by Tabitha Bird
Daddy is saying other things now. ‘Australia is unique. The patterns in our skies are different. Do you see –’
‘I want to walk on the moon one day.’ I didn’t know I was going to say that.
He looks at me for a moment. ‘Astronauts are men, and you’re just a girl. Right now the world is waiting to see if the first man on the moon will be American or a Russian.’ He clamps his hands behind him and goes back to his skies.
Why can’t girls be smart enough for astronaut school or wherever you have to go? There’s lots more room in my brains for learning stuff and I eat my Weet-Bix, so maybe I will be big enough to clomp around the stars one day. Big enough to help Mummy. I think about that until my tummy does flip-flops ’cause I really want to make it true. One day I’m gonna be big enough to buy that old Queenslander I saw beside the ocean that day with Grammy, and us girls will be safe. Mummy says not to tell other people what happens in our family or they will take me and Lottie away. I don’t know who they are, but I’m going to come up with a plan to help. I’m the big sister, after all.
Daddy’s still talking about the skies, but I’m not really listening. I nod along. Uh-huh. Yup. Really?
In my head I’m making a dot-to-dot that maps the sky. There’s a bear in a car. A donkey on a roof. A giraffe. A pig. I almost tell him about my pictures, but I decide not to. His pictures have pretty names. The Milky Way, Mimosa and Jewel Box.
Happy stars, I think. Maybe tonight we can be happy.
We walk back towards the tin house with its skinny leaning legs. Daddy squashes the too-short grass and my gumboots step in his footprints. Frog Dog follows. Trample, trample, trample. We are the kings of the castle. Everything in the way gets knocked over.
At the back steps, I take a quick look back at my ocean-garden then hold Daddy’s hand. We discovered the stars together so maybe it’s okay.
‘Can I wear my glasses to bed? Want to hear some of my amaze-a-loo stories?’
Daddy’s not listening. When I reach for my glasses they are not in any of my pockets. Only the white card and the jam jar are still there.
‘Where are my glasses?’
Then I see them in his hands. He holds them away from me, a smile on his face. But it’s not the soft thing that Grammy has on her face when she’s baking jam drops.
My tummy feels sick. Frog Dog growls.
Daddy puts a hand on the back of my neck. ‘Want to see some more stars? Let’s go to my art shed and I can show you my pictures. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’
He steers me to the back corner of the yard, where a lantana bush grows over his shed. Thorns scrape my arms as we walk inside.
He’s closing the shed door. Closing the door on the ocean. Locking us in. Locking the stars out.
My eyes are squeezed shut and I’m on the floor of the art shed. All I know, all I will let myself think about, is the ocean that I planted under the mango tree. I can feel the glass in the pocket of my robe. Cold glass, how smooth it is. I tell myself a story where the ocean grows. In my mind I hear waves rolling into the shed, sloshing all over me. I remember the roar of waves crashing on rocks from the day when Grammy took us to the beach.
Think about that, Willa. Nothing else. Only that day.
Holding on to the jam jar, I remember the squawk of gulls. I pretend the hard concrete floor that I’m lying on is really sand.
I tell myself that over and over, and won’t let go of the jam jar. I remember the smell of fish and chips from the Very-Best-Day-Ever. I listen with all of me, so I can remember the waves licking our feet and Lottie’s squeals when she found the washed-up jellyfish and we poked at its wobbly head. In my mind I look up the beach, where Grammy and Mummy were laughing. Their footprints side by side. I ran over to hold their hands and that’s when I saw the house. The white fence and purple flowers. Grammy said it was an old Queenslander, and that it was lavender growing in the front gardens. Did I see the steps at the front? It’s called a butterfly staircase.
‘Willa, see how the stairs splay in two directions, like the wings of a butterfly?’ Grammy said. I remember her words exactly.
‘Amaze-a-loo! A house with butterfly stairs.’
I pretended I got to open the yellow front door and go inside. I would take Lottie’s hand because we’d live there. It would be our house. I wanted the waves to smash over our tin shed and change it into this old Queenslander.
Oh, please let that happen, Ocean. I want so bad to live there. To make everything right.
When I hear yelling, my body wakes up. My eyes open. Everything I was thinking about the ocean, it stops. I’m back inside my skin enough to know that it is very late at night, or early morning, or some hour when it isn’t really day or night, only dark.
There’s a smell of oil paints, but also salty air. I am still holding tight to the jam jar in my robe pocket. There’s something like sand all over me, but I can’t see. It’s too dark.
I remember what woke me up. Mummy pounding on the shed door saying, ‘The lights are out in the house again, Hawthorn! Did you pay that bloody bill? Hey, is that Willa in there with you? What’s happening? Hawthorn, you open this goddamn door!’
I think she said that. I wasn’t dreaming it.
I look up. She has a torch shining into the shed. The door opens wider and Daddy grabs her.
I see a head.
I see Mummy’s head.
I see Mummy’s head being pushed into the shed door.
The torch drops.
There’s the sound of the metal door pushed backwards and Mummy falling down.
Daddy’s voice makes me think of bony bits when he says, ‘Stay where you are, Willa!’
No, no, no! The words I can’t say ring in my head. They hurt like all the dark in my eyes. I have to get outside. I push up on my elbows and the floor really does feel like a beach. I’m not sure if I have legs anymore or if they work, and I’m surprised when they do.
Go! Past Mummy lying by the shed door. Past the torch, which I pick up. Past the backyard and the mango tree, past the grass glowing blue. Up the back stairs.
I hear Mummy and Daddy yelling in the shed. Something crashing. Lottie whimpering from her room. And when I hear her, my legs work very well.
‘Lottie!’ I call as I run inside to her, sloshing water from the jam jar through the kitchen and down the hall. There’s lots of water. More than there should be. Much more than there was in my jar to begin with.
‘Willa, it’s dark. I so so scared!’ Lottie calls back.
‘Stay where you are – I’m coming!’
But she doesn’t stay. Her feet run on the floor.
Crash! We slam into each other in the hallway. Smack heads. The torch drops and goes out. I’m not sure if I can stand or how long I’m down, but I grab Lottie’s arm and pull her up. She’s a crying, messy thing. We are both wet now and I can hear waves in my head, but they can’t be real.
Lottie and I race into our room, holding each other. My robe is dripping from the pocket and the water is pouring down onto my feet. The carpet is squishy between my toes.
The back door opens and I know Mummy and Daddy are in the kitchen now.
‘Quick, crawl under your bed.’ I drag Lottie, push her underneath, and I lie down too. And that’s when I feel the sand under Lottie’s bed. No more carpet.
‘You stay under here, Lottie. You have to hide.’ We are both on our bellies on what feels like a sandy beach.
‘It’s dark!’ Lottie sobs in the blackness. ‘Tell me a story.’
In the hallway we can hear Mummy’s screeching voice and Daddy’s booming. I reach up to Lottie’s bed and grab her blankets and pull them under with us. ‘I’ll tell you a story if you stay here.’
‘It’s very sandy,’ Lottie whimpers. ‘Where’s the carpets?’ But then she brightens. ‘Oh, there’s a shell under here! And I can feel another one!’
‘Shh, now. There was once a little girl with colours in her head.’
Lottie whi
spers, ‘Inside her brains?’
‘Yes, like someone poured paints inside her head. And she could see these colours spinning and making worlds. Anywhere she wanted to go. Like the beach.’
I stop because I want so bad for it to be that day when Grammy took us to the ocean.
‘The beach?’ Lottie grabs my arm. ‘I want the beach.’
I hold her hand. ‘The girl told the colours to make a new house by the beach and make sand and waves that go wish-washy up to her toes. To make seaweed like clumps of ratty green hair.’
Lottie holds my hand back. We are tight together.
Footsteps down the hallway now.
‘Lottie, I have to go. Pretend you are inside the bottom of a boat floating out to sea. Your special place. But you have to stay under the bed and be quiet. No matter what happens, okay?’
Lottie grabs me, but I pull away.
‘Pinkie promise, you will stay?’
We link pinkie fingers and shake hard.
The sand squeaks as I run to my bed.
Under the covers. Dive!
‘Frog!’ Oh, where is my Frog?
She snuffles out from under my bed and I pull her under the covers with me and the jam jar. ‘Good, Froggie. Stay.’
There’s a crash in the hallway. I squeeze my eyes shut. The tin roof creaks and a wind howls. I’m waiting for the roof to fall on my head, but I can’t move.
Daddy must have come inside looking for me. What if he’s also come for Lottie? I should have stayed in the shed. Mummy and Daddy wouldn’t be fighting, and Lottie would be safe.
I only make everything worse.
Oh, Ocean. Please, please let me fix this! Just help everything be okay.
I have one hand tight around Frog, the other holding my jar of ocean.
Shh, Willa. Disappear.
Chapter Six
1990
Willa Waters, aged 33
It’s a little after 1 am and I should long be in bed, but my insides hammer with each passing moment of this day that is too young to even be called a day. Later, I phone the police. No, Lottie’s not a missing person as such. She hasn’t run away. Um, yes, she is living with my father voluntarily, I suppose. I understand that she is free to come and go as she chooses, but my father – No, I don’t know for sure what the problem is. I think she’s in trouble, yes. There’s a history of violence. Well, no, she didn’t actually say she needed help. I don’t have his address. Or phone number. Maybe she’ll call again? Phone all family and friends. Yeah. Okay. Thanks.
I try the last number I was given for Jack. The number is disconnected. My mother’s phone goes to her answering machine, but she is probably asleep. All those years of ignoring Lottie, pushing her outside my carefully made life. What have I done to her? To us?
I drop to my knees.
Please, please let me fix this! Just help everything be okay.
There will be no going back to bed to lie beside Sam. No refuge under the wings of Sam’s words, of him taking my hand and saying, ‘Everything is all right. Leave the washing.’
I pace the kitchen floor. Rub my hands. Fingernails pick at skin until I make small cuts on my forearm. On automatic, I walk over to the dryer at the side of the kitchen. The door creaks as I pull it open. The clothes are warm. I hold them to my face and bury my head in them. Who knows how long I stand like that? Some time later, I find myself at the kitchen table surrounded by neatly folded piles of T-shirts with the Ninja Turtles on them and mismatched socks that I haven’t yet given up hope of reuniting with their partners. Walking into the middle of the boys’ bedroom with an armful of clothes, I can hear Eli, a lump under the bedsheets, talking to his teddies.
His younger brother, Sebastian, has his toddler bed on the other side of the room. When I don’t see him in his bed I know immediately that he has crawled underneath. It’s his favourite game, pretending to be a bear. Cave Sleep he calls it, since Sam read him the book We’re Going on a Bear Hunt. I put the washing on top of the drawers. On my hands and knees, I reach under the bed for the sleeping form of Seb curled around his blankie. Even in the dark, I know this blanket is the one I sewed him when he was born, patchwork with whale print. Gently, I slide him out and put him back in his bed, tuck sheets around him and kiss the wild mess of his gingery curls. Seb’s sleep is so simple, so safe. So different to the childhood I once had.
I try not to think of Lottie, how I hid her under her bed long ago and told her to stay quiet no matter what.
Across the room Eli is muttering about the night being too dark, and I open the curtains to let the moonlight in.
He peeks out from the bed covers. ‘You know the stars are running around in the night sky playing with the moon,’ he says.
I am quiet as I stand looking out his window. The moon. The stars. I close my eyes and block them out. But they are there, aren’t they? Lottie and I were once children, and that night when I was little and under the stars with my father happened. I am falling down inside, the weight of me crashing into my feet.
‘Hello? Mummy? I know you’re there, I can see you. Open your eyes,’ Eli says.
My body is hollowed out and won’t move, and my eyes are squeezed shut.
I am that little girl standing beside her father under the skies. She gathered the courage to ask what they were looking at. ‘Stars,’ he said. And then he shattered the skies while she tried to save Lottie.
‘Mummy? Okay, fine. But the moon is so full and fat. It might have eaten the stars,’ Eli says. A laugh hanging in his voice, waiting to find me. Draw me in. But memories of my childhood prise me open, gut me while I stand there. I only remember I am breathing when Eli emerges from his covers and takes my hand.
‘Mummy? Are you okay?’ I open my eyes. ‘It’s only a story. The moon isn’t really eating the stars. They don’t really need saving.’
‘Good to know, Eli. Good to know.’ I pat his head, still not moving. Not knowing if I can put away washing or sort Tupperware or pack lunches ever again. Or breathe. What would a real sister do?
Eli throws his arms about my waist, but I can’t hold him. When I simply stand there, he lets his arms fall.
‘Are the kookaburras awake yet? I miss them when it’s night.’ He watches me staring out at the streetlights, crisp in the winter air.
That night long ago I held my father’s hand because we’d discovered the stars together. I thought maybe it would be okay.
It wasn’t okay. None of the things I’ve done to protect Lottie have worked.
I grab the curtains. Rip them closed. Stand there. Panting.
Then I snap at Eli, ‘Get back in bed.’ He falls on his bed like I’ve slapped him.
‘Sorry.’ I rush over and crouch before him. Try again, gentler. ‘We hardly hear birds in the suburbs. In the gum trees, in the country, there you can hear them, but Australian cities get lumped with nasty crows. Lucky us.’
I ruffle Eli’s hair, but he isn’t sure.
‘Want some …’ I search for a thing to offer that might make Eli forget the tone of my voice before. ‘Hot Milo?’
Eli bites his lip, like he’s seen me do. ‘If I get out of my bed now, I’ll have to jump.’
‘Because?’ I stand up, walking to the door.
‘Because, Mummy! You know why. There are monsters under my bed. Catch me.’ Before I can stop him, he jumps into my arms.
‘There are no monsters,’ I say. But I’m lying. There are monsters. They might not live under his bed, but they are alive. In my head. Out there right now with Lottie.
Eli turns on the lamp and looks about the room. Freckled face screwed up in seriousness. I’ve done that to him, made his giggle go away.
‘Grammy gave me a tin of Milo when she visited the other day,’ he says.
‘She did?’
We walk to the kitchen and I put the kettle on to make tea for me, then heat some milk for Eli’s Milo. My apologies in a mug. Inside the opened Milo tin is a scrap of paper. I know immediately what it is:
Grammy’s word of the day. Previse (verb): To foresee or predict an event.
‘What’s a p–p …?’ Eli spoons Milo into his mug.
‘Previse. Ah, well. It means there’s nothing to worry about because your house is a little brick nest.’
Next week, tomorrow, in a moment, who knows, another phone call. Lottie beaten. Lottie dead. And it will all be my fault. How do I find her? Dad found her in the city park, so perhaps he lives nearby? Tomorrow I must drive around looking. What house would I be looking for, though?
Maybe she’s okay?
She’s not okay. In no universe is she okay.
Eli follows me as I carry my teacup and his mug into the living room and place them on the coffee table.
‘Wrap the blanket tight around your shoulders and sit here beside me. Mind the tea. It’s hot.’
We let the drinks cool, and Eli scoots close beside me on the couch and takes my face gently in his little hands. ‘Mummy, who was on the phone?’
I take his hands and kiss them. ‘No one.’ I force a happy face. ‘Don’t worry,’ I say.
‘I’m only care-worrying.’ My sweet six-year-old. So serious, full of soft concern and big love.
Eli sips his Milo, a quiet thought behind those eyes. Finally, he says, ‘I can hear the waves at night. They woke me up. Do you ever hear them?’
My eyes widen and a moment passes before I can speak. Stroking the side of his cheek, I say, ‘It was Mummy that woke you up. Or the phone.’
He puts his Milo down. ‘No, I heard the waves. Did you?’
‘Perhaps it was a dream and you woke up thinking you could still hear waves?’
He shakes his head. Very sure. And I believe him. Of course, I can’t tell him that I am haunted by the sound of waves, too. What would I say? That I have these memories of an ocean that came in a box when I was eight years old? I’ve talked about this to Dr Williams in counselling many times. I was a child who experienced trauma, so I imagined the magical ocean-garden and meeting my older self in order to cope. Stories, that’s all.
‘No, I don’t hear waves,’ I lie.
Eli sips his Milo again. I can’t stop a tear escaping. It’s only the beginning. Five minutes later I’m sobbing, a deep well from within. Eli runs out of the room and then Sam is beside me. A blur of Eli’s tears mixed with my own.
