The Peacock Detectives

by Carly Nugent

  The snake hissed again and tried to strike at William Shakespeare’s legs, but William Shakespeare was too fast. He moved back and then forward straightaway, and pecked the end of the tiger snake’s tail. The snake pulled its head down and looked around, like it was thinking about what to do next. It looked at all of us one by one with both eyes—Rhea, Jonas, Simon, me, Leo and William Shakespeare. And the look in the snake’s eyes was frightening, but it was also frightened. It gave one last hiss, and then dropped to the ground and slid back under The Snake Stairs.

  For a moment no one did anything. Then Simon barked and Leo chirped. And when I put my arms around William Shakespeare I was partly catching him, but I was mostly giving him a hug.

  Every story has a Climax. The Climax is the part when the problem from the beginning of the story—the Inciting Incident—is finally solved. A lot of things have happened already in this story, like Jonas running away and Diana moving outside and Leo hatching. But the Climax didn’t happen until today, when we caught the peacocks.

  Maybe you were expecting the Climax to be more exciting. Maybe you were hoping someone would get bitten by the tiger snake, so they would have to go to hospital in an ambulance and there would be sirens and doctors and people crying. But Climaxes aren’t always big and noisy and dramatic. Sometimes they are quiet, like a snake sliding under some stairs.

  When we got home Rhea’s brothers and sisters had finished eating Christmas lunch and were playing cricket. We took William Shakespeare across the road to the holiday flats, and Virginia and the peacock chicks were very happy to see him. Mr and Mrs Hudson were happy, too, but in a less squawky way.

  Mrs Hudson gave Rhea, Jonas and me twenty dollars and a box of biscuits for being excellent Peacock Detectives, and we went back across the road to see what was left of Christmas lunch. There turned out to be a lot—the fridge was still half full of Dad’s and Mum’s cooking. Mum had even made lemon meringue pie—which is my favourite dessert—with whipped cream and without glazed pomegranate peel or cherry-crusted cashews. While I was eating Mum told me she wasn’t going to be working at The Very Nice Restaurant anymore.

  ‘Why not?’ I asked. Except I had a mouthful of lemon meringue, so it sounded more like ‘I ot?’

  ‘It wasn’t really for me,’ Mum said. She said she was looking for another job. She was still going to be living in The Flat, though. When I asked where Roger was, Mum looked over at Dad, who was washing the dishes. ‘He couldn’t stay,’ was all she said.

  When the kids had finished playing cricket (Felix got twelve runs and told everybody about twelve times) they came inside and Dad opened up the rest of his cardboard boxes and handed out ornaments to everyone. And Rhea’s brothers and sisters didn’t think having boxes full of ornaments was weird at all. I looked carefully at Dad’s face to make sure he wasn’t too sad to say goodbye to all the little things he had bought. He did look a little sad, but not in a Those Days way. When he caught me staring at him he said, ‘Don’t worry, I’m keeping the elephant.’

  It got late in the afternoon, and Jonas went home with his parents. (‘Did you know this was the best Christmas ever?’ he said as they went out the door. Which I thought was a weird thing to say, since I had almost been bitten by a snake.) Rhea’s mum came to pick up her family and when everyone was introducing themselves a strange and amazing thing happened.

  ‘I’m Diana,’ Diana said. ‘And this is Tom. My boyfriend.’

  Nobody knew what to say, except Rhea’s mum, who didn’t know anyone and certainly didn’t know who was supposed to be whose boyfriend and who wasn’t. And Rhea’s mum said, ‘Nice to meet you, Tom,’ which was exactly right.

  Then it was four o’clock, and everyone was gone except my family. And that meant it was time to go to the hospital to visit Grandpa.

  When we got there I sat down in the hallway like always and got ready to imagine more horrible Grandpas that I would still want to see. But then Dad said, ‘Cassie, do you want to come in?’

  I blinked at him a few times, because I wasn’t sure I had heard him right. I wondered for a moment if William Shakespeare had damaged my eardrums with his heroic squawk.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, because I did want to come in, and I had ever since the end of autumn.

  Dad looked at Mum, but in a different way from usual. Usually when Dad looks at Mum his face is like a big question mark, like all of his features are saying, ‘Is that okay?’ But this time he looked at her with a face like a full stop. Like all of him was saying, ‘That’s what I think should happen.’

  I thought Mum was definitely going to argue with Dad, but she didn’t. Instead she looked at him with a face like a semicolon; open and unfinished. Then she said, ‘Come on, Cassie.’

  And we all walked through the door together.

  It was a nice room. There was a big window at the back, and the late afternoon sun was coming in and crawling across the floor. The tips of the sun’s fingers touched the end of a long white bed. In the bed was Grandpa.

  I studied him carefully, from his feet up to his head. His legs were under the sheet. They looked a bit skinny, but they didn’t seem to have any spikes or bumps or extra toes. He was wearing pyjamas with short sleeves and his arms came out of them like sticks. But they were still his arms. They had the same knobbly elbows as before, the same hairs, the same brown spots on the backs of their hands. The little crease between his neck and his chest seemed deeper than usual, and the skin under his chin was a bit looser. His cheeks were more sucked in, his chin was pointier, and his forehead seemed higher. The top of his head was shinier. But it was still his head. It was still his face. He hadn’t turned into a skeleton, or a vampire, or a monster, or anything else my brain had imagined while I was sitting in the hallway. He was still my grandpa.

  For a minute I stood by the bed watching Grandpa breathe in and out. Then he opened his eyes. They were the same deep, clear blue that they had always been. They were staring at me now, ready to hear whatever I wanted to say.

  I unzipped my backpack and Leo poked his head out. He was smart enough not to chirp too loudly. I showed him to Grandpa.

  ‘Hi, Grandpa,’ I said. ‘Can I tell you a story?’

  He nodded. So I did.

  Grandpa died on the 3rd of January. It was the middle of the afternoon and I was swimming in the river with Jonas when Dad came to tell me. At the funeral Diana and I sat next to each other, and Mum and Dad held hands.

  We were all crying, and even though I know it sounds weird something about us all being there together felt like our Family Holiday, which was a feeling I thought I would never feel again. Whenever I remember our Family Holiday now it is a mix of good and bad. I remember how Diana played in the pool with me some days, and how it rained on others. And I remember how Mum and Dad argued about where to go for dinner, and also how they teased each other about Scrabble words.

  Three weeks after the funeral I walked across the downball courts and started secondary school. It was a bit scary, but not the kind of scary that comes from being in a really dangerous situation. More like the kind of scary that comes from watching Jurassic Park, which is scary mixed with exciting and interesting. My favourite thing about secondary school is being allowed to take books out from the teenage section of the library. Jonas’s favourite thing about secondary school is using Bunsen burners in science (which I also think is pretty cool).

  Even though we’re not in primary school anymore Jonas and I still eat our lunch on The Snake Stairs. I don’t sit on the other side of the footpath anymore. I sit right up on the top step, next to Jonas.

  I see Rhea on the basketball courts sometimes. We’re not really friends, but we’re not enemies, either, which is a good start. She is still tired and grumpy a lot because she has to spend her after-school time taking care of her brothers and sisters. But she is trying harder at school, and Rhea’s mum says that in a few weeks she will take time off work so she and Rhea can go to The City to visit Rhea’s dad.

 
Jonas still complains about his parents, but now he complains about them like they are really his parents, and not just strangers he has to live with. He gets annoyed when his mum wants to walk to school with him, and when she puts notes in his lunchbox that say things like ‘Did you know your dad and I love you very much?’ He crumples them up, but he never throws them in the bin.

  Diana is in Year Ten now, which means she has a lot more maths assignments to do, which she loves. Her boyfriend, Tom, doesn’t understand maths, but Diana is really good at helping him. Diana still Meditates, but she moved back inside, so she does it in her room now. She doesn’t mind if I want to sit next to her and do it, too. When I told her I had figured out what Buddhism really meant, she smiled at me and said, ‘Me too,’ which didn’t make sense to me, because I thought she had known what it was all along.

  Mr and Mrs Hudson decided that the peacocks didn’t want to be ornamental after all. They found a wildlife park for William Shakespeare and Virginia to live in where they have lots of space to roam and have more babies. I asked Mrs Hudson if she thought I should send Leo to the wildlife park too, but she said it was pretty clear that Leo was happy with us. I breathed an inside sigh of relief when she said that. I would really miss Leo if he wanted to go to the wildlife park, and I think Dad would miss him even more.

  Mum and Dad aren’t back together, and Mum is still living in The Flat on The Other Side of Town. But she comes to visit a lot, and we have family dinner once a week. She got a job at a new bakery that opened in the Bloomsbury main street. They make lots of delicious things like cinnamon rolls and vanilla slices and custard tarts. Mum’s lemon meringue pie is the bakery’s best seller.

  I can tell Dad still misses Mum because of the way he smiles when her car pulls into our driveway every Friday night. But he is trying really hard not to be sad. He gets up early most mornings, and buys groceries and cooks dinner and takes Simon and Leo for walks. He still has Those Days, but not as much anymore. In January he went back to work, and he even started writing stories again. He spends a lot of time with Leo, who—even though he is big now—likes to sit under Dad’s desk in his study while he is working.

  I still don’t know if this story has Themes in it. Maybe you can find some. I know I said at the beginning that this was a story about peacocks, but that turned out to be not completely true. And it wasn’t completely true because—even though I didn’t know it at the time—this story is actually about lots of things. Which is kind of what life is like. When I realised this I decided to change my equation. Now it looks like this:

  Cassie = Peacock Detective

  Which doesn’t just mean I’m someone who looks for peacocks. It also means I’m someone who writes stories, and someone who reads, and someone who is a sister, and a daughter, and a friend, and a dog-walker, and a Year Seven student, etc etc etc. It is a list that can go on forever, and can always be added to.

  But even though the list is never-ending, every story has to end somewhere.

  Today at lunchtime when we were sitting on The Snake Stairs Jonas said, ‘Did you know you’ve been writing that story for almost a year?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But I’m going to finish it now.’

  ‘Why now?’ Jonas asked.

  ‘Partly because Christmas was ages ago and it’s Dad’s Christmas present,’ I said. ‘And partly because the peacocks aren’t escaped anymore. But mostly because when this story is finished I can start a new one.’

  ‘What will it be about?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘Then how will you start it?’

  I looked down through the gaps between The Snake Stairs. ‘I’ll just write down everything I can,’ I said, ‘until I find a story.’ And I knew I would. Cross my heart.

  Acknowledgments

  The Peacock Detectives could not have been written without a lot of help. I’d like to say a huge thank you to the following people. To those readers of early drafts and givers of thoughtful feedback: Luke Young, Loralie Young, Natalie Jane Peou, John Christopher Brown, James Christy, Claire MarchantCollier, Jehangir Mehentee, Bryan Humphrey, Abby Millerd, Kathryn Whinney, Chris Sanders, Monique Hutchinson, Michelle St. George, Marije Klijn and everyone from Seoul Writers Workshop and Phnom Penh Writers Workshop.

  To Ella MacDermott, for her insightful review—I know Cassie would love to be your friend. To Lin Kim, for reading and for helping me remember why writing is so important. To Tee O’Neill, for being the best mentor I could ever ask for.

  To my best friend, Emma Manning, for her beautiful drawings and her songs. To Peta Cherry for coffee and books. To Georgia Brown for long chats and cats. To Vanessa Danielsen, Erica Hamence and Avalon Carr for Skype dates and live feeds.

  To Robyn and Greg Schultz and all the wonderful staff at Riverdeck Cafe in Bright, for giving me a job, a place to write and cake.

  To the students and staff at Porepunkah Primary School, for their love of reading and for reminding me just how important books are.

  To Nannie, for sharing novels and scone recipes. To Apam and Panda, for homemade pasta and ideas about passata. To my brother, Bradley, for making lists and helping me tick them off. And to Mum and Dad, for their constant support and encouragement.

  To everyone at Text Publishing, for their enthusiasm for The Peacock Detectives. And especially to Jane Pearson, whose meticulous editing helped make this book the best it could be.

  To Jake, for having a great sense of smell. And to Penny, for all the licks.

  Finally, to Andrew. I love you.

  Carly Nugent lives in the small country town of Bright in north-east Victoria. She grew up in a house across the road from a holiday park where there were two pet peacocks. The Peacock Detectives is her first novel.

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  Copyright © Carly Nugent 2018

  The moral right of Carly Nugent to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published by The Text Publishing Company, 2018.

  Book design by Imogen Stubbs.

  Cover and internal illustrations by Sophie Beer.

  Typeset by J&M Typesetters.

  ISBN: 9781925603705 (paperback)

  ISBN: 9781925626681 (ebook)

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia.