The summer was wonderful. Evie was wonderful, too; finally a teenager, finally worthy of long, hot days. She shaved her legs for the first time and bought cut-off shorts from the op-shop that made them look long. She got a Warehouse singlet so tight on her new shape that her dad said, “Did they paint that onto you?”
She walked to the bakery in the afternoon heat. There was something adult about the smell of melted tarseal; smokey and oily like a man. She tried different ways of moving her hips. A university student was watching the street from a couch on his front lawn and he whistled as she passed. Evie paused, surprised, and called out to him with a teasing smile, like she’d played a great trick, “I’m only thirteen!”
He shouted back, “Don’t be such a slag, then!”
Something in his voice wanted to hurt her, so she ran the rest of the way.
She bought a lamington and an off-brand cola at the bakery and held the cold can against one cheek and then the other, until she felt calmer. She sat on one of the bakery’s old plastic chairs and tried a few pretty arrangements for her legs. She ate the edges of the lamington, working her way in towards the blob of jam until the cake collapsed inwards and her fingers became a mess of cream and crumbs. She licked them clean. The student hadn’t followed her. She walked the long way home to avoid him, hurting with the word ‘slag’ and the sneer in his voice. But when she focussed on the low whistle her stomach flipped with excitement at having been recognised in a way she’d never been recognised before.
That evening, other families came around with big bowls of salad and warm loaves of bread wrapped in tea towels. Everybody talked in the back garden, eating slowly and endlessly. Children invented games where they had to run at high speed, ducking and weaving between adults and outdoor furniture. Their mums called out to them in panic if they got too close to a flickering citronella candle. Evie’s dad strummed his guitar the whole time, sometimes humming along; a gentle blanket of sound to keep them all comfortable as the sun started setting.
There was nobody else Evie’s age, so she sat with the adults. Her mum’s friend Fiona told her she had lovely long fingernails and asked how she did it, displaying her own short ones with ragged ends. Evie ran to her room to get the nail file and clear polish that were the only things she used, but it didn’t feel like enough, so as she filed Fiona’s nails, she invented a secret. “Don’t brush this off. You want all the dust from filing to mix into the polish. It’s a natural strengthener.”
“Wow – I had no idea!” Fiona said.
“Okay, done.” Evie screwed the lid back onto the bottle and the sharp smell began to fade, blending with the candles and dry grass and adults’ beer breath. “But be careful – it takes longer to harden than you’d expect. Don’t do up any buttons or play with your hair for at least half an hour.”
It felt wonderful giving all this advice to an adult – a fellow woman. Evie walked back to her room to put the polish away, trying to think what she could teach Fiona about next. She got distracted by her reflection in the tall bedroom mirror, smoothed her singlet, swung her hair so it swished like a shampoo ad. She turned her back to her reflection and pretended to run in slow motion, looking over her shoulder at the way her calf muscles moved under her hairless skin. She must have looked amazing, when she ran away from that guy on the couch, and when she ran up the garden to get polish for Fiona. The night was cooling now, but when she looked in her drawer of jumpers there was nothing that suited her new self; these were clothes for someone awkward and sprouting who wanted to hide parts of her body.
When she went back outside, her mum wrapped a woollen blanket around her, and Evie shrugged it off quickly, annoyed. “It’s not cold, Mum!”
She was going to need so many new things for this stage of her life. She decided to start saving up for a leather jacket.
Everyone was talking to someone other than her, now, voices lower because the dark had hushed them. The kids were still running around, but slower; sometimes an older one would hide and wait for the others to pass, then jump out and frighten them, so they screamed and laughed and sped away. She watched them for a while, trying to look the way women looked when they watched children play – gentle, tolerant, faintly amused. She focussed on not letting herself shiver, keeping her shoulders from clenching up in the cool air.
Then, she saw something over the fence. The sky was dark, but the shape of the neighbour’s roof was even darker against it, and the two types of darkness weren’t meeting in a smooth, diagonal line; there was a little, lumpy shape on the roof, and the shape was shifting as if it was alive. It looked like a child. She couldn’t work out how one of them had made it over the tall fence, let alone up the side of the neighbour’s house. There were no good climbing trees for gaining that sort of height. Evie got up and went to the fence, not trusting her own eyes – surely it would turn out to be a cat or a possum or a shadow.
“Hi!” a little voice called down.
“What are you doing up there? That’s so dangerous!” Evie yelled.
The other adults turned to look, then raced to join her at the fence, all calling their own children’s names.
“Come back to the garden,” Evie’s mum called, gentler than the others because her own child was safe beside her.
“I can’t,” the little voice on the roof said. It sounded like a girl. “I wanted to come but my grandma said it’s past my bedtime. And I’m so bored.”
One of the dads shone his cell phone torch at the girl and she flinched away, but not before they saw the small face – pale as a ghost in the glare – and realised they didn’t know this child. The man’s wife told him off for blinding the girl, adding to the danger, but the rest of the adults shifted and sighed; it was a relief to only be worried about a stranger.
“Go inside, go to bed,” Fiona called.
“Can you get down safely?” another mum asked.
The girl shuffled to the edge of the roof and put her feet through an open window, then slid down and backwards until she disappeared inside. Her head hit the wooden frame as it went through and she made a sad, surprised sound, then called, “I’m okay!”
They all stayed by the fence for a while – watching, waiting – but nothing else happened.
“Good catch, darling,” Evie’s mum said, squeezing her shoulder. Evie realised she’d failed at pretending to be warm; she was clenched and shivering under her mum’s hand. The garden felt so cold, now that her dad had put down his guitar.
“Speaking of bedtimes…” Fiona said, and started putting her things into her bag. “Can we help at all, with the tidy up?”
“No, no,” Evie’s mum and dad both said at once. Fiona put her bag by the driveway and tried to round up her three sons, but two of them ran away and hid.
The couple with the youngest kids – Evie couldn’t remember any of that family’s names, but the mum worked with her dad – started snapping at each other about who should carry what and who should get the children.
“We shouldn’t have stayed so late,” the woman said, her face tight and pale like she was about to cry. “They’ll be awful tomorrow.”
“I’ll get the car,” her husband said. “I’ll pull in, so you don’t have to walk – just get the stuff together, get the kids.”
Most of the children started to calm down; they let their parents herd them back towards the exit. Fiona’s boys came out of hiding. Adults started hugging each other goodbye and kids started whining; “You said we were going right now.” “Mu-um.”
The grumpy dad pulled his car in and ran something over; there was a soft whomph sound and then a huge, horrible crunch. Someone screamed, someone whimpered, but everyone else was hushed and frozen. The man reversed a bit, then got out to see what was under his car – Fiona’s bag, her white dish in fragments, pieces of it mixed through the teatowel and sunhats and little boys’ spare jumpers.
“It’s okay,” Fiona said. “It’s just a casserole dish. I’ll give everything else a good shake tomorrow. It’s just stuff.”
The tight-faced woman started to moan.
“It’s fine!” Fiona said. “It’s fine.”
The woman kept moaning; started shaking. Her husband tried to put his arms around her and she shoved him away. “You idiot,” she screamed. “You idiot! That could have been one of our children. That could have been one of our children!”
Both of their children joined in the screaming.
“You know,” Fiona said, loud, trying to be heard above all the crying. “The funny thing is, I stole that dish. My friend brought a meal to my house and I never gave the dish back to her…”
Fiona kept running her fingers through her hair. Hopefully her nails were dry now. Maybe the casserole dish could be ground down to dust and used to strengthen something.
Other adults murmured gently and got the crying family into their car at last, all of them sniffling except for the silent husband. Just as she was closing the last door, the mum realised they were missing an essential toy; a stuffed rooster the size of a tennis ball that someone couldn’t sleep without.
Evie – daughter of the house, whose legs looked amazing when she ran – darted off to look for it. Her mum searched the other side of the garden. Fiona’s oldest boy joined in.
Just as her mum called, “Got it!” a little voice came from next door, “Hi!”
“Mum,” Evie said. “That girl’s on the roof again.”
But the girl wasn’t on the roof this time, Evie realised as her eyes adjusted, she must just be sticking her head out the window.
“Who cried?” the girl asked. Before anyone could answer, she added, “Can I come over tomorrow?”
“I’m thirteen,” Evie called back. “And I’m the only one who lives here. The kids your age are leaving now.”
“I’m staying here for a week,” the girl said.
Fiona’s oldest son went and got his two brothers. Fiona followed them over to the fence, saying, “Wrong direction, boys. We’re leaving, remember?”
A kid who’d been copying Fiona’s oldest son all night whizzed over, laughing, then saw that everyone was looking at the house next door and shouted, “Hi!” over the fence.
“Look!” the little girl called to the crowd that had gathered below her. “Shine a light on me.”
Nobody shone a light on her. She was invisible in the dark window.
“Go and get your grandma if you can’t sleep, darling,” Fiona called over. “We can’t help you from here.’
“No! Look!” the voice was more breathless now, like she’d been exercising, and it seemed that it was coming from higher up than before.
“We can’t see you,” a little boy called, like he was in the audience of a pantomime.
“My pyjamas were too hot,” the voice said. “And my grandma’s asleep.”
The grumpy dad from the car came up behind them. He was sweeping his phone torch across the lawn, not realising the rooster had already been found. He pointed it at the crowd by the fence, then up to see what they were looking at. For a second, there she was, like a sideways koala, clinging to the plastic guttering that edged the roof. Her little naked back towards them. Her little-girl knickers with lace at the waistband. Every limb tensed. A head of wispy, messy blonde.
Then, with a crack, she was falling, still holding the piece of gutter that her weight had pulled free.
Time sped up but Evie didn’t. Adults ran around. Evie was stuck in slow motion, so everyone else was a rush of colour and movement and sound. She was still living in the second before the girl next door hit the ground; the girl had disappeared from sight behind the fence but Evie hadn’t heard her body land yet. It still seemed possible that something else would happen next.
Someone took Evie’s shoulders and steered her faster than she was ready to move, so she stumbled on the grass, couldn’t find the right way to place each foot, felt sea-sick.
“…inside…” she heard her mum’s voice say.
“…away…” said her dad.
He should play his guitar again. That was what they needed. Everything had started to feel wrong since he’d stopped strumming. She could hear that there were people from their party on the other side of the fence, now. People banging on the neighbour’s door.
The person who had her shoulders took off his polar fleece and put it onto Evie, zipping the front up to her neck. The inside was hot from him having just been in it. It covered her cut-offs and the sleeves went past the ends of her fingers. It was the angry dad. He only had a t-shirt on now.
She followed him to his car. “Go!” he told his wife. “Go home – I have to stay.”
Safe in the sweater, cocooned and warming up with this big, decisive man cooling down beside her, things clicked back into focus. “One second,” Evie said, remembering the rooster. She hurried to the fence and found it where her mum had let it go as the girl started falling. She carried it back and the car was gone, and so was the man.
Fiona ran in from the street, panting with effort. “Hey darl,” she said quickly. “My boys are inside, can you make them a Milo and keep them distracted? They’re tired. I’ve sent all the other families home, but I guess I have to be here. For your mum. For the police – since I saw it all…”
“Where is my mum?” Evie asked, rubbing the soft fleece of her sleeve between a fingertip and thumb, squeezing the rooster in her other hand.
“She’s with the girl, darl. And with the poor grandma. Your dad’s out on the street so he can catch the ambulance and point everyone in the right direction.”
“Oh.”
It was so late that there wasn’t any traffic going past. Most of the houses around them had the curtains closed and almost every light turned out. Evie didn’t want to be the oldest person left here. She wanted her mum and dad to come and tuck her into bed and tell her that if she didn’t feel tired, she should close her eyes anyway and pretend she was sleeping until she really was.
“I don’t know how long we’ll be, sorry darl,” Fiona said, still speaking so fast. “I’m afraid I’m not experienced with this type of thing. Although that’s a blessing, isn’t it? You’ve got my boys. I know you’ll take care of them. I’ll go.”
Fiona charged off, towards the emergency that had already happened.
Evie found two of Fiona’s sons wrestling in the bathroom, trying to overbalance each other; if your foot stepped off the bathmat, you lost. The youngest son had both arms elbow-deep in the toilet, his sleeves darkened by the water, eyelids so heavy he looked like he was asleep standing up.
“If you come to the lounge in the next five seconds, you get a Milo,” Evie said.
The two older ones ran, shoving each other so they’d be first, and the littlest one followed. Evie took off the little one’s wet sweater and lay him on the smaller couch, under a blanket. He was pliable as a doll. She told the other two to go tops-and-tails on the big couch.
“The game,” she said, “is that you have to be totally still and quiet and keep your eyes closed. The person who’s still for the longest gets a marshmallow in their Milo.”
She stayed in the doorway and listened to sirens get closer, and then stop right outside. She didn’t go to the window to look. The boys’ breath slowed and deepened. After a long time, Evie took a step into the hallway, but the eldest boy – he was probably nine – whispered, “If you break your back, it’s really bad.”
“Yeah,” Evie said softly.
“If you break your neck, you die,” he whispered.
“Not every single time,” Evie said. “But usually, yeah.”
“If you break your leg, you need crutches. But if you break your arm as well as your leg, you can’t use the crutches, so what do you do?”
Things had been messier in Evie’s mind; the girl smashed beyond recognition, blood and broken pieces everywhere.
She tiptoed over to the couch. “Do you want to come to the kitchen for your Milo so your brothers can keep sleeping?”
“I think I might have my Milo tomorrow,” he said. “But don’t go, okay? Stay here until my mum comes back?”
So she stayed there, standing in the lounge, and without even meaning to, she watched them sleep the way women watch children sleep.
Next week’s short story is by Anna Scaife
