The next day was the last day of holidays. I headed to the dam with my towel around my neck, thongs slapping the dirt. I was glad summer was over, glad I could finally get away from everyone. We’d have a new teacher this year, so Mrs Raymond wouldn’t be picking on us all the time. Maybe there’d even be a new person starting in our class, someone who knew nothing about me and Wally, nothing about Les. A new friend to take the place of Tilly, to be the person Tilly was supposed to be.
I made a list in my head of what I needed for school the next day. I’d have to find my uniform and clean out my bag. I still had some stationery left over from last year, but I would scrounge around the kitchen for anything else. I’d got a new packet of textas for Christmas. I was saving them for school and hadn’t even opened them yet. Last year someone had gone through my tidy tray at lunchtime, taken all the nice colours and left the ugly greens and browns. I was sure it was Brendan, but when I looked through his school bag they weren’t in there, and Mrs Raymond caught me and called me a thief and I had to stand in the corner for the rest of the afternoon. This year I would hide my textas where no one could find them.
Closer to the dam I could see something on the path ahead of me, a brownish lump in the grass. The air was glary, and there was a bad smell wafting, like when no one washes out a pan of eggs for a few days and the kitchen stinks right up. I got closer to the lump; the smell got worse, boiled in my mouth. I squinted, but it wasn’t until I was right close to it that I could see what it was, who it was: a paw stretched out like it was waving hello, a floppy sausage of a tail, scabby and raw. The fur socks were round and white, but where Mango’s head should have been, there was nothing.
I couldn’t stop staring at the mash of reddish brown slime slicked into the fur around her neck, that blank space. I tasted vomit in my mouth. I crouched down, prodded her with my finger, pulled my finger back. She wasn’t soft, but hard and very still.
I took a breath, picked her up by her front paws and held her to my chest. Her fur felt crusty but she was light as a cob of corn, like her organs had been taken out of her and replaced with wool. I held Mango close to me, headed back to the house. Hot tears started leaking from my eyes. I could taste vomit still, but hugged Mango tighter, pressed my nose to her back. I could feel the rotten smell of her seeping into my clothes, into my skin but I didn’t care. She was cold and should have been warm.
I took Mango into the lounge room, stood next to the couch until Dad looked up from the screen. He put his beer down but his face went stiff. He didn’t look sad, but there was a strange expression on his face and I didn’t know what it meant.
‘Where was she?’ he said.
‘In the paddock,’ I said. I felt my chin wobble but tried not to cry again.
‘Where in the paddock?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Near the dam.’
Dad stood up, took Mango from my arms.
‘Was it a fox?’ I said.
Dad didn’t say anything. He took Mango outside and laid her on the top step. I followed him down the stairs and into the shed, where he took a shovel from the wall.
‘Can we have a funeral?’ I said.
‘It’s just an animal, Cub,’ Dad said.
‘Last year for show-and-tell Rachel brought in her pet mice, but the next week she said they died and that she’d had a funeral for them. They buried them in toilet rolls.’
‘Who’s Rachel?’ Dad asked.
‘Girl from school.’
Dad walked to the edge of the paddock and began to dig. The sound of metal clanging off rocks rang in my ears. I stood back, and when he’d dug a kitten-sized hole he rested the shovel against the fence post, turned and walked back to the verandah. He went inside, came back a minute later with a pillowcase. He crouched on the stairs, picked up Mango and held her towards me.
‘Say your goodbyes now,’ Dad said.
I scratched Mango just above her tail. ‘Bye, Mango,’ I said.
Dad slipped Mango in the pillowcase, folding the material over like a little parcel. He walked back towards the paddock then paused.
‘I’m sorry, love,’ he said, his back towards me. ‘You shouldn’t have had to see her like this.’
When he reached the edge of the paddock he placed the parcel in the hole. He used the shovel to fill it in, to smother Mango with dirt, and then he smoothed the dirt over with his shoe so you couldn’t even tell anything was different, couldn’t even tell that right under the dirt was Mango packaged up in a pillowcase. He walked back into the house. He didn’t look at me. I wanted to ask Dad how long it would take for Mango to disappear into bones. Cassie once told me that when people get put in coffins they decompose straight away, turn into dirt. I wondered how long it would take for Mango’s bones to turn into dirt, or whether bones just stay bones forever. We learned about dinosaurs at school and their bones didn’t turn into dirt, which is how we know that dinosaurs were here in the first place—because of the bones. But I didn’t ask, because I didn’t think I could stand it if Dad looked through me like I was a cloud of dust again.
When we got to school the next morning, none of the other kids said hello to Wally or me. It was like we had a bubble around us making us invisible, as though we didn’t exist. I hadn’t really cared before. Before, I had Wally and Cassie, but now everything was different. I thought about what Cassie had said about Les, about Wally and I getting half of his soul each. At the time I thought it was a good thing, because Cassie had loved Les, but now I knew it was a terrible thing to have someone like that trapped inside you.
I saw Brendan by the bubblers. His shorts were low on his hips, and I could see a jellyroll oozing over the elastic. I don’t know why, but I waved at him from across the grass. He tugged up his pants, looked at me, then turned away.
We went to the classroom, stood outside the door and waited for the bell while the other kids ran around on the oval, chittered like birds as they put their bags away. After a minute a lady walked towards us from the office. When she got to the door she stopped and smiled at us, told us she was a new teacher.
‘What are your names?’ she said.
When she spoke she sounded kind of fancy, not like how Mum and Mrs Raymond and the tuckshop ladies spoke, and even though her glasses were magnifying her eyes and her skin was a bit spotty, I thought she looked beautiful. I felt shy all of a sudden, couldn’t get my mouth to make words. I tried to smile back but I’m not sure if that’s what it looked like. She smiled again, didn’t make me answer. We followed her into the classroom.
There were no nametags on the desk, so I sat in the front row and waited for the bell to ring. I watched the kids as they piled in, but no one was new. Brendan barged into the classroom but I didn’t wave again. Wally went to the other side of the room. He sat on a chair and put his head on his desk while everyone else started peeling off the plastic from the workbooks left on each desk. I thought maybe Wally hadn’t noticed I’d sat down, so I waved and pointed to the desk next to mine. I knew he’d seen me but he didn’t get up.
After a while Maddy came and sat at the next desk. It was the only seat left. She didn’t say hello or ask me how my holiday was, what I got for Christmas. She’d been in our class every year since year one and once asked me if I was Wally’s brother, just because I was the only girl in shorts. Wally and I had shared Cassie’s hand-me-downs until Wally nicked me a dress from lost property. I stared at her hand as she wrote her name on the inside of her new books, over and over. I knew that the next day all Maddy’s books would be covered with clear contact, pictures of horses and flowers cut from magazines glued to the cardboard, because that’s what she’d done last year. There was a bite mark on the web between her thumb and finger, like a set of teeth, and when she saw me staring she put her hands under the table.