Beastkeeper (2 page)

Sometimes Sarah would sit on the edge of the bath and talk to him while he picked his nails clean. She would ask, “Why do you have to take so long? It doesn't take me that long.”

“Somehow, I don't think going to school leaves you quite as filthy as my job does.”

And Sarah would say, “Shows what you know,” and her father would laugh and say, “Indeed.”

When she looked at the weirdness of her parents compared to her classmates' parents, it would make her feel a little bit better to know that at least her mother and father's sole ambition in life wasn't just to make money, money, and more money. They didn't have a shiny new car and expensive clothes or a big house with rolling green lawns.

And it didn't matter, because her parents were at least interesting. They did things. They packed up when they got bored and they left, like migrating swallows. They weren't tied down to their fancy cars and heirloom furniture. It was one of the things she told herself every time the plastic storage containers came out of the garage, every time the contents of her home were packed away and labeled. It was that or let the sinking feeling take over and pull her feet-first into the ground and bury her.

Sarah had made herself become used to changing schools. She could even tell the signs: when the wind turned, and the first acorn caps began gathering in the gutters. When the martins skimmed and wheeled and patterned the sky with their dances, she would know that the move was coming soon.

She would know to gather her library books and turn them in.

It wasn't always seasonal. It was just a knowing. Sometimes she'd be walking home from school, kicking the grass, and a dandelion head would burst and scatter just so. The seeds would drift up in front of her, and from the geometry of their flight she would know.

When she got home, her mother would be sorting all their life into boxes.

Sarah never went out of her way to make friends anymore, or stand out in her classes. She made sure she was an adequate student and would spend her breaks catching up on the work she'd missed.

When you're constantly changing schools, there's always work to be caught up. Her only confidants were the toys she still kept, and they never told her that everything was going to be all right. They would just look at her glassily and smile their tight-sewn smiles.

*   *   *

All this meant was that the next morning, Sarah got up and went to school, and no one knew her mother had flown away, had left her and her father alone in the boring rabbit-hutch house they were renting at the moment. For the other kids in her class, nothing had changed.

Sarah tried to pretend that they were right, that nothing really had changed.
If I believe it hard enough
 … she thought to herself, but didn't give in to completing the wish. That way, if it didn't come true, she wouldn't feel that double slap of disappointment. That not only was her mother gone, but also there was no magic in the world.

In the books that Sarah liked to read, children who had to move around a lot seemed to always end up in strange houses with extra doors that went to new lands, tunnels and connecting passages, or boarded-up rooms that held treasures, ghosts, mysteries. Old houses filled with secrets and strangeness, gardens tangled up with adventures. The reality was that every house Sarah had ever moved into had been almost exactly the same. It was true that some of them had been single-stories with big gardens, others had been double-stories, some had neat little squares of lawn, and others had gravel driveways or concrete backyards, but the essence of the houses had always been the same. They were all clean and modern, with enough plugs to satisfy her parents, built-in cupboards, and neat kitchens with all the conveniences expected of them.

It's hard to find magic in houses like that. And Sarah wanted magic, wanted to know that there was something more to her life than packing up and moving, and going to new schools, and not bothering to learn the names of the people around her because what did it matter, really.

The first day after her mother fled, Sarah held on to her hope that this was just temporary and that she'd be back before the week was out. But there was no mother that day. Or the next. Or the next. The little hope shriveled up and fell away, and Sarah swallowed down that ugly, salty taste in her mouth and held her head higher. She let the sky lick her eyes dry and the wind kiss her welcome.

Her father went to work as if nothing had changed, and the boxes gathered dust in the garage. Sarah almost wanted to come home one day to find him packing up the house, because at least that would be something normal. Or if not packing, then looking for her mother, even if it meant printing up posters of her mother's startled face in black and white, with a phone number and a reward offered. Although Sarah wasn't sure that would exactly work for getting back a parent.

Instead, the laundry gathered in the baskets and overflowed, the dust bunnies multiplied under the beds and couches, the cutlery tarnished, the weeds grew in the gutter alongside the house. Sarah discovered that untended houses very quickly give in to neglect. She'd never understood how much her mother had done while she'd been in class and her dad was at work. She'd always sort of assumed that the places just looked after themselves.

Reality was very different, Sarah realized, after using the last of the clean dishes for the dusty remains of the very last box of cereal. Her father had stopped eating, had seemed to forget that children needed food.

“We need groceries,” Sarah said to him that night over a boiled potato gone mushy on the outside but still woody in the middle.

Her father was dressed in his stained blue overalls and watching television. His hands and clothes left inky smears over the fabric. Under his ragged nails, the dirt gathered black. When he turned at the sound of her voice, there was a flash of something in his eyes, an empty green flare. He was unshaven, and his beard bristled over his face, like he'd glued clippings from a doormat all over his cheeks and chin. “Hmm,” he said, but he reached into his pocket to pull out his worn leather wallet and peeled out some crumpled notes for her. They were as grubby as he was. Her father held them out, and Sarah slipped down from the chair and padded over nervously to take them.

He smelled odd, musty and sour, like a sick dog caught in the rain.

But she'd been able to buy bread and apricot jam and peanut butter and instant noodles, so at least she didn't have to starve.

 

2

AN IMPROBABLE BOY

AFTER A WHILE
Sarah gave up hoping, and when she walked home along the grassy pathways, she held on to her disappointment instead. It was all she had. She would recite a new mantra to herself, and let it fill her head. That way she could feel like she was Dealing With It, and other things that grown-ups did.

After all, there is nothing quite like losing a parent to knock the childishness out of a person's spirit.

The freak icy snap had passed, and the weather had gone back to being the usual cold and sunny days interspersed with mushy drizzle. Sarah was on her way home from school, and the late-afternoon sun slanted thinly down through a clean blue sky tufted with the faintest wisps of faraway clouds. Her bag was slung over one shoulder. It was so overladen with books that the thin strap dug right through her school blazer and made her shoulder ache. It pulled her whole body off center. As she walked, she kicked at the pathway, and in her head the disappointment mantra was on a loop:
Dad-and-I-are-all-alone
-kick-
Dad-and-I-are-all-alone
-scuff.

It was better to repeat this over and over in her head until it stopped making sense than to give her mind space to start hoping again.

Every now and again her thoughts would slip from her little singsong, and Sarah would catch herself just about to think that maybe when she got home, her mother would have flown back and would greet her at the door, would allow herself to smile, hug Sarah so hard that her ribs would break—

You are being ridiculous,
Sarah thought.
You are being ridiculous.

She was so busy repeating this to herself in the hope that she'd eventually believe it, that at first she didn't notice the boy following her.

If the house that Sarah and her father lived in now was as empty of magic as a broken wand, it still had one tiny redeeming feature. Between the school and her house lay a very small parcel of untouched land. It had a
FOR
SALE
sign older than Sarah, and this sign leaned dejectedly on one overgrown corner. The words were faded away so that only close up could Sarah make out the faint shadows of what was written. The edges of the board were chewed ragged by rain and time.

Once, she supposed, the land had been cleared and ready for someone to grow a house from its broken stones, but it had been left untended for so long that it had become something that was not quite a forest.

It was a thick tangle of fast-growing shrubs, and flowering weeds, and abandoned junk. The route through the Not-a-Forest was the long way to her house, but Sarah preferred to walk the extra distance on the narrow track that wound between the wiry bushes than to keep to the strict pattern of the roads.

Her parents had told her she must never walk that way, as people could be hiding in the bushes just looking for a girl like her to steal, and the warning had made her all the more determined to take that path.

Especially now.

It wasn't that she wanted anyone to steal her; it was more that she had long ago discovered a delicious pleasure in not listening to what adults say.

In all the times she'd taken the path, she'd never seen anyone else, anyway, which just went to show. She always saw
signs
that other people had been there—new litter, carvings in the bushes that had grown big enough to look almost like stunted trees, the stamped-out coals of cooking fires—but always it seemed to Sarah that the moment she set foot on the path, the Not-a-Forest became hers and everyone else fled.

That day, though, someone was in her realm and moving, silent, through the shrubs and weeds and rusted junk. Sarah paused to lower her bag to the ground so she could shake out her aching shoulder. It was only because of this that she stopped her little mantra and began to notice the world around her properly. Everything felt subtly wrong. It was as if a very neat thief had ransacked her forest and left only the smallest clues behind. The shadows had been moved an inch out of place, the bushes put back in not quite the right positions.

Sarah had a skin-prickling feeling that someone was watching her. She swung around in the middle of the path, looking in every direction, but saw no one.

“Who's there?” The birds and the rustling lizards went about their business, and above, the sky stayed cold and blue. Sarah swallowed. “Hello?” she tried again. She was starting to feel foolish now. “And maybe it's nothing,” she said to herself as she bent to pick up her overstuffed bag.

“Maybe it's a murderer,” said a stripling boy. He stepped out from behind a scraggly gathering of young eucalyptuses and pushed his russet-brown hair back from his forehead. “Or a hunter.”

He was older than she was—he had that skinny, half-starved look that some boys got when they grew too fast for their meals.

A shiver went down Sarah's back, and she tightened her grip on her bag. She could run. She was fast. But perhaps not fast enough to outrun a lanky teenage boy. She kept her voice loud and firm even though at first the words felt shivery in her mouth. “Or maybe it's just some stupid high school kid,” she said. Sarah wasn't far from high school herself, but she didn't quite trust the ones who had Moved On. The battle lines were firmly drawn, as far as she was concerned.

The boy frowned. “I don't go to school,” he said. “I'm Alan. Who are you, then?”

Sarah had been warned never to speak to strangers, and this happened to be one of the adult rules that had managed to get itself stuck in her brain. Her parents hadn't explained just how strange a stranger had to be to make him really a stranger, but she was quite sure that this boy qualified. Names meant nothing.

He was dressed in thick corduroy trousers the color of bark and fallen leaves, the knees of which were black with dirt. His sweater was a gloomy green, like the middle of a pine forest, and he wore no shirt under it. In the thin and sandy soil, his bare feet were dirty as a child's, and around his neck he wore a necklace strung with dull ivory shapes. Teeth. Teeth of all kinds, all shapes. “Beast got your tongue?” he said.

“It's ‘cat.'”

The boy crouched down in the long, pooling shadows of the young eucalyptus trees and clicked his tongue. He appeared to be looking at markings in the earth. “What is?”

“The saying. It's ‘Has the cat got your tongue?'” Sarah eyed him. He was very definitely
off
, but at the same time he exuded a feeling of contentment. It crept up around Sarah, as soothing as her mother's whispers in the dark. She shrugged her shoulders like she was trying to shake off a too-heavy blanket. The feeling didn't go; it just pressed down, got even heavier, thicker. An eiderdown of warm laziness.

“Well, has it?” he said, and glanced up at her, one eyebrow raised.

Sarah leaned forward, just a little, as if to get a better view of whatever it was he found so fascinating on the ground. She'd listened to the girls in her class giggling over pictures they'd cut from magazines and stuck into their school notebooks, but she'd never understood why they got so
excited
over the actors and musicians whose faces covered the pages where their homework should be. She thought she might be a little closer to some kind of understanding now. It felt ridiculous. “Has what?”

“The cat. Got your tongue.” The boy sighed. “We're talking in circles. What are you doing here, cat-girl?”