Like a House on Fire

by Cate Kennedy

  The nest for the budgies is soft because I think the mother bird pulls some feathers out of her chest to put inside. This seems cruel but Mrs Carlyle says she put other soft things in the cage and the mother budgie didn’t want any of them. She is using instinct. The babies would all be snuggled up inside. If she will give one to me, I would like a girl budgie. I think I would name her Alicia. When I think about teaching her how to say her name I can nearly hear it. I have to wait, Mrs Carlyle says, because she’s not sure her budgie is even going to lay eggs yet. She says not to tell the other kids because they would get jealous. After she says this, when I walk back into class and down to my desk, I feel my skin buzzing like someone has stroked it. I hope Alicia is blue.

  My mum says do you like him? Shane, I mean. She has on her nice earrings. He’s OK, I say. Later on when Shane comes over, Mum is in the kitchen cooking dinner. She’s made homemade lasagne and now she’s heating up oil in the deep saucepan. She calls to Shane you haven’t lived till you’ve had my home-cooked chips. I’m famous for them. Isn’t that right, Tyler? My home-cooked chips?

  Once I asked if I could get some money to go and buy a hamburger and she suddenly jumped up really angry and said why do you need a crap takeaway hamburger? I can make you a much better hamburger here at home. She got mince out and made a hamburger in the frypan with onions. It took forever. At last she gave it to me with two pieces of bread holding it all together. Isn’t that better than Maccas? she kept asking. Isn’t it? Answer me.

  Now I just say yes. Mrs Carlyle told us that when you are training your dog you need to say the same thing over and over until the dog gets it. He wants to do the right thing, he just doesn’t know it at first. She says it’s the same with training a bird to talk, you have to say the same thing again and again so they learn. That’s true and maybe it’s true for people too.

  I’m starving, says Shane and looks over at me with a smile. He is just out of the shower and there are comb marks in his hair. He says you wanna change channels? and leans over to give me the remote. You have to press the button really hard to make it change channels now because it’s wearing out. So I change it over to The Simpsons.

  What grade are you in? he says, and I tell him Grade 6, Mrs Carlyle’s class. 6C. She comes in and says how are you this morning, my treasures? My lovely 6Cs. I’ve missed you!

  I don’t tell Shane this. Grade 6, he repeats. When Homer and Marge talk to each other their whole heads move to ask a question and then answer but when Shane talks to me just his eyes move sideways, his head stays watching TV.

  He says I bet you’ve got a boyfriend. I can hear my mum clattering oven trays in the kitchen. On the TV Bart is climbing up into his tree house. He can go really fast, much faster than I could in real life. Just a few steps and he’s there. But I always like to see the inside of his tree house. I wish I had one. And I don’t want a boyfriend. I want the set of seventy-two Derwents.

  They are in a tin that opens out with all the sharp points of the pencils in order and in every colour you could ever think of using. Georgia has some at school and even when you sharpen them they feel special, the wood is so soft and it peels back to leave the pencil good as new. My grandma asked me what I wanted for my birthday and I took her to the shop where they are. The art supply shop smells so beautiful inside, all clean new pencils and paper and brushes. She had a good look at them. For your colouring in? she said. I felt happy when we walked out again, imagining. They have names soft as feathers. Pale Mint. Sea Green. Grey Green. French Grey. Rose Pink. Cloud Blue. Iced Blue. Kingfisher Blue. Prussian Blue. Indigo. Sometimes just when I am walking along the names come into my head like a rhyme in time with my footsteps.

  I will put them into my denim pencil case and only take a few at a time to school, but I will invite Georgia over to my house and open up the whole tin so we can do drawing and colouring in together on the table on the weekend. Mrs Carlyle has a special Stanley knife and she could scrape some of the paint off the end so I could write my name on each one. On the tin someone’s done a sketch of an old stone bridge going over a rocky creek. It is a very good drawing and it looks like a picture from the old set of encyclopaedias in the library. When I go in there Mrs Bradbury says it’s good to see someone still uses the reference section, Tyler. I think she means the lovely way the books smell, which is true, I love that too.

  You have got a boyfriend, haven’t you? says Shane. I can tell. Cause you’re blushing.

  Bart and Milhouse are in his tree house and they’re talking about staying out there the night. I’m watching and I know that in a few seconds it will be night and you will see the moon and they will get scared.

  In cartoons time passes really fast and sudden. Also, things happen that aren’t true. Like a cat will be running along and will go through the wall and there will be an exactly cat-shaped hole left behind in the wall. Mum’s old boyfriend Gary threw a bottle at the wall once and it didn’t leave a shape like that it just smashed.

  Bart and Milhouse are still in the tree house but it’s night and there are big shadows that scare them. They race down the rope ladder screaming. When they scream on The Simpsons their mouths open way up and their little tongues come out and wriggle and you can see their tonsils. That’s meant to be funny, and it must be because Shane laughs. Bart runs back into his room and hides in his bed. I like Lisa but she’s not in this one.

  I’m not blushing, I say to Shane. Sure looks like it to me, he says. What do you get up to with that boyfriend of yours? See, you’re not looking at me, so I know it’s true.

  I try to think if I’ve ever seen a Simpsons where a human goes running through a wall and leaves a person-shaped hole.

  Wait till you taste these chips, calls my mum.

  Shane is under my mum’s Subaru in the driveway. What a shitheap, he says. I ask him what he’s fixing up and he says the carby. He’s out there for a long time even when Mum tells him to come inside and have dinner, which is just pasta tonight. It is those little shell ones. I get a clean one onto the side of my plate and imagine it is something in the sea where an animal lives. Ellie is working tonight at Subway. Shane and my mum argue outside about the car and something in the garage gets knocked over. Whatever you’ve taken out you’d better put back in because I need it tomorrow, says Mum, and Shane says look it’s just not that simple. I could curl up inside this soft shell and it would be like a hammock in there, all warm. That’s all I want to write for today.

  If Georgia came over to my house we could make hot Milo and some of that popcorn that you cook in the microwave. She told me she was on camp once and they had toasted marshmallows on sticks over the fire. We could do them under the griller. We have a packet of wooden skewers. We could draw horses and do the colouring in and then we could watch Saddle Club and if she wanted we could put on some of Mum’s nail polish. Even just do our homework together. I always do my homework when I come home from school. Mum says I sure didn’t get that gene off her. I like to sketch but Mum says that’s not going to impress the teachers and she wasn’t still paying off a colour printer and a computer with internet so I could just do drawings.

  First there is Home and Away then Deal or No Deal. If Georgia came over we could go into my room and Mum wouldn’t keep knocking and asking me what I was doing because when you have a friend over that explains it.

  And if Shane came over he would leave us alone I hope.

  OK, goodbye for now.

  Mrs Carlyle said who’s been writing things in their diary and nobody put up their hand so I kept mine down too, just in time. Someone said there’s nothing to write about and Mrs Carlyle said why not write about something that happened to you when you were little, like learning to ride a bike or Christmas or a favourite toy.

  I have a doll that my Aunty Jacinta gave me for Christmas two years ago when we went to their place in the country. The doll has a long dress and hidden u
nder the dress instead of feet is another doll and you can pull it all inside out. She is first of all like Cinderella when she was dressed in patchy clothes and when you pull the dress over the other side has Cinderella in her ball gown and she has a crown on her head. The whole doll is knitted. When my mum saw it she laughed. My older brother Zac had come with us for Christmas and she rolled her eyes at him and nudged him and said see, told you it would be like The Waltons, but Zac just said who are The Waltons? and he wouldn’t look at her. I don’t know Zac very well because he has lived with another family since before I was born. There’s just been Ellie and me even though Mum had three other children before us, Dylan, Zac and Tegan. Anyway Zac was there and it felt strange because the cousins were all like new kids at a strange school, not talking, and my mum said I had so many dolls at home already I was just getting spoiled and to say thank you to Aunty Jacinta for the homemade one.

  I said I love her, I love her crown, thank you. Aunty Jacinta leaned over and gave me a hug and she smelled so nice, not like perfume but just cups of tea and shampoo, and she said softly she doesn’t have to be Cinderella, Tyler, you can give her a new name if you like. Then my mum jumped up and said are we allowed to have a glass of wine or do we have to say grace first round here.

  After lunch when we got into the car to come home Zac said just drop me off at the station and Mum said I thought you were staying for a few days and he just shrugged and shook his head. Mum said there probably won’t even be a train on Christmas Day and he said I checked and there is.

  After we dropped him Mum said he always was an ungrateful little shit, wasn’t he, Ellie? Do you remember, Ellie, how he always took his father’s side? Ellie said no she couldn’t remember. I wished she had just said yes because then Mum wouldn’t have kept going. I knew she would and she did. All the Christmas lunch in my stomach turned into a hard cold stone as she started talking on and on about how Aunty Jacinta and Uncle Matt thought they were so great and they didn’t even have a plasma and they’d always been like that, always judging her, and Jacinta had always been the favourite with Grandma and how neither of them had given her any support when she’d got pregnant with Tegan and she’d had to move out of home too young and that’s what had started all the problems. Mum said they both denied it but she was sure either Jacinta or Grandma had been the one to dob her in to the department and that was how she’d lost Tegan and she couldn’t trust anyone, they were all shits to her even her family.

  I looked at my doll’s wool hair that Aunty Jacinta had sewed on and made into two little plaits, they were so neat and perfect, tied with thin red ribbon.

  When I look at my doll now I remember all this exactly like it happened.

  I wrote a card to Aunty Jacinta last year and she wrote a card back to me. Here is what she said: ‘Dearest Tyler, we missed you this year and we’re sorry you couldn’t make it back here again for Christmas. Remember, Ty, we think you’re wonderful and would love to see you again any time.’ On the bottom of the card was a little arrow pointing to the back where she’d written her phone number and her small writing saying: ‘If you ever need to ring me for anything at all, here’s the number.’ Mum already had that number in the phone book, but Aunty Jacinta must have forgotten. I put the card in my box. I called my doll Calypso. It’s just a nice word.

  If I had a bike I would of written about that instead.

  On Saturday mornings early my mum says I’m allowed to watch cartoons then she goes back into her room. When I peek in as I go past I see an orange shawl over the lamp and a bare foot sticking out of the bed from under the doona. It is Shane’s foot, he has a snake tattoo on his ankle. Do you like my tattoo? he said once, lifting up his foot to show me. I said didn’t it hurt? and he said yep it sure did. He made me read out the words under the snake and said and don’t you forget it, that’s the truth, babe.

  If you get something written on your skin it’s like you imagine yourself blank like a piece of paper, ready for words, but the bones in Shane’s ankle bumped up underneath so the letters were crooked. The snake had fangs that were much too big, like a cartoon snake, when they open their mouths their jaw goes right back and the fangs fill the screen and that’s impossible. The person they’re attacking starts running in midair without going anywhere and first you hear bongo drums and then the noise they’re supposed to make when they run really fast.

  One thing about the early Saturday cartoons is that sometimes they show the old ones about the cat chasing the mouse. He makes up all these plans to get the mouse but never gets him, then they wreck the house again, running over and over again past the same lamp and the same chair. Sometimes the cat or the coyote gets big red sticks of dynamite and it always happens that they get it wrong and the dynamite blows up their head. Anyone knows you wouldn’t survive that but they do. They just shake their heads, which have gone black like someone’s dropped a packet of black powder onto the floor and it’s split open, then suddenly they’re back to normal. They can still run so fast they’re a blur.

  Live fast die young leave a pretty corpse is what Shane’s tattoo says. A corpse is a body like on NCIS. I don’t know how you’d stay pretty if you were dead. I watch the cartoons listening for when Shane gets up so I can run and get dressed because I don’t like being just in my pyjamas when he’s here. It just feels funny.

  My birthday today. I got my present from my grandma. As soon as I saw it I knew it wasn’t the tin. It was a long plastic packet of coloured pencils all different colours but when I coloured with them it wasn’t the same. With Georgia’s Derwents it feels soft when you colour and it goes on dark and strong. These pencils feel gritty like there’s sand in them and no matter how hard you press the colour isn’t very good. Say thank you to your grandma, said my mum, for your lovely pencils. Grandma said they’re just what she wanted, aren’t they, Tyler?

  Mum said that next year I can have a party and we can go to Lollypops Fun Centre. Ellie said that place is for preschoolers, and Mum said well, Maccas then. We had a birthday afternoon tea because Ellie couldn’t stay home for dinner, she had a shift at Subway till 9.30. She whispered to me in the kitchen sorry, Tyler we’ll do something good next year, just you and me, don’t worry. I said I didn’t care because I had cupcakes at school today. Shane wasn’t there tonight because Grandma doesn’t know about him yet. Mum says she’ll introduce them when the time’s right. She says Grandma always interferes and wrecks her chances when it’s none of her business so don’t tell her yet. Ellie asked her why not and she said first Shane has to get his parole period out of the way and get his gold star for staying clean. Maybe that’s why Shane comes over to our place to have a shower and get changed. Much later when I was in bed Ellie came in and woke me up and said come into my room. We lay in her bed and she opened a bag from the mall and inside were two little mirror disco balls and two torches. We put batteries in and shone the lights on the mirror balls and sparkling dots went everywhere, all around the corners of the room, spinning. It was like we were floating in the solar system. It was lovely and warm in Ellie’s bed.

  Thank you for making the cupcakes today, Mrs Carlyle. It was great when everyone sang.

  My mum says she is going to have a new job. Centrelink is running it and it is sewing. She is good at sewing and she already has the overlocker Aunty Jacinta gave her to make tracksuit pants and tops two years ago.

  It is very heavy and she has to lift it up onto the kitchen table. Ellie asks her what she’s sewing and Mum says designer things. She says it is support to start her own small business.

  She shows me a pattern and it is not clothes, it’s a doll. Sort of like a doll anyway. Like a prep kid’s drawing, just a round soft shape with big eyes and two useless little arms sticking out the side. Mum has rolls of felt and soft velvet, stretchy fur material for the clothes. The dolls are called Glamour Plushies.

  Designer plush toys, Mum says reading from her pattern
page. They’re just for fun. I’m going to sell them in that shop with the cushions and teak furniture in the mall, that Asian one.

  Are they the scissors? is all Ellie says. The ones that cost forty-five bucks?

  Mum says I told you I would pay you back so lose the attitude. She lines up material on the table and Ellie just turns away rolling her eyes.

  Mum tells me the scissors are just for special sewing, not for my school stuff or craft things. She says that will wreck them. There is a special tag that gets sewn onto the dolls when they’re finished with a card tied on it that says: ‘Glamour Plushies are soft, loveable critters that teach us that beauty is only skin-deep. When you adopt one of these adorable soft monsters you are showing your warm-hearted side, a valuable lesson presented by cutely irresistible toys designed and created with great care.’ Mum says you will have to help me round the house more, Tyler, so I can get my first order finished for the assessment. I have to make twelve.

  So I cook the chicken with the simmer sauce while she cuts out the pieces and says we will eat dinner on our laps tonight so I can leave the overlocker and all my work on the table OK? And I say OK even though we always eat dinner on our laps anyway because Mum is hooked on Survivor.

  The stuff for the Glamour Plushies takes up all the room on the table so I have to do my project on the glories of Ancient Greece on my bed after dinner. It’s hard to write neatly.

  Mum hears me snipping and rustling when she comes down the hall to her room and calls out they better not be the good scissors.

  They’re not. They’re the plastic ones that don’t cut. Pictures stuck down with the glue that doesn’t stick, coloured in with the pencils that don’t colour. Sorry, Mrs Carlyle.

  Mum nearly finished two whole dolls today when I got home from school. She said the overlocker doesn’t really work properly on the felt so she’s worked out how to do the blanket stitch by hand. The dolls have big round eyes and little mouths like cats or big open mouths with teeth and they stick their arms straight out the side like they’re running towards you afraid. Out of like a fire or away from a scary thing. They are not dolls, they are more like cartoon monsters. Ellie was doing her homework in her room and I went in there. Her room is nice and she bought some curtains for herself at Spotlight and a hot pink mosquito net. I looked at Ellie’s homework which is so hard because she is in Year 10. It was science and she had written, red blood cells plus white blood cells plus platelets plus water equals blood. There was a picture of platelets and they looked like biscuits. When I get to high school I want to do art in the art room where they have easels. I saw them when we went to Ellie’s school for parent-teacher. You stand up and paint and they have huge pieces of paper you’re allowed to use, as many as you like. And also a pottery wheel. It’s those things that make me want to go to the secondary school even though there’s hundreds and hundreds of kids there. I get worried I might forget where my locker is in all those corridors. You get a locker with a combination so that only you can open it. Maybe the other kids want to steal your stuff. You would never know who because there are so many kids there is no way a teacher would notice that or even remember everyone’s names. Ellie says she just does the subjects that are going to get her good marks, not art, so that she can do something at TAFE or uni. That is why she works part time too, to save all her money. When she and Mum fight Mum says set your sister a good example, and Ellie says I’m setting her the best example I can, which is how to get the fuck out of here.