Chapter TWO
I brought the car to a stop outside my house, only too aware that the black Ford sedan parked a few houses behind me. I walked into my garden and stopped as a willy willy blew over me violently. Willy willies were miniature whirlwinds that seemingly sprang from nowhere. This one was small enough simply to lift my skirt. It sped down the road, taking with it little swirls of dead leaves before it dissipated.
For a second I watched the spinning dust race away along the street, as if it could carry my unease with it. The hot air dropped back around me at once, heavy and still, and the quiet of our end of the road returned. Most people in Bayberry Creek were either already at the town picnic or in their kitchens nursing roasting pans, so the street looked deserted. The only movement, apart from that unwelcome car, was one of Mavis’s hens scratching half-heartedly in the bare patch of earth near her fence.
I bent over my lavender bushes, pretending to inspect them, but in fact keeping an eye on the man who was now out of his car and was standing facing my direction.
The lavender stalks were dry at the tips, and a few greyish sprigs broke off under my fingers. I pinched one to release the scent and kept my head down, counting stems as if I were checking for beetles. I could feel the weight of the man’s attention from the footpath a few houses away. He did not move on, which an ordinary passerby would have done, but stood there as if he were waiting for me to straighten and wave.
I had no intention of waving.
I told myself that it was perfectly reasonable for a stranger to park in our street, particularly on Christmas Day. Perhaps he was visiting a relative. Perhaps he was lost. Perhaps he had stopped to admire Mavis’s hen. I did not believe myself for a moment.
After casting a quick glance at my wilting daisies and making a mental note to water them later, I hurried inside my house, out of the sun and away from the stranger.
I went up the front path more briskly than I usually did, cardboard box bumping against my leg and the Kangaroo Apple pressing awkwardly into my hip. The key stuck in the lock for half a heartbeat, enough to make my shoulders tense, then turned. I opened the door wide enough to slip in, pulled it firmly behind me, and let out a breath I had not realised I had been holding.
The familiar cool of the hall met me. It was not truly cool, but after the glare outside and the glare of that black sedan it felt like plunging into water. The hall table sat in its usual place with Wolff’s hat and a neat pile of Christmas cards, and from the back of the house I caught the savoury hint of something cooking.
Wolff was nowhere to be seen, so I placed the box on the floor.
The living room looked very much as I had left it that morning, only with the light shifted across the rug. The gum sapling in the corner drooped under its paper chains, and a scatter of wrapping paper from last night’s gifts to neighbours still waited for me to fold it for reuse. The heat pressed against the glass of the bay window, and the lace curtains tried their best to pretend we lived in a sensible climate.
I took out the kitten and held him to me. He purred so loudly that his whole body vibrated. I put him down and dangled one of the homemade paper chains from the Christmas tree in front of him, much to his delight. Our Christmas tree was no grand affair like those of our northern neighbours, but a gum sapling cut down and stuck, unceremoniously, in a pot.
He batted at the paper with two determined paws and then did a sideways leap that almost toppled him. I laughed in spite of myself and steadied the branch before he took the whole arrangement down on his head. The pot was an old jam tin buried in a larger one, and the earth around the trunk had already started to crack as it dried out. Next year, I thought, I might put the decorations on a painted branch instead and save myself the trouble.
I smiled at the snow-covered Christmas decorations under the Christmas tree. While witches in the northern hemisphere were celebrating Yule, here in the southern hemisphere, Christmas falls at midsummer so I had celebrated Litha, the pagan summer solstice, three days earlier. Here our sun-oriented rooms faced north, while sun-facing rooms in the northern hemisphere faced south.
The tiny glass houses, dusted in pretend snow, looked faintly ridiculous sitting above a strip of bare brown lawn outside the window. Still, they had belonged to my grandmother, and I liked the way the light caught on them in the evenings. Three nights earlier I had stood in this same room with the curtains drawn, a single candle on the chiffonier and a sprig of thyme in my hand, marking the longest day in my own quiet way while Wolff read a book in the kitchen and pretended not to notice.
There was still no sign of Wolff, so I put the kitten in the laundry room with food and water. He didn’t seem interested in either, but climbed back into the cardboard box and went to sleep.
The laundry, at the back of the house, was cooler again. I set down the saucer of water and the little dish of chopped meat I had brought from Nama’s, and the kitten merely yawned and curled into the towel. He was clearly satisfied with the world. I envied him that. I left the door ajar for air and paused to listen. The gentle clatter of something in the kitchen told me Wolff was occupied.
As I walked back into the hall, Wolff came out of our bedroom and embraced me. “Your gift’s in the living room,” he said. “I do hope you like it.” His eyes twinkled with anticipation.
He smelt faintly of shaving soap and roast fat, which suggested he had been darting between the oven and the mirror. His shirt sleeves were rolled up, and there was a streak of flour near one elbow. That meant he had either been helping himself to the shortbread dough I had left or attempting something ambitious of his own. The thought that he had possibly baked anything made me more nervous than the man in the Ford.
“Have you been in my kitchen?” I asked. “Without written permission?”
“I might have,” he said. “Come and see before lunch burns.”
On my way to the living room, I heard a loud meow. I looked at Wolff, but he didn’t comment. Perhaps he hadn’t heard him.
The sound came from the direction of the laundry, full of outrage and importance, as if the kitten had suddenly realised he had been abandoned. I hesitated for a heartbeat and then kept walking. If I turned aside now, Wolff would think I did not trust him to surprise me. He had the air of a man who had been rehearsing his face.
I wondered what Wolff’s gift could be. We had agreed not to buy each other gifts. After all, the Great Depression had ended only recently. Wolff had a good job teaching science at the local school, and I was lucky enough to be one of the few people in town, if not in the state, to own a Silent Night refrigerator that actually ran on electricity and not kerosene. Who’d have thought such a thing was possible?
When we had first had the Silent Night delivered, the man who brought it had shaken his head and said he would not trust any machine that depended on the wires staying up. I had pointed out that ice melted too, and at least the refrigerator did not drip all over the floor. The first time Wolff came home and found butter that was still firm after lunch he had admitted that perhaps progress had its uses.
Still, we were both reeling from the shock of the Great Depression. Only a few years earlier, more than one third of the workforce in the entire country had been unemployed.
Sometimes, in quieter moments, I still thought of the boarded shop windows in Sydney and of the queues at the soup kitchens in streets that had once felt prosperous. People in town spoke about those years as if they were a passing storm, but there were men in Bayberry Creek who had not found steady work again and did odd jobs for meat or a bag of potatoes. That sort of thing stayed in the air. It made you feel guilty if you wanted a new dress.
When I walked back into the living room, I gasped with shock as a piece of scrunched up paper flew at me. A ghost? I soon saw the culprit, when an elegant black kitten darted after it and pounced on it.
The paper hit my shoulder and bounced onto the rug. The kitten skidded after it on overlong legs, his tail held high. He placed both front paws squarely on his prey, then seized it in his mouth and shook it. One ear was tipped slightly to one side, giving him a look of great seriousness, which did not tally with his antics.
I looked at Wolff with my mouth open. “A kitten? For me?” I laughed as I hurried over to the kitten and scooped him up. “Oh, you’re such a little darling,” I cooed, tickling him under his chin. “And you won’t be lonely.”
The kitten relaxed in my hands at once, as if he had been waiting to be admired. His fur was sleek and glossy, and his whiskers quivered against my fingers. He smelt of floorboards and dust and the faintest hint of soap, which meant that Wolff had tried to tidy him up and then thought better of it.
“What do you mean?” Wolff looked puzzled. “Do you like him?”
He stood in the middle of the room with a crumpled newspaper sheet in one hand, as if that explained everything. There was a tiny scratch across the back of his other hand that suggested the elegant black kitten had sharp opinions.
“I love him,” I said, “but it seems great minds think alike. I got you a kitten for Christmas, too. He’s in the laundry room.”
Wolff stared at me for a heartbeat, and then a grin spread slowly across his face. The notion that we had both broken our own agreement in precisely the same way appealed to him.
“You mean you’ve smuggled a cat into my house?” he said.
“It’s our house,” I said. “And I had an accomplice.”
Wolff walked from the room with large strides, and I sat down on the couch with the black kitten on my knee. “I’m going to call you Willow,” I said, “because Willow is good for witches’ wands.” The little kitten purred loudly and rubbed his head on my hand.
I liked the way the name felt in my mouth, cool and smooth, like the wood itself. The kitten gave no sign of objecting. He kneaded happily at my skirt and tried to catch one of the loose buttons on my blouse.
“Willow it is,” I said. “You can supervise spells and keep Wolff in order.”
From the back of the house I heard an exclamation from Wolff that sounded very much like someone who had discovered an extra present at the bottom of the stocking.
Wolff burst through the door, clutching the fat ginger kitten to him, an unmistakable look of delight on his face. “This is the best Christmas gift ever, Thelma. Thanks so much!”
The ginger kitten dangled with all four paws spread and a faintly stunned expression that suggested he had been scooped from his box without warning. His white bib was already a little smudged from the towel, and his pink nose twitched as he scented the room and the other kitten.
“You’re supposed to say that about socks,” I said. “Not about live animals.”
“I’ve never said that about socks,” he said. “This is far superior to socks.”
We put the kittens on the ground, chuckling as they played with each other. “They’re going to be best friends,” Wolff said. “Where did you hide the kitten all this time? I hid mine with Nama.”
The two of them circled each other for a moment, sniffing cautiously, then seemed to come to some private agreement and launched into a game that involved batting at each other’s ears and rolling over on the rug. One of the paper chains worked loose and drifted down, and both kittens froze, then pounced together and collided in a tangle of paws.
“Nama?” I said in surprise. “That’s where I hid your kitten. They’re about the same age. They must be litter brothers. She told me he was a magical cat.”
It felt exactly like something Nama would do, to tuck two kittens away from us and hand them out as if she were dealing a well planned card. The thought of her drinking her tea quietly while the black Ford sat at the end of her street flickered at the back of my mind, but I pushed it aside for now.
Wolff laughed. “That’s what she said about your kitten.”
“Of course she did,” I said. “She wouldn’t risk us with anything ordinary.”
The black kitten leapt over his brother’s back and skidded into the leg of the chiffonier. The blue glass lustres chimed together gently. I made another mental note to move anything fragile higher up until the pair of them learnt to keep their feet.
A loud knock on the door disturbed us. “Who could that be?” I asked in alarm. “Who would call by, uninvited, on Christmas Day?”
My heart gave a small jump that had nothing to do with the surprise kittens. A picture flashed into my mind of the black Ford and its driver striding up the path. I wiped my hands on my skirt, which made no sense because there was nothing on them, and looked at Wolff.
“We’ll soon find out!” Wolff climbed to his feet. He returned moments later with our neighbour, Mavis Fuller. She also was a witch, and it was a relief that we could be open with each other, given witchcraft was illegal in New South Wales.
It was at once obvious she had been crying.
The change from light teasing to the sight of Mavis in the doorway was so abrupt that it seemed to take a moment for the room to catch up. Her hat sat crookedly on her hair, and there were dark streaks on her cheeks where tears had run. She clutched her handbag to her middle as if she were holding herself together with it.
Mavis threw her arms skyward. “The police just found my husband’s body!”
For a moment the only sound in the room was the faint jingle of the paper chain as one kitten tugged it and the other tried to sit inside the fallen loop. The word body hung in the air between us, heavy and solid, and my thoughts swung from kittens and roast to Mavis’s kitchen down the road, standing empty. I opened my mouth and then shut it again, because I could not think of a single sensible thing to say.
The hot air from outside pressed at the windowpanes, and the decorations under the gum sapling seemed suddenly out of place.
