Undine Read online

  Undine smiled shyly. “I think I can manage to stay upright and mobile at the same time.”

  “Good, good.” Richard appeared genuinely pleased at the prospect of her company. And as they set off making benign small talk, Undine forgot about Trout and Lou, and storms and voices, and fish and feelings, and instead just concentrated on staying upright and mobile at the same time.

  Undine ended up walking all the way to the door of Richard’s lecture room with him. By the time they got there, she knew that the room was filled with history students, which was what he was planning to major in, and also that Richard thought Neapolitan ice cream was vaguely sinister, that he knew how to milk a goat and make porridge (but not at the same time), that he could play Für Elise on the piano but he didn’t know his left from his right, that he couldn’t ice-skate or drive a car, but he could say the alphabet backward without a single mistake, and that he was going on his first archaeological dig this summer, excavating a convict site at Port Arthur.

  “I’m heading down there tomorrow afternoon. It’s not very exciting, like Romans or Vikings, but it’s good experience. Hopefully it will help me get a scholarship to go somewhere a bit farther away next year.”

  “Where do you want to go?” asked Undine, trying to think where people went to do digs. “Egypt? Greece?”

  “Scotland, actually. The islands. I rather fancy being a bit windswept and interesting…you know, the remoteness…just me and a hundred other undergraduates and the elements…Oh, and beer. I’m pretty sure there’ll be beer.”

  In turn Undine shared her disappointment at never having had a guinea pig. When she was little, still at the Bellerive flat, she had hassled Lou for one endlessly. Lou finally fobbed her off with, “We’ll see. Maybe in the spring.”

  “For years I asked her if it was spring yet,” Undine said. She shook her head sadly. “But spring never came.”

  Richard clutched his heart. “Oh, how awful. No wonder you argued with your mother. What a cruel and pitiless woman. And yet one cannot help but admire the ingenuity of her evil plan.”

  Undine smiled, but weakly. She had forgotten Lou somehow. Richard had proved an extraordinarily successful distraction. It was nice. She felt at this very moment like any teenager; nothing marked her out as unusual. She could disappear, lose herself amongst the university crowd and no one would know that she was meant to be anywhere else.

  A bright-faced, gray-haired woman who was even shorter than Undine pushed past them through the open door and made her way to the podium at the front of the lecture hall. Chatter subsided as she fiddled with an overhead projector.

  “That’s Professor Rose. I better go in.” Richard held out his hand and it took Undine a moment to realize that she was expected to shake it. As her fingers touched his, she was suddenly reminded of the power of the storm; the energy of it seemed to be rushing to the place where their hands touched. She looked at him sharply. Had he felt it? She couldn’t tell. She saw something new in his face. The same amused expression teased at the corners of his eyes, but it was as if he were seeing her for the first time. For a moment he seemed struck silent, then the moment passed and he was back to his own comical self.

  “It has been a pleasure walking with you. Now remember, onward and upward. Or in your case, upright and mobile.” He gave a flourish that was half wave, half bow, and Undine watched him go into the lecture hall. Just when she was about to turn away, he turned back, and for a moment their eyes met. Richard winked, then Professor Rose began to speak, and Richard hurried toward the bank of seats, so that from where Undine stood, he could no longer be seen.

  It was only when she was halfway home that Undine realized she had well and truly missed the school bus. Trout would be at school by now, first period would have begun, and she would already have been marked absent. She began to feel sick again. Two days in a week. The school would ring. Lou would not be pleased.

  She shook her head. “Upright and mobile,” she reminded herself, and kept walking.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Undine knew, even before she opened the front door, that Lou wasn’t home. The house seemed poised, giving the impression of a stalking cat, alert on its haunches.

  As she opened the door the phone rang. It didn’t occur to Undine to leave it, though as she picked it up she realized she was totally unprepared if it was the school. She should have let it ring. Lou was good at that, letting the phone ring off, but Undine was a Pavlov’s dog, responding slavishly to the sound of the bell.

  Anyway, it was only Mim. “Hi, Undine. Lou’s just left here with Jasper. I was ringing to warn you that she knows you skipped school on Tuesday and she knows you didn’t go today either.”

  “Yeah, I figured the school would have rung this morning. What did you tell her?”

  “That you were a bit upset about something that happened at school so I let you hang out here with me. I don’t think she believed me, though.”

  Undine felt guilty that Mim had lied for her. “Thanks, Mim.”

  “Is everything okay? Why didn’t you go to school again today? Has something happened?”

  Undine remembered her promise to Mim, and hesitated. “Well…” But what could she say? She didn’t want to say anything. She didn’t want to talk about the storm; she didn’t want to even think about it. She wanted to forget everything. Hearing the lie in her own voice, she answered. “No. Nothing’s happened.”

  Mim did not sound at all convinced, and Undine thought she even sounded a little annoyed. “Lou knows something’s going on. Why don’t you just talk to her? She’s worried about you, mate.”

  “Yeah,” said Undine, unconvinced. “Worried.” Angry, maybe. Ballistic. Not worried.

  “I think you’re underestimating Lou,” Mim said.

  She should have known Mim would side with Lou. “I think you are, Mim. You didn’t hear her today. The things she said.”

  “Then tell me. You promised me, Undine, remember? You said you’d keep me in the loop.”

  “Look, there’s nothing to tell, Mim. I was just…the feeling—it’s gone, it was a mistake…I thought I heard something. I’m just…it’s just normal teenage girl stuff, that’s all. A mistake. I shouldn’t have worried you.”

  “Oh, Undine…” Mim sighed before she hung up. “Don’t burn your boats, okay?”

  But Mim, as Mim herself had pointed out, was a grown-up, with grown-up responsibilities. She would feel she had to do something. Mim might have been able to wrap her head around the more intangible stuff. A feeling? Why not? A voice even. But generating a whole storm out of thin air? It was too implausible. Mim wouldn’t buy it. She’d tell Lou. They’d think she was totally insane.

  Don’t burn your boats, Mim had said. But that’s exactly what Mim was now, Undine thought, a burning boat—and for a moment she was overcome with a startling vision of an enormous wooden boat, ablaze, collapsing into the sea.

  It took Undine a total of two seconds to decide that she didn’t want to be in the house when Lou got home.

  She went to her bedroom, changed into a fresh pair of jeans and a loose white shirt, grabbed some money from the jar under her bed, and left.

  It was only about a two kilometer walk from Undine’s house to the few blocks that made up the city center, and she took it slowly, looking into gardens, admiring the old cottages and Victorian town houses, some of them built on the downward slope, so that they had a third story below street level, almost subterranean. Many of them had been converted into offices and doctors’ practices, with plaques on the door saying things like DR. FLETCHER, SPECIALIST IN DISEASES OF THE SKIN.

  She stopped to talk to cats basking in the sun, patted dogs, smiled at babies, and hummed a little under her breath.

  Actually, on the whole she was in a fantastic mood. Which, all things considered, was unexpected. As she investigated her good mood, her mind turned something up for further scrutiny. It was the image of Richard, looking back, winking at her.

  Oh.
r />   Thinking about that wink, and Richard’s smile, her stomach capsized, and she felt a strange little tickle in the back of her throat.

  Oh crap.

  When it rains, it pours. Or in Undine’s case, when it rains, the world flies apart.

  Undine went into every shop in Hobart. Clothes shops, shoe shops, delicatessens, shops selling home wares, shops selling hardware, bookshops, music shops, little shops, and big department stores, but she couldn’t find anything that she wanted. Her money was burning a hole in her pocket and she was desperate to buy something, but nothing seemed to suit.

  What could she buy, what one object could make her world make sense? A hairbrush? A pair of red patent-leather shoes? A hat? It was ridiculous. She touched everything she saw, and it all seemed to resonate with a hollow echo, as though nothing were quite as real as it had been yesterday.

  She felt as if she were detaching from the world, spiraling off to some other place. Everything seemed shabby, like a pale imitation of itself—as if she were on a movie set, but no one had told her her lines.

  The city had that deserted weekday air about it. It was as though everyone except Undine was where they were supposed to be. It was kind of exciting. Possibilities seemed to expand around her, although she didn’t quite know what those possibilities were.

  As the day passed into the afternoon she wandered down to Salamanca, which on Saturdays was a big marketplace, and every other day was a parking lot. Except for the cars, Salamanca felt out of time, with its cobbled ground, the huge stone buildings and, opposite them, the lawns and the large English trees, threaded with fairy lights that were lit at night. The sandstone buildings were filled with cafés, restaurants, and galleries, and arcades of permanent shops were sandwiched between them, selling art, crafts, antiques, furniture, and second-hand clothes and books.

  It was all so artificial. It was beautiful, but it did not belong to her. She was a tourist, an outsider, and she could only see the thin surface veneer of things; she couldn’t get beneath it to the real heart of anything.

  She called on all her senses, trying to find a way in: looking at mirrors and masks and hand-blown glass bottles and soaps carved to look like shells; fingering bright, lumpy candles; stroking the thick coarse wool of handmade sweaters and the soft mohair of knitted hats; brushing hand-dyed silks against her cheek. She cradled heavy-based pottery jugs with fine cracked-egg glazing, and opened and closed wooden boxes: myrtle, blackwood, Huon pine, breathing in their sharp, sweet perfumes.

  She lingered outside the cafés and bakeries, inhaling the aroma of freshly ground, roasted coffee and the yeasty smell of baking bread. She admired jars of small cheeses marinated in oil, and chilies, olives, and dried tomatoes, displayed in the long wooden-framed windows of a restaurant.

  She bought a souvlaki and sat on the grass to dismantle it, extracting the hot spicy meat blackened on the spit, licking the garlicky yogurt off her fingers, pulling apart the bread to eat with slices of tomato but discarding the ubiquitous shredded lettuce. Seagulls collected around her, and she tossed them the unwanted lettuce and the soggy remains of the bread.

  The sun glistened and shone, and the day stretched around her like a bubble, protecting her from what had happened and from what might happen, holding her in the here and now. She felt a taut sensation in her tummy, as if she were waiting, balanced on a precipice, about to dive in and discover a new world. It was dizzying.

  She lay down on the grass and closed her eyes, feeling the late afternoon sun on her face. She listened to the birds, to the sound of car doors closing and engines revving, and to the music, chatting people, and clinking glass at the pub across the road where the after-work crowd were spilling over onto the footpath. She could hear the faint swish of the leaves above her. A child shouted. A car horn blazed. A ship sounded in the nearby river docks. She could hear it all so clearly, and yet it was all so far away. She had the uneasy sensation that she did not belong to this world anymore, that the magic she had done had separated her from the rest of the living, breathing populace of the city.

  And then, softly, “Undine…”

  …Undine, it’s time to come…

  “Not you again,” Undine said crossly and sat up.

  Richard was standing over her. “Sorry.” He looked red in the face.

  “Oh no, not you, I thought you were…”

  Who, Undine? she asked herself. The voice inside your head?

  It was strange that she hadn’t realized until now that the internal voice had been there all day, like the humming of a fridge in a kitchen, a background noise to which she had learned to pay no attention.

  “…someone else.”

  Richard smiled. “You looked like you were sleeping.”

  “Just about.”

  “Sorry to wake you.”

  “Oh no, no, that’s okay.”

  They shared a moment’s awkward silence. Undine had to squint to look up at Richard, who was standing just to one side of the lowering sun.

  “Shall I sit down?” Richard asked. “Your face is all scrunched up. It looks painful.”

  “It is a bit. If you take two steps to the left I should be all right.”

  “Like this?”

  “Lovely.”

  “Having gone to all that trouble,” Richard said, “I actually have to go. I’m meeting people in the pub. Do you want to come?”

  Undine hesitated. “Um…I’m underage.”

  “Oh yes,” said Richard, breezily, “so you are. I’m sure we can smuggle you in. There’ll be a group of us. Duncan’s girlfriend is underage too.”

  “Yes, Fran. I know her.”

  “Well, there you go. Coming?”

  Undine had had alcohol before. Lou gave her a glass of wine with dinner sometimes, and she’d had the odd beer at parties, but she’d never been to the pub before, mostly because she was worried about getting caught.

  She looked at Richard’s face, the setting sun framing it. She should go home. She should make up with Lou.

  But suddenly she was overcome by the desire to try to slot herself back into the human race, to prove to herself that she was no different from anyone else. To be an ordinary, irresponsible teenager, like Fran.

  Richard offered his hand and pulled her to a standing position.

  “Coming?” he asked again.

  Undine smiled. “Sure.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  It turned out that Richard’s friends were the sort to start early, so they actually had a table inside. As they pushed their way through the burgeoning crowds, Undine kept her face down.

  After spending the day alone, it was strange to suddenly be in the middle of a lively throng. Despite the friendly atmosphere of the crowd, Undine still felt remote and disengaged, as though she was an observer only, and not a participant. It didn’t help that she was underage—she was sure it was written all over her face, and she avoided eye contact with the smiling beery men they passed, in case one of them was an undercover policeman, about to leap out and arrest her.

  “Hi, everyone,” Richard said, stopping at the biggest table. “This is Undine.” Richard ran through about a dozen names, gesticulating around the table. Undine recognized a few people, including Duncan and Fran, whose face lit up when she saw Undine, and Dan, Trout’s other brother, who shot Richard a questioning glance.

  Fran shuffled over on the bench seat she was sharing with Duncan, elbowing him as she did so.

  “Here, Undine, sit next to me.”

  “Do you want a drink?” Richard asked her. It was noisy in the pub and he had to lean over and talk right into her ear. His voice reverberated through her ribcage. She felt him brush against her hair and her stomach quivered and seemed to rise and drop like a jellyfish. She could smell his skin, not unlike the smell of Trout’s—Oh, Trout, she thought with a pang—but Richard was sharper, sexier. She looked down at the table, hoping no one had noticed the effect he had on her.

  “Yes, please.”

  “
Beer?”

  Undine nodded.

  Fran said, “Where’s Trout?”

  “Um. He’s not here.” Poor Trout. She felt hideously guilty, not just for walking out on him, but because she hadn’t thought about him all day. Thinking about Trout might lead to thinking about the storm, and about her fight with Lou, and that was no good. She shook her head, and tried to immerse herself in the light banter that batted around her at the table.

  Fran was studying her too closely. “I thought you and Trout were, you know…”

  “Did you really?” Undine was genuinely surprised. She considered Fran to be one of her closest friends, but it occurred to her that they never really spent much time together out of school.

  “I mean, I know you deny it at school…”

  “No, no. Trout and I are just friends, really.”

  Duncan leaned over Fran and smiled. “Isn’t that what they all say?”

  “Oh they,” said Richard, who was suddenly standing at Undine’s shoulder. “What do they know?”

  “Oh my god,” Undine groaned. “You should so meet my mother.”

  The guy sitting across from Undine, whose name was Grant or Grunt or something, made a sound like a whip. “Watch out, man,” he said to Richard. “She wants you to meet her mother.”

  “Oh yes,” said Richard. “Very droll.” But Undine could see he was uncomfortable. He handed her a beer, and went and sat down at the other end of the table with Dan and a rather pretty blond girl, who flicked her hair at him.

  “Don’t worry about Grunt,” Duncan said, leaning over Fran. “They still haven’t figured out how to connect all three brain cells.”

  “What?” said Grunt, stupidly. Fran and Undine laughed.

  “So anyway, Miss Naughty,” Fran nudged her. “Where were you today?”