The Peacock Detectives

by Carly Nugent

  When we got to The Very Nice Restaurant, Roger was waiting for us at the door. He kissed Mum on the cheek and said, ‘How’s it going, kids?’ to me and Diana (which I knew made Diana mad because now that she is fifteen she hates being called a kid).

  I guess Roger is all-right-looking from the outside. He is tall and straight. His nose is a nice shape and his chin has an almost-beard that is always trimmed very neatly. His clothes are never wrinkled and they look like they come from somewhere more expensive than Target. But there is something a bit wobbly about Roger. Looking at him sometimes reminds me of looking at a mirage on a hot day—he is sort of shimmering. Like he might come apart and disappear any minute. When he showed us our table he pulled Mum’s chair out for her, and the way he smiled reminded me of the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland.

  I wanted to order spaghetti but there wasn’t any on the menu. The closest thing (Mum said) was Chicken Linguine with Cream Sauce and Shaved Truffles. The only thing I know about truffles is that they come from underground and you have to use a pig to find them. So I said I would have that, because then I could imagine a pig snorting and snuffling and digging up the truffles for my dinner. Diana said she wasn’t hungry. Mum said she had to eat anyway, and then she waved to Roger and he came over to our table.

  ‘I’ll have the Barramundi,’ Mum said. ‘Cassandra will have the Chicken Linguine with Truffles.’ (Mum only calls me Cassandra when she is angry with me or when she is trying to sound fancy.) ‘Diana?’

  ‘A garden salad, please,’ Diana said, in her polite voice. ‘And some more bread.’ As soon as Roger walked away Mum turned to Diana with scrunched eyebrows.

  ‘That was very rude.’

  ‘What?’ Diana asked (and she was really asking, not being fifteen and sarcastic).

  ‘You don’t ask for more bread in a place like this,’ Mum said. ‘It’s insulting.’

  ‘Insulting to who?’

  ‘To the chef.’

  ‘Why? It’s delicious bread,’ Diana said. She took a big bite of her baguette. Bits of crust scattered all over the table.

  Roger spent more time at our table than he did at any of the others. I know because I was timing him. The time he spent looked like this:

  Family of four by the window: two minutes, eight seconds.

  Romantic couple by the fireplace: one minute, forty seconds.

  Big group of laughing old people with lots of wine: one minute, fifty-two seconds.

  Our table: seven minutes, twenty-two seconds.

  After Roger had finished spending six minutes, thirty-eight seconds talking to Mum about salad dressings and had gone back to the kitchen I asked, ‘Why does Roger spend so much time at our table?’

  Mum had a sip of her wine. ‘He wants to make sure we have a nice dinner. That’s his job.’

  ‘What about everyone else?’ Diana said. ‘Doesn’t he want to make sure they have nice dinners, too?’

  Mum twisted a piece of hair around her fingers. ‘He’s looking after us a bit more because I work here. We’re friends.’

  Diana was looking at Mum the way detectives look at possible suspects. ‘You must be very good friends,’ she said.

  Mum put down her wine glass. ‘Diana,’ she said, in her warning voice.

  ‘What?’ Diana said, and this time she was being fifteen and sarcastic. She picked up another piece of bread. ‘I’m just saying.’

  I waited for Mum to tell Diana to stop eating bread, but she didn’t. She just stared at Diana until Roger came over with our food.

  We ate in silence, and I couldn’t enjoy the truffles that the pig had snuffled out for me. And later when Diana and I were lying together in the cold, white lounge-room/kitchen I wanted more than anything to talk to her. But I didn’t, because we were still in a fight, and because I didn’t know how to begin.

  On Saturday I decided—even though it was cold and damp outside—that Simon needed a walk. Since it became winter Simon hasn’t been for many walks at all. This is partly because it’s too cold, but mostly because Mum isn’t home and Dad is always watching TV and Diana is always cooking and cleaning and doing homework. So the only person left to go walking with Simon this morning was me.

  We walked down to the river and along the track. The wind felt like ice, and there was snow on the very tops of the mountains so they looked like they were wearing white elf hats. Simon was still sniffing everything, but because the ground was so damp grass kept sticking to his nose and he had to stop every two minutes to sneeze it off. We got to the bridge and I was about to turn us left to visit Jonas when Virginia appeared out of the bush.

  She stood in the middle of the bridge and looked at us. She seemed smaller, standing on the smooth, wide road. Her feathers were dark from the damp.

  She bobbed her head. Simon barked. Virginia squawked, and then she turned and ran away from us across the bridge. Simon barked again and we followed.

  Simon was running fast and I was concentrating so hard on not letting go of his lead that I didn’t notice where we were heading until we were already there. Then we stopped and looked and where we were was The Other Side of Town, past Lee Street, outside Mum’s Flat. Virginia flapped herself over the back fence and was gone.

  Between the front and back of The Flat there is a little path behind a gate that I am just tall enough to open if I stand on my tiptoes. Simon and I squeezed our way down the little path past the air conditioner and into the backyard. The backyard is really just a concrete square with a barbecue and a clothesline and some herbs in pots that Mum uses for cooking. There is nowhere for a peacock to hide in Mum’s backyard, but Virginia had disappeared.

  I sighed and Simon growled. I thought about knocking on the back door and asking Mum if she had seen where Virginia went, but I knew if I did that she would ask me questions about school and Diana and Dad that I didn’t feel like answering. Instead, Simon and I sat down behind the barbecue for a rest. Chasing peacocks (especially Virginia) makes you really puffed.

  The back door of The Flat is the kind of door that slides and is made of glass. This was why, while Simon and I were sitting there puffing behind the barbecue, we could see into the kitchen. And it was why we could see that on the bench were chopped-up tomatoes and cheese and those long green onions that are fun to sprinkle on things, which are all ingredients for making an omelette. And it was why we could see someone standing at the bench, wearing pyjamas and mixing eggs in a bowl. And that someone we saw was not my mum. That someone was Roger.

  When my eyes saw Roger my brain asked three questions in this order:

  1) Why is Roger making an omelette?

  2) Why is Roger making an omelette in his pyjamas?

  3) Why is Roger making an omelette in his pyjamas in my mum’s kitchen?

  As I pulled Simon around the corner and back down the side-path my brain answered all three questions at once. And then it put those answers together with all the Tupperware in our freezer with Roger’s name on it, and Diana looking at Mum strangely at dinner at The Very Nice Restaurant. And then it told me The Truth.

  ‘Roger is your mum’s boyfriend,’ my brain said. ‘She wants to always be around him. She wants to eat omelettes with him, and hug him, and kiss him. One day she’ll want to marry him. And there’s nothing you can do about it.’

  Simon and I ran back to the bridge, which seemed like a safe distance from The Flat. When we got there we stopped. I didn’t want to go home, because going home would mean seeing Dad’s face and I didn’t know if I could see Dad’s face after seeing Roger’s pyjamas. So we didn’t go anywhere. We just stood on the bridge, feeling like worms that had been dug out of warm earth and stomped on by someone’s shoe.

  We had to go home eventually, though, because Dad was waiting for me to go with him to the hospital. Diana was in her tent studying and I didn’t want to sit in the car alone with Dad, so I tried to sneak Simon into the back seat. We were safe until just before Dad turned the key to start the car and Simon sneezed. (He s
till had some grass stuck to his nose from our walk.) Dad turned around.

  ‘Out,’ he said, and Simon put his head down and crept out of the car and into the fernery. Dad looked at me like he wanted to be angry but all he could be was blank. He was wearing proper clothes, but he had on the face that he usually wears with his pyjamas. ‘You can’t bring a dog to a hospital,’ he said, in the sort of voice you use for things you should say (like spelling tests and Bible verses in church) and not things you want to say.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. I wanted to explain that it felt good to have Simon next to me because he was the only one who knew The Truth. But explaining this would mean also explaining Roger and the omelette, and that was something I couldn’t do to my dad.

  At the hospital I sat in the hallway while Dad went in to see Grandpa. I put my elbows on my knees and my chin in my hands and looked down at the floor, which was a sort of yellow-black colour. It was the kind of floor that squeaked when you walked on it, like it was alive and you were hurting it with your shoes. It had no cracks in it like other floors did where bits of floor joined together, so it looked like a giant piece of spread-out skin. Yellow-black skin, like a tiger snake.

  When Dad came out of Grandpa’s room he still had his pyjamas-face on. His runners were very rubbery and when he walked the floor sounded like it was screaming. I followed him, lifting my feet as high as I could. When we got to the doors we had to stop because Mum was walking in.

  The floor went quiet because everyone stopped walking. I could tell from the way Mum’s eyes went up and down and around and never stayed on Dad that she was thinking about Roger. She had a look on her face like there was a big shot-put in her stomach.

  ‘Mark,’ Mum said. Her voice was like a sigh. ‘How is he?’

  Dad looked at me, and then at Mum. Mum nodded. I was half-annoyed that they were keeping a secret from me and half-happy that they were sharing a secret.

  ‘How are you?’ Dad said.

  ‘Fine,’ Mum said.

  ‘How’s the restaurant?’

  ‘Good.’ Mum twisted some hair around her finger. She said the word ‘good’ like it was the word ‘tired’.

  ‘That’s good,’ Dad said, and then, ‘Right.’ But there was nothing right about us all standing in the hallway of the hospital. There was nothing right about Grandpa being in a room all alone and me not being allowed to see him. And there was nothing right about the way Roger seemed to be hanging over the top of us, like a big saggy storm cloud looming closer and closer, about to hit Dad in the head.

  ‘It’s nice to see you, Helen,’ Dad said, and then he put his head down and walked towards the automatic doors. They opened with a hiss, and he was gone.

  Mum stopped me before I could follow him.

  ‘Cassie, is everything okay?’ Her eyes were so full of guilt they looked like a pot of boiling water about to overflow. And maybe it was because of the screaming floor or Grandpa just down the hall. Or maybe it was because it was just getting too hard to keep all this Truth inside me, that I said, ‘No.’ And then, ‘I hope it was a nice omelette.’

  And then I followed Dad through the snake-hiss doors.

  At school today Jonas was in a really bad mood. He didn’t tell me any facts (not even disturbing ones) and in science he wouldn’t answer Mrs Atkinson’s questions about volcanoes (and Jonas knows a lot about volcanoes). At lunchtime he sat at the top of The Snake Stairs glaring and not-eating. When I yelled, ‘What’s wrong?’ he yelled back (unnecessarily loudly and angrily), ‘Nothing!’

  And then a few seconds later, ‘Why do you have to sit all the way over there?’

  I was sitting where I always sat, on the other side of the footpath, as far away from The Snake Stairs as I could get and still have a (loud) conversation.

  ‘Because I’m scared of snakes,’ I yelled.

  ‘I know,’ Jonas yelled. ‘But why?’

  Here is a list of things I know about snakes:

  1) They are cold-blooded, which means they need to lie in the sun to keep their bodies warm.

  2) They use their tongues to smell and to figure out which way to go.

  3) They can’t hear but they can feel vibrations in the ground. (This is why it’s important to stomp your feet when snakes might be around.)

  4) They like to eat frogs and mice.

  5) They don’t take care of their babies.

  6) There are lots of them in Victoria (which is the state Bloomsbury is in).

  7) A lot of the snakes in Victoria are poisonous.

  8) A lot of the poisonous snakes in Victoria are deadly.

  9) In stories snakes are usually the bad guys (like in The Jungle Book and the Bible).

  All of these are good reasons to be scared of snakes, but none of them is my reason. My reason is something that happened when I was little. I don’t like telling people why I’m scared of snakes because even talking about it gives me goosebumps. I thought about how Jonas had seen the snake behind his house, and about how he had just stood there while the snake slid away, and about how he hadn’t been scared. I thought maybe he wouldn’t understand my reason. But then I remembered that Jonas is my friend and that he had saved me from Rhea Grimm, and I decided to tell him.

  ‘Because of my dad,’ I said. ‘When I was six there was a tiger snake in our backyard. Diana was in the garden with Akela, and the snake came out from under the camellia bush. So Dad killed it.’

  Jonas was leaning forward so he could hear me. This was a story I didn’t want to yell.

  ‘What did it look like?’ he asked.

  ‘It was long,’ I said. ‘Longer than the shovel. And it was mostly black, but it had yellow stripes and a yellow tummy. Its neck was cut, and there was blood on the grass.’

  ‘Gross.’ Jonas said ‘gross’ like he was saying ‘cool’.

  ‘Dad said it was dead. But—’

  ‘But what?’ Jonas was leaning so far forward I thought he was going to fall off the steps.

  ‘It was moving. Its tail was moving. And its mouth and eyes were open.’

  ‘Things can be dead and still have their eyes open,’ Jonas said.

  ‘Yeah, but they weren’t just open. They were looking.’

  ‘Looking at what?’

  ‘At my dad.’

  There was some silence then, because I had stopped telling the story.

  ‘Then what happened?’ Jonas said.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘That’s the end.’

  Jonas sat back on the stairs. ‘That’s not a very good story.’

  I shrugged. My feelings were a bit hurt, but I knew Jonas was in a bad mood and when people are in bad moods sometimes they say things they don’t mean. I also felt guilty because I had lied to Jonas when I said that was the end. There were two things about my snake story that I hadn’t told him:

  1) After I saw the snake with its eyes open I screamed so loud that Mr and Mrs Hudson heard me from across the road, and

  2) I didn’t just see the snake looking at my dad. I saw the snake looking at my dad like it would kill him. Not just like it wanted to kill him, but like it actually, definitely, would kill him. As actually and definitely as the sun.

  Today was Jonas’s birthday but he wasn’t at school. He wasn’t there for maths, or Japanese. I looked for him on The Snake Stairs at lunchtime to give him his present, but he wasn’t there either.

  When I got home Dad was sitting at the kitchen table with his glasses on, and Peter and Irene were sitting next to him. Irene is usually very pretty and friendly looking, with her curly brown hair and round cheeks. Peter is usually smiling and stroking his chin while he tells science jokes, like: ‘What do molecules say when they wake up in the morning? Up and atom!’ But today Irene had big red eyes and Peter had the most serious face I had ever seen, like someone was pulling the corners of his mouth with string to make it straight. When I came in they all stood up and seeing them standing there with their faces like that made me want to go straight to my room.

 
; ‘Cassandra,’ Dad said, so I knew right away something was really wrong. ‘Have you seen Jonas?’

  The shot-put feeling started building in my tummy. Because I hadn’t seen him. Not in class and not on The Snake Stairs.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘When was the last…’ Irene started speaking but her voice was really shaky and she had to stop before she was done. Peter finished her sentence for her.

  ‘When was the last time you saw him?’ he said.

  ‘Yesterday,’ I said. ‘At school. We had music last and then we got our bags and I walked home and Jonas walked home.’

  ‘Which way?’ Irene’s voice was like a peacock’s, high and sad. ‘Which way did he go?’

  ‘The same way he always goes,’ I said. ‘Left, past the church, and home.’

  Irene’s eyes watered. Peter’s mouth got so straight I couldn’t see his lips anymore.

  ‘Jonas didn’t come home after school yesterday,’ Peter said. It was a sentence that didn’t make sense to me because Jonas always went home after school. He didn’t play football or basketball, and he didn’t have any friends to visit. He always went home because at home were the things he liked to do. For example, going on the Internet and reading his encyclopaedias.

  ‘Cassie, do you have any idea where he might be?’

  I was thinking about Jonas the last time I had seen him. How he had been angry and quiet, not telling me any facts or answering any questions or even once talking about his birthday. I was wondering when Jonas had decided to leave. Had he known on Monday morning he was leaving? In science? All through spelling? While we were eating lunch on The Snake Stairs?

  ‘Cassie, please.’ Peter’s voice was desperate, like a dog crying at a locked back door.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘Cassandra.’ Dad’s voice was a warning.