That afternoon Wally moved Cassie’s things back to where they belonged. The door stayed shut after that.
I waited for Cassie to come home. For months I waited. Each afternoon I sat on the verandah, listening for him to trudge up the driveway. I knew it was my fault he was gone. I never should have told Dad that Cassie and Ian were in the knackery, never should have given Cassie all that money. It was exactly how Cassie said it would be; I would do something stupid and Mum would get sick again and the only person to blame for it would be me.
Because Dad and Mum were in their own worlds I was the only one who noticed Wally stopped brushing his teeth. I’d remind him every day, squeeze a strip of toothpaste on his brush and leave it by the sink. I’d try to breathe through my mouth when I went near him, but sometimes that was worse because then I could taste the pong on my tongue like a piece of rotten meat.
When the dental van came to school Wally’s turn went for ages. Most kids took fifteen minutes, but Wally was gone for double that. When he came back to class I went over to him, asked him why he took so long, but he put his head down on the desk and didn’t lift it up until the bell rang.
At home, he pulled a piece of paper from his backpack and stuck it to the fridge. Dad found it after dinner. ‘What’s this about?’ he said, holding up the crumpled paper.
‘I don’t know,’ Wally said, shrugging.
‘Come here,’ Dad said. ‘Open your mouth.’
He moved Wally under the kitchen light and held open his jaw with his hand. ‘Jesus Christ,’ Dad said as he poked his finger around Wally’s spitty gums, shiny as the kidneys Dad ate for breakfast every Sunday. ‘This is going to cost a bloody fortune.’
I stood on my tiptoes and tried to have a look in as well but Wally pressed his palm into my face and kicked me in the shins.
Before bed Dad stood in the doorway in his boxers, watching Wally brush his teeth.
‘It hurts,’ Wally said, his mouth frothing.
‘Should have thought of that before you left your teeth to rot in your head,’ said Dad.
The toothpaste dribbled down Wally’s chin. His eyes started to water and he let out a cat moan from his throat.
‘Keep going,’ Dad said.
‘But it hurts,’ Wally said, holding his head back to keep the toothpaste in.
‘I don’t bloody care if it hurts.’
Wally’s eyes went dull. He stared right at Dad, opened his mouth wide. The toothpaste dribbled down his shirt and onto the floor. It was streaky pink from his bloody gums. Wally let the toothbrush fall from his fist, clattering on the tiles.
‘Little shit,’ Dad said. He bopped Wally on the back of the head, but Wally didn’t bother ducking, didn’t seem to care. ‘Clean that muck up.’
Wally spat the rest of the toothpaste into the sink, licked his teeth like he was licking sores. I crouched down and wiped up the toothpaste with a wad of toilet paper.
When Wally was having a piss I went into our room and found Wally’s teeth in a Ziploc bag underneath his pillow. They were small and gristly as dried-up corn kernels, rattled when I held them close to my ear. I put them back and went to sleep, but the next morning I found them floating in the toilet bowl, the Ziploc bag bobbing on the surface. I scooped the teeth up with the frog catcher, rinsed them in the sink. I wrapped them in a tissue and slipped them into Wally’s special box for him to find when he wasn’t acting so mental.
Dad brought the kitten home the next week. We’d never had a pet before. Other than snakes, I didn’t like animals, didn’t like their little legs and ears, like half-humans. They probably thought all sorts of awful things about me, probably said all sorts of terrible things in a secret language I couldn’t understand.
‘I used to have a cat,’ Dad said. ‘Trixie, her name was. Soft as a bunny rabbit.’ He crouched down and closed his hand into a fist, held it out towards the kitten. She took a few soft steps towards Dad’s fist. Her pink nose was like a boiled lolly, and she bumped it onto Dad’s knuckles. Before she could dart away Dad swept up the kitten and held her to his face. ‘You’re a sweet little thing, aren’t you?’ he said. The kitten chewed his hand with fishbone teeth. I imagined Dad opening his mouth wide and sticking her whole head in there. She was small enough to fit.
‘Who’s it for?’ I asked.
‘For all of you,’ Dad said. ‘For you and Wally and your mother.’
‘But why?’
‘Can’t I do something nice for my family?’ Dad said. ‘You’re turning into Cassie. Always seeing the bad in things.’
I couldn’t wait to show Tilly the kitten, but something didn’t feel quite right. ‘You can’t just replace Cassie with an animal,’ I said.
Dad ignored me, held the kitten out to Mum. ‘How about it, Chris?’ Dad said. ‘Something to cheer you up.’
Dad named her Mango, and she liked him the best out of all of us. When Dad watched TV she would knead her paws in his lap before curling up in a little puffball, and at night she slept in the cocoon of his elbow. When he came home from work, Mango recognised Dad’s footsteps coming up the back steps and followed him around the house and yard as he pottered about before dinner.
A few days after Dad brought Mango home he came into our room while me and Wally were in bed. I pretended to be asleep, and he walked over to Wally. He had something bulky in his arms: Mango. He put her down on Wally’s bed, stroked her so she didn’t run away.
‘You awake?’ Dad half-whispered to Wally.
There was a silence, and then Wally moaned. ‘Yeah,’ he said, his voice croaky with sleep.
‘How’re your teeth?’
Wally waited a few seconds before answering. ‘They’re alright.’
Dad took a step back, turning to the door. ‘Give Mango a cuddle,’ he said, ‘if they start to hurt.’
At least someone knew how to feel bad about something. At least someone knew to do something good to make up for whatever terrible thing they’d done.
Cassie called that weekend, as the sun was dipping behind the mountains, the sky on the horizon orange as an apricot. I didn’t know it at the time, but he’d been calling all afternoon, hanging up when Dad picked up. It was only when Wally answered that he stayed on the line. Wally stared into space, said ‘okay’ over and over until Cassie asked for Mum.
I missed Cassie, but I was surprised by how quickly I’d got used to him being gone. It was like he’d vanished into thin air, and even though Mum was going a bit weird again, everything felt calmer. It was a relief not to have to watch what Cassie did all the time, not to have to worry about what Ian was doing to Cassie. I liked not feeling as if my blood was fizzing under my skin.
I still wanted to talk to Cassie, though. I tugged at the cord, tried to grab the phone from Mum’s hand, but she kept turning her back to me. When she finally said goodbye I stretched the cord into the bathroom and closed the door.
I’d never spoken to Cassie on the phone before. His voice sounded deeper, and I couldn’t tell if that was just the way the phone made him sound or if something inside him had changed. I hardly had a chance to say anything, as he rambled on about where he was staying in town, his new job at the Connolly. He said he sometimes got to call out the winners of the raffle and make sure the milk jug at the tea table was full. He said aside from the dance on Saturday nights people mainly came for the five-dollar lunch special on weekdays, the back room with pokies that you have more luck winning on than at the other pub in town, according to the crusty men he served at the bar.
Cassie stopped talking. I could hear him breathing through the phone.
‘We got a cat,’ I said. ‘Mango.’