Jack came back the same week that Fosters the cat had kittens and they found starlings in the roof. Jack was joyously arrested on Tuesday night, fed with an omelette, sausages, toast and two kinds of jam for breakfast. Kari carefully carved a basket from an orange, with a glacé cherry on top. Ruth put it on Jack’s tray, with a white cloth and butter and family spoons. At playtime Sarah told Mrs White, the canteen lady with the wet marks under her arms, that Jack was back. On Friday night, the canteen ladies left half a box of Lamingtons and fairy cakes on the back porch. Jack saved three fairy cakes and left them on the back step of the Boolaroo house on Sunday morning, along with a half-dead Waratah flower from the front garden.
Kari heard the starlings first; the scratching in the roof happened loudest above her bed. She noticed them on Thursday morning. ‘There’s angels in the roof, Daddy.’
Mal pulled the high wooden ladder upstairs onto the dark landing, beneath the manhole. Sarah held the ladder fiercely while Mal slid the white trapdoor across and pulled himself up and through the hole, into the blackness of the ceiling. Sarah held her breath and said the whole times table three times in her head waiting for him. Twelve times ten is one hundred and twenty, twelve elevens are one hundred and thirty-two. Mal reappeared with blood on his hands and a flushed-up face. His eyes were sparky hard and his voice was loud loud loud. ‘They’re pests, they’re no good to anyone, starlings.’
Sarah helped her father put the hessian bag of strangled starlings in the outside big metal bin. That was Thursday. On Sunday, Fosters had kittens. Kari, who always fed and stroked the grey cat, had watched her grow big and nippled. Sarah Sweet had no time for sooky cats, like girls and spastics. Ruth, absorbed in teatowels and hair-sets and casseroles, noticed the cat only if hairs were left in the kitchen. Mal noticed only horses.
Fosters was huddled in the wardrobe Kari shared with Sarah. Slime and blood dribbled on the clothes of Sarah and Kari, which had dropped down from their wire hangers. Fosters had found a solid pile of hotpants and tunics and dug herself in. When Kari opened the sliding door (chipboard, with a fake walnut-wood Laminex panel), Fosters looked up, startled and howling, biting on a pink worm coming from her own belly. Four small cases of shine and slime clustered around the pink worm and the warm belly. Small they were, smaller than Kari’s hand, and slits where eyes should be, but too little to open. No hair, just shine. And more were coming, that was the thing. Fosters’ claws dug into the clothes, her eyes and mouth widening as her catbody convulsed. Three more, before she breathed out like a sigh and licked and pawed the sad bundles. Kittens. ‘Kittens on my clothes,’ Kari rattled and clinked through the Boolaroo house, calling Sarah to come and see. Sarah pushed Kari out of the way; blood, blood on everything. ‘She’s bleeeeeeding,’ Sarah was like a bell tolling through the quiet of the house. They were piled up, an exhausted bundle, seven silver-slimed kittens and Fosters’ striped panting body. Occasionally, one of her claws tucked itself out and in.
‘Shush, quiet, we’ll put them in a box before your father gets home’, Ruth moved through the crowd of two with a white Bartletts shoe-box, the one which had held Sarah’s black school shoes with lion prints on the sole.
They were careful in the loading of the small parcels in to the box, lined with bits of old undies from the rag closet. Ruth tore the box open at one end, for Fosters to lie next to and let the pink blobs climb to her still swollen nipples. All were tucked up at the end of the wardrobe, the door left a teensy teensy fraction open, for air and light to just dribble in. It was a secret.
*
Kari, tucked up tight with the secret, kicked her legs at dinner. She drew patterns in the mashed potato on her plate, pictures of two circles on top of each other, with whiskers and tails. Stupid stupid stupid – the song in Sarah’s head had changed, and she kicked at Kari’s callipers beneath the Laminex table. Kari looked happy and bewildered, singing to herself beneath her breath. Mal knew nothing about the secret. He ate mostly in silence, sucking his teeth ferociously and telling Sarah, ‘eat it up, eat it all up.’ This was the dinnertime song. Sarah thought about little starving children and swallowed, thought how she would turn into a nigger girl if she wasn’t civilised with her knife and fork, thought about the little slimy pillows bleeding on her best yellow skirt, nearly gagged on her lamb chop. Kari sang, ‘Five little kittens have lost their mittens, they don’t know where to find them.’
At bedtime, Mal dusted Kari in Johnson’s Baby Powder and helped her into pink flannelette pyjamas, laid her callipers carefully by her bunk, said, ‘Prayers now, Blossom.’ He helped her to kneel, holding her beneath the arms and lowering her down. He sat on the bunk, helped her begin: ‘“Little jesus meek and mild, look upon this little child, now I lay me down to sleep I pray thee Lord my soul to keep.”’
Mal sat silent then, letting Kari do the Godblesses on her own. The Godblesses were a kind of way of saying ‘I love’. ‘I love Mummy, I love Daddy.’ It was like saying ‘Atishoo’ for sneezes, you just said it or you had bad luck. If you missed anybody out in the Godblesses, they would have very bad luck and probably die. ‘Godbless Mummy, Godbless Daddy, Godbless Sarah, Godbless Miss Pound, Godbless the horses, Godbless everybody in the whole world.’ Kari stopped, breathing hard, trying to whisper the secret into her hands, to save the kittens from the bad luck of not getting a godbless. ‘Godbless Fosters and her babies.’
She said it quickly, and though a soft thumping came from behind the sliding door, Mal was calm and soft, said ‘go to sleep now, my Blossom,’ and kissed her goodnight. Sarah, waiting outside the door for her turn to say prayers with Mal spat inside her head at Kari the stupid spastic big mouth can’t keep a secret spastic. Bloody bloody. Mal stepped out through the door and let his hand ruffle about in Sarah’s hair. ‘In bed now mate, garn.
No mention of prayers. Sarah took three big jumps to her bed, playing the if-your-feet-only-touch-the-floor-three-times-it-will-be-all-right game. The light clicked off and Sarah hung her head over the edge of the bunk, staring at Kari’s callipers lined upon the floor. Fear and knowing and mad all tumbling around inside her. ‘Da-aad,’ Sarah’s voice called after him and the door swung open again. Mal’s face popped in and out of the darkness; he was like a dream. Sarah let her eyes see the dream, a disappearing shadow. She told it: ‘Kari saw Fosters have kittens she hid them in the wardrobe I didn’t know.’ The door closed and there was the dull thump of Mal’s feet on the hall floor.
They were gone in the morning. The kittens, the box, the undies, nothing was left in the wardrobe except neatly hung hotpants and dresses. All the shoes were piled up at one end of the wardrobe – Sarah’s gym-boots and school shoes all mixed up with Kari’s special shoes. In the kitchen, Ruth was bright like a moon, ‘toast or Froot-loops, toast or Froot-loops?’ talking quickly and putting things on the table, concentrating hard. ‘Get dressed for school quickly, blue clips or pink, Kari? Sarah, put long socks on please, quickly quickly.’
Sarah could walk to school on her own. Ruth walked with Kari to the bus stop on the main road, waited until the yellow bus full of yelling and laughing arrived. Sarah let herself out through the back door. She could see Mal in the far bit of the back yard, way down near the paddock. His back was bare, brown as brown in the sun, while he piled bits of tree and kindling wood onto a big bonfire pile, like for cracker night. Sarah sucked her breath in, held her tummy in tight and ran to the gate on tippy toes.
All day at school she felt bits of sick rising and falling in her mouth. She hid her face in bits of paper and stayed in to colour in her Cars and Trains project at playtime, playing with the burn of shame, her head feeling like a merry-go-round. People’s voices seemed to come from far, far away. She could hear the sea in her ears.
There was the dry dead smell of fire in the afternoon when Sarah walked home. She smelt it before she even reached the gate of the Boolaroo house, left-over smoke clogging her nostrils. There was a big dead black place in the yard, near the paddock. Sarah sucked the smell in to herself, willing the sick to rise up, daring the dizziness to just try it. She watched her feet moving one after the other, closer and closer to the black charred circle. The grass around the black circle had turned brown, the way it did at the heat of Christmas when everything was born. Grey ashes had floated about, settling on the cement path, the paddock fence, the green grass as well as the brown. There was an unburnt bit of wood, only grey from the fire, not black and ashy, and seven black shapes, little corpse-parcels with crooked necks.
Sarah could see the tiny ears and the slits for eyes. They were black and hard and still shiny, but like melted plastic now. Sarah picked them up, one at a time, and placed them on the outer rim of the circle. She dragged her foot in a figure of eight, making a smooth track in the ashes, and knelt down, ramming the black bodies against each other. Ram, crash, crack. Dodgem Kittens. Sarah made the sounds of cars playing a knock-out comp. When one Dodgem Kitten got hit, she chucked it into the centre of the circle. ‘Out!’ She was driver, dodger and commentator. The kittens did nothing but leave black marks on her hand and they didn’t skid well, having no wheels. Sarah kicked them into a pile, their twisted necks all poking over each other, and banged on the back door.
Ruth was in the laundry, pushing a line of Mal’s police shirts through the wringer with one hand. Sarah watched above the loud rumble of the machine. Ruth pulled the blue shirts from the washer, fat and alive with water, and fed them one by one through the squeeze of the wringer. Like two rolling pins stuck together. Squeeeeeze, squeeeeeeze. Sarah fed the wringer words it did not want. The shirts flattened, grew lifeless, flopped onto the other side of the metal tub, where Ruth quickly pushed them into a wooden basket. Both her hands worked at the same time, one pulling a dead shirt off the wringer, one feeding a live shirt through. When Ruth looked down, Sarah could see a blue, black and purple mark on her cheek. When the wringer stopped, the laundry was shocking in its silence.
Mal was bright again that night, his face all gleaming and shining like before, with the starlings. Thwacking Sarah and calling her his little mate, ay? His mate. Kari sat still all through dinner and did not play with her food. No-one mentioned the kittens.