… Poppy and Talia from next door are bouncing on the trampoline. It’s hot. Poppy has on her new togs. They are red with a little frilly skirt round her middle. Talia’s are new, too. They are blue with white spots. They have turned on the hose. It snakes across the lawn from the outside tap with the purest water in the world. It never has to be boiled. It comes from a river that flows right under their house. You can’t see it but it is there, a long way down, on its way from the mountains to the sea. The water from their kitchen taps sometimes has to be boiled and tastes a bit like swimming pools. The water from the outside tap tastes like ice.
She directs a jet of the purest water in the world above the trampoline. It’s her turn to squirt while Talia jumps. When the water hits Talia’s bare skin, she squeals. She leaps higher. They have lain side by side for ages on the tramp, warming up on black plastic. Through the fence there’s the sound of Talia’s dad talking to the big giggly uncles who are visiting for Christmas, and across the back lawn there’s the sound of her own mum banging and clattering about the kitchen.
The air smells richly of summer and roasting meat. Talia’s dad and the uncles are cooking a pig on a spit. Usually they would cook it on rocks on the ground, but the ground is funny this year: it’s dead and heavy so they are cooking it on the spit instead. The pig turns over and over with an iron stick poked through its bottom and out its mouth. From Poppy’s house comes the smell of turkey, stuffed and basted. There’s a ham, too, a fleshy pink lump that, despite being coated in rings of pineapple and scarlet cherries, is unmistakably the leg of another unfortunate pig, its little black tiptoe foot removed. Poppy has been wondering lately about becoming vegetarian. Lots of people are. And that leg sitting impassively in the fridge since yesterday morning has finally persuaded her. Maybe after lunch …
Poppy’s mum is flushed and in a bad mood. Her mum is here. Sue, who lives in Australia. Except she isn’t Sue any more, or Nana, or Grandma: she’s Sahana, which makes her mum mad, though Poppy finds that puzzling. Sahana is a much nicer name than Sue, and shouldn’t everyone be able to choose their own name if they want to?
‘No,’ said her mother. ‘It just confuses everybody.’
‘I’d like to change my name,’ said Poppy. ‘I’d like to be called Beyoncé.’
‘No, you wouldn’t,’ said her mum. ‘Now go outside and play. I’ve got heaps to do. I have no idea why I agreed to this whole stupid family thing.’
Poppy could have said, ‘But you do have an idea. It’s because it’s Sahana’s birthday,’ but her mother was furiously whipping cream so it did not seem like a very good idea. Ten people for lunch because Sahana had the same birthday as Jesus, and this year she was going to be sixty, which was very old indeed. Sahana and some American she has picked up at a yoga retreat in Bali. ‘God knows what he’ll be like,’ her mother said. ‘She has appalling taste in men.’ (‘Taste?’ said Poppy. ‘You mean she eats them?’ And all the grown-ups laughed as if she had made a joke. ‘More or less,’ said her mum.)
There was Auntie Fern and Uncle Greg and Uncle Lou, who was Sue/Sahana’s brother, and his boyfriend Miguel, who had driven up from Queenstown in Lou’s car (‘a classic MG,’ her dad called it, which was evidently a good thing) with a cake in a big box on the back seat and a couple of manic Jack Russells. Lou was a chef and made amazing cakes.
The dogs race about the lawn, ears flattened, leaping the rows of vegetables in the garden and barking frantically as Poppy lifts the hose’s heavy head and the purest water in the world forms a rainbow through which Talia does a kneesie, then bounces back onto her feet, squealing.
Around the trampoline their toys lie in little heaps where they have fallen. Poppy’s dolls and teddy and the stuffed koala Sahana brought from Australia, Talia’s dolls and Little Pony with its flowing blue mane. It’s their favourite game: Earthquakes. You arrange all the toys you can find on the trampoline, then you take turns to see how hard you can jump and how high and far the toys can fly. They bounce off in all directions, faces frozen in fixed expressions of happy acceptance as they spin with stiff splayed legs through the blue summer air.
When Isobel lived across the road their flight was truly spectacular. Isobel had a totally enviable collection of toys sent by her granny in Scotland. A single jump released a blizzard of Barbies and teddies that rained down upon the garden. But Isobel doesn’t live there any more. Her mum Sharon didn’t like the aftershocks. You could hear her yell after every one.
‘Fuck!’ she’d scream, which was a very bad word, and she made Isobel and her brother sleep on a mattress under the table because she was frightened stuff might fall on their heads, like in that story about the chicken who thought the sky was falling when it was only an acorn.
It was quite nice, actually, under the table. Isobel’s mum put a sheet over so it was like a tent, and she slept there beside the children, with a torch by her pillow and Isobel’s dad’s hard hat that he used to wear when he was cutting down trees, which was a fairytale kind of job: being a woodcutter. Except one of the trees fell on him. So Isobel’s mum kept his hat beside her, yelled ‘Fuck!’ so loudly they could hear her all the way over the road, and one afternoon Poppy had come home from school to find Isobel standing on the footpath with a big suitcase on wheels and her best teddy. ‘We’re going on a plane,’ she said. ‘We’re going to live in Scotland. Mum says they don’t have earthquakes in Scotland. I’m going to get a puppy.’
She Skyped once or twice. Said it rained a lot in Scotland and it was hard to tell what people were saying. She had had her hair cut. She held up a squirmy brown puppy who was very cute. His name was Bruno. Her voice sounded different. She had a friend called Layla. She stopped Skyping.
Poppy and Talia used to go sometimes to Isobel’s house. The gate had a padlock but you could squeeze through a hole in the fence into the garden. It was kind of messy with lots of long grass and when you looked through the windows you could see Isobel’s bed, still with her mattress and some toys lined up as usual on the chest of drawers, as if she had just stepped out and was about to come back into the room. Her scooter still leaned against the wardrobe. There were cups on the kitchen shelves and a dead pot plant on the window sill. It was like the Sleeping Beauty’s castle, the roses growing up and up till they covered the whole house.
They would not be going again. Last time, they had squeezed through the fence and were standing on tiptoe looking into Isobel’s window when a scrawny hand gripped their shoulders and a high witchy voice said, ‘And what are you girls doing?’
It was only old Mrs Novak but not quite Mrs Novak, with her glittery eyes and blood-red lips. She made them come to her house, though they had both been told over and over that they must never go into strange houses.
She had seated them on high stools at her kitchen bench and served them biscuits that were probably poison, and orange juice, and while they ate and drank, choking on every morsel, every drop, she had sat stroking her big ginger cat whose name was Zitto and told them about Christmas when she was a little girl, and how everyone went to church in the snow at midnight on Christmas Eve and then they all came home to a feast, a big feast with soup made of thistles, which didn’t sound very nice, but she said it was. It was delicious. And fish, seven different kinds, there had to be seven, and a whole stuffed eel as big as your leg, which didn’t sound very nice either but exactly the sort of thing a witch might eat.
And next day, said Mrs Novak, on Christmas Day, there was another feast. This time, it was roast lamb and little cakes made of chickpeas and chocolate, and they didn’t have Father Christmas but a kind old woman, a good witch who had given the presents meant for her own little baby, who had died, to the baby Jesus instead. So every year she came, flying through the air on her magic broom, and for good children she brought toys and lollies like bits of coal.
‘Coal?’ asked Poppy.
She knew about coal. It was a black stone that burned. Their teacher had told them about a place where people went to dig coal and there had been a fire and they were trapped under the ground, waiting in the dark, crying and sad, for someone to come and rescue them. She had shown them a picture, smoke pouring from the hole, and she had brought a piece of coal to show them because none of the children knew what coal looked like.
It didn’t look like something you could eat. But Mrs Novak was looking sad remembering the coal lollies and the thistles and the eel, and then, appallingly, while Poppy and Talia choked down their poison orange juice, their poison biscuits, which tasted very nice, though that was part of their danger, the old woman sat down at her piano and began to sing, ‘Tu scendi dalle stelle,’ in a high witchy wavery voice. They sat either side of the bench, heads down, not daring to catch her eye, until finally, every crumb consumed, she released them, with more biscuits in shiny scarlet boxes tied with ribbon for their mums and dads. Poppy and Talia ran as fast as they could, back across the road to the safety of the garden where they dumped the poison biscuits in the hedge.
And they didn’t die, and now Talia executes a perfect somersault and Poppy aims the hose so she lands in a shower of diamonds. The sight of the water, gleaming in sunlight, falling and falling, makes her dreamy. She’s a bit sleepy anyway, having gone to bed late. Sahana had suggested the midnight service, though none of them, said her mother, had been inside a church in years apart from weddings and the occasional funeral, but hey! Why not? Everyone except Poppy’s dad, who said religion was bullshit. Even Tom came, who asked if there’d be monks.
There were no monks, and no snow, just the big cathedral doors open to a warm wind blowing dust round the Square. They sang carols, some of which she knew from school, and then the people stood up and sat down and murmured words. And Tom took out his phone until Janey reached over and shook her head, no. And Poppy must have gone to sleep and been carried to the car because she woke some time later in her own bed. In the darkness she could hear voices. Next door, Talia’s dad and mum and all the cousins and uncles and aunties were singing. It sounded nice. She went back to sleep.
And in the morning there had been presents, the new togs, the Jack Russells, Sahana in pink silk, the table set with flowers on the deck, the turkey, the pig’s leg. And the trampoline. Which is always bouncy. So bouncy you can’t feel the rest of the world bouncing. You can’t feel it shake. Because the world does shake. It can do all sorts of things you don’t expect. It can roar and crack things and it can go on fire. It can explode and you can be trapped in the dark, so she holds the hose high. She points it straight to the sky and Talia from next door bounces up, hair flying, into a dazzling arc made of the purest …