PAISLEY

BUNDANOON, AUSTRALIA, PRESENT DAY

No part of me wanted to go to school this morning. Mum had stayed in bed and wasn’t opening the shop. She had offered me a day off as well, but I had decided that sometimes facing a problem head-on was preferable to hiding away to let the thing fester. I had suggested to Mum that she dry her tears, put some cucumber on her swollen eyes, open shop and go about business as normal to show the world that the accusations were groundless. But she decided to stay shut and work on her job as organiser of the inaugural Winter Solstice Festival. There were only a few months to go and still so much to do.

‘No one is answering the phone,’ she had grumbled from the plumped up cushions on her bed. ‘And they’re not returning my calls.’

I’d thrown on my uniform, grabbed my bag and set off to the busy little hive at the railway gates, where the Moss Vale bus collected us every morning at five past eight. I’d set my jaw, kept my expression blank and walked calmly toward the bus, ignoring the intense nods of acknowledgement from shop owners and local joggers who passed me as I walked down the main street. I could see the questioning, the sympathy and the disgust in every eye. Overnight I had gone from mildly boring Paisley Muller-McLeod, to the local trending topic of the day. The news of the awful accusation against my mother had clearly spread to every hidden corner of the tiny township. It was malicious and scandalous and untrue. But it was golden currency in the world of gossip.

A couple of hours later I am sitting in the quad eating my lunch, avoiding the stares from other students because now the thing has done the rounds of the school as well. My best friend Emily is away. She texted me this morning to say she had a sore throat. I had tossed up whether to tell her what was going on or not and had decided to wait until we could talk face to face. I’ll talk to her tomorrow. By then she will probably have heard it from someone else.

‘Hey there,’ says a voice from above and behind me.

I turn and nearly choke on my falafel and hummus wrap. Ben Digby is standing beside me, casting a shadow over me from his tall body. I nod but cannot speak through the mouthful of my wrap lodged in my throat. He wasn’t on the bus this morning and I didn’t even realise he was at school today.

‘Can I sit down?’ he asks, and I nod, eyes watering as I gulp and force the soggy wad of food down my throat. ‘I just wanted to see if you were okay. I had a dentist appointment before school. That’s why I wasn’t on the bus.’

I nod again and take a deep breath while he continues to talk. ‘I know you know that everyone’s talking about this thing with your mother,’ he says, cutting straight to it, not stopping for some general chitchat.

‘L-look,’ I stammer. ‘It’s a mistake. It’s that Hooper family. They’ve got it in for my mother …’

‘So it didn’t happen?’ he asks, looking surprised. ‘She didn’t put a spell on him? Didn’t turn him into a jabbering toad?’ He laughs and I immediately relax.

‘She really isn’t that sort of witch.’ I smile back. ‘She’s a psychic healer. There’s a difference.’

‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ he says and touches my hand. He actually touches my hand! ‘I’m sure the kid was confused. They call your mother the white witch of Bundanoon, but I’m not stupid. I know there’s no such thing as witches.’

‘I really don’t want to be talking about this, you know?’ I say, putting my head down, staring at his hand on my hand, feeling the burn, the thrill and the tingle. ‘It’s not easy for me that everyone is talking about it. I hate all this attention. I’m … I’m …’

‘Shy?’ he ventures.

‘Something like that, I guess.’ I shrug. ‘I just don’t like being the centre of attention. It feels creepy and awkward.’

I watch as three girls cross the quad and giggle, looking our way, and I wonder if I am just being paranoid or whether they know.

‘Well, I just hope no one’s giving you a hard time about it,’ Ben says, and I nod without meeting his eyes. ‘Do you maybe want to come to a thing I’m having on Saturday night? It’s just the usual suspects. You know, the locals. Nothing special. Just some music and pizza.’

I look up at him, now, curious to see the expression on his face. Is he asking me along because he feels sorry for me or because he’s interested in me in a romantic way? I’ve never been to Ben’s place. He looks nervous. I give him an awkward smile. ‘Sure, I mean, I don’t think I’ve got plans,’ I say, my voice coming out a few notes higher than usual. ‘What time?’

‘’Bout seven?’ he says with a shrug. ‘Cool. Well, I’ll see you on the bus this afternoon, okay?’

I feel a buzz of insects in my belly. He is ridiculously handsome. Tall, broad and with a perfectly symmetrical face, dark eyes and dark hair with a cowlick. When he smiles, two dimples punctuate his cheeks. I melt a little. And then he is gone, just a uniformed figure moving away, dissolving into a herd of shapes.

Later in English I’m sitting, head down trying to ignore the strange looks I’m getting and the feeling that every furtive whisper is about the drama. It’s no surprise that Isaiah Hooper is not at school today. I’m not sure how I would have reacted if he had been. I really feel a lot of anger toward him for letting his parents use him like this. I’m sure, one hundred per cent sure, that my mother is completely innocent and that his mother has put him up to it. Or maybe he’s just putting on an act to get out of school. It is exam time.

I haven’t bothered seeking out any company from anyone today. Usually, Emily and I just talk about stuff or we’ll go and sit with Sophie and Bec, the Bundaloonies as we like to call ourselves. Today, though, it all feels rather awkward and embarrassing, as if I’m walking around with my dress tucked into my undies or something.

There’s one guy at school who everyone hates: Liam Chandling. Actually, that’s not completely accurate. There are a handful of kids who like him, though I can’t imagine why. He’s dating Ben Digby’s ex, Lara McDermont, the wannabe princess, this week. Liam is brash, arrogant and the sort of boy who would torture small animals as a hobby. A bully. So I am hardly surprised when he stops at my desk in the last class before Mr Funder calls for silence.

‘Heard your mum’s a witch. Can’t she do a spell or something to fix that head of yours?’ he hisses down at me.

I look up at him. I want so desperately to push the desk at him, hard, taking him by surprise and knocking him back, but I just glare, daring him to continue, praying that he won’t.

‘What’s she done to poor Isaiah Hooper? Turned him into a parrot, I’ve heard. She must have some strong powers,’ he goes on. I feel my face getting hot. ‘Hey, I might make an appointment to see if she can give me a potion to make me irresistible to women! Oh … that’s right. I already am.’

I keep it together. I feel like I am about to erupt into tears. I want to run from the room, bawling like a baby, but then he would win. I will not let Liam Chandling do that to me. I give him exactly what he deserves, which is nothing. I stay silent. My eyes are stinging and my cheeks prickle but I continue to glare at him from the burn of my face. I count silently to distract me from the hatred in his eyes.

I think of Mum. She drives me mad most of the time with her frivolous fluff. Her head is in the clouds. She lives in a fairyland and it is more than frustrating. All my life I have been surrounded by incense and crystals. I have been raised in some kind of a shrine to the Great Goddess and the background soundtrack of my short life has been a nonstop chant of Om. When I was little I loved my mother’s tales of fairies and magic. I really believed that we were powerful creatures, separate from everyone else and somehow special. She talks about the mitochondria, the female bloodline, as if we are descended from royalty.

But right now my mother needs to tread very carefully in the real world and think with a rational and reasoning head and I am terrified that all the nonsense she has dabbled in has made her unable to do this. I am concerned that her otherworldliness will work against her in this very often cruel world.

I ignore another look from Liam Chandling as I leave the school gates to get on the bus, and I feel a measure of comfort in the usual and routine when Ben sits beside me.

‘I’m sure it will all blow over and be forgotten before the week’s out,’ he reassures me.

I’m not so sure.

‘I mean, your mum is lovely and Isaiah is a bit of a weirdo, not to mention his mother …’ Ben continues before being interrupted.

Sophie is obviously eavesdropping because she shoves her face between our shoulders and weighs into the conversation that she has not been invited to join. ‘That’s not cool, Ben,’ she says sharply.

She is right, of course. There is, from all accounts, something very wrong with Isaiah Hooper at the moment, and when questioned about what is causing him such distress, he can only say my mother’s name. But my mother also has the right to defend herself against the galloping accusations that she caused this weird malady.

‘Well, someone is clearly lying or very seriously mistaken about something. You can’t actually just jump to the conclusion that the liar is my mother, either, Sophie. That’s not fair,’ I retort, although I know that there is no good that can come of being defensive just yet.

‘Look,’ Ben cautions, ‘let’s just let the people involved work it out and keep out of it. We can only speculate and that’s dangerous. At the end of the day it’s up to a psychiatrist, or whoever, to figure out what’s wrong with Hooper. He’s either sick or very upset and I don’t know how one person can have the power to make that happen. I don’t want to get involved.’

But I am in it. I am right there in it.

We fall into silence while students squeal and growl around us. Paper balls, scrunched tightly, fly like cannons about our heads. I have the window seat and stare out at the landscape, a palette of undulating hillsides. My cheek is pressed against the dirty glass and I see a pair of hawks circling high in the sky, alternately soaring and descending, approaching and leaving one another in an aerial ballet that seems to embody my own scattered thoughts. I think of my mother’s tears and protestations, and I think of the searing, burning accusation in the eyes of all the other students who know but know nothing at all. And I flit and duck between believing my mother wholly and doubting her. I know she would never ever willingly hurt anyone or anything. She cries when she finds a dead mouse in the kitchen. She is fickle and flighty. She is fragile and foolish. I just sometimes wonder if her total belief in the ethereal might be dangerous. Not dangerous in a life-threatening way, but in the way that she misses things, misses people’s feelings. She didn’t seem to understand at all how deeply I felt about seeing my father again. She just thrust that at me and I had to catch it like a ball coming at my face from nowhere. I worry about my mother as if she is my child sometimes. Mum is so gentle and soft, and in a hard, unforgiving world, that’s not necessarily always a great way to be. This whole Isaiah business has left a deep sourness in the bottom of my stomach. My mother is a white witch in the Wiccan sense of the word but, with enemies creeping out from under the rocks in town, I fear we’re going to need her to be a warrior woman. I’m not sure she has that in her.

The bus passes wheat-stubbled fields that reach down toward a dam where geese potter. My breath fogs the window. I let a finger trace a cross in the condensation and shut my eyes and ears to the smell and clamour of sweat-stained school students as I try to let everything float away into a drone of dark silence.

I hop off and Ben waves from the bus as I cross the road from the train gate to the Good Yarn corner store. I wonder what he’s thinking. I avoid the locals chatting in the main street, preferring to look down at my Converse shoes stepping one foot in front of another, as regular and predictable as my breath.

May stops me and I startle when she calls my name. ‘Paisley. How’s your mum going?’ she asks as she catches up with me. I am so glad to hear a friendly voice. May is a loud and jolly woman with a big laugh.

‘She’s okay,’ I shrug.

‘Tell her to call me about the festival,’ she says with a smile. ‘I don’t want all this hocus pocus rubbish to get in the way of our plans. Full steam ahead. Tell her to call me.’

And then she’s gone, blustering back down the street.

I go around the back of the shop, through the gate, past some wrought-iron garden furniture that has seen better days, past the succulent scents of the rehydrated herbs in the pots and up the steps, through the damp-smelling laundry, down the dark hallway, to the living room where my mother sits like a marble statue, upright, pale and pink, dressed in her white nightrobe. She has not dressed all day.

‘May wants you to call her about the festival,’ I say, frowning, but she doesn’t seem to hear me.

‘Someone else has come forward and made a complaint against me,’ she says in a small wooden voice. ‘A woman says she’s had chronic migraines since I did reiki on her. I think they’re all out to destroy the festival.’

I feel sick and my legs feel heavy. This is just the beginning. I know it’s only going to get worse.