Reluctant Hallelujah Read online

  And then I understood, a grin bursting onto my mouth.

  ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘I’m being pranked, aren’t I? It’s a joke.’

  ‘Under the carpet in your lounge room is a basement. You know it?’

  I stared at him, not giving too much away. I’m all for practical jokes being filmed and aired on national television, but when you’re the one being pranked, it’s important not to come off looking too gullible.

  ‘Upstairs in your mum’s wardrobe,’ he went on, ‘there’s a key in one of her runners, which opens the basement.’

  ‘Enron,’ I said, stepping back from him and grinning. ‘My mum’s not exactly Cathy Freeman. She doesn’t even own a pair of runners.’

  ‘I’ll meet you at the school gate after fourth period.’

  ‘Enron,’ I said, the English books in my arms a buffer between him and me, ‘this is a joke, right? I mean, it’s not funny, but it’s meant to be a joke, right?’

  Enron’s shoulders dropped, as if he didn’t want to say what he was about to say.

  ‘Father Brody rang my mum last night,’ he finally said, ‘and told her something had happened to your parents.’

  ‘Father Brody?’

  Father Brody from the church across the road? Organiser of prayer vigils and general holy-moly-ness in our street?

  ‘Whatever your parents have been looking after, it’s something to do with the church.’

  This time I laughed and meant it.

  ‘Enron,’ I said, putting my hand on his huge forearm to show no hard feelings, ‘there’s no way. My parents aren’t the religious type. They’ve never spoken to Father Brody in their entire lives. They might have waved to him from across the street. He wouldn’t even know our names. Your mum must have been talking about someone else’s parents.’

  ‘Your mum was supposed to meet someone yesterday afternoon. But she never showed up.’

  ‘Who? Who was she supposed to meet? Or don’t you know that either?’

  Enron shook his head slowly. ‘I don’t know. All I know is, she didn’t turn up. And no one’s heard from her since.’

  A frown chipped away at my eyebrow.

  ‘Enron. Seriously. This is stupid. I’m not laughing.’

  Enron looked straight at me.

  ‘Dodie. Seriously. I’m not joking.’

  Things were not skewed and tilted and upside-down looking.

  But they should have been.

  Minty leaned back in the chair beside me. Celia Bradley was withdrawing her raised hand from the air as she asked a question. The pinboard still ran the length of the classroom with its only brass pin stuck into the same notice about a short-story competition that no one had ever considered entering.

  Everything was exactly as it should be.

  Except it wasn’t.

  ‘I’ll meet you at the school gate after fourth period,’ Enron had said.

  Enron was coming back to my place at lunchtime.

  Enron, the smartest guy in the room, was now in control of the situation.

  I thought I was going to vomit. Vomit and keel over.

  I stood up and weaved my way through the desks, banging my hip against Simonette’s chair as I made my way past her. The door was my goal. If I got to the door and outside into the corridor I’d be able to breathe again. It was like I was having an asthma attack except I wasn’t.

  I pushed the door open and stumbled into the corridor, scrabbling to get to the bathroom. It felt better out of the classroom. Less people taking up space, sucking up the air. Clearer. Fresher. I slunk down to the floor, my backbone pressing into someone’s locker, then wrapped my arms around my head. After a few moments, someone started rubbing my back.

  ‘Dodie? Are you okay?’ Miss Manning asked.

  I kept my eyes firmly shut, the blackness of my eyelids comforting.

  ‘Just breathe,’ she said soothingly, slowing the word ‘breathe’ right down. ‘Plenty of people feel like this at this time of year.’ Her palm was making circles on my back. ‘You’ll be fine. You know your stuff. There’s no need to panic.’

  If my parents were friends with Father Brody, I’d have known about it. They’d have spoken to him. I’d have noticed something. Why would they be looking after something for Father Brody if they’d never spoken to him in their entire lives?

  ‘You’ve studied hard all year,’ Miss Manning said, circular-motion-circular-motion-circular-motion. Her hand felt sandpapery through my schooldress. She was scratching a groove into my skin. There is a barely acceptable amount of time that a teacher can touch a student, and Miss Manning was fast approaching, no, wait a minute, had officially sailed past the point of acceptability.

  ‘Everything’s going to be fine,’ Miss Manning said. Rub rub rub.

  ‘Try a little down-time,’ she said. ‘Take the pressure off.’

  Rub rub rub. Pressure pressure pressure.

  I sat up, my shoulderblades pushing into the metal of the locker door, barring her access to my back.

  ‘You feeling better?’ she asked, folding her arm back in towards herself like a retractable awning. ‘You right to come back in now?’

  I put my head back down on my knees now that I’d established the quit-rubbing-my-back boundaries. It occurred to me that I should tell Miss Manning my parents were missing. But something stopped me. What if what Enron had said was true? What if we did have a basement? What if my parents really had been hiding something and we needed to move it?

  ‘Dodie? You right to come back in?’ Miss Manning repeated.

  I looked down and noticed that tears had started dripping onto the floor. Drop, drop, drop, drop, drop. As if I was Alice, filling up the entire corridor with my tears so I could float up to the ceiling and climb through whichever door I needed to get back to my normal life.

  ‘Dodie,’ Miss Manning said, placing her hand back on my shoulder. ‘Honey, what’s going on? Is everything okay?’

  I kept my arms bracketed around my head.

  ‘I think I have to go to the sick bay,’ I said, mouth to knees. ‘Can Minty take me?’

  Reverting back to grade two protocol.

  I heard the pause before Miss Manning stood up and opened the door to the classroom.

  ‘Melinda,’ she called into the room. ‘Could you come here, please?’

  Miss Manning said something quiet to Minty, probably along the lines of ‘She’s having a complete and utter breakdown and we’re potentially going to have to white-coat her,’ and then I felt Minty sliding down the locker beside me, her arm slinging over my shoulders, the weight of it exactly right.

  ‘You want to go to the sick bay?’ Minty said softly, the way you speak to a dying person.

  I nodded.

  ‘I’ll leave you girls to it,’ Miss Manning said. ‘Only another couple more weeks and then it’s all over.’

  And she squeezed my shoulder before going back into class and shutting the door.

  ‘What’s happened?’ Minty said.

  I kept my head on my knees for another moment, then hoisted myself up off the floor, pushing against the locker to give me grip.

  ‘I need to go home,’ I said, the effort of standing straight with both feet on the ground giving me a centre. ‘I have to get home, now.’

  ‘Should we get Jools?’ Minty asked.

  ‘Definitely.’

  And we set off down the empty corridor towards Mrs Harmes’ class.

  The number 78 tram swayed down Brighton Road, heading back the way I’d come only a couple of hours before. The rocking of the tram felt solid and everydayish. Normal. I started thinking maybe I was going to get home and Mum would be there. We’d walk in the door, and she’d look at us and ask what we were doing home when we had classes on Wednesdays till end of trade.

  Jools sat opposite Minty and me, her entire body shunting in time to the metal-on-metal suspension of the tram.

  ‘So Father Brody rang Enron’s mum and said your folks didn’t come home last night?’ Jo
ols asked.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘He couldn’t have just walked across the street and told you himself?’

  ‘I said the same thing. Enron reckons Father Brody couldn’t come over because he thinks people are watching the house, and if he came over to us they’d know they had the right house. He’s hoping by not doing anything they’ll think they’ve got the wrong place and let my mum and dad go.’

  The tram swayed us like we were doing a hula, but without the music or grass skirts.

  ‘You sure this isn’t some kind of weird prank?’ Jools asked.

  ‘You know,’ Minty said, as the tram stopped at Carlisle Street, ‘there’s every chance that Father Brody isn’t the full can of Coke.’ She twirled her finger at her temple. ‘He is a priest, after all. He thinks he can talk to people who sit on a throne in the clouds, so it’s not out of the question that he hasn’t got a full grip on reality. I mean, maybe he did ring Enron’s mum last night, but maybe he’s kind of made up the rest of it. That could be a possibility.’

  What Minty was saying kind of made sense. I mean, he seemed like a sweet enough old guy when I saw him out front of his church, but ‘old’ was the key word here, and being a priest was probably the exact sort of thing that would turn your brain loopy.

  No offence to all those priests out there.

  The tram braked in that body-jolting way Melbourne trams have, and the three of us got off at my stop.

  ‘Your mum will be home, guaranteed,’ Jools said, slinging her arm over my shoulder. ‘Which is good for two reasons. One, she hasn’t been kidnapped. Two, she can make us some lunch.’

  ‘Definitely,’ agreed Minty, slinging her arm over my other shoulder. ‘And afterwards we can plan tomorrow morning. Because otherwise we run the risk of going down as the lamest year-twelve class ever. I mean, a few flour bombs are hardly going to do it for us. We’ve got to think up something that’s going to blast last year out of the water.’

  I smiled at the two of them. I knew they were trying to make me feel better, but I also thought they were probably right. In fact, I was starting to feel a bit ridiculous for getting carried away with what Enron had said. For having believed that my parents had been kidnapped. Mum would be home, Dad would be at work, and Minty, Jools and I could get down to the more pressing issue of tomorrow’s last-day-of-school pranks.

  Last year’s class had trumped all the prior years by sneaking fifty-seven sheep (one for each year-twelve pupil) into the school quadrangle the night before the last day of school. A good prank that had worked on many levels, because one – it said loads about the education we were receiving; two – it caused complete chaos; three – it wasn’t technically illegal, which was important because our teachers had made it crystal clear that anyone who did anything illegal wasn’t going to be able to sit their exams; and four – sheep are always funny.

  ‘Roland’s saying we should go onto Wikipedia and edit the school’s page, but really, who could be bothered, and who would notice, and who would care?’ Minty was saying to Jools.

  As we got closer to my joint, St Luke’s loomed in its smug Catholic position, heavy dark clouds bumping up against the spire, the sound of prayers rubbing across the air like hundreds of bees scouting for honey. Twenty or thirty people were scattered around the garden, kneeling under the trees, rosary in hand, head bowed.

  It occurred to me that maybe they were praying for me. For my mum and dad and me and Coco.

  I scanned the street for Mum’s car, looking to see if it was parked either out the front, or just up the road. But it wasn’t. No little red Honda Civic, QGF 114.

  An anxious feeling sweated to the surface of my skin. Maybe Mum had left the car up the shops and walked home, forgetting she’d driven. She’d done that before. Come home from the hairdresser with her hair all zhooshed, and then gone into a spin about someone stealing the car before she remembered she’d driven to her hairdressing appointment in the first place.

  ‘Holy crap, what’s happening over there?’ Minty asked, looking across the road at St Luke’s.

  ‘It’s called praying,’ I said sarcastically.

  ‘Well der,’ Minty said, raising her eyes at me. ‘But what are they doing outside? I thought praying was a strictly inside-only type activity.’

  I shrugged.

  ‘Dunno. They do it every few months. Mum said it’s called doing a novena, or something like that. They all get together and pray for something – you know, “cure my sick mother”, “get me that house I want”, that type of thing.’

  ‘And whatever they ask for, they get?’ Minty checked.

  ‘I s’pose.’

  ‘Hang on,’ Jools said, grabbing a hold of my arm. ‘Why are you only telling us about this now? We could have been using it all year. Straight As, without the stress of studying. Bang out a couple of prayers and party party party.’

  ‘I think you’ve got to be Catholic.’

  ‘I am a Catholic.’

  ‘No, you’re not.’

  ‘I’d become one if it meant not studying.’

  ‘How long do they go for?’ Minty asked. ‘Novenas?’

  ‘Depends. Sometimes a few hours. Sometimes a few days.’

  ‘Nonstop?’

  ‘Pretty much.’

  ‘That’s weird.’

  ‘That’s bizarre.’

  ‘That’s Catholic.’

  I could see Father Brody under the tree, Bible in hand, rosary beads rolling through his fingers, crossing himself, nodding his head, everyone else rolling beads and crossing and nodding in time to him.

  ‘We should go over and ask him what’s going on,’ Jools suggested, eyeballing Father Brody even though his head was bent. ‘Who cares that “someone” might see. So what? He can’t go round ringing strangers and saying something’s happened to your folks without telling you first. It’s just ridiculous.’

  At that exact moment Father Brody looked up, as if Jools had seared the top of his skull with her scorching glare. I half expected him to fold his Bible shut and come over to tell me what was going on. But instead he simply turned back to his prayers and kept the tempo going. Nodding, crossing, fumbling. Everyone following his lead. But something about the way he’d looked at me had been a warning. Just keep going, he’d been signalling. Don’t come over.

  Or maybe I was imagining it.

  ‘I just want to go inside,’ I said, suddenly tired. ‘See if Mum’s home.’

  We creaked open the gate and walked down the path to my house. I unlocked the front door and threw my schoolbag into its usual pozzie in the middle of the hallway. Minty and Jools plonked their bags on top. Minty grabbed my hand and squeezed.

  ‘Mum,’ I called out, ‘I’m home.’

  Nothing.

  The answering machine on the hallway table was flashing. What was the normal thing to do here? Listen to messages or search the house? As I stood trying to think, Jools pushed the ‘play’ button.

  ‘You have, one, new message,’ said the automated voice. The three of us looked at the machine, waiting.

  ‘Hi. It’s Paula here.’ Paula from Dad’s office. ‘Your car’s here but I’m not sure where you are. I’ve tried your mobile but it’s turned off so I thought I’d give you a try at home on the off-chance you’re there. Leanne’s here for your ten thirty conference.’

  Beep.

  Minty chewed on her lip, the thing she always did when she was stressed.

  The quietness of the house – which usually I loved when I got home from school – seemed eerie. I wondered if someone was watching us. If they could see us through the front windows. If one of the people praying across the road was one of the ‘bad guys’. If he was putting his rosary beads away this very moment, and telling Father Brody he had to go now. Thanks for the prayer session, but got a million things to do. And then he’d cross the road and knock on our front door.

  My spine felt all spider-creepy.

  But if someone did come and knock on our door, Father B
rody would do something. Surely. There’d been a couple of big guys praying with him. Maybe they were security. Bouncers. Bounce any bad guys out of my house.

  I called Mum’s mobile. It went straight through to her voicemail. Called Dad. Voicemail. Rang Manda.

  Voicemail.

  It wasn’t clear what all these adults thought their mobiles were for, but one of the major purposes is to get calls while they’re mobile. Hence, mobile and phone. Mobile phone.

  Minty took my hand and led me upstairs like a reluctant bride.

  ‘We’ll go have a look,’ she said. ‘See if there really is a key.’

  In my folks’ room, I folded my arms and hunkered down in the doorway, taking up as little space as I could. Minty and Jools rifled through Mum’s wardrobe, holding up pairs of shoes to show me they weren’t runners. Not runners: check. Not runners: check.

  I looked at Mum and Dad’s big, slouchy old double bed under the window, with the squashy handmade quilt Mum had sewn years ago from vintage Japanese fabric. You could see the dip in the middle of the mattress from my mum spooning into the back of my dad all these years. All my life, if ever I went into their room for something early in the morning – you know, I needed money or whatever – they’d both be facing away from the door, Mum snuggled into Dad’s back, her arm tangled in with his, their breathing in tandem. They were like a pair of loved-up teenagers, except with greying hair and wrinkly elbows. Salt and pepper, without the holes in the head.

  Minty leant back on her haunches and raised another pair of shoes. This time a pair of running shoes, in pristine condition. Never been worn. Minty gripped them by the heels as if to prevent them from jogging off.

  I watched from the door frame, not daring to breathe. Minty started poking around inside the shoes, jemmying open the shoelaces and pulling out the tongue so she could see better down the throat of the shoes. But each time she came up with nothing nothing nothing.

  I was aware of my heart, blood squeezing through ventricles at a squishy pace. My face burnt hot, and my arms hugged tighter in to me. I was furious with Minty for trying to find the key. It was as if she wanted my parents to be missing. This was not some treasure hunt where you got an Easter egg at the end.