The History of Mischief

by Rebecca Higgie

  For Marye and Mum

  Jessie

  There’s an old lady outside vacuuming her driveway.

  I’ve seen old ladies do many things, but I’ve never seen an old lady do this.

  It’s 3 am. She’s across the road at Number 61. She drags a round vacuum cleaner on wheels, sucking up the sand in the cracks of her driveway as a fluffy white cat watches her from the veranda. It’s loud, like how a plane sounds as it’s taking off. I’ve been on six planes so I know.

  I wonder why Kay hasn’t woken up. Maybe she’s ignoring it. Maybe the old lady does this often and the other adults on the street have decided to pretend it doesn’t happen. Adults do that a lot. Maybe I’m the only one who’s ever seen her.

  She turns the vacuum off, takes out a pair of glasses from the pocket of her nightie, and inspects her work. She turns the vacuum on again and shuffles back and forth, going over any spots she missed. Once she reaches the front door, she turns it off and pushes it inside. The cat flicks its tail and goes inside too.

  From the doorway, the old lady looks out at the street. She can’t see me though. There’s lace over the window so I can peek out without people seeing me. I smile at her just in case. She doesn’t smile back. She just looks, as if she’s waiting for someone, and then goes inside. The lights go off at Number 61. The street is quiet again.

  I go back to bed. Kay will be angry tomorrow if I’m tired. She’s always angry these days. She used to be silly and fun. She used to tell stories about weird old ladies like the one from Number 61. Now she just goes to work and snaps at me and won’t let me eat ice-cream, except on weekends. If I’m good.

  My name is Jessie and I’m nine years old. I’m good at many things. Like counting. I can count lots of things without losing where I’m up to. I counted all the names on the giant gravestone in the park. There are two hundred and ninety-eight on the stone spike in the middle: one hundred and two on one side, one hundred and two on another, and ninety-four on the third side. They are men from Guildford who died in the war. On the fourth side, there’s a sign that reads ‘THEIR NAME LIVETH FOR EVERMORE’.

  Kay says it’s a memorial not a grave, but I don’t believe they buried all those men in other places and put their gravestone here. I like to guess where they are lying under my feet. I count out every one, taking a big step so they have lots of room between them. There are way too many to be buried under the gravestone itself. I have to go past the footpath and into the park to count out all of them.

  Kay won’t let me go to the park by myself. She says it’s not safe because you need to cross two roads and train tracks. Also, there are strangers around, especially near Alfred’s which is a burger place that has a fire outside and ladies who yell numbers at the customers. But I like to go to the park. When it rains, I imagine the ground being eaten away, leaving all the coffins out in the open. Everyone walks past like all those men aren’t there. Sometimes I worry I’m being rude by stepping on them. I say, ‘I’m sorry, Allan A.M. I’m sorry, Allan G.T. …’ I use their names so I hope they forgive me.

  I wish Mum and Dad had a gravestone but Kay said they didn’t want to be buried. I want a tomb for them like we saw in Europe, where people are buried in mini temples called mausoleums. Others are in big marble coffins above the ground with angels, skeletons and Jesuses all around them. In Venice, there’s a whole island graveyard. They have plastic lights on the graves that never go out and a huge stone lady in long robes. She looks down and has one hand on a coffin. I wasn’t supposed to, but I took a photo of her. Mum said she looked like sorrow. I wanted to remember what sorrow looked like. I want something like that for Mum and Dad. I want everyone to feel sorrow for them too.

  Jessie

  ‘Time to get up, Jessie.’

  The first wake-up call. I pull the covers over my face. Kay leaves for five minutes, then comes back and opens the curtains.

  ‘Come on!’

  The light can’t get through my doona but I know what’s coming next. I grip the covers.

  ‘Get up, Jessie!’

  She yanks the doona out of my hands. Bundles it up and leaves. It’s cold and bright. I’m so so tired.

  Kay’s at the kitchen table, sitting on my doona. I glare at her. She smiles at me, not a proper smile, a fake one. She takes her earphones out of her ears.

  ‘Morning,’ she says.

  I sit down. She pushes a bowl of cornflakes towards me.

  ‘Eat.’

  I nudge the cornflakes with my spoon. They bob up and down in the milk. Some sink when I poke them.

  ‘You need to stay at school today. I can’t keep leaving work because you decide to go home without telling anyone.’

  I fill my spoon with milk and let it slowly drip back into the bowl.

  ‘Jessie, please,’ Kay says. She looks tired. I wonder if the old lady from Number 61 woke her up with her vacuuming.

  I put the spoon in my mouth. ‘It’s soggy.’

  Kay snaps. ‘Well, don’t let it sit then!’

  She snatches the bowl and dumps the cornflakes in the sink. She fills it again and shoves it back in front of me. My eyes go blurry with tears. Kay sighs.

  ‘At least half in the next ten minutes. Please.’

  I eat half a bowl. Then she walks me to the bathroom, turns the shower on, checks the water and waits until I get undressed. I don’t like her watching me but this is the rule now because yesterday I sat on the bathmat in my jammies and let the water run for ten minutes. I smile when I remember how angry she was, how she screamed and shut off the shower and said I could go to school smelling like shit. That made her even angrier because she doesn’t swear anymore now that she’s supposed to be a real adult.

  So I take off my jammies and get in the shower. I know I’m being annoying but I don’t care. I hate Kay the most in the mornings, when she makes me do the things Mum used to make me do. Since the accident, Kay’s stopped putting on makeup and doing her hair. She doesn’t wear nice clothes or put on nail polish anymore. She wears button shirts she never irons and ties her hair up in a boring ponytail. She looks more like Mum now. She has Mum’s thin brown hair that flops about when she moves. She’s soft and has big cheeks that Dad called puppy fat, even though Kay is twenty now.

  Me, I look like Dad. I have his nose. That’s what Grandma said at the funeral. She touched my nose and said ‘Dear Harry’ and cried a lot. I used to have his hair. Dad and I were the only ones with black hair, and we had lots of it. It was thick and a little wavy, not like Mum and Kay with their limp straight hair. Dad called theirs boring hair. Me and him: we were the funky hair gang.

  But my funky hair is gone now. The doctors shaved it off. When I woke up it was gone and everything hurt and there were staples in my head. I have a big scar there now. It runs from the top of my head to my right ear. It goes red in the shower, like it’s angry. The hair is growing back a little, but it stays away from the scar. Kay bought me a wig but I lit it on fire in the backyard at our old house.

  I get out and Kay helps me dry off and get dressed. My school uniform is red and blue, but Kay lets me wear a pink beanie with sparkly cat ears even though it’s not really allowed. I glance in the mirror, seeing the uniform and cat ears. I start to cry again.

  ‘I’m tired.’

  ‘I know,’ Kay says softly, and puts my backpack on my shoulders. I let it slip off. She picks it up.

  ‘I’m hungry.’

  ‘There’s an extra banana in your bag.’

  She takes my hand and leads me to the door. She gets the big umbrella ‘just in case’. As we walk to school, I glance at Number 61 and imagine the old lady in there, sleeping with her fluffy cat on the bed, warm and happy and dreaming about vacuum cleaners
that can suck up all the sand in the world.

  Kay leaves me at school. She puts her earphones in and walks away. I know she can feel me glaring at her.

  I hate Wednesdays because Wednesdays are dance days. The dance teacher, Mrs Lornazak, dresses like she stole the craziest things she could find out of the kindy costume box. Today, she’s wearing chunky red glasses and a poufy pink skirt with black roses on it. Her shoes are sparkly and red, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, and she has hundreds of jangly bracelets.

  We go to the undercover area. She makes the boys get in one line and the girls in another. I sit on the concrete in the far corner, leaning against the wooden bench.

  ‘Not today, Jessie?’

  She says it every lesson and then touches my arm. I shake my head.

  ‘Maybe next time.’

  One of the boys asks why he can’t sit out too and she snaps at him to get in line. There are whispers, getting louder as the weeks go by.

  It’s only cuz her parents are dead.

  Miss Sparrow, our normal teacher, isn’t at dance. I don’t know what she does. Maybe she has lunch. There’s another lady in the class who isn’t a teacher, and she’s always here. Her name is Mrs Armstrong and she does things for the teacher, like photocopying, reading stories, and taking the autistic kid outside when he yells. At dance, she sips her coffee and sits on the bench next to me. Sometimes she asks if I’ve seen a new movie and then tells me not to because it’s ‘garbage’. Sometimes she tells me knock-knock jokes that make fun of teachers. But most of the time, she doesn’t say anything.

  A boy skips over to us at the end of the first dance. I don’t know his name, but he’s the weirdest boy in class. He’s skinny and short. He has a grin that takes up his whole face. He does strange things, singing and dancing on his own in the mornings when he’s dropped off. He has a tiny square iPod like Kay’s and he sings pop songs in another language. If anyone teases him about it, he asks if he can teach them the words. He doesn’t notice when people are annoyed or mean or don’t want him around. When I first started at the school, he yelled that my head had a cool line on it and I was bald like his dad. The whole class laughed and Miss Sparrow told him off. He didn’t think he did anything wrong. At recess, he asked if we could be friends. I said no. He still bothers me. He bothers everyone.

  ‘You should dance with us!’ he says.

  I ignore him.

  ‘Mrs Lornazak doesn’t mind if you don’t do it right.’

  I ignore him.

  ‘Dancing is good for you because dancing is exercise. When you exercise, your brain gets full of happy chemicals called dolphins.’

  ‘I don’t want dolphins in my brain,’ I tell him.

  ‘They aren’t like normal dolphins. They’re happy dolphins. Everyone has them!’

  I put my head down. All my happy dolphins are dead. Dancing can’t bring them back.

  ‘Get back to your cha-chas, mister,’ Mrs Armstrong says. ‘How else will you become the next Justin Bieber?’

  He explodes with laughter. ‘Justin Bieber!’

  ‘I would have said Fred Astaire, but you don’t know who he is, do you?’

  He laughs again and runs back to class.

  ‘I think he could do with a few less happy dolphins,’ Mrs Armstrong says.

  I blink the tears away.

  Kay’s not here. The bell went twenty-three minutes ago and she’s not here.

  I stand by the gate between the school courtyard and the out-of-bounds area. The principal, Mrs Fraser, tells me to come wait in the office.

  I watch the clock. 3:26. Kay’s only been late once before and that was only by three minutes. Normally she arrives before the bell goes. She stands off to the side and doesn’t talk to any of the parents. She always has her earphones in, only taking them out when I come. She asks if I have everything – ‘Is your lunchbox in there? Where’s your jumper?’ – and then we leave. She smiles at anyone who says hello but never stops. She shrugs her shoulders like she’s apologising.

  But she’s not here now. The office lady tries to call her but she doesn’t answer.

  I hate that Kay drives to work. We don’t need a car. We have the train near our house. It goes right to her work in the city. She doesn’t have far to walk. Too many people use cars and it’s dangerous and bad for the environment anyway.

  I try not to think about cars so I look at the pictures on the wall, of all the faded faces from Guildford. I wonder if my picture will be there one day. Maybe girls one hundred years from now will wonder what I was like.

  Everything is old here. Even the new things look like they came from a black-and-white movie. The school is the oldest in Western Australia. I think that’s why the heating isn’t good in the classrooms. Grandma told me that many of the houses in Guildford are from colonial times. They have fireplaces that work and little signs that say they’re ‘heritage listed’. The busy road near our house doesn’t have normal shops. There’s a place that sells rusty metal things and broken chairs, and a hotel that was burnt years ago but just got fixed. I went in there last week when I shouldn’t have. There are still burnt bits sticking out of the roof. There’s a bakery too where sometimes Kay will buy me a jam donut, but only if I hold her hand when we cross the road.

  Our house is old too. It was Grandma’s place before she went to the nursing home. She went a long time ago, before I was born. We didn’t even know about the house till Kay met with the lawyers. We always just saw Grandma at the nursing home. I think Dad was supposed to sell her house but he never did. When we first arrived, it was covered in dust and the plants were dead except for the ivy, which still covers the veranda and blocks the drains. Small sculptures hide between the weeds. Some are like the statues in Europe with their blank eyes. But there are tiny dragons and jousting knights too. Some are painted messily, like maybe a kid painted them.

  I didn’t want to move here but I didn’t want to be at home anymore, where we all used to live. Everyone knew about the accident. At school, kids I didn’t even know cried like their parents had died. They came to the funeral and sobbed and hugged each other. I hated them for it. For weeks, parents from school would drop by without calling and give us big pots of food. It was always the same: ‘I made way too much and thought you might like some. It’s my kids’ favourite, you know. But how are you, Kay? We all miss Jessie at school, she’s such a lovely girl. You tell me if you need anything, okay?’ Kay started ignoring the doorbell. Then we moved.

  The house is surrounded by a fence made of tall iron bars and a gate covered in metal roses, some in full bloom and others just little buds. You need a big key, like the ones you see in movies with castles, to open it. When we moved in, Kay gave me one of the keys. It has a small copper rose on top, its petals only half open. On the handle, there are the strangest words: Property of A. Mischief.

  ‘Huh,’ Kay said when I first showed her. ‘I didn’t notice that.’

  ‘What’s A. Mischief?’

  ‘I dunno.’

  Maybe Kay’s locked out because she forgot her key. Why wouldn’t she just come to school and pick me up? We could open the gate together, like we do every day. She makes me put my key in the gate and then puts her hand on mine and we turn it together. I have to do it even if I’m angry with her. I wonder if she’s home yet or if she’s still on the road in her stupid car.

  ‘Jessie?’

  I turn to the office lady. She’s on the phone.

  ‘Kay’s at home but she’s had a little problem. One of your neighbours is going to come get you.’

  We don’t know any of our neighbours.

  ‘I’m not allowed to go with strangers.’

  ‘Kay says it’s okay because Mrs Moran has been helping her.’

  ‘Why can’t Kay come and get the neighbour to fix whatever it is?’

  The office lady pauses. She purses her lips together like she’s trying to decide whether to tell me something bad. ‘Kay needs to be the one to fix it. Everything’
s fine, there are just people she needs to wait for.’

  I glare at the office lady and her lie. The best thing to do when adults lie is to be quiet and stare as angrily as you can. She goes back to the phone.

  ‘She’s not keen to go with your neighbour.’

  Kay says something LOUD because I can just hear her down the phone. The office lady nods a lot and mutters, ‘Of course, don’t worry, I’ll talk to her, don’t worry,’ and then hangs up.

  ‘Kay says it’s very important. She says Mrs Moran is not a stranger, so you can go with her.’

  I glare at her until she looks away. Then I look at the clock. 3:41.

  At 3:46, I hear a meow. A big one. MOWW! The lady from Number 61 comes into the office. Her fluffy cat trots in beside her on a bright pink lead.

  ‘You’re Jessie then, are you, dear?’

  I nod.

  ‘I’m Mrs Moran,’ she says. ‘This is Cornelius. Be polite, Cornelius.’

  The cat meows and lifts its paw.

  ‘Be a good girl and shake Cornelius’ paw.’

  I shake the cat’s paw. It meows at me again.

  ‘Cornelius says it’s very nice to meet you.’

  This lady’s weird.

  ‘Be a good girl and say “it’s nice to meet you too”.’

  I look at the lady from Number 61. ‘It’s nice to meet you too.’

  ‘No, to Cornelius, dear. Say “it’s nice to meet you too, Cornelius”.’

  I look at the cat. ‘It’s nice to meet you too, Cornelius.’

  The cat meows again.

  ‘Good, good. Let’s go then.’

  The old lady from Number 61 leads me out of the office. We walk towards home, with Cornelius trotting in front of us on his lead. He has a pink harness too, and swishes his fluffy tail at us. It looks like a feather duster dancing.

  ‘Now, I bet you’ve never seen a cat on a lead before.’

  I shake my head.

  ‘He’s a very clever puss, aren’t you, Cornelius?’

  The cat meows.

  I wait for a moment and then ask, ‘Is Cornelius a boy?’