Kalpana's Dream (2 page)
Inside the library, Snow White and Rose Red settled themselves at a small table near the window. Their real names were Sarah Dunne and Ivy Stevenson, they were in Year Eight, and they’d both had Ms Dallimore for English only the year before.
‘Poor kids, ’ observed Sarah thoughtfully, as she arranged her folders on the table.
Ivy was frowning. She’d just found an old sandwich in the bottom of her school bag, left over from last term. ‘Yuk! What poor kids?’
‘Those two little girls in the courtyard. Did you see how long their skirts were? Year Sevens, eh? Remember when we were new?’
‘Oh, don’t remind me!’
‘Hey, look!’ Sarah pointed to the window. Out in the courtyard a tall red-haired lady in a long swirly skirt was hurrying towards the steps that led down to Block A.
‘She’s late again.’
‘Mmm. Perhaps she’s been out to lunch with her boyfriend. With Him.’
Ivy studied the teacher, frowning. ‘Do you think it’s true, what people say?’ she asked Sarah. ‘That her boyfriend really is Count Dracula?’
Sarah shrugged. ‘Could be.’
‘No-one’s ever seen him though – only that big black car that picks her up from school. It could be anyone behind those tinted windows. Might be her mummy, even.’
Sarah grinned, craning her neck for a last glimpse of Ms Dallimore. ‘She’s definitely getting paler, though – and in the summertime!’
Ivy nodded. ‘Oh, very definitely.’
At another table in the library the boy with the skateboard sat thinking about the slender dark-haired girl he’d met in the courtyard a few minutes back, the girl who’d sent a strange little shiver of recognition tingling down his spine. The boy’s name was Gull Oliver, and though he was in Year Eight he was new to Wentworth High.
His skateboard sat beside him, propped against his bag. ‘Who was she, mate?’ he asked it softly. ‘Who?’
Someone he’d known a long time ago, thought Gull, so that now she looked entirely different: that was the sort of thing that was always happening to him these days.
There was a fairy story he’d read when he was little, about some guy who’d fallen into an enchanted sleep beneath a mountainside for years and years and years – and when he woke up, no-one knew him, and everything was changed. It was a little like that with him. He hadn’t been asleep, of course; it was simply that when he was halfway though Grade One at Short Street Primary, Dad’s job had taken the whole family away to Germany for seven years. It was the strangest thing, how people you’d last seen as little kids were now almost grown-up, how faces had lengthened and hair grown darker and voices deepened; and yet there was always something familiar about them, so that after a few minutes you realised who they were. With the dark-haired girl it was the eyes: he’d seen those eyes before, a deep clear brown with tiny flecks of gold, fringed by dark sooty lashes and fine arched brows. Yet he couldn’t remember who she was, and he knew from that funny little tingle that had fluttered down his spine that she must have been someone special to him, back when he was six years old. And if she was special, why couldn’t he remember?
Gull frowned. The way he couldn’t remember was a little like losing something. When you mislaid some small object you didn’t much care about, you always found it quickly; but when one of your treasures went missing, you could search and search all over and it was nowhere to be found. ‘We’ll find her, mate, ’ he whispered to the skateboard. ‘We’ll find out who she is, you’ll see.’
It was one o’clock on a brilliant summer’s afternoon when Neema and Kate walked down the corridor of Block A towards their first class with Ms Dallimore. But far away in a little country town in India, where Neema’s great-grandmother lived, it was still early in the morning.
Her name was Kalpana, and she’d been up for hours.
She always rose early; old people didn’t need much sleep: there were too many memories, nipping and twitching, tugging you awake. And dreams: two nights ago Kalpana had been young again; she’d felt the gentle touch of her mother’s hands at her waist, folding the pleats of the marriage sari; she’d seen her mother’s face, with tears standing in her eyes. ‘Please Ma, ’ she’d whispered, ‘please don’t cry.’
‘Tears of happiness, ’ her mother had replied.
Kalpana saw many faces in her dreams, but never the one she wished most of all to see: the face of her young husband, who’d died when he was barely twenty. No, not once had she seen her Raj’s face, and even its memory was fading.
She crossed to the window and stood there. Everything outside seemed smaller today: the cobbled courtyard, the tamarind tree, even the big iron gates that screened the house from the road. Smaller, and lonely too – abandoned, as if she had already gone away.
Because last night Kalpana had made up her mind. She would do it, she would go; she would fly to Australia to see her great-granddaughter, Nirmolini. It was a whole nine years since she’d seen her last, and the child would be twelve now, almost grown.
She would travel by herself, she was determined on that. When you were old, you had to do new things. Her family would fuss, of course: her nephews and grandnephews, her daughter Usha most of all. They would want to come with her, carrying her suitcase and shawl, dogging her footsteps, telling her what to do. Let them fuss! She was going on her own!
‘Ah!’
Kalpana turned. Her old friend Sumati stood in the doorway, barefoot, a giant pail of washing hanging from one arm. There were washermen in plenty in their little town, but Sumati distrusted them all. ‘Thieves and liars, every one!’ She preferred to do her washing in her big old laundry pails, exactly as her mother and grandmother had done theirs, in their small rock-strewn village way up in the hills.
When they were children, Sumati had been Kalpana’s little nurse; and when they were grown-up she’d become Usha’s nurse. Now she and Kalpana were old, Sumati was more like a big sister – a rather bossy one.
Sumati took one look at Kalpana and set the pail down with a clang. ‘So you have decided.’
‘Yes.’
Sumati clapped her hands. ‘I knew. The moment I saw your face, I knew. And you will go on your own?’
Kalpana nodded.
A wicked grin lit Sumati’s leathery old face. ‘Ah!’ she crowed, waving one hand in an easterly direction, towards the new part of town where Kalpana’s nephews and grand-nephews lived in their big modern houses that Kalpana found ugly and cold. ‘There will be much squealing over there, ’ Sumati said gleefully.
‘Let them squeal, ’ replied Kalpana. ‘What else can they do? They can’t lock me up, can they?’ She grinned back at her friend. ‘We are in modern times.’
‘Exactly so, ’ replied Sumati, ‘modern times.’ Then she added slyly, ‘Your daughter will not like it, either.’
Kalpana shook her head. ‘Poor Usha.’
‘She will come hurrying from Delhi to bother and fuss and boss. Ah, these teachers! Always boss, boss, boss.’
‘How would you know?’ asked Kalpana, smiling. ‘You never went to school.’
‘Thanks be to Heaven! But the village school was near to my father’s house. I passed it daily – such things went on there in that place! Small boys hardly taller than this’, Sumati gestured at the laundry pail, ‘slapped about the ears for talking, or getting answers wrong. What foolishness was that? Everyone knows a slap will make the thoughts fly from your head. Of course, your Usha would not slap; she was always a kindly child.’ She sucked her teeth and frowned. ‘But bossy, still.’
‘Bossy, ’ Kalpana agreed. She paused and then added, ‘You’re sure you don’t want to come with me, Sumati?’
‘Ah, no. That is your journey; I have my own. I will go to my sister Lakshmi’s place in the hills. She has been begging me to make a visit for a long, long time.’ Sumati picked up the bucket and went out into the hall. Then she stopped and called back, a little shyly, ‘You will come back, though? You won’t stay there?’
‘Of course I’ll come back. This is my home, and yours.’
When Sumati had gone, Kalpana went to the window again. The blue sky dazzled, vast and empty, except for a big dark bird circling high above the trees. Her little great-granddaughter had loved the Indian sky.
‘I have had that dream again, ’ Kalpana whispered to the great black bird. The dream she’d been having all through this winter, over and over again. The dream of flying – not in a plane above the world, as she would do very soon, on her way to Australia; no, not like that at all. In the dream Kalpana flew by herself, like magic, her feet skimming only a little way, a hand’s height, over the ground. Small pink clouds sailed above her; on her right there was water, a blue lake reflecting sky, on her left, a bank of silvery unfamiliar trees. It was no place Kalpana had ever seen, yet she knew with utter certainty that it was a place that existed on the earth – a place that she would one day see. In the dream she flew faster and faster, the cool breeze fanning her cheeks, her sari floating out behind. And she knew that if she flew fast enough, a small crack in the world would open and she would see Raj’s face again. She would see that special smile he kept for her alone, the one that brought the tender light into his eyes, and made the hidden dimple show, that secret little hollow at the corner of his mouth.
Kalpana turned away from the window. The great bird circled once more, slowly, and then flew away, across the river towards the great desert, over the ragged rooftops of the dusty little town.
It was three whole weeks before Ms Dallimore handed out her first essay to 7B.
WHO AM I? she printed in big bold letters on the board.
Easy. It didn’t look as if He had set it.
Because by now most of 7B knew who ‘He’was. They’d heard the rumours the Year Eight kids passed round: how Ms Dallimore’s boyfriend – the driver of the big black car that waited for her every afternoon outside the gate – was Count Dracula. ‘She’s getting paler, ’ the Year Eight kids kept whispering. ‘Paler and paler, every day.’
They said Count Dracula chose the essay topics for Ms Dallimore. But ‘Who am I?’ didn’t seem the sort of topic a vampire would select. All the same, a chorus of complaint rose from the ranks of 7B.
‘But, Miss! That’s baby stuff.’
‘Dead boring!’
‘Embarrassing!’
‘We’ve done it heaps of times.’
‘All though primary school.’
‘You start off in Prep, with this drawing, and your name–’ ‘Next year it’s in printing.’
‘And then joined up.’
‘Longer and longer–’ ‘More and more words–’ ‘I want you to forget all that, ’ said Ms Dallimore. ‘All those other times. This time I want you to
think
–’ and she turned round and wrote the word up in the same big bold letters, so firm and fast you could see the chalk dust spurt into the air. ‘I want you to use your brains, and your imaginations!’ She smiled radiantly around the classroom. ‘Writing can be like flying when you do that, ’ she said.
Flying??? There was a disbelieving silence from 7B, so thick you could hear the chief school cleaner and her Hoover noisily entering the staffroom at the bottom of the hall. ‘Disgusting!’ snorted Mrs Drayner. ‘What a rats’ nest! A hole! Worse than the kiddies, any day!’The rest of her grim displeasure was drowned in the outraged roar of her machine.
Kerry Moss spoke up. Her voice was a low ragged growl. ‘My mum says it’s unhealthy to think, ’ she told Ms Dallimore.
‘Then you can ask her to see me, ’ the teacher answered calmly.
There was a gasp from the other kids who’d gone to Short Street with Kerry: Kate and Neema, Big Molly Matthews and Blocky Stevenson. Tough Mrs Moss had been the terror of the Short Street teaching staff. That day in Grade Four, when she’d bawled out poor Mr Pepperel, Mr Pepperel had – left. He’d packed his bags and gone; he was teaching in the country now. ‘Somewhere along the Lachlan, ’ Neema’s doctor dad had told her, for Mr Pepperel’s old mother was one of his patients. ‘Somewhere along the Lachlan, ’ her dad had carolled, ‘at a place called Booligal. Sounds like it should be set to music, doesn’t it? Poor Mr Pepperel!’
Frail Ms Dallimore would be no match for Mrs Moss, thought Neema.
Or would she be? Neema didn’t believe the Dracula story – how could you? – but there
was
something a little unearthly about their English teacher. She was so very pale and her curls were such a dark vivid red, as if her blood was rising up into her hair. Could she be sick? Was that why she was so pale? But Ms Dallimore didn’t seem sick: her movements were brisk and energetic, and when she spoke about writing, and
thinking
, her big eyes glowed, and her pale face took on a kind of shimmer, like the lustre of a pearl.
‘Think, ’ Ms Dallimore went on serenely. ‘Think at strange times.’
Strange times???
‘When you wake suddenly in the middle of the night, and everyone’s asleep except for you – don’t you feel a different person then? A secret person? And mightn’t that secret person be the real you, that rare person who’s never been on earth before? Mightn’t you then, in the quiet, hear the heavenly music of your own soul?’
Huh?
It was all too much for Blocky Stevenson. His hand shot up. ‘Miss!’ he called sternly. ‘Miss!’