Cicada Summer (3 page)

Curled on the white bedspread, Eloise fell asleep.

3

I
t was cold. Eloise pressed herself into the mattress. Her head swirled with images of floating pale figures, sunken ships, dark ribbons of seaweed twined through portholes. She was swimming from room to room, swimming after a ghostly girl who drifted just ahead of her. A voice called,
I’m coming!
But Eloise didn’t know if it was herself who spoke, or the girl she was chasing through the dim green water. Eloise swam through the dark, deeper and deeper, colder and colder, until she shivered awake.

The first three seconds after Eloise woke were always the same. In the first second, she knew there was something she had to remember, but she didn’t know what it was.

In the next second she did remember.
Mum
.

In the third second she squashed that knowledge into the tightest ball she could and wedged it right into the very back of her mind, so she could pretend it wasn’t there. Then she opened her eyes.

Eloise blinked. All the things that didn’t really matter came flooding in: Dad, the house, Mo, the boy next door.

The bedroom was almost dark. Eloise slid unsteadily off the bed and stumbled out into the hall. Mo was in the kitchen, dipping a chunk of bread into a bowl of beetroot soup. She gestured to the stove. ‘Plenty left if you want some. Bread’s on the bench.’

Eloise looked around for Dad.

‘He’s gone,’ said Mo. ‘Back to the city. Sent you his love. Said he’ll be back soon.’

A lump came into Eloise’s throat. Mo grimaced. ‘Couldn’t face saying goodbye to you, so he ran away. We McCredies are good at running from our problems. Runs in the family, you could say. Ha!’ She scooped up a spoonful of soup. ‘Go on, sit down. Don’t stand there like a shag on a rock. Eat something.’

They sat on either side of the kitchen table in silence. Presently Mo pushed her bowl aside and looked at Eloise over the top of her glasses. ‘Since we seem to be stuck with each other for the time being, we’d better set up some rules of the house.’ She ticked them off on her fingers. ‘One: you don’t disturb me while I’m working. Two: my study is out of bounds. At
all
times. Is that clear?’

Eloise nodded.

‘Three . . .’ Mo stopped, and sighed. ‘How shall I put this? You might think I’m a crazy old woman, but the fact is, I don’t . . . I don’t like to leave the house any more.’ She narrowed her eyes at Eloise. ‘Young Tommy runs my errands and so forth these days, bless him, and his mother’s been kind enough to pop in and have a look at me if I’m ever sick, which, touch wood,’ she rapped on the table, making Eloise jump, ‘so far, I haven’t been, very. The point is, I’m not going to
ferry you about
. Understand? You want to do any,’ she waved her hand vaguely, ‘
activities
- netball or soccer or hanging about the train station or whatever it is the young do for fun these days – you organise it yourself. There’s a bicycle in the garage and a helmet somewhere, you’re welcome to use them. Just don’t get into trouble . . . Ha! That can be rule number three: don’t get into any trouble. That should cover most eventualities.’ Mo popped a piece of bread into her mouth. ‘You could get Tommy to show you around. He knows what’s what.’

Eloise kept her face neutral. She didn’t want to join in any kind of activities;
activities
filled her with dread. At the last few schools she’d been to, she’d spent most of her time avoiding them. And she certainly wasn’t going to trail around after that boy; she’d die of embarrassment. At least Mo wasn’t going to make her do anything.

‘And, of course, there are rules about water,’ Mo was saying. ‘Dishes are washed in that little tub in the sink. Three and a half minutes for showers; there’s a timer in the bathroom. Make sure you put the plug in, I bucket the grey water onto the garden. And the toilet. You know the old rhyme?’

Eloise looked at her blankly.

‘If it’s yellow, let it mellow. If it’s brown, flush it down. Understand? Good.’ Mo pressed her lips together and rose to her feet. ‘I think we’ll manage quite well, after all. Now I’m going to do some work. You want to watch television? It’s in the living room.’

Eloise shook her head, and Mo shrugged. ‘Suit yourself. I’ve made up your bed in the sunroom. Your bags are in there.’ She shuffled away to her study and soon Eloise heard the faint clackety-clack of a computer keyboard. She took a chunk of bread and went to find the sunroom.

It was hardly even a room, just a tiny alcove beside the back door. The laundry, the back toilet and the back door all opened off it. The fold-out sofa filled almost the whole space; it had been made up into a bed, the sheets tucked in savagely tight. There was no table, not even a shelf, nowhere for Eloise to unpack.

But she didn’t mind that. Bree had a very neat apartment, all shiny and bare, and she made such a fuss if she found any of Eloise’s things ‘cluttering up the place’ that Eloise had ended up living out of her bags and never unpacking anything. The single bed in Bree’s junk room had become Eloise’s private island, her lifeboat in someone else’s ocean. Mo’s fold-out was a double bed. Eloise stretched in luxury.

She wondered when Dad would come back. He’d said soon – maybe tomorrow. He was always coming and going these days; she didn’t like it, but she was used to it. And Mo was going to leave her alone. If it was only a day, or a couple of days, she’d be all right. Though Mo had been talking as if it would be longer than that.

Her stomach was starting to tie itself in knots, so she sat cross-legged on the bed and pulled out her sketchpad and pencils. She flipped to a blank page and started to scribble. The knots in her stomach loosened when she drew. First she sketched the big white house, almost drowned between the trees. Then she drew the pattern in the glass panels by the front door. As she shaded the triangles, swinging the page this way and that, her heart calmed.

She took a fresh page and drew Mo as she’d first seen her, brandishing a knife, her hair writhing like snakes. Drawing the witchiness made Eloise see that Mo really wasn’t as scary as she’d thought. She looked at that picture for a while, pleased with it.

Next she drew the boy who’d brought Mo’s shopping. Eloise wasn’t good with names. But his face came alive under her pencil: strong nose, straight-across eyebrows, long eyelashes, curling hair, a soft mouth. He frowned out of the page at her, as if he were annoyed about being captured in her book.

Now she was ready. Now she’d draw the girl on the stairs: the big hat, the tripping feet, the fingers light on the rail. But her pencil stuck; she couldn’t transfer her memory onto the paper. She traced a tentative line; stopped; drew another. Her heart was beating fast again. It was all wrong—

‘
Eloise!
’

She jumped, and slammed her book shut. Mo glared from the doorway. ‘What are you, deaf ? Didn’t you hear me? It’s almost midnight.’

Eloise blinked, startled.

‘Not that I care, particularly, but apparently it’s good for young people to go to bed at a reasonable hour. When I was your age, I used to stay up all night reading with a torch under the blankets. Ruined my eyes. So if you must stay up reading or scribbling or whatever, please keep the light on. What’s that, your sketchpad? No, it’s all right; you don’t have to show me. One thing I can do is mind my own business. Good night.’

Mo stalked away, and when she’d gone, Eloise leaned from the raft of the bed and clicked off the light. She lay awake for a long time, staring into the dark, trying to think about nothing, before sleep pulled her under at last.

Eloise’s eyes flew open. Something was rattling near her head. Then a voice called, ‘Hello, Mrs Mo?’

Eloise sat straight up in bed and found herself staring into the startled grey eyes of the boy from next door. He had pushed the door open as he called out to Mo and had almost tripped over the end of Eloise’s bed. And there she was in just her singlet.

The boy’s face flushed deep red. ‘Sorry . . . didn’t . . .’ he mumbled and backed away, almost falling down the steps. The screen door banged and sprang open again behind him.

Eloise hurled herself out of bed, pulled on her T-shirt and shorts and slid her feet into her thongs. She heard the front doorbell chime, then Mo’s slippers shuffled down the hallway and there were voices at the front door.

‘Tommy? You’re very formal today.’

Then, very muffled, ‘. . . back door . . . the girl . . .’

Mo, loud and brisk, ‘Gave you a fright, did she? Don’t pull that face. Come and have a proper look at her; you’ll see she’s nothing to be scared of.’

Eloise didn’t wait to hear more; she flew out the back door. The garage had old-fashioned double doors that gaped apart. She squeezed through the crack, heart racing.

‘Eloise?’ Mo banged the back door open and called into the yard. ‘Elo-
ise!
’ There was a pause, then the screen door slammed again as Mo went back inside.

Now was her chance. There was the bicycle – a faded-red boy’s bike, propped against the garage wall. Eloise dragged it outside, swung up into the saddle and wobbled down the driveway. The bike was too big for her, and the tyres were soft; she had to push hard. She jammed her feet down on the pedals and flew out into the street, the hot wind in her hair.

She zoomed round one corner, then another. She’d never ridden so fast without a helmet before. She felt wild and reckless. Her shadow dipped and swayed on the broad black ribbon of the road.

The big red-brick church crouched at the top of the hill, and Eloise pedalled toward it. She knew where to go. The last time she’d ridden a bike was when she and Dad had first moved in with Bree, when Bree was still pretending they could be a family. One weekend they’d all ridden along the river.

She remembered calling to Dad to slow down, so it must have been before she went quiet.

That was how she thought of it,
going quiet
. It had happened gradually. Somehow there was less and less to say, and now she seemed to have forgotten how to speak at all. Bree and Dad pretended not to notice; maybe they’d got used to it, too. It was a bit of a shock when Mo had pointed out that it wasn’t normal.

Maybe Mo would get used to it, too.

The wheels hissed softly on the pine needle carpet as Eloise pushed the bike down the driveway. Glowing with sweat, she dropped the bike near the front door.

The long grass at the back of the house must have been a lawn once, but now it was so high that the crisp blades brushed Eloise’s fingertips. Maybe there were snakes. The grass shifted and swayed in the hot, dry wind. Eloise looked up at the silent house with its blank, blind windows, but no ghostly face peered out at her.

At the bottom of the slope she spied the shabby roof of a small pavilion, and the scaffolding of a diving board. A swimming pool! Eloise swished eagerly through the grass.

The pool was screened from the house by a grove of trees and bushes. The pool was empty, of course, and littered with dead leaves. It wasn’t long, but it was deep, lined with tiny blue and green tiles, with bald patches where the tiles had flaked away.

Beside the pool stood a hexagonal summerhouse with an arched doorway, its pillars wound around and overgrown with ivy. Eloise pushed aside a curtain of vines and stepped inside.

Once, it had been painted white, but the paint had peeled from the walls. Inside the summerhouse was quiet and still, as if she’d stepped into another world. Eloise was enchanted. She ducked outside again, eyes screwed shut against the sun, and the noise of cicadas burst over her. They shrilled louder and louder, blotting out all other sounds, and then, abruptly, switched off. Eloise opened her eyes and blinked.

The garden was transformed.

The long dry grass had contracted to a shaggy green lawn, the tangled trees had shrunk and neatened, banks of flowering bushes had exploded into existence. A neat white fence ran between the pool and the screening trees. And beyond the trees, the house was bright and white and fresh. It sat up straight and alert, not sad and tilted any more.

Eloise’s stomach jolted, like being in a plane when the ground drops away below. For a minute she was paralysed, frozen where she stood.

Then slowly she turned her head and saw that the pool was filled with blue shimmering water.

Eloise caught her breath. Could it be real? She knelt and dabbled her fingers in the water. It was clean and clear . . . She hesitated for a second, then stripped off to her underwear and slipped into the pool. The cold made her gasp. She shook her hair back and dived down as deep as she could, a needle through cool silk. The green and blue tiles shimmered and glowed; the pool was filled with light. Eloise brushed the bottom of the pool with her fingertips, the smooth lustrous tiles like the inside of a seashell, and kicked herself back up to the surface. Her head broke through and she pushed the wet hair from her eyes.

Someone clapped their hands.

Eloise’s heart jumped into her throat and she twisted around. A girl sat on the edge of the pool, dangling bare legs into the water. A broad-brimmed hat was pushed to the back of her head.

‘Hello,’ said the girl. ‘Where did you come from?’

4

E
loise said nothing. In confusion, she dived again, right to the bottom, half-hoping that the girl would be gone when she came up again.

But she wasn’t; she was still sitting there, watching. Although it seemed she didn’t expect an answer to her question. Instead she crunched into an apple, and held another out to Eloise. ‘Want one?’

Eloise swam over to the side of the pool and heaved herself out, dripping. Suddenly she was conscious of having wet underwear and no towel. The girl must have understood because she scrambled up, darted into the summerhouse and emerged with a slightly dusty dark-blue towel, which Eloise hastily wrapped around herself.

‘There are spare towels, and hats, and
paranephalia
like that in there,’ said the girl, sitting down again. ‘But I’ve told them, it’s
my
place. I don’t want their stuff all over it. It’s not fair.’

Eloise wondered if she’d stepped into a dream. Everything was different. The air was cooler. There were clouds in the sky where none had been before. The garden was so
neat
. And the summerhouse looked different too. The ivy that had almost hidden it had shrunk back to reveal sturdy arches, and the curtain of vines that had hung over the doorway was gone.