Dreaming of Amelia (34 page)

Because I wanted to see!

To see who had destroyed Seb's painting!

To look further back and see what happened when Sandra Wilkinson fell from that window! To see if she really is the ghost!!

(I knew that Toby would want to go even
further
back, to convict times, to see his friend Tom, but I myself can live without Tom.)

Then Lydia, who was sitting between Seb and Riley, and slowly kicking her heels against the side of the stage, spoke up. ‘Em,' she said, ‘there might be a few technical hitches.'

‘Like how to get the mirror far enough away,' Riley said.

‘And I don't think there's a powerful enough telescope yet,' Cass told me.

‘Even if there was, I think there'd be too much space noise or interference in between. You couldn't get a clear picture,' Toby apologised.

‘And does Ashbury have an observatory?' Seb smiled.

Why do other people have to be so
knowledgeable
sometimes?

And why use their knowledge to stamp all over sparks of hope?

To be honest, the whole thing agitated me beyond belief.

I was tired of not knowing, you see.

We left the building soon after this, and as we did there was a distant cracking sound — and I trembled violently. But
I did not feel like trembling!
Always with the trembling. The HSC! The future! The ghost!

If I was tired of not knowing, I was even
more
tired of being scared!

Those two issues are related, I think. The not knowing and the being scared? You're scared of the things that you don't know. That's my wisdom for today.

And now, a final confession. A terrible secret.

That night?
I felt annoyed with Riley and Amelia
.

Sacrilege, I know! But suddenly, out of nowhere, I'd had
enough of my own fascination. Enough of yearning to see them and feeling excited when I did. Enough of pondering: Why are they so amazing? When will they ever notice me?

It was exhausting.

All year they'd been twitching out of my reach. They came to parties — great! But they arrived at strange hours. Mysterious. They came to coffee with us — great! But they didn't talk about themselves. Mysterious. They told us about their past — great!
But look at that past!
The streets! Juvenile detention! A whole new can of mysteries!

And kind of scary mysteries too. I'm very sorry, but crime scares me. I try hard to be ‘modern' — compassionate like Cass, or cynical like Lyd — but I can't be.

Therefore, I was scared. Scared of Amelia and Riley.

I invited Amelia to come and study with us at Lyd's place. And she did. And the next few weeks, she spent a lot of time with Lyd, Cass and me, especially Lyd.

But do you know why I invited her to study?

Because I was scared of her. And I didn't want to be. It made me mad.

 

Riley T Smith
Student No: 8233569

Different ways of being absent, Amelia collects them.

Dreaming of her stepfather — she's gone.

Slipping away to spend time with a madwoman who speaks in fairytales.

And now, check it out, she's hangin' with the richgirls.

It's a trick, she says, but I taste something like fear.

 

Tobias George Mazzerati
Student No: 8233555

1 February 1804

A blast of rain like a sudden loss of temper. Thunderclaps that feel personal. Hailstones the size of sheep.

I feel the darkness looming, and taste fear.

My final letter to Maggie is shredded in the mud. I'll not write again. I've not heard from her for almost a year; she's forgotten me.

So she should have, for I am doomed.

It's true there are nights when I talk to Phillip, look at the grand stone barracks that he built, and the stars light up my heart and make me think his plans will succeed.

But mostly I think they will shoot us down like dogs.

The signs are everywhere. Here's three that come to mind:

1: Not a single uprising has ever succeeded here. There was one planned a couple of years back now. They captured two men, thinking they might know who the ringleaders were. Three hundred lashes each, just to make them say.

‘You'll not get any music from me,' said one, ‘for other men to dance on air.'

The floggers shook their cat-o'-nine-tails, so that the blood, skin and flesh flew fast in the wind, and carried on counting the strokes.

2: Not long ago, some men escaped from the barracks, visited a nearby farm, made themselves hot dumplings, and headed back out into the night to sleep under stars. They were captured. We assembled to watch the execution. Then
the sound of galloping hooves and a soldier, breathless, announced that straws were to be drawn.

The first man drew the long straw, and the noose was lifted up off his head. The other two got short straws and were hanged. One kept laughing 'til the pain twisted his smile into a shriek.

3: They've swept the natives away like so many dying bats before a hot wind. Because the natives fight back, the governor has issued a proclamation: any native west of Parramatta must be shot on sight.

The signs are clear. Failure and death are everywhere. We will fail.

Knowing this, a secret terror stirs in me each night, and it is this: what if Maggie has
not
forgotten me? What if the reason she's not writing is that she's carried out her foolish plan to steal something? And she's on her way here, a convict too?

Do you know what happens to female convicts when they arrive? As soon as the ship's in anchor, the decks are crowded with gentleman settlers and male convicts, come to choose servants or wives. They look about them, rub their chins, squint at women's waistlines. Take wrists between their hands and turn them to the light.

In my nightmares, I see Maggie's wrist in the light. She laughs and then her laugh becomes a shriek. Then Maggie's own voice speaks to me: ‘Never look at a cat that's washing its face,' she says, and my blood turns cold. ‘The first to look at such a cat will die.'

I remember her telling me this years ago at home, and I laughed. But here, in this place, I fear it may be true.

Eat hot dumplings. Draw a short straw. Look a cat in the face. Or just be seen west of Parramatta.

This place is a vortex with death at every curve.

Sure, and I never knew that fear could be this vast.

Riley T Smith
Student No: 8233569

We overhear them talking in the courtyard.

This is August, the coldest month. Amelia and I walking a balcony, voices drifting up from below.

‘There's a whole section on her, like Riley said. Photos and everything.'

‘Have you got the book?'

‘They wouldn't let me take it away from the front office. But it was nothing new anyway — just, she fell out of a window and, you know, died. Tragedy, tragedy, blah blah.'

Emily, Lydia and Cassie, sheltered from the wind by the angle of the courtyard. Legs stretched out to the winter sun. Hair catching sunlight.

We can't see their faces.

‘Does it say why she fell? Because who falls out a window? What, was she leaning out to see a bird? Was she a birdwatcher?' That's Lydia's voice, dry, ironic, impatient all at once. Also sleepy. As if her eyes are closed.

‘Maybe she was trying to get away from someone,' Emily says. ‘Or there could have been a fire. She was trying to run away from a fire, and the school hid the evidence so they wouldn't be liable.'

‘Maybe she was sleepwalking,' says Cass.

A slow sigh from Emily.

Silence. Vague rustle of papers.

It's the first week of the Trials. They're looking over study notes. About to go into an exam.

We wait. Lean against the railings. Amelia beside me.

‘Lyd, do you seriously know all this already?' Em's voice.

‘She's reading through her eyelids,' Cass says.

‘There's only five minutes to go and I've still got, oh my god, thirty pages to learn, so, what is that, like, five pages a minute? That's physically impossible, right?'

‘If you shut up and let me sleep,' says Lyd, ‘it's not.'

Low, slow giggles. Laughing just because it feels good to laugh.

Something shifts beside me. Amelia tensing.

Then Emily speaks again. ‘Oh, there was this one thing though. In the history book? After she died, they went and carved on this tree. There used to be this tree where people carved, like,
SB loves NW
or whatever, so, after Sandra Wilkinson fell out of the window they did this ceremony where they wrote
WA loves SW
on the tree.'

‘Why?'

‘The WA stood for
we all.
Like, we
all
love Sandra Wilkinson.'

Another sleepy, sultry giggle from Lydia.

‘They decided to stop carving any other names on the tree after that,' Em continues. ‘So it would be, you know, sacred to Sandra's memory.'

Silence, more flipping of pages.

Emily speaks again: ‘I was thinking. After this exam, do you want to see if we can find the tree? And look at the initials? Just for, you know, fun?'

A pause.

‘Where's the tree?'

‘The book says it's a Moreton Bay fig. Behind the music rooms. It might still be there.'

‘It is,' says Cassie. ‘I know that tree.'

The bell rings out. Emily swears. Papers fall. More laughter from below.

Amelia and I step back. We look into one another's eyes. I'm thinking that she's thinking what I'm thinking: the timing could be perfect.

Then complicated clouds blow across Amelia's face.

She doesn't want to do it. She wants to see her crazy friend. She likes the richgirls too much now — She's hoping that they'll ask her to join them in their ghost hunt …

All of these. Or none.

But then the clouds clear and Amelia laughs.

 

Emily Melissa-Anne Thompson
Student No: 8233521

The plot thickens!

(Which is very gothic of it.)

It was late afternoon and we'd just had an exam.

Lyd, Cass and I tramped through the cold, down to the music rooms and around the corner.

And there it was, plain as day: a big, old tree carved with initials!

All three of us stopped suddenly.

Strange, strange! that this tree had been here all along and I had not known!
Oh, Ashbury,
I thought,
you still have some secrets in you, don't you, old girl?

(I was going quietly mad, I suppose. The stress of exams.)

Then, as I approached, the tree seemed to me to be angry!

It was wrinkled and twisted like an old person, and the old often
are
cranky — but was this the anger of the forgotten? Once, the tree had been popular, the place young romantics declared their love. Now, a nobody. Who amongst us likes to be famous when young only to become a wrinkled old tree in later years? (Not Lydia's mother, certainly.)

We looked closely but initials and hearts swarmed all over that tree.
There were too many!
A jumble of foolish little letters. Young love
itself
began to seem foolish to me (sacrilege).

No wonder the tree is angry!
I thought.
Carvings all over its bark!

The sun was sinking fast, and the chill was in my shoulder blades. I began to wonder, with gothic horror, what I was doing here. Why was I studying this tree when I should be studying for tomorrow's exam?! There could be snakes in this grass! And what would happen to my eyes if I kept peering
at tiny, faded letters in this gloomy light?! I would go blind! And what if I put a crick in my neck from leaning forward like this?!

And so on.

I was just about to shriek to the others, ‘LET US FLY FROM THIS PLACE! LET US FLY TO THE BLUE DANISH CAFÉ!' when Lyd and Cass both said: ‘Here.'

They were looking at separate parts of the tree, Cass crouching down to read near the ground, and Lyd stretching up high. I wondered, briefly, how they could both say, ‘Here,' at the same time.

Cass stood up. Lydia pointed to a heart shape. Inside it:

WA

SW

Just as
The Illustrated History of Ashbury High
had promised.

‘
We All Heart Sandra Wilkinson
,' I whispered.

‘Not so much me,' Lyd said.

‘Me neither,' Cass agreed.

But, you know, they were just being funny. I felt at that moment a gust of something warm and I believe all three of us felt it. The tender sadness of the past stood before us — people our own age had lost their friend and had wanted to tell the world they loved her. And here we were, the
future
, hearing their words. A shiver of goosebumps struck me — the thrill of a message from nowhere. The joy of an impossible connection. A bit like being able to make a mobile phone call in a tunnel.