The Red Shoe Read online

  “Really?” Their mother looked up, alert. The house next door had two storeys and a long wide front garden and a side driveway for cars. It’s like a film star’s house, their mother said, but nobody lived there, not even a film star, because it was a holiday home. Lots of the houses in the streets around them were like that. In the summer people came in cars and had parties in the houses and trailed down to the beach. But the rest of the year the streets were empty as a ghost town. There were more trees than houses, more possums than people, their mother said. It’s like living at the ends of the earth, said their mother, and in fact it was.

  “What did you see?” their father asked Matilda, as they finished off the lamb and the last drops of gravy.

  “Some men came in a car,” Matilda answered. “They looked funny.”

  She had been playing by herself in the front yard when they came. She had watched them through the fence but they hadn’t seen her.

  “What sort of funny?” asked their mother.

  “What sort of car?” asked their father.

  “I don’t know,” said Matilda. “It was black. They had black hats and coats and umbrellas and they went inside.”

  “Why umbrellas?” Uncle Paul raised his eyebrows. “It hasn’t rained for weeks.”

  That was true. It was dry as dry, and the red earth was like powder and rock. You weren’t allowed to water the garden. The newspaper said you just had to get used to grass being yellow instead of green. Matilda liked that idea. Perhaps you could get used to things being different colours altogether – the huge ocean could be pink and the sand could be purple.

  “Weren’t there any women?” asked their mother, sounding desperate, because she was lonely at the ends of the earth.

  “There wasn’t a mother,” Matilda said with certainty. “Or any children.”

  “Or an auntie or a granny or a dog,” smiled Uncle Paul. “Or a little blue budgie in his cage.”

  Their father stood up from the table and went over to the door that led from the dining room to the back yard. He pushed open the flyscreen and looked out, standing on the back step. They could hear the cicadas crying from the tall trees surrounding them, like hundreds of heartbeats. The big house next door seemed to wave in the afternoon sunlight.

  “Nobody there now,” he said. “And the blinds are down.”

  Through the open door, wind came in from the Pacific Ocean. They couldn’t see the waves from where they lived, but they heard it and smelt it, all the time. Uncle Paul smiled again from under his silvery moustache. He was looking at their mother. She was wearing tiny crimson earrings, like drops of blood.

  Then their father made a funny sound. “Look!” he said, and his voice was hoarse.

  They all got up from the table, except Elizabeth, and looked.

  A large, grey-green goanna was slowly climbing up the concrete step, out from the tangled bush, through the afternoon heat towards their house, towards their father’s feet. Its mouth was hanging open, and it raised one of its knobbled legs in the air, spreading its toes apart.

  “Calm down,” said Uncle Paul to their father, because their father was shaking as though he had a fever. He wasn’t afraid of Germans or bombs but he was afraid of lizards. He was afraid of all animals.

  “He’s a coward,” said Floreal.

  “Do something, Paul,” said their mother urgently. “It’s horrible. Do something! Shoo it away.”

  Now they were all crowding around the door, looking down at the goanna, except Elizabeth. She put her elbows on the table and yawned.

  “Can we catch it?” begged Matilda, excited. “I could take it to school for the Pet Parade.”

  There was to be a Pet Parade at school that week. The prize for the most unusual pet was a huge round green and yellow and white and pink lollipop that sat on her teacher’s desk. It had every colour in the rainbow, the teacher told them, and it was called an all-day sucker, which meant it would last all day long if you were careful not to chew it. God must have made it, thought Matilda, it must be what they eat in heaven. If Matilda could catch the goanna and take it to school in a bucket, she might win! She bent down and reached out her hand. If she could just get hold of its tail…

  Uncle Paul stepped forward and made a kicking motion with his foot.

  “Cha-cha-cha!” he grunted through his teeth and kicked again.

  The goanna did not move. Its front leg was suspended in the air. It was still as stone, its mouth gaping and its eyes fixed.

  “Don’t!” said Matilda, tugging Uncle Paul. “Don’t scare him! Let me catch him!”

  “It’ll bite you, Mattie!” warned their mother.

  The goanna raised its head calmly as a judge, its tongue flicking in and out of its mouth. It hesitated, looking at Matilda through small black eyes as though considering what to do.

  “Gara-gara-gara!” said Uncle Paul, showing his teeth.

  “Don’t!” Matilda wailed.

  The goanna made a decision. It wheeled its heavy body around and leapt down the step, running on all four legs surprisingly swiftly, back into the high weeds at the edge of the yard, the dark growth beyond the fence.

  “What did you do that for?” Matilda shouted at Uncle Paul.

  “Poor Mattie,” said Uncle Paul. “Nature lover.”

  “It must have smelt the meat,” said their mother.

  Their father walked out of the room. They heard him in the kitchen, opening the fridge, taking out a bottle of beer. He was ashamed because he was so afraid. Elizabeth laid her head on the table. Frances sat down and ate a spoonful of peas.

  Uncle Paul leaned over to Matilda and gave her shoulders a squeeze, but she was too angry. She turned her back to him, her face squashed up in crossness.

  “Don’t think the goanna would have liked school much,” he said.

  “Go away!” mumbled Matilda.

  Why did he do that? She could have won the lollipop, she knew she could have. But none of them cared, not a bit. Now she wouldn’t tell them anything more about the people she’d seen in the house next door, about the big black car and the men in their suits and black hats.

  There were lots of things she wasn’t going to tell them now. There were so many other things they didn’t know that she knew. She certainly wasn’t going to tell them about the gun.

  Two

  ONE OF THE MEN Matilda had seen going into the big house next door had a gun. It was black and curved, hanging from his belt. Matilda knew it was a gun, a real gun. It was not the first time that she had seen one.

  She had seen a gun just like it in the house of the mad old man who lived on the other side of them. Nobody knew she had been in the house of the mad old man. Nobody saw her and she didn’t tell anybody. This was partly because she was sneaky, but more because her mother would have been cross. The old man was strange as well as mad, and her mother had told her not to speak to strangers. But sometimes Matilda couldn’t help herself.

  She hadn’t meant to, it had just happened. She had been out in the front garden one afternoon all alone playing with some pebbles, singing a little song she’d made up about a bus and a train, when the mad old man came up the path to get his letters. He didn’t shake his walking stick at her as he did at her mother. Instead he stared through his scrunched-up eyes and said, “What are you doing? Eh?”

  “Playing,” said Matilda.

  “Would you like a chocolate biscuit?” asked the old man. “Eh?”

  “Yes,” said Matilda.

  “Come on, then,” said the mad old man, gesturing.

  He was very old. His arms and legs were covered with long white hairs and his face was all brown and crushed. When he walked he hardly lifted up his feet, and his shoes sounded like rustling newspaper as they scraped along the ground, and then his stick as well. He was wearing a red woollen hat like a lady, and he had a pencil stuck behind his ear.

  Matilda put the pebbles into her pocket and followed him down the concrete path to his front door. There were an
ts scurrying all over the ground and they bit her toes, hundreds of little black stinging ants.

  “What’s your name?” he asked her as he pushed open the rusting screen door. “Eh?”

  “Matilda,” she said, trying to wipe the ants from her feet.

  The door banged shut behind them. Inside the house it was dark and it smelt of cats and something else. It feels wet, thought Matilda, like a cave. There was a reddish cat lying almost flat on the table in the kitchen, and another one, a brown and grey one, curled on top of the stove. They didn’t open their eyes but she knew they were alive because she could see their stomachs moving up and down.

  “Here you are,” said the old man.

  Apart from the cats, the kitchen was neat, neater than theirs. There was a folded tea towel next to the sink and a shining blue metal teapot. There was an open newspaper on the kitchen table, and next to it a biscuit tin. The old man picked it up and pulled off the lid. He had to do it with one hand, because with the other hand he was leaning on his wooden stick, which was twisted at the top like Little Bo Peep’s. His hand shook so much as he opened the tin, Matilda thought it was never going to happen. But then:

  “Go on, take one,” said the old man at last, holding the tin out. “Get on with it, will you?”

  The biscuits sat in layers underneath a piece of greaseproof paper. Matilda was disappointed that they weren’t chocolate-covered, but only chocolate-coloured. She reached out her hand and took one.

  “Have another,” he said, rattling the tin. “Eh!”

  So she did.

  “Have another,” he said again, sounding angry.

  Matilda thought she might be going to cry. She took another one and put all three of them in her mouth at once.

  “Come in here,” said the old man, beckoning as he shuffled into the living room with his stick. “Here’s something I bet you’ve never seen. Eh?”

  Matilda followed him into the room. There was a green velvet sofa and two armchairs and on every cushion another cat. There was a long mirror in one corner, mouldy with gold edges. Matilda could just see herself in it, in the shadows.

  The old man stood next to the fireplace. He had dropped his stick and was leaning forward. In the dark, his red hat was like a flame. There were bookshelves all along the walls, filled with rows and rows of empty beer bottles.

  “What do you think of this, eh?”

  The old man lunged over to the mantelpiece and seized a huge silver sword curved like a new moon, which was hanging on a hook above the fireplace where there should have been a picture of trees and a river and cows eating grass.

  Matilda screamed and jumped back. The mad old man stood in the middle of the room and whizzed the sword through the air. It sounded like a bird flying by very fast.

  “Bet you never seen one of these,” said the old man, suddenly lowering the sword to the floor. “Eh?”

  “No,” admitted Matilda.

  “Come here and have a proper look,” he said. Then, because she seemed to be hesitating, “Come on, come on, don’t muck about!”

  Matilda went over. She looked at the sword. It was like a giant knife for cutting up roast chicken. She wondered if the old man might be about to kill her with it, chop her head off. She waited for him to say something. There were bits of chocolate biscuit stuck to her teeth and she tried to get them off with her tongue. She wished she could go home.

  “Got it from a Jap,” said the old man. “It’s mine now, ha!”

  “Were you in the war?” asked Matilda.

  “Ha!” replied the old man.

  “My dad was in the war,” said Matilda.

  “Ha!” said the old man.

  Matilda wasn’t sure if she believed in the war. Maybe the war never really happened, like a film at the cinema which looked real and felt real but wasn’t. Films were just dreams, flashes of light in the dark, like stars.

  “Ha!” said the old man again, and he held the sword right up to his face, the blade on his cheek.

  Matilda had been born when the war was over. That meant she was different to her sisters. Now there would be no more wars, their mother told them, since Matilda was born. But Matilda was not so sure.

  “Got to watch those Japs,” said the old man. “Got to watch ’em. The Japs. And the Reds, don’t forget them. You got to watch the Reds.”

  Well, he didn’t have to tell Matilda that. Matilda knew all about the Reds. Down at the bend in their street there was a block of bush, so thick with tall gum trees and a great grey rock broken in pieces scattered about at the front. There were cowboys and Red Indians hiding in there, with guns and bows and arrows and they would shoot her if they could.

  “Which is meaner?” asked Matilda curiously. “The Reds or the Japs?”

  “I know what I’m talking about,” muttered the old man, seeming not to hear. “Got to be careful.”

  Matilda waited. She wanted to go home but she didn’t know how. She didn’t want to look at the sword or the mad old man and the place where his eyes had disappeared into folds of skin, so she looked around the room instead.

  She looked at the fireplace and she looked at the cats, and she looked at the floor and the hole in the carpet in the shape of a lake. Then she looked over to the other side of the room and she saw it. In one corner, there was a little round table with a tray on top of it, and on top of the tray was the gun. It lay there, gleaming like fresh licorice.

  “Want another biscuit?” snapped the old man. “Eh?”

  “No thank you,” said Matilda.

  “Well, off you go then,” said the mad old man, irritated again.

  He had his back to her, he was sliding the sword into its scabbard, on the wall above the mantelpiece.

  Matilda ran away from the mad old man’s house, out the door and down the path covered with ants and back inside her own front yard.

  She didn’t tell anybody about where she’d been, or the sword or the gun or especially the chocolate biscuits. She just ran away as fast as she could, back to her own safe house.

  Three

  AFTER THEY FINISHED LUNCH, the day the lizard crawled up the back step, their father returned to his ship and Uncle Paul went back to his hotel in the city to play the piano, and the girls and their mother had the house to themselves again. When the men had gone, their mother was sad.

  “Why does it have to be like this?” she said, sitting down in the chair in the kitchen, the same chair she always sat in when things went wrong.

  That night Matilda couldn’t sleep. She sat up in bed and put her face against the glass of the window. In the big house next door the lights were all on under the blinds. How did they breathe, if they never opened the windows? She looked over at Frances. She was asleep, flat on her back, as though she was staring at the ceiling with her eyes closed. It made Matilda feel nervous.

  “Floreal?” she whispered into the dark room.

  There was no answer, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t there.

  He could be standing right there staring at me, thought Matilda, and I wouldn’t know.

  What colour would Floreal’s eyes be? Maybe they had no colour, but were like balls of ice.

  “Floreal?”

  When Matilda had first got to know Floreal, she had thought he might be her guardian angel. But there was nothing patient or kind or at all angelic about Floreal. Matilda had the feeling that if she found herself about to be eaten by a shark or hit on the head by a falling coconut, Floreal wouldn’t do anything at all.

  Sometimes it seemed to Matilda that she had known Floreal all her life, although she knew that was not the case. Floreal had first spoken to her just three months ago.

  It was the day after Boxing Day. She and Elizabeth and Frances had been lying in the living room, listening to the radio. It was a strange afternoon, they all felt strange. They had been on a picnic to the Basin the day before and their blood was warm with sunburn. Elizabeth was on the couch, Frances was sprawled out on the floor drawing and Matilda sat sl
eepily in an armchair with her book of fairy tales in her lap, looking at the pictures.

  The radio was in a brown box which sat in front of the fireplace. When you turned it on, it crackled, like bacon spitting in a pan. Their mother and father were having an afternoon rest in their bedroom, so the volume of the radio could not be very loud, just a slippery murmur from the square soft space where the sound was made.

  They spent a lot of time listening to the radio. Normally they listened to a children’s program called “The Argonauts”, named after Jason and the Argonauts, who sailed around the world in the olden days, looking for the Golden Fleece. The Argonauts on the radio were in a club, and they all had different voices and funny names, like Pallas 21 or Arachne 93.

  Sometimes Matilda imagined the Argonauts were actual little people who lived inside the radio. She thought of them sitting around a tiny kitchen table, just like their own, reading things out from tiny newspapers, arguing or acting out plays. But when she knelt down and peered inside the back of the radio, there was only darkness and a bitter electrical smell. Perhaps they were just voices, like Floreal. Could a person be only a voice? You don’t have to see things to believe them. Like God, thought Matilda.

  That afternoon, when Floreal first spoke to her, someone inside the radio was reading out a story all about a brave doctor who saved lives in the jungle. It went on and on and on. Matilda wished they would sing a song. The Argonauts had a special rowing song, when you could pretend you were on a boat.

  “Row! Row! Row!” hummed Matilda.

  Elizabeth gave her a kick.

  “I can’t hear,” she said.

  Matilda stopped humming. Her skin was peeling from sunburn, she pulled off a long translucent piece from the top of her arm. On and on droned the story about the brave doctor. She began to feel distant and slightly airborne. In fact, she fell asleep. She only realized that the radio had been turned off and the others had gone, when the corner of the book in her lap began sticking into her ear and she woke up. She shifted in irritation and threw the book into the middle of the floor.