Don't Breathe a Word

by Marianne Musgrove

  When no one said anything, Lydia smiled sadly. ‘It’s okay, Grandpa,’ she said, bending down to kiss him on the cheek. Even though she was huge in her maternity dress, she looked small somehow. ‘I’ll go now, but I will be back. I’m going to make space in my life for all of you. Better late than never, hey?’

  Lydia left and Grandpa slumped in his recliner. He suddenly looked very, very old. ‘I think it’s time for my nap, Meredith,’ he said.

  ‘You mean “Kenzie”.’

  Grandpa looked at me strangely. ‘I’m very weary, Meredith. Could you please help me out of this, um, this whatchamacallit?’

  ‘Chair?’ I suggested.

  ‘Yes, chair.’

  I turned to Tahlia. ‘How many painkillers did you give him? He’s out of it again.’

  Tahlia frowned, taking the packet out of her pocket. ‘I haven’t given him any,’ she said.

  If it wasn’t sleepwalking and it wasn’t painkillers, what was it? We needed to keep Grandpa away from everyone until he was better. So the plan was pretty simple: don’t let anyone in and don’t let Grandpa out.

  The question was how? There was Lydia, for starters. After that afternoon’s showdown, she’d stay away for a few days, but she’d be back. Then there was Mahesh’s mum, Grandpa’s mates from the Polar Bears and the RSL, not to mention his lady-friends. And what if his ankle healed before his brain got fixed? He’d be fully mobile and how could we control him then?

  ‘We’ll get through this, Kenz,’ said Tahlia. ‘We’re in this together.’

  To prove it, she called in sick for the next day’s dance rehearsal, despite her fears about ‘that cow Sophie’ stealing her place.

  The first step was to set up an alarm system. If Grandpa tried to escape, we needed to hear him. I rummaged around under my bed for a jester’s hat I had from a school Shakespearean festival. When I found it, I yanked off the bells, strung them together and hung them on the front door handle. It was a good thing too. Later that night, when the moon was out and normal people were in bed, I woke to the sound of jingling. Tahlia and I leapt up, only to find Grandpa in the corridor with a towel over his shoulder.

  ‘I’m late for me swim,’ he said.

  He wouldn’t go back to bed. And worse than that, he had – there was no easy way to say it – leaked. Wet the bed. Like a little kid. It was like he’d become our child and we were the parents.

  Tahlia helped him into the bathroom to shower and I stripped the bed. As I searched for some clean sheets, it occurred to me this leaking business might happen again. I remembered the huge sheet of bubble wrap we had in the shed that had come with the fridge we’d bought a couple of years ago. One minute later, Tahlia and I were wrapping Grandpa’s mattress in it.

  ‘I’ve gotta say, Kenz,’ said Tahlia, lifting up the corner of the mattress, ‘this is one of your more inspired ideas.’

  Once Grandpa finished his shower, we spent a long time convincing him to forget about the Polar Bears and go back to bed. As I pulled my (girly, pink, floral) curtains around me, I heard pop pop popping coming from Grandpa’s room.

  ‘What the dickens?’ he said.

  I smiled in the dark. Even at the worst of times, little things could lift your spirits. And anyway, he wouldn’t be like this forever, right?

  A few days after the blow-up with Lydia, Grandpa was still acting strangely. He kept wanting to go out even though his ankle was really sore. I had to hide the keys to the Vee Dub to stop him driving to his mate’s place. He forgot stuff too, like how to use the remote control and, one day, even the phone. I don’t think he recognised the numbers.

  He wasn’t like that all the time, though. Mornings and afternoons, he was often – though not always – fine. He was a bit like a werewolf that way, sort of normal in the daytime, but completely transformed when the sun went down. I joked about this to Tahlia, then felt terrible. How could I say my own grandpa was a werewolf? He was the person who gave up his job for us when Mum and Dad died, who cooked us chicken schnitzel and drove us to school, who told corny jokes, mended our broken toys and drove us up the coast for holidays. He was the one who had brought us up, who was still bringing us up. He was our grandpa. He wasn’t a werewolf. And yet something was happening to him and it wasn’t good.

  On Saturday afternoon, I made Tahlia sit down so we could review the money situation. I had $3.35. She had $1.55. Grandpa hadn’t seen his wallet in over a week. He said someone had stolen it. More likely, he’d put it somewhere weird, like in the freezer or the first aid kit. We’d just have to keep looking. $4.90 wasn’t going to last very long. If only we had his ATM card, we could get some money out of the bank.

  ‘You know those vegies Lydia left us?’ I said, straightening up the small pile of coins in front of us.

  ‘Vegies?’ said Tahlia, making a face. ‘Don’t remind me.’

  ‘We’re going to have to eat them for tea tonight,’ I said, ‘since we don’t have much else apart from an egg and a bit of flour and that. Oh, and a can of creamed corn.’

  ‘Slight problem, Kenz,’ said Tahlia. ‘I may have thrown the vegies into the compost bin.’

  ‘Tahlia!’

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s just, Lydia bugged me so much, I couldn’t stand to look at them. But seriously, you wouldn’t really have eaten them, would you?’

  My stomach growled. ‘Creamed corn it is,’ I said. ‘But then what? $4.90 won’t buy much. We’re going to starve, unless …’

  ‘Unless what?’

  I sighed heavily and went into my room. Inside my box of special things, underneath the phone message books, were some coins. Every birthday, Dad had bought me a proof set. The coins were set in cardboard and covered in plastic. Four sets of coins for the four years Dad had known me. I tilted one of the packets back and forth and the coins shone like large sequins. Seeing them made me happy and sad all at once.

  Tahlia knocked on my door. It wasn’t often she came into my room. Not since she got hormones. ‘Whatcha doing?’ she said, pulling aside the curtain around my bed and plonking herself down on the mattress.

  I held out the coins to her. ‘We could always use these.’

  She took them from me and I felt a pang in my chest. Tahlia shuffled slowly through the packets. ‘Oh, Kenzie, no,’ she said. ‘Things aren’t that desperate.’

  ‘Aren’t they? You might be able to get by on three cornflakes and a sultana, but I need, like, y’know, food. So does Grandpa.’

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘But not this way.’ She pushed the coins back into my hands.

  My lucky doorknob was sitting on my bedspread. Tahlia picked it up, spat on it, and held it against her heart. ‘I, Tahlia Rosamund Carew, do solemnly swear that I will get us through this.

  ‘May my nose fall off and my hair turn blue, may I fall in a tub full of alpaca poo.’

  She laid the doorknob on the bed like it was a precious chick.

  ‘I think I can get us some money,’ she said, ‘but it involves you doing me the teensiest favour.’

  ‘Exactly how teensy?’ I asked.

  Tahlia’s master plan was to ask her friend Bree for a loan. Her teensy favour involved me staying home with Grandpa all day while she went off on her quest.

  Over the past week, we’d worked out a system where we took turns looking after Grandpa during the day. It was the only way to get a break since both of us were needed at night. So far, Tahlia had taken the most breaks. Her concert was less than a week away and she had rehearsals to go to. Or so she claimed. I was beginning to wonder how many rehearsals one concert required. And now there was the ‘borrow-money-from-Bree’ plan. I wasn’t sure why she needed to be gone all day.

  As she headed out the door, hunger pangs told me it was time to tackle the food problem head on. We had flour. We had mulberries. We had oil, sugar and one egg. I wasn’t very good at baking but, as my teacher Mr Goodfellow said, it was better to try and fail than never to try at all. I set up Grandpa in the dining room with a br
oken radio to tinker with, then headed for the kitchen.

  We didn’t have many cookbooks in our house, just a couple of Women’s Weekly ones and a school fundraiser recipe collection, that kind of thing. The one I liked to use was Mum’s, an old exercise book filled with pasted-in recipes from magazines, newspapers and friends. She’d written notes inside; things like ‘Less chilli powder!’ and ‘More nutmeg!’. Dad had written comments in there too. For example, ‘Mmmm – scrumptious. Five stars. Please make again.’ That was next to her banana caramel cream pie recipe. Beside the tuna mornay recipe, he’d written, ‘Urgh. Terrible. Boo! Hiss!’ Then he’d drawn a smiley face just so Mum would know he was joking.

  Unfortunately, the last time someone used the cookbook, they (all right, it was me) spilt juice all over it and some of the handwritten bits had smudged. Polly’s Mulberry Muffin recipe needed some baking powder, but how much? I chucked in a few tablespoons. You could never have too much baking powder, right?

  Half an hour later and it seemed you could have too much baking powder. Instead of a dozen perfectly rounded muffins, the mixture had spewed out like foamy lava, creating one big mega-muffin. What was worse, as it cooled, it sank lower and lower into a muffiny pancake. I felt as flat as my cooking. And I’d wasted all those ingredients.

  ‘They’re not muffins,’ I wailed. ‘They’re the opposite of muffins!’

  Grandpa gave my arm a squeeze. ‘Sure, they’re not what you’d call traditional muffins,’ he said. ‘As muffins, they’re probably not going to win any prizes.’ He paused. ‘But as flatfins, I’d say they’re a standout success. Why, Kenzie, they’re the most brilliant flatfins I’ve ever seen. And I bet they taste delicious.’

  I nodded. ‘Flatfins. Yeah, I like that.’

  I hunted around for a knife to carve the flatfins into squares. Grandpa limped out to the divan on the back verandah and together we ate half the tray. They weren’t as delicious as Grandpa had predicted, but they weren’t cowpats either. I gave my lucky doorknob a rub. I had a feeling Mum would have approved of flatfins.

  ‘Tahlia,’ I said later that night. I was in bed but I’d left my door open so I could hear the alarm.

  ‘Yeah?’ she said, leaning on the door jamb.

  ‘What if he’s still sick when school goes back?’

  ‘Won’t happen,’ said Tahlia, taking a bite of a flatfin.

  ‘You don’t know that,’ I said.

  She chewed thoughtfully. ‘If he’s still not one hundred per cent, we’ll – I don’t know – pretend you’ve got glandular fever or something.’

  ‘You want me to stay home all term and pretend I’m sick? I’m supposed to hand this assignment in first day back, and I haven’t even started it. And I’ve got to be with Annie or the Egans will steal her away for good.’

  ‘I’m sure it won’t come to that,’ said Tahlia. She looked in the mirror and pulled out her hair elastic. Her hair fell around her shoulders like she was in a shampoo ad. ‘I know he’ll be fine. I can feel it. I got us some money today, didn’t I? I always deliver.’

  ‘A few dollars won’t last very long.’

  ‘I’m telling you, we’ll be fine.’

  ‘You keep saying that, but what if we’re not?’

  It was Sunday, my turn for a break. Annie had invited me over, just the two of us. In other words, no Regan and Tegan. Woo hoo!

  Just as I was putting my lucky doorknob in my pocket, Tahlia burst into my room. ‘There’s a costume emergency at Bree’s,’ she said. ‘I absolutely have to go over there and help.’

  ‘But you were there yesterday!’ I cried. ‘And I’m just about to leave.’

  ‘Can’t help it, Kenz. Bree’s freaking out and the concert isn’t far away.’

  ‘But I had this whole new stunt planned. Annie and I were going to leap out of her tree house and onto the trampoline.’

  Tahlia smiled at me sympathetically. ‘It’s just this once,’ she said, hitching her dance bag over her shoulder. ‘Annie will understand.’

  ‘I haven’t agreed yet,’ I said, though deep down, I knew I was going to let her go. I didn’t have the energy to fight her.

  ‘I’ll be back ASAP,’ she said. ‘Now, don’t forget: whatever you do, don’t let Pirate out and don’t –’

  ‘Let anyone in,’ I finished. ‘I know that, Tahlia. I’m not a complete idiot.’

  As I watched my sister disappear down the driveway, a bucket of tiredness washed over me. I told myself that of course I was happy to look after Grandpa. He’d done so much for us, he deserved my help.

  Except that I wasn’t happy. All I wanted was to play outside without worrying if my grandpa was halfway out the window or doing a nuddy run down the street. It was exhausting, always having to be on alert in case he did something crazy, always having to get up in the morning, no matter what. I supposed that was what it was like when you had children to take care of.

  Then there was the constant washing: I looked out the window at the sheets and PJs hanging on the line, right next to my green velvet curtains. Okay, maybe the curtains weren’t Pirate’s fault. And really, the other stuff wasn’t either. He couldn’t help it if his insides didn’t work properly. The thing was, when Tahlia was around, we shared the load, but lately, she was around less and less.

  I picked up the phone to call Annie and tell her the bad news.

  I only left him alone for a moment. I had to go to the loo and some things can’t be put off. When I came out, Lydia was standing in the dining room, holding a big bunch of gerberas.

  ‘I’m so glad I caught you,’ she said, thrusting the flowers at me and giving me a hug. It wasn’t one of her usual suffocation-type hugs, though. It was a nervous little hug, as if she thought I might push her off. She pulled back, looking anxious but deter-minedly cheerful.

  ‘I’m taking you all to the movies,’ she announced. ‘Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines is playing at the cinema!’

  ‘My favourite!’ said Grandpa, reaching for his crutches.

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Thanks and everything, but I don’t think that’s such a good idea.’

  ‘Why not?’ asked Lydia.

  ‘Well, you know, um, the roads are dangerous,’ I blurted out. ‘Also, watching movies is bad for the eyes and, ah, I heard the safety standards at the cinema are no good. Yeah, lots of accidents happen at the cinema.’

  Grandpa patted me on the arm. ‘You’re a funny one,’ he said. ‘Go and get me my jacket, would you please, love?’

  ‘I’ll shout you popcorn,’ said Lydia.

  I sighed. It was obvious there was no way Grandpa was missing out on his favourite film, and some popcorn would definitely help stave off the hunger for a bit, especially since we were rationing our food supplies. All I could do was go along, keep an eye on Grandpa, and try and get us back home as soon as possible.

  Since it was the school holidays, the cinema was chockers. Heaps of kids were there, squealing, laughing, stuffing chips into their faces. The chances of running into someone we knew were high.

  ‘Lyle! Lydia! Kenzie!’ It was Mrs Banerjee, and with her were Mahesh, Basanti and Vijay. The younger two were wearing cardboard ears, their faces painted black and white. When Mahesh saw me, he ripped something off his head and ducked behind his mum.

  ‘What a coincidence, all of us ending up at the cinema,’ said Mrs B. ‘We’re here to see the latest Disney film. The one about the kittens.’ She pointed towards the door of Cinema One. Lots of little kids were lined up with their parents, waiting to get in. Many of them were also dressed as kittens. ‘The kids have been nagging me to see it for weeks.’

  ‘Basanti and Vijay have been nagging you for weeks,’ said Mahesh from behind his mum’s back. ‘I have not been nagging anyone.’

  I peeked around to look at him.

  ‘Are those whiskers on your face?’ I said. ‘Are you dressed as a kitten?’

  Mahesh groaned. ‘Basanti did it,’ he said. ‘And anyway, I’m not a kitten. I’m a
panther, all right? Panthers are very dangerous animals.’ He held up his cardboard ears. ‘See? Panther ears.’

  I couldn’t help smiling. He looked so harmless and sweet. Not that I liked him or anything.

  ‘Mahesh has gone all red,’ said Basanti, bouncing around like she’d had a green cordial injection.

  ‘Yeah, Mash,’ said Vijay. ‘Why are you red?’

  ‘Shut up,’ said Mahesh. ‘It’s sunburn, all right? The UV rating is especially high today.’

  ‘We’re going to see Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines,’ said Lydia. ‘Kenzie doesn’t seem too keen, though.’

  Grandpa pulled his radiation detector out of his pocket and twiddled with a dial. ‘Do you think this place has a microwave?’

  I swiped it from him.

  ‘I’ve an idea, Lyle,’ said Mrs B. ‘What say Kenzie comes with us and we meet you and Lydia in the foyer afterwards?’

  ‘What? No!’ I said, thinking of Grandpa alone with Lydia all that time.

  Mahesh’s face fell. ‘You don’t want to be seen with me looking like this,’ he said.

  ‘It’s not that,’ I told him. ‘It’s just that, I, um, I came here with my family.’

  Lydia smiled at me warmly. ‘You called me family,’ she said, her eyes getting teary. ‘Oh, Kenzie, you’ve made my day. Here, go with your friends. You deserve some fun.’

  ‘But –’

  ‘Go on, love,’ said Grandpa. ‘You don’t want to be stuck with us old fogies.’

  And before I knew it, despite my objections, I found myself crammed in between Mahesh and Basanti and a whole bunch of kittens, watching a movie in Cinema One. And all the while, in Cinema Two, Grandpa was sitting next to Lydia, capable of anything.