House That Was Eureka (9781922148254) Read online

  Evie felt guilty, because it was her fault about the darkness, and about the Mr Men books being lost. So she’d stay till Sammy went to sleep, and then go and fight those other two. She could hear them jumping and squealing up in the front room.

  ‘Oooooo, I’m a ghost…’ Crash. ‘Watch it, Jodie!’

  ‘How can I watch anything in the dark?’ Jodie said reasonably.

  Evie knelt beside Sammy on the mattress, knelt and looked out the open back window. There was a bit of moonlight, you could just make out a few shapes. About a metre and a half below the window was the corrugated-iron roof over the old breezeway and scullery. It was joined on to the roof over next door’s scullery, for on this side 203 and 201 shared a wall right the way along.

  ‘Make up a story,’ Sammy murmured.

  ‘Once upon a time,’ Evie said, ‘there was an old, old house, and a new family moved into it.’

  ‘What were their names?’

  ‘Oh, Evie, and Sammy, and Maria and Jodie.’ Evie was bad at inventing things.

  ‘Then what happened?’

  Sammy’s voice was drowsy; she was about to drop off. Evie watched the cloud shadows moving over the corrugated-iron roof. There was a narrow passage running down beside the kitchen and scullery on the right side, next to 205’s fence. In this light it was a long dark pit, disappearing into the blackness of the tiny backyard. The shadows made Evie shiver.

  Silver now, a foot-shape of silver formed itself on the roof below her as the clouds shifted. Then a black lump moved fast up the wall beneath her, to the window-sill. Down along that passage was blackness. Evie shivered.

  For down there, in the scullery, Evie would be all alone. The family upstairs would be tight in their beds, and anything could creep along down the dunny-can lane, in the back gate, down the passage, up the breezeway, and into Evie’s room. Evie was to sleep in the old scullery.

  Maybe she should do what Mum suggested, and keep her things up here in Sammy’s room and make up the divan in the loungeroom each night. Or follow Ted’s idea, and sleep up here with Sammy. (Or do what she wanted to do, and move out.)

  But it’d be good, down there alone. If she was upstairs, she’d spend half the night getting drinks of water for Sammy and taking her to the toilet, and if she slept in the lounge she’d have to wait till Ted finished watching television. In the scullery, she could lock the door so the kids couldn’t muck up her things.

  ‘But what happened?’ Sammy drifted awake again, her voice cutting into Evie’s thoughts.

  ‘Nothing.’ Evie was bad at inventing things.

  ‘But what happened to the lady?’

  ‘What lady?’

  ‘The one you were telling me about. In the story.’

  ‘There wasn’t any lady.’

  ‘Yes there was. The one that was talking to you.’ Then Sammy stuck her thumb in her mouth and went to sleep.

  A couple of hours later, Evie sat in the upstairs front room that was to be Mum and Ted’s. She was sampling the whole house, like playing musical rooms. From this one she could just hear Jodie snoring in the room behind. Then that was drowned by the cold whine of a mouth-organ, coming from next door. And now a voice took over, a kind of nasal chant, as if whoever was singing had a blocked nose. Evie could just make out that it was that Bob Dylan song about the answer blowing in the wind. As the mouth-organ started up again she realised that whoever was playing was going over and over the same bit, then changing songs midstream. This time he was singing about how it was all over now.

  (What was?)

  Evie went out onto the balcony, stepping gingerly for the boards were gappy and she was scared they mightn’t hold her weight. It seemed okay. From out here you could now catch a boy’s voice floating out the balcony door of 201. He wouldn’t want to sing up here at night when Ted wanted to sleep, or Ted would blow him in the wind all right. Though come to think of it, Ted couldn’t do much, because 201 were the owners and Ted said he’d been lucky to get rent so cheap around here.

  The music stopped. Evie studied the street. There was still a bit of noise, people getting in and out of cars, though it must be half past ten or so by now.

  It was sure going to be different, living in here in Newtown.

  Out at Campbelltown, where they’d lived before, houses were all separate, on blocks of land, and the streets were wide and quiet. Here in Liberty Street you were only allowed to park on one side, and even then it was hard for two cars to pass. And out at Campbelltown all the houses were new, at most only as old as Evie.

  ‘I don’t know, darl,’ Evie’s mum had complained when Ted had decided on the move. ‘If your boss wants you for that big contract in the city, then we’ve obviously got to move. And if this is the only house we can afford, well, we’ll make the most of it. Somehow, but, I just don’t go much on the idea of living on top of a hundred years of other people’s dirt.’

  And Evie’s friend Roseanne had been even more extreme. ‘Just think, in a place that old, people must have died there! I’m never going to live in a second-hand house.’

  …A second-hand house full of dirt and dead people, Evie thought now; and Evie all alone, with only the sleeping kids.

  What if someone did break in? Or if a gang came? You read about gangs hanging around suburbs like this.

  Evie imagined them breaking in the back door to the kitchen, or climbing over the scullery roof and getting in Sammy’s window, or even getting in from the next-door balcony – the partition between the balconies of this place and 201 was only wood, and there were cracks and little holes. Evie felt eyes through the partition.

  Don’t be so stupid, Evie.

  Evie stopped thinking about eyes through the partition. Evie was renowned for being dull. English teachers at school had always complained of her lack of imagination.

  Down in the street a car backfired like a bullet, and Evie jumped. Mum and Ted would be home any minute, and there were gangs at Campbelltown anyway, so it wasn’t any different from being alone at their old place…

  Still, if a gang did want to break in, Evie thought, that was how they’d do it: in the kitchen door or (if they couldn’t do that) over the scullery roof, or through this partition (though that’d mean they’d have had to have got into 201 first; unless the owner of 201 was a friend of the gang).

  Evie screamed. Not loudly, but loudly enough, loudly as would anyone who saw eyes move behind two neat round holes. Then much more loudly when the gun barrel slid fast out at her through a crack.

  The boy stuck his head and the gun around the partition, and laughed. ‘Bang!’ he said. Evie recognized the gun as a toy rifle of Maria’s.

  The boy was funny-looking, or at least his head was; that was really all Evie could see. There was something old-fashioned about it, though Evie couldn’t pick the style immediately. The face was thin, the nose long with a bump in the middle, the neck was long and thin and the dark eyes were narrow and slanty. The mouth was wide, but the lips were thin. The face looked pale and a bit sickly in the streetlight. But the most noticeable thing was the boy’s hair. It was dark, and grew right down to his shoulders; and it was fuzzy on the ends and a bit greasy on top. One long strand kept flopping over his left eye as he laughed.

  He pulled his head back from round the partition, then leaned perilously far over the balcony and pointed the rifle down into the street. ‘Bang-bang-bang-bang-bang…’ he yelled as he mowed down the cars.

  ‘Of course, it should be a machine-gun,’ the boy said when he’d finished. ‘That’s what they use in the movie.’

  ‘What movie?’

  ‘If, of course.’ The boy stared at her as if she was stupid. ‘Didn’t you see it? They had it on TV again last week. That’s the third time on TV. The seventh time I’ve seen it. It’s my favourite movie.’

  He stopped and corrected himself, in a pedantic way that Evie would grow used to over the weeks to come. ‘No,’ he said, ‘it’s not my favourite movie, it’s the only movie I really like a
t all.’

  Evie was confused. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Evie usually wouldn’t admit ignorance to a stranger, certainly not to a male one, but you could see from this person’s looks that he didn’t count. He was weird. And, despite the partition, Evie could see that he was shorter than her.

  ‘If,’ he said again. ‘That scene at the end where the kids are up on top of the building and they mow down all the enemy on the ground with machine-guns. Whenever I see it I always get a funny feeling that it’s me up there, shooting down – as if I’ve done it all before, in real life. What’s your name?’

  ‘Evie.’

  ‘Yeah, I’m Noel. Mum will be collecting the rent from you, I suppose. Though it’s not her house, it’s the despot’s. The despot stays in bed nearly all the time, though she can get out, and she speaks too sometimes. That’s a secret. What’s she charging?’

  ‘Eighty, I think.’ More than for their nice house in Campbelltown; but then, rents were high in the inner city.

  ‘Of course, she has to cut the price, they reckon it’s haunted.’ Noel burst out laughing. A wild, violent laugh.

  How stupid, to try to scare her. ‘I’ve got to go now,’ Evie said, but he was rattling on and on.

  ‘That’s your father, I suppose, the guy with the beer gut. Your mother looks like Loretta Young in a midday movie, but spunkier. How old are you?’

  ‘Sixteen.’

  ‘Yeah, I’m fifteen.’

  He didn’t look it. Or rather, his body didn’t, for he was a little shorter than Evie. And he was thin, like a primary-school kid. His face though could be old when he wasn’t laughing.

  ‘What music do you like best?’ He fired questions like bullets.

  ‘Oh, most things. Everything. I don’t know. Nothing in particular.’ That was part of the trouble with Evie. As far as music went, and food, and people, and possible jobs, and everything else, Evie had no particular opinions. She neither hated things nor loved things. She was just middle-ey Evie. Middle-ey-muddle-ey-piddle-ey-puddle-ey-fuddle-ey-Evie-Peevie. That was one of Maria’s songs. Evie hated being asked what she thought of things, or what she wanted to do, because everything seemed as grey and floppy as everything else. Perhaps the strongest feelings she had were of disliking Ted, and liking Mum and Sammy; but even then it didn’t seem very strong. It wasn’t like love or hate. Or not like love or hate seemed when you saw them in movies. And so people got annoyed with Evie because she was always so uncaring and undecided; and Evie thought less of herself too, because other people thought she was boring, and because it was very frustrating for Evie herself, never knowing what she liked or she wanted.

  ‘The only music I like is Bob Dylan,’ Noel said. ‘But only his early stuff, not the stuff he’s into these days.’

  One thing about Noel, Evie thought, is that he’s so full of his own opinions that he doesn’t seem to mind that I don’t have any. Evie knew that the guys she talked to in Campbelltown thought she was boring.

  ‘What I wish,’ Noel went on, ‘is that I’d been around in the sixties, when Dylan was good and people fought if they felt things, like the kids in If. That’s why I look like I do.’

  Evie was confused again. The sixties were as far away as Ancient History. But she could now sort of recognize Noel’s looks as being like those people with messy hair and black jumpers and duffle-coats that you see on old record covers. Evie looked, and sure enough, Noel had a black polo-neck jumper on, though it wasn’t all that cold.

  ‘People think I’m a creep,’ Noel said.

  Evie didn’t say anything.

  ‘It always kills a conversation,’ Noel said, ‘to let people know you know what they’re thinking of you. Adios amigo.’ Noel handed her the rifle. ‘I found this in your front yard this afternoon. Sweet dreams.’ And Noel’s face disappeared around the partition and then Evie heard the mouth-organ in the room.

  Evie’s watch had stopped and she didn’t know where she’d packed the radio, so she couldn’t find out the time. It was dark and lonely upstairs now that Noel was gone, so she felt her way down the stairwell. Tripped at the bottom. Went through the dark diningroom and into the lounge, looked at the divan and decided: I might as well sleep out there, right from the first night. Evie rarely had such a positive feeling about something.

  She made her way back through the diningroom, through the half-lit kitchen, and unlocked the back door. There was the empty, narrow breezeway, and then the scullery…

  It seemed odd to Evie, the wasted space of the breezeway, but Mrs Cavendish next door had explained it to Mum and Mum had told Evie: In the old days, about a hundred years ago when these houses had been built, the scullery was where people had a fuel copper for the washing, and to boil up water for baths. They used to use the scullery too for washing up, and for peeling the vegetables, plucking chooks, and other messy things. In lots of houses they’d built a narrow passage called a breezeway in between the kitchen and the scullery to stop the scullery smells and heat from getting into the house. The scullery at 203 had been used as a combined laundry-bathroom until ten years ago, when they’d converted the tiny upstairs storeroom next to Sammy’s room into a bathroom. But at the end of World War I, Mrs Cavendish had said, they’d got the gas on, and they’d got new gas coppers and had stopped using the old fuel ones in both houses. Mrs Cavendish knew all these things because her mother, who owned the two houses, had lived in 201 all her life. Mum said Mrs Cavendish’s mother was evidently bedridden, poor old thing, but Mum hadn’t met her yet…

  Evie found a box of matches and went in. She’d had a good look by daylight, but just wanted to make sure.

  It was a small room – small and square. The walls were unplastered brick, cracking a bit, painted grey. She could repaint them. The floor was concrete, covered with yellow lino; not too old, not too bad. There was a window looking out onto the side passage and 205’s fence.

  On the other side of the room, the back corner was completely filled in with a big diagonal cupboard. Evie had looked in there that afternoon, and that was where the old fuel copper was. It was a tall, brick structure, with the copper set right into it. Under the copper was a space that came up to Evie’s knee; that was where the fire used to go. You could still see the fire-marks on the bricks, and on the floor too – for when they’d cemented the room they’d stopped at the cupboard, and under the copper there were still the old flagging stones. In the farthest bit of the corner was a rusty tin chimney pipe. No attempt had been made to turn the cupboard into a proper cupboard, with shelves and things: it was just a big, dirty, triangular, closed-in space, containing some broken odds and ends like an old push-mower and bike tyres and old paint tins and some old flagon bottles containing little bits of sedimented, noxious-looking liquids. Mrs Cavendish had told Mum that the cupboard had been built in 1920, and it sure looked it.

  Evie glanced a bit dubiously at the cupboard now, struck a match, and had a quick look inside just to make sure no one was hiding in it, or anything. One day soon she’d clear out all the junk, and then she’d get Ted to put some shelves up in there. Ted was good about things like building shelves, and got wood cheap because he worked for a builder.

  Evie dragged a mattress through from the dining-room, psyching herself into liking this room.

  ...It’ll be good down here. A place to be private. I can play the radio at night, and if I put up some thick curtains I can lock the door and sleep in the daytime and no one will know…

  The last few months, Evie had been sleeping a lot. She’d get up and help Mum, and then as soon as Mum had gone to work and Evie had taken Sammy to the play centre, Evie would come home and go to bed again. Then she’d get up and do some housework, and then she’d go back to sleep again. Sometimes she was late picking Sammy up because she’d been fast asleep. Ted worked odd hours, and sometimes he’d come home in the afternoon and find her asleep.

  ‘Lazy bloody kid,’ he’d rave at Mum. ‘You’d think she’d be out looking for a job
. I only wish I could have a kip in the afternoon.’ When he was really vicious, he’d call her Sleeping Beauty, or Wee Willie Winkie…

  But down here, no one will know if I’m in here asleep, or out looking for work…

  Evie went in and got a couple of blankets and a pillow, snapped off the kitchen light, stepped into the breezeway, and pulled the kitchen door hard shut behind her.

  She heard the lock click, tested the door with her shoulder just to be sure, then crossed into the scullery and locked her own door too against the Newtown night.

  2

  Evie always went to sleep the instant her head touched the pillow. If she had dreams, they disappeared completely before she woke. Maria and Sammy sometimes screamed themselves awake with nightmares, and Jodie dreamed a lot that she was a fish, but Evie couldn’t remember ever having had a dream in her life.

  This night, though, something happened.

  It was the sound of the footstep first, treading stealthily across the roof above her, only one foot, then two feet, more feet; and more feet too, a new set of feet, six more feet, lots more feet, running fast down the side passage in rhythm with the feet above. But only the sounds; she couldn’t see anything.

  Then it stopped, then it happened again.

  But visually this second time, and soundlessly, she saw the shape of a foot plant itself silverly above her. Not a naked foot, with toes, but a boot-shape, rounded at the front, a heavy heel at the back, heavy though soundless the footstep now grew above her till it seemed to cover the ceiling, silver first then changing to black.

  Then outside, in the passage that ran along beside her mattress, she could see feet in black boots planting down fast. One after the other, rhythmically running, a sort of running march-at-the-double; she could see them though she was inside and they were outside and there was a wall of bricks between her and them. She could see them, though not hear them this time, and nor did she see bodies growing up from the feet but just felt the feet.

  Then maybe she awoke, if really she’d been asleep (for it hadn’t felt like sleep) because it stopped again.