Rain May and Captain Daniel

by Catherine Bateson

  ‘It is a good stove,’ Maggie said. ‘I remember her getting the brochures.’

  ‘Heats all this part of the house, too,’ Jeff’s dad said. ‘And she could run her hot water from it.’

  ‘So there’s no hot water until it’s lit?’ I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

  ‘Oh there should be. There’s gas — if there’s any in the bottles.’

  ‘What! Gas in bottles?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Maggie said, ‘you order them from the supermarket. I’d forgotten. They’re round the side. There’d be some. You can’t move house without needing a bath at the end.’

  ‘There’s a bit,’ Jeff’s dad called through the kitchen window, ‘but you’ll have to go easy on it. When we’ve unloaded, Jeff’ll go down and order them for you — they’ll deliver ’em Monday — won’t do it on the weekend. You’ll have to be careful though. I wouldn’t run that gas heater if you want a couple of hot baths.’

  When they’d emptied the truck, I stood in the gloomy kitchen and looked around. I wanted Maggie to admit that it was all a big mistake, but she didn’t. She plugged in the fridge and turned it on. She unpacked a box marked ‘Electrical Appliances’ and brought out the kettle, the coffee grinder, the blender and the rice cooker. She set these up on the largest bench. She said, ‘I’m not going to unpack much, Rain. Not in here. I think we need to do some thinking next week.’

  I wondered what she was going to think about — moving back to Brunswick?

  ‘Couldn’t we go on renting this house out?’ I asked. ‘And couldn’t we rent a house in the city with the money we got in rent? We wouldn’t have to unpack anything then. We’d just ring up Jeff’s dad and they could take it all back to the city.’

  ‘Good heavens, darling — the rent we’d get for this wouldn’t cover a dog kennel in Melbourne. No, Rain — I meant thinking about what paint colours we want, whether we want to get rid of this lino, what we need to make this house into our special wonderful home.’

  ‘A demolition team,’ I said, but very quietly.

  The next thing Maggie unpacked was our fridge poetry kit.

  ‘Here we are, Rain — feels like home already! Do you want to put them on?’

  Fran had bought the poetry kit on her last overseas trip. It was just a plastic box containing a lot of magnetic words. You stuck these to the fridge and turned them into poetry. It was neat. You don’t always have the word you want, though — like our kit has no ‘love’ in it. And then it’s got words that you think you’d never want to use, like ‘kill’.

  Mum and I wrote poems to each other. Not soppy poems. We wrote about stuff that maybe we don’t want to actually talk about. I like poetry. I was named after a poem, after all. Everyone thinks I’m called Rain because I have dippy hippy parents, but that is actually not the case at all. Before Mum became Maggie she was an education administrator who wore high-heeled shoes and had her hair done ever six weeks by Jodie at The Do to Die For. And Dad’s a systems network architect, which is to do with computers, not buildings, and he wears a suit to work every day.

  I was named after a line from a poem. It was by e e cummings, who wasn’t into capital letters. I had just been born, Mum said, and she knocked the basinette I was sleeping in and I startled. Which is what they call it when babies open their hands up wide, like little stars. Mum knew then I would be Rain — ‘and nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands’.

  Rain was a good name for Brunswick, Melbourne, where everyone is dippy hippy, post-punk or wired techno, but I wasn’t sure it was going to be such a great name in Clarkson, Central Victoria, where Jeff’s dad said ‘wok’ as though it was a word he hadn’t heard much before.

  It was depressing to even think of, so I checked out the garden. Maggie was right — it was a great garden. I remembered more and more about it as I explored. It’s funny about memories, how they suddenly plonk into your mind, and it is as though once they start you can’t stop them. First I remembered gathering damson plums with Granny. She would pull down the branches and I’d pluck the plums off for her, into a big bucket. Then I remembered eating bread warm from the oven spread with plum jam. Then I remembered her scrubbing my face until it shone like an apple and felt warm from my forehead to my chin. I was muddy — I’d been playing in the new vegetable garden bed. The bed was still there, although it was totally overgrown with weeds.

  Right along the fence were apple trees, their branches stretched out so they were almost horizontal to the fence, like prisoners being tortured. I wandered over to look at the hard, new little apples and remembered Granny walking along the fence and naming each tree for me. ‘Gravenstein, you don’t get your Gravenstein apple in a supermarket. The best crisp apple in the world.’ Then I remembered eating the apples she baked in a buttery, golden sauce.

  I was getting hungry, when I got that ‘someone’s watching you’ feeling and looked around.

  ‘Up here,’ a weedy voice said, and I looked up and straight into a boy’s face. He was in a tree-house next door, a tree-house which looked right over Granny’s — I mean our — backyard.

  ‘You’ve just moved,’ he said.

  ‘Brilliant,’ I said. ‘As if you have to be Einstein to work that one out.’

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Nearly thirteen,’ I said, crossing my fingers behind my back. I was actually just twelve years and one month old. ‘How old are you?’ He looked younger than me. His hair was all thick and sticking up and his face was a pale triangle against the dark wood. He was thin, too.

  ‘I’m just about eleven and a half,’ he said, ‘but I’m phenomenally bright. What’s your name?’

  ‘Rain May Carr-Davies,’ I said.

  ‘Rain?’ he said. ‘Like that girl in Future’s End, Star Trek, Voyager series?’

  I didn’t know what he was talking about. ‘After an e e cummings poem, actually,’ I said.

  ‘Oh.’ He sounded a little disappointed. ‘That’s a shame. She’s quite a good minor character even if she does go all soppy over Lieutenant Tom Parish in the end. I’m named after a biblical figure. I’m Daniel. Daniel Stephen Gill.’

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘So is your dad or your mum the doctor?’

  ‘My father is,’ Daniel said. ‘Counsellor Diana helps out in reception sometimes, but mostly she worries.’

  ‘She’s a counsellor?’

  ‘No, I just call her that. She’s empathetic, like Counsellor Troy from Star Trek.

  ‘What is all this Star Trek stuff? What are you talking about?’

  ‘Television show,’ he said patiently. ‘Mr Spock. Movies, too. Haven’t you ever heard of it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Pity. So what do you do?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, do you play chess, collect stamps, go bushwalking, play basketball, or do you just muck around?’

  Daniel’s question made me feel as though I should do something wonderfully original to impress him, although I wasn’t sure why.

  ‘I write fridge poetry,’ I said, suddenly inspired, ‘and I should really be unpacking.’

  ‘Fridge poetry?’

  ‘You know, it’s what everyone’s doing in America these days.’

  It was Daniel’s turn to sound unsure.

  ‘Do you just write it on the fridge?’ he said. ‘You mean with textas?’

  ‘No, stupid, you get a kit of magnetic words.’

  ‘So you stick the words up on the fridge and they make poems?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Can I come over and have a go?’

  ‘Well, maybe later, maybe when we’re unpacked. Probably tomorrow?’

  ‘Hey, that’d be neat. Thanks.’

  ‘I’d better go now,’ I said. ‘We have loads and loads of stuff to unpack.’

  ‘Yeah. Counsellor Diana said that moving was really tough. She was going to bring your mum over some soup because she said you’d never get that big old slow combustion stove working and
what if you didn’t have a microwave, but Dad said city people might think that a little strange. What will you have for dinner, though, that’s what I want to know.’

  ‘Pizza, Mum said.’

  ‘From where?’

  ‘We’ll get it delivered,’ I said. ‘That’s what we did at home if Maggie worked late.’

  ‘You can’t get it delivered here,’ Daniel said. ‘Where would it come from?’

  ‘Well the pizza place, stupid, I mean where else?’

  ‘There isn’t a pizza place in town,’ Daniel said, ‘so stupid yourself.’

  ‘No pizza place?’

  ‘Nup. Closed down. They went to Queensland.’

  ‘You’re joking?’ I said. ‘That is so horrible. No pizza place. I knew we shouldn’t have moved. I just knew it. I’d better tell Mum.’

  ‘See you tomorrow,’ Daniel called out as I trudged up to the house, but I was too discouraged to do more than just give him a tiny wave without even turning around.

  ‘There’s no pizza place,’ I said to Mum. ‘Maggie, we’re going to starve.’

  ‘We don’t eat that much pizza, Rain.’

  ‘Tonight, though, we’ll have absolutely nothing to eat. The woman next door, the doctor’s wife? She was going to bring over soup but Daniel’s father said we’d think that was strange so we haven’t even got that.’

  ‘Who is Daniel?’

  ‘Their son. He’s eleven and a half and phenomenally bright.’

  ‘Phenomenally bright?’

  ‘That’s what he said. Mum, what are we going to do about dinner?’

  ‘We’ll go down to the supermarket and get something — baked beans. I don’t know, Rain. How’s your room? Can we concentrate on what needs to be done, please?’

  In the end we didn’t even make it to the supermarket. It closed at 5.00 pm on weekends. We nearly didn’t make it to the fish and chip shop. It closed at 7.30 pm and we got there a minute before. The chips were soggy.

  ‘Disgusting,’ I said, ‘absolutely inedible.’ But I ate them anyway, because there wasn’t anything else.

  ‘Who would have thought the supermarket would close so early?’ Maggie said. ‘Not that I expect to shop here — the prices were always horrendous. I think I might drive to Bendigo once a week. Well, I’m done in. I’m going to run a bath — you can hop in after me, Rain — that way we won’t waste any hot water.’

  ‘You mean in the same water?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘But Mum, all your skin will be in the bath. There’ll be a sludge of dead skin cells floating on the water.’

  ‘I don’t think you need to worry about dead skin cells tonight. Just for one night.’

  She was right. There were worse things ahead. The house made so many unfamiliar noises that I couldn’t get to sleep for the longest time. And when I did finally drift off, someone thumping around on the roof woke me up and I screamed out wildly.

  ‘It’s a possum,’ Mum called, ‘that’s all. Possums in the roof. We’ll have to get them out somehow. They can damage the wiring and wee up there.’

  I looked up at my ceiling. In one corner, right above my bed, was a round stain I hadn’t noticed before. ‘It’s done it,’ I shouted. ‘It’s peed above my bed.’

  ‘Rain!’

  ‘Mum, it has. It’ll probably leak down during the night. I’ll get possum pee in my eyes and up my nose. Please, please can I come in with you?’

  Mum appeared at my door. She was wearing her saggy, sleepy face. She peered up where I pointed.

  ‘I don’t think that’s possum pee,’ she said. ‘I think that might be a rain leak, or something. Anyway, it’s not fresh. I wouldn’t worry.’

  ‘Please Mum,’ I said, ‘I don’t like the night here. It’s too noisy. My heart is still thumping all over the place.’

  ‘Noisy?’ she said. After the traffic on Sydney Road? Oh come on, then. Just keep your dead skin on your side, all right?’

  Mum’s room already smelled like home because she’d burnt some incense in her little brass burner. She had unpacked some books, too, and they lay on her bedside table as though she had been reading them all week. The room looked friendly. It had been waiting for her, I decided sleepily. Maybe the whole house had been waiting for us. Maybe it could be the best Maggie-and-Rain house just like Mum promised.

  I nearly got out of bed and changed my moving-day fridge poem, which was only small but packed in a lot of bitterness and had been inspired by the lack of pizza. I didn’t though. It was too cold out there in the middle of the night. I thought I’d get up early in the morning and change it before Maggie even noticed.

  I thought that maybe when Dad got sick of Julia and executive stress he’d come up and like the house so much he’d move back in. He and Maggie would fall in love again and watch television at night holding hands and kiss in the commercial breaks like teenagers and that would be really sick. Maybe Daniel has an older, gorgeous brother who would fall in love with me when I turn fourteen and we’d get married and open a groovy Brunswick kind of pizza place in Clarkson and everyone would say it was a great day for Clarkson when Rain May Carr-Davies-Gill moved in to town.

  Moving Day Fridge Poem

  me

  cleaned out

  homeless

  girl

  everything about me

  decay

  I am haunted

  and asking

  why

  Maggie’s Reply

  celebrate grass

  tree

  cloud

  no concrete

  every day

  can laugh

  and will heal

  we are secretly feline

  our slow rhythms

  flower brilliantly

  o crap

  have a bath

  The Captain’s Log, Stardate 130901 —

  Winter ’s End, Alpha Quadrant

  Counsellor Diana just informed Dr McGarvis to expect alien activity on Planet 7 tomorrow. New settlers are arriving. This is bad news as it means the back territory will be out of bounds again but good news as all change brings with it new potentials.

  The people moving in actually own the place — the old woman’s daughter, she said — rather than more tenants. The Ferengi at the supermarket told her. They know everything. I suspect young Mr Stewart has a link to the police computer equipment. He probably has his mobile phone tuned to their frequency. Not that I think the alien activity will be closely observed by our security officers.

  I can’t actually remember the old woman dying — well, that’s not so surprising, is it? She died there — let me just check with Mum — yep, about four years ago. Planet 7 wasn’t under surveillance by the USS Endeavour then. In fact, that was the year I collected stamps. Or was it the year I panned for gold? Anyway, sometime later the first aliens arrived. They didn’t stay long. Too cold, they said, atmosphere hostile, nutrients expensive, company dismal, and they moved up the highway. Pity, they had a son who played chess, like me, and, like me, hated sport.

  The next colonisers were a dead loss, too. A couple of girls, practically teenagers. All they did was sit out in the sun all day and paint their toenails and dry their hair. They were living away from the mother ship for the first time. Males of their species kept arriving in hotted-up starships and driving recklessly away long after my bedtime.

  Then there was the strange alien, the one we simply had to place under surveillance because he was so unreadable. That’s when Planet 7 got its name and that’s when I started this Log. Despite all my efforts, I could find no reason why he shouldn’t stay on Planet 7 and do his work. It turned out, after months of close watching, that he was an artist, that was all. Of course this rather shocked the larger population of Cosmos, but I’m afraid that’s what Cosmos is like — a system occupied by the mediocre, the plain stupid, the incurious and the aged. Present company excepted, of course.

  The Captain’s Log, Stardate 140901

  The aliens
arrived. Both females. One is Counsellor Diana’s age, the other is more my age. I climbed the observation tower knowing that the smaller female would eventually check out the back territory. I was not disappointed. First contact was friendly.

  Her name’s Rain, not after the astronomer in Future’s End, Star Trek, Voyager, Season 3, but after a poem. She’s heavily into poetry. She writes fridge poetry. I don’t know anyone who writes poetry. They tried to make us do it at school but the Klingons wrote obscene limericks instead.

  Counsellor Diana thought about taking them soup. The Doctor said they might think that strange, though. She should have gone ahead — Rain thought they could get home-delivered pizza! Boy, she will take some acclimatising to Cosmos.

  I wonder if she plays chess? I wonder if she’ll want to be friends, even though I’m a boy and younger?

  Counsellor Diana said not to expect too much from the aliens. She said their ways may be different. She said they may not even stay. People do rather tend to leave Cosmos. I have noticed this. It could be the hostile environment, the lack of sufficient entertainment pods and employment for young colonisers.

  I hope they do stay. I’d be friends with any kid next door within a reasonable age range. Their gender wouldn’t worry me. Anyway, if she’s as old as she said, why isn’t she taller? And why hasn’t she got female signs developing? She looked just like a boy. And she’s not much taller than I am.

  I think the alien lied about her age.

  I hope the alien lied about her age. I hope she’s not a snobby city girly girl. There are lots of things I could show her that might interest her — the platypus in the river, the best yabbying place, the McMaster alpacas and where Dad and I saw the echidna last month.

  Two minutes until lights extinguished and sleep pod activated. Lights still burning on Ship 7. I wonder if she’s up writing on the fridge? Poets work at night, I believe. One minute and Counsellor Diana is counting down. Yes, yes — good night, Mum. Good night, galaxy. Lights off.

  The Captain’s Log. Stardate 150901