Now I was close I could see the lines on his face, the point of his beard. Ellery buried his face in his father’s coat. A possum screeched.
‘We are all safe now,’ said Ellery’s father. ‘So that is all right.’
And as soon as he said it, the siren started up again, strong straight blasts, like a train. I jumped, even though I was expecting it. It was the All Clear. That meant it was over. We were allowed outside again and we wouldn’t be in trouble with the ARP.
‘That’s the All Clear,’ I said. ‘It’s over. We can go home now.’
‘Yes,’ said Ellery’s father. ‘Time to go home.’
We began walking up together, away from the water. I walked next to Ellery and Ellery had his hand wrapped up in his father’s big fingers.
When we reached Wallaringa a faint light was oozing out from under the front door. Ellery’s father turned to me.
‘We will walk with you home, Columba,’ he said. ‘It is too late for you to be by yourself on the street.’
‘It’s all right,’ I said quickly. ‘My house isn’t far. I’m used to it.’
I didn’t want them to walk me home. What if Ellery’s father had already found the letter and started to tell Ellery about it? The thought made me feel sick with nerves, like having a story I’d written read aloud in front of the class.
‘Goodnight!’ I cried, and before he could answer, I took off up the street at a run.
Goodnight, goodnight! My voice sang through the stars. I left them at the door of Wallaringa and I didn’t look back. Because of the blackout there were no streetlights, just the stars and the moon overhead. I ran under the branches, along stone walls, and leapt over the open-mouthed drain-ways, filled with dead leaves and loose paper. Through the curtains and blinds and shutters I glimpsed shards of rooms where people sat or stood, talking, eating, listening to the radio. I ran past them all, flying, all the way to my front gate.
There was Miss Hazel, standing on the footpath.
‘Columba!’ she said. ‘What are you doing out so late? In the air raid, too! What will your mother think?’
I came to a stop, panting. I hoped my mother wouldn’t think anything.
‘Where have you been?’ said Miss Hazel. She didn’t wait for an answer. ‘That dreadful siren. What a hullaballoo!’
I was hungry and wanted to go inside, but Miss Hazel kept talking.
‘These air raids. They’re evacuating all the kiddies from the Mission now, you know. I’ve had a letter from Mrs Macadam just today.’
‘Is she scared?’ I asked.
I would be scared if I was up there in Darwin. I was scared already and our bombs were not real.
‘Furious, more like it,’ said Miss Hazel. ‘Spitting chips, she’ll be, at those Japanese.’
I pictured Mrs Macadam, waving a bunch of emu feathers angrily at the lowering sky filled with Japanese bombers.
‘The kiddies are something else though,’ conceded Miss Hazel. ‘You’ve got to look after the little ones. I wonder your mother doesn’t send you to the country,’ she added. ‘Quite a few of the local children are going, I’ve heard.’
I had heard this too. There was a family at school with four children, and they had all trooped off to Central Station a week ago with their kit bags to get the train to Molong, to stay with their cousins. Hours away on the train, in the country.
But I didn’t want to go to a family in the country. I didn’t want to have to sleep in a house with strangers. I didn’t want to leave my house and my room and my own things and all the people I knew. Like Ellery, I thought, suddenly.
‘To top it all off,’ continued Miss Hazel, ‘that silly cat has taken off. Shot away as soon as the siren started. Don’t blame him. It sounded like the Second Coming. Miss Marguerite is terribly upset. She thinks he must be hiding out here on the street somewhere. But I can’t see him, can you?’
I looked around obediently. It was night, you couldn’t see anything. Although, I remembered, cats’ eyes are supposed to glow in the dark.
‘I can’t see him,’ I said.
‘Waste of time looking for him, if you ask me,’ said Miss Hazel. ‘He’ll be back soon enough. He knows what side his bread is buttered on. In any case,’ she said, straightening her shoulders, ‘we must never give up hope.’
‘No,’ I agreed, dutifully.
Miss Hazel lowered her voice, and cast a look backwards.
‘I’m sorry to say Miss Marguerite has given up hope. She says she’s just waiting for death.’ She snorted. ‘I ask you!’
I pictured Miss Marguerite in the corner of the sitting room, clinging to her harp, waiting…
‘You run along inside now,’ said Miss Hazel. ‘I can smell your dinner from here. I’ll worry about the cat.’
The night was so clear the sky was thick with stars and the moon was half-full and low and yellow. As I made my way up the path to my front door, I heard Miss Hazel calling unconvincingly: ‘Here kitty-kit-kit! Here kitty-kit-kit!’
Nothing stirred, not even, it seemed, a blade of grass. But far away, where we couldn’t hear, guns exploded, and wheels turned, driving on through rubbled streets.
CHAPTER XVII.
AT HOME, behind the blacked-out windows in the kitchen, my mother was frying chops. My father sat with his hands flat on the table, ready to eat.
‘Columba, where have you been?’ said my mother, as the pan spat fat into the air. ‘I was so worried about you!’
‘Just walking around,’ I replied.
I sat down next to my father. My mother slid a chop onto each of our plates.
‘But the air raid practice,’ my mother persisted. ‘Where were you? Where did you go?’
‘I hid in the change rooms,’ I said. ‘Near the rock pools.’
Miss Hazel must have stopped calling for the cat and gone back inside her own house, because we could hear her arguing with Miss Marguerite through the common wall.
‘There they go again,’ growled my father.
We couldn’t hear the words, just the sounds, high and low, like singing. They often argued like that. Then Miss Marguerite would go and play the harp, plink plonk plink.
‘Their cat ran away,’ I said. ‘You know, that stray they’ve been looking after. It ran away in the air raid. Miss Hazel told me.’
High and low, high and low.
‘Oh dear,’ said my mother, sitting down next to me. ‘Miss Marguerite will be very upset. She’s so attached to it.’
‘It’ll come home when he wants to,’ said my father. ‘It’s a cat.’
‘He must have been scared,’ I said.
‘I don’t know,’ said my father. ‘Hard to imagine that animal being scared of anything.’
He got up from the table and turned on the radio. There was a play being broadcast. We listened for a few minutes as we ate our chops. It was all about a rich family fighting over their mother’s will – money and jewels and a big mansion. The rich girl laughed, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
‘She sounds like a lunatic,’ said my father and leant over and switched it off again.
He wiped the fat from his hands with a tea towel and stood up, reaching into his pocket for his pipe. My mother put the frypan in the sink to soak. I stared at the remains of my chop and listened to the glomp of the pan going under the water, the clank of the knives and forks.
That night I fell quickly into a deep sleep.
I’d been swimming. I’d just come out of the waves and was shaking myself dry and all the drops of water sprayed like melting snow across the sand.
I walked across the beach, through the bush, past the houses, up the hilly street, steeper than ever, under the arms of the trees that brushed against my back and head. Petals fell about me from vines, slow flakes onto the pavement.
There was light from the moon but nowhere else. It was grey and so very quiet. Except that someone was muttering something, repeating words in a language that I couldn’t understand.
Miss Hazel w
as standing on the corner with a jug in her hand, about to water her illegal Brazilian plant. But then I realised it was not Miss Hazel at all but a statue of a lady in a droopy dress, holding a torch made of stone and she was also made of stone and was gazing out at nothing with blank eyes.
‘Here, kitty-kit-kit! Here, kitty-kit-kit!’
I was not near my home. I was far away in a strange place where the sky was a sharp translucent white. There was a bridge and the silken water of a river. The buildings were tall and old and like something from a painting, and snowflakes were falling, one after the other, shreds past my face, falling and disappearing.
A bell began to ring. A heavy, heavy bell. It came from a church. No, not a church, a castle, the castle where Sleeping Beauty was still asleep with her family, hidden by rose bushes and tall trees, sudden streaks of green against the charcoal towers. The bell stopped ringing and changed to a ticking. Tick tick tick went the hands of the watch as Sleeping Beauty’s chest rose and fell, her face as still as waxwork.
Tick tick click click footsteps. Across the bridge, a woman in a coat and soft fur hat was walking with a child next to her, a boy, also dressed in coat, hat and boots. Further along the bridge under the falling grey and white sky, there were two men, one carrying a bag and the other, who seemed very old, with a walking stick. The man with the bag turned and called out something to the boy, and the boy left his mother and ran forward. The sky was bright with flames and the air full of smoke.
And running furtively, swiftly along the bridge after them, was the blue cat…
I must have cried out, because the door of my parents’ bedroom flew open, and my mother came down the hallway, her footsteps muffled by slippers.
‘Columba,’ she whispered, crouching beside my bed. ‘Wake up. You’ve had a bad dream.’
I sat up. My heart pounded. I looked up at my mother. It was as though I could see her thoughts, shining above her head. I smelled the powder that she dusted her skin with at night.
‘You mustn’t worry,’ she said. ‘You know your father and I will always keep you safe.’
I knew that wasn’t true. I knew they couldn’t save me from everything. But in the morning, when I woke up again in the sunlight, there was still the sweet smell where she had fallen asleep, laying her head on the pillow next to mine.
CHAPTER XVIII.
‘DARWIN’S been bombed!’ I heard my father say. Something, a spoon, fell with a clatter on the kitchen floor.
I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and got dressed and ate my breakfast with my mother. My father had left the newspaper cast aside on the table and was smoking on the balcony before going to work. I looked away from the headlines and concentrated on my toast.
It was Friday. On Fridays in summer we brought a towel to school and wore our swimsuits under our clothes and walked to the local pool, a basin of ocean enclosed by wood and wire. I said goodbye to my mother and left the house, my satchel on my back and my towel around my neck.
On the footpath next to Miss Hazel and Miss Marguerite’s house there was a bowl of creamy milk, full to the brim. They must have left it out for the cat, hoping it would tempt him to come home. The milk had already curdled in the sun and magpies were hopping around it, dipping their beaks in and out.
‘The Japanese are at our doorstep,’ said the headmaster at assembly, under the wavering flag. ‘Many have fled the city and many more continue to flee. But life must continue as we have known it.’ He paused. ‘So swimming as usual today.’
He blew his whistle. We left our satchels in a pile outside our classrooms and tied our towels around our waists, ready for the walk to the pool. I stood in line next to Hilda. She had sold all her rock cakes, but she still had her golden syrup tin around her neck.
‘I’m going collecting after school,’ she announced. ‘Knocking on people’s doors. Do you want to come?’
No, I thought. I found it embarrassing, asking for money, even to save the Empire. But nothing embarrassed Hilda.
‘I can’t.’ I searched my mind for an excuse. ‘I have to – I have to – help look for a cat!’ I said wildly.
Hilda put her head on one side, like a terrier waiting for the stick to be thrown.
‘Whose cat?’
‘The neighbour’s,’ I said, wishing I hadn’t spoken. ‘It ran away in the air raid siren.’
I could see from Hilda’s eyes that she was thinking, making calculations.
‘Is there a reward for whoever finds him? If there’s a reward, I can put it in my War Fund.’
The headmaster’s whistle blew again. We marched, boys and girls, across the playground and out of the gate to the road that lead to the pool. The blue water gleamed through the trees and the Harbour Bridge arched across the waves, its grey stone pylons tall as the pillars of a Roman temple or the legs of a frozen giant.
Beyond the bridge were the silver domes of Coney Island, behind the smiling face of Luna Park. Soon the ferris wheel would start to turn and all the machinery of pleasure, smelling of smoke and grease, would click into action, and the wild screaming would begin. But now it was locked in silence.
By the time we girls reached the pool the boys were already there, waiting, half-naked in lines, ready to jump in. I looked for Ellery. He was sitting, fully dressed, on a low slab of sandstone, half-hidden from sight by branches. He had his book on his lap and the leaves of the trees touched his shoulders like a cape. Had he read my letter?
‘He can’t swim!’ I heard someone whisper behind me, pointing.
Can’t speak English, can’t swim. Ellery kept his eyes straight ahead and had an expression on his face as though he was counting to a high number and did not want to lose his place. I walked over and sat down next to him.
‘Can you really not swim?’ I asked.
Ellery’s white fingers tightly clenched around the edges of his book. The other children stamped up and down at the pool side. We had to swim laps first, and then there would be free time for leaping about in the water, splashing, racing, diving underneath.
‘Why are you sitting here?’ said Hilda, coming over to us in bare feet. ‘Aren’t you coming in?’
I shrugged.
‘Maybe I won’t,’ I said.
Hilda put a hand on my forehead.
‘Are you sick?’ she asked, in a professional manner.
I shook my head. I was never sick, as my mother often told people. It’s a gift, she said.
‘I never get sick,’ I reminded Hilda.
‘But that’s what it’s like just before you get really sick,’ said Hilda, knowledgeably. ‘My great-grandmother never got sick, and then she got sick and she died in twenty minutes.’
I had heard several times about the dramatic death of Hilda’s great-grandmother, who died at the age of ninety-one after eating some tulip bulbs by mistake.
‘I don’t want to go in,’ I said, doggedly.
‘You have to,’ said Hilda. ‘They’ll make you.’
She was right. You weren’t allowed to not swim. The teacher would come over and would make me get in. They could make you do whatever they wanted.
But how could they make Ellery? He didn’t even have a swimsuit.
CHAPTER XIX.
THERE was a shout from above. Three American soldiers, war-whooping, came leaping down the stairway, three, four, five steps at a time, to the pool.
It was easy to know they were American. They were tall, they were strong, their hair was so short, their arms and legs were so long, and they had mouths of great white teeth. The city was full of American soldiers. They were going to beat the Germans and they were going to beat the Japanese. They were going to save us.
The three Americans stripped off their clothes. They were like big bears, getting ready for a dip in the river. Other people, seeing a pool full of children, might have found somewhere else to swim, but not these three.
‘Here goes,’ said one of them.
He leapt into the pool in a single great movement and was
gone. The surface of the water rippled, swaying as he swam with wide arms, as though he was flying through the sky. The others vaulted into the deepest part of the deep end, and a wave swept down the length of the entire pool.
We were spellbound. Even the way the soldiers swam marked them out as strangers – they kept their heads above the water, turning their necks like seals. That was how my mother swam, because she didn’t want to get her hair wet. But these soldiers hardly had any hair at all.
Then they dived under and came up again, and one after another, they powered up and down. The teacher, also transfixed, finally remembered to blow the whistle for us to get in the water and start our laps, although by this time any attempt at organised activity was unlikely to succeed. The children sprang in one after the other haphazardly, avoiding the big men’s arms and legs.
Hilda ran down to the water and dived in. She had tied her plaits together, and her hair was plastered to her scalp. She swam down the pool in and out of all the tangled bodies with astonishing speed. Hilda won races and certificates which she kept in her satchel along with the letter from her brother, produced as credentials from time to time.
One of the American soldiers said something to her as she came past, and Hilda shouted something in reply. Having brothers in the army, Hilda was not shy of soldiers. But when she reached the end, instead of turning back and doing another lap, she stopped and climbed out of the pool, up the metal ladder.
She found her towel and tied it around her head, so it looked like a turban. She came back to the bench where Ellery and I were still sitting. Spray from Hilda’s body dotted our faces like light rain, scraps of harbour onto my skin, then down into the warm ground beneath our feet. All the water, drop by drop, vanishing from the face of the earth.
‘Don’t run away!’
The soldier who had spoken to Hilda in the pool was coming over to us, plodding, dripping, towel over his arm. None of us answered. We were tongue-tied in the presence of the giant. In any case, we were not supposed to talk to strangers, although soldiers might be different.
The Blue Cat Page 6
