by Carly Nugent
First I thought she meant Grandpa was at the hospital because someone he knew was sick and he was visiting them. It made no sense for Diana to say that Grandpa was in hospital, since Grandpa was always doing things for other people and not for himself. So I thought that Diana had got her prepositions (which is the kind of words that at and in are) confused. But then I realised we wouldn’t be standing in the middle of the road crying if Grandpa was just at the hospital visiting somebody we didn’t even know. And then I realised what Diana really meant but didn’t have the breath to say was: ‘Grandpa’s really sick. So sick that he’s in hospital. Which means he doesn’t have a cold or the flu or a tummy bug. Which means he has something serious. Which means we have to stand here and hug each other and cry in the middle of the road even though it’s dark and even though it’s dangerous, because we don’t know what else to do.’
And when I realised The Truth about why we were crying I also realised that there was no way to fix it. Thinking differently couldn’t fix it, and finding the peacocks couldn’t fix it, and Metaphors couldn’t fix it. Not even writing this story could make The Truth better. And I looked at Diana and she nodded, and I knew she knew exactly what I was thinking.
We stayed like that in the road for a long time, until a car came, and we had to move.
In India there is a religion called Hinduism. Hinduism has a different kind of Creation Story. In Hinduism, God has three parts. The first part is called Brahma. Brahma is the creator, which means he made the universe and the planets and the grass and the caterpillars. The second part is Vishnu. Vishnu looks after everything that Brahma made.
The third part is Shiva. Shiva destroys everything that has been made and looked after by Brahma and Vishnu. He breaks it into pieces and stomps on it—all the planets and the grass and the caterpillars—like a little kid having a tantrum. He kills people and animals, too—even dogs that never did anything to anyone. The bit about Shiva is not really a Creation Story. It is a Destruction Story.
I never used to like Shiva’s story. I didn’t understand why someone would exist just to destroy things. And I didn’t understand why people in India built temples and wrote stories and made art for Shiva. I thought Brahma and Vishnu were the good guys, and Shiva was bad.
But now Shiva’s story makes sense to me, and it makes sense because it is true. And it is true because in real life nothing lasts forever. In real life people move out and turn fifteen and get sick. In real life The Truth is things getting broken and stomped on. And any story that tells you something different is A Lie.
Winter came quickly. At the end of autumn it was chilly, but as soon as the calendar turned over to June it was cold. And now that it’s July it is freezing. Winter in Bloomsbury looks like snow on the mountains and darkness at five o’clock. It sounds like black birds sitting in leafless trees going caw caw…caaawww. It feels like frost. It tastes like frost. It smells like frost. Winter is like a giant mud puddle in the middle of the road with no way around it. You know you need to get to the other side, but you also know you will have to get your feet wet.
In June Mum moved into a flat. The Flat is all the way past Lee Street, on The Other Side of Town. Mum says it is ‘very cosy’ but I think it is just very small. Mum and Dad made a deal that when Mum has nights off from The Very Nice Restaurant Diana and I stay with her at The Flat. So on Tuesdays and Wednesdays we pack clean clothes and homework and toothbrushes and towels and walk across the bridge. Diana isn’t allowed to sleep outside at The Flat since the only outside Mum has is a courtyard that is mostly cold concrete. So Diana sleeps on the floor in the lounge-room/kitchen and I sleep on the foldout couch in the lounge-room/kitchen. The foldout couch is hard and cold, and the walls and curtains are all cream-coloured (‘I’ve always wanted cream-coloured curtains,’ Mum said when she moved in, but I’ve never heard her want them before). So when I stay at The Flat I feel like I’m in a fridge and I can’t sleep. When Mum moved there she asked me if I wanted to live with her full-time. I said, ‘No, thanks,’ because even though I was still angry with Dad I was worried about him, too. I thought leaving him alone in the house was a bad idea.
One day in June I was walking home from school when Tom Golding started walking next to me. But he didn’t smile and say, ‘Hi, Cassie.’ Instead, he sighed and said, ‘Why doesn’t Diana talk to me anymore?’
His mouth was straight and thin, like those mechanical pencil leads that always break.
‘She’s Meditating,’ I said. ‘She’s finding a place where she doesn’t need anything.’ But I don’t think this was the right answer, because Tom Golding turned around and walked back the way he had already come, and didn’t even say, ‘See ya, Cassie.’
Dad is having more of Those Days. He had so many in a row that he stopped going to work, and now he just sits on the couch in his pyjamas and watches TV. He is using his long service leave, which he was supposed to be saving for our next Family Holiday. He stopped going to The Clinic, too. The only times he ever goes out are to visit Grandpa in the hospital, or to buy more boxes. There are so many boxes now that Dad has started filling the kitchen cupboards with them.
Once a week Diana takes Dad’s wallet and goes to the supermarket to buy milk and bread and other groceries. Most nights we eat food from Tupperware containers that Mum drops off on her way to work, but sometimes Diana cooks. Diana only knows how to cook two things:
1) Spaghetti with tomato sauce, and
2) Toasted cheese sandwiches.
I used to really like both of these things, but after eating them every week for a month and a half I don’t like them so much anymore. When Diana isn’t cooking she is cleaning, or helping me with my maths homework. She is also trying really hard not to get angry at Dad. (I can tell because sometimes when she looks at him her calm face disappears for a second and is replaced by a frustrated-and-tired face.)
William Shakespeare’s feathers that I found are starting to look droopy. I haven’t seen the peacocks since the end of May, when William Shakespeare yelled at me from the hill. Not-seeing the peacocks is a problem because this story is supposed to be about losing peacocks and looking for peacocks and finding peacocks. I’m worried that if the peacocks aren’t in this story anymore you will stop reading and will find something more interesting to do instead, like making biscuits or bike riding or going to the cinema. Thinking about nobody reading this story makes it even harder to write.
We visit Grandpa in the hospital every day after school, and on weekends. Except I don’t really visit, because Mum says I shouldn’t see Grandpa Like That. I don’t know what Like That means, except it has something to do with being very sick. When I ask Dad what Grandpa looks like he just says, ‘Different.’ So I sit outside Grandpa’s room in the hospital hallway while Dad and Diana go inside. While I’m sitting there I try to imagine how Grandpa could look so bad that he wouldn’t want me to see him. Then I test myself to see if I really wouldn’t want to see him if he looked that way. I imagine him with long nails and hair, and teeth like a wolf. But I still want to see him. I imagine him with blood coming out his ears and black lips and a really fat stomach and even then I still want to see him. I imagine a thousand different, horrible Grandpas. But none of them is horrible enough. I still want to see him. And I’m still not allowed to.
Jonas and I are friends again and we sit together every lunchtime at school. Even though it’s winter I still sit on the other side of the footpath. I know—because it is a fact—that the snake is hibernating. But I feel in my stomach like it is wide awake and waiting under the stairs to strike at my ankles.
Jonas will be twelve on the 30th of July, but he isn’t excited. When I showed Jonas the birthday party invitation his mum had put in our letterbox he told me to throw it out. He says he doesn’t want a party, and that the 30th of July isn’t his real birthday. When I asked him when his real birthday is he just scuffed his feet on the steps and glared.
Jonas still tells me facts but now most of his facts are interesting-an
d-disturbing. For example: ‘Did you know that tapeworms can live in your intestines and eat all the food you eat and get stronger while you get weaker?’ I still tell Jonas stories, too, except now all the stories I tell are true and most of them are sad. Because we are both already feeling bad we like to hear sad stories and disturbing facts. It’s funny how when you feel bad you want to do things that make you feel worse. It’s like feeling worse makes you feel better, somehow.
Today I told Jonas a true story about Akela. Akela was my dog who died when I was seven years old. Akela had been in our family since before Diana and I were born. I showed Jonas a photo of me and Akela. In the photo I am only one year old and Akela is much bigger than me. She is all black except for her stomach and under her chin, which is white and tufty. Her fur sticks out like a lion’s mane. One of my hands is grabbing onto Akela’s fur and I am staring at her. My eyes are really big and my mouth is open like I can’t believe she exists. Akela is looking at the camera. She doesn’t have her mouth open, or her tongue out, and she is not smiling. She looks more serious in this photo than some people ever look. She is saying—with her eyes and her white mane—‘If you try to hurt this baby I will kill you. I will really, properly, kill you.’ When Grandpa got sick I took this photo out of its frame on top of the microwave and put it in my bag.
I told Jonas that when Akela died she was sixteen years old, which is almost one hundred in dog years. We knew she was going to die because she stopped eating, and she didn’t want to go for walks or bark at people walking past our house anymore. Most of the time before Akela died she just lay down wherever people were. (When Akela got old she was allowed to be an inside dog.) If we were having dinner she would lie next to the table, but she wasn’t waiting for leftovers like Simon does. If we were watching TV she would lie in front of the couch with her head on Mum’s feet. And sometimes when Mum and Dad and Diana were in the lounge room and I was in my bedroom reading, Akela would come and lie on my floor. When she did that I felt really, really special.
I told Jonas how Akela had died on a school day. When Diana and I got home Mum was waiting for us in the kitchen. She said Akela was really sick and had to be Put Down.
‘First when Mum said Put Down I didn’t understand what she meant,’ I yelled (not too loudly) to Jonas. ‘But then Mum explained that when vets say Put Down it means something else. She said when vets say Put Down what they really mean is kill.’
Jonas nodded. ‘It’s a euphemism,’ he yelled (softly).
‘What’s that?’ I yelled (softly) back.
‘It’s a word that makes something horrible seem not-so-bad. Like saying casualties instead of people killed in war, or laid off instead of sacked.’ (Jonas doesn’t just know facts about science; he knows facts about words, too. This is another reason why we are friends.)
‘That’s a sad story,’ Jonas yelled when I was finished. And by sad story I knew he meant good story. ‘Do you want to know an interesting-and-disturbing fact about sandflies?’
There was one part of the story about Akela that I didn’t tell Jonas. And that was how after Mum had told me and Diana about the vet I went to my room. In my room I pretended to be a worm, busy wriggling, buried in warm dirt. And while I was pretending Mum came in and looked in my cupboard for something, and then she turned around and hugged me and she was crying. That was the first time I ever saw my Mum cry. I didn’t tell Jonas this part because talking about it makes me scared. It makes me scared the same way Dad taking long service leave so he can sit at home all day makes me scared. It makes me feel like I am big, and Mum and Dad are small. Which is wrong because I’m eleven-turning-twelve and Mum and Dad are old-turning-older. It is weird and disturbing, like tapeworms. Or like someone saying Put Down when they really mean kill.
Today was a sort-of-sunny winter day, so after not-visiting Grandpa I went to lie in the grass outside Diana’s tent.
After I had been lying there a little while Diana said, ‘He’s not getting better, you know.’
I wasn’t reading anything. I was just lying and looking down at the grass. It rained yesterday, and the ground was damp. When Diana said what she said, I was watching a worm. I liked the way it wandered around in its fragile body. So small, and so squishable.
‘How do you know?’ I said. Being fifteen means you know more things, like trigonometry and art history, but it doesn’t mean you know everything.
‘He’s been sick for ages,’ Diana said.
‘Only since June,’ I said. ‘That’s not ages.’
‘He’s been in hospital since June. He’s been sick since Christmas.’
I stopped looking at bugs. At Christmas we had gone to Aunt Sally’s, like always. We had eaten turkey and pudding, like always. Grandpa had sat on the veranda and done crosswords, like always. And then we had come home.
‘No, he wasn’t,’ I said. ‘We went to Aunt Sally’s.’
‘Grandpa wanted to go. He wanted Christmas to be normal,’ said Diana.
I tried remembering Christmas again. We had gone to Aunt Sally’s, like always. We had eaten turkey, but Grandpa hadn’t had any pudding. We hadn’t sung Christmas carols like we always did—instead we had watched TV. And Grandpa had started a lot of crosswords, but he hadn’t finished any of them.
Then I remembered coming home from Christmas. I remembered Dad having more of Those Days, and Mum cooking all the time, and Diana Meditating and not going to church. And that was when I realised I was remembering The Truth about Christmas, and that everything I had remembered before was A Lie.
‘How come no one told me?’ I said.
‘You’re too young, Cassie,’ Diana said. ‘You wouldn’t have understood.’
I was getting really sick of people telling me this. Mum, Dad, teachers, Ms Carol the librarian, who won’t let me take out books from the high school section even though I can read at a Year Seven level. I was so sick of hearing this sentence that I didn’t know what to say. I just lay in the grass and watched the worm trying to push its way into a clump of mud.
‘Cassie…’ Diana looked down at her book like she wanted to be reading it but couldn’t. She folded and unfolded the bottom corner of the page. ‘I heard Mrs Harris talking to Dad this afternoon. She said there’s not much else they can do. Except make him comfortable.’
‘Comfortable?’ I said this word like it was from a language I don’t understand, like Russian. ‘How can he be comfortable if he’s dying?’
Diana just looked at me.
‘Comfortable is reading a book in the sun, or watching a movie in a beanbag with popcorn. Dying is no more sun, no more books, no more popcorn. Dying is the end of everything. How can that be comfortable?’
I didn’t really expect Diana to answer this question, and she didn’t. She looked down at her book.
‘You don’t really mean comfortable,’ I said. ‘Comfortable is a euphemism. What you really mean is giving up. What you really mean is doing nothing and letting Grandpa die.’
Diana looked up. Her eyes were like tadpoles swimming in tears. I could tell she was waiting for me to say something nice, something that would make her feel better. Something that would make both of us feel better. But I didn’t want to be nice.
I stood up. ‘You shouldn’t lie like that, Diana,’ I said. Then I stomped back to the house. I felt bad because it was a pretty mean thing to say to someone I really loved very much. And when I got to the deck and bent over to take off my shoes I felt even worse, because I realised I had squashed the worm.
I’m going to tell you something that I’ve never told anyone, not even my dad. Some days I don’t want to write anything at all. Not even this story. Some days when I look at this notebook on the dresser next to William Shakespeare’s feathers I feel sick right down deep in my stomach. I want to do anything that isn’t writing. Anything. Even eating silverbeet or working out multiplication problems.
The reason I can’t say this to anyone—especially not my dad—is because everyone thinks I’m a W
riter. When Dad introduces me to new people he says, ‘This is my daughter Cassie. She’s writing a book.’ At church Grandpa says to his friends, ‘My granddaughter writes the most wonderful stories.’ At school Mrs Atkinson takes time out from doing important work like The Budget to read my stories. Even Mum says to people, ‘Cassie’s definitely got Mark’s imagination.’ Whenever anybody I know thinks about me the thought in their head looks like this:
Cassie = Writer
And if I told people that some days I hate writing, the thought in their heads when they think of me would look like this:
Cassie =
Which is a very unbalanced thought, and it makes me feel like I’m sitting on a seesaw with no one at the other end.
Sometimes I think about changing this equation so that when people think of me they see something else on the other side of the equals sign instead of Writer. Like:
Cassie = Scientist
or
Cassie = Chef
or
Cassie = High Jump Champion
But none of those things seems right. And I wonder if I will ever find something that really fits, or if I will just grow up being half a person pretending to be something I’m not.
Today Mum turned forty so she took me and Diana to The Very Nice Restaurant to celebrate. She wore a black dress and stockings and the pearl earrings Dad gave her for their anniversary last year. I thought it was unfair to wear Dad’s earrings to a dinner he wasn’t invited to, so I tried not to look at Mum’s ears. This probably would have made Mum mad if she hadn’t been so distracted by Roger.
Diana and I couldn’t get dressed up for The Very Nice Restaurant because we had forgotten to pack our nice clothes. We had to wear our school uniforms, which are just blue dresses without any shape and black shoes without heels. I could tell Mum wanted to blame Dad for us not having nice clothes because she made a face when she saw what was in our bags like she had just eaten a bad potato chip (one that is green at the edges instead of crispy yellow). But she didn’t say anything. She just plaited our hair—hard—and then put in her earrings.