‘Where … did you find him?’ Ruth asked.
‘He was a gift from a lady I used to know,’ her aunt replied. ‘When your mum and I were growing up she lived next door.’
‘What was her name?’
‘Everyone just called her Bee.’
‘Bee?’ said Ruth. ‘As in
bumblebee
?’
‘Yes.’ Mary Ellen smiled. ‘But I called her
Mrs Bee
.’
‘Was she good friends with Mum and Faye too?’ Ruth asked, tentatively putting a finger inside one of the rough little paws, half expecting it to close on her.
‘Not so much. They were older. But Mrs Bee and I became very close.’
‘Is she still alive?’
‘No. She died not long after giving him to me.’
‘Did she tell you anything … else?’
‘Only that I should be careful of him.’
‘Careful of him?’ Ruth whispered. ‘But … he’s not real, is he?’
Mary Ellen kissed the top of Ruth’s head, and went into the kitchen to check on their lunch. ‘Maybe just a little bit,’ she said.
* * *
Ruth put the rat back in the box as carefully as she could, but didn’t put the lid on. She figured that after being cooped up in a box for a long time, more than anything he would appreciate some space and air. She put the box on the side table and went to help her aunt with lunch. But for the next couple of hours, as they ate and talked, she couldn’t stop thinking about the strange gift.
When Mary Ellen was in her bedroom making a long phone call, Ruth took him out again and held him up to the large window. She loved this view, particularly in winter. The sun was going down over the oval; the pink, streaky sky bled out over the surrounding grey clouds. There were joggers and cyclists and groups of fast walkers cutting their way along the paths under the dripping, bare trees. Feeling safe and cocooned in her aunt’s warm apartment, Ruth shivered with pleasure when she remembered that she was going to stay the night as a special treat. She would put the rat on her bedside table so that when she woke up he would be the first thing she saw.
‘Don’t be afraid,’ she whispered into the small hairy ear, ‘you’ve come to the right person.’
Mary Ellen came back into the room and laughed when she saw Ruth holding the rat up to the window.
‘Will you promise me something, darling?’ Mary Ellen said, as they stood staring down at the wintry park. The seriousness of her tone alarmed Ruth a little but she tried not to show it.
‘Don’t let him rule you.’
‘Who?’
‘The rat.’
‘The
rat
?’ Ruth laughed. She looked down. With his bright eyes he actually did look as though he was listening to the conversation. ‘Nobody rules me,’ she said.
‘Good.’ Mary Ellen squeezed her eyes shut. ‘Keep it that way. And when he stops being … useful … pass him on, okay?’
Ruth nodded, but she didn’t understand. Not really.
Useful?
She looked at her aunt’s strained profile in the fading light. In fact, she didn’t have the faintest idea what Mary Ellen was talking about, but somehow it didn’t seem the right time to ask a whole lot of questions.
‘Okay,’ Ruth murmured, loud enough for her aunt to hear, ‘I promise.’
O
ne year later…
Ruth Craze woke early to the sound of blaring newsradio and the smell of burnt toast. As she lay in bed, she heard her father’s deep voice asking the reigning king of all things cool – her fifteen-year-old brother, Marcus – if he’d fed the dog yet.
‘I’m looking for my spikes!’
‘Feed the dog!’
‘He’s way too fat.’
‘Feed the dog, Marcus.’
‘What about Miss Skinny-bum? She’s the one who loves him.’
‘Just do it,’ Ruth’s father boomed again. ‘We have to be gone by seven!’
‘Sweet,’ Marcus shot back cheerfully.
Ruth pulled the blanket over her head.
Sweet
had to be the most overused word in her brother’s vocabulary. And it wasn’t true that she liked the dog. Flipper had worn out his welcome eons ago. He was slow and surly and he smelled bad, but someone had to be on his side. The rest of them were just waiting for him to die.
In the background she could hear the Crown Prince of Dirt, Mess and Getting-his-own-way – otherwise known as Paul, her six-year-old brother – whining about how there was no honey left for his toast.
‘Marcus took the last bit.’
‘Have jam!’ their mother shouted from another room.
‘Don’t like jam!’
‘Then go hungry!’
Ruth wished time would stand still for just a bit. Lying snug under the covers, watching the light creeping in through the holes in the blinds, she could imagine a completely different kind of family – a cool, polite, interesting family where everybody minded their own business and no one shouted.
The following week she was going to turn twelve. Maybe she’d get something she actually wanted this year, instead of the usual last-minute panic presents. Last year it had been a slightly damaged supermarket mud cake from the boys, a horrible pair of striped socks from her father and a double pass to a weird movie with subtitles that Ruth knew for certain her mother had won in a raffle.
Thanks, Mum!
The film had turned out to be not so bad, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that on her birthday she went to a
free
film that she had never heard of, with her
mother
in some mouldy little cinema that didn’t even sell popcorn.
The next day her friends had been
embarrassed
for her rather than sympathetic.
‘So that was
it
?’ Lou could hardly look Ruth in the eye. ‘That was all you got for your birthday?’
‘Well, I got some clothes vouchers,’ Ruth had muttered defensively.
‘Who from?’
‘My aunt.’
‘How much?’
‘A grand.’
Lou’s eyes became slits. ‘
A thousand dollars?
’
Ruth could see that they were all impressed but there was no way they were going to let her know it.
‘When’re you going to use them?’
‘Soon.’
‘From your
sick
aunt?’ Bonnie had asked.
‘Yeah.’
‘Oh,’ Bonnie shuddered, ‘that’s a bit creepy.’
Bonnie’s words made them all look a little uneasy until Katy remembered that she was due at her music lesson and the bell for the end of recess rang.
At least Ruth had managed to avoid admitting that her only birthday card, which the whole family had signed, had been made by her little brother and that it was covered on all four sides with colourful drawings of dinosaurs with ‘Happy Birthday’ bubbles coming from their bums.
* * *
Ruth closed her eyes. Even a mat to hide the worn carpet would do, or a curtain to cover the holes in the old blind or … Her small, stuffy room stuck upstairs over the kitchen and the laundry, with its high, narrow window and dripping ceiling, was more like a holding pen for a stray animal than a bedroom for a (soon-to-be) teenage girl. But more than anything else, Ruth wanted one of those sleek little silver laptops of her own. Having to share an ancient computer with her older brother was a pain. He was always playing violent games and chatting with his stupid friends. With a laptop of her own she’d be able to make interesting friends all over the world and …
and things would be totally different
.
There’d been no mention of her birthday over dinner the night before. All the talk had been centred on the boys, as usual. Marcus had won a scholarship to a music school for the following year and he’d also been invited to try out for the state cycling team. Not to be outdone, Paul had insisted on showing them all how he could now read
hard
books. There was lots of patting him on the back and joking about how he was going to become the next Einstein. Ruth could distinctly remember reading
The Hobbit
in Grade
Three
– a much harder book than Dr Seuss – but she didn’t remember anyone suggesting
she
was going to end up inventing anything. The signs did not look at all promising for her birthday.
‘Rise and shine!’
The bedroom door flew open and Ruth’s mother crashed in like a tank preparing for battle. ‘We have to be gone by seven, remember!’ Mrs Craze flipped the blind up with one plump brown hand. ‘So get a wriggle on!’
Ruth could only blink furiously against the light blasting into her eyes and try to pretend she was somewhere else. In her ideal world no one would ever say
get a wriggle on
, much less yell it at someone who could well be still asleep.
Mrs Craze’s short, round body was encased in a figure-hugging purple tracksuit with a bright-yellow skivvy underneath, and she was wearing an old pair of Marcus’s gym shoes with gold stripes down the sides. Ruth had to wonder sometimes if her mother ever looked in the mirror, because if she did right at this moment, even she would have to admit that she looked like an oversized Violet Crumble.
‘Remember to rug up,’ Mrs Craze ordered on her way out. ‘It’s freezing outside.’ She stopped at the door. ‘Oh, by the way, I’m afraid old Flip had a go at your red jumper last night.’
‘What?’
‘You left it on the verandah!’
‘I did not.’
‘Oh, come on, sourpuss.’ Mrs Craze sashayed out of the room, her thick grey hair bouncing around her shoulders like tufts of steel wool. ‘It’s not a tragedy, you know!’
The door slammed shut.
‘It is to me!’ Ruth yelled back.
‘We’ll get you another one!’
‘When?’
But her mother was out of earshot.
Ruth swung her feet over onto the cold floor. Only last week her other halfway decent piece of clothing, a crisp white shirt that had belonged to Mary Ellen, had come out bright pink from the wash. Her mother hadn’t bothered to consider that it shouldn’t go in with the el cheapo Indian tablecloth she’d got at the two-dollar shop. Ruth walked to the chair where she had laid out her clothes – the way she did every night before going to bed – and started putting on her socks. Then she stopped for a moment.
‘Ruth Craze,’ she told herself firmly, ‘one day your life will improve.’
Ruth was pulling on her jumper when she remembered exactly
why
she’d been woken so early, and her whole mood plummeted another ten notches. Marcus was competing in a bike race in a country town three hours away and they all had to go. This was the
family rule
. It would mean standing all day with crowds of noisy, sports-mad people shouting and screaming and jumping up and down as they watched the races.
Ruth ran to the bedroom door, her pyjama bottoms flapping around the calves of her long legs, hoping against hope that there might be some way out of it.
‘Do I have to go today?’ she called down the hallway.
‘Of course you have to come, Ruth!’ her mother called back.
‘I could stay and clean the house.’
‘Oh, don’t be silly!’
‘I could do your accounts.’ Ruth was the only one in her family with a head for figures. ‘You and Dad are way behind with your tax.’
‘Worrywart!’
‘I’m not!’
‘Marcus might get into the state team,’ her mother called. ‘He needs us all to cheer him on!’
‘Hey, Ruth, do you know where my long black socks are?’ her father cut in. ‘You know, the ones that –’ ‘In the washing basket,’ Ruth shouted back.
Where do you think they’d be … on the roof?
Ruth was also the only one in the family who could ever find anything.
‘Not here!’ her father called. ‘Hey, Ruthie, they’re not here.’
Fully dressed now, in jeans and her least-favourite pale-yellow jumper, Ruth turned off the light and went to the window. Outside, the day was breaking nicely. After the rain overnight the grass was wet and little drops hung from the washing line like tiny jewels.
She sighed and wondered for the millionth time what terrible thing she might have done in a previous life to deserve the family she’d got.
Her father was a paint salesman who thought he was an inventor. He spent every spare moment experimenting with new creations that he was sure would catapult the family into instant wealth. Last year it had been pumpkin-flavoured ice-cream and cardboard chopsticks; this year it was a tea bag that didn’t go soggy in water, along with flavoured disposable pens for those who wanted to chew while they were writing! Meanwhile, there was no money for anything. None of his schemes had made the Craze family even one dollar – in fact, they
cost
money, and the big shed at the back of the family home was testament to that. It was full of his failed inventions. There were bits and pieces of them all over the house as well. But in spite of all the spectacular failures he had a business card that said
Mr Kenneth Craze:
Entrepreneur and Inventor.
‘Dad, you’re a salesman!’ Ruth sometimes felt compelled to remind him. ‘Why don’t you concentrate on that?’
But he would just smile in that vague, dopey way he had when he wanted to get out of an awkward situation. ‘I know, Ruthie. I know. But one day it’s going to change, you’ll see.’