The House That Was Eureka by Nadia Wheatley Page B

them.
    ‘Down at the CES headquarters. The unemployed demo.’
    Evie watched them dump the gear in an old Volkswagen. There were banners on top, and boxes of pamphlets on the back seat.
    ‘There’s room,’ the girl yelled to her. ‘You can sit on my lap.’
    ‘Oh no thanks.’ Evie went to the play centre and picked up Sammy, then went home. Maria and Jodie were already there, because the school holidays had just started.
    ‘You two can look after Sammy today.’
    ‘I can’t,’ Maria said. ‘I’ve got to go somewhere.’
    ‘Where?’
    ‘It’s a secret.’
    ‘
Tell
me!’ Jodie demanded.
    ‘It’s a
secret
!’
    Maria liked secrets for their own sake. Secret friends, secret places, secret money, secret food. Morning secrets and afternoon secrets and dark night secrets. Out at Campbelltown, she’d had lots of secrets, but now they’d moved here she’d have to start all over again.
    A few days ago, she’d found her first one. It was an afternoon secret, a food secret, a friend secret, a money secret, a place secret, but mainly a food secret. Like most secrets, it’d started by itself.
    One afternoon around the middle of last week, Maria had been mooching around the street thinking about getting a secret pile of money and secretly buying a BMX bike:
that’d
show Dad. For all she had now was Evie’s crumby old hand-me-down ancient-history dinosaur, and Dad reckoned she didn’t need a new one.
    So she was wandering along the far end of the street when she spotted a fat foreign lady dressed all in black, sweeping and hosing her neat concrete front yard.
    ‘Would you like me to do that for you?’ Maria asked.
    The lady looked up, smiling a wide smile, but with a blank look in her eyes. ‘Excuse me?’ she said.
    ‘Would you like me to do that? I could do it for you, and you could pay me, and then you wouldn’t have to get your slippers wet.’
    The lady didn’t seem to get the point. She looked back to an old man sitting on the porch.
    ‘Bob-a-job is it, love?’ He smiled too.
    ‘No,’ said Maria. ‘I just want lots of money, that’s all.’
    ‘Ah,’ the old man grinned. ‘Sheer capitalist free enterprise, is it?’
    Maria didn’t know what his big words meant. She didn’t say anything. The lady wasn’t there now anyway, she’d disappeared inside her door.
    But was back again a second later, with little white crescent-shaped biscuits on a plate.
    ‘Eat, eat,’ she urged. Then fast words in a foreign language. ‘
Einai orea, i koritzei!
’ With one hand she stroked Maria’s white-blonde hair, while with the other she held the plate right up to Maria’s nose. She smiled, and there were teeth missing, and some of the teeth that were there were gold. It was like a witch story, Maria thought. The biscuits were poison; the lady was doing a spell on her head; propped up against the fence was her
broom
. Maria looked around for a cat, but could only see a bird in a cage.
    Maria wasn’t scared. She’d always longed to meet a witch. She took a biscuit, and it was covered in white icing-sugar that powdered down all over Maria’s jumper. Arsenic, she thought, biting in. Quite delicious.
    ‘
Einai orea ta mallia tou koritzei!
’ The lady was gushing fast in foreign as she gently pulled and stroked at Maria’s hair.
    Maria looked towards the old man, whose eyes were on her, curious, amused.
    ‘It seems she thinks your hair’s pretty,’ the old man said drily.
    ‘Yes, pretty, very pretty hair,’ the lady knew the words now. ‘Very pretty girl.’
    That was nice. The biscuits were nice (Maria took another one) and the lady was nice, and it was so nice to hear you were pretty. The lady was so nice, she couldn’t be a witch, that was a pity, but the compliments and biscuits made up for it. I’ll find a witch somewhere else, Maria thought.
    Then the man explained to the lady about the money, and the lady let Maria sweep and gave her twenty cents.
    ‘You come back, eh?’ grinned the lady