The Blue Cat

by Ursula Dubosarsky

  OTHER NOVELS BY

  URSULA DUBOSARSKY INCLUDE:

  The Golden Day

  The Red Shoe

  Theodora’s Gift

  How to be a Great Detective

  Abyssinia

  The Game of the Goose

  My Father is Not a Comedian!

  Black Sails, White Sails

  Bruno and the Crumhorn

  The First Book of Samuel

  The White Guinea-Pig

  The Last Week in December

  Zizzy Zing

  High Hopes

  First published by Allen & Unwin in 2017

  Copyright © Ursula Dubosarsky 2017

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or ten per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: info@allenandunwin.com

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  A Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available from the

  National Library of Australia www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 9781760292294

  eISBN 9781925576597

  Teachers’ notes available from allenandunwin.com

  Cover and text design by Debra Billson

  Cover photos by George Marks/Getty Images, 123RF and Canstock

  For the wonderful young, Maisie and Simon

  i only know

  the cat is blue

  he sits alone

  his needs are few

  his eyes are green

  his teeth are white

  his fur is like

  the sky at night

  he breathes and stares

  and then he blinks

  and nobody

  knows what he thinks

  his body shakes

  when he’s asleep

  with secret anger

  dark and deep

  there’s nothing

  nothing we can do

  i only know

  the cat is blue

  ‘Australia is a British land of one race and one tongue.’

  John Curtin, Prime Minister of Australia 1941–45

  CONTENTS

  POEM

  THE BLUE CAT

  1 JANUARY 1942, SYDNEY

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  CHAPTER IX

  CHAPTER X

  CHAPTER XI

  CHAPTER XII

  CHAPTER XIII

  CHAPTER XIV

  CHAPTER XV

  CHAPTER XVI

  CHAPTER XVII

  CHAPTER XVIII

  CHAPTER XIX

  CHAPTER XX

  CHAPTER XXI

  CHAPTER XXII

  CHAPTER XXIII

  CHAPTER XXIV

  CHAPTER XXV

  CHAPTER XXVI

  PICTURE SOURCES

  WITH SPECIAL THANKS…

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  1 JANUARY 1942, SYDNEY

  IT WAS New Year’s Day. Outside the world was dozing, the leaves in the trees were almost still. The waves lapped against the sea wall, and from far away, but not very far, came the sound of a lion roaring and the lonely trumpeting of an elephant.

  I watched my father take the big clock down from the kitchen wall. It was made of dark wood with a creamy face and stiff Roman numerals. It had a loud tick, like someone clapping in time to a silent song. My father had to stand on a chair, and his arms trembled as he brought it down because it was so heavy. He laid it on the kitchen table and turned it on its face. Then he opened the little rusting doorway at the back and twisted a lever inside it.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I asked, leaning over, elbows on the table.

  ‘Changing the time,’ my father replied. ‘Putting the clock forward.’

  I was startled. Changing the time? You were not allowed to do that. It was like moving the stars in heaven, or changing the days of the week.

  ‘Orders from above,’ said my father, jerking a thumb at the ceiling. He did not mean God. He meant the Prime Minister. ‘We’ve all got to do it.’

  He half-lifted the clock and turned the big hand forward, exactly an hour. Now it said nine o’clock. All summer long, the clock would lie. It was because of the war. Everything that happened now was because of the war.

  ‘It’s to save electricity,’ said my father. ‘So they say.’

  He took his wristwatch from his pocket. He never wore it on his wrist, but kept it loose, so it lay on tables and shelves in different places around the house.

  ‘I’m not changing this one,’ he said, in a mock whisper. ‘But don’t tell anyone.’

  He wandered out onto the balcony to sit in the sun with his legs crossed. He would sit there each morning, reading the paper and smoking his pipe, staring at the bright blue water, where the navy ships sat like mountains on the surface of the harbour.

  A few streets away, a car came purring down the twisted hill. It halted outside a block of mulberry-brick flats. A small boy emerged from the back seat, out onto the pavement. He was carrying a suitcase. He stood there, looking upwards. His skin gleamed like snow.

  In the middle of the road a sleek cat lay stretched out, absorbing the sunshine.

  CHAPTER I.

  I WAS named Columba, after a nun. This nun had lived next door to my mother when she was a little girl. My mother had loved Sister Columba.

  ‘Why did you love her?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, you see, my own mother died, and Sister Columba was very kind to me.’

  ‘How was she kind?’

  Well, my mother said, Sister Columba had played card games with her and shown her how to grow lavender in jars, and how to cut it and dry it and wrap it up with a hankie so you could smell it whenever you felt like it. And she had given her a beautiful little picture of Jesus to put above her bed.

  These did not seem to me very strong reasons to love someone so much. Surely there was something else? If there was, my mother kept it to herself.

  ‘How did she die?’ I asked.

  ‘She was very old,’ said my mother.

  But even very old people are alive, I thought. There must have been a reason why Sister Columba died.

  ‘Did she have an accident?’

  ‘How could she have an accident?’ said my mother, exasperated. ‘She was a nun. She was very old, she lay in bed for a long time, and finally she stopped breathing.’

  ‘Did you see her when she was dead?’

  ‘No,’ said my mother shortly, and the conversation was closed.

  Sister Columba died when I was a baby. My best friend Hilda said that sometimes when a person dies they look around for the nearest person for their soul to jump into, so they can keep on living.

  ‘But then you would have two souls,’ I objected.

  I knew all about souls. We had learnt about souls in Scripture at school. Hilda considered this.

  ‘Maybe the two souls sort of join together,’ she said, sounding uncertain just for a moment, which was unusual for Hilda.

  I thought of the stories my
father had told me from ancient Rome. In those days people were always jumping into each other’s bodies before they died, or turning into things like trees or rivers or animals. I stood in front of the mirror and looked carefully in the glass. Could the soul of Sister Columba have jumped into my baby body when I was born? It gave me a peculiar feeling. I opened my eyes as wide as I could. I found if I looked at myself for long enough, I stopped recognising who I was. I turned into a stranger.

  Of course, I did not know what Sister Columba looked like. Nobody took photographs of nuns. When I asked my mother, all she said was: ‘What do you mean, what did she look like? She looked like a nun.’

  My mother told me that the name Columba means ‘little dove’. There was a picture on the wall at school of a dove flying back to Noah’s Ark, landing on Noah’s outstretched hand.

  The dove in the picture looked like a pigeon, with feathery wings. One of my uncles kept pigeons. We only visited him once a year, on Boxing Day. He had a garage full of birds – grey and brown with bits of white, but none of them were quite the same as the dove in the Bible picture, with her soft eyes and tail like a little fan.

  Out flew the dove, the teacher said, to find out if there was any dry land after the flood. One day it brought back an olive leaf. The next time it flew away and they never saw it again. That was meant to be a good sign. The dove had landed in a tree and was building a nest. So everything on earth had grown back after the disaster, and all the animals could leave the ark and get on with things.

  But who knew what had really happened? Perhaps the dove never came back because it was lost. Or it was so tired from flying that its poor wings stopped flapping and it fell down into the big water. Or something worse. Perhaps there was a lion or a tiger or some other hungry animal that had survived the flood that Noah didn’t even know about…

  The streets where we lived were twisted, thick with houses and blocks of flats of crimson stone and balconies with trailing pot plants. The buildings seemed to grow right out of the ground, like trees. The road came to an end when it reached the water, where the green and yellow ferries edged in and out of the wharf, carrying people around the bay and into town. Now the ferries had to find their way through the maze of great grey warships that sat on the water, still and massive like a herd of tired elephants.

  My father took the ferry through the maze every weekday to work. He carried a black bag and wore a black hat. He always sat outside in the sun and the wind, even when it was white with fog. He wasn’t a soldier like other people’s fathers because he had a bad heart. Instead he went to work in the city during the day and came home at night. In winter, he carried a torch in his pocket so that he didn’t trip over in the darkness.

  I liked to walk along the splintering wooden planks of the wharf, right to the end, and sit with my legs hanging over the side above the rocking water. Underneath me shadows of life were slinking in and out of the seaweed. When I swam in the harbour pool or at the slivers of beach on the shoreline, if I dived down and turned on my back, paddling under the roof of the waves and opened my eyes and looked up through the stinging salt water, I could still see the sun. The water was bright, like a mirror shining in my eyes.

  In spite of my name, I never felt much like a dove. If I could be an animal, I always imagined swimming like an eel or a platypus, down in the deep where it was black as night. If I went even deeper I would be able to see nothing at all and it would be so cold I wouldn’t feel anything either. I would forget I had a body. It would be as though I had turned into water, free and invisible.

  CHAPTER II.

  THE WAR used to be far away, out in Europe in the snow or in the sands in Africa. We saw the newsreels at the cinema – the tanks, the lines of soldiers, the generals in their big coats and seven-league boots, marching up and down the plains of the world to the sound of gunfire. It was all somewhere else, in a place that seemed imaginary. But since December, the war was coming to find us.

  ‘If the Japs fly over and see a light on in your house,’ said Hilda, ‘they’ll drop a bomb and everyone inside will die.’

  I stopped still, one leg in the air. We were playing hopscotch outside in the street. Hilda had scratched the hopscotch squares into the tar with a piece of loose sandstone that she’d dug out of the ground. We played together like this for hours, with occasional bursts of conversation.

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Hilda. ‘It’ll be really quick. You won’t know what hit you.’

  ‘That child,’ said my mother, when I repeated this. ‘I suppose this is what her parents tell her.’

  ‘Is it true?’

  ‘Of course it’s not true,’ said my mother.

  Still, my mother and father pasted black paper over the windows of the front room, to stop the light showing at night, just in case a Japanese plane flew by and dropped a bomb. The streetlights were dimmed when the sun went down and everything was in shadows. Even the ferries had to turn off their lights and feel their way across the inky harbour, their foghorns blowing mournfully like sad lost birds.

  ‘Our army and navy and air force will stop the Japanese very soon,’ said my mother, in a firm voice, ‘and they will all go home to Japan feeling very sorry and silly.’

  I couldn’t help remembering that my mother had said something similar about the Germans one morning a while back.

  ‘The Germans will never take Paris,’ my mother had declared, pinning her hair calmly to the top of her head.

  ‘They will take what they like,’ called my father from the balcony.

  ‘France will never fall!’ cried the headmaster passionately at our school assembly.

  We children lined up in class rows in front of the flagpole. France? What was France? How could it fall? But we believed the headmaster. He wore a suit and a tie and stood up very straight and his voice was deep and he rolled his Rs.

  The school held a concert in the Masonic Hall, to raise money for the war. Because Hilda was the tallest child in the class, even taller than the tallest boy, she was chosen to stand on the stage wrapped up in a Union Jack, while we all sang together:

  There’ll always be an England

  And England shall be free

  If England means as much to you

  As England means to me!

  ‘I’m never doing that again,’ said Hilda, crawling out from under the Union Jack. ‘How embarrassing.’

  A reporter had come to the concert and taken a photo of Hilda. It was published on the third page of the local paper. The picture was small and blurry.

  ‘You can’t even see my face!’ complained Hilda, unaccountably annoyed. ‘It could be anybody!’

  In the event, my father was right and my mother and the headmaster with his deep gravelly voice and rolling Rs were wrong. Overnight, it seemed, Paris belonged to the Germans.

  ‘The Swastika flag now flies from the Eiffel Tower,’ my father read out from the morning paper, pausing between bites of toast and marmalade.

  At school, we lined up in the playground, saluting in front of our own small creaking flagpole. Would there soon be a swastika flying there too? We waited with interest to hear what the headmaster would say now.

  ‘France will rise again!’ he cried, his hands raised to the sky.

  But we did not believe him any more. How could we? We felt sorry for him. He didn’t understand. France had fallen, and the Germans had taken over. Nobody could stop them. Soon England would belong to the Germans too. Soon all the world will belong to the Germans, we thought. The whole wide world.

  Although not quite the whole world.

  ‘Everyone will have to speak Japanese,’ said Hilda, ‘when the Japs come. We won’t be allowed to speak English. Anyone who speaks English will be shot on the spot!’ and she pretended to be hit and fell with a gurgle, shot dead by a Japanese soldier.

  ‘I don’t know any Japanese,’ I pointed out, practically.

  ‘Just keep your mouth shut, then,’ said Hilda, getting back to her feet, dusting h
er knees. ‘When they come at you with a bayonet, just nod and do whatever they say.’

  I wondered if I could learn Japanese from a book. But there was no such book in the ragged box the teacher kept at the front of the classroom. There was a copy of Black Beauty, a book about penguins and another about railways, and a dictionary. Certainly nothing about teaching yourself Japanese. In the library in town, there might be a book for learning Japanese. I would ask my mother.

  ‘I’m not worried,’ said Hilda. She lowered her voice. ‘My dad says he’ll never let the Japs get us. He says he’ll shoot us first.’

  I decided not to tell my mother this. She might say I had to stop playing with Hilda. I liked Hilda. I liked going to Hilda’s house. It was so noisy, so full, of things, of people, food, clothes, and doors opening and closing. In my house there was just the three of us and we tiptoed around, whispering. Hilda had three big brothers and two little sisters although her two biggest brothers were so big they were in the army and nobody knew where they were. They stepped onto a grey battleship one day and waved goodbye and disappeared.

  ‘It’s a secret, where they are,’ said Hilda. ‘They can’t tell anyone, not even my mum.’

  When a letter arrived in Hilda’s letterbox from one of her brothers she was allowed to bring it to school, to show the teacher. The letter was written on paper thin as a moth’s wing, in blue ink, like curly veins under the skin.

  ‘What excellent handwriting!’ the teacher said. ‘Look, children, if a soldier in the heat of battle can write neatly and correctly, so can you.’

  She held up the sheet of paper to the window and you could see the light through it, like stained glass. It didn’t look that neat to me. There were blots all over it. But Hilda said her brother didn’t make the blots.

  ‘The big General reads their letters and blots out any bits where they say something they’re not supposed to say. You know, about where they’re camping and things like that.’

  I pictured the big General sitting in a tent by a kerosene lamp, night after night, with a great pile of letters next to him and a pen full of bubbling ink. I was surprised he had the time.