The Other Side of Summer (3 page)

We had dinner in front of the TV that night. The menu was nothing to get excited about – brown pasta and salad sprinkled with seeds that kept getting caught in my teeth. I could feel my stomach grinding the food as if I had gizzard stones in there. I kept glancing round at the hallway phone, just visible through the living room doorway, waiting for Plan A to kick in.

Mum was downstairs with us, which was what everyone wanted even though it made sitting on the sofa feel more like perching on a cliff edge. It was still better than sensing her on the other side of the ceiling. Up there she was a whispery ghost, and the dark weight of her not wanting to be near us pressed through.

‘If everyone’s finished, I’ve got something to show you,’ said Dad. He switched off the TV.

Wren carried on looking at the black screen. She chewed slowly like a dairy cow, with a look that let us know that the grass wasn’t nearly sweet enough for her.

‘Wren? Are you with us?’ he said.

‘Not by choice.’

‘Well, I’m waiting to show you something special.’

‘Here, I’ll show
you
something special instead.’

Slowly she raised her middle finger. She looked at it admiringly. I watched Dad’s mouth tighten but knew he wouldn’t explode. This was typical Wren. She was like a match with a huge phosphorous head that struck against any frictional surface it could find.

Dad wasn’t going to do anything to help her ignite. You had to choose your battles very carefully.

I think Wren was born angry. She treated it like a natural talent that needed daily practice. The difference now was that the only people who had ever fought Wren and won – Floyd and our mum – weren’t playing anymore.

Wren was Bellatrix Lestrange in looks and behaviour and Australia would be her Azkaban. She once said I was like Hermione without the brains. No prize for figuring out what that meant: without brains, Hermione was just plain annoying.

No one liked the way Wren made herself look and that suited her fine. She was anti-pretty and angry-beautiful, with overdrawn eyebrows and lips. If her make-up was designed to warn people away, her clothes were protective: a spiked choker, meshed arms, leather fingerless gloves, a chaos of black from head to steel-capped toe. Our neighbours glared at her as if she were about to feed on their young. She knew I was scared of her, but she didn’t know that I admired her. It was hard not to care what people thought. We didn’t look like sisters. I was a pale minikin with gossamer hair; a wisp of smoke. In old photos where I’m standing beside my brother and sister, I look like a hoax phantom.

Floyd had looked like he’d spent his whole life outdoors. He had been taller than Dad, fit and strong. He’d had dark honey waves that tumbled over one eye when he tilted his head to look at you. You’d do anything for him if he looked at you like that. (Usually, with me, it was taking over his dishwasher duties.) He had dark brown eyes that twinkled when he was being cheeky, tiny pinprick freckles on his nose, and a big smile. I’d thought of him as invincible.

The last mouthful of food turned sour on my tongue.

‘Come on, Wren,’ said Dad. ‘You’ve been chewing that piece for five minutes.’

Wren gave him evils and let her plate drop to the coffee table with a loud clatter. Dad ignored the fuss, reached into the back pocket of his jeans and produced a folded piece of paper, which he opened up precisely, like reverse origami.

First it went to Mum. She looked at it with the same tired, hollow look that she gave everything, and then she passed it to me.

It was a photograph of a house. Underneath was a long description that started with the words ‘
Sensationally positioned! The family home of your dreams
’. Underneath that, Dad had written in his terrible hand writing ‘
24 Lime Street, Melbourne
’, and added an exclamation mark after it.

It was a gleaming white house made of horizontal boards and a shiny tin roof. There was a porch, two windows either side of a black front door and a perfectly round rose bush in front, like a face about to lick a pink lollipop.

On the porch was a wooden bench and three pairs of wellington boots, large, medium and small. Lavender poked through the gaps of the white fence.

It
was
lovely.

‘You’re speechless, hey?’ said Dad.

‘It doesn’t look real.’ I was still angry about his plan and there was no way I actually wanted the stupid
thing, but saying anything against this house would sound unconvincing.

‘Give it to me.’ Wren snatched it away and the paper sliced a minuscule line in the soft skin between my thumb and forefinger. She looked nuclear. Anyone with any sense would evacuate to the air-raid shelter.

But not Dad. He stood and held up another piece of paper: a photo of a puppy. A dark yellowish scruffy one, lying on its tummy, its head resting on one tiny paw, its dark eyes full of longing.

‘What’s that?’ Wren scowled.

‘It’s our dog.’ Dad’s eyes were shining, desperate.

This was too much. I’d
always
wished for a dog. So had Floyd. We used to spend hours coming up with dog names, even though Dad had said there was absolutely no way we were getting one. Floyd’s favourite name was Soda, after a character in a book he loved. I wanted something tough from mythology, like Hector or Juno. Getting one now was a betrayal.

‘He’s a golden retriever. A present for both of you. In Melbourne, waiting for us.’

‘We’ve got a cat, moron,’ said Wren. ‘Why the hell would we want a dog? Dogs are idiots.’

Dad sighed. ‘But the cat … And
don’t
call me a moron by the way.’

‘The cat
what
?’

‘Nothing. The dog can be for Summer, then. Summer’s always wanted one, haven’t you?’ He waved the paper in my direction. I had to take it.

It was no use. Hot tears started running down my cheeks and there was nothing I could do to stop them.

‘Typical!’ Wren said with a growl. ‘Of course you’d side with Dad.’ She tried to screw up the picture she was holding and then rip it apart furiously, as if she couldn’t decide the best way to destroy it, then she threw it at my head and hissed at me savagely on her way out of the room. Message received, Wren. Australia was as much my fault as Dad’s. The injustice of it hurt but it was pointless to take her on. The hate in Wren wanted revenge and I was an easy target. A little blind larva wriggling between the tips of her beak.

I smoothed out the photo of the house on my right leg, put the hopeful puppy on my left and silently told it to stop looking at me like that. Over my shoulder I sensed Mum looking. She hardly made a sound anymore. In the beginning that had been like the shock of someone switching off loud music at a party.

The picture-book house said ‘welcome’. It was small. We wouldn’t be able to hide from each other as much. It was also neat and new. I could almost smell the sour white paint and the soft musky flowers of the
fat lavender bushes. I’d always wished for a porch with a bench, where I could sit and read books and watch people go by. The doors of this house would close properly, the floors wouldn’t slope, and we’d never need to leave saucepans on the staircase when it rained.

But I’d never minded any of those faults. They were Jackman quirks, and they were special.

‘Mum?’ I said. ‘Do you want us to go?’

Mum pressed four fingers hard into her lips the way she always did when she was about to cry. It looked like the first part of a blown kiss.

Dad held out his hand over the arm of the sofa, but she didn’t take it.

She said, softly, ‘Dad thinks …’ and then swallowed the rest of the words before her face screwed up in pain. ‘Yes. Yes. Sorry.’ She squeezed my shoulder for an instant but when I looked, her hand was back on her mouth, making me think I’d only imagined it.

After the bomb, the prime minister had gone on TV and said that we’d been lucky because only twelve people had died. Two of them were teenagers – Floyd and a girl we didn’t know. The prime minister got into a lot of trouble in the papers for saying ‘lucky’ and ‘only’. But that was months ago. He’d have a whole bunch of new problems now. But we couldn’t move on.

Mum slept and breathed and cried and that was all she could manage. She didn’t look or sound or even smell the same. The doctors told Dad, who passed it on to me, that Mum had no choice. She wasn’t behaving that way to hurt us.

But it did hurt.

Mum’s name was Cecelia, which I thought was beautiful, but everyone called her Cece because it sounded more friendly. Once upon a time, Mum had been both of those things. She had been big and colourful and loud, a rainbow one day and a hurricane the next. You could hide behind her if you needed to, or she’d help you not to feel so shy if you let her. You could tell her your secrets and most of all you could trust her. She made things better.

She could be bossy, I suppose. Sometimes she used to snap at Dad if he was working too hard (which was often) or being boring (also, admittedly, often). If she had too much wine her temper could pop like a champagne cork. But honestly, that hardly ever happened.

This shell of Mum was doing silent crying with her mouth open and one fist clenched at her heart. She was all the pain in the world and I felt numb, as if I was watching something too horrible for my brain to measure. I stared at the house on the paper and almost
didn’t notice her get up and squeeze my shoulder again as she left the room.

Dad and I were alone. When I looked, I saw he had tears in his eyes. I felt us nudge closer to his plan.

‘To tell you the truth, I’m frightened for us, Summer. I want to take us somewhere new, better. I just want to protect us.’

An uncomfortable pip stuck in my throat – the small, sharp-edged seed of the matter. If dads were frightened, what were the rest of us meant to do?
I
couldn’t promise
him
that things would get better if we stayed. What did I know?

Softly, like the last bit of air in a balloon, I said, ‘Okay. We’ll go.’

His face brightened and he wiped his tears. It was that easy. All I had to look like was ‘okay’, and all I had to say was ‘okay’.

‘You’ll love it, Summer.’ He came to sit right next to me. ‘I guarantee it.’

The room was so clogged up with other people’s feelings that I couldn’t work out my own. But Dad’s plan was moving fast enough for things to go blurry and maybe that would feel better than the stiff, slow crawl of missing Floyd.

‘Look at the photo of the house again, Summer. Tell me what you like about it.’

He needed me back on his side, didn’t he? ‘The welling tons,’ I said, with my jaw clenched.

He nudged me playfully. ‘We say “gumboots” in Oz.’ Then he put his arms around me, front and back, like safety bars on a fairground ride. We looked at the house together and my stomach lurched. I tried to imagine what lay outside the edges of the photograph. What the street would look like. How hot the sun would feel. Which birds we’d hear in the mornings. I remembered a song we used to sing at Girl Guides, the one about a laughing kookaburra. Laughing didn’t feel right anymore.

Floyd had always wanted to go to Australia; he would have loved this. Mum had always wanted to go, too. They’d had exactly the same sense of adventure. We’d talked about living there before, but I’d always thought it was just pretend, like the talks we’d had about getting a dog or taking a year off school and caravanning around the world.

Maybe Dad was thinking that Mum would get better once we were far away …

That was the thought that made me jump up and grab the phone as soon as it rang. It was Plan A calling.

‘Mal, don’t bother, it’s just me.’

‘Er … Hello … I mean,
good evening
. This is Jamila Everdeen from the Australian Department of Immigration –’

‘Mal, seriously, it’s too late.’ On another day I’d have laughed at her mashed-up name – Jamila after one of her favourite authors, Everdeen after her favourite book character. She was going to try to convince Dad that there was a problem with our passports, to buy us time.

‘Sorry, madam, I don’t know who “Mal” is. This is
Jamila Everdeen
. I wish to speak with Mr Doug Jackman, please.’

‘Mal, stop. I mean it. We have to give up now.’

It felt like forever until she spoke again.

‘I don’t know what I’ll do without you, Summer.’

She kept talking, and the nicer she was to me, the more I felt my heart getting smaller and colder. A china doll’s tiny fist. Already I was forgetting how to talk to my best friend.

We hadn’t even packed, but when I put the phone down, it was the end of something.

It was Christmas Eve and I was alone in the same spot where Dad had first told me we were leaving. Everything looked different. The treasures of our living room were gone. The rug had been rolled up and it leaned against the mantelpiece, full of our old footsteps. The curtains we’d hidden behind as little kids were slumped on the floor where the Christmas tree should have been. There would be no Christmas this year. We had four more days until we were leaving and that was our only countdown.

The house had changed and I’d changed, too. For a start, since around the time the Ibanez Artwood had come back, and especially when it was close to me, I’d had a visitor in my head.

That’s a strange thing to call me.

What are you, then? Actually, don’t answer that.

Floyd sounded like more than a thought or a memory. I could hear his voice as clearly as if I had one earphone in and the volume down low. At first I’d been scared and wouldn’t even admit to myself that it was really happening, but now I wanted him to stay.

Look at this place! How can a room feel so empty with forty-three boxes crammed into it?

I know what you mean.

Floyd didn’t like our old life packed up like this any more than I did, even though the boxes were stacked into forts like the ones he used to build for our games when I was little. Summer the princess, Wren the witch and Floyd the brave knight.

Only, you’re not here to defend me anymore.

What did I always tell you? You don’t need defending.

I didn’t blame Floyd for what was happening to us. I didn’t blame him for anything and never could. Even though he wasn’t perfect, he was perfectly Floyd and he’d loved me exactly the way I was.

And that’s why you can’t let me go.

Yes, that’s why I won’t let you go.

I’d been listening to Dad go on and on about Australia. No one else would. He’d been teaching me new words for things: a capsicum was a pepper, you
coloured in with a texta not a felt-tip, and there was an essential item called a rashie that you wore at the beach to stop sunburn.

Dad had bought us a jar of Vegemite. He said he’d grown up on it. He said all Australians loved it.

‘Dad, I’m really sorry but this stinks,’ I’d said.

‘Rubbish. Just try it. You put it on toast.’

‘I can’t eat that.’

‘You’ll be fine. Hold your nose.’

Luckily for me he’d chosen that moment to read the ingredients and decided that Vegemite was out because of glutamates, whatever they were. It went in the bin. For once Dad’s health kick worked in my favour. But then I got worried: if I thought Vegemite was that horrible, and it was something all Australians loved, how was I ever going to fit in?

As well as going on about how perfect Australia was, Dad had started picking on our old life here. He pointed out everything that was wrong with our house, our suburb, the school we went to, and the weather. He said he’d always hated our street because it looked like no one cared. But I liked our street. All the houses were as rundown as each other. It was like staying in your pyjamas all day with messed-up hair because you were with old friends and nobody cared what you looked like.

What about that bright purple house at the end? Are you saying you like that one now?

Yes, I’ve changed my mind. It’s
…
original.

It was no surprise that Wren had spent almost every waking hour since Dad had announced the move trying to sabotage it. She’d run away from home five times. The trouble was that she didn’t exactly blend in, so Dad found her by combing the streets slowly in Dorrit (Mum’s car), or the police picked her up. The fifth time, she’d taken the cat with her, but we found Charlotte mewing at the front door twelve hours after we’d discovered they were missing and an hour after that, Wren was home, too. She was even angrier that time than the times Dad or the police had found her.

Mum was still the same. Mostly she stayed in her room. Sometimes I’d go in and lie on the end of her bed with the cat, but I’d never look at Mum’s face. I’d become too scared to do that. When she would leave – for the bathroom, or to wander around the house – I’d look around for clues about what she did in there all day long. The bookmark from the novel she was reading never moved, but the television was occasionally warm. Sometimes there would be half a mug of cold tea over by the windowsill. I kept telling myself that things were on hold until we left England, and not to worry too much.

The Ibanez Artwood was the thing keeping me going. It was propped against the side of the boxes along with a bunch of other things that didn’t fit inside one: the cat basket, Mum’s easel, and some framed school artwork by Floyd, Wren and me. I reached over and took the guitar into my lap. The promise to keep it safe was still deep inside me, as tight as the strings that I still couldn’t let my fingers go near. It was enough just to be close to it.

I tapped quickly and unevenly on the back of the guitar and looked into the sound hole. Floyd used to play a trick on me when I was little: he’d tap, just like I was doing now, and tell me there was a goblin inside who’d leap out and grab onto me with his dirt-caked fingernails if I ever took the guitar without permission.

You should have seen your face.

Well, I was younger then. I believed in lots of impossible things. Anyway, that was a pretty mean thing you did.

You’re shivering. Are you cold?

Freezing.

So tell Dad.

He’s probably making it cold in here on purpose so he can keep going on about the benefits of Australia.

You know what I think? I think it wasn’t the central heating that kept us warm all the years we lived here. It was all our stuff plugging up the cracks.

Floyd was right. The cracks were everywhere.

Outside it was night-time and freezing. It wouldn’t be freezing in Australia. It would be tomorrow instead of today and everyone would be on the beach in their rashies. I tried to imagine myself in the blazing hot sun with all the carefree, happy people. It would feel like having the flu at a birthday party.

The doorbell rang and I heard voices at the door. Mal and Deeta. I felt nervous and wished they hadn’t come. It was easier to be alone with my thoughts and the guitar.

‘I’d love to pop in and say a quick goodbye to Cece,’ I heard Deeta say.

Mum would be ‘in the bath’ or ‘asleep’ or ‘out’. It didn’t matter which excuse Dad used. I heard Deeta say goodbye to Dad but I knew Mal wouldn’t leave with her. I waited for her to come into the living room.

It was such a strange feeling to like someone as much as I liked Mal and not want to see her. I’d stopped asking her to come over and I replied to her hundreds of messages with smiley faces. I’d run out of words. I couldn’t stand this waiting. Every moment we spent together was a reminder of what I was going to miss.

But Mal wasn’t easy to put off. She came into the room like a whirlwind.

‘Wow, it looks huge in here! I can’t believe how much you’ve done. Look at all these boxes!’ She knelt down and hugged me. ‘Do you feel Christmassy? I don’t. I wish it would snow. So look,’ she said, letting me out of the hug, ‘I bought some things to help get us in the mood.’ She held up a striped plastic bag I recognised from the corner shop. Then, between us, she placed a miniature Christmas pudding, two clementines with shiny green leaves still attached, two candy canes and a packet of gingerbread stars with white icing.

‘This is so nice,’ I said. I felt formal and awkward. I reached over the guitar and took a candy cane.

‘So. How are you?’ said Mal. She sounded like the school counsellor.

‘Okay.’ I shrugged.

‘I haven’t seen you for ages.’

‘We’ve been packing. Sorry.’

‘I could have helped.’

She sounded hurt. I didn’t know what to say. ‘We were fine. It was too boring to ask you to do it. Really.’

By now we’d both sucked all the red out of the end of our candy canes. Mal looked like she was wearing lipstick. It made me wonder if the next time I saw her we’d have changed so much we’d hardly know each other.

‘Tell the truth, Summer. Do you blame me?’ Mal
said. Her voice had shifted from a happy major chord to a soft, sad minor chord.

‘Blame you? For what?’

She put the colourless sticky end of the candy cane on the empty plastic bag. ‘I read online that people feel regret if they don’t get to say goodbye to someone they love. And you were at my house when it happened.’

I’d never seen Mal this close to tears. I was scared of how sad I’d made her without even knowing I was doing it.

‘Of course I don’t blame you, Mal.’ Because that would be horrible and pointless and something Wren might do. I was not like Wren at all … was I? ‘I don’t, Mal. Seriously. Never.’

‘Okay. That’s good.’ She grinned, believing me instantly. But I wondered if I believed myself.

Mal opened the packet of gingerbread stars. Then she peeled both clementines, dangled the peels from her ears as if they were earrings, and smiled goofily.

Give her something, Sum. Look at her. She’s trying so hard.

But I don’t know what to say. And maybe I do blame her for that night. I could have been here with you.

Say anything.

I took a deep breath and looked out the glass doors that led to the dark garden. And I saw something beautiful. ‘Look, Mal, it’s your wish!’

‘It’s snowing! Summer, it’s actually snowing!’

We crawled excitedly to the glass doors and knelt there, looking out and up. I couldn’t remember the last time it had snowed on Christmas Eve.

‘The snow looks like fireflies,’ said Mal.

She was right. The snow was in flurries that tumbled frantically in midair. It was fast and muddled like a snow globe that can’t settle.

‘This might sound strange,’ I began, ‘but sometimes I think insects can travel between worlds.’

‘How come?’

‘The way they move. One minute you see them, the next minute you don’t. They disappear so fast – backwards, even. Sometimes I imagine they’ve found tiny holes that lead to other universes.’

‘Wormholes?’

‘You mean they exist? There’s an actual name for them?’

We suddenly started to laugh.

‘Do you have to be a worm to use them?’ I squeaked.

We laughed like mad. We said silly things about worms. We didn’t care. This was exactly the sort of conversation I’d only ever had with Mal. My head was filled with nothing but our laughter, and I never wanted it to stop.