… a rellevay, fingers on the dado rail, just the tips, not hanging on, head up so she is tall, tall as a giraffe, with a long long neck. Eyes looking straight ahead, feet turned out in second position, bottom tucked in, tummy tucked in. And up one two with all her toes on the floor. And down three four. She’d like to be able to see herself in the mirror that used to hang here, her face rising up one two, down three four in a thick frame of carved wooden fruit and flowers with the fat baby at the top. Poppy had not much liked the fat baby. Her mother had said it was Cupid, the god of love, but he didn’t look much like a god of love to Poppy. How could he be a god of anything with his fat bare bottom and dimpled legs.
Her mother had hung it among Dad’s maps in the hallway when Grandma Ruth went into the hospital. She thought it might brighten it up. She was always trying to brighten things up.
‘What do you think, Popps?’ she’d say, head on one side contemplating a streak of green on the living room wall. ‘Will that brighten things up?’
‘It’s already bright,’ said Poppy.
‘It’s white. Everything’s white,’ said her mother. ‘I hate white as a colour.’
‘White isn’t a colour,’ said Poppy. ‘Mrs Ngatai said. It’s achromatic.’
But her mother wasn’t listening.
The fat god has gone, along with the maps, smashed to bits when the thing beneath her bed exploded.
She had always suspected it existed, the Thing that had made her insist upon the light being left on in the hall. The Thing that had made her take a deep breath when she finally had to leave the warmth of the sitting room where everyone was slumped on the sofas watching TV, for her distant bed. She’d paused in the doorway, then leapt in three giant strides across the room to the safety of duvet and pillow. When she was little she had imagined something big and hairy like the Wild Things in the picture book who danced with Max. She’d imagined a long skinny arm reaching out to grasp her leg and drag her down down into the dark. She’d never confessed this fear, but Tom must have guessed, because once after she’d broken one of his Transformers, he had hidden under her bed and grabbed her leg and she had screamed. She had peed in her pyjamas and screamed so hard she couldn’t stop, even when her mother came running and held her close and said there were no such thing as monsters under the bed, there was just Tom who was being very silly.
‘Why are so mean to your sister?’ she’d said, Poppy a damp bundle in her arms. And her father had told him to grow up.
That was a long time ago when monsters could inhabit cupboards and dark corners and the dolls in her dolls’ house could walk about leading small intricate lives and her bike could become a pony and fly. Such times pass.
But on that night the Thing had risen up, and it was real after all. It lay under her bed. Under the house. Under the entire city. It was strong enough to break the mirror and tumble the chimneys. It could collapse the front porch so the posts stood at awkward angles, and wreck the turret. It cut a big crack across the front path and when Mum poked a broom handle down to see how deep it was, the handle waggled in empty space. The Thing had opened a great hole beneath the house, maybe a hole under the whole city into which they could all tumble.
It was more powerful than she had ever imagined. It had pushed over the cathedral in the Square. Talia had been in the city with her mum getting her eyes tested because she needed glasses, when the steeple fell down and heaps of shops and a big tower where people were killed. The dust gave Talia asthma. If she laughed too much she began wheezing and had to fumble for her inhaler and squirt the asthma stuff into her mouth and that was one reason she had gone away. In Auckland maybe she wouldn’t need the asthma stuff.
The Thing was all-powerful. At night she lay in bed looking up into the dark awaiting its arrival. It tapped at the window, trying to get in. Over and over. It was better when they slept in the tent. For a while, after the terrible day when she had sat in the playground with the other kids waiting for someone to come and find her, they had dragged mattresses outside and gone camping in their own garden. She had liked that, snug in her sleeping bag, her hat over her ears because Isobel had once told her about this girl in Scotland who had lain down on the grass and an earwig had crawled into her ear and eaten all the way through her brain and come out one of her eyes. She tugged the hat securely, then lay between the reassuring bulk of her parents, Tom sleeping on the outer edge, all of them in a row, playing Guess as the aftershocks rattled through. ‘Four point two,’ she’d say, ‘Four,’ said Tom or Dad or Mum, and in the morning they’d check on Geonet and whoever came closest got a chocolate. She was really good at guessing. In the garden the shocks were less alarming. They felt like a kind of ripple under your sleeping bag, like riding over a wave when you were in one of the kayaks. Outside, the Thing lost some of its power.
But after a couple of weeks, Mum had said they might as well move back into the house. A builder had examined it and said the back rooms were safe enough. They slept once more in their own rooms.
Her mother sighed with relief. ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘That feels a bit more like normality.’
Except it wasn’t normal, was it? The Thing still lay there, under her bed, breathing slowly, quietly in the dark. She had dared once to look into the darkness. Something glistened there, right at the back. A big brown mushroom. There was a whole row of them growing from the bottom of the wall. She had reached out and touched one tentatively and it was sticky, like honey, and stank of toadstools. Just the kind of thing a Thing might eat. She didn’t dare tell anyone. If they saw it, they’d take it away and then what would the Thing eat instead? She lay in the dark, listening to the mushrooms growing, spreading.
Nothing was normal. People were going away. Their houses had holes in them or were nailed shut with bits of plywood. Yesterday on the way to school she had passed a house where a boy called Luca used to live. A tall red crane stood outside, its skinny head swaying above the trees.
From its clamped jaw a window dangled. A whole window, slowly turning in the air, while another machine tore at a wall, ripping a huge hole. The front of the house was already gnawed away, left bare like a dolls’ house so you could see inside, where everything was black. Someone had got in over the weekend and set a fire, a man said.
There were things inside the blackened house: a cupboard on the top floor, still with all the coats and clothes lined up in a row. ‘Bloody vandals,’ said the man. ‘Some people.’
The machines roared, and when she scootered home that afternoon, Luca’s house had all gone. Just a big bare open space with a black mark where it had been.
Houses left, and people, and her school, too, might go away. Mrs Ngatai said because lots of kids had left and the school was damaged with fences blocking off the playground, they might all be going to another school and wouldn’t that be cool? They’d meet heaps of new friends.
Poppy didn’t want to go to another school. How would she find her way? She wasn’t very good at finding her way. When she was little she got lost at the A&P Show. She stood alone in a forest of legs, her hot dog leaking tomato sauce over her hand. Around her the legs shifted, a wall of shorts and bare knees and skirts and jeans. Dense, impenetrable and she very small on a patch of crushed summer grass. And then suddenly the forest parted and her dad was there, reaching down and saying, ‘Ah, there you are, Popps! Why did you wander off? We were wondering where you’d got to.’
She often got lost finding her way back to the car at the supermarket. She got lost the first time she tried to go to this school on her own. She was supposed to walk with Talia but Talia had flu so she decided to go alone and ended up on her scooter miles away near the mall, crying, until a nice lady stopped and said, ‘Now, what’s the matter with you, sweetheart?’ And the school was in a fuss, and her mother came running when she and the nice lady turned the corner at last onto Savage Street, her hair all mussed-up and hugging her far too tight, saying, ‘Poppy! What on earth were you thinking?’
After she’d calmed down she drew a map of the way to school with the things that Poppy recognised: Talia’s house next door, then a little further along, the house with the black cat who often sat on the stone wall to be patted, his eyes two lemon slits. And beyond that, the house with the fuchsia bush where she usually stopped to pop some buds. And further along, there was the house with the barky dog, and the place with the red letterbox decorated with daisies where Luca lived, then she walked along the street by the river towards the silver footbridge, and just past that was the school. The map helped, though now all the details had changed: Talia had gone and Isobel, and the black cat no longer sat on the fence. Instead there was a sign pinned to the gate with a blurry photo. BILBO. Our much-loved cat, lost February 22, $100 for safe return. The barky dog had gone, too, which was a good thing, but Luca’s house was that big black patch and the little silver bridge had been twisted and hung over the river like a length of silver rope with a sign saying DANGER.
The map would be no use for a new school. She would need to make a new one if she was to find her way.
And their house, too. Would it stay? Dad said it was Orange. All the houses were either Red or Green or Orange. Red meant they would be pulled down. Green meant they were okay. And Orange meant no one knew for sure. It was already uncertain, especially since the witchy lady had moved into their sleepout. Mum said Mr and Mrs Novak were too old to be living in a garage over the winter. It was the least they could do, until everyone was sorted. Poppy saw her sometimes at the sleepout window, and looked away quickly before she could see the wave, the dangerous smile.
And all the time the Thing bangs and jumps and Poppy stands in the twilit hallway, hanging onto the dado with her head up, looking straight ahead at the crack in the wall, dips down into a pleeay, one two and up three four. Shoulders down, head up. And again. One two and up …