by Carly Nugent
Diana is getting closer to fifteen and further from fourteen every day. She said she cut her hair short because she didn’t need long hair and she didn’t care what other people thought. She is Meditating more (I can tell because she is always in her room with the door shut and no music) and she is still being vegetarian, even when Mum cooks chicken schnitzel with mushroom sauce, which is Diana’s favourite. When Tom Golding calls, Diana says she is too busy to talk, even though all she is doing is breathing and not-thinking. And then tonight while we were eating dinner Diana made an announcement:
‘I’m moving out.’
I stopped chewing. Mum looked up from the cookbook she was reading. Dad dropped his fork.
‘What?’ Dad had his serious face on.
‘I’m moving out. Of the house,’ Diana said.
‘You’re fourteen,’ Mum said. ‘Where on Earth would you go?’
‘The backyard,’ Diana said. ‘I don’t want to live inside anymore. I don’t need all these things’—she said the word ‘things’ like it was the word ‘snot’—‘in my life.’
‘I see,’ Dad said. ‘So you’re going to live outside. With no electricity.’
‘Yes.’
‘No TV.’
‘Yes.’
‘Where will you sleep?’
‘In the tent.’
‘You’ll freeze,’ said Mum.
‘No, I won’t,’ said Diana. ‘I’ve got two sleeping bags. And I’ll take the extra blankets from the spare room.’
‘This is ridiculous.’ Dad picked up his fork from the floor and wiped it with his serviette. ‘You’re not living in the backyard. Helen?’
Dad was looking at Mum, but Mum was looking at Diana. She had a half-smile on her face, the same half-smile she gets when she looks at photos of her and Dad before they were married and she had hair down to her bum and shorts up to her hair.
‘Helen?’ Dad repeated.
And then Mum said something that surprised everyone, even Diana.
‘Why not? Sounds like an adventure.’
Then she started clearing the table while the rest of us sat there with eyes like balloons about to burst.
‘Who wants dessert?’ Mum said.
And that’s how Diana started to live in the backyard.
Jonas decided we would do the stake-out today at two o’clock, because that was the time I had seen Dad on The Pupil-Free Day last week. We synchronised our watches so that they would show exactly the same time and we wouldn’t be late. At school I couldn’t concentrate at all, and I got into trouble five times (two times from Mrs Atkinson for not listening while she explained long division, and three times from Mr Harper in music because I kept coming in late with the triangle). All morning I thought about calling off the stake-out, but then I remembered that Jonas was my friend and that he knew lots of interesting facts and had come to my birthday party dressed as the God of the Sea. So at one o’clock I breathed in and out a lot and went to meet Jonas at the gate.
When I found him he handed me a rock.
‘What’s this for?’ I said.
‘It’s a Special Stone,’ Jonas replied. I looked more closely. It didn’t seem very special—it was grey with flecks of brown, a little bumpy at one end and smooth at the other.
‘It’s just a river rock,’ I said.
‘Yes, but look.’ Jonas held out another rock. He pushed the side of his palm against mine, so both rocks were side by side. And then I saw the special thing. The rocks were exactly the same. They both had brown flecks in the same places, and they were both bumpy and smooth at the same ends.
‘I found them,’ Jonas said. ‘That one’s for you. If we get separated, leave your stone as a clue. No one else will notice it, only me. Okay?’
I nodded, and looked down at my Special Stone like it was a diamond. The thought that Jonas and I were the only people who knew these stones were special made me smile right to the corners of my mouth.
‘What did you tell Mrs Atkinson?’ Jonas asked me while we were walking out of school and across the road.
I tucked my Special Stone into my backpack. The sky was getting dark and the air had that prickly, before-rain feeling. ‘That I had to go to the dentist,’ I said. ‘What about you?’
‘That Peter and Irene were taking me to volunteer at the old people’s home.’
‘Why do you call your mum and dad Peter and Irene?’ I said.
‘They’re not my mum and dad.’ Jonas kicked a stick so hard he almost hit a duck that had wandered away from the river.
‘Why not?’
‘Why do you think?’
I hadn’t thought, because to me Jonas’s parents were always just Jonas’s parents.
‘Because they’re robots?’ I tried. ‘Because they’re aliens?’
‘Don’t be stupid,’ Jonas said (which hurt a bit, because Jonas had never called me stupid before). ‘Because I’m adopted.’
We walked in silence for a little while. I knew what adopted meant because I had read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In that book the main character Huck is adopted because his mum is dead and his dad is an alcoholic. But I had never thought about Jonas being adopted before.
‘Are your real parents dead?’ I asked.
‘No,’ Jonas said.
‘Are they alcoholics?’
Jonas gave me a weird sideways look and said, ‘No.’
‘Where are they, then?’ If my mum had been walking with us she would have said, ‘That’s enough, Cassandra,’ because I was asking a lot of questions about a sensitive subject. But she wasn’t, so she couldn’t.
‘I don’t know,’ Jonas said.
We were at the bridge then, and I couldn’t think of any more questions to ask so we walked across the river to The Other Side of Town without talking. I was wondering about Jonas’s real parents and where they were. Maybe they were in the Amazon, or maybe they were secret scientists working for the government, or maybe they were deep-sea explorers. And even though Jonas wasn’t talking I was pretty sure he was wondering about the same thing I was. And that was a nice feeling.
We walked right through The Other Side of Town wondering together but not talking. I looked for the peacocks but there were no signs of them anywhere—not even a feather or a pile of poo. For some reason not-seeing Virginia and William Shakespeare made the sky seem darker and the air more prickly.
When we got to The Clinic we set up our stake-out behind the bushes across the road, which was where Simon and I had hidden on The Pupil-Free Day. Jonas had biscuits in his bag that Irene had made, and we ate some while we were waiting. (I thought they were delicious, but Jonas said they were too chocolaty.) Jonas had also brought a pen and some paper so he could write down things we noticed on our stake-out. He wrote the day and the date, and where we were. I asked him if he had ever done investigating before, since he seemed to know a lot about being a detective.
‘A bit,’ he said. I didn’t ask where or why because I thought he would tell me if he wanted to. He didn’t, which made me wonder if maybe he was a spy, too.
It was getting late in the afternoon, past the time when Simon and I had seen Dad on The Pupil-Free Day. I was worried about two things that were opposites (and not the good kind). The first worry was that Dad wouldn’t come, and that Jonas would think I was stupid and a liar and wouldn’t want to do stuff outside of school with me again. The second worry was that Dad would come.
We waited behind the bushes for ages while the sky got darker.
‘Maybe he’s not coming,’ I said.
‘Just wait,’ Jonas said.
‘We don’t have an umbrella,’ I said. ‘The biscuits will get wet. Maybe we should just—’
‘Look!’ Jonas pointed across the road. Dad’s car was driving into the car park. ‘There.’ Jonas got his pen ready. ‘That’s your dad, right?’
I nodded and swallowed hard. I watched Dad get out of the car and walk across the car park in exactly the same way he had on The Pupil-Free Day.
�
��See?’ I said. My voice was shaking a bit. ‘Probably important spy business. I guess we should get going.’
Jonas stood up. I was hoping he would say, ‘Let’s get out of here before we get rained on,’ or ‘I’ve got to get home and look up some interesting facts on the Internet.’ But he didn’t say anything like that.
Instead he turned to me, with his eyes big and bright behind his glasses, and said, ‘Let’s follow him.’
Sometimes I think Jonas is really smart, like when he tells me the scientific names of whales or when he makes magnets or does magic tricks. And other times I think he is not smart at all, like when he says things like ‘Let’s follow him’ after I’ve already told him my dad is a spy and that spies deal with dangerous people who do dangerous things.
‘We’d better not,’ I said. ‘Let’s wait here for a bit. We can have another biscuit—’
But Jonas was already walking across the road. For a moment I didn’t know what to do. I felt that following Dad was a bad idea, but something else was telling me that letting Jonas go by himself might be a worse one. I ran across the road and caught up with him.
He was standing out the front at the little gate, which was open. All he had to do was walk through the gate and up the path and inside, and he would see my dad.
‘Jonas, wait,’ I said.
‘What?’ Jonas turned around.
‘You can’t go in there.’
‘Why not?’
I had to think for a long moment before I could answer him. ‘Because they’re doing experiments. Dangerous experiments. Like, with radiation. And animals.’
Jonas shook his head. ‘No, they’re not.’
‘Really! That’s what my dad’s been spying on. They’re trying to make super-beasts, for the army. Dogs with two heads, and horses with shark teeth. If you go in there you’ll get hurt.’
‘No, I won’t.’
‘The super-beasts are dangerous. They’re like…like…’ I tried to find a simile that would really frighten Jonas, but my thoughts were going so fast that I couldn’t think of any words at all.
‘Like what?’ Jonas asked.
I sighed, and my breath came out shaky. ‘Jonas, please just don’t go in there.’
‘Why not?’ Jonas looked confused. ‘Don’t you want to know what your dad’s doing?’
I guess I’m not a very good detective after all, since good detectives are supposed to want to solve the mystery they are investigating. But I didn’t want to solve this mystery. What I wanted to do was go home, and pat Simon, and sit in my room where everything was brown and quiet. I wanted to be like Diana, sitting and breathing and not-thinking.
But I couldn’t say this to Jonas, so instead I said, ‘No.’
‘But why?’
‘Just.’
Just is not a full sentence. Just is a word that is trying to get out of explaining. It is an excuse word. Sometimes when kids in my dad’s English class don’t do their homework and my dad asks them why they say ‘Just’. Then my dad says, ‘Just is not good enough,’ and he makes them write an essay explaining why they didn’t do their homework using reasons and examples and transition words. As soon as I said ‘Just’ to Jonas I felt my cheeks go red because I knew that it wasn’t good enough. But I wasn’t brave enough to do any better.
Then Jonas said something that made my fingers and toes go cold.
‘Don’t you want to know The Truth?’
I know a lot of things. One thing I know is that The Truth is right, and lying is wrong. But at that moment The Truth didn’t feel right at all. It felt like how you swallow eight spiders every year, only you don’t know because you swallow them in your sleep. And if you don’t know then you can’t feel disturbed or sick. And if I went home without going through the gate and up the path and in the door I wouldn’t know The Truth. But I also wouldn’t feel like my stomach was full of spiders.
So even though my head was thinking all of these thoughts the only one I said to Jonas was ‘No.’
And then I turned and walked away.
On my way home from the stake-out the rain started, and it soaked me right down to the soles of my shoes. A big part of me wanted to turn back and say I was sorry and tell Jonas a story and ask him to tell me a fact. But I didn’t. I imagined Jonas walking through the gate and up the path and in the door. And I wondered if I would ever be able to talk to him again, knowing that he knew The Truth, and I didn’t.
After the stake-out I worked really hard not to think about Jonas, or The Clinic, or chocolate biscuits. I made myself busy by practising all the songs in the recorder book for music, and memorising a half-hour talk in Japanese about tea ceremonies, and making a diorama of convict settlements for my First Fleet project. I tried Meditating like Diana, but I couldn’t stop my brain from thinking, so I read Sherlock Holmes instead. I looked for the peacocks every day but they must have been hiding on The Other Side of Town because I never saw them. At school I didn’t go near The Snake Stairs, and when Mrs Atkinson asked Jonas and me to pick up the lunch orders from the canteen I pretended I had a stomachache so I didn’t have to go.
A lot of time passed like this, so much time that April ended and May began, and the peacocks were still missing. All of the leaves, except from the gum trees, changed colour and fell on the ground, so now when you stepped on them they made a crunchy dead sound. The weather got properly cold, the kind of cold where there is frost on the grass in the mornings and Simon’s water bucket freezes across the top and makes him bump his nose when he tries to have a drink. It is also the kind of cold that makes Grandpa’s cough worse, which means he has to stay at home most of the time, which means he can’t come to church or visit us for dinner.
Diana is still living in the backyard. I think Dad thought she would move back inside after one night, but she didn’t. Not after two nights, either. She comes into the house to eat and to help Mum with the dishes, but that’s all. On the 14th of May Diana officially turned fifteen, but she said she didn’t need a party. So Mum cooked a special vegetarian dinner and we sang ‘Happy Birthday’ with a candle in a piece of zucchini cake. Diana didn’t invite any of her friends—not even Tom Golding.
When Mum isn’t at night classes she takes Diana treats in Tupperware containers and they sit in the tent together wrapped in blankets and talk for a long time.
Mum stopped working at the library so she could spend more time cooking. She filled the pantry with ingredients that I have never heard of, like galangal and wasabi and liquid smoke, and she decorates our dinner plates with flowers and herbs and fruit skins.
Dad is just Dad. He goes to school, and he goes to his study. And that’s all.
Even though I’m trying not to think about Jonas, I really miss him. I miss talking to him on The Snake Stairs, and walking with him to get lunch orders, and hearing him say ‘Did you know…’ all the time. I think he misses me, too, because every now and then at school he looks at me and opens his mouth like he is about to tell me a fact, but then he remembers the stake-out and closes it again.
The only thing that makes me feel a little bit better about missing Jonas is thinking that us not-being-friends anymore is an example of Cause and Effect. An Effect is the thing that happens, and a Cause is why it happens. ‘Because’ is a Cause and Effect transition word. Jonas and I stopped being friends because of the stake-out. The Cause of us not being friends was the stake-out, and a Cause is a Reason, and a Reason is something I can understand.
There are some things that happen, though, that don’t have a Cause. When those kinds of things happen you can’t use transition words like ‘because’ and ‘so’ and ‘therefore’ to help explain them. They are completely meaningless, and trying to understand them is like trying to chew fairy floss—as soon as you have it in your mouth it dissolves into sugar-saliva and slips down your throat. When people try to explain meaningless things their mouths get twisted and all their words slip away and they can’t finish their sentences.
Today o
ne of those things happened in America. A man went to eat lunch at a restaurant and after he finished his lunch he opened his bag and took out a gun and killed forty-five people. And nobody knows why he did this, or why he talked to a lady about barbecue sauce first, or why he bothered to put his knife and fork neatly together on his plate when he was just going to make a big mess straight afterwards.
When they started talking about America on the news tonight Mum told me to go to my room.
‘Why?’ I said.
‘This isn’t suitable,’ Mum said, which is what she says about movies that are on after nine-thirty and CDs that have EXPLICIT LANGUAGE stickers and some of the books Dad gives me.
‘Let her watch it, Helen,’ Dad said. He was wearing his glasses. ‘All the kids’ll be talking about it tomorrow, anyway.’
‘She’s too young,’ Mum said. She came out from behind the bench where she had been making hummus. ‘She won’t understand.’
‘No one understands this,’ Dad said.
‘I understand lots of things,’ I said. ‘Like triple time and Japanese and Cause and Effect.’
‘There are some things you can’t understand until you’re older,’ Mum said.
‘But I am older,’ I said. ‘I can read and write at a Year Seven level.’ I saw Dad smile a little bit when I said that, but he tried not to show it to Mum.
‘She’s got a point,’ Dad said.
‘She’s not mature enough, Mark.’
Mum was standing with one hand on the bench and the other on her hip. She was looking at Dad the way she does when he’s not allowed to say no. Dad looked at me, and then at the TV, where a reporter in America was having trouble finishing her sentences.
‘Your mum’s right, Cassie,’ he said. ‘You’d better go to your room.’
So I did, but I didn’t shut the door. And from the doorway I could hear Mum and Dad talking. And what they said went like this:
Dad: I think we should tell her about Dad.
Mum: No.
Dad: It’s not fair.
Mum: She’s only eleven.
Dad: She’s old enough.