The History of Mischief

by Rebecca Higgie

  I turned sixteen during the school holidays. Our lighthouse community came together to celebrate, save for Mother who rested and Alexander Senior who was on shift. Alexander Jnr took a piece of cake to him and had it knocked out of his hand. He was just shy of his eighteenth birthday, and taller than his stout father, yet he shrunk as the man berated him for failing to polish the iron balcony to an acceptable standard. My day was spent listening to a man’s shouting compete with the ocean dashing itself against the rocks. I felt sad.

  Soon, my sadness slid into terror. I hadn’t had a period for two months. I developed a nasty ‘stomach bug’.

  I stood at the top of the lighthouse stairs, wondering if the fall would hurt me enough to miscarry but not to die. Father caught me staring many times.

  ‘You afraid of heights all of a sudden?’ he’d tease.

  I smiled but said nothing. The terror consumed me completely. All I thought was how to escape it. One night, I couldn’t take it anymore. I needed to see Henry.

  I snuck out soon after Father started his night shift. I hopped on my bicycle and made my way towards Augusta, the beam from the lighthouse my only light.

  Then the spotlight seemed to be following me. It was the ute. Mother was in the driver’s seat.

  ‘Get in,’ she said to me. Not ‘where are you going?’ Not ‘why are you out late?’ Just ‘get in’.

  We returned to the lighthouse. Mother sat with me at the kitchen table, a cup of tea in one hand and her head in the other. She looked at me through glazed, angry eyes. Tears were already spilling out of mine.

  Finally, she spoke, ‘You were going to see a boy.’

  I said nothing.

  ‘You girls think I don’t know anything,’ she said. ‘Who were you going to see?’

  ‘No one, Mama.’

  She leant into her hand and closed her eyes. ‘Do I need to get your father?’

  A fresh wave of tears came as I thought of Father finding out. I shook my head.

  ‘Who were you going to see?’

  My answer came out in a whisper. ‘Henry.’

  ‘The Aboriginal boy?’

  I nodded.

  ‘You’re a monstrous little girl.’

  I put my face in my hands and wept. I don’t know how I got the courage to say it.

  ‘Mama, I’m pregnant.’

  She said nothing at first. She just stared at me. Then she threw her cup at me. I gasped as the hot tea hit me. The cup smashed. Mother hit me.

  ‘How could you do this?’ she screamed.

  She hit me again, this feeble angry slap. Then, I can’t remember how, I hit back, just to block her. She fell. Everything stopped. It was quiet. Mother was on the floor. She wasn’t moving. No one came running. Nothing moved. Only the spotlight, flashing through the windows.

  ‘Mama,’ I said.

  She just lay there.

  I ran out of the cottage. The wind buffeted me about as I made my way to the lighthouse. I ran past it and stumbled down the rocks. The clashing oceans pulsated every time the light passed over them. I stood on the edge, crying as I remembered all the times Henry and I had watched those two oceans colliding from his cave. His tender little comment, ‘like you and me’, as if he could ignore how violently the waves hit one another. I cried bitterly, letting the howling wind take away the sound of my anguish. I saw my only solution in the waves. I jumped.

  Someone grabbed me from behind. We stumbled and went down hard.

  ‘Lou, it’s okay.’

  A young man’s voice.

  For a moment, I thought it was Henry. The light passed over us. In a flash, I saw Alexander Junior. I writhed like a rabbit in a trap, trying to escape. He held me tight, muttering over and over again, ‘It’s okay, it’s okay. Whatever’s wrong, I can help.’

  He dragged me off the rocks, bundled me up and took me to the foot of the lighthouse.

  I cried and cried. It felt like hours. He whispered promises, told me he’d hide me, protect me, help me escape whatever was bothering me. He said he hated his father, he was so alone. He was leaving, tomorrow if I wanted. He even had his own car.

  He took me to the cottage he shared with his father. Hid me in his room, told me not to make a sound. My whole being was a blur, as if my mind was disconnected from my body. I waited for him to take me back to the cottage where Mother lay motionless on the floor. But he never did.

  ‘I can’t stay here,’ he said.

  Finally, I spoke. ‘Neither can I.’

  We got in his car. We drove over those roly-poly hills, the light chasing but never catching us. We drove through Augusta, through Karridale, through bush still black with the fire from years ago.

  I left everything. I left Henry. I left Chloe. I left my mother, unsure if she ever got up. There was no going back, I told myself. My mother. The pregnancy. It was better to be missing. It was better to be dead.

  We drove non-stop, Alexander talking incessantly, like he was making up for lost time. He told me how he’d wanted to do this for years, just run away.

  ‘And now,’ he said joyously, ‘we’re both free.’

  I didn’t think to ask where we were going.

  After hours on the road, tall dark spires erupted from the horizon, muddied by smoke from a bushfire. As we got closer, the skyscrapers came into view. Their blocky-concrete-metalness contrasted with vibrant green hills that I’d later learn was Kings Park. We went over the Narrows Bridge. I stared at the water, hoping we’d fall in.

  We bypassed the city centre, veered off to a suburb nearby. Finally, we stopped on a street with five shops. It looked like Augusta’s main street, only with thinner roads and buildings in the background instead of bush.

  Finally, I asked, ‘Where are we?’

  ‘Bookshop!’ he said, as if that explained it all.

  We approached a two-storey, terrace-style building, with a sign in calligraphy: Summers’ Books – Antique, Rare and Unique Bookseller. We went through a front door with a sign that read, in similarly elegant font, NO TIME WASTERS. A bell tinkled to announce our arrival.

  The bookshop was very romantic. Dusty shelves bowed in the middle from the weight of all the books. Countless volumes scattered on the floor. An old man with a shock of white hair sat behind a desk and a glass cabinet displaying what promised to be the store’s most precious collection. He looked up, saw us and dropped his book.

  ‘He’s dead!’ he proclaimed.

  ‘No, Papu, I left,’ Alexander said.

  ‘Oh,’ the man said, disappointed.

  He shuffled over, his back stooped. He grasped Alexander’s arms, pulled him down and kissed him on both cheeks. ‘You sure you didn’t push him off that lighthouse?’

  Alexander smiled. ‘No, Papu.’

  ‘Bugger,’ he said. He looked at me. ‘Who’s this?’

  ‘A friend.’

  He eyed me suspiciously, glancing at my belly as if he knew. Then, he turned his head and shouted, ‘Owen, come here!’

  ‘Coming!’ A voice came from deep within the bookshop.

  ‘Now, you wretched thing!’

  ‘Coming!’ the voice yelled back. ‘I’ve just found those Dostoevskys you wanted, Christ!’

  A young man came out, cobwebs in his hair and three giant books in his arms. His look of annoyance vanished when he spotted us.

  ‘Alex!’ he exclaimed. The two embraced. Then he turned to me. ‘Lizzy, right? Or Chloe?’

  Alexander tried to correct him. ‘No –’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. In that moment, my name changed. ‘Lizzy.’

  ‘Heard all about you! You’re a reader too, yes?’

  I nodded. Tea was put on and chairs relieved of their book piles as we gathered in the back room. Despite calling the old man ‘papu’, Alexander wasn’t his grandson. I never figured out how they knew each other, but gathered it had something to do with his mother. Old Man Summers called Alexander ‘pup’, ‘a little papu’ he joked, because who would want to share the name of a father l
ike that.

  We were welcomed to the bookshop, told to consider it home. We lived upstairs. I was given a storeroom filled with books, broken bookshelves, and a sagging bed. Alexander slept on the floor in Owen’s room.

  I was to help in the shop and read only good books. Old Man Summers regularly smacked books out of my hand and replaced them with something that ‘wasn’t garbage’. Here, I read all the classics. I was given science textbooks and tomes on Greek philosophy. The only good books I wasn’t allowed to touch were the ones in the glass cabinet.

  New books arrived daily, so the same patrons would come in often to see what fresh rarities had arrived. Owen was particularly skilled at finding books. He also had no qualms about stealing them. He called it ‘confiscating’ or ‘rehoming’. He’d disappear for days. Come back with boxes. Say he’d had a successful meeting with a client. Old Man Summers would nod and say, ‘good lad’. Alexander took up this cavalier attitude, assisting Owen with his ‘rehoming’.

  Me, I just did what I was told. I cleaned up. I made lunch. One of my first jobs was the morning run: to the baker opposite to buy bread, the newsagent on the corner to get the paper, then back home to make a pile of fresh sandwiches and a pot of coffee. I never looked at the paper, frightened as if I knew what was written in those pages. One day, Old Man Summers waved it at me. I saw a glimpse of my face.

  ‘You want to be here, girl?’ he asked.

  I nodded.

  ‘What’s waiting for you back home then? What’s worth all this?’

  I cried but said nothing. From this, he assumed I’d escaped a monster like Alexander Senior or some other violence. He instructed me to cut my hair and never fetch the newspaper again. Newspapers, after all, were a poor man’s literature.

  I cut my long black hair, the same hair that earned Chloe her nickname of Pan. As I glared at my reflection, I knew this was it. I was never going back. When I went to fetch bread the next day, the baker didn’t recognise me. A. Mischief was dead.

  Books grew tiresome. Yet, my love of stories never died. I missed days spent getting tales out of Father, Uncle Martin, or anyone with something interesting to share.

  I started to linger in the bakery. It was a charming place, with loaves stacked high in wooden shelves behind a glass counter filled with delicate pastries. Many of the special items were named after people. The most popular bread, a twisted ring-shaped roll studded with poppy seeds, was called Mama and Tata’s obwarzanek. There were sweet pastries named Władysław’s and Ulryk’s rugelach, one filled with jam, and the other with nuts and raisins. An intricately braided chocolate loaf was Dorota’s babka. But my favourite was the treaclecoloured biscuits with a dusting of icing sugar in the shape of a dragon’s head – the Feliks.

  Though the bakery was inviting, the air sweet with the smell of baked bread and burnt sugar, the baker himself was not as welcoming. He was a gruff Polish man with a black beard forever flecked with flour. He was never rude, but his clipped manner didn’t invite conversation. Normally, his teenage daughter served the customers, but when it got busy, he had to help front of house. I tried asking once, ‘who do all these names belong to?’

  ‘Family,’ he answered. He handed me my loaf, my change, and turned his back. He tinkered at the till. I left but resolved to figure out his story.

  ‘You have a nice big family,’ I said the next day.

  ‘Had,’ he corrected, and gave me my bread.

  The next few mornings, he wasn’t there. His daughter served me. I learnt her name was Irena. In the afternoons, when everything was quiet, he sat outside the bakery, smoked half a pack of cigarettes, and talked animatedly to her. Smoke billowed out of him as he spoke. Despite the way he wildly gestured, the way her laughter filled the street, it seemed private.

  I tried a busier time. He was there again. I spoke as if we were still having the same conversation, ‘I don’t have a family.’

  ‘I hope you only have friendly ghosts that haunt you,’ he said.

  Irena glared at me. When I bought bread the next day, she gave me the most squished loaf.

  I examined her insult. ‘I’m sorry if I upset your dad.’

  She stared at me until I left. I gave up, though I still spied on the afternoon storytelling sessions with envy.

  Two weeks later, on the way back from the general store, I saw the baker smoking outside. He nodded a greeting.

  The bottom fell out of my bag. An entire carton of eggs smashed. I was feeling isolated, lonely. I missed Chloe. I missed Henry. I was sick all the time. So, of course, I burst into tears.

  The baker didn’t rush to console me. He just said, ‘There, there, love,’ and took the smashed carton inside. He came back out, the carton refilled.

  ‘You don’t need to do that,’ I said.

  ‘It’s fine,’ he said.

  I wiped my face. ‘I’m sorry. I’m not crying about the eggs.’

  He nodded. ‘I know.’

  These little encounters continued, tiny moments during the daily bread run. He asked, ‘Who’s looking after you then, love?’ I answered, ‘Friends, at the bookshop.’ Another day, he asked, ‘No siblings?’ I said, ‘Not anymore.’ A week later, ‘What happened?’ I lied, ‘Car accident,’ then truthfully, ‘I messed up.’ Two days later, ‘Who, love?’ I answered: ‘Mum, Dad, sister, boyfriend.’

  Finally, on a quiet afternoon, he came out from behind the counter. His finger traced along the glass, following the names.

  Mama

  Tata

  ‘Mum and Dad. Gas chambers.’

  Feliks

  ‘Starvation.’

  Dorota

  ‘Gas chambers.’

  Władysław

  Ulryk

  ‘We were separated. I like to think they escaped.’

  I couldn’t say anything. I felt a terrible fraud. I was a pregnant teenager who ran away. No one had been taken from me.

  And what do you say anyway, to something like that? I stared at those names, sad memories baked into something sweet, wanting to say how sorry I was. Instead, I asked, with as much kindness as I could, ‘What were they like?’

  He looked surprised, then he smiled sadly. He said, ‘They were good.’

  He never said anything about their deaths again. Never commented on the numbers inked into his left forearm, the ones that peeked out from his rolled-up sleeve on hot days. Instead, he told me about the family bakery in Krakow. He was especially attached to his brother Feliks and cousins Władysław and Ulryk. He spoke at length about the games they played, of times spent slaying imaginary dragons. Once they’d managed to convince his Uncle Jozef, who worked in the salt mines, to take them down for a tour.

  Though the war was never spoken of directly, there was always sorrow in his tales. He spoke of ‘whispers’, of how life had been filled with some murmur of what was to come. There were also so many gaps. He’d forgotten his father’s gingerbread recipe and most of his mother’s folktales.

  ‘Death kills more than people,’ he told me.

  It took a week of searching, but I found a book of Polish folktales. I stole it when Old Man Summers was snoozing, though I suspect he knew, as he insisted on ordering me around in Polish for the rest of the week. It was worth it.

  When I gave it to the baker, memories came out of those pages. He flicked through, showing Irena and me stories he remembered. He came across ones he’d never heard, but then halfway through he’d cry out and retell it with different details. We came across the Dragon of Wawel. He ran his fingertips over the faded line drawing of Krakow’s dragon.

  ‘My name is from this,’ he said. ‘Serafin means many things … all names do, I guess. Something to do with angels, I think. But Feliks said it meant ‘burning one’ in Hebrew. Feliks wanted a dragon, so that’s what he called me. I had another name, the one my parents gave me. I forget it now.’

  Slowly, his tales of joy and loss were interwoven with kind, soft questions about my own history. The real lying began here. Think
ing of Uncle Martin, I made my father a butcher, said my grandparents came from France and that they’d fought in the resistance. Lie upon lie poured out. I too didn’t tell of their deaths. A car accident seemed enough. One doesn’t talk about death, I learnt, one talks around it. I was Elizabeth, Lizzy to her friends, the pregnant orphan. Lighthouses, mischief, sisters who moved like panthers, and stolen boys who shared books: these stories were written out of my history.

  The next well of stories came to me through flowers. Owen was smitten with a young woman at the newsagent. She was willowy, delicate, and always had fresh flowers in her hair. Owen started bringing her blooms, all of which were stolen. He went around with a pair of scissors. Nothing was off limits: clients’ gardens, neighbours’ window-boxes, the roses in the Nedlands War Memorial.

  ‘You steal flowers like you steal books,’ I said one day.

  ‘I don’t steal books, I confiscate them,’ Owen said.

  ‘Rehome!’ Old Man Summers called from his desk.

  ‘Yes,’ Owen echoed. ‘Rehome.’

  Owen roped Alexander into his misadventures. Soon I was receiving flowers, left in a vase outside the storeroom. The boys never crossed the threshold into my space. Anything in the store could only be retrieved with my permission.

  The flowers annoyed me. Not because they were, I suspected, the rejects, but because they were the spoils of mischief. Finally, when I found a colourful bouquet outside my room, I took the whole bunch and threw it at Alexander.

  Later that night, his voice came from the other side of my door, soft and careful.

  ‘Lizzy?’

  I ignored him.

  ‘I’m not sure what I did, but I’m sorry. I know you’re going through a lot.’

  I was showing now. Five months, I guessed.

  ‘I’m sorry if I’ve been unkind.’

  I didn’t answer, but he stayed there. He sent through little acknowledgements of how I must be feeling. Every allusion to my pregnancy brought tears. I wanted to be that little girl again, the girl who blew bubbles into the wind at the top of the lighthouse. Eventually, I ripped the copyright page out of a water-warped book. Wrote on the blank side. Slid it under the door.