Through the Tiger's Eye (2 page)
Lucy was
about
to say ‘with Dad in
our own
house’, but suddenly Mum looked as if she was about to cry, so for once in her life Lucy shut up.
Too late. Her unspoken words hung in the air. She might as well have hired an aeroplane to write them in the sky in humungous letters.
Lucy felt a wet nose on her ankle and picked up the squirming black puppy with the white chest and white-tipped tail. She buried her face in puppy fur so she wouldn’t have to look at Mum’s face.
‘I’m
not
lucky,’ she whispered to T-Tongue.
He was. He got in three licks on Lucy’s face before she remembered how he got his name: Tyrannosaurus-Tongue.
‘Come on, kids, just take a look at it,’ Mum pleaded. ‘I know it doesn’t look terrific, but sometimes houses are really good on the inside, even if they look terrible, and the agent says it’s great inside.’
Even Mum didn’t believe that. Her voice went wobbly again.
‘And we’re allowed to have T-Tongue . . .
and
it’s really cheap. It will give us more money to spend on other stuff. If we have to pay too much rent, there’ll be no lunch orders when you go back to school.’
That
got Ricardo out of the car.
‘You can’t do that! I’ll starve to death!’
‘Good!’ Lucy shot back. ‘Can you start starving Retardo today, Mum?’
Uh oh. She’d gone too far. Here came the ‘
Be nice to your little brother or else
’ speech . . . or maybe worse. Lucy took diversionary action.
‘All right, I’ll look, but we’re not living there! Because it’s a
dump
!’ She jumped out of the car, marched across the road with T-Tongue scampering along beside her, and ripped opened the rickety old gate.
It tumbled off its hinges and Lucy fell over.
T-Tongue was delighted. So was Ricardo.
The first thing Lucy saw when she scrambled up the rickety stairs was a naked woman. Well, a naked mermaid; a heavy, cast-iron mermaid. You picked her up by the tail and rapped her scaly bum on the huge, old-fashioned door. The door
had
been dark green but the paint had blistered and peeled, revealing veins of undercoat, like dried blood. Lucy shivered. It was a corpse of a house and it probably had a corpse in it.
‘And I bet the toilet’s outside,’ she said accusingly as Mum stepped up brandishing a mega bunch of keys.
‘Find the right one!’ Mum said to Ricardo, ignoring Lucy’s outstretched hand.
Ricardo examined the keys. Big ones and little ones, shiny silver and greasy gold ones. He picked out a small silver key. It worked, turning with a clunk and a creak.
A wave of musty air hit Lucy as she peered down the hallway. It seemed to go forever. An old rug with a faded blue-and-yellow pattern stretched all the way to a blue-and-gold glass door at the far end.
Lucy took a deep breath and stepped onto the rug. She was standing on a faded mermaid with gold scales and long dark hair. It coiled into the next mermaid and the next, all the way up the hall. She stepped onto the next mermaid’s tail, cautiously, and after that it was easy – she just kept walking from scaly tail to scaly tail. Mum made Ricardo take off his shoes, and they followed.
Whoever had lived here had been a mermaid freak. There were mermaids painted all over the hallway walls. Lucy opened the first door she came to. Every centimetre of the huge floor was painted with mermaids, shells, dolphins, angelfish, seaweed, giant clams, turtles. Even though it was covered in dust, everything looked alive.
‘Awesome! It’s like Sea World,’ said Lucy, stepping gingerly away from a shark.
A chandelier above her head dripped with glass sea creatures, dust and spiderwebs. The sun streaked through filthy windows, chequered blue, green and gold.
‘It’s a ballroom!’ exclaimed Mum.
She pointed at the grand piano, grey with dust, in the corner – but Lucy was already next door in the bathroom, where the water spouted out of dolphin-shaped taps. Glass starfish glittered in the windows.
Every room was decorated like an underwater cave. And there was something else strange: the house was bigger on the inside than it seemed. Little rooms came off big rooms, opening into other larger rooms, which opened into alcoves that were really just cupboards, big enough to walk into. It was as if the house never really ended. Lucy wanted a map. It was like one those wooden puzzles you got on Christmas morning that looked easy-peasy until you tried to work them out, and you still hadn’t finished by the time Grandma called you for Christmas dinner.
‘See,’ said Mum, ‘I told you things can be nice on the inside even when they look awful outside’.
Silently, Lucy admitted she was right. The house was weird, but cool. Of course, it was nothing compared to their own renovated house, with its shiny floors and brand-new kitchen. But still . . . weirdly cool. And think of the parties she could have in that ballroom!
At the end of the hallway, near the blue-and-gold back door, were two other doors, one on either side. The door on the left opened into a big kitchen with an ancient fridge, almost as big as a small car, and a long wooden table with high-backed chairs. It was set with dusty plates, cutlery and candelabra as if ready for a banquet. But it was the other door that caught Lucy’s eye. It glowed wine-red, the dust settling in the deeply carved scales of a dragon. Two Chinese vases stood guard on either side. They were taller than Ricardo and painted with red-and-gold dragons that glared at Lucy.
T-Tongue was sniffing feverishly at the gap under the door. Lucy tried the handle. Locked. She grabbed the keys from Ricardo and went straight for one with a funny, loopy decoration. It worked. She swung the door open and T-tongue let out a strangled bark as something small, lithe and supremely fast jumped off an old black bed in the corner, streaked across the floor and out an open window, leaving lace curtains swinging in the breeze. Lucy looked out into a wild back yard, just in time to see a ginger cat race up a steep path and disappear into the rainforest. T-Tongue tried to jump out the window, pulling on his lead so hard he almost strangled himself. He tried to bark but it turned into a coughing fit.
Holding fast to his lead, Lucy checked out the room. Two iron beds on either side. A big, rug faded to dusty brown. The only room with no mermaids or sea creatures. In fact, it was the most boring room in the house. So why was it locked?
She kept exploring. The house was full of odds and ends, as though whoever lived here before hadn’t had time to pack up properly. Ricardo found a really old-fashioned piggy bank, actually shaped like a pig! When he shook it, he could hear coins rattling.
‘Put that down,’ said Mum.
Even Mum got excited when Ricardo found a big wooden chest, carved with dragons and strange faces and shapes, but none of the keys worked on its heavy lock.
They didn’t find one dead body.
The toilet was definitely inside.
Back at the real-estate agency, Mum kept telling the agent, Nigel Adams, how much she loved it and she didn’t mind how old and dusty it was and it didn’t matter that it was way too big for three people. He had a funny look on his face but stretched his mouth open in a big smile and said he’d talk to the owner and let Mum know that night.
Weird, thought Lucy, they’d all stopped hating the worst house in Kurrawong at the same time. One minute even Mum couldn’t pretend to like it, then the next they were all exploring like excited kids. Maybe the house had cast a spell on them? Maybe old houses got lonely, just like old people, and wanted humans to move in? Maybe the house didn’t want to die with all its paint falling off and the verandah caving in.
She couldn’t wait to get back there.
That night they told Grandma all about it. Mum muttered something about not getting everyone’s hopes up, but she was the smiliest she’d been in weeks. Since the night she’d had the really big fight with Dad – the night both of them cried, first Dad, then Mum. When Mum had stopped crying she’d packed up clothes and soccer balls and books and moved them all into Grandma’s. That was right at the beginning of the school holidays, just before Christmas. Ricardo was worried Santa wouldn’t know where Grandma lived. Grandma said Santa definitely
did
know, but what if Santa didn’t know Ricardo had moved? Ricardo rang Dad, who said he would email Santa. And the Tooth Fairy. And the Easter Bunny.
Over dinner, Mum and Grandma chatted happily about the mermaid house. Everyone was in a good mood. Ricardo even had a bath without anyone having to yell at him.
So Lucy rang Dad to tell him the good news, about Ricardo getting in the bath. She told him about the house, too, and he said that was good, but he didn’t sound all that happy. Then he said he was flying to China in the morning for a conference and would be back in a few days, and he’d see her after that.
Then Mum got on the phone to Dad and spoke in that frozen voice she used when they weren’t going to fight but they weren’t going to make up either.
Then Nigel Adams rang. They could move into the mermaid house straight away.
And that was that. Sort of.
First they had to help Mum clean it.
‘Aawwww!’
‘Or no TV for the rest of childhood.’
That was a lot of TV.
The kids were up to their armpits in hot water in the back yard of their new house. Poor T-Tongue was in it up to his nose. He didn’t like baths, Lucy could tell, because of the way he was shivering, even though the water was warm and they’d made it smell nice. Lucy had convinced herself that puppies liked roses, so she’d filled T-Tongue’s bath with red rose petals. Ricardo had convinced himself dogs liked minty things, and Lucy had to stop him squeezing toothpaste into the water.
Lucy let go of T-tongue’s collar to grab the toothpaste, and he seized the chance to run inside, leaving a trail of wet pawprints, looking over his shoulder as if they were traitors. Now he was hiding somewhere in the big old maze that was their new house.
Maybe it was his doggy DNA. Lucy had read about DNA in one of Dad’s magazines. He kept his science mags in the toilet, and they built up and built up until Mum went psycho every few months and threw them out. In between psycho attacks, Lucy had read a few stories. As far as she could work out, you were born with the right DNA for having brown eyes or curly hair. Or, in Ricardo’s case, the DNA for treading in gross things. Maybe all puppies were born with the DNA for hating baths. Come to think of it, Ricardo had that sort of DNA too.
Lucy finally tracked T-Tongue down to the room near the back door, where she and Ricardo would have to sleep tomorrow night, until the furniture van came with their beds. It was the one with the dragon vases standing guard outside, the ratty old brown rug on the floor and the two old iron beds, which is why they had to sleep there. Ricardo didn’t mind because it was closest to the kitchen and therefore closest to food, but Lucy hated it. The rug was too grungy.
T-Tongue, cowering under one of the beds, didn’t look as if he liked it much either but he also didn’t look as though he was planning to leave in a hurry. He had squashed himself almost flat against the wall, and when Lucy got under the bed and grabbed his collar and dragged him gently out, his body was completely stiff and he made a funny kind of whimpering sound – a ‘No, no! Not the bath! Please not the bath!’ sort of whimper.
As she began to wriggle out, Lucy noticed a face under the bed. Or at least two big round eyes and the vague outline of a shape, woven into the old rug. How weird was that? The rest of the rug was just a gross, faded brown with no patterns at all. Mum reckoned it would be full of fleas, dust and life-threatening germs that scientists hadn’t discovered yet. She said if they didn’t rip it up and cremate it, Lucy and Ricardo wouldn’t live long enough to graduate from school.
Just then T-Tongue made a wild bid for freedom, twisting and almost slipping out of Lucy’s grip. She hauled him back, scrambled out and ran outside in time to see Ricardo squeezing toothpaste into the bath, a whole tube of it, like a fat white worm. For the minty freshness, he said. They washed T-Tongue in it anyway.