Brothers & Sisters - Charlotte Wood [79]
‘Go and get the catherine-wheels,’ Dieter said.
‘Okay,’ the boy answered breathlessly, and as he raced past me to the house I wondered how Dieter could keep these people coming back.
When Klara and I were eleven, her family moved to a small farm in the country. The next summer holiday I went to spend a week at their new place. They lived in a fibro house. The property ended on the boundary of a flat scrubby national park. In the heat of the day Klara and I walked through the straggly bush and sat with our legs dangling in the creek. Or we lounged on her bed in her bedroom, batting away mosquitoes in the dense air and slurping fast-melting blocks of flavoured ice.
Klara sat with her arms wrapped around her legs, her chin resting on her knees. Sometimes she held her pillow like a shield pulled tight against her shins. She was so thin and could make herself so small that the pillow almost hid her from my view when I lay on the other end of the bed. When she was hidden away like that, she told me some of the dark thoughts that occupied her mind.
‘I picture myself dead. Like I’m dreaming, it’s so clear. My body lying bleeding on the floor, my head smashed in. My stomach split open like a supermarket bag. Do you ever have those dreams?’
‘No,’ I answered.
‘Dieter will kill me one day. I’m sure of it.’
She turned the jam biscuit she had been holding for fifteen minutes around and around in the palm of her hand and finally took a tiny bite of the jam that had oozed out of the side of the biscuit. A red spot stuck to the corner of her mouth.
‘I think he’s insane,’ she said.
Since she’d moved away Klara had sent me notes and cards. We’d talked on the phone but she had never mentioned Dieter.
‘I haven’t thought about your horrible brother all year,’ I replied. ‘Where is he?’
‘He’s been staying at a friend’s place. He’s back tonight. I don’t want to see him. I don’t want him to live here,’ she whispered.
‘Neither would I.’
We were silent for a moment. I picked at a mosquito bite on my shin and from the crater a trickle of thin red blood emerged. I blotted it with my hankie.
That evening Dieter arrived. The car dropping him off pulled up so fast at the front of the house that pebbles from the driveway flew up and pinged against the lounge room window. The car door slammed and the car backed away, tyres spinning and crunching on the gravel.
‘Let’s go to my room,’ Klara said hurriedly. She took my hand and pulled me out of the lounge room and along the hall to her room. Behind us, the front door opened and a gust of fiery dusk wind burned down the hallway.
On my last day at their house I woke late. I was sleeping on a mattress on the floor of Klara’s room. The night before, we had set the alarm to twelve for a secret midnight feast of chips and chocolate we’d been hoarding all week. Everything tasted extra salty and extra sweet by torchlight. We stifled our laughter by pressing the sheets against our mouths and fell asleep again at two.
‘I think she’s in the shed, darling,’ her mother said when I came into the kitchen after my shower, so I skipped to the shed and pushed open the big door. Dieter and Klara were both inside in the gloom.
‘Hi,’ I said, still unable to see properly in the dim light. ‘What’s happening?’
Dieter giggled his high, unnatural giggle. My stomach leapt inside my ribcage and my skin prickled. As my eyes became accustomed to the dim light, I saw Klara standing against the wall, her arms held out horizontally, her face turned away from Dieter, who was standing a few metres back from the wall. Below her hemline Klara’s legs were glistening and there was a puddle in the dust at her feet.
‘Ready?’ Dieter cried, and he giggled again.
Klara pressed her face harder against the wall as Dieter drew back his arm then flung a knife in her direction. The knife thudded into the wall above her left arm before clattering to the floor. Another was embedded in the wall near her face.
I tried to scream but no sound came out. Dieter was