When she got close to our verandah I scrammed into the kitchen and took a bag of spuds out of the cupboard, dumping them in the sink. I started peeling one, but it was knobbly as an elbow, and hard to get the knife around the lumpy edges.
Mum came into the kitchen. She slammed the jam drops down on the table, took one of Cassie’s beers out of the fridge. I heard her sucking on the bottle, and I tried to be small and still and concentrated hard on the spud skins.
‘Why don’t you and Wally play with Tilly anymore?’ Mum asked. She stood next to me, looked at me properly, like she was suspicious of me, like she was trying to see if she could read a secret on my face.
I shrugged, looked down at her feet. ‘I don’t know.’
‘I don’t understand why you couldn’t have tried to get along with her,’ Mum said.
‘I did try.’
‘I bet Wally was a right pain to her.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘He was nice.’
‘Well, what then?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I think we had a fight.’
‘About what?’
I was starting to get nervous; maybe she did know something and was trying to worm it out of me. ‘I don’t remember.’
‘And whose fault was it?’ Mum said. ‘Wally’s, I bet.’
‘No, not Wally’s,’ I said. ‘It was Tilly’s fault. She’s just not very nice.’
‘Well, sometimes we have to put up with people who aren’t nice,’ Mum said. ‘That’s just life.’
I kept peeling the spuds, hoping the conversation was over. I hated when Mum was like this: picking at me, trying to get me to admit to something, so she could have someone to blame for whatever was wrong with her.
I heard her put the beer down, and a second later she was right next to me. She grabbed the knife and spud off me, held them both to my face. ‘Bloody useless, you are,’ she said. She told me to look, but the spud was too close to my face, a brown blur. ‘Covered with eyes,’ she said. ‘You see that?’ She shouldered me away, so that she was in front of the sink. She turned on the tap and started peeling the spud as though she was skinning an animal.
The next Monday, when I was doing my homework on the verandah, a car I didn’t recognise turned off the highway. Miss Williams didn’t give us much homework, but I wanted mine to be perfect so that she thought I was one of the smart kids. I put down my pencil and watched the car roll into the driveway of the yellow house and slow to a stop. I stood up and leaned over the railing so that I could get a better look.
One of the backs door opened. Tilly scrambled out, and a second later the front passenger door opened as well. A strange girl got out too. She was wearing the same uniform as Tilly, hat on her head. Tilly opened the boot, swung her bag onto her shoulders, and then slammed it shut. They stood by the boot for a second. They looked like two little dolls from so far away, in their stupid little hats. The girl must have said something funny, because Tilly laughed and the strange girl laughed along with her.
As the car pulled away Tilly stood on the grass and waved her hand over her head. It beeped its horn as it went through the gate, and Tilly kept waving, even when it had disappeared towards the highway.
I went and found Wally, told him what I’d seen, but he didn’t seem to care. ‘So what?’ he said.
‘Don’t you want to know who she is?’ I asked.
‘Nope.’
‘They’re probably in the same class.’
Wally didn’t say anything. I kicked him on the leg but he didn’t kick back. I grabbed the remote and changed the channel, and then ran out of the room, hiding the remote in the bathroom. I didn’t understand how Tilly had made a friend when Wally and me had been at the same school for years and years and no one had ever offered to drop us home before. There was nothing special about Tilly. She had a loony granddad as well, a dad who was almost as bad. It didn’t make any sense. It was like none of that stuff stuck to her, not like it seemed to stick to us. I went outside and started ripping out the weeds nestled in the ground near the fence, creeping around the wood. They scratched my hands, made them itch like poison.
A cockatoo landed on the clothesline and let out a squawk. It gave me a fright, like I’d been caught snooping, and I stood and threw the weeds over the fence. A second later another bird landed on the wire. They started squawking together, or maybe at each other, and another three or four swooped down from the sky and the trees and joined the other birds. It was loud as screams, shooting up and bouncing off the trees, their sharp beaks opening up to the sky.
I came out of my room when Cassie got home from work. Everyone else was asleep. He took some leftover casserole out of the fridge, scraped it onto a plate and heated it in the microwave.
‘Are you going out tonight?’ I said.
‘Nup,’ Cassie replied.
‘What’s Ian doing?’
‘Dunno.’
‘Is he coming over?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Is Ian your best friend?’ I asked.
The microwave beeped. Cassie took out a fork from the drawer. ‘What’s with all the questions?’ he said.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘They’re just questions.’
‘Well, who’s your best friend?’
‘I don’t know. Wally, I s’pose.’
I asked him if he’d had any more bad dreams and he looked at me like I was an idiot, like he had never even told me about the girl and the mice in the first place. I thought he’d been telling me something special and important, but maybe he’d already forgotten about it. It probably wasn’t important at all.
Cassie took his dinner and went into his room. After a minute I knocked on the door, but he didn’t answer. I tried turning the knob but the door was locked.
When I got home from school the next day, Mum was on the verandah. She had a cup of tea in one hand and a smoke in the other. I’d never seen her smoke before. I thought about the blood in her snot the other day. I knew blood was a bad sign.
‘Are you smoking?’ I asked.
Mum blew out her breath. ‘What does it look like?’ There was something mean in her voice that gave me a little prick.
‘Smoking gives you cancer,’ I said. ‘At school they showed us a picture of a person’s liver that was sliced open and filled with tar.’ Cassie smoked too, but with Mum it was different. It was like the smoke could poison her with just one puff. She looked worse already.
‘Lots of things give you cancer.’
‘Tongue cancer as well,’ I said. ‘They’ll chop your tongue off. Imagine not having a tongue. You wouldn’t be able to talk.’
I was trying to be funny to lift her mood but Mum didn’t laugh. She tapped her cigarette into a can of beer. ‘For Christ’s sake,’ she said. ‘I can do whatever I like in my own house without a bloody interrogation.’
I thought about telling her it could also make your fingers turn black and fall off, but decided not to.
I leaned against the railing. There was a mole on the side of her face that looked bumpier and browner than it had been before. It looked like a tiny planet.
‘Just leave us alone, would you?’ Mum said.
I didn’t understand why she was like this. Cassie was home. Everything was fine. Why couldn’t she just snap out of it and stop being in awful moods for no reason?
Her hand went to her face and picked at the planet. I could feel the smoke in my lungs, could feel my liver turning black.
14.
THE NEXT FEW WEEKS OF term flew by. Every afternoon when I got home from school I spent ages on my homework, made sure my handwriting was perfect. I decided I was going to be the best in the class, so I could go to a school far away where no one knew me, where no one thought I was strange or that my blood was rotten, where I didn’t have Wally acting like I was a fungus when, really, he was the fungus. I borrowed books from the library at lunchtime, and every night after dinner I sat on my bed and tried to learn properly instead of watching TV, which Miss Williams said rotted your brain. The strange girl dropped Tilly home a few more times. They even had a sleepover one weekend, but I didn’t care. Wally had started sleeping on the couch because he said he couldn’t stand to share a room with me anymore, but I didn’t care about that either.