Undine Page 3

  “Jesus, Undine. What were you dreaming about? You scared the hell out of me.”

  “Mum?” Undine was still trying to straighten out her thoughts, to separate dreaming from reality. “Lou?”

  “I’m here. You must be spooked. You haven’t called me Mum since you were Jasper’s age.”

  “What are you doing up here?”

  “You were shouting in your sleep. You kept yelling, ‘I am home, I am home.’ Must have been a ripper of a dream, sweetie.”

  “Mmm.” Undine remembered the sensation of opening the wound and could feel the sand and the shells and the crabs moving—living—under her skin. She clutched the bandaged wound, shuddering.

  From downstairs they heard Jasper crying. “Oops. Sounds like he’s working his way past ambulance to fire engine. Come downstairs with me. We’ll all get up and have a midnight feast, hey?”

  Undine gathered Jasper up out of the crib. He was too big for it really, and the bars were pointless as he was perfectly capable of climbing out on his own. Lou had never got around to buying him a proper bed. Undine suspected that it was because Lou didn’t want to encourage Jasper to keep growing.

  Undine loved the smell of Jasper when he had just woken up: brown-sugary sweet. His hair was damp where he had been lying on it. His eyes were sleepy and adorable. He had stopped crying, and his fingers had crept into his mouth.

  “Jasper had a woogie,” Jasper said, his voice still teary, muffled by fingers.

  “Poor Jasper.” Undine kissed the top of his head. “Undine had a woogie too.” Woogie was a remnant of Jasper’s baby-speak, when he had his own personal language for everything. Somehow woogie had remained in his small but rapidly expanding lexicon. Woogie was a safer word than nightmare; there was something comforting about it, partly because it belonged only to Undine, Jasper, and Lou. Undine held it in her mind now, like a talisman against the dark.

  After a hot chocolate with Lou in the kitchen, surrounded by the dependable mess of A Brief History of Sea Voyages, Lou’s latest indexing job, and listening to Lou read Jasper the first chapter of Winnie-the-Pooh, Undine felt tired enough to risk going back to bed.

  This time the dream, though still disturbing, was at least more restful. She was at the beach, waves tumbling onto the shore. On the horizon, a large wooden boat keeled to and fro. Gulls arced around her, with the same harsh shriek as Jasper’s fire-engine cry. She looked down and at her feet, lying on the sand, were three long bronze fish, dappled in the strange light. Someone was there, or almost there, like a ghost, printed on the air, flickering like an old film.

  He thumped her hard on the chest. She woke up, gasping for breath.

  When she woke, she felt ordinary again. The feeling had gone, and she thought perhaps, after all that, she had imagined it. Still sleepy, she idled down the stairs. She made herself a cup of tea, finding a meditative pause in the act of measuring out the leaves into the pot and stirring sugar into the cup. She heard the thump of the paper being flung down the steps outside from Camelot Road, and opened the front door to retrieve it. The paper was lying a meter away, but that wasn’t what caught her eye.

  There, on the wooden step immediately outside her own house, were three long bronze fish, dead but still fresh, their scales glittering in the early morning light.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Undine burst into the Montmorencys’ house without knocking. Mrs. M raised her eyebrows as Undine, dressed only in her nightie, whirlwinded up the stairs to Trout’s room, nearly knocking over a half-asleep Mr. M on the way.

  She flew into Trout’s room and threw the one fish she had snatched up on her way out her front door onto the bed next to him. The tail of the fish slapped Trout on the face, and if he hadn’t been awake before, he certainly was now.

  “Is this your idea of a joke?” she demanded, her eyes glittering and furious.

  “No,” said Trout. “It’s my idea of a fish.”

  “Very cute,” Undine said. “And how did it get to my front door? Grew legs and walked from the sea, I suppose, with its little fish friends? I don’t think so.”

  “Well, it does seem unlikely,” Trout agreed, “but it certainly had nothing to do with me.”

  Undine towered over him for a moment, and he had the sudden impression of her as enormously tall, her power almost palpable in the room, like electric sparks. At the same time the thought flashed briefly through his head that Undine was in his bedroom wearing only her nightie. But the expression on her face made it clear that there was no time for a thought like that, and he pushed it aside, promising himself he would reflect on it later.

  After examining his face for a moment, Undine seemed to deflate. His look of bewilderment and passivity was too much for Undine, and she was forced to admit to herself that he was not the culprit. As soon as she accepted this she realized she had never truly believed he’d had anything to do with it. After all, even if he had crept up to her house to deliver the unwanted fish, then returned to bed, how could Trout have arranged her dreams?

  “Well, if you didn’t do it,” and her voice was small, “who did?”

  Trout looked at Undine, growing and shrinking in his room like Alice in Wonderland in her vaguely transparent white cotton nightdress, and then at the fish, whose blank stare revealed nothing.

  “Do you think you could start at the beginning? I’m afraid the fish is a less-than-substantial visual clue as to what the hell has been going on over the last twenty-four hours.”

  Undine smiled weakly. “Tell me about it.”

  “No,” said Trout, firmly. “You tell me about it. What’s going on? You ran off from school yesterday. You wouldn’t come to the phone last night. You’re behaving—excuse me for saying so—very strangely, and you’ve topped it all off by throwing a fish at my head. Isn’t it about time you let me in on it, whatever it is?”

  Undine sat down on the little wooden chair by Trout’s bed, a relic of Trout’s childhood when he used to suffer from asthma attacks and his mother would spend the night sitting by his side, managing his breathing.

  “I don’t know what’s going on. If I did, I hardly would have thrown the fish at you, would I?”

  “Well, tell me what you do know. Come on, Undine, we’re best friends, aren’t we?” He raised himself up on one arm, feeling rather disempowered at being in bed with the bedspread up to his neck, wearing only his jocks underneath it, while she sat at least mostly dressed looking down on him.

  Undine sighed a leaky, revelatory sigh, and seemed about to launch into something, when the sound of three sharp knocks on the bedroom door startled them both. Mrs. M’s voice boomed through the closed door.

  “Come on, you two. It’s nearly time for school. Are you dressed yet, Trout?”

  The emphasis on the word dressed made them both blush.

  “I better go home and get ready. I’ll meet you back here in fifteen minutes.”

  “Well, remember to put on more than a nightie this time. You’ll have my mother in an early grave.”

  Undine looked down at herself distractedly. “Oops.”

  “Oops, indeed. Now go away. I want to get out of bed and I clearly have finer sensibilities about my state of undress than you.”

  As she passed Mrs. M on the stairs, Undine smiled inadequately. Richard, Trout’s oldest brother, emerged from his bedroom. He rubbed his eyes. “Wow,” he remarked to no one in particular. “I should get up early more often.”

  Undine went scarlet and avoided Mrs. M’s eyes, though she could hear her huffing and puffing. As Undine walked out the door, Dan was just walking in with a carton of milk.

  Of course, the whole family has to see me like this, thought Undine, embarrassed.

  Dan raised his eyebrows but said nothing. However, he forgot to duck at the Undine-sized door and whacked his head.

  “Oh,” said Undine, and, treacherously, she laughed, while it was Dan’s turn to blush. Splaying her hand across her mouth but laughing still through her fingers, she flew up
the stairs and burst into her own house, banging the front door behind her.

  Lou observed her helter-skelter arrival. “Did you go out like that?” she asked, more amused than upset.

  “Apparently.”

  Lou chuckled, and Undine did too, thankful her mother didn’t ask for any more details. Lou looked at the fish in Undine’s hand. “Did you find one too? There were two on the doorstep when I went to get the paper. Any idea where they came from?”

  “No,” said Undine. “Absolutely no idea at all.”

  “Here.” Lou held out a page from the sports section of the newspaper. “Wrap it up in this and put it in the rubbish. Good thing it’s bin day today. Stinky fish is a bit much to bear, and it’s going to be hot today, so they say.”

  Lou was very dismissive of they. They could be anyone, from weather forecasters to doctors, or any other disembodied group of people who had fixed ideas about things.

  Undine wrapped up the fish and binned it, and went to the bathroom to prepare herself for school.

  Little scales glittered on her hands from the fish, and her skin felt dry and salty. She lathered and washed, but suspected the scales were as insidious as Jasper’s day-care glitter, which hung around for months, miraculously appearing underneath a fingernail or at the end of an eyelash, no matter how many baths he took, and migrating to Lou and Undine, and various other unlikely places, so that little bits of Christmas would suddenly and surprisingly appear in the corners of things. She put her hair in a messy ponytail, which actually looked all right, in a Mim way, and washed her face and hands.

  It was surprising that, instead of feeling as if she might come apart altogether, Undine actually felt ready to face the day. She had a strong suspicion that whatever was happening to her was going to manifest itself as something else—like the fish—and that the feelings and the voices were gone.

  At any rate, today it seemed that school and Trout were safe prospects, and Wednesdays were a slack day anyway, with double phys ed in the middle, which involved very little effort on Undine’s part. Now that they were getting toward the end of the year, they were allowed to choose their own activities. Last lesson, Undine and her friends had sat on the little hill overlooking the oval, making daisy chains.

  Mr. Hanson, the spunky young sports teacher, who seemed to like Undine despite her eternal lack of interest in organized exercise, had come up and said, “You know that wasn’t exactly what we had in mind.”

  Fran had looked up with her big blue eyes and said, “But, Mr. Hanson, we’re improving our hand-eye coordination.” Fran was the star of the hockey and cross-country teams, so Mr. Hanson just grunted and walked off, and they spent a happy hour clipping holes in the stalks with their fingernails, pushing the next flower through, and winding themselves in long, looping chains of the white-and-yellow flowers.

  Undine had felt as if she were in primary school again: the childish activity, the almost overwhelming smell of the freshly cut lawn on the oval, and the general silliness that pervaded the group of girls, so that by the end of the lesson they were rolling around on the grass, laughing weakly, hiccupping air, unable to stop.

  Undine double-checked that she was completely dressed as she left the house for school. Trout was waiting at the bottom of the steps for her.

  “Come on, we’ll miss the bus. You women, you take an age to get ready.”

  Undine gave him a playful swipe. “Oh, bollocks,” she said. “What do you know about women? And who picks up whom every morning on the way to school?”

  “Yes, yes. Details. Anyway, you should be nicer to me, Ms. Secretive. I may just have a secret of my own.”

  “What?”

  “It’s about your fish.”

  Undine looked at him expectantly. Trout remained silent, but smug.

  “Well?” Undine asked finally. “What about it?”

  “Ah-ah-ah.” Trout waggled his finger. “I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours.”

  Undine rolled her eyes. “But if it’s about my fish, then it’s my secret. Isn’t it? And you’ve…misappropriated it.”

  “Sorry. This is not negotiable. The fact is, it is my secret, because I know what it is and you don’t. So spill.”

  “You’re being childish!”

  Trout smiled annoyingly. “Technically at sixteen, in the eyes of the law, I am a child. But that’s not the point. Are you going to tell me or aren’t you?”

  Undine made a funny noise in the back of her throat, like a growl, but Trout knew he’d won. “All right,” said Undine, as the bus pulled up. “I’ll tell you, but not now. After school.”

  “Mine can wait too,” said Trout, sauntering onto the bus behind Undine. “By the way, my mum said your nightie was so transparent she could see your knickers.”

  Somehow Trout had timed that comment to come exactly at one of those awful, perfect moments when a sudden quiet had fallen over the bus. The word knickers rang through the air and the raggle-taggle of kids from the Year 7s to the Year 12s started hooting and laughing loudly, but not so loud that they couldn’t hear Undine’s response. They leaned forward, waiting for it.

  Trout and Undine stood at the front of the bus, caught in the aisle between the smelly brown leather seats, frozen for a moment. Trout looked mortified, but Undine turned around and said serenely, “Oh well, at least I was wearing knickers,” and the bus exploded, but somehow the laughter, which had been directed at them, turned into something friendly and easy and Trout slumped into his seat, pulsing with relief.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  As Undine predicted, school was comfortably ordinary.

  It turned out they were right; it was an exceptionally hot presummer day, so phys ed was a swim in the river behind the school or, for those without bathers, a paddle. Or, for those girls who liked to live dangerously, sunbathing on the gravelly sand.

  “You could go for a swim in your knickers,” one of the boys from the bus called to Undine as she stood ankle deep, looking longingly out at the water.

  “We could, you know,” said Fran, “and our T-shirts. No different to bathers.”

  “They’d be wet all day,” said Undine, though not opposed to the idea.

  “We could lie on the grass afterward and dry them out.”

  Not all the girls could be convinced, but Undine was easily persuaded. The idea of suspending her body in all that blue (though it looked a bit more like a mucky greenish gray up close) was too tempting to worry about leaving little damp seat marks on the splintery school chairs, and she and Fran ran in, followed by a few other squawking girls, shouting from the icy cold.

  “Watch out for icebergs! The water comes straight from Antarctica!”

  Fran and Undine bobbed about, exerting little energy, talking idly over their plans for the summer, or Fran’s plans at least. Undine knew this summer would be like the last one, and the one before. Two weeks camping in the mountains with Lou and Jasper and Mim, and various extraneous people dropping in and out, with at least one huge exhausting bushwalk to remind everyone why they live in the city and only go bushwalking once a year.

  Fran was going to Noosa with her cousin and her cousin’s friend. “Ah, the beach.” Fran smiled up at the sky serenely. “Proper beach. Not this boring river with its barnacles and stones. The Pacific Ocean. Warm water. Lifeguards.”

  Undine closed her eyes. The sea. Lou hated the sea. She was terrified of it: sharks, riptides, the openness of it, the emptiness. She didn’t mind rivers or creeks or even lakes, but, “It just stretches on forever,” she said of the sea, with horror. “Forever.” No one could persuade Lou to holiday on the beach and so Undine had very little experience of the sea.

  But Undine was fascinated by the sea, for some of the same reasons that Lou was repelled. The emptiness. The openness. She remembered reading somewhere that sailors were called, the sea chose them.

  Undine thought she might have heard this call in her dreams, the sea’s siren song.

  Her own name was a sea name. The
book Lou had bought to choose a name for Jasper, when he was still a restless lump inside her, said Undine was Latin, meaning “of the waves,” but Trout had told her Undine was a sea nymph in old mythology. In fact, it was one of the reasons she and Trout had become friends.

  Trout had been a nickname, describing his panting asthmatic breath, but somehow it had evolved from being a private family joke to being his moniker in the outside world, so not even teachers called him by his real name, which was, forgettably, Trevor.

  Trout and Undine had recognized each other from their names as two sea things, landed in the dryness of the suburbs.

  Suddenly Fran gasped out a little strangled cry. “Ugh. Ooh. I think a fish just brushed past my leg.”

  “A fish?” said Undine doubtfully. “Are you sure?” She’d had quite enough of fish for one day.

  Fran grimaced a smile. “I hope it was a fish.”

  “Seaweed?”

  “Ugh.” Fran shuddered. “Whatever it was, it gave me the heebie-jeebies. I’m getting out.”

  They kicked themselves back to shore and lay on the beach on their school sweaters, drying themselves out. Undine slathered herself in sunscreen and pulled her school hat over her face, sticking her legs into the shade of one of the resilient native trees that grew by the river, rooted in the sandy soil.

  Conversation dried up in the heat, and Undine closed her eyes, feeling sleepy and satisfied, the salt water stretching her skin so it felt taut. She listened to the shouts bouncing over the water amidst the warble of birds, and drowsed happily.

  “Hey, sleepyhead!” Fran roused Undine from her state of slumber. “Come on. It’s time for lunch.”

  “Oh, you go ahead. I might just stay here for a while.” Undine waved Fran away.

  She closed her eyes again, but couldn’t recapture the feeling of peacefulness she had had a moment before. She was just trying to decide if she was hungry enough to walk all the way to the canteen when she felt a shadow pass across her face.

  She opened her eyes to find Trout standing over her. “Here.” He pushed a bag of food toward her, doing his worst Italian mamma impersonation. “Eat somesing. You too skeeny.”