Callie

Callie’s Castle

1

As Callie came out of the school gate, she almost turned left along the way she used to walk to her old home. But when she heard Frances calling her, she ran off quickly in the right direction.

Until a week ago, Frances and she had been best friends. What had they quarrelled about? It had been something so small, so silly, that Callie couldn’t remember it. She didn’t want to, either, for the fight had ended with her blurting out such cruel things that now her face scorched at the thought of them.

To say such things to Frances! Callie nearly groaned aloud. And yet, as Frances came pounding along behind her, she turned in silence, putting on a hostile face.

‘Oh, it’s all right!’ bristled Frances. ‘I don’t want to talk to you. Mrs Wheeler said you were to give this to your mother.’

Callie looked at the envelope, on which was written, Mrs Beck, per courtesy of Carol.

‘Take it yourself!’ she said.

Frances glowered. ‘No, I won’t, you pig.’ She threw the letter on the ground and walked away.

Callie waited until Frances had disappeared around the corner. Then she picked up the letter and dawdled down the hill. She was worried. What was Mrs Wheeler writing to her mother about?

On the way home Callie had a daydream about pushing that letter down a stormwater drain and saying nothing about it. But Mrs Wheeler would be sure to ask about it. All right then, stand up and say boldly, ‘My mother says you’re a nutsy old lady. Teachers ought to stick to teaching and not write letters home about their pupils, my mother says.’

Callie could just see Mrs Wheeler’s face going red as everyone roared. That would fix her.

Fix her for what? thought Callie desolately.

Only last term she had loved Mrs Wheeler generously, delighted when she was asked to do something special, proud when her mother and stepfather had laughed at those jokes and sayings of Mrs Wheeler’s that she had retold. Then, all of a sudden, like everything else, Mrs Wheeler had turned sour.

Well, perhaps she could put the letter between the pages of her social studies book and forget about it.

Callie stopped outside the hibiscus hedge of their new house and opened her school-case. Just as she took the letter from her pocket, her brother Dan wandered out of the gate. He was as thin and pale as a whitebait, with frail silvery hair blowing over his brainy skull.

‘Who’s the letter for?’ he asked.

Callie scowled. Everything that could be the matter with a brother was wrong with Dan. Ever since he’d had virus flu he had been awful—weepy, mean, finicky, a shameless tale-teller. Yet Callie ached with love of him and had to take great pains to hide it.

‘Mind your own business!’ she snapped. She jammed the case shut. Might as well take the letter straight to Mum, she thought, now that Dan knew about it.

Dan was looking pleased. ‘I know something awful,’ he said. ‘About you,’ he added.

‘What?’ asked Callie, with dread.

‘You’ll see when you get to your room,’ said Dan. ‘Gret and Rolf are up there,’ he added demurely, ‘playing with your things.’

Callie shrieked with dismay and rage. She dropped her schoolbag and the letter, flew up the stairs and along the hall to her bedroom. The door was ominously shut.

‘I’ll kill them, I’ll kill them!’ Callie croaked. She hurled open the door. Dan arrived just in time to see, from behind her, their sister Gret and their baby brother Rolf, sitting on the floor, silent and absorbed in the disastrous mess they had made of Callie’s treasures. The bread-tin was still beside the chest of drawers. That was how they had climbed up to the top drawer, which was Callie’s special place. The drawer was open, and everything that had been in it was strewn about the floor; the loved old toys, the favourite books, the tangled beads, the troll dolls Aunt Mette had sent Callie from Copenhagen, the limp teddy bear known as the Gutless Wonder, which Callie had taken to bed until she was six,

even Callie’s greatest treasure, a little glass turtle. Gret was busily worrying the sewn-on clothes from the trolls, and Rolf was squeezing tubes of paint on the torn-out pages of Callie’s diary.

Fury burst out of Callie’s chest in a terrifying squawk. Rolf, who was three, dropped the paint and began to cry. But Gret, a rose-quartz beauty bursting with health and confidence, only giggled, half-scared and half-thrilled. She jumped up, dangling the troll by its orange hair, watching warily.

Callie’s mother, hanging curtains in the kitchen, heard the commotion.

A radiant Dan met her in the passage. ‘Come quick, Mum. Callie’s killing them!’

Fascinated, he hovered in the doorway as his mother dragged Callie away from Gret, and plonked Rolf on the bed, where he rolled purple with over-excitement. Callie gave a cry of despair and began to sob.

‘I have absolutely had enough of you children!’ said Mrs Beck. She spoke sharply. ‘Gret, go and wash yourself. Dan, take Rolf to the toilet.’

When the door had shut, she looked despairingly around the room.

‘Oh, Callie, you must have left the drawer unlocked. Why are you so careless?’

‘I didn’t know they could climb up and reach it,’ hiccupped Callie. ‘Why didn’t you keep an eye on them? And Dan, he…he KNEW, and he didn’t stop them. I hate him! I hate them all!’

And she put her foot on the glass turtle and crunched it to glittering dust.

‘Callie, that’s a wicked thing to do!’ said her mother.

But Callie was crying so hard it was useless to try to reason with her. Instead, Heather Beck tried to tidy the room.

‘That little wretch has paint all over the floor. Thank goodness we haven’t put the carpet down yet. Oh, Callie, he’s torn up this notebook, too.’

She picked up a page and read in Callie’s large neat writing: I wish my real Dad hadn’t been killed when I was a baby. I wish my mother hadn’t married again ever.

‘That’s my diary!’ cried Callie, twitching the page from her mother’s hand. ‘It’s supposed to be private!’ She scrabbled up the pages, splodged with crimson-lake and gamboge and green, and screwed them into an untidy ball. ‘I don’t want it any more…all spoiled…I’ll burn it…not fair!’

‘Very well, Callie. Tidy up in here, as best you can,’ said her mother quietly. ‘I’ll keep Gret and Rolf out until you calm down. I’m sorry about it all, darling, really I am.’

As she closed the bedroom door behind her, Dan said jauntily, ‘I’ve been waiting to give you this letter. I’ll bet it’s from Callie’s teacher.’ He had picked it up when Callie dropped it.

Mrs Beck gave him a cold look. ‘Did you really know the children were playing with Callie’s things? You come into the kitchen, Dan. I want to speak to you.’

By the time Laurens Beck came home, Gret and Rolf were their usual radiant selves, dimples on every corner. Callie was sullenly setting the table, and Dan was invisible.

‘I had to scold him about something,’ Mrs Beck told her husband. ‘And now he’s sick in the stomach. I sent him to bed.’

‘The boy’s a little upset with all the excitement of moving house,’ said Callie’s stepfather in his gentle Danish voice. He put his arm around her. ‘How’s my big girl? Callie likes our new old house, doesn’t she?’

‘It’s a beautiful house,’ muttered Callie, keeping her face turned so that Dad wouldn’t see her puffy pink eyes.

And that was true. The first time Callie had been taken to see the house she hadn’t believed that they could ever possibly live in it. Only a few streets from their own home, this house stood in half an acre of shadowy, overgrown garden, looking towards Sydney Harbour. The garden was walled in by a hibiscus hedge that had grown ten feet high for lack of pruning, and was spangled all over with huge red and yellow flowers. It was like the hedge that grew around the Sleeping Beauty’s palace. And the house wasn’t a bit new and bright; it was just peaceful and homely, a Victorian house with six big rooms downstairs and five upstairs, no proper cupboards, peeling wallpaper, and porches paved with gloomy Dutch tiles with Biblical pictures on them—not nice ones like Noah and the Ark, but horridly fascinating scenes of Pharaoh chopping the heads off slaves.

The upper storey was covered with silvery wooden shingles cut like fish scales. The chimneys were large and topped with twisted chimney-pots, all befouled with seagull droppings, and out of the roof stuck a queer little cupola with a weather-vane and windows of dirt-encrusted glass that Dad said he thought must be coloured.

It was the sort of house any girl would think romantic, and Frances, who had accompanied them on one of their inspections, had said longingly, ‘Oh, please buy it, Mr Beck, so I can come and visit.’

At first Laurens had thought he would never be able to afford to buy such a large house, even though it was rundown and shabby, for he was a painter and paperhanger, and found it hard to keep a family of six comfortable. But in the end it was his talent and industry as a house-painter that enabled him to buy the property.

He fixed up the bottom floor as a large self-contained flat whose tenants could have the sole use of the front garden. He painted and papered it in pale sunny colours, and let it at a rental he was almost too bashful to ask.

‘It’s an average rent for Sydney today,’ said his wife. ‘And there’s the harbour view, and Neutral Bay shopping centre just up the hill, and schools close by. And although the flat is half a house, really, it’s as private as though we two families were fifty miles apart.’

The rental very nearly paid the bank repayments on the house, and so with a happy heart Laurens began to fix up the top floor as a home for themselves. He was not handy except with paint, but he worked very hard in the evenings, and very soon he had the roomy back bedroom fitted up as a kitchen and family dining-room, the bathroom refitted, and everything painted and papered with great skill.

When Callie first saw the bedroom she was to share with Gret, she thought she had never seen anything prettier than the ornate plaster ceiling, which Laurens had cleaned and repaired and painted soft blue, with all its garlands and ribbon bows in lily white. It was just like Mum’s Wedgwood bowl that she kept her earrings in.

The two big front bedrooms, with their graceful bay windows, Dad had turned into the master bedroom and a big living-room. Both rooms overlooked the leafy hillside down to Neutral Bay. The house was so high that it overlooked the deck of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. At night Sydney itself was before them, glittering as a dream.

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