Daughter of the Regiment Page 2

  Or maybe …

  A mopoke called—more pork, more pork—down by the swimming hole. It was funny, thought Harry drowsily, how you never heard mopoke’s during the day. Maybe they thought their song would shrivel up in daylight. Or maybe sounds just travelled further at night.

  Harry sat up. Night—of course! He’d been stupid. STUPID!

  It had been daylight when he looked through the hole into the other world. Daylight here and daylight there. And now it was night here … so it could be night there as well … and there’d be no golden light glowing through the hole at night. There’d be only darkness, imperceptible in the darkness here.

  Harry lay down again. Tomorrow first thing he’d go down to the chookhouse. No, not first thing—there wasn’t time before the bus to school. Straight after school then, when he had time to really look at the hole. It had to be there then, it had to!

  chapter three

  Cissie

  The school bus snaked down the road to the valley. Harry called it the Spaghetti Road—from up on the tableland it looked just like a piece of spaghetti that someone had dropped on the floor.

  ‘Three whole days off school,’ Spike stretched in satisfaction. ‘Whoever invented pupil-free days should be given a medal. Coming swimming this afternoon?’

  Harry shook his head. ‘I’ve got some jobs at home,’ he answered evasively.

  ‘Too bad.’ Spike stretched his toes out into the aisle. ‘Dad says it’s building up to a thunderstorm. The water might be too cold to swim tomorrow.’

  ‘It’s always cold.’

  ‘It gets colder after it’s rained though.’

  ‘Yeah. Pity,’ agreed Harry. He gazed out the window impatiently. Shorn paddocks of brown stubble, with scattered bales of hay still greenish-gold. Paddocks of tough, thin cocky’s bootstraps with the sheep looking enviously at the lusher grass next door; Dwyer’s place and Steinler’s …

  The bus seemed to take forever. Everyone was on the bus today. The bus stopped at almost every letterbox. There was a box of lemons to drop off to Mrs Albertstein at Woolly Corner, and everyone had to peer out the windows at Melissa Forrest’s joey which her mum had brought down to the bus stop in its hessian sack. Couldn’t Mac drive faster?

  ‘Got much homework?’

  Harry shook his head. Surely the bus usually went faster than this?

  ‘Sure you can’t come for just a quick swim?’ asked Spike again, as the bus pulled in to his and Angie’s stop. The swimming hole down at their place was bigger than the one up at Harry’s, though Harry’s had a smooth rock you could slide down and splash into the water.

  Harry shook his head. ‘No. Thanks anyway.’

  ‘It’s not as much fun just swimming with Angie,’ Spike complained as he hauled himself out of his seat. ‘See you Tuesday. Hey, how about a swim Sunday then? Or Monday? We’ve got to go to Aunt Mag’s Saturday, it’s Uncle Finn’s birthday or something, but we could come up to your place Sunday if you like.’

  ‘Yeah, sure,’ agreed Harry. Anything to get him moving off the bus. ‘See you Sunday. See you Sunday, Angie.’

  ‘What’s on Sunday?’ demanded Angie, dragging her bag up the passageway from the back where she’d been making faces out the back window with the other girls.

  ‘We’re going up to Harry’s place for a swim in the afternoon …’

  Harry watched them straggle off the bus. Mac turned the wheel again and pulled out into the dusty road. Only one more stop now …

  The chooks looked at him with interest as he walked up the flat, hoping for wheat. Humans meant food. The scrap bucket in the morning: leftover porridge or baked potatoes or yesterday’s stale sandwiches. Or wheat or corn at night, a final treat before they were locked inside to keep them safe from foxes.

  Arnold Shwarzenfeather gave a half blast crow—the sort that meant, Food alert! Food alert! Possible food coming! Get it together girls! (A full-throated crow meant, Warning! Warning! Pay attention now!)

  ‘Buzz off,’ said Harry. He stepped over Midnight Sky and Omelette and Mr J (they always crowded at your ankles so they wouldn’t miss a thing) and peered into the chookhouse.

  No chooks in the boxes, except for Sunset, broody in the corner. Chooks mostly laid their eggs in the morning, except for Smokin’ Joe … yes, there was her egg, dark brown against the hay. Smokin’ Joe must have been in already this afternoon. Harry stepped through the door and peered between the perches.

  The hole was in the corner, just where it had been the day before.

  Harry stared at it. Of course he’d known it would be there, he’d been sure it would be there—but it was still amazing that it really was there. It glowed as strongly as before.

  Harry glanced behind him. No sign of Mum or Dad. Should he yell for them to come down and see it, in case it disappeared again? Or should he have a closer look at it first? Just to make sure it really was as weird as it had been the day before, that the other world really was inside it.

  Harry bent under the perches. He craned his head up and put his eyes to the hole.

  The other world was still there. It looked just the same, except today the sky was cloudy—pale grey cloud stretched tight as Speedos across the sky. The creek shone grey as well. He could almost hear it whisper between the rocks … was it the creek through the hole or his creek outside? He could hear trees brush their leaves against the wind.

  Hey, what was that? It sounded like laughter. Was it coming from the hole? Maybe someone was laughing up at the house, or in the garden. Or was it Stan laughing up in the big shed?

  Harry crawled back under the perches and stuck his head outside. The chooks clucked curiously; a currawong yelled in the tree above. The house, the sheds, the grassy flat, the garden were quiet.

  Harry crawled back inside. The laughter was definitely coming from the hole. It was louder now, as though whatever made the sound was coming closer, closer, closer …

  Harry put his eye back to the hole.

  The creek still rippled in the other world. The clouds still stretched featureless across the sky. Harry blinked.

  There was a girl among the trees on the other side of the creek. She wore a long skirt and her blouse was long-sleeved although the day looked warm, and a funny-looking hat so it was hard to see her face. The girl laughed again, and spun around, around and around and around …

  ‘Hello? Hello? Can you hear me?’ Harry felt stupid calling through a hole … but if he could hear her, maybe she could hear him?

  The girl’s skirts swirled faster.

  ‘Can you hear me?’ Harry yelled louder.

  Suddenly the girl collapsed in a giggling heap among the trees.

  ‘Cissie!’ It was a man’s voice. It sounded like he was laughing as well, though Harry couldn’t see him. ‘I said you’d make yourself giddy if you whirled like that!’

  The girl lay back on the grass. She was much younger than he was, Harry realised, about five perhaps, or six. Her hair hung in two plaits down both shoulders. It was blonde hair, tied with blue ribbons at the ends. ‘The sky is going round and round and round!’ she called.

  ‘That’s because you were going round and round.’ It was a woman’s voice now, warm and amused. ‘Come on, sillyhead. If you don’t come now we’ll have eaten all the cake.’

  The girl sat up. What had the man called her? wondered Harry. Cissie, that was it.

  ‘Cake! Is there cake?’ she cried. ‘What sort of cake, Mama?’

  ‘Currant cake.’ It was the man’s voice now. ‘Your mama used the last of the currants too, and there won’t be any more till the supply ship comes, and who knows when that will be.’

  The girl—Cissie—leapt to her feet. Her first step was unsteady. She blinked then oriented herself. She ran in the direction of the voices.

  Blast! Harry tried to crane his head around to see her. But no matter which way he turned he could only see straight ahead in the hole and not to either side.

  ‘Can I have that piece?’


  ‘Greedy reedy. You’ll have the piece you’re given, miss.’

  ‘Yes Papa.’ But the voice was hopeful, not repentant.

  The woman laughed. ‘Give her the big slice, John.’

  Cissie laughed again and suddenly she was back in view, leaping up onto the largest rock, hardly hampered by her skirts. She sat down on the rock’s flat top, arranging her skirts around her, and began to eat. Her shoes were funny, thought Harry. Sort of boots and all buttoned up to the ankle.

  ‘Papa?’

  ‘Yes, Cissie?’

  ‘Why is the sky blue?’

  Harry almost laughed. It was just the sort of question a little kid like that might ask.

  ‘I don’t know, my dear. Maybe you should ask Captain Piper. He knows the answer to everything.’

  The woman laughed. ‘John! Don’t you encourage her to ask the Captain a question like that. She probably will now!’

  ‘He won’t mind,’ said the man’s voice.

  ‘She’s being thoroughly spoilt, that’s what she is.’ But the woman’s voice was indulgent. ‘The only child here. Everyone treats her like a pet kitten. Sergeant Wilkes carving her that doll and the o’possum skin Lieutenant Burrows brought back for her and …’

  ‘And the feathers he brought back for you, for your hat. You’re the queen of the garrison, Mrs Harrington, my love, you and Mrs Sorrell, but she can’t hold a candle to you. I should be jealous …’ There was more laughter suddenly and words he couldn’t catch.

  ‘Papa! Look!’

  ‘Look at what, my pet?’

  ‘That tree! Look, there’s a face on it!’

  Harry looked. The kid was right. There was a face, shaped by the gnarled bark on the trunk of the tree.

  ‘It looks a kind face,’ decided Cissie. ‘I like this place. It’s the best place in the whole world. Who owns it, Papa? The black people?’

  ‘His Majesty the King owns it now, pet.’

  ‘Why? Did he buy it from them?’

  Her mother laughed. ‘The questions you ask, Cissie! Who ever heard of a question like that!’

  ‘But King William owns EVERYTHING! I mean who REALLY owns it?’

  ‘No one then. Not yet.’

  ‘Can it be mine, Papa?

  ‘Of course,’ assured the man.

  ‘John!’ The woman’s voice was laughing again. ‘She really will think it’s hers!’

  ‘I think this place should be mine, because I love it best,’ decided Cissie. ‘Much more than King William. Besides, King William likes the sea, doesn’t he, Papa? Captain Piper said he was the sailor king. He’d think this pool was much too small. Papa, can I bathe?’

  ‘It’s too cold. Besides, it’s past time we were getting back.’

  ‘But Papa!’

  ‘Don’t argue, Cecilia,’ said the man.

  Cissie wrinkled her nose and brushed the crumbs from her skirt. Would the man and woman come into view now, wondered Harry. But they didn’t. Cissie jumped to her feet and began to leap from rock to rock along the creek. Her boots clicked and slid on the granite. The voices grew more distant and the laughter; then the laughter merged with bird calls.

  Then it was gone.

  Harry stayed with his eye to the hole. But they didn’t return.

  It was hot in the chookhouse, the smells more pungent in the heat. Harry’s neck was cramped. His knees hurt from kneeling above the muck.

  ‘Harry! Harry, where are you?’

  ‘Here! I’m here, Mum!’ Harry straightened his knees painfully and clambered out of the chookhouse.

  Mum came down the garden steps onto the flat. ‘I saw your bag but didn’t know where you were.’

  ‘I was in the chookhouse.’

  ‘Looking for your hole?’ Mum smiled.

  ‘Yes. It’s …’ Harry halted. All he had to do was take Mum over to it, and she’d see it for herself. But something stopped him.

  Maybe it was the laughter. It had been such private laughter, the girl and her parents believing they were alone. He’d eavesdropped and he wasn’t sure he wanted anyone else to eavesdrop as well. Besides, it was his world, that funny world inside the light.

  And suddenly he realised he didn’t want anyone else to share it. Not even Mum and Dad.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said finally. ‘You were right, Mum. It was just a trick of the light. There’s this little hole on the wall and the light shines right through it.’

  ‘I told you it’d be something like that,’ said Mum sympathetically. ‘Come on. It’s hot enough to melt a mountain out here. You’ll be getting heatstroke, just like Uncle Ron did that time down at the coast when we were kids … did I ever tell you about that? Come and have some afternoon tea.’

  chapter four

  Trying to Make Sense of It

  He dreamed of the girl that night. Cissie, that was her name. Cissie.

  In his dream she was laughing, among the rocks, the creek muttering beyond her, the ripples wrinkling the red gum shadows on the water. Then suddenly the laughter stopped. There was silence, the sort that seemed to echo even though there was no noise, and then the sound of sobbing, sobbing, sobbing …

  Harry woke up shivering. His Doona had slipped sideways in the night. He was cold, that was all. He’d had a nightmare because he was cold.

  Harry pulled the doona up over his shoulders again and twitched the curtain aside. The sky was grey, not black. A cuckoo trilled down the scale like it was practising for an eisteddfod. Arnold Shwarzenfeather would be crowing soon, and then the kookaburras would be gurgling, and the shrike thrush singing and then every other bird around would yell up at the sky.

  There was no way he could get back to sleep. The dream was still too strong.

  That small girl by the creek, crying, crying, crying, all alone.

  But that was silly. Silly. She’d been laughing. Her parents had been with her. She’d been having fun, not unhappy at all. They’d all been picnicking by the creek which was so like his creek …

  Harry sat up, the Doona slipping from his shoulders. Of course!

  It WAS his creek! Cissie’s creek was his creek like it must have been last century perhaps, before the gold miners dredged it and sieved it searching for their gold … the gold miners came in 1852 so it had to be before that. Maybe twenty years before or even more.

  Mrs Easton at school said there’d been waterlilies all along the creek in those days, and giant red gums along the banks, instead of just a few skinny ones on the creek flats. The miners had cut down the red gums to fuel their dredges and the casuarinas had taken their place.

  Hadn’t Mrs Easton said there’d been a garrison here in the early days, even before the farmers came? The soldiers had been stationed down by the river in case the French invaded, in case they sailed up from the sea with their cannons and their flag to claim the land, just as the English had claimed it a few years before … but no French ship ever came.

  Cissie’s father must have been one of the soldiers at the garrison, and her mother and Cissie lived there as well. And that Captain Piper they spoke about, and Sergeant Wilkes … and there would have been more soldiers stationed at the garrison if they were there to keep out the French.

  It would have been a lonely outpost in those days. It took weeks of trekking on horseback from Sydney to get there in the days before roads and cars and planes, unless you had a boat, and how many boats were there back then?

  So, thought Harry, that’s what he was seeing through the hole. This place more than a hundred and fifty years ago. What was the hole then? A hole in time? Could Cissie see him … was there a hole at her end as well? There had to be … but she hadn’t seemed to see it. Maybe she was too upset to see the hole.

  Or maybe… yes, Harry realised, that was it. He’d seen the hole because it was bright in the dimness of the chookhouse—but on Cissie’s side it’d just be another patch of daylight with daylight all around. You’d have to be right up against it to see that it was different. You didn’t hear anything f
rom the hole unless you were right up close as well.

  Maybe there were lots of holes like that, thought Harry drowsily, as though time rubbed thin just there and you never noticed. You just walked on straight past …

  He must have slept. The next thing he knew Arnold Schwarzenfeather was yelling from the chookyard and Dad was singing in the shower.

  Breakfast was always late on Saturdays. Dad had to go into work till lunchtime, and Mum usually went with him, but they didn’t open till eight-thirty or even nine, so there was no point eating early.

  Dad fried bacon and eggs. He always cooked Saturday breakfast—Australorp eggs for him because he liked them best, and Isabrowns for Harry, and a white Leghorn egg for Mum.

  Harry squeezed the oranges that came from the giant tree on the flat. The juice was yellow. It looked more like lemon cordial than the orange juice in bottles.

  The tree had been planted over a hundred years ago, when orange trees grew into huge things, almost as tall as gums, not like the small neat modern trees at all. The oranges were hard and tiny, and always freckled (sometimes if you rubbed them off onto your skin the freckles stayed there till you washed them away), but the juice tasted better than the stuff from the supermarket. Or maybe you just liked what you were used to, thought Harry. He’d always drunk the juice from the fruit of the trees on the flat.

  ‘What do you plan for today?’ asked Dad. His hand hovered between the honey and the plum jam. ‘Coming into town with us? We could pick up a video if you like.’ He unscrewed the lid of the plum jam and began to spread it thickly on his toast.

  Harry shook his head. ‘I’ve got a lot of homework,’ he said. ‘I’ll just get it over with this morning if that’s okay.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Dad, surprised. Harry usually left his homework till just before bedtime on Sundays, then panicked because he couldn’t get it all done. ‘Do you want us to pick up a video for you?’

  ‘Oh thanks,’ said Harry. ‘Any one … Hey Mum, can I take the scrap bucket down to the chooks.’

  Mum blinked. ‘Thank you,’ she said.