‘Funny,’ said Phyllis. ‘As soon as I saw the suitcase that day I thought of June’s story. I knew it must be the one Pa had found with Nell on the wharf all those years ago, yet in all the time it had been at the back of Pa’s storeroom I’d never given it a thought. Didn’t connect it with Nell and her origins. If I ever considered it at all, it was to wonder what Ma and Pa had ever wanted with such a funny-looking case. White leather with silver buckles. Tiny it was, child size . . .’
And although Phylly continued to describe the suitcase, she needn’t have bothered, for Cassandra knew exactly how it looked.
What was more, she knew what it contained.
5
Brisbane, 1976
Cassandra knew where they were going as soon as her mother wound down the window and told the petrol station attendant to ‘Fill her up’. The man said something and her mother laughed girlishly. He winked at Cassandra before letting his gaze fall to her mother’s long brown legs in their cut-off denim shorts. Cassandra was used to men staring at her mother and thought little of it. Rather, she turned to look out her own window and thought about Nell, her grandmother. For that’s where they were going. The only reason her mother ever put more than five dollars of petrol in the car was to make the hour-long trip up the Southeast Freeway to Brisbane.
Cassandra had always been in awe of Nell. She’d only met her five times before (as far as she could remember), but Nell wasn’t the kind of person one easily forgot. For a start, she was the oldest person Cassandra had ever seen in real life. And she didn’t smile like other people did, which made her seem rather grand and more than a little frightening. Lesley didn’t speak much of Nell but once, when Cassandra was lying in bed and her mother was fighting with the boyfriend before Len, she’d heard Nell referred to as a witch, and though Cassandra had stopped believing in magic by then, the image wouldn’t leave her.
Nell was like a witch. Her long silvery hair rolled into a bun on the back of her head, the narrow wooden house on the hillside in Paddington, with its peeling lemon-yellow paint and overgrown garden, the neighbourhood cats that followed her everywhere. The way she had of fixing her eyes straight on you, as if she might be about to cast a spell.
They sped along Logan Road with the windows down and Lesley singing along to the radio—the new ABBA song that was always on Countdown. After crossing the Brisbane River they bypassed the centre of town and drove through Paddington with its corrugated-iron toadstools cut into the hills. Off Latrobe Terrace, down a steep slope and midway along a narrow street was Nell’s place.
Lesley jerked the car to a halt and shut off the ignition. Cassandra sat for a moment, hot sun shining through the windscreen onto her legs, skin under her knees glued to the vinyl seat. She hopped out of the car when her mum did and stood beside her on the pavement, gazing upwards, involuntarily, at the tall, weatherboard house.
A thin, cracked concrete path ran up one side. There was a front door, way up top, but someone years ago had enclosed the stairway so that the entrance was obscured, and Lesley said that no one ever used it. Nell liked it that way, she added: it stopped people from dropping in unexpectedly, thinking they were welcome. The gutters were old and wonky, with large rust-rimmed holes which must’ve let through buckets of water when it stormed. No sign of rain today though, Cassandra thought, as a warm breeze set the wind chimes to jangling.
‘Christ, Brisbane’s a stink hole,’ said Lesley, peering over the top of her large bronze sunglasses and shaking her head. ‘Thank God I got out.’
A noise then from the top of the path. A sleek caramel cat fixed the new arrivals with a look, distinctly unwelcoming. Squeaky hinges on a gate, then footsteps. A tall, silver-haired figure appeared by the cat. Cassandra drew breath. Nell. It was like coming face to face with a figment of her imagination.
They all stood, observing one another. Nobody spoke. Cassandra had the strange sensation of being witness to a mysterious ritual of adulthood that she couldn’t quite understand. She was wondering why they continued to stand, who would make the next move, when Nell broke the silence. ‘I thought you agreed to call first in future.’
‘Good to see you too, Mum.’
‘I’m in the middle of sorting boxes for auction. I’ve things everywhere, there’s no room to sit.’
‘We’ll manage.’ Lesley flicked her fingers in Cassandra’s direction. ‘Your granddaughter’s thirsty, it’s bloody hot out here.’
Cassandra shifted uncomfortably and looked at the ground. There was something odd about her mother’s behaviour, a nervousness she wasn’t accustomed to and couldn’t articulate. She heard her grandmother exhale slowly.
‘All right then,’ said Nell, ‘you’d better come inside.’
Nell hadn’t been exaggerating about the mess. The floor was covered in scrunched newspaper, great crinkly mounds. On the table, an island amidst the sea of newsprint, were countless pieces of china and glass and crystal. Bric-a-brac, Cassandra thought, pleasing herself by remembering the term.
‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ said Lesley, gliding to the other side of the kitchen.
Nell and Cassandra were left alone then and the older woman trained her eyes on Cassandra in that uncanny way she had.
‘You’ve grown taller,’ she said eventually. ‘But you’re still too thin.’
It was true, the kids at school were always telling her so.
‘I was thin like you,’ said Nell. ‘You know what my father used to call me?’
Cassandra shrugged.
‘Lucky legs. Lucky they don’t snap in half.’ Nell started pulling teacups off hooks attached to an old-fashioned cabinet. ‘Tea or coffee?’
Cassandra shook her head, scandalised. For though she had turned ten in May, she was still a little girl and not accustomed to grown-ups offering her grown-up drinks.
‘I don’t have fruit juice or fizzy drinks,’ warned Nell, ‘or any of those sorts of things.’
She found her tongue. ‘I like milk.’
Nell blinked at her. ‘It’s in the fridge, I keep plenty for the cats. The bottle will be slippery so don’t drop it on my floor.’
When the tea was poured, Cassandra’s mum told her to scoot. The day was too bright and sunny for a little girl to be cooped up inside. Grandma Nell added that she could play under the house but she wasn’t to disturb anything. And she most certainly was not to enter the downstairs flat.
It was one of those desperate Antipodean spells where the days seem strung together with no gaps between. Fans do little else but move the hot air around, cicadas threaten to deafen, to breathe is to exert, and there is nothing for it but to lie on one’s back and wait for January and February to pass, the March storms to come, and then finally the first April gusts.
But Cassandra didn’t know that. She was a child and had a child’s stamina for difficult climates. She let the screen door slap closed behind her and followed the path into the back garden. Frangipani flowers had dropped and were baking in the sun, black and dry and shrunken. She smudged them with her shoe as she walked. Drew some pleasure from watching the smears scar the blond concrete.
She sat on the little iron garden seat in the clearing at the top and looked down at the strange garden of her mysterious grandmother, the patched-up house beyond. She wondered what her mother and grandmother were speaking of, why had they come to visit today, but no matter how she twisted the questions in her mind she could divine no answers.
After a time, the distraction of the garden proved too great. Her questions dropped away and she began to harvest pregnant busy lizzie pods while a black cat watched from a distance, pretending disinterest. When she had a nice collection, Cassandra climbed up onto the lowest bough of the mango tree in the back corner of the yard, pods cupped gently in her hand, and began to pop them, one by one. Enjoying the cold, gooey seeds that sprayed across her fingers, the pussycat’s surprise when a pod shell dropped between her paws, her zeal as she mistook it for a grasshopper.
When
they were all discharged, Cassandra brushed her hands on her shorts and let her gaze wander. On the other side of the wire fence was a huge white rectangular building. It was the Paddington theatre, Cassandra knew, though it was closed now. Somewhere nearby her grandmother had a secondhand shop. Cassandra had been there once before on another of Lesley’s impromptu visits to Brisbane. She’d been left with Nell while her mother went off to meet someone or other.
Nell had let her polish a silver tea set. Cassandra had enjoyed that, the smell of the Silvo, watching as the cloth turned black and the teapot shiny. Nell even explained some of the markings—lion for sterling, leopard’s head for London, a letter for the year it was made. It was like a secret code. Cassandra had hunted at home later that week, hoping to find silver that she could polish and decode for Lesley. But she hadn’t found any. She had forgotten until now how much she’d enjoyed the task.
As the day wore on and the mango leaves began to sag with heat and the magpies’ songs got stuck in their throats, Cassandra made her way back down the garden path. Mum and Nell were still in the kitchen—she could see their shadowy silhouettes through the gauze of the screen—so she continued around the side. There was a huge timber sliding door on runners and when she pulled the handle it opened to reveal the cool, dim area beneath the house.
The dark formed such a contrast to the bright outdoors that it was like crossing the threshold into another world. Cassandra felt a jolt of excitement as she went inside and walked around the room’s rim. It was a large space but Nell had done her best to fill it. Boxes of varying shapes and sizes were stacked from floor to ceiling around three sides, and along the fourth leaned odd windows and doors, some with broken glass panes. The only space left uncovered was a doorway, halfway along the furthest wall, which led into the room Nell called ‘the flat’. Peering inside, Cassandra could see it was about the size of a bedroom. Makeshift shelves, heavy with old books, spanned two walls, and there was a fold-out bed in the corner, a red, white and blue patchwork quilt draped across it. A small window let in the room’s only light, but someone had nailed timber palings across it in places. To keep burglars out, Cassandra supposed. Though what they would want with such a room she couldn’t imagine.
She had a strong urge to lie on the bed, to feel the cool of the quilt beneath her warm skin, but Nell had been clear—she could play downstairs but she wasn’t allowed inside the flat—and Cassandra had a habit of obedience. Rather than enter the flat and collapse onto the bed, she turned away. Went back to the spot where some child, long ago, had painted hopscotch squares on the cement floor. She nosed about the edges of the room for a suitable stone, discarded a few before settling on one that was even in shape with no jagged angles to send it off course.
Cassandra rolled it—a perfect landing in the middle of the first square—and began to hop. She was up to number seven when her grandmother’s voice, sharp as broken glass, cut through the floor from upstairs. ‘What kind of a mother are you?’
‘No worse than you were.’
Cassandra remained still, balancing on one leg in the middle of a square as she listened. There was silence, or at least there was silence as far as Cassandra could tell. More likely they had just lowered their voices again, remembered that the neighbours were only a few metres away on either side. Len was always reminding Lesley when they argued that it wouldn’t do to have strangers knowing their business. They didn’t seem to mind that Cassandra heard every word.
She began to wobble, lost her balance and lowered her foot. It was only for a split second, then she had it raised again. Even Tracy Waters, who had a reputation amongst the grade five girls for being the strictest of hopscotch judges, would have allowed it, would have let her continue the round, but Cassandra had lost her enthusiasm for playing. Her mother’s tone of voice had left her unsettled. Her tummy had started to ache.
She tossed her stone aside and stepped away from the squares.
It was too hot to go back outside. What she really felt like doing was reading. Escaping into the Enchanted Wood, up the Faraway Tree, or with the Famous Five into Smuggler’s Top. She could picture her book, lying on her bed where she’d left it that morning, right near the pillow. Stupid of her not to bring it; she heard Len’s voice, as she always did when she’d done something dumb.
She thought then of Nell’s shelves, the old books lining the flat. Surely Nell wouldn’t mind if she chose one and sat down to read? She’d be careful to do no harm, to leave things just as she’d found them.
The smell of dust and time was thick inside. Cassandra let her gaze run along the rows of book spines, red and green and yellow, and waited for a title to arrest her. A tabby cat was stretched across the third shelf, balanced in front of the books in a strip of sunlight. Cassandra hadn’t noticed it before and wondered where it had come from, how it had entered the flat without her seeing. The cat, seeming to sense that she was under scrutiny, pushed up on her front legs and fixed Cassandra with a look of majesty. Then she leapt in a single fluid motion to the floor and disappeared beneath the bed.
Cassandra watched her go, wondering what it would be like to move so effortlessly, to vanish so completely. She blinked. Perhaps not so completely after all. Where the cat had brushed under the quilt, something was now exposed. It was small and white. Rectangular.
Cassandra knelt on the floor and lifted the quilt edge. Peered beneath. It was a tiny suitcase, an old suitcase. Its lid sat askew and Cassandra could see some of the way inside. Papers, white fabric, a blue ribbon.
The certainty came over her suddenly, the feeling that she must know exactly what it held, even if it meant breaking Nell’s rules further. Heart flickering, she slid the suitcase out and leaned the lid against the bed. Began to look over the things inside.
A silver hairbrush, old and surely precious, with a little leopard’s head for London stamped near the bristles. A white dress, small and pretty, the sort of old-fashioned dress Cassandra had never seen, let alone owned—the girls at school would laugh if she wore such a thing. A bundle of papers tied together with a pale blue ribbon. Cassandra let the bow slip loose between her fingertips and brushed the ends aside to see what lay beneath.
A picture, a black and white sketch. The most beautiful woman Cassandra had ever seen, standing beneath a garden arch. No, not an arch, a leafy doorway, the entrance to a tunnel of trees. A maze, she thought suddenly. The strange word came into her mind fully formed.
Scores of little black lines combined like magic to form the picture, and Cassandra wondered what it would feel like to create such a thing. The image was oddly familiar and at first she couldn’t think how that could be. Then she realised—the woman looked like someone from a children’s book. Like an illustration from an olden days fairytale, the maiden who turns into a princess when the handsome prince sees beyond her ratty clothing.
She set the sketch on the ground beside her and turned her attention to the rest of the bundle. There were some envelopes with letters inside, and a notebook full of lined pages that someone had covered with long curly handwriting. It may have been written in a different language for all that Cassandra knew, she certainly couldn’t read it. Brochures and torn-out pages of magazines had been tucked in the back with an old photograph of a man and a woman and a little girl with long plaits. Cassandra recognised none of them.
Beneath the notebook she found the book of fairytales. The cover was green cardboard, the writing gold: Magical Tales for Girls and Boys, by Eliza Makepeace. Cassandra repeated the author’s name, enjoying the mysterious rustle against her lips. She opened it up and inside the front cover was a picture of a fairy sitting in a bird’s woven nest: long flowing hair, a wreath of stars around her head, and large, translucent wings. When she looked more closely, Cassandra realised that the fairy’s face was the same as that in the sketch. A line of spidery writing curled around the base of the nest proclaiming her ‘Your storyteller, Miss Makepeace’. With a delicious shiver, she turned to the first fairyta
le sending startled silverfish scrambling in all directions. Time had coloured the pages yellow, worked and worried at the edges. The paper felt powdery and when she rubbed a dog-eared corner it seemed to disintegrate a little, fall to dust.
Cassandra couldn’t help herself. She curled up on her side in the centre of the camp bed. It was the perfect place for reading, cool and quiet and secret. Cassandra always hid when she read, though she never quite knew why. It was as if she couldn’t shake the guilty suspicion that she was being lazy, that surrendering herself so completely to something so enjoyable must surely be wrong.
But surrender she did. Let herself drop through the rabbit hole and into a tale of magic and mystery, about a princess who lived with a blind crone in a cottage on the edge of a dark wood. A brave princess, far braver than Cassandra would ever be.
She was two pages from the end when footsteps on the floorboards above called back her attention.
They were coming.
She sat up quickly and swung her legs over the side of the bed, feet onto the floor. She wanted desperately to finish, to find out what would happen to the princess. But there was nothing for it. She straightened the papers, tossed everything back into the suitcase and slid it under the bed. Removed all evidence of her disobedience.
She slipped from the flat, picked up a stone and headed for the hopscotch squares again.
By the time her mum and Nell appeared at the sliding door, Cassandra could make a pretty convincing case that she’d been playing hopscotch all afternoon.
‘Come here, kiddo,’ said Lesley.
Cassandra dusted off her shorts and went to her mother’s side, wondered as Lesley wrapped an arm around her shoulders.
‘Having fun?’
‘Yes,’ said Cassandra cautiously. Had she been found out?
But her mother wasn’t cross. Quite the opposite; she seemed almost triumphant. She looked at Nell. ‘Told you, didn’t I? Takes care of herself, this one.’