The Red Shoe (2 page)

“Like what?”

Frances read: “Her soul flew on the sunbeams to Heaven and no one was there who asked after the Red Shoes.”

There was a short silence.

“That’s it?” said Matilda, in disbelief.

“That’s the end,” admitted Frances.

“That means she’s dead!” said Matilda, outraged. “If she goes to heaven, she’s dead. What’s so happy about that?”

“Well, that’s the end.”

Frances closed the book. She climbed out of bed, found her slippers and headed down the hall to the kitchen for breakfast.

She’s not happy if she’s dead, thought Matilda, flopping on her back and staring up at the ceiling where a big crack was growing like a giant spiderweb. That’s a silly thing to say. I don’t like that story at all. Why shouldn’t little Karen have her beautiful red shoes?

Their mother had some red shoes, with golden buckles and shiny black heels. They made a clicking sound on the pavement, like a tap-dancer. Matilda loved those shoes.

“Red shoes,” whispered Matilda under the blanket.

And she lay there quite still, listening to the sounds of the morning, but somewhere inside her she thought she might be afraid.

I
N A HOUSE FAR AWAY
, right at the end of a long dusty road deep in the bush at the back of Palm Beach, lived three sisters with their mother, their father, and sometimes their Uncle Paul. The three sisters were called Elizabeth, Frances and Matilda.

Elizabeth was fifteen. She had long hair in plaits and she didn’t go to school. She used to go to school but one day she’d come home with her plaits tied up on top of her head with a white ribbon and said she wasn’t going back. Their mother had called the doctor and the doctor agreed with Elizabeth.

“She needs a rest,” the doctor said, stroking Elizabeth’s tight hand. “She’s having a nervous breakdown.”

Their mother sat down on a chair in the kitchen and cried.

After a while Elizabeth said, “I am the one having the nervous breakdown, not you.”

So their mother got up from the chair, but she was not pleased with Elizabeth. She thought Elizabeth was making it up.

“You can’t have a nervous breakdown when you are only fifteen,” said their mother.

That’s what she told their father on the telephone. He was in the merchant navy, far away on a ship in the middle of the ocean, looking for the enemy with his binoculars.

“Y
OU CAN’T HAVE A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN WHEN YOU ARE ONLY FIFTEEN
!” their mother shouted down the telephone.

Frances, the middle daughter, was eleven. She had grey eyes and even her hair looked grey, a sort of koala colour. She didn’t talk much, not when adults were there, anyway, but that made everybody listen to her more. When she finally did say something, it was almost exciting.

“She speaks!” Uncle Paul would cry.

Then everyone would stare at her, and of course she would forget what she was going to say, and she’d wish she’d never opened her mouth in the first place.

Matilda was the youngest. Matilda was six. Some six-year-olds are not sneaky, but Matilda was. Her hair was black and so were her eyes. Even her blood was nearly black and seeped out very, very slowly when she cut herself. She was like a spy.

“You’re not brave enough to be a spy,” her friend Floreal told her. “You’re cowards, all of you.”

“My father is brave,” Matilda retorted. “He was in the war.”

“The war is over now,” said Floreal. “And he’s not so brave, anyway. I have seen him go white in the face when a big lizard crawled up the back step.”

This was true, and it was hard to see how a man who was frightened of a lizard would be much good in a battle. Floreal was blunt and truthful, and remembered all sorts of things that other people forgot. He was an unusual friend, because he was invisible. He was also very small, only about as tall as a book. If he had been flat, he could have been a bookmark.

“I still think my father is brave,” Matilda said to herself. “Anyone can be frightened of a lizard.”

The lizard had crawled up the back step one Sunday afternoon when Uncle Paul was visiting and they were eating roast lamb and potatoes and peas and onions for Sunday lunch. Uncle Paul was their father’s little brother. He used to come and stay with them when he didn’t have to work. Uncle Paul played the piano in restaurants lit by candles while people danced round and round on a shiny floor. He lived in a hotel in the city with clean sheets every day.

They looked alike, the two brothers, but Uncle Paul was more handsome because his hair was longer and he led a wild life. He was hairy altogether, with curling eyelashes like a doll and thick eyebrows, and he even had a moustache with little streaks of silver in it. He had one lock of grey hair on the right side of his head. It had been there since he was a child. It shows I’m a genius, he told them. No matter what I do, it keeps growing back.

Usually Uncle Paul came to visit when their father was away, because it was hard to have two large men in one house. They ate too much, and also when they were both there at once the laundry overflowed with pairs of shoes and no one could ever find anything. They used to fight as well, not punching each other, but bellowing even when they were standing face to face. They argued about cigarettes and aeroplanes and how to cut the lawn. Brothers will always fight, sighed their mother, it’s in the Bible.

It was because of Elizabeth that their father was at home that Sunday when the lizard crawled up the back step. He should have been on the deck of his ship but he had come especially because he was worried about Elizabeth. He wanted her to go back to school and do her exams. Elizabeth had a big brain, everyone said so. There was no one else in the family with a brain like hers.

“You are all of you so stupid,” said Floreal, “except for Elizabeth.”

That Sunday it was two months already since Elizabeth’s nervous breakdown. Two months is a long time to stay at home when you are only fifteen. Elizabeth didn’t go out to see any of her friends from school. She just sat around the house, reading the newspaper and watching her mother. Some days she took a plastic bucket and went down through the thick twisted bush to the beach and filled it with pale sand. Then she brought it back and dumped the sand in the front yard on the flower bed. Now there was a big pile of sand and the flowers underneath were dying.

Lamb and potatoes and peas and onions – how rich it smelt, how warm! Like spring and summer and winter and autumn all mixed up at once. Matilda sprinkled salt onto her potatoes so they looked like the Snowy Mountains. She forked each mountain whole into her mouth and swallowed them one by one, until she finished the entire range. She felt very good and strong.

“You’re greedy,” said Floreal. “You’re going to be sick.”

Matilda poked out her tongue to where she thought he was. She didn’t like it when Floreal talked to her when other people were there. It made things difficult. But Floreal did as he pleased.

“I saw some men go in the big house next door this morning,” said Matilda.

“Really?” Their mother looked up, alert. The house next door had two storeys and a long wide front garden and a side driveway for cars. It’s like a film star’s house, their mother said, but nobody lived there, not even a film star, because it was a holiday home. Lots of the houses in the streets around them were like that. In the summer people came in cars and had parties in the houses and trailed down to the beach. But the rest of the year the streets were empty as a ghost town. There were more trees than houses, more possums than people, their mother said. It’s like living at the ends of the earth, said their mother, and in fact it was.

“What did you see?” their father asked Matilda, as they finished off the lamb and the last drops of gravy.

“Some men came in a car,” Matilda answered. “They looked funny.”

She had been playing by herself in the front yard when they came. She had watched them through the fence but they hadn’t seen her.

“What sort of funny?” asked their mother.

“What sort of car?” asked their father.

“I don’t know,” said Matilda. “It was black. They had black hats and coats and umbrellas and they went inside.”

“Why umbrellas?” Uncle Paul raised his eyebrows. “It hasn’t rained for weeks.”

That was true. It was dry as dry, and the red earth was like powder and rock. You weren’t allowed to water the garden. The newspaper said you just had to get used to grass being yellow instead of green. Matilda liked that idea. Perhaps you could get used to things being different colours altogether – the huge ocean could be pink and the sand could be purple.

“Weren’t there any women?” asked their mother, sounding desperate, because she was lonely at the ends of the earth.

“There wasn’t a mother,” Matilda said with certainty. “Or any children.”

“Or an auntie or a granny or a dog,” smiled Uncle Paul. “Or a little blue budgie in his cage.”

Their father stood up from the table and went over to the door that led from the dining room to the back yard. He pushed open the flyscreen and looked out, standing on the back step. They could hear the cicadas crying from the tall trees surrounding them, like hundreds of heartbeats. The big house next door seemed to wave in the afternoon sunlight.

“Nobody there now,” he said. “And the blinds are down.”

Through the open door, wind came in from the Pacific Ocean. They couldn’t see the waves from where they lived, but they heard it and smelt it, all the time. Uncle Paul smiled again from under his silvery moustache. He was looking at their mother. She was wearing tiny crimson earrings, like drops of blood.

Then their father made a funny sound. “Look!” he said, and his voice was hoarse.

They all got up from the table, except Elizabeth, and looked.

A large, grey-green goanna was slowly climbing up the concrete step, out from the tangled bush, through the afternoon heat towards their house, towards their father’s feet. Its mouth was hanging open, and it raised one of its knobbled legs in the air, spreading its toes apart.

“Calm down,” said Uncle Paul to their father, because their father was shaking as though he had a fever. He wasn’t afraid of Germans or bombs but he was afraid of lizards. He was afraid of all animals.

“He’s a coward,” said Floreal.

“Do something, Paul,” said their mother urgently. “It’s horrible. Do something! Shoo it away.”

Now they were all crowding around the door, looking down at the goanna, except Elizabeth. She put her elbows on the table and yawned.

“Can we catch it?” begged Matilda, excited. “I could take it to school for the Pet Parade.”

There was to be a Pet Parade at school that week. The prize for the most unusual pet was a huge round green and yellow and white and pink lollipop that sat on her teacher’s desk. It had every colour in the rainbow, the teacher told them, and it was called an all-day sucker, which meant it would last all day long if you were careful not to chew it. God must have made it, thought Matilda, it must be what they eat in heaven. If Matilda could catch the goanna and take it to school in a bucket, she might win! She bent down and reached out her hand. If she could just get hold of its tail…

Uncle Paul stepped forward and made a kicking motion with his foot.

“Cha-cha-cha!” he grunted through his teeth and kicked again.

The goanna did not move. Its front leg was suspended in the air. It was still as stone, its mouth gaping and its eyes fixed.

“Don’t!” said Matilda, tugging Uncle Paul. “Don’t scare him! Let me catch him!”

“It’ll bite you, Mattie!” warned their mother.

The goanna raised its head calmly as a judge, its tongue flicking in and out of its mouth. It hesitated, looking at Matilda through small black eyes as though considering what to do.

“Gara-gara-gara!” said Uncle Paul, showing his teeth.

“Don’t!” Matilda wailed.

The goanna made a decision. It wheeled its heavy body around and leapt down the step, running on all four legs surprisingly swiftly, back into the high weeds at the edge of the yard, the dark growth beyond the fence.