Undine

by Penni Russon

  “Oh,” said Undine, with a grin. “Whoops.”

  “What’s this?” Duncan asked.

  Fran raised her eyebrows at him. “She wags school, then she shows up at the pub.”

  “What a rebel!” said Duncan. “I don’t know if I want you hanging around with her, Fran. She might be a bad influence.”

  “Yes, Mum! Anyway, Undine could wag the whole year and still get great marks.”

  Exams! Undine groaned inwardly, and then with an enormous mental effort, heaved studying into the same closed box already occupied by Trout, Lou, possibly Mim, and the storm of the previous night. “I wish,” she said, lightly. “I think my math teacher might have something to say about that. If he could get the words out while he’s choking with disbelief.”

  “Ah, math teachers,” Duncan reminisced, “the great unbelievers.”

  Undine and Richard walked silently together up the hill.

  It was dark by the time they left the pub, but Undine didn’t care. She felt fuzzy from the two beers she had drunk, the first slowly, with small, sour sips, the second with less discomfort. Beer, she had decided, was good. Beer was her friend. Beer kept everything at arm’s length. It was so much easier to trivialize her world when she had beer on her side.

  She would even say she had developed something of a taste for it. Not enough to want to drink it every night, but a taste for beer was useful, as it was the cheapest of drinks, apart from some nasty fruity things that were not socially acceptable, except at exclusively female Year 8 slumber parties.

  She was extremely aware of Richard beside her. The warmth of his body seemed to emanate toward her even though they were not touching.

  Duncan and Fran had offered her a lift home.

  “It’s okay. It’s a nice walk. I’ll be all right.”

  “You are so not walking home on your own,” Fran had insisted.

  “Of course she isn’t,” Richard had said, appearing behind Undine. “She’s walking home with me.” From where she was standing Undine hadn’t been able to see him, but she could feel him and the sound of his deep voice vibrated around her and made the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end.

  Duncan and Fran had subtly dissolved at that point, after Fran had given Undine a hug and said, “I’m so glad you came tonight,” into Undine’s ear.

  Two minutes later Undine realized why Fran had been so glad of her company. Left alone with Richard and a few others, including Dan and the hair-flicker, Undine realized how out of place she would have felt if Fran hadn’t been there. They stood around talking about university and exams and Richard’s upcoming archaeology trip. There were others in the group going on the trip, and Undine tried to suss out whether one of them would be the blond hair-flicker.

  “What do you study?” the hair-flicker had asked Undine. Dan had answered for her.

  “She’s in Year 11. With Trout.”

  “Oh. Lucky you. Trout’s such a sweetie. Unlike his big boofhead brothers.”

  “Watch it,” said Richard, and they had started a jokey slanging match, thinking up various insults for each other. It was a game that Richard and the blond girl had obviously played before, and it was one that excluded Undine. She stood silently waiting for them to finish, feeling prudish and prim.

  Dan seemed to notice but did nothing to help her, and as the game drew to a close, he pulled Richard to one side. This was even more awkward than watching Richard and the hair-flicker’s game; at least that had been a public display, something she could watch, so that to the outside observer she might have appeared part of it. Dan and Richard’s angry murmuring in the corner was obviously not for her to hear, and though she tried clumsily to engage the blond girl again—“What’s your major?” seemed the standard opener for uni students—the girl either didn’t hear her or deliberately ignored her and Undine was left with her poor discarded question hanging in the air. It may as well have been painted in fluorescent colors, she felt so obviously out of place.

  Now she was finally alone with Richard, which had felt so easy and natural only this morning, but with Richard’s silence, it suddenly seemed awkward and painful. She wondered if the blond girl was Richard’s girlfriend, but she didn’t know how to ask. Maybe that had something to do with why Dan was so wild with Richard.

  They were not far from home when Richard broke the silence. “Did you have fun tonight?”

  “Yes.” Undine only half lied, because it had been fun before Fran and Duncan left. Surprisingly so. Undine had achieved what she would have thought impossible—feeling like a fun, frivolous teenager.

  Richard became distracted again, and Undine wanted to leave it alone, but her mouth opened before her brain kicked in. “Is everything okay?”

  As soon as she asked it she wanted to take it back, because she wasn’t really sure she wanted to hear the answer.

  “Dan had a go at me.”

  “Yes,” said Undine. Dan had also given her a rather greasy look as he left, after declining Richard’s invitation to walk with them in favor of a ride in Grunt’s car, which was a surprisingly cute little Fiat-y thing. Undine thought it better not to mention the look.

  “Are you and Trout…? I mean, are you…?”

  “What?”

  Quietly Richard said, “Dan seemed to think I was stealing you away from Trout.”

  Undine bristled. “No one is stealing me away from anyone. I’m not a thing. And I am not Trout’s girlfriend. Trout and I have never been anything but friends. We haven’t! Despite what Fran and my mother and Dan and…” She looked at Richard, her anger diminishing, replacing itself with disappointment. “…and you might think.”

  “What about Trout?” Richard asked. “What does he think?”

  Undine shook her head. “I can’t help what Trout thinks. But I have never said or done anything to make him think we’re anything more than friends.”

  They reached Richard’s house. They lingered outside, silence hanging between them. “Look, I can’t say that I don’t care what Dan says, or what Trout thinks,” Richard said. “I do care.”

  “So do I.”

  Richard looked into her eyes. The buzz between them intensified. She stopped feeling like an awkward, inexperienced teenager. She looked him in the eye and held his gaze.

  They seemed to be getting closer together. Neither of them appeared to be moving but now their faces were almost touching.

  “Dan thinks you’re trouble,” Richard murmured.

  Undine smiled, a wry, sideways smile. “That makes me sound so exciting.”

  “I think you’re exciting.” His voice was still soft, mesmerizing—or mesmerized.

  “Your mum isn’t exactly my greatest fan either.”

  “That’s only because you’ve got sexy legs.”

  Undine laughed. “I have to go. I still have a fight with Lou to repair.”

  “All right,” Richard whispered. She felt his nose brush her cheek. “Off you go then.”

  Neither of them moved. Then Richard leaned in and kissed her.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  There are two ways for a star to die.

  A star more than eight times the mass of the earth’s sun will become a supernova. It will burn hot and blue until it exhausts the hydrogen at its core; then it will burn helium, then carbon, neon, oxygen, and finally silicon. Silicon burns into iron and iron does not burn at all. The star runs out of energy and explodes and collapses, shining with the light of a billion suns, spinning in space, pulsing like a lighthouse. A smaller star will gradually shed its outer atmospheres and form a bubble of expanding gas around itself, becoming cold and dense, what’s known as a white dwarf.

  Trout, whose feelings for Undine seemed to burn inside him, thought of his heart as an enormous star, pulling about it masses of energy. He had always supposed that his love for Undine would eventually burn everything he had, all his resources, and that one day his heart would supernova, leaving an absence that would be as present as a living sun, his damaged he
art spinning and pulsing with light.

  Instead, when he saw Richard lean in and kiss Undine, his heart sealed over. It became cold as liquid nitrogen.

  He watched her say good night, and turn and bound up the stairs toward him, not seeing him where he sat like an obedient puppy outside her front door in the shadow of her house. He had been sitting there for how long? An hour. More. He wished desperately that he could make himself disappear. Whatever it was that was forming around his heart thickened and seized him when she did notice him.

  “Oh, Trout,” she said, and she was sorry for him, he could see sympathy all over her face. He couldn’t bear it. He stood up and pushed past her, hating her, and stumbled down the stairs, almost falling.

  The front door slipped in his hand and slammed, bringing his parents from the living room, the somber murmur of the television news seeping out with them. Richard stood frozen on the stairs, his hand on the banister, his features arranged in an almost comical imitation of the expression Trout had just seen on Undine’s face.

  Trout wanted to pull him from the stairs down onto the hall floor, to pummel him with his fists like he had when he was a small boy. But now, as then, Trout knew he would have no effect on Richard. Richard could not be hurt by his younger brother. Richard would always be older, bigger, stronger. And besides, his mother would pull Trout off, and then scold not Trout but Richard, because Trout was the youngest and his asthma made him weak.

  Worse, Trout imagined hitting Richard with everything he had, and Richard laughing. And in his mind he could see Undine laughing as well, splitting the veneer of sympathy that she wore for him.

  Richard opened his mouth to say something. Trout felt a spasm of anger. “Don’t speak to me,” he hissed.

  “What’s going on?” Mrs. M asked, looking from Trout to Richard. Richard looked at Trout.

  “Leave it, love.” Mr. Montmorency put his hand on his wife’s shoulder. “Let them work it out.”

  Mrs. M waited, looking questioningly at Trout.

  Trout shook his head. “Nothing’s going on. I’m going to bed.”

  Richard followed him up the stairs. “Come on, Trout. We have to talk about this.”

  Trout turned around and for a moment he got what he thought he wanted. The expression on his face wounded Richard, and Trout realized for the first time that there were new ways to hurt his brother.

  “I said”—Trout spoke through clenched teeth—“don’t talk to me.”

  Trout closed his bedroom door and went to the window. Undine stood at her front door, where he had left her.

  He stood there for some time watching her front door, even after she had disappeared inside the house, his hands shaking, his chest aching with loss.

  Lou was already in bed when Undine came inside. Undine stood outside Lou’s door, hoping Lou was waiting up for her. What Undine really wanted to do was slip into bed beside Lou, like she used to when she was little, and lie there listening to Lou breathe.

  It bothered Undine that she hadn’t had a chance to make up with Lou before she went to bed. It was rare for an argument to go unresolved between them for more than a few hours.

  Undine put the kettle on and sat at the kitchen table. Her brain felt like a clothes dryer. The dueling images of Richard, his face so close to hers in that moment before he kissed her, and Trout, his face twisted with betrayal, fought for her attention.

  Then her eyes caught the page-three headlines in the newspaper that lay open in front of her, and she forgot both of them.

  FREAK STORM CATCHES WEATHER WATCHERS BY SURPRISE

  Last night’s storm “appeared to come from nowhere,” said baffled weather watcher Bill Wells from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO). The Bureau of Meteorology today released satellite images tracking the storm’s development. Wells says they prove the storm was impossible to predict.

  “You can see from the images that the storm formed very quickly in a highly localized area on the fringe of the city. This is unusual as storms in the Greater Hobart area usually move in from the coast.

  “The clouds formed quickly, which is also uncommon. The temperature rose suddenly just before the storm, which vanished as fast as it appeared.”

  Bill Wells believes the storm was simply an unusual weather phenomenon, caused by a sudden rise in atmospheric pressure. However, he does concede it may have been caused by environmental changes due to global warming and the greenhouse effect.

  The sudden storm brought down trees, caused confusion on the roads, and blacked out power in some metropolitan areas, but so far no injuries have been reported.

  Next to the article there was a photograph of Bill Wells looking suitably baffled and an incomprehensible reproduction of the satellite image, showing storm clouds like beaten egg whites frothing over the sky.

  Undine read the article a few times over. She had avoided thinking about the storm all day, and it had become so unreal for her that she had almost managed to disown it. But here it was, written all over Bill Wells’ face.

  I should do something, she thought helplessly. But what? Send a bunch of flowers and a note of apology to the CSIRO? Turn herself in to the Bureau of Meteorology?

  In the end she did the only thing she could do. She went to bed.

  It occurred to Undine as she was lying in bed that maybe her father was a ghost.

  The disembodied voice could be a haunting, and she supposed the storm could be some kind of psychic energy. She concentrated on the storm, trying to remember the moment when it began, when she realized she was conducting it.

  Conduct. It was just the right word because it had two meanings. It could mean conduct like an orchestra conductor; they made things happen, they told the orchestra what to do. Or there were conductors like those used to conduct electricity: acted upon, merely enabling the passage of energy. So, she wondered, which was she?

  The idea of her father being a ghost made the message she had been hearing even more disturbing. It’s time to come home. When she had first heard it at Mim’s, she had assumed it meant this house, the only home she really knew, except maybe for the flat in Bellerive. But if he was a ghost, then…what? Home. What was home to a ghost?

  Her eyes drooped, heavy with sleep. Just before she dozed off, the image of Richard’s face appeared behind her lids, as though printed in her memory, and she smiled, Trout, for a moment, forgotten.

  Somewhere in the back of her mind, the voice kept whispering. “Undine, Undine, it’s time to come home…”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Undine dreamed she was drowning.

  Small bright fish poured from her mouth. Her hair twisted behind her like a trawler’s net. Above she saw the surface of the ocean, sun playing on the sheet of blue. The wooden keels of boats, like reverse shark fins, sliced through the water.

  She descended, sinking farther and farther below, past the gannets diving for fish, where the water was dark and cold, where old forgotten wrecked ships collapsed into the ocean floor, spilling their cargoes of silk and spice and tea.

  Down there, residing in the empty hull of a ghostly ship, were drowned sailors. They were not quite dead, but instead had become another type of sea creature: bloated, spongy, their eyes growing sideways, the narrow slits of gills appearing on their swollen throats.

  Undine panicked. She kicked, suddenly aware that she was unable to breathe. She tried to propel herself upward, but realized the dress she was wearing was weighted with stones that had been sewn into the lining. She desperately tried to pull open the stitches, but they wouldn’t come apart, so she tried to slip the dress off over her head. She got caught in it, and struggled violently. Her chest burned. Her mouth opened and, with horror, she began to breathe in mouthfuls of bitter, salty water…

  She had to fight herself awake.

  She lay alone in the dark, flooded with terror. She could feel her heart thumping rapidly. She lay there, trying to breathe normally, struggling to make herself feel ordi
nary again.

  In the dark the voice was almost comforting. Undine, it whispered. Undine. It’s time to come home.

  Undine must have slept again, because the next thing she knew, Lou was standing over her.

  “Since you’re not going to school again today,” she was saying, “you can look after Jasper. He’s got the flu or something. Day care won’t take him if he’s sick, and I’ve got things to do.”

  “I was planning on going to school.” Undine was only just awake and slightly confused at the direction the conversation seemed to be taking.

  “They told me on the phone yesterday that there were no classes today. Swot vac for your exams, isn’t it?”

  Exams. Oh lord.

  “Yeah. I forgot.”

  Swot vac was a week off, six school days including that Friday, to study for exams. The school library was open and teachers were available, but attendance wasn’t compulsory, so practically no one went.

  Undine sat up and wiped her eyes. She felt bleary and strange, either due to her harrowing night’s sleep, or the beer, or the events of the day before.

  She looked at Lou’s face and tried to figure out if things with Lou had righted themselves. Lou looked pale and trembly, as if she might have flu too. She didn’t smile at Undine, and gave no sign that the quarrel between them was over.

  “Right,” Lou said briskly. “I’m off then. You’ll look after Jasper?”

  “Wait, Lou, I…”

  But Lou was gone.

  Undine swung herself out of bed, ready to pursue Lou down the stairs. “Ugh,” she said as her foot landed on something damp. She looked down and there on the floor was a small pile of coarse yellow sand containing fragments of shell and a fine, beaded strand of seaweed. Beside it rested a thin, long-boned skeleton. It seemed to be some kind of bird, or parts of a bird: tapered sternum, arched pelvis, the slender hooked bone of a lower jaw, all washed smooth by the tide.

  And like the previous morning, she detected a strong but brief smell of salt, wind, and kelp. She took a few quick breaths and the smell was gone.