No Stars to Wish on

by Zana Fraillon

  It’s weird, but I sort of feel I know the real Number 49. As if we’ve met before somewhere. He’s like a cousin you don’t see very often, but when you do it feels as though you saw each other just last week. I know a whole lot about him, from the clues he left behind. Great-great-aunt Jess says you can’t understand someone unless you walk in their shoes, which is funny because his shoes are the only things I’m not wearing! I reckon I can still understand the real Number 49, though. We even have the same sense of humour.

  Right next to the picture of the hand, I found where the real Number 49 had caught his shirt on a bit of nail sticking out of the wall. I know it was his, because it matched up to a hole in the shirt I’m wearing now. The same shirt the real Number 49 used to wear. The exact same tear, right near the shoulder.

  The torn bit of shirt was stiff, as if he had dunked it in milk and then it dried all hard. But it wasn’t soaked in milk. It was soaked in blood. He must have scratched his arm on the nail. I know it was blood because it had the same colour and smell as my shirt did after a boy punched me and made my nose bleed. Maybe the real Number 49 offered someone his shoes to sniff as well. Ha!

  If the tear is a clue, I don’t know what it means.

  I don’t know if it’s because I was thinking about my family, or the real Number 49, or both, but suddenly I felt strong when I was down in that Hole. Maybe some brave thoughts snuck into my head when I was shoving rubbish into a bag to drag to the tip. Maybe that brave stuff was just waiting for the next poor kid who was locked in the dark.

  Some people have too much brave in them. They do stupid things because they don’t worry about the bad stuff that might happen after. And other people don’t have enough. If the really brave people could share, we’d all be better off.

  I didn’t know what to do with it at first, my brave. It just seemed to grow. It made me feel big and strong, the way I do when I’ve been scared and Amrei has taken my hand and the scared has just melted away. But it was only when I was actually eating my lunch that I had the Brave Idea. This was the Idea – I would bring some happiness to the person in the Hole. Samson told me they don’t give you much to eat when you’re down there. Just bread and water, which fills you up a bit but wouldn’t do much for your soul. Amrei always says good food is medicine for your soul.

  I decided that if anyone needed medicine for their soul it would be the kid who banged on the wall while I was cleaning. I felt the vibrations as I scrubbed the walls. Bang bang bang. Bang bang ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-bang. Like the drumming Samson showed me, except this drumming didn’t feel nice or happy or excited the way our drumming did.

  So I hid some of my food in the cuff of the real Number 49’s too-big pants. These cuffs are great. You can carry just about anything in them. And the food was actually okay to eat today. Perhaps Cook had stolen some salt from the bathrooms, or found something tasty to add before the Nuns noticed.

  I was so nervous sneaking the food that my hands started shaking. But then I remembered my brave, and even though I was sure everyone was watching and a cane would find me soon, I did it. Food may not be a big happy thing, but some is better than none. And maybe just knowing someone is looking out for you makes you feel better.

  After the nice Nun led me down to the Hole again after lunch, I pushed the food under the locked door. I don’t know who was in there, but the food got taken. I slipped my hand under, so they could see that a kid brought the food. I worried that if they didn’t eat all the food, the Nuns would know it was me who brought it. But then I decided it didn’t matter anyway.

  Then, just as I was leaving, a hand came back out under the door. It gave me a thumbs up.

  The nice Nun is called Sister Augusta. She isn’t Nunish at all. She glows, as if someone has hidden a torch in her cheeks. And she will help my plan. Because she has forgotten that Nuns aren’t supposed to smile. I didn’t even have to tell a joke. She just smiled when she collected me for lunch. She even thanked me for making the Hole so clean. Her smile isn’t as big as Cook’s, but it’s a pretty good smile all the same.

  Sister Augusta smiled and said, ‘Thank you,’ down low so I could see. I haven’t ever seen a Nun say ‘Thank you’ before. If Sister Augusta wasn’t a Nun, then I’d rate her a zero. I might rate her a zero anyway. At the moment, though, she’s a one, just in case. If all the Nuns were like her, it wouldn’t be so bad being here. It would never be like home, and it would never be okay, but at least I could bear it. When you worry about getting into trouble all the time, it makes you tired. I’m so tired. Six-year-olds aren’t supposed to be tired. Neither are seven-year-olds.

  I’ve already turned seven. I only just realised that our birthday, Janey’s and mine, must have happened already. It’s kind of strange thinking that. When I see Janey I’ll say happy birthday.

  Sister Augusta took me outside then. ‘Just for a little breath of fresh air,’ she said. The other Nuns don’t worry about fresh air, not ever. Sister Augusta really isn’t Nunish at all. She’s the way a proper, kind Nun should be. Maybe all the others just had bad teachers. Or have forgotten how it’s meant to be. Everything is so mixed up and confused around here. Maybe the Nuns are too.

  The other kids weren’t back from school yet, so I was outside with the little kids. They were playing some game I didn’t know. And then all of a sudden they freeze. Mother Superior is suddenly there, in that spooky way she has.

  She walks across the yard, and no one dares even look at her or move in case they do the wrong thing. She stops, about halfway, and all the littlies shrink back. I shrink back too.

  But she isn’t looking at a kid. She’s looking at a mouse. Mother Superior hates mice. There are hundreds of mousetraps all over the place. She watches the mouse, and then – quick as a cat – she stomps on it with her shoe. I didn’t think a person could be quick enough, or strong enough, but that little mouse was squished flat.

  My mum sometimes says ‘That makes my blood boil’ when she’s really angry. I never knew what she meant, but seeing that poor mouse get squished, and seeing Mother Superior’s smile, I suddenly know what it feels like when your blood boils. Your whole body is screaming and kicking and pushing and biting and going crazy. That mouse wasn’t even inside the Home. Mother Superior didn’t own him the way she thinks she owns us. No one put that mouse here. He was probably here long before the Nuns came. He wasn’t doing any harm. He didn’t even know he was racing past Mother Superior. She shouldn’t have done that. It was cruel. I think she would step on us if she was tall enough.

  But I didn’t do anything. My blood boiled and I stayed still. Like a statue. When something makes Mum’s blood boil she takes a deep breath and smiles. ‘Not everyone can be as perfect as us, I suppose.’ I took a deep breath. I couldn’t smile, though. Only Mum can do that.

  Mother Superior didn’t even wipe her shoe. It was covered in mouse blood and fur and probably guts too, and she didn’t even wipe it on the grass. She will probably wear it like a badge.

  And that’s when I had Another Brave Idea, with my head down and my eyes not looking at Mother Superior. There must have been a little piece of brave left in me. I remembered the hundreds of mousetraps all over the place and I thought, Well, I’m going to undo every single one. It won’t help the poor squished mouse, but it will help his friends and family. I wonder if they’ll sniff around their mouse-hole, wondering when he’s coming back.

  I’m going to start my own war. Me and the mice against Mother Superior. If I save them from the traps, maybe there will be enough mice to take over. They could come in a huge mouse army, tearing down the walls, swarming all over the Nuns, tripping them up and running across them. And we could join in, kids and mice together, running over the Nuns and off across the fields. I think Sister Augusta would cheer us on. She might even come with us, if we let her.

  I don’t like cleaning out the dead mice from the mousetraps, anyway.

  I had a mouse once. As a pet. I didn’t keep him in a cage, but I left f
ood out for him. Mum said not to, because mice cause havoc. Havoc means chaos. Which makes my idea even better, because I reckon a bit of Mouse Havoc is just what we need around here.

  It’s crazy, because if I get caught I’ll be in big trouble. But thinking about brave things and doing brave things makes me feel not quite so worried or tired.

  By the end of the day I’d undone five mousetraps, and no one saw me, not once. Samson said he’d help. He asked if he could tell the other kids my plan. I guess that would be good. All of us together. I was a bit worried that someone else might get in trouble for my plan. But then I remembered how doing brave things made me feel better, even though I might get in trouble, and I figured it might work for other kids too.

  I told Samson he could tell the other kids, but he had to tell them a joke first. A good one. Samson said he couldn’t use any of mine, then. I laughed. Not because it was funny, but because it meant the smiles are catching on. That was Samson’s very first joke.

  I wonder if my spiderlings have made it home yet. They’ve all gone except for three. I guess those three aren’t quite ready to leave. Maybe they don’t know how to drop a line. Maybe they aren’t brave enough. I said goodnight to them, and I was sure I heard them say goodnight back (ha ha).

  SOMETHING else happened down in the Hole.

  Thinking about it, I’ve decided it was better that I didn’t go to school. If I had gone, I wouldn’t have found the real Number 49’s clue in the Hole. And I wouldn’t have found the other really big clue that someone else left – but maybe not on purpose, because it’s a strange place to leave a clue.

  After I had my Brave Ideas, I was taking the bin bags to the tip out the back. It’s not a real tip, like the one at home. Really this one is just a huge pile of rubbish. It used to be somewhere else, but then the Director said we would be getting pigs so he made everyone move the rubbish so the stalls for the pigs could be built there instead. That happened before I got here, but the kids still laugh about it because the pigs never showed up, and now the wind blows smells from the rubbish right in through the Director’s window.

  Most people don’t like the rubbish-pile smell. But I do. It smells like home when the wind catches the fumes off the tip at the end of our street. Mum hates the smell and closes all the windows, even when it’s hot and the wind is cool. When the smell is extra strong, she even wraps a teatowel around her face, so all you can see is her eyes. She looks funny when she does that. And sometimes, when she isn’t too tired, she pretends she’s Zorro and we even sword-fight across the kitchen. She’s good at sword-fighting, but I always win. I know she lets me win, and I never tell her I know. It’s nicer like that.

  Even if the tip smells strong enough to curl the hair in your nose, I like it because it’s like treasure.

  Lots of someones have left behind every little bit that ends up on the tip. Like a whole history of the world. The wind brings clues from the tip right inside your head and into your brain, so you know what has been happening all over town. Someone ate a banana. Someone wiped dog poo off their shoe or bike wheel. Someone had fish for dinner and threw out the bones.

  Often there are smells that I can’t guess, and then I make up what they could be. Like the smell from a treasure box closed up at the bottom of the sea for hundreds of years. I can’t imagine it would smell great. Probably like my gumboots at the end of a hot day.

  And that’s what the rubbish pile is like at the Home, too. A whole treasure pile of stuff that’s happened. When I was smelling the rubbish, and pretending I was at my real home, instead of the Home, I remembered something my teacher told me: ‘Consider old things, to understand new things.’ He said it was a poem that came from Japan, and it sounded better in Japanese, like a song.

  That made me think. If I was going to work out how the real Number 49 escaped, I needed to understand what happened before he ran away. And here I was now, looking at a whole history of THE Home, right in front of me.

  So I started digging through the rubbish, pushing right down to the very bottom of the pile. I figured the rubbish pile was like a timeline. We did those at school. Except the rubbish-pile timeline went down instead of across. The deeper I went in the pile, the longer ago the clues would be from.

  When I was deep enough for a time when the real Number 49 was here, I looked really carefully at every little thing. There were lots of dead mice, but not much left of each one. I was glad I’d started undoing the mousetraps.

  There were chips off canes, and one cane snapped in two. That must have hurt. Part of a broken toilet bowl, a lens from glasses. And then, right at the very bottom of the pile, I found a shoe with 49 drawn on it, just the way the number 49 is drawn on my shoes.

  This was the clue. But I don’t think Number 49 himself left it. What are the chances I would look in exactly this spot, months later, and what are the chances the rubbish pile would still be here? It didn’t seem like a good clue to leave. So it must be a clue that wasn’t meant to be found.

  If the Nuns threw away his shoes, that means they already know I’m not the real Number 49. And it means the real Number 49 isn’t coming back.

  I started to feel sick, then, like the first time I tried to eat watery porridge with weevils. And while I was holding the shoe, trying to listen to what it could tell me, Sister Mary came out. She didn’t look happy and I knew I was going to get into trouble for messing with the rubbish.

  But as soon as she saw the shoe in my hand, and the questions flapping around my head, the grumpiness drained right out of her face. She went white, like the scarf she wears over her hair. For a moment, she dropped her Nunishness and looked scared.

  I wondered if this should be another part of my plan. If we could scare the Nuns, they might remember how to smile and be real people again. I imagine they were people once.

  But then her face stormed. It went from white to normal to red, and a tidal wave of grumpiness swept in.

  Sister Mary ripped the shoe out of my hand and pushed it into her pocket. She didn’t whack me. She didn’t push my head in the rubbish or grab my arm and throw me onto the pile. She didn’t even yell at me.

  She just looked at me and shook her head, muttering, ‘Stupid boy, stupid boy.’ She doesn’t know I can read lips. Then she bundled me upstairs, away from the Hole and the pile of rubbish.

  But she kept the shoe.

  AMREI could smell rain. She loved the smell of rain. If she looked straight up into the sky she could almost see the drops forming, feel the wind shaping the water as it plummeted to earth. She could hear the ground singing out in welcome, and the breath of the birds as they ruffled their feathers in appreciation.

  Now would be a good time. She fetched her tin from the campsite. She would have to move on tonight. She had already spent far too long here. Three days now. Even Dog was agitated, as if he needed to keep going. Perhaps he had Visions of his own to follow.

  But something was holding her here. Perhaps it was the food and what little money she was given in exchange for the tins of worms she sold to fishermen by the river. More likely, though, it was just her body regaining some of the strength she had lost when she’d been so hungry and thirsty.

  Amrei felt the ground for a good spot. A patch of earth that was damp, but not too wet. She closed her eyes, listened to the sound of the wind, the faint tap of the rain as it started to fall, and when she was completely relaxed she started to drum.

  Great-great-aunt Jess had taught Amrei worm-charming. She had taught all the kids. They used to have competitions in the back garden to see who could charm the most worms. Amrei always won. Something in the way Amrei tapped on the ground seemed to speak to the worms. Perhaps she tapped most like a bird. When she was little, she used to watch the birds drum their beaks on the ground to find worms. Perhaps this small smudge of a memory was what made the difference.

  Amrei thought she could feel the worms making their way through the ground. She imagined the ease with which they tunnelled towards her. She kne
w she should start collecting them, now, before she startled them back underground with her presence. But she could also feel a Vision moving to the forefront of her mind. Visions usually came like memories jumping into her brain, as if she was remembering, only backwards. But this Vision was different. This Vision was like watching through a curtain of rain. And then Amrei knew with great certainty that this wasn’t a Vision at all, but a Calling.

  Amrei had never experienced a Calling before. This one showed an image of Aunty Nell, Jack and Janey’s mum, who had taken Amrei in as one of her own when Amrei was five. In a hazy series of images like a film, Amrei watched Aunty Nell walking between police stations and agencies, searching for news of her children. She saw the grief, the unbearable longing, etched into Aunty Nell’s face as one door after another was closed on her, and she was turned away again and again.

  Amrei watched her Aunty Nell arrive home in the dark. The Greats were still in their beds. Aunty Nell did all she could, making sure they had good food, opening windows to let the wind push the musky, stale air of despair out of the house, but Amrei could see that the Greats were wasting away.

  Amrei shivered as a spider ran across the ceiling in front of her aunt. It seemed as though a plague of spiders had moved into the house during Amrei’s absence. Hundreds of dots, like stars in the night sky, made their way across the ceiling and down the walls. And when a spider dropped onto Aunty Nell’s shoulder, Amrei didn’t blame her for reaching for a broom.

  But as Nell methodically squashed each and every spiderling, Amrei knew that she was making a grave mistake. The thumping of the broom was so loud it woke the Greats, who got up from their beds to see what the problem was.

  Amrei felt her tears splash onto the ground, mingling with the rain, which was now falling in earnest.