Undine

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Chapter One

Undine trailed down the stairs to the bathroom. She felt a lump of something, starting at the base of her spine and working its way upward. It wasn't a physical something, though it belonged inside her body, under her skin, trapped inside the fine network of muscle, tissue, nerves, and bone. She knew what was happening because it had happened before and even though she felt a shiver of fear, she told herself firmly that mostly she was annoyed, because it was Tuesday, and Tuesdays were -- on the whole -- not to be trusted.

As the lump worked its way up and prepared to inhabit her mind, she spoke sharply to it. "Stop it. Stop it. Not on Tuesdays."

It stopped for the time being, and she managed to continue her preparations for the day: locating her math book, extricating her homework from Jasper's tight grasp -- "Mine, mine," said Jasper, and, You can have it, thought Undine. But she continued to prise Jasper's fingers away and replaced the assignment with a bank statement so Jasper wouldn't cry. She dressed herself in her crumpled uniform and settled on one blue sock and one almost-blue sock because, after all, it was Tuesday and not everything could be expected to go right.

Tuesdays were just badly designed, she thought crossly, as Lou danced in front of her with a piece of burnt toast and a coffee. They didn't have the anticipation and freshness of Mondays, when you woke up with the weekend still singing in your mind, and made resolutions to be more organized for the rest of the week, and looked forward to school so you could hear who wore what to Nick's party and the various assorted minutiae that colored other people's lives. By Tuesday, the weekend was well and truly done with -- old news -- and the next weekend felt a long way away.

Undine ate a halfhearted breakfast while Lou tried to pack Jasper's backpack with the absurd quantity of stuff an almost-three-year-old was expected to take to day care. Jasper was sitting at his table and chair set, made of bright yellow plastic, conducting experiments with his toast and juice. Undine eyed the results queasily, her own toast flipping over in her stomach, and decided it was a good time to beat a hasty retreat.

She swept on Lou in midflight to give her a kiss good-bye, and -- remembering the feeling she had had that morning -- an oversized hug. Lou raised her eyebrows."Tuesdays aren't that bad, Undine. I'm sure we'll both survive another one. Off you go, horrible adolescent, or you'll miss the bus."

Undine shrugged and smiled foolishly, but the shiver of fear returned. She bent down and buried her face in Jasper's hair, which smelled of vegemite and orange juice. Jasper was busy squelching wet toast through his fingers. Undine sighed.

"How about you be the horrible adolescent and I'll be the baby."

Jasper gave her a withering look. "I'm not a baby. I'm a Busy Bee," he said, naming the big kids' room at day care that he had graduated into early because he was too boisterous for the toddlers' room.

"Too busy for me," said Undine cheerfully, surveying the results of his industry and giving him another squeeze.

"Go on," said Lou, shooing Undine away with both arms, "before I make you clean up this child."

Undine ran through the door, shaking off the residual feelings and flutters of fear, determined to push them way, way down for as long as she could. Still, she couldn't help but peek back through the living room window, to see Jasper patting his juice and toast concoction onto Lou's smiling face.

Undine lived in the old part of Hobart near the rivulet, in a crooked little house that was halfway up a concrete flight of stairs between two streets.

It was a very complicated place to live, because the two streets were in different suburbs and controlled by different councils, and no one could ever decide exactly which street they lived on. Their mail came addressed to either 2½ Myrtle Street (which was below them), or 43b Camelot Road (which was above them). Every year arrangements were made about the rates, but the next year they would receive two bills and the councils would bicker over it, with Lou caught in the middle.

Every time the bills arrived, Lou would sigh and say, "I wish, just once, neither of them would send us a bill."

Although the house was a bit dilapidated, its thick stone had been covered with whitewashed stucco, and it had a pale blue door and shutters on the front window. The house looked as if it belonged more in the glaring whitish-blue light of the Greek islands than under Australian pepperminty gums scribbling their branches in the sky overhead.

There was a long, crouching attic bedroom at the top of the house for Undine, a bigger bedroom downstairs for Lou, and a triangle-shaped space that jutted out unexpectedly to one side of the house for Jasper.

Most of the time Undine liked living in No-Man's-Land, as she and her mother called it. She loved her bedroom, with its sloped ceiling and long windows on either side, looking over the back garden at one end and the steps at the other. The window that looked over the front was what Lou called a French window, which meant it was big enough to climb out of, onto a balcony that was just the right size for her to sit on. She had put up shelves on the outside walls and crowded them with busy little pots of geraniums. It was her favorite place to be; she felt like Rapunzel or Juliet, or some other fated and mysterious woman, sitting up there, watching the sky for bats on the edge of dusk, or eating bread and honey on a summer Sunday morning.

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Excerpted from Undine by Penni Russon
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.