Daughter of the Regiment

by French, Jackie

  Dedication

  For the people who love chooks.

  To Edward and Joseph, who breed Araucana

  chooks; to Kay Sagar, an unexpected chook

  lover; and to Catherine, Ian, Conor, Tarin,

  Marnie, Ashlee, Dani, Patricia, Rowan,

  Eleanor, Justin, Matthew, Jerome, Micah, Joel,

  Nick, Sam, Natalie, Sarah, Carleigh, Danni,

  Anne-Marree, Jack, Marg, John, Ashley,

  Amanda, David, Darcy and Mr J, who gave me

  the names of Harry’s chooks … and to

  everyone else at Bolinda Primary School,

  with love.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One: The Hole in the Chookshed

  Chapter Two: Trying to Explain

  Chapter Three: Cissie

  Chapter Four: Trying to Make Sense of It

  Chapter Five: The Hole in Time

  Chapter Six: What Happens Next?

  Chapter Seven: Captain Piper

  Chapter Eight: Sunday

  Chapter Nine: Cissie’s Decision

  Chapter Ten: Discovered!

  Chapter Eleven: Monday

  Chapter Twelve: Looking for Cissie

  Chapter Thirteen: Cissie Returns

  Chapter Fourteen: Next Week

  Chapter Fifteen: Daniel

  Chapter Sixteen: Heart’s Place

  Chapter Seventeen: Decision

  Chapter Eighteen: Gone

  Chapter Nineteen: Searching for Cissie

  Chapter Twenty: Final Clue

  Chapter Twenty-One: Secret’s End

  About the Author

  Other Books By

  Back Ads

  Copyright

  chapter one

  The Hole in the Chookshed

  The chookhouse smelt of fresh droppings and laying mash and the slightly musty scent of feathers. The chookhouse always smelt, thought Harry. After it rained it smelt worse. When Dad had laid down fresh hay it smelt less; but it always smelt.

  It wasn’t a bad smell though, decided Harry, as he bent to collect the eggs. Sort of sweet, sort of … chooky.

  The hens peered in the door behind him, hoping he’d brought down scraps. Chooks smelt sort of friendly, as long as the stink wasn’t too strong.

  ‘Shoo,’ he said to a particularly persistent hen. That was Smokin’ Joe, the old Isabrown. Smokin’ Joe must be getting on for six years old, calculated Harry.

  Dad had bought the Isabrown chickens the year the bushfires burnt Blaine’s Gully. They’d thought Smokin’ Joe was going to be a rooster. She’d even crowed a few times, the sort of strangled crow roosters make before they’ve learnt how to do it properly. But then she’d laid an egg.

  Smokin’ Joe pecked at Harry’s feet, then looked up expectantly.

  ‘No, I haven’t brought you anything you dopey chook,’ declared Harry. ‘I’m just collecting the eggs. Mum already brought the scrap bucket down this morning. Remember?’

  Smokin’ Joe paid no attention. She crouched on the dusty floor.

  ‘Squark,’ said Smokin’ Joe.

  ‘Do you want to jump up and lay an egg?’ asked Harry. ‘Is that what’s wrong?’ He stepped back from the laying boxes, the old ice-cream container full of eggs in his hand. ‘Up you go then.’

  It was silly to talk to chooks, but Harry reckoned everyone probably did it. Just not when there was anyone around to hear. ‘I’m going to miss you if I have to leave next year Smokin’ Joe. Will you miss me?’

  Smokin Joe’s tiny black eyes gazed at him. She fluttered up into the old wooden fruit crate lined with hay that served as a laying box.

  It’d be a brown egg, thought Harry. Isabrown chooks always laid brown eggs, brown as your knees in summer, just like Leghorns laid white ones and Australorps’ eggs looked like they’d been dipped in milk with just a little chocolate added …

  ‘Clurrrk,’ said Smokin’ Joe as she settled down.

  In the next box old Sunset fluffed herself more firmly over her eggs. Sunset was an Araucana and laid blue eggs—tiny ones like they were made of painted china, not quite real. Everyone at school stared when Harry brought a blue hard-boiled egg for lunch.

  Sunset’s chickens would be half Araucana like Sunset, and half Australorp like Arnold Shwarzenfeather, the rooster. With a bit of luck Sunset’s chickens might lay blue eggs like their mother, but really big ones, like Australorps. Sunset had been sitting for nearly two weeks now.

  Smokin’ Joe wriggled impatiently on the nest. Chooks didn’t like anyone watching them lay.

  ‘Lay a good big one, Smokin’ Joe.’ Harry turned to leave. ‘Hey! What’s that …?’

  There was a light in the corner of the chookhouse, just below the perches. It pierced the gloom like a bit of sun had wandered in by mistake.

  Harry stared at it. There must be a hole in the corrugated iron, he thought. A new hole with a sunbeam glancing through. Dad had made the chookhouse with the rusty old iron from the hay shed roof, so it was always getting holes.

  Harry bent down under the perches. The light was incredibly bright in the dimness of the chookhouse. Surely the hole must be pretty large to let in so much light …

  Harry looked up at the roof. If there was a really big hole up there the rain would splash in and the chooks might get wet. Of course, their feathers kept them warm, but they still didn’t like to get wet.

  The roof seemed okay. Harry looked at it more closely. No, there definitely wasn’t a hole in the roof.

  Harry ran his fingers over the walls. No holes there, either.

  The light must be coming from somewhere. Not the door. It was at the wrong angle for the door. Harry peered at the light.

  It wasn’t really like a sunbeam at all. Sunbeams were long and slanting. This bit of light was round, like a hole on your jumper when the moths had been at it. It just sort of hung there, like it was a part of the dimness that someone had polished till it was bright. Almost as if it was solid.

  He was being silly. Of course it wasn’t solid …

  Harry put his fingers up to touch it. See, he told himself. Your fingers pass right through.

  Harry stopped. His fingers had disappeared.

  Harry pulled his fingers back towards him. They seemed alright, solid and slightly grubby. Maybe he had just imagined …

  Slowly, very slowly, Harry put his fingers back towards the light. His fingers shone as they neared it, went through it and …

  And immediately they vanished.

  Harry pulled his fingers back again, but slowly this time, watching them reappear millimetre by millimetre. He hadn’t imagined it. When he put his fingers into the light they vanished, and when they came out of the light he could see them again.

  Why?

  Maybe the light was a whatsit ray, just like in that movie … and everything it touched turned invisible.

  Except his fingers weren’t invisible. They were still there. They only vanished when they were in the light.

  What was the light?

  Harry looked at it closely. It was just light, that’s all. Just …

  Except it wasn’t. It wasn’t just light. The closer you got to it, the more you saw it was colour as well as light. Lots of colours, like a rainbow squeezed into the end of a plastic bag and all scrunched together. A bit like a TV, thought Harry, shining in the darkness from a distant room. Without thinking Harry put his eyes up against the light.

  What …! It was impossible. It couldn’t be real …

  The light wasn’t light. Or rather it wasn’t just light.

  The light was a window, a tiny window onto …

  What? thought Harry, as he peere
d into the hole. A window onto what?

  There were trees through the hole, up on the hills above the creek flats. Not special trees, not magic trees. Not the sort of trees you’d see in another universe, perhaps. Just ordinary trees: manna gums and peppermints and a few red gums just like there were here, above the casuarinas along the creek.

  The creek was like the one outside, except this other one had white-trunked gums along it instead of casuarinas, and there were waterlilies like splashes of white paint nudging at the boulders. It looked deeper, with soft, high grassy banks, and it was flowing more strongly. The water was clearer, too, so clear the clouds floated on the water like they were waterlilies.

  Water like that would taste sweet, thought Harry. It’d feel like ice-cream on your skin when you swam in it.

  The sky was blue, but a different colour blue to the blue outside the chookhouse. It was a deep midsummer blue, and high like a blown-up balloon so you’d think it would collapse if you pricked it. The sky today was cloudy, Harry remembered. A milky sort of blue.

  There was nothing else. No animals. No people. No houses or aliens, or spaceships or cars. The trees rustled, a currawong called in the distance, but Harry couldn’t tell if the sounds came from the hole or from outside.

  Harry took his eyes away. It was odd. Really odd. A sort of window in the chookhouse. But a window into what?

  ‘Harry! Have you got the eggs?’

  ‘Coming Mum,’ yelled Harry.

  He glanced one last time at the hole and galloped over the flat and up the path to the house. The old oaks squatted above him, as still in the heat as a chook on her nest. The giant agapanthus blooms stood like round blue soldiers of the guard along the path.

  ‘Mum?’

  ‘In here. I wish whoever finished the last of the toilet paper would get the next roll out. I remember your gran saying that if she had a penny for every roll of toilet paper she’d had to … just put the eggs on the table. I’ll sort them out later.’

  ‘Mum, there’s something funny in the chookshed.’

  His mother’s face appeared around the bathroom door. ‘Not that goanna again? If it takes one more egg I’m going to turn the hose on it.’

  ‘No, it’s a hole—’

  His mother’s face disappeared again. ‘I’m not surprised. That tin leaked like a sieve when it was up on the shed roof. Tell your dad at dinner time.’

  ‘No, Mum, not that sort of hole. It’s a …’

  ‘Oh blast it. There’s the phone, and I wanted to get the accounts finished before dinner. It’ll probably be your Aunt Gretchen wanting to tell me all about … what the … forget I said that word, Harry, you didn’t hear it, now I’ve knocked the blessed fern out of its hanger. Get the phone will you, love? I’ll be there as soon as I’ve put the poor thing back … oh look at all the mess …’

  chapter two

  Trying to Explain

  ‘Dad?’

  ‘Mmmm?’ Dad looked up from his gravy. Dad was fond of gravy. He’d eat a pig and never notice its feet, Mum said, as long as it had gravy. ‘Pass the potatoes will you, son? How was school? By the way, I meant to ask you, have you decided about boarding school yet?’

  ‘No,’ said Harry.

  Dad’s eyes sort of focused, as though his son was a farmer with 2000 prime steers to sell, and he was wondering how to get the commission. Dad was the stock and station agent up in town. You always knew when Dad got that really friendly tone in his voice that he was trying to sell you something, thought Harry.

  ‘I don’t want to pressure you Harry,’ Dad said earnestly. ‘It’s your choice whether you go or not. I’ve seen too many kids hate boarding school because they were forced to go. But just think of all the kids you’ll meet up there—kids from all sorts of places—’

  ‘Yeah,’ muttered Harry.

  ‘Not to mention all the subjects you can do,’ said Mum. ‘Chinese, Japanese, photography … you can’t even take a language at all at Bradley’s Bluff. Your cousin Elspeth is taking Indonesian now. It’s her favourite subject, and her mother says …’

  Whacko for Elspeth, thought Harry. He poked his silver beet over to the edge of his plate and watched the thin green water trickle out onto the mashed potatoes.

  Dad was silent for a moment. ‘If you’re not going to take up the place we really need to let the school know,’ he said finally.

  ‘I’m thinking about it,’ said Harry shortly. ‘Dad I saw something funny this afternoon. I mean really off. It’s this hole in the chookshed.’

  His father shrugged, and went back to his potatoes, carefully covering them with gravy before transferring them to his mouth. ‘Well, there’s not much I can do about it. I’m flat out at work at the moment. I’ve got three sales on next week and Stan’ll be cutting the lucerne if the weather holds.’ Dad and Grandad employed Stan Lennock to run their two farms. ‘I haven’t time to put a new roof on now and Stan certainly doesn’t. A few holes won’t hurt the chooks.’

  ‘No, I mean a funny hole. A really funny hole.’

  ‘That’s what you said this afternoon,’ remarked Mum. ‘Harry, don’t leave your silver beet on the side of your plate. Eat it. It’s good for you. I don’t know how you can expect to keep growing if you don’t. What do you mean, a really funny hole?’

  Harry took a breath. ‘I don’t quite know. I just thought it was an ordinary hole. Then I took a closer look at it, and I could see trees and the creek.’

  Dad looked puzzled. ‘But if you look through a hole in the chookshed that’s what you do see—the trees and the creek.’

  ‘But it wasn’t our creek … it was like our creek, but different. And the trees were a bit different, too. I mean, there were the same sort of trees, but not the ones that are really there. And the hole wasn’t in the wall of the shed. It was just hanging there.’

  ‘A hole doesn’t just hang there,’ said Dad.

  ‘This one does,’ insisted Harry.

  Mum frowned. ‘Are you sure you’re not making this up, Harry?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure. Come and look at it if you think I’m lying!’

  ‘I don’t think you’re lying,’ said Mum soothingly. ‘Just maybe mistaken …’ She glanced at Dad.

  Dad put his fork down. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Let’s have a look at this hole.’

  The garden smelt of freshly watered grass. The moon pushed its way effortlessly through the clouds, sending shadow dapples through the oak trees. It was hotter down on the flat below the garden. The grass shone dry and purple-gold in the moonlight.

  Dad clicked off the torch. ‘Don’t need it,’ he said. ‘You could almost read a newspaper out here tonight.’

  ‘Well, at least it’ll make it easy to see this hole of yours,’ said Mum. ‘The moonlight will shine right through it.’

  ‘Mum I tried to tell you—it isn’t that sort of hole.’

  Mum nodded.

  The chookshed smelled stronger at night, Harry realised, the sort of smell that sawed down into your throat each time you breathed. The hens sat hunched and motionless, their dirty claws grasping the old bit of pipe Dad had nailed up as perches. They didn’t even blink when the door opened.

  ‘It’s just over there,’ said Harry. ‘No, don’t put the torch on, Dad. You’ll see it better in the dark.’

  ‘I don’t see anything,’ said Mum.

  ‘It was here this afternoon!’ Harry looked round the shed desperately. Maybe the hole had moved.

  Dad clicked on the torch and shone it over the roof and walls. Spiders scuttled away, startled by the light. ‘No new holes that I can see,’ he said.

  ‘But it WAS here,’ insisted Harry. ‘It was this funny golden light and it just hung there. I’m not lying. I’m not.’

  ‘Of course you’re not lying,’ said Mum reassuringly. ‘It was probably just one of the old holes that you hadn’t noticed before.’

  ‘But it just HUNG there—’

  ‘Light can do funny things, son.’ Dad clicked the torch
off again. ‘I remember an old shed—you know the one that used to be on Lagos’s place before they built the new hay shed. I went in there one day and there was this great beam of light, like one of those laser things you see on TV and it was just coming through this pinhole in the ceiling.’

  ‘But Dad. It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t coming from anywhere.’

  ‘I remember when I saw a polar bear on the freeway just outside Sydney,’ said Mum. She shut the door of the chookhouse behind her, and latched it. ‘Do you remember that time, dear? Look, I yelled to your father, there’s a polar bear in that Kombivan. But when he looked the van was gone, of course. I wondered for years about that polar bear, then one day I saw one again outside the supermarket in town … but then when I went up close to it it was a dog, one of those Pyrenean Mountain dog things you see at the Show, and that must have been what I saw on the freeway, but I could have sworn it was a polar bear, just sitting up there beside the driver cool as you please …’

  It wasn’t LIKE that, thought Harry stubbornly as he tramped across the flat behind them. It wasn’t like that at all!

  But there was no use trying to explain to Mum and Dad.

  His room smelt of sweaty joggers and the summer jasmine twining up through the eaves outside the window. Harry couldn’t sleep.

  The hole HAD been there. He hadn’t imagined it. He could still see the creek with its dappling of waterlilies, the sky that stretched forever, the thick-trunked trees. There were only a few as thick as that on the farm now. Most of them had been taken for fence posts or for timber last century.

  Maybe the hole had moved. It hadn’t seemed to move while he looked at it, but maybe it had shifted. After all, it hadn’t been there yesterday afternoon. He’d been down at the shed for over an hour yesterday, just watching the chooks and wondering about boarding school—it always helped you think to look at chooks. He would have been sure to have seen it yesterday if it’d been there.

  Maybe the hole moved really slowly. Maybe it was down by the creek now, or even over near the giant orange tree. If he crept out now he might find it …

  Or maybe it really was a window to another world, and someone had shut the window. Though there hadn’t been anyone inside the hole when he’d looked through it…