by Carly Nugent
Mum: She’s still a child.
Silence except for the TV, which said, ‘We thought they were letting off cannons, and…’
Dad: I don’t think there’s much time left.
Silence.
The TV said, ‘You don’t think it’s ever gunna be…as bad as…’
Mum: Mark. I’m sorry.
The TV said, ‘Awful, just very, very…’
And then I shut the door.
Today was the last Sunday in May, almost one month after the meaningless thing happened in America. Today was also the day I opened the boxes in the laundry cupboard.
It was cold and rainy, more winter than autumn. Diana was reading in her tent, Dad was in his study, and Mum was cooking something that smelled like nail polish. I had finished all my homework and read Jane Eyre, and the only other thing I wanted to do was look for the peacocks. So, even though I knew Mum wouldn’t like me going-out-in-this-weather, I went to the laundry to get the big umbrella.
Usually when I open the laundry cupboard the mop and the umbrella fall on top of me, but today they didn’t. And they didn’t because they weren’t in the cupboard. And they weren’t in the cupboard because there wasn’t any space for them. And there wasn’t any space for them because the cupboard was full—from floor to ceiling—with cardboard boxes.
I hadn’t forgotten about the boxes. I remembered them whenever I walked past the laundry, which was a lot. And every time I remembered them I tried not to imagine what was in them. Most of the time this didn’t work, and my brain imagined anyway. It imagined stolen money, and it imagined whisky (which is what Huck Finn’s dad was an alcoholic for), and it imagined guns. For more than two months most of me didn’t want to open the boxes, and some of me (the some of me that was still a detective) did. But today when I saw how full the shelves in the laundry cupboard were and how easily I could reach them, the scales inside me shifted. Suddenly only some of me didn’t want to open the boxes, and most of me did.
I closed the laundry door just in case Mum came looking for me, and then I took a box from the shelf where the spare pillowcases used to live. It was just a plain brown cardboard box, not very big, with no wrapping but with a price sticker that said $25.95. It was kind of heavy in my hands, like an unboiled egg. I got ready to open the lid. My brain was imagining illegal drugs and casino chips and dead fish. I poked my fingernail under the little cardboard latch and pulled.
Inside, lying on a scrunched-up bed of white tissue paper, was a little elephant. It was grey, and it had its trunk in the air. I picked it up, and it was hard and cold in my hand. It was a really good elephant, with lots of details like the creases in its skin and the whites in its eyes. I put it back on the tissue paper and opened another box. In it was a small pink pig with a curly tail. In the next box there was a robin sitting on a branch. In the next box was a little girl holding a balloon. In the next box there was an aeroplane.
I opened ten boxes altogether. Inside all of them were ornaments, the kind you put on window ledges and mantelpieces to brighten-up-your-home. Some of them were cheap, but some of them were very expensive. A tiny man trimming tiny rose bushes had a price sticker that said $189.95.
After I had put all the ornaments back in their tissue paper I sat on the laundry tiles and stared at the boxes. For the first time in two months my brain wasn’t imagining anything. I sat there until Mum opened the door.
She looked at me, and then she looked at the boxes, and then she said, ‘What are you doing?’
‘Looking for the big umbrella,’ I said.
‘I moved it,’ she said, and then she closed the cupboard doors. ‘It’s in the spare room. I’ll get it for you.’ She went out for a minute and came back with the umbrella. She gave it to me without asking what I was going to do with it or where I thought I was going in this weather. I didn’t say anything, and I didn’t move. Mum twisted her hair around her finger the way she does when something is making her uncomfortable, like a horror movie or talking to her sister-in-law. She knew I was waiting for some kind of explanation.
Finally she said, ‘Your dad did some shopping.’
And then she went back to the kitchen.
I was sitting on my own by the monkey bars when Rhea Grimm came up to me. I wasn’t eating my lunch because I didn’t know exactly what it was (it smelled like a cross between spaghetti sauce and pineapple) and I wasn’t hungry. Even though I was trying harder than ever not to think, my brain was asking lots of questions and answering none of them. The main questions my brain kept asking were:
1) Why did my dad need so many ornaments?
2) What didn’t I understand about Grandpa?
3) What exactly was Buddhism?
4) Where were the peacocks?
Because I was thinking all these thoughts I didn’t see Rhea Grimm until she was halfway across the downball courts. By then it was too late to do anything except scrunch up small and pretend to be studying my shoes and hope it wasn’t me she was pounding across the asphalt towards.
‘Hey. Andersen.’
It was.
When I looked up, Rhea Grimm and three other Year Eight girls were standing in front of me. They all had messy buns with bits of hair dangling off them, and lots of jewellery. They all looked angry, but Rhea Grimm looked the angriest. Even with makeup her face was red. She had both hands on her hips, and—even though it was lunchtime and not home time—she had her schoolbag over her shoulder. She was standing so close to me that the bottom of her school dress almost touched my nose, and every time she spoke little bits of angry spit landed in my hair.
‘Me?’ My voice was more mouse than person.
‘Yeah, you.’
Rhea Grimm’s friends giggled the way mean kids do when they have pulled the wings off a bug and are watching it try to fly away. But Rhea Grimm didn’t even smile, and that was when I knew she wasn’t just angry. She was furious. ‘Guess what?’ she said.
‘What?’ I squeaked. A big part of me was wishing more than anything that they would walk back across the downball courts and find some other bug to torture. But the part of me that was still a detective wanted to know what Rhea Grimm was so furious about.
‘I’m suspended,’ she said. ‘Guess who suspended me?’
I swallowed and didn’t say anything. I didn’t need to guess.
‘Your dad,’ Rhea Grimm said. ‘Your crazy, psycho, loser dad.’
I stayed quiet. It felt like I had fallen down a very dark, very deep hole. But what really frightened me about this hole wasn’t the dark, or the deep. It was the feeling I had that The Truth was sitting at the bottom of it with me.
Rhea Grimm’s friends started to get even closer, like seagulls closing in on dropped chips at the beach.
‘And you know what else?’ Rhea Grimm leaned down and spoke straight into my face. ‘You know what he did, right before he told me to get out?’ Her voice crackled like something burning. ‘He cried. He sat down at his desk and cried. Like a baby. You know what happens when dads cry, don’t you, Andersen?’
I didn’t know, but I had a bad feeling. At the back of Rhea Grimm’s eyes, behind her anger, I could see a little bit of happiness that came from making me sad.
‘What happens?’ I said.
‘They go away,’ Rhea Grimm said. ‘They go away, and they don’t come back.’
And that was when I knew I wasn’t just in a hole with The Truth: I was sitting right in the middle of it, and it was damp and sticky and bad-smelling. Tears were heating up the backs of my eyes and I knew I would only be able to hold them in for about three more seconds before I sobbed in Rhea Grimm’s face. Just like she said my dad had done.
But then, from behind Rhea Grimm, there was a different voice. And the different voice said, ‘Did you know—’
Rhea Grimm turned around. I could see her pink polka-dot knickers peeking out from under her dress.
‘—if you mix peanut butter and tomato sauce together it smells really, really bad. And—’
Rhea Grimm’s friends moved back, and I saw Jonas standing there with two water balloons in each hand.
‘—it stains really, really well.’
Then there were four loud smacking sounds, like playdough being thrown on a tile floor, and screaming. Lots of screaming. Rhea Grimm and her friends ran like it was sports day and they were doing the hundred metres. Just before Rhea Grimm disappeared behind the lockers I noticed something red-brown running down her front. I knew Jonas was good at science and facts, but I didn’t know he was such a good shot.
‘I saw them coming,’ Jonas said, and he sat down next to me. ‘I’ve had the balloons in my locker for a while. Science experiment.’
‘A while?’ I said.
Jonas smiled in a lopsided sort of way. ‘Three weeks.’
We laughed because we were both thinking the same thing, and that thing was Rhea Grimm covered in three-week-old peanut butter and tomato sauce. And then we sat quietly together. I was thinking about The Truth, and Jonas was thinking about the day he had followed my dad into The Clinic and we stopped being friends.
‘I didn’t really see anything,’ Jonas said. ‘Just the waiting room. Your dad was reading a newspaper, and then the lady at the front desk called his name and he went into another room. That’s all. Cross my heart.’
I nodded. Jonas telling me what he saw didn’t make me feel better, but it did feel true. And The Truth of what Jonas and Rhea Grimm had said was so heavy that I couldn’t hold it up anymore. When I let it go I felt like a balloon slowly running out of air: sighing, soft, and empty.
On my way home from school I saw William Shakespeare. He was standing on top of the little hill behind the church, watching me. He had lost all of his blue-green feathers and when he opened his tail I could see through it to the blank, empty sky behind him. He wasn’t that far away but I was so tired that I couldn’t even imagine walking up the hill, let alone actually walking up it. As I turned the corner away from William Shakespeare I heard him cry out, but the sound of him didn’t make me feel anything. I wondered if I even wanted to be a peacock detective anymore.
At dinner I couldn’t look straight at my dad. Everything he did seemed strange and sad. The way he stirred his borscht around in circles, the way he sat with his shoulders pulled down, the way he stared at Mum with a hypnotised look on his face, like she was a lava lamp. When he asked me how school was all I could think of was Rhea Grimm’s face, and I looked down at my prosciutto-and-cheese tart like it was a really interesting bug under a microscope.
In between dinner and dessert Dad went to his study and Diana went to her room and Mum and I were in the kitchen alone. I was sitting on the couch pretending to watch TV but really thinking about Rhea Grimm. Mum fiddled around behind the bench for a while. The dishes were done and dessert was already made, so she sort of just moved plates and cups around for no real reason. Eventually she said, ‘Cassie, can you turn that off, please? I want to talk to you for a minute.’
I switched off the news, and Mum came and sat next to me. She pushed her hair back behind her ears and licked her lips before she spoke.
‘I’ve got a job,’ she said. There was some silence. ‘At Calpurnia’s. They’ve asked me to help out in the kitchen. Salads and desserts, mostly. I start next week.’
Calpurnia’s is the name of The Very Nice Restaurant on The Other Side of Town.
‘That’s good,’ I said. ‘Congratulations.’
‘Thank you.’ Mum pulled a strand of hair from behind her ear and started playing with it. ‘There’s something else. I’m not going to be living here anymore. I’m moving out.’
This time the silence was so strong and solid it felt like stone.
‘To the backyard?’ I said.
Mum shook her head. ‘No. To my own place. For a while.’
I tried to imagine good reasons for my mum moving out. Like her being a lion tamer with a travelling circus, or a secret superhero, or the prime minister. But none of these reasons were true enough, and I didn’t believe any of them.
‘Cassie?’ Mum was looking at me very carefully. ‘Are you all right?’
‘What about Dad and Diana?’ I said. ‘What will they say?’
Mum took a deep breath. ‘I’ve already told them,’ she said. ‘They understand. Cassie…’ She stopped and looked down at her hand—the one with her wedding ring—and then back at me. ‘It’s difficult to explain. But this is really important to me. Does that make sense?’
I nodded, even though it didn’t make any sense at all, because I was starting to feel dizzy and I didn’t trust myself to speak.
Mum smiled, and hugged me. ‘I love you,’ she said, into my hair. When she pulled back her eyes had tears in them. ‘All right. Dessert?’
Dad and Diana came back and we sat down at the table with little bowls of pink mousse. I waited for someone to say something about Mum’s news, but no one did. Diana was sitting perfectly still, the way she does when she’s Meditating, and her eyes were staring far off into the distance. Dad was looking down at his lap, where he was twisting a serviette around his fingers. That made me really mad, because I thought my dad really loved my mum, but now she was going to leave and Dad was acting like he didn’t even care. So because Diana was Meditating and Dad was twisting, I was the only one who could say something to Mum.
And what I said was, ‘You can’t leave.’
Mum put down her spoon. ‘Possum,’ she said. ‘Try to look on the bright side. I’ll still see you every day, and you can come and stay with me whenever you like.’
But I didn’t want to look on the bright side. ‘I don’t want to stay with you. I want you to stay here.’
‘I know this is difficult, Cassie, but when you’re older you’ll understand.’
‘I understand a lot of things now.’ I stood up. ‘Like what’s in an M movie, and how to swear in Greek, and what sausages are made of. And I want to understand why you don’t want to live with us anymore. I want to understand why Diana doesn’t have to go to church and why she gets to live in the stupid garden. I want to understand about Grandpa. And’— I turned my voice in Dad’s direction —‘I want to understand why you’re not doing anything.’
I was looking properly at Dad, which was something I hadn’t done for months. He seemed smaller than usual, and greyer. ‘Say something,’ I said. But he didn’t. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ I said.
Dad just kept twisting and twisting and twisting. And then—maybe because of all the twisting or because of Mum’s news or Diana’s Meditating or a whole lot of things mixed together—something I didn’t know was in me started to rise up and grow, like a sickness or a sneeze. And that something made me do a thing I never thought I could do. I lifted my little bowl of pink mousse off the table, and dumped it upside down on top of Dad’s head.
And then I left.
I didn’t know I was walking to the bridge until I was already there.
I stopped in the middle, halfway between My Side and The Other Side of Town, and looked down at the water. All I could see were shiny bubbles where the rapids were catching the moonlight.
When I left my only plan was to get away from home. But when I got to the bridge I realised home had followed me. My mind was full of Mum leaving, and Dad crying at school, and Diana staring into nothing. I tried to remember a time before home was so hard to think about: before Dad was going to The Clinic, and before Mum was cooking all the time, and before Diana was Meditating and being vegetarian and living outside. I tried remembering our Family Holiday, and how Diana and I had swum every day and Mum and Dad had held hands and we’d all played Scrabble. But now when I remembered it, everything was different. It had rained, and Diana and I had been bored, and Mum and Dad had argued about the price of Movie World tickets. Maybe Jonas was right: maybe family holidays were the worst, after all.
I thought if I stood and thought on the bridge for long enough I would feel better. Usually if I think really carefully I can take the things that
are making me feel bad and turn them into something that has meaning. Like a story. But when I started to try to give all these thoughts transition words and paragraphs it didn’t feel right. And it didn’t feel right because it didn’t feel true.
After a while I gave up and went to find some sticks to throw off the bridge. There were some good ones just near the road, at the edge of the track. I threw them into the water on one side of the bridge and then I ran to the other side to see which one was the winner. That’s how you play Pooh Sticks, which is a game Diana and I have played together ever since we moved to Bloomsbury. I had to squint to see the sticks in the dark, and it wasn’t much fun since both sticks were mine so I always won. But I kept playing because finding sticks and throwing them and running and squinting was better than just standing and thinking.
I threw two sticks in and ran across the bridge. But when I looked down three sticks came out. I turned around, and that’s when I saw someone standing on the stick-throwing side of the bridge. That someone was Diana. She found me partly because she likes to play Pooh Sticks on the bridge (or she did before she was fifteen), but mostly because she is my sister.
For a few seconds we had to stand and look at each other—her on the stick-throwing side and me on the stick-looking side—because a car went between us. And it was when the headlights of the car shone on Diana’s face that I knew something was wrong. Not just me-dumping-pink-mousse-on-Dad’s-head-and-leaving sort of wrong. Something else.
We met each other in the middle of the road, which is a dangerous thing to do but right then it didn’t matter. When I got close to Diana I could see she was crying and so I started crying too, because if Diana cries I cry, and that’s just how it is. It’s like how dogs always wag their tails when they see someone they love. They can’t help it.
We stood in the middle of the road crying and hugging for ages, and I didn’t know why we were doing any of this. But then Diana wiped her eyes and sniffed and stopped enough to say, ‘Grandpa’s in hospital.’