Cicada Summer (7 page)

But she was so exhausted that she went to bed straight after dinner and fell asleep the moment her head touched the pillow. In her dreams she heard the phone ring on and on, and the grumble of Mo’s voice; then she dreamed someone touched her shoulder and murmured, ‘Are you awake? Your father’s on the phone.’

But Eloise just rolled over and pushed herself further into sleep, and she thought she heard another voice, a deep kindly voice, explaining that sometimes there was nothing to say.

The next day Mo was back at work on her book of sea voyages, tapping away in the study, and Eloise rode off again to the big house. The radio said the fires in the national park had been contained, but smoke haze still lingered over the town. Eloise could taste it in her throat.

Smoke lay over the garden like a dirty mist, tinting the sunlight orange. Eloise squeezed her eyes shut and tiptoed toward the summerhouse, her mind full of that other world.

As she came past the screen of trees and the raucous chorus of cicadas gave way to the buffer of silence, the smell of smoke lifted, replaced by the smell of fresh paint, and there was Anna, beaming, her clothes spattered with white.

‘I found a
ginormous
tin of white paint,’ she said at once. ‘And a roller, look.’ A huge paint roller, taller than Anna herself, was propped in one corner. Anna gave Eloise a little shove. ‘You didn’t come and help! You never come when it’s a really big job, I had to do it all myself.’

Eloise peered around. ‘It’s gone.’ The walls were blank again, but faintly grey, where the black paint still showed through.

‘Why didn’t you come? You haven’t come for three whole days.’

How could one day in her time stretch to three in Anna’s? ‘Sorry,’ said Eloise helplessly. ‘Can’t help it.’

‘Oh, never mind.’ Anna bounded around the summerhouse. ‘You’re here now. What are we going to paint today?’

‘A shipwreck,’ said Eloise without thinking.

Anna clasped her hands. ‘Oh,
yes
! How will we do it?’

Eloise stared around the summerhouse. The two walls where they’d painted the storm were still damp with white paint; better to use a different section. After a minute she sketched with her hands. ‘The sea – storm at the back – and the ship there – and in the front . . .’ She stopped.

‘People drowning,’ said Anna with relish. ‘Where’s your pencil? You better draw it on first.’

Eloise dragged the pencil across the walls, tentatively at first, then with growing confidence as Anna cheered her on. ‘Um,’ she said. ‘Drowned people . . . next to a swimming pool?’

Anna laughed. ‘I don’t care. No one’ll see it except us. This is
my
place. What’s that?’

‘Rocks,’ said Eloise. ‘To wreck the ship.’

‘Can I do them?’ begged Anna, and without waiting for a reply, she grabbed a brush and began to dab the rocks into existence, filling Eloise’s pencilled outline with streaks and blobs of brown.

Eloise painted the ship. It was a white ocean liner with red funnels, like the one in the movie
Titanic
. Eloise painted it up on end, poised at the moment before it slid beneath the icy waves. She used the finest brush, tipped with black paint, for the tiny figures that spilled over the sides and into the water. Jab, jab, jab, she sent dozens of passengers to their doom.

‘I can’t
see
them,’ complained Anna. ‘Do bigger ones, up the front.’

Eloise sketched a face. Its mouth was open, its hair plastered to its skull, eyes squeezed shut. One hand clung to a rope that floated, useless, not attached to anything. The face could have belonged to a man or a woman; it was a blank face, a face of blind terror. Eloise’s stomach felt cold, looking at it. A dead person. Dead, like her mother.

She looked across at Anna, busy dabbling green and blue to make the sea, her tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth. It was impossible to believe that in Eloise’s time, Anna wasn’t alive, that there was no Anna.

Anna looked up, frowning. ‘Don’t stop,’ she ordered. ‘There’s heaps to do yet.’

‘Not stopping,’ said Eloise.

She took up a thicker brush and began to swirl black and grey and white across the sky for the storm. The colours massed and congealed along the top of the summerhouse walls. Eloise stepped back. All that black was too heavy, it crushed the whole picture.

Eloise swapped to a thin brush and broke up the mass of darkness with the threads of white lightning she’d seen the night before. No, last night was in the future. She was in the past now. Safe in the past. Nothing could hurt her here, back here before she was born. This time was a safe place, the safest place there was . . .

There was too much lightning now. Eloise started to paint out the zigzag strands.

‘No!’ cried Anna. ‘Leave it alone, you’ll wreck it again!’

Eloise took a deep breath. Anna was right; fiddling always made things worse. She forced herself to dunk and wipe her brush. Anna needed help with all that sea.

Eloise mixed green and black into a murky colour, and swept her brush up and across into wave-shapes. No, that looked all wrong – too smooth, too curvy, a friendly summer sea. She tried again. Choppy shapes, hard-edged, almost square. Much better. Now it was a scary sea, a sea you could easily drown in.

‘Ooh, that’s
splendufferous
!’ cried Anna. ‘How did you do that?’

Eloise showed her how to paint the shapes, then, suddenly inspired, she tipped the waves with a hard white edge of foam that echoed the white strands of lightning.
Yes
. This sea was vast, and cold. It would slap you in the face, grab your ankles and suck you under. This was an angry sea, a ruthless sea. It was overwhelming. No lifeboat, no oars could save you from this sea; nothing could.

Eloise lowered her brush and shivered. For a second she thought she might faint.

Anna said, ‘You’ve stopped again.’

Eloise dropped her brush into the bucket. ‘Don’t want to . . . paint any more.’

‘You’re a lazy slug,’ said Anna, but she looked tired too; there were dark rings under her eyes. Neither of them had remembered to eat all day.

Anna rummaged in her pocket and pulled out a jelly snake, dusted with lint. She offered it to Eloise, who shook her head.

They stood side by side in front of the picture they’d made together: the black slab of sky, the choppy blocks of sea, the rocks. The toy-like ship, seesawing in the air as the black dots of people rained down. The single pale ghost face, floating blind as a jellyfish, open-mouthed in the unfinished sea, clutching its hopeless loop of rope.

‘No,’ said Eloise. ‘No.’

‘I don’t like it either.’ Anna stuck one end of the snake in her mouth and chewed. ‘It’s
respulsive
.’ ‘Have to start again.’

‘Paint it all over again?’ Anna sagged. ‘Will you come back tomorrow? Do you promise?’

Eloise said wretchedly, ‘I’ll try . . .’

But she was speaking to empty air, and a blank set of walls. The wave of time had swept her up and dumped her back on her own shoreline again, and she was all alone.

9

E
loise slid the plug into the bath and turned on the shower. It was hard to believe that not long ago, she would have just let the water pour away down the drain, that she hadn’t known how precious water was. Bree used to have twenty-minute showers. Eloise could imagine how Mo would have thumped on the door and yelled at her.

Precious, beautiful water . . . She’d really like a swim today . . .

Suddenly she wrenched off the taps and jumped out of the bath.

She was barely dry, still buttoning her shorts, as she snatched some toast and crunched it down.

‘You’re in a hurry today.’ Mo stared over the top of her glasses. ‘Something urgent to do?’

Eloise nodded, then, as she passed Mo’s chair, she impulsively dropped a kiss on her grandmother’s wiry tangle of hair.

‘Strewth! What’s brought this on?’ Mo looked up, startled. ‘Not going to do anything silly, are you?’

Eloise shook her head and grinned as she flew out of the kitchen. She rushed out the back door, launched herself onto the bike and down the driveway, and nearly knocked over Tommy and a slightly-built woman in a blue headscarf as they stepped out onto the pavement.

‘Watch it!’ Tommy shouted after her, jolted out of his usual politeness, and Eloise glanced back to make sure they were all right. That must be Tommy’s mum, the doctor. But she couldn’t stop, not even for mothers; nothing could stop her today.

The smoke had dispersed and the air was clear. Eloise rode the short way, along the main street and past the shops, even though that hill was steeper. She pedalled down the road and through the sagging gates, along the rutted driveway and across the gravel. She was in such a hurry that she didn’t drop the bike at the steps, but rode right around the house and through the tangled grass all the way to the summerhouse.

Let Anna be there. Let Anna be there
, she prayed. She couldn’t waste this idea. It filled up her head, she
had
to paint it. If only she could get it right.

She wobbled desperately past the screening trees, jumped off the bike and leapt through the silence into the other time.

‘You nearly knocked me over!’ shouted Anna indignantly.

‘I know what to paint today!’ burst Eloise. ‘Better than yesterday—’

‘Yesterday? That was
days
ago. I’ve been waiting and waiting, every day, and you never came! Don’t you want to be my friend any more?’

Of course I do
, Eloise tried to say, but her voice clogged her throat. She stared at Anna, mute and miserable, and Anna stared miserably back.

Then Anna underwent one of her sudden transformations. ‘Oh, let’s not fight, you’re here now.’

‘I
try
to come every day,’ whispered Eloise unhappily.

‘What do you mean? Why don’t you just come? Does someone stop you? Do they lock you up?’

‘No . . . but . . .’ Eloise stopped. How could she explain to Anna who she was and where she came from? How could anyone handle a glimpse into her own future – a future where she was no longer alive? Eloise could never tell her, never.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said softly. ‘I come as often as I can. Promise.’

‘Okay,’ mumbled Anna. ‘I just get lonely, that’s all.’ Her eyes filled with those sudden tears that seemed to rise and fall like the tide, and she said, ‘I miss my mumma.’

‘Me too,’ whispered Eloise. ‘Me too.’

The two girls were silent, their loneliness wrapped around them like a dark mist. Eloise stared at the ground, a lump pressing inside her throat.

‘Where’s your mum, then?’ Anna said in a small voice.

Eloise swallowed. ‘She died.’

Anna’s eyes went completely round. ‘Oh . . . oh, no. What happened?’

‘It was a car crash.’ Eloise felt her voice scratching as she spoke. ‘She didn’t feel anything. It was instant.’

Her scalp prickled; she’d never told anyone about Mum’s accident. She shouldn’t be telling Anna now; surely it was wrong tell someone about their own death, even if they didn’t know it . . . She grabbed up her pencil. ‘Wait, see my idea,’ she said hurriedly. ‘Look at this.’

She swept the pencil across the pale expanse of the two walls they hadn’t painted on yet, the two walls that faced the doorway and had clear light falling across them. She had to pin down her idea while she could still see it; the image had come to her so clearly in the shower, all in one piece, perfect.

Anna watched as Eloise sketched and paused and looked and sketched some more, lines of firm grey pencil laid over the pale boards, a picture emerging out of nothing.

‘It’s a girl. A girl flying? Ooh no, I see now. Is she swimming?’

‘She’s inside the ship.’ Eloise’s hand swooped over the wall. It was hard to get the scale right across the angle of the two walls; the girl’s head was the wrong size. Impatiently she rubbed it out and tried again. ‘She’s under the water.’

‘Drowned?’ asked Anna ghoulishly.

‘No, no – maybe – I don’t think so.’

Eloise kept drawing. She wasn’t sure about the edges of the picture, but the central image was strong and clear: the swimming girl, hair streaming in the water, bare feet kicking behind her.

‘What’s she holding?’ Anna stepped in close to stare. ‘Is it a mirror? A painting? Something in a frame.’

The girl held it out in front of her with one hand, as if she were about to swim right through the frame. Eloise scribbled, stood back, erased, scribbled again. She couldn’t make the angle work.

‘That hand looks all wrong,’ said Anna helpfully.

‘I know!’ snapped Eloise.

‘Look,’ said Anna. ‘Why don’t you draw me?’ Carefully she posed her hand, angling her fingers backward, and turned her big hopeful eyes to Eloise.

‘Yes!’ breathed Eloise. ‘That’s it . . .’ She nudged Anna’s hand into the right position, and sketched a few surer strokes on the wall.

The girl wasn’t holding a mirror; it was a window. And through the window you could see – Eloise saw it clearly, all the edges sunlit and precise, not like the dreamy underwater shadows the girl swam through – you could see a garden. Eloise roughed in the outlines of the trees, the border of the flowerbeds, and the house behind, just enough to hint at the shapes, for later. Then she threw the pencil down and rushed for the paint tins.

Green and blue, a touch of red, to turn it murky purple. The colours swirled and blended. More green, dark green. Eloise dabbed it on the wall.

‘Let me, let me!’ Anna pleaded, jumping up and down behind her. ‘I can do that. You do the girl.’

It was hard to paint someone swimming, suspended in water. How to show that her dress floated around her? Her hair waved delicately, like weeds in water. She was swimming away from the viewer; you could see the soles of her bare feet but not her face. One hand pointed backward, pale fingers like – like little fish. Yes, she was too pink, too pink! Feverishly Eloise mixed colours. She should be silvery, like a fish. That grey was too dark. A splodge of white, mix it in. Yes, that was almost right. A touch of yellow. And white, tinged with blue, for her dress. And her hair greeny-dark, seaweed-dark.

‘You have to keep swimming through.’ Anna’s dark head was bent with concentration as her brush swished and dotted. ‘That’s what my mumma always says. Never give up.’