tights that’s letting the cold in, and he wraps his cape around his leg to keep it warm. I try to take a few steps forward, but my legs start to shake underneath me and I have to put my hand out to catch myself on a tree.

  ‘Here, son,’ Arnold says, and he picks me up and puts me over his shoulders. I squeal when he does it, and when I put my hands on the top of his head to steady myself I can feel the skin moving loose over his skeleton.

  ‘I’m heavy, though!’ I say, and Arnold laughs.

  ‘Ah, but I’m strong now, you see? Strong as I ever was.’ And to prove it he starts jumping up and down with me on his shoulders, and I laugh for a second when I can feel my head bouncing around on the end of my neck, but then I start to feel the pull in the muscles, and put my hands over my ears to keep my head in the right spot.

  ‘Stop,’ I say, and Arnold goes still under my legs.

  When I look up we’re standing on the edge of a rock shelf, and I can see down through the trees into the valley below.

  ‘Is that on your map, then?’ Arnold says.

  I hold it out in front of him so he can see. ‘I can’t tell,’ I say. ‘Maybe it’s the dark green bit?’

  ‘That could be mountain, of course,’ Arnold says. ‘There’s no key?’ He takes the map from me and turns it upside down. ‘You’d never get a map like this leading your regiment through enemy territory,’ he says, and he clicks his tongue. ‘The lot of you’d waltz into their camp before you’d even realised you were heading arse about.’ He scrunches the map up and hands it back to me, and I put it back in my bag.

  Superman is standing a little further down, with his hands over his eyes to shield them from the sun, and when he lifts his arms up you can see sweat stains dripping down the armpits of his costume, and the rip in his tights big enough that you can see all the way down to his knee.

  ***

  By the time it gets dark we’ve reached the bottom of the valley, and there’s another stream at the end of it. I put my whole face in the water to drink, and to try to get some cool across the sunburn on my ears. When I put my hands on my tummy I can feel that it’s empty, and the ache of it goes down into my legs and out along the tops of my feet.

  ‘Here, let me listen,’ Arnold says, and he puts his ear to my tummy and taps it with his fingertips. He waits for a second, and I can smell stale and old mud coming off the top of his head. ‘Ah, my lad, just like I thought—nearly completely hollow.’ He looks at me with his eyes all crinkly and watery. If I shine the torch on his skin I would probably see right through to the bones underneath, and for a second I think about Grandpa in his hospital bed with his tubes sticking sharp out of his chest.

  With the dark I feel the cold come back over the top of my jumper, and it gets in under the cotton to rub up against my skin. If I squeeze my teeth together over my lips I can pull off little shreds of skin, and after I get a long one I can taste blood on the end of my tongue.

  ‘Just rest a while, lad,’ Arnold says, and I can feel my eyes getting heavy for the sleep in them. ‘We’re nearly there.’ He’s standing up over the top of me so that I can lean back and rest against his legs.

  ‘Will Ms Hilcombe have food for us when we get there?’ I ask, and my voice sounds rusted over and dusty, and I can hear the old nails and chicken wire in it when I talk.

  ‘Oh, yes, everything,’ Arnold says. ‘More Vegemite Vita-Weats than a boy could cram in him, and not the dry ones that Grandma gets on sale, either.’

  ‘Will she be happy to see us?’ I ask. I pull my legs up along my chest and put my arms around them to keep them steady. There’s cold coming up from the dirt and down along my back, but when I tuck my jumper up over my nose I can blow hot breath onto the skin, and there’s enough warmth in it to keep the shivers out.

  ***

  ‘Here, look at this!’ Arnold says, and when I open my eyes it’s still night-time, and when I try to lift my head up off the ground I can hear the bones in my neck creaking from the weight of it. If I put my hands on my tummy I can feel it rolling, and there’s a squeeze down along my bellybutton that knocks the air out of me when I sit up. I take a big breath in to get some back into my chest, and the cold of it makes me cough into the night. The sound bounces off the trees in front of me, and off Grandpa’s boxes, which are stacked up around me in the dirt.

  Arnold’s standing in the middle of them, with his hands on his hips. ‘Can you see all the records, lad?’ he asks, and he’s up to his elbows in one of the boxes. ‘Oh, this one’s a classic, it is.’ But when he pulls the record out of the box his grip is too tight on it, and I can see it bending under his fingers.

  ‘Hey,’ I say, but there’s no sound in my throat, and when I cough you can hardly hear the noise.

  ‘What’s in this one?’ Arnold asks, and he’s ripping the masking tape off the box before I can stop him.

  ‘Books!’ he says, but he’s not smiling. ‘What bloody use are these?’

  When he throws them over his shoulder they land in the dirt and the dead leaves, and one of them splits open and falls apart in front of me, and mud and grass leak out of the pages.

  ‘Stop,’ I say, and I can feel the rattle in my chest when I try to breathe out, but there’s enough anger in me now that I can get the sound out, even if it makes my throat burn from the pain of it.

  ‘Look, another!’ Arnold says, and he pushes a box off the top of the pile to get to the one underneath it. ‘Give us a hand, would ya, lad?’

  I pull myself up off the ground to get to him, and I can feel the creak and the thunder in my legs when I try to move them, and my fingers are so cold that they’re not going where I want them to anymore.

  ‘Ah, just junk,’ Arnold says, peering into the box. He pulls something out and the brightness burns in my eyes, but when I get used to the light I can see it’s a birthday candle, and it’s in the shape of the number 6, and it’s from Davey’s birthday when Grandpa came around with a cake he’d bought special from the bakery in Manerlong. The cake was in the shape of a car, and the wheels were made of marshmallows, and Davey loved it so much he tried to save the wheels in his secret shoebox, but they went mouldy and melted when summer came and it got too hot under his bed.

  ‘Put that back,’ I say, and when I touch Arnold’s arm I feel the paper of his skin on mine.

  ‘But there could be something,’ Arnold says, and he’s still trying to get to the bottom of Grandpa’s box, and I hear the cardboard starting to rip from where he’s pulling it. He keeps reaching in, until his arms have gone through the bottom of the box and down into the ground underneath it, and if he topples head first into the dark he’ll bury himself.

  ‘I said stop!’ I
yell. I grab onto the sleeve of his pyjamas, but the cotton starts to come away under my hands, and when I rub it between my fingers it turns to dirt and falls apart.

  ‘Bloody hell, son,’ Arnold says, and he’s angry now, and when he turns to look at me he puts his face right up into mine so that the stale smell gets all over me when he breathes. ‘I was just getting somewhere, too,’ he says, and he kicks the box over.

  I get down on my hands and knees to stop everything spilling, but when I pick it up I realise the box is empty, and that it’s always been empty, and that there’s an ache in my tummy pulling out into the dark.

  Minus two

  I wake up with a jolt and nearly roll into some rocks. I feel along the top of my nose and along my jaw, and there’s an ache that starts out sharp under my skin and goes all the way into my eyeball. I can tell from the light that it’s morning, but I can’t get my legs to move enough to sit up, and when I pull my fingers across my face the pain gets caught on them, and I have to tug to loosen it from my skin. It comes away like cobwebs that are pink and red and purple, and when I spread it between my fingers I can mould it into shapes. I pull the pain apart so that it’s in shreds, and as I watch, it goes from red to brown to black, then dead.

  ‘Simon!’ someone yells, but so far away that it’s just on the wind. I look up at the trees and see there are birds on top of the branches looking down at me. I wave to them, and they watch me. ‘Simon!’ they call, and their eyes are black and so big that you can see your own reflection in them, and that you are lying on the ground with your head in the dirt.

  I reach out to the bag but the bottle has leaked and there’s muddy water all along the guts of it. The map’s soaked through and the needle in Jeremy’s dad’s compass won’t move in any direction at all anymore. I put it against my skin and let the cold come through to my insides. I feel it hard and round in my hand. Superman stands above me with his cape trailing behind his shoulders, and he reaches out but I won’t let him take the compass. The air is cold on the back of my throat when I breathe it in and it makes me wheeze, and I can feel the skin catch under my ribcage.