‘Such a shame,’ said Tommy’s father quietly. ‘Is there no value in age?’
‘Apparently not,’ said Mo. Her eyes flashed. ‘Stephen, when I gave you the house, there was no question of
demolishing
it. You said—’
‘Plans change, Mo.’ Dad laid Eloise’s drawing on the table. ‘It’s called flexibility. You have to go with the flow.’
Lorelei Swan linked her arm with Dad’s. She said to Mo, ‘I understand how you feel. You have an
attachment
.’ She made it sound like a disease. ‘But now we’ll always have Eloise’s lovely picture to remind us.’ She raised her glass of champagne. ‘Happy Christmas, everyone!’
T
he Durranis prepared a delicious meal, fragrant with spices, but Eloise barely picked at her food. She heard Dad’s jokes and Lorelei’s titters and Mo’s sarcastic remarks as if through a fog. She stirred her dessert with a spoon and couldn’t eat a mouthful. And all the time she felt as if something inside her chest were screaming and hammering to get out.
But part of her still couldn’t believe that it was really going to happen: that Dad was going to knock down the house. She kept expecting him to wink at her and say,
just kidding!
It was the kind of thing Dad would do.
But he didn’t.
Once he leaned across to Eloise and said in a low voice, ‘That was an amazing picture you drew, El Niño. I can’t believe you drew that just from memory, from that one day we went there . . .’ He was thinking it out as he spoke. ‘You can’t have been back to the house. You couldn’t have gone with Mo.’ He laid down his spoon and looked at her intently. ‘You haven’t gone back there by yourself, have you?’
Eloise stared at her plate. Conversation around the rest of the table died away into silence, and suddenly everyone was watching her. Eloise tried to hold herself tightly, to not give anything away. But Dad knew.
‘Elephant Ride, you mustn’t do that. You can’t go roaming around on your own. How many times have you been there? More than once?’
Lorelei Swan pressed her hand to her bosom. ‘You can’t let them out on their
own
,’ she told Mo and the Durranis. ‘It’s not
safe
.’
‘Rubbish,’ said Mo. ‘The streets aren’t any more dangerous now than when I was a child.’
‘How would you know?’ Dad narrowed his eyes.
‘When was the last time you were out on the streets? If they’re dangerous enough to keep
you
inside, how much more dangerous is it for a twelve-year-old girl?’
‘I can’t keep her locked up, Stephen. What did you expect when you left her here? If you wanted her watched twenty-four hours a day, you should have kept her with you.’
‘All I’m asking for is a little common sense, a few sensible precautions—’ Tommy’s father cleared his throat. ‘Perhaps we should go home now.’
Dad’s hand flung out. ‘Stay there, stay there. No need to ruin the party just because I’m having a discussion with my mother.’
‘She isn’t on the streets,’ said Tommy suddenly.
Everyone’s heads swung round. Eloise’s eyes flicked to him, then down again.
‘Osman,’ murmured Tommy’s mother.
‘She isn’t on the streets,’ said Tommy again, ‘if she’s at the old house.’
‘Well, that’s even worse!’ said Lorelei shrilly. ‘Hanging around that old dump! There could be vagrants, rats, falling plaster. It’s just irresponsible, that’s what it is.’
‘I’ll handle this, Lorelei.’
‘We really must be leaving now,’ said Tommy’s father firmly. He pushed back his chair and gave Mo a little bow. ‘Thank you so much for allowing us to share this family day.’
Tommy’s mother kissed Mo on the cheek, and then, unexpectedly, she kissed Eloise too. ‘Thank you for our wonderful gift,’ she said softly, smiling into Eloise’s eyes. Then the Durranis left.
‘Those people,’ Mo pointed after them with a knife. ‘
Those
people know what danger is. They’ve been through war, bombs, refugee camps, detention centres. And you dare give them lectures about rats and falling plaster?’
‘I think the real point, Mrs McCredie, is that Stephen left Eloise in your care. Allowing her to roam around without any supervision is neglect. If Child Services heard about this . . .’
Mo clenched her jaw. ‘Ho-ho! Is that a
threat
, Miss Swan? Because I’m sure the National Trust would love to hear about a pristine Art Deco building that someone’s planning to demolish.’
Lorelei Swan swung round to Dad. ‘You told me the house wasn’t covered. If it’s registered by the National Trust, we can’t touch it.’
‘It isn’t,’ Dad said.
‘Only because I haven’t told them about it,’ said Mo. ‘Yet.’
‘Simmer down, everybody,’ soothed Dad. ‘Hey, hey, this is supposed to be a celebration, isn’t it? How about we leave the child-rearing to Mo, and Mo leaves the business side to us, and then we can all get along nicely.’
‘She isn’t my child, Stephen,’ said Mo.
‘But it is Stephen’s house,’ said Lorelei Swan sweetly. Her lips stretched in a smile, but the rest of her face didn’t move at all. It was the creepiest thing Eloise had ever seen.
‘Let’s go into the living room and have another drink.’ Dad ushered Lorelei away and a minute later there came the loud
pop
of another champagne cork.
As Mo and Eloise cleared up and washed the dishes in the kitchen, they could hear Lorelei’s raised voice and Dad’s quieter rumble, and then finally screams of laughter, punctuated by long stretches of silence.
‘Hope they’re not planning to drive back to the hotel,’ said Mo. Then she added darkly, ‘And I hope they’re not planning to stay here.’ She peeled off her rubber gloves with a weary sigh. ‘Think I might have a lie down, Eloise. It’s been a long day. You’ll be all right?’ Eloise nodded, and hung her damp tea towel over the oven rail.
‘Good girl.’ Mo pottered to the door, then turned back. ‘What they don’t understand is that it’s all about
trust
.’ She looked hard at Eloise. ‘You know what I’m talking about.’
Eloise nodded again, but slightly guiltily. Because as soon as Mo closed her bedroom door, she knew exactly what she was going to do.
Thunder growled overhead as Eloise eased the back door open and gingerly picked up her bicycle. Dad and Lorelei wouldn’t hear her, and Mo was probably asleep by now. It was late afternoon, and the sky was slated over with dark clouds. Mo had said it wasn’t going to rain. ‘That thunder’s just empty promises,’ she’d sniffed. The air was still, close and muggy. Eloise decided not to bring a jacket. After all, she wouldn’t be gone for long.
As she stood on the pedals, shifting her weight to force the bike down the street, Eloise didn’t notice Tommy peering out his front window. And when she reached the red church at the top of the hill, she didn’t notice another bicycle toiling up the street behind her.
The streets were empty. Everyone was inside recovering from Christmas dinner, and the town was deserted. The shops were shut, no cars were on the road, and the lowering sky brooded over the paddocks. Eloise hurried on, anxious to escape from the eerie atmosphere, anxious to slip across into Anna’s time. Anna’s house could never be demolished; Anna’s garden was safe.
Eloise let the bike drop near the front steps and began to run. She wanted to hurtle through into the other time, right through that invisible wall, through the muffling barrier of silence, and burst out into Anna’s protected, sunlit world.
She closed her eyes as she ran. The noises of her own time fell away like the dry husk of a cicada, and the wave dumped her on the shore of the other time, soft and vulnerable. Eloise opened her eyes.
And saw a different world.
Eloise felt jarred, as if something had struck her on the side of the head. This was all wrong. This was a nightmare. It couldn’t be. She closed her eyes and flicked them open again.
There was no house. No swimming pool. No summerhouse. They were gone.
The pitiless sun beat down on a wasteland. There were trees and a bald stretch of earth where the lawn should be, but there was nothing like a garden – just a half-dead tangle of plants, fallen branches, uprooted bushes, and weeds. Where the pool should have been, there was a kind of sunken place strewn with rubble and broken bricks. Where the summerhouse had stood, Eloise saw shards of splintered white timber, gleaming pale against raw dirt.
She stumbled up the slope toward the place where the house should have been. But there was only a blasted landscape of dust and rubble, smashed concrete and broken tiles, twisted iron and shattered glass.
‘Anna? Anna!’ she called out, her voice weak and shrill in the stillness.
From a branch above her, an unseen magpie cawed. Eloise jumped in fright, bashing her ankle on a jagged chunk of concrete. The magpie eyed her sideways, then spread its wings and silently swooped down at her.
Eloise cried out, covering her head with her arms, and stumbled away, sliding and scrabbling across the rubble. The magpie’s wings grazed her hair, and she beat the air with her hands. ‘Anna!’ she screamed. ‘Anna!’
The magpie swooped again, and this time its beak struck Eloise’s head. She threw herself forward, away from the wasteland of rocks and dust, across the mangy stretch of ground where the lawn had been, crashing between the thick stalks of thistles and dandelions that snatched at her bare legs.
She was still crying for Anna, though she knew Anna was gone. In this place, there was no Anna. She sobbed for breath. The garden had turned against her: smashed walls and swooping birds, thorns and prickles.
Let me go home. I want to go home!
But this time the garden didn’t want to let her go. Eloise stumbled forward and back, trying to beat her way back to her own time. She called for Anna, but she was alone in this wild time, this bleak and barren time, and there was no way out.
Eloise screamed and screamed. The noise filled her ears, blotting out everything. She screamed until the world went black.
E
loise woke into night.
She lay on her back in the long grass, staring up into the dark. A hard lump of pain pressed into the middle of her back. Slowly she sat up.
The sun had set while she was in the other time. Clouds blanketed the sky; there was no moon, no stars, just blackness overhead. A growl of thunder shook the ground, and Eloise clambered up. Her hands were trembling. She didn’t understand. Where had it all gone? Where was Anna? Where was the summerhouse and the main house and the pool?
A horrible thought struck her: what if she was still trapped there, in the ruined time? She whirled around. Her eyes had started to adjust to the dark and she could just make out the pale shape of the summerhouse behind her, shrouded in its cape of ivy, and the ghostly scaffolding of the diving board looming out of the dark.
Eloise groped toward the summerhouse, and even before she reached it she knew that she was back in her own time. The summerhouse was overgrown, the curtain of ivy hung over the door. When she touched the archway, she felt splinters, not the smooth painted wood of Anna’s time. But what could have
happened
to Anna’s time? Where had it gone?
The first drops of rain spattered onto the leaves, and then on Eloise’s head. She hesitated; should she run for her bike and race home to Mo’s, or shelter in the summerhouse until the rain stopped? It must be late; even Mo would have noticed by now that she wasn’t home . . . But on the other hand, she didn’t want to ride through a rainstorm . . .
Then she heard a faint sound, so faint that she wasn’t sure if she’d imagined it. A human sound, coming from the swimming pool. She tiptoed to the edge. Rain was falling faster now, splattering the concrete until it blurred to a grey slickness. Eloise peered over the edge of the pool, and at that moment lightning crackled overhead and lit up the garden with a strobe-light flash.
A body was lying at the bottom of the swimming pool.
Eloise knelt on the wet concrete, her heart thudding hard. Her lips shaped the word,
Tommy?
As if he’d heard her, he groaned and lifted his head, then let it fall back onto the mat of dead leaves.
He must have fallen in. He was hurt. She could never get him out on her own. She would have to get help. Her heart squeezed up small with fear. She couldn’t do this. She didn’t know what to do.
Lightning flashed again, and Eloise stood up. At the junction where the red church stood was a small blue sign: TURNER-BUNGAREE DISTRICT HOSPITAL. All she’d have to do was stick to the road and keep on riding until she ran into it.
It was really raining now. Eloise was so wet already that it was pointless to worry about getting any wetter. Her hair clung to her head, rain poured down her eyebrows and into her mouth. She ran through the wet grass, swish, swish, toward the house, back to where she’d dropped her bike, a dark knot of metal on the gravel. A second dark knot lay nearby: Tommy’s bike. What was he doing here? Had he followed her? Or come to find her? Had Mo sent him to look for her? Or . . .
There wasn’t time to think about it now. Eloise lifted up her bike; the handlebars were slippery, the wheels skidded on the wet gravel. As she pushed off she nearly slipped sideways. But then she had it; she just had to hold on tight, and focus, and pedal tight and careful. Under the pine trees, the ground was almost dry, but it was so dark she almost crashed into the trees.
Out on the road, the tarmac was slick and the rain came down in curtains. Eloise could just make out the white posts that marked the edge of the road. She swung the bike to the right, away from the town, the direction she’d never been. The bike skidded under her but she managed to steady it. Squinting into the rain, Eloise steered from one white post to the next. If a car came zooming along in the wet, it would never see her in time to stop. The dress she’d worn in honour of Christmas dinner clung to her legs. She began to shiver. She’d almost forgotten where she was supposed to be riding to; she seemed to have been pushing the bike onward forever into the dark, into the rain.
Suddenly the bike slewed from under her. Eloise hurtled sideways, the bike smashed down on her; pain gashed across her leg, and her hands scraped gravel. She’d come off at the side of the road. She wasn’t badly hurt, but her whole body was trembling as she stood up and groped to heave the bike upright. Her hands hurt. Something was wrong with the bike; the bike wouldn’t stand, it wouldn’t go. The chain dangled loose from the gears, and one wheel was bent.