The Peacock Detectives

by Carly Nugent

  I felt my face go red from my neck up to my hair. I turned around and grabbed Jonas and we started running. We didn’t stop until we were on the other side of the downball courts, and then we sat under the monkey bars and looked at each other. I could tell Jonas was thinking I told you so, except he was too much my friend to say it.

  I looked down at my feet. I was thinking about the Rhea from yesterday—the Rhea who had pretended to be my sister and had bought me lunch. The Rhea who had sat next to me on a tram all the way across The City. The Rhea who had called me Cassie. And I was thinking how weird it was for one person to be two people—one who is nice and who smiles and wants to hold hands in train stations, and one who is mean and ashamed and wants to make the people who care about them feel like dog poo.

  For a while everything went along as normal, except for a few things. For example: Simon taking all of Dad’s shoes and burying them in the backyard (I think he was angry at Dad for never walking him), and Diana sneaking into the house in the middle of the night to watch TV and charge her phone. She thinks no one notices, but I do, because I’m a Peacock Detective and a writer, and I’m good at noticing details.

  I started reading books again. In August and September I read Gulliver’s Travels, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Flies (which Dad was teaching for Year Eight English). I’ve been writing more stories, too. I give them to Mrs Atkinson to read, and she says they are some of my best stories yet. And I started a new To Do List. It looks like this:

  1) Find the peacocks

  2) Find out what Buddhism is

  3) Be friends with Rhea.

  In October it was my birthday, which means I’m not eleven-turning-twelve anymore. I’m completely twelve. I had three birthday parties this year: one with Dad (we ordered pizza and watched Jurassic Park, which is an old movie, but still a good movie), one with Mum and Roger (Mum made a Castle Cake, and it was the best and most complicated cake she has ever made), and one with Diana and Jonas (we went out for pancakes and blue heaven spiders, which would have been the best birthday party of them all, except that Tom Golding was there and he kept looking at Diana in a weird way, and she kept not-looking at him in a weird way, which left Jonas and me in an awkward way).

  Mum is still living at The Flat, and Dad is still at home. Diana is talking to Dad less and less, and not-being at home more and more (which was why she didn’t join the pizza–Jurassic Park party). But—maybe because I’m twelve now, or maybe because I had been missing, or maybe both—Diana and I are talking to each other again. Sometimes I visit her in her tent, and sometimes she comes and lies on my floor before I go to sleep. In October Diana told me—carefully and quietly, like her words were made of glass and might break—that the doctors said Grandpa only has a few months left. I think Diana was afraid that when she said this I would get mad and stomp off, like I did last time. But I didn’t. And now we talk about Grandpa all the time. Not about Grandpa being sick, just about Grandpa being Grandpa. We talk about how much he loves crosswords, and how I like to sit next to him in church, and how he always talks about his garden. And instead of making me feel upset and scared, talking about Grandpa this way makes me feel sort of light, like I have been carrying around a really heavy backpack but now I can finally take it off.

  October also means spring. Spring in Bloomsbury sounds like wattlebirds warbling, and it looks like flowers. It smells like flowers, too, which is nice for most people but not for people like Diana who have hay fever and get sniffly. Spring in Bloomsbury feels like sun, and it tastes like honeysuckle. I like spring because of my birthday, and because of school holidays. I don’t like spring because it is swooping season, which means magpies are having babies and worrying about their babies and swooping anybody who walks near their babies. So even if you are just looking for peacocks or walking to school and have no intention of climbing a tree and stealing magpie babies you still have to look out for swooping magpie parents. The other reason I don’t like spring is because it is snake-waking-up season, so you have to start stomping again when you walk in the bush.

  And this spring I’m doing lots of bushwalking, because Jonas and I are looking for the peacocks again. We go out every day, with Simon and our backpacks and water and Irene’s chocolate biscuits (which Jonas now agrees are just the right amount of chocolaty). We stomp hard, and we wear bike helmets with faces painted on the backs of them so the magpies won’t swoop us. The peacock we see the most now is William Shakespeare. We see him the most because he has all his feathers again, so he is easy to spot. He is also doing a lot of dancing and singing, which makes him easy to find but hard to catch, because he is so busy and full of energy.

  Then, yesterday, on the last day of the spring school holidays, The Peacock Detectives finally had a breakthrough.

  ‘Wait a second,’ I said to Jonas, when we were walking on the track in the bush. I got my Notebook for Noticing out of my backpack and turned a lot of pages, all the way back to the day in March when the peacocks had escaped and I had gone into their cage to investigate. I re-read what I had written:

  Dirt scraped away

  Trying to make a hole?

  Then I looked back at the ground we were standing next to, where the dirt was scraped away, and the grass was dented.

  ‘What is it?’ Jonas said.

  ‘Something,’ I said. I looked around. We were standing in the bush, but the bridge was only a few metres in front of us.

  ‘Look!’ I checked for cars and then ran onto the road. Jonas followed me. In the middle of the bridge, right on the white line, was something I had never seen before. But I knew straightaway—even before I felt its smooth, still-warm shape—what it was.

  And what it was was a peacock egg.

  Jonas went home to look up peacock eggs on the Internet, and I took the egg straight to Mr and Mrs Hudson.

  ‘They’re making a nest!’ I said, instead of ‘Hello’ or ‘Good afternoon’ or ‘Can I come in?’

  Mrs Hudson was sitting on the couch reading and Mr Hudson was ironing a shirt. They both stopped what they were doing to look at the egg. It was a bit bigger than a chicken egg, and a bit more brown.

  ‘It’s definitely Virginia’s,’ Mrs Hudson said. ‘You can tell by the colour.’

  I told her about the scratches in the ground, and how they were the same as the scratches I had seen in the peacock cage. ‘And it explains why Virginia was noisier than normal,’ I said, because I had just remembered how I had written down that detail without knowing why. Now I knew. ‘She was noisy about wanting to have babies!’

  Then I told Mrs Hudson that I had found the egg on the road. ‘It seems like a bad place to lay an egg to me,’ I said. ‘But I’m not a peacock.’

  Mrs Hudson smiled. ‘It’s a decoy egg,’ she said. ‘Peahens always lay one egg out in the open, to distract any predators from the rest of the clutch.’

  I stared at the decoy egg. It stared back at me, blank and silent. I thought about how brave this little egg was, sacrificing itself to save its brothers and sisters. ‘Will it hatch?’ I asked.

  Mrs Hudson frowned. ‘It’s unlikely,’ she said. ‘But if you take care of it and keep it warm enough, it might.’

  I looked up at her. ‘I can keep it?’

  ‘Sure,’ Mrs Hudson said. Then she looked at Mr Hudson. ‘Cassie, if you find Virginia’—she looked back at me—‘if she’s with her nest, just leave her be. All right?’

  I nodded. ‘Yes, Mrs Hudson,’ I said.

  As soon as the bell went at the end of school today Jonas and I went looking for Virginia’s nest.

  ‘We won’t touch anything,’ I told Jonas as we walked towards the river. ‘We’ll just have a look.’

  But we didn’t get a chance to look. As soon as we got close to the bridge William Shakespeare appeared out of the bush. It was as if he was waiting for us. He had his tail open wide and he was squawking so loud I bet Mr and Mrs Hudson heard him from their house. When he knew that we had seen him he turned around and
started running. On the bridge he stopped and looked back at us. He put his head on one side and squawked like he was saying ‘Hurry up!’ (But I don’t speak peacock, so he might have been saying ‘I like cheese.’) I looked at Jonas, and Jonas looked at me. And then we did the only thing good Peacock Detectives can do in a situation like that. We chased William Shakespeare.

  William Shakespeare isn’t as fast as Virginia, but he is more confusing. He would run up one street, and then back down it again. He would fly over a fence or up a tree so we would think we had lost him, and then he would reappear and squawk at us to keep following. He ran past the hospital, and The Clinic, and the bus station. William Shakespeare ran us up and down and back and forth for ages, all over The Other Side of Town, until Jonas and I were both puffed and had stitches. Then, finally, William Shakespeare flew into a clump of pine trees and didn’t come out again. Jonas and I leaned against a tree trunk and slowly got our breath back. While we were leaning and breathing, Jonas saw something across the road. He squinted his eyes.

  ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘is that—?’

  ‘Rhea Grimm,’ I finished Jonas’s sentence for him because he didn’t have the breath for it. Rhea was walking along the side of the road on her own, scuffing her feet and stopping a lot to look at things or stare into the distance. From the way she walked and stopped and looked it was obvious she didn’t want to get to the place she was going. I wanted to know where that place was.

  ‘Let’s follow her,’ I said.

  ‘She’s not a peacock,’ Jonas pointed out. ‘What about Virginia and the nest?’

  I was starting to think there might be more to being a Peacock Detective than just finding peacocks. ‘We can look for them later,’ I said. ‘Come on.’

  So we followed Rhea, even though I could tell Jonas didn’t really want to. Since that day on the basketball courts Jonas and I had avoided going to the secondary school at-all-costs. I think Jonas thought we should give up on Rhea completely, but I didn’t want to. I still believed that there were two stories about her—one that was nice, and one that wasn’t. I wanted the nice one to be the one people knew, and told, and wrote down.

  We followed Rhea for a long time—partly because she was walking so slowly, and partly because where she was going was a long way from the bridge. It was so late in the afternoon that I was starting to worry about getting home to check on the egg. But then Rhea turned. And the place she turned at was Lee Street.

  Jonas and I looked at each other, but didn’t say anything. I could tell from Jonas’s face that Irene had told him Lee Street was not the kind of place he should be hanging around, too. I could also tell that for him wanting to know what Rhea was doing was bigger than listening to his mum. So we kept following.

  Lee Street was short, and it led to a dead end instead of another street. None of the houses had fences around their front yards, and the grass was long and full of weeds. The houses were faded like T-shirts that had been washed too many times, and the front windows were big and dark and made the houses look like they were hollow. There was stuff that should have been picked up all over the ground, like plastic buckets and chip packets and broken bike helmets. And it was really quiet. Even though it was the warm end of spring there were no kids playing outside, and no adults sitting on verandas drinking wine-before-tea and chatting. The only sound was the buzz of TVs coming from behind closed doors and windows.

  Rhea dawdled all the way to the dead end of the street, to a white house that wasn’t exactly white anymore. Lots of the paint was peeling off like scabs, and the bits that weren’t peeling had faded so they were the colour of wet white dog.

  Jonas and I hid across and up the street a bit, behind a tree. Part of me was scared to see Rhea walk into that house; I wanted to cover my eyes, like I did in the velociraptor bits of Jurassic Park. But then, before Rhea could get to the end of the path, the front door opened. And, instead of a monster or a velociraptor, a little girl with blonde hair and a blue Dora the Explorer dress ran down the red bricks to meet Rhea. She looked about three years old and when Rhea picked her up the little girl smiled a smile that was almost bigger than her face.

  Rhea twirled the little girl around in the air, and when she twirled in our direction Jonas and I saw that Rhea was smiling, too. Not just smiling—grinning. Not just grinning—laughing.

  Jonas looked at me with a face that said, ‘Is that really Rhea Grimm?’ And I looked back at him and said with (whispered) words: ‘See? I told you.’

  Because I was right. Rhea was a nice person (as well as sometimes a mean one). And—even though I didn’t know exactly how I was going to do it—I knew I could make her be nice to us again, too.

  Today was Tuesday, which is shopping day. I waited for Diana at the gate after school and we walked to the supermarket together. My brain was still busy thinking about Rhea, so I didn’t talk much. I wasn’t sure whether Rhea would like me telling people about seeing her at the house on Lee Street. Something about it felt Personal—like taking a bus and a train to The City and not wanting to come back.

  Diana didn’t talk much, either. I wondered if her brain was busy with thinking about Buddhism, or Tom Golding, or something else that she didn’t want to tell me about. I tried to guess what it might be, but now that Diana is fifteen it is even harder for me to know what she is thinking.

  We put the things from the shopping list into the trolley quietly, and we only said things we needed to say, like ‘Pasta’s in the next aisle’ and ‘Do you want vanilla or strawberry yoghurt?’ By the time we had finished the trolley was half-full with stuff for toasted cheese sandwiches and spaghetti, as well as other essentials like toilet paper and dishwashing liquid. We wobbled the trolley on its slippery wheels over to the checkout and the woman scanned our items. Dollars added together on the little screen above the cash register. When everything was through and bagged and sitting neatly at the end of the checkout waiting for us to take it home, the woman said, ‘That’s forty-six fifty, please.’

  Diana took Dad’s credit card out of her bag and gave it to the woman.

  ‘Tap?’ The woman asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Diana said.

  The woman tapped the card against the machine. We waited. Diana twisted a piece of hair around her finger. This was strange because hair-twisting is usually something Mum does, not Diana.

  After a minute the woman shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, sweetheart, it’s been declined. Do you want me to try another card?’

  Diana didn’t say anything. She took a deep breath, and closed her eyes for a second. Then she just stood there, like she was frozen, staring at the woman and the card in her hand.

  ‘What does declined mean?’ I asked. The woman looked at me, then back at Diana. Still nobody said anything. And even though I didn’t know what declined was I knew it wasn’t good.

  Finally, Diana said, ‘I’m sorry,’ to the woman and took the card back. Then she grabbed my hand and pulled me towards the exit. I turned around to look at our shopping sitting neatly on the counter.

  ‘What about—’ I started to ask, but Diana was already dragging me through the automatic doors. They opened and closed with a hiss.

  ‘Just come on,’ she said, through gritted teeth. Gritting teeth is something Diana does when she is trying to keep in an emotion that wants to come out. She walked us all the way home like that, straight ahead and quickly, like she really needed to go to the toilet.

  I found out which emotion Diana was keeping in as soon as we got home: an enormous amount of anger. Which was surprising, because usually Diana is calm and quiet and Buddhist. She released all of her anger right on top of Dad, who was sitting on the couch in his pyjamas watching an after-school show about reptiles.

  ‘Here,’ Diana yelled. She threw the declined card at Dad. It hit him in the middle of his chest and slid down to his stomach.

  He stared at it like he had no idea what it was.

  ‘So, now what?’ Diana said this like she was spitting out ch
ewing gum.

  Dad didn’t say anything.

  ‘Well? What are we going to have for tea?’

  Diana was getting angrier each time she spoke. She started walking around, moving her arms and stomping her feet. She walked to the cupboard and opened it.

  Then she started pulling out Dad’s boxes.

  ‘That could’ve been a loaf of bread,’ she said, opening a box and throwing a little gnome onto the floor. Then she threw a small piano at the wall. ‘That’s two cartons of milk.’ A little monkey went flying. One of his hands broke off and rolled under the fridge. ‘A pack of toilet paper.’ A ceramic sandal. ‘Toothpaste.’ A fire truck. ‘Butter.’ The elephant skidded across the floor and slammed up against the TV cabinet. Its trunk broke off and lay on the lino, reaching for its body.

  ‘I hope you’re happy,’ Diana said, when she had emptied four boxes and the kitchen was full of broken ornaments. ‘I hope all of this made you really, really happy.’ She picked up her backpack and walked to the front door. ‘Come on, Cassie.’

  A big part of me wanted to go with her. A big part of me wanted to leave the messy kitchen that had nothing-for-tea in it. But a bigger part was tugging me back. I looked at Dad’s pyjamas-face. I looked at the boxes, upside down and empty on the floor. And finally I looked at the little elephant whose trunk was broken. And even though I didn’t really want to, I knew I had to stay.

  I looked at Diana and shook my head. She made an angry humphing noise, kind of like a horse, and then she left.

  After the door slammed I turned around to look at Dad. I was hoping to see something different about him. I was hoping that he had stood up, or crossed his legs, or at least stopped watching TV. But the only difference was that his eyes were glistening a little, like he almost-maybe-might-have wanted to cry.