by Penni Russon
‘Shush,’ I say again, but not so harshly this time. ‘They’ll hear you.’
All I want is to get into this new house, have a shower, something to eat and a sleep, not necessarily in that order. Tears prick my eyes.
‘You duffer,’ says Clancy, not unkindly, as if he is the big brother and I the little sister. ‘Why do you have to make everything so hard for yourself?’
‘Success!’ calls Olly, holding up the bundle of keys. She tosses them to Dave.
‘Here goes nothing,’ he says. ‘Let’s hope there isn’t a family of rats in the kitchen.’
‘Bats in the belfry,’ says Finn.
‘Skeletons in the closet,’ says Oscar.
‘Shall we turn back now?’ Dave asks Olly.
‘No!’ the twins and Sibbi shout, clamouring at the door as Dave turns the key in the lock. Clancy and I stand back, side by side.
‘I wonder what it’s like,’ says Clancy. We don’t have to wonder much longer.
The door opens. The twins are the first across the threshold. Then Dave and Sibbi. Olly reaches back a hand, and Clancy takes it. I watch them all disappear into the house. The air on the street smells of honeysuckle and the promise of summer. The house smells of furniture polish and shadows and the past.
I pick up my bag, and follow them all inside.
SIBBI
THE TWINS BOLT up the stairs.
Mama drops the bags and gazes dazed around the spacious entryway. Even though it’s quite bright and warm outside, between showers, inside the hallway it’s dim and chilly.
‘Come and explore the house, Mum,’ Clancy says, tugging Mama’s sleeve.
Mama shivers. ‘Tea first,’ she says. ‘I’ll find the kettle.’
Daddy stands in the hallway staring first at one painting and then another, generations of Outhwaites gazing down from the walls. ‘Woah,’ he says. ‘I remember this. The carpet, the wallpaper . . . it’s just the same as it was when I was a little boy. I thought I’d forgotten but it’s all come rushing back.’
Sibbi stands in the hallway too, peering up the stairs. There were no stairs in the cottage on the hill.
She is down and Mama and Daddy are down and Else and Clancy and Finn and Oscar are up, up, up. She wants to go up with the boys and Else, but the stairs will carry her away from Mama and Daddy. She stands at the bottom of the staircase gazing upwards for a long time, listening to the sound of the twins calling out to each other from different rooms in the house.
Your brain is in your head, and your head is at the top of your body. Your blood flows all through your body, out of your heart and into your brain. Up up up. Your brain is your thought. Your brain is your mind and your mind is where you think. Sibbi thinks, I am Sibbi. Up up up.
‘Shall we go and find your bedroom?’
‘It’s up the top,’ says Sibbi. ‘In the highest high room of the tall, tall house.’
‘Hm,’ says Daddy. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘The house thinks so. The house says so.’
‘I think you’ll be sharing with Else for a while, till we’re all settled in. Just up this first flight of stairs.’
Sibbi is pleased about sharing with Else. She takes her Daddy’s hand and together, they climb the stairs.
ELSE
‘I KNOW WHAT an endsister is,’ Sibbi says as Olly tucks her into bed.
‘Hmm?’ Olly murmurs.
‘It’s a kind of a ghost.’
‘Is it?’ I can tell Olly is not really listening, but I shiver underneath the sheets.
Sibbi often says spooky things, and I don’t always pay much attention, but here in the new, strange house, Sibbi’s words seem to have shadows.
Olly said months ago it’s because Sibbi is Oedipal, though I don’t really get what that means.
‘On the cusp between knowing and not knowing about life’s mysteries. Teetering at the edge of the abyss,’ Olly explained, cryptically. She was writing her thesis at the time, caught somewhere between the real world of our family and the inner world of her deep thinking. At sixteen I don’t understand life’s mysteries yet, so I don’t really see how Sibbi could be so close to them.
‘I know what an endsister is,’ says Sibbi again.
We are endsisters, I think, Sibbi and I. Bookends, oldest and youngest, with the three boys sandwiched in between.
‘We don’t believe in ghosts,’ I say. ‘Do we, Mum?’
‘Don’t we?’ says Olly, distracted. She focuses. ‘Oh, no. I suppose not.’
‘I don’t see why I have to go to bed at the same time as the baby,’ I complain, though my head spins woozily from lack of sleep.
‘I’m not a baby,’ Sibbi protests.
‘That’s right,’ Olly says. ‘You’re my big girl.’
‘I’m not a big girl!’
‘Oh,’ says Olly. ‘What are you?’
‘I’m Sibbi.’
‘Fair enough,’ says Olly. ‘That’s quite profound, really.’
‘I can’t believe we’ve inherited a mansion, and I still have to share a room.’
Olly sighs. ‘We’ll think about sleeping arrangements, I promise. But this will have to work for now.’
Actually, I’m glad I don’t have to sleep alone in this big, creaky, creepy house. But I’m not about to admit this to Olly, or to Sibbi.
‘Goodnight, girls. I’ll be just upstairs if you need me.’
Just upstairs is an unfathomable distance. Sibbi knows it. I know it.
‘Do you like our new house?’ Sibbi asks me.
‘Hm,’ I say. ‘I don’t know. Do you?’
Sibbi yawns. ‘This house likes me. But I don’t like the other room.’
‘What other room? There’s hundreds of rooms. Do you mean the formal lounge? The one with the stuffed deer head?’
‘No,’ says Sibbi. ‘I mean the Other-room. She doesn’t like it either.’
‘Who? Mama?’
‘No,’ says Sibbi, rolling over and cuddling into the pillow. ‘That girl there, watching us sleep.’
‘Where?’ I sit up in bed. ‘There’s no one there.’
‘She wented away just when you looked.’ Sibbi yawns again.
‘Ri-i-ight.’ I lie back down. ‘Go to sleep, Sibbi.’
‘I am asleep.’
‘Goodnight, Sibbi.’
‘I am goodnight.’
Sleep descends like a wave.
ELSE
I WAKE UP after a long, dreamless night, still exhausted. The morning is already progressing without me. Sibbi’s bed is empty.
I go downstairs. My parents are in the kitchen, sitting at the large oak table with a man Dave introduces as Mr Brompton.
‘I was just telling your parents, Elspbeth, that I’ve been throwing myself at the problem of schools, and where you and your brothers might go come September – your parents are quite right, no point starting this late in the year. Oh, and the little girl, of course.’
‘Sibbi’s going to school?’ I ask Olly.
Olly shrugs. ‘Apparently they start at four here.’
‘You mean like kindergarten?’
Olly shakes her head. ‘More like prep. School shoes and everything, Mr Brompton says.’
I open my mouth to say how stupid that is, but then I see how miserable Olly and Dave look.
‘Yes, yes,’ says Mr Brompton. ‘All right and proper. Wouldn’t want the little one to languish uneducated now, would we?’ But he says it kindly enough. He turns his attention back to me. ‘Now, as it happens, it would appear you have a choice to make. We’ve found two schools with a place for you. I made some notes. Here we go. Kingsley Comprehensive is a co-ed school with a strong –’ He peers over his glasses, frowning at his own handwriting. ‘Arts and humanities focus. There’s a brochure here.’
The brochure has a photo of the school chamber group on the cover. They are dressed like any school chamber group, in neat grey uniforms, perhaps a little scruffy at the edges. In fact, they could all be students of t
he school I just left behind in Australia.
‘That looks great,’ says Olly, a little too enthusiastically.
‘I suppose. What’s the other one?’
‘The other is the Lady Emily Hartington School for Girls. This is Miss Dorothy Outhwaite’s old stomping ground, as it were, and she’ remained a loyal Old Girl of the school, er, financially speaking. They’d be happy to have you, and there’s an Old Girl’s scholarship they suggest may suit. It’s usually reserved for direct descendants – children, grandchildren – but in this case they’re happy to make an exception.’
I take that brochure. These girls look nothing like anyone I’ve ever known.
‘And it’s a good school too?’ Olly asks.
‘One of the oldest in London. Yet quite progressive, I am given to understand. Very strong in the sciences. I seem to remember there was an article about their new robotics lab in the newspaper recently.’
‘What do you reckon, Else?’ Olly says.
‘There’s no contest, is there? She’ll got to Kingsley,’ Dave says. ‘I mean, no offence to Lady Penelope, but –’
‘Hang on a minute,’ I say, annoyed.
‘Come on,’ Dave laughs. ‘You? At an uppity girls school?’
‘Kingsley does sound like a good fit,’ Olly agrees. ‘The other school, the Lady Jane whatsit . . .’
‘Lady Emily Hartington,’ Mr Brompton supplies.
‘Come on, Else. A private school?’ Olly says. ‘Hats and blazers? You’d hate it.’
‘We will need to finalise the issue in reasonable haste,’ says Mr Brompton. ‘Of course you might like to tour the schools first?’
‘She’ll go to Kingsley,’ says Dave.
‘No, I won’t!’ I mean that I won’t automatically go to Kingsley, that it’s my decision, but it comes out as if I am firmly in favour of Lady Emily Hartington.
‘But what about your music?’ says Olly. ‘Kingsley sounds really promising. It’s co-ed, it has an arts focus, it doesn’t cost the earth . . .’
‘Mr Brompton says there’s a scholarship for Lady Jane Whatsit.’
‘Lady Emily Hartington,’ says Dave. ‘Whoever she is when she’s at home. It sounds like a finishing school. Maybe you’ll learn to walk in high heels with a tea tray on your head.’
‘Awesome,’ I say, flatly.
Olly sighs. ‘That’s a bit sexist, Dave.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Are you sure she’d be able to get a scholarship?’ Olly asks Mr Brompton. ‘She’s got what you might call natural intelligence. She’s very clever of course,’ she rushes to add, as I clench my jaw, ‘but she’s never been very academically inclined.’
‘Dorothy Outhwaite’s contributions have been very much appreciated over the years.’
‘I don’t get why this isn’t my decision,’ I grumble. ‘You guys made me come here. At least I can pick my own school.’
‘Of course it’s your decision, within reason,’ snaps Olly. ‘I’m just trying to understand. I would never have dreamed you’d want to go to an all-girls school and study robotics. What about your violin?’
Sibbi has slipped into the kitchen. She says, ‘Else hasn’t got a violin anymore. I’m hungry for jam.’
‘What do you mean, Else hasn’t got a violin?’
‘Shut up, Sibbi,’ I say.
Mr Brompton flinches.
‘Oh, Else! You didn’t leave it on the plane, did you? I’ll have to call the airline.’
‘Did you see me with it on the plane?’ I challenge her.
Olly frowns, trying to remember. ‘Did you have it in Hong Kong?’
‘You didn’t even notice!’
‘I had my hands full!’ Olly protests.
Dave puts his hands up. ‘Everybody slow down. What’s going on? Else? Where is it?’
‘I left it in Melbourne. In the van.’
‘Oh Else, you idiot,’ Dave says. He huffs out a sigh. ‘I’ll call Rick. I don’t even know how you post a violin.’
‘You don’t have to call him. I don’t want you to.’
‘If I don’t call him, then I don’t see how we’re going to get it back.’
‘I don’t want it. I left it behind on purpose. I knew you would never understand.’
Mr Brompton clears his throat and stands up. ‘Well. I’ll just leave you with the paperwork then. I can arrange tours for you, if you’d like some time to decide? No need to see me out, I know the way.’
‘No jam,’ Sibbi says sadly, and leaves the room before the shouting begins.
CLANCY
ON THE PLANE, I read that the best cure for jetlag is Vitamin D, which comes from sunlight. The only way into the back yard is through the kitchen where the fight between Else and Mum and Dad is building to a noisy crescendo. I let myself quietly out the front door.
The sun is bright and the day is warm. It’s a luxury to be warm. Frosty mornings, grey skies, and chilly nights of home feel far, far away. Home. The word has never been so foreign.
I sit on the low front wall. London moves around me. Double-decker buses and black taxi cabs navigate the narrow road. Pedestrians walk past with shopping bags. A small child runs ahead of his parents, a dog lags behind on his leash, determinedly sniffing every post, every crack, every stone in the wall.
I wonder if I will ever know this place like I know the hills and creek and wild bushlands at home in Australia. I would like to be a dog, sniffing a map of smells. I close my eyes and takes a deep breath in through my nose. I smell traffic and the river, and history, and people living. An almost-too-sweet, human, made kind of smell, like fabric softener. It doesn’t smell like Australia at all, but it’s not unpleasant.
I open my eyes and see on the wall beside me an enormous brown beetle with large serrated jaws. A stag beetle! I’ve seen them on David Attenborough. I lean in for a closer look. Being still tired and jetlagged is making the whole world oddly crisp, and I have a sudden impression that the prehistoric-looking stag beetle is very, very big and I am very, very small. I feel a wave of dizziness. I put my hand on the wall to steady myself.
‘Don’t hurt it. They’re endangered. And besides, they don’t bite humans.’
‘I know!’ I say, looking around to see where the voice is coming from. ‘I’d never hurt a living creature.’
There’s a girl in the front garden of the house next door. She looks my age. Her long thick hair and skin and eyes are all dark brown. She’s wearing a green singlet dress with an orange T-shirt underneath. She has long green socks, a green silk scarf in her hair, and dangly silver earrings which catch the sunlight.
‘My name’s Pippa. Do you live here now? My best friend used to live here, but then she went away and died.’
I frown. As far as I know, the only person who lived here was Great-Aunt Dorothy.
Pippa keeps going. ‘She was old. She was an old, old lady, but I liked her best of anyone.’ Pippa looks at me as if she is deciding something. ‘I like you too,’ she says in a deciding sort of way. ‘I’d never hurt a living creature either.’
I can’t help but like Pippa. Was this the way you made a friend? I never knew it could be this easy. Her straight way of talking was so different from the girls on the bus, with their double meanings and confusing facial expressions, where a smile meant the opposite.
‘Dorothy was my great-aunt,’ I say. ‘But I never met her.’
‘You’d have liked her.’
I feel sad at the lost opportunity of Great-Aunt Dorothy. It hadn’t really occurred to me to wonder what she was like.
‘You have an accent,’ Pippa says.
I find this surprising, because to me, Pippa is the one with the accent, like she’s chewing her words.
‘Are you Australian?’ she asks.
‘Yeah.’
Pippa stares a moment more, and then says, quite loudly, in a peculiar nasal voice, ‘Stone the flaming crows!’
‘What?’
‘That’s what that man says.’
I shake my head, mystified.
‘On TV.’
‘Oh. I don’t watch much TV. Mostly David Attenborough documentaries.’
Pippa thinks about this. ‘I think if God could talk he’d sound like David Attenborough.’
I find the idea of a giant David Attenborough in the sky incredibly reassuring.
‘Don’t Australians really talk like that?’
I shake my head.
‘Oh,’ says Pippa. ‘I suppose you can’t believe everything you see on television.’
We look at the stag beetle for a while.
‘They live under the ground for years,’ says Pippa. ‘Blind white naked grubs. And then they grow all the proper legs and armour and stuff, and come out into the air for two or three weeks, look for mates, lay their eggs and die. Your aunt left old stumps in the garden and piles of leaves for them to lay their eggs in, which is why you still get a few around here. You won’t dig up the stumps, will you?’
‘Of course not,’ I say. ‘You know a lot about them.’
Pippa shrugs. ‘Your aunt taught me. She knew a lot about all sorts of things.’
Again I feel a strange tug, like an invisible string connects me to Great-Aunt Dorothy, and Pippa has hold of it. I have never wondered about my love of animals. It comes so naturally to me that it would be like wondering why I have arms or ears. But now it seems it means I belong . . . to Aunt Dorothy, even to England in some way.
‘I’d love to go to Australia,’ Pippa says. ‘I’ve read so much about it. So much history there. Did you know Australian Aboriginal people are the world’s oldest living continuous culture? I mean, that’s amazing.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Do you have any Aboriginal friends in Australia?’
Most of my friends were of the four-legged variety, but wouldn’t that sound a bit pathetic? But then I think, if Great-Aunt Dorothy was Pippa’s best friend, then Aunty May would count as my friend too. ‘My friend Aunty May is Wurundjeri on her dad’s side. She mostly grew up with her Dutch mum and her stepdad and his kids, who were all white. She didn’t get to know her dad’s family until she was a teenager.’
‘I’m Jamaican on my mum’s side. Mum’s grandparents came to England in the nineteen-fifties. But my dad’s family is from Scotland and Wales and most of the time I live with him. Mum’s got a new boyfriend who doesn’t like kids. So I guess I’m sort of like Aunty May.’