He shakes his head, as if he thinks any imbecile with half a brain could figure that out. Well, I happen to be a non-imbecile with a whole brain.
‘I thought when you were here last time you wanted to be my friend,’ I say.
‘I did,’ he replies.
‘Well,’ I point out, ‘if you want someone to be your friend, usually you don’t treat them like they don’t exist.’
He holds out his hand to me. ‘I’ll show you something,’ he says, like he’s got a present for me.
I back away. I don’t want him touching me! He drops his hand and looks hurt. And suddenly I remember how it felt when I didn’t have a clue how to make friends. Not that I was ever as strange as he is. But back in primary school, I knew there were rules for friendships, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t figure out what they were.
‘You got something good in that backpack?’ I ask him. ‘Is that what you wanna show me?’
‘No,’ he says. ‘Come to the timber.’ I look across the golden cornfield to the trees beyond. It’s such a gorgeous afternoon, and the timber does look like an inviting place to explore.
‘How come you want to go over there?’ I ask Leon.
‘I’ll show you.’
‘Look,’ I say, ‘if I go, first you have to agree to a condition.’
He frowns and says grumpily, ‘What condition?’
‘If I say something to you,’ I explain, ‘you have to say something back. You’re not allowed to just stare at me like a stunned mullet.’
He looks down at his shoes and thinks about that for a while, then says, ‘All right.’ So I know he really, really wants me to come with him.
4.00 p.m.
The timber’s bigger than it looks from the house. Leon’s striding out in front of me, following a path that’s just an indentation in the forest litter, leading me towards whatever it is he wants to show me. We’re walking under trees that are a lot different from the gums in the bush back home. These ones have so many leaves and their branches spread out so far that it’s like dusk in here, even though the sun won’t set for another couple of hours.
‘When do they lose their leaves?’ I ask, catching up to Leon and pointing to the treetops.
‘November,’ he answers. ‘They’ll start turnin’ colour any day now.’
Wow. A whole sentence. So far he’s done pretty well complying with his condition.
He stops and turns to me. ‘Here it is.’ He pats a rough, dark trunk.
‘Here’s what?’ It’s a tree, just like five hundred or so others around here. On the tall side maybe, but that’s hardly worth dragging me out here for.
‘Have a closer look,’ he says.
I hate it when people say stuff like that, as if it’s a puzzle that a smart person would solve in a second. What am I supposed to be seeing? ‘Just show me,’ I plead.
He looks a little disappointed at my refusal to play along, but he points to a spot on the trunk at his knee level. And then I see it: a piece of old, weathered board nailed into the trunk. He points to another one, at his shoulder height. I look up, and there are more boards, nailed at regular intervals.
‘It’s a ladder,’ I say.
He gestures skyward. ‘Go on up.’
‘What for?’
‘You’ll see.’ Is that a hint of fun I hear in his voice?
‘You go first.’ Those steps don’t look too sturdy to me. If they’re rotten, I don’t want to be the one to plummet to the ground.
He sighs, then climbs the tree. The ladder seems to be holding, so I follow him. Good thing I’m only a little scared of heights, because the ground seems to be getting far down quicker than I thought it would.
‘Here we are,’ he announces and steps off through the leaves onto a wooden platform supported by a couple of thick branches. ‘Come on,’ he urges, bouncing up and down, ‘it’s solid.’
I step through the leaves and join him. There’s a railing around three sides of the platform and out the far side you can see for kilometres: green hills, yellow cornfields, more timbers in the distance.
‘What a cool tree-house!’ It’s the best place I’ve been since the Matterhorn at Disneyland. ‘Did you build it?’
‘Sure,’ he answers dreamily. ‘Me and my dad. He helped me build it when I was real little.’
This is such a great place to be, up amongst the treetops. Leon takes off his backpack, unzips it and produces one of those rubber-backed picnic blankets. He spreads it out and says grandly, ‘Have a seat.’
I can’t believe he lugged a blanket all the way up here. ‘Have you got a thermos of tea in there as well?’ I tap his backpack. ‘Maybe some scones and cream?’
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Just listen,’ he says sternly.
‘Listen to what?’ He’s starting to annoy me, being all mysterious, issuing instructions, not even smiling at my joke about the scones. ‘All I can hear are a few wimpy birds.’
He looks disappointed again. ‘I brought you here to listen,’ he says.
‘All right,’ I answer crossly. ‘I’ll listen!’
I plonk myself down cross-legged on the blanket, and Leon sits beside me. He closes his eyes, so I do, too. Guess I’ll have to spend a few minutes like this to keep him from sulking. Leaning back against a support for the railing, I let my mind drift. When I was off school with that cold last week, I went into Leon’s old bedroom quite a few times to look at the collage on his walls. I think of those cartoons now. Especially one where there’s an Indian boy in a forest sitting high up in a tree. He’s looking down at some other Indians – his family I suppose – sitting around a fire. They seem so peaceful and happy. But in the next frame the boy is looking far off into the distance. He can see horses approaching, with men on them, and the men have rifles. There are guns in practically every one of Leon’s cartoon strips. Along with explosions and blood and people dying.
My eyes fly open. Maybe he’s got something in that backpack that is the opposite of scones and cream. Even if he doesn’t, I’m sick of sitting here in silence.
‘Hey, Leon,’ I say. He opens his eyes and looks at me. ‘You should hear the cockatoos we have in Melbourne. They don’t just go twitter-twitter like these guys. They squawk like anything.’ I take a deep breath and screech as loud as I can, ‘Bawk! Bawk!’
He looks so shocked I’m afraid he’ll fall out of the tree. I can’t help laughing. But he can. His shocked look has turned to hurt. ‘Didn’t you hear the people?’ he asks me.
‘What people?’
‘The people!’
‘You mean those teeny little Indians you draw?’
Leon looks like he might cry. ‘I thought you’d be able to hear them. I thought you’d want to hear them.’
‘How come you think I’d want to do that?’ I demand. ‘You think all this stuff about me and you don’t even know me!’
He acts like he hasn’t heard me. His eyes have gone from teary to wild. ‘This isn’t a tree-house!’ he yells, kicking hard at a rail support.
‘Hey,’ I say, ‘you don’t have to knock it down.’
‘It’s not a tree-house, I said!’
‘Well, it’s up a tree!’ I point out. ‘What is it if it’s not a tree-house?’
‘It’s a hide.’
‘A what?’
‘It’s where hunters hide to shoot deer.’ He goes to the edge where you can see forever. He aims an imaginary rifle and makes a firing sound. The tears are back in his voice. ‘My dad comes here every fall, to murder the deer. He told me it was a tree-house when we built it, and I was so little I believed him.’
‘It’s not murder,’ I protest. ‘Nadine said some of the deer need to be killed, otherwise the population gets too big and they get sick and starve and stuff.’
‘No.’ He shakes his head. ‘The deer deserve to live.’
‘They do culling in Australia, too,’ I say. ‘With kangaroos. I had to learn about it for a debate. And
kangaroos are even cuter than deer.’
‘No!’ he explodes. Why did I think I could teach him anything?
‘They killed the people,’ he goes on. ‘They can’t kill the deer, too!’
He’s shouting and it’s making me mad. ‘I guess they can kill them!’ I snap back at him. ‘Nadine says she’s shot one every year since she was twelve.’
‘You don’t talk to her.’ Leon’s voice is raw with shock.
‘Yes, I do. She’s cool as.’
‘No,’ he moans. ‘She murders the deer. We don’t speak to her.’
I can’t stand it when people tell me what to do! ‘What do you mean, we?’ I ask. ‘I speak to whoever I want to. And you’re stupid if you think you can stop anyone from doing anything just by refusing to talk to them!’
He looks at me like I just stomped on one of the kittens so I could watch its guts squish out. Maybe he won’t speak to me either, after this. That thought makes me feel like I just lost something new and good. Suddenly I remember one of his cartoons that doesn’t have guns in it. He’s drawn a herd of deer, and at the edge, looking on, stands a woman with a baby strapped to her back. In the next frame there’s a close-up of the baby’s face. Her eyes are big and trusting, wanting to see everything, like my baby sister Alice’s.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say softly. ‘I don’t really think you’re stupid.’
He’s sad now, not angry any more. When he speaks it’s like he’s not really talking to me, because he’s staring into the distance and I haven’t got a clue what he means when he says, ‘If I can’t find anybody who’ll listen, then I’ll go up there. I can hear their voices there. I’ll go and sit with the milkweed and gather up sounds.’
Sunday 23 September
1.00 a.m.
I’m walking through the timber again, only this time I’m alone. And it’s night. The trees are a lot closer together than when I was here with Leon. And this time I’m listening.
The leaves are whispering. Millions of them, gossiping in low voices. And suddenly the trees are moving, walking along with me. I stop and they stop, too. No. Not all of them have stopped. Some of them are advancing towards me. Slowly, tentatively. The moon grows brighter, and I can see they aren’t trees after all. They’re Indians. Tall and strong. They’re staring at me, hundreds of silent men and women. They stop walking, except for one woman. She comes towards me with her arms outstretched, holding a baby out to me.
‘Why have you come here?’ she asks in a voice sodden with grief. ‘You don’t belong here!’
Her little one’s eyes are full of terror. But I recognise her. She’s the baby from Leon’s cartoon. I reach out to take her, to cuddle her close to me, when suddenly a shot rings out and blood spurts from the baby’s chest.
‘No,’ someone’s moaning. ‘No!’
I wake up enough to realise that it was me. For a second I don’t know where I am, but then my mind engages fully, and in the moonlight from the window I recognise my big bedroom in the middle of nowhere. But the feeling of the dream is still here. That Indian mother’s accusing question is still in my ears. I can’t get back to sleep like this, so I might as well go down to the kitchen and get a drink.
As I pass the dining room I see there’s a light on. Mum’s still up, books and papers and highlighters and coffee mugs spread out on the table in front of her. I stand in the doorway for a second, till Mum notices me.
‘What’s up, kid?’
‘I wanna go home,’ I wail.
‘What? Come over here.’
I don’t want her to touch me. I’ll cry if she does. I go and sit on a chair across the table from her. ‘I wanna go back to Australia. I don’t belong here.’
‘I thought you loved it here,’ Mum says. ‘Has something gone wrong at school?’
‘No, it’s not that.’ School’s fine. I keep waiting for people to get tired of the new Aussie gal, but so far that hasn’t happened. And right now it doesn’t seem important. ‘I think there was a massacre around here,’ I tell Mum.
‘Sorry?’
‘You know, when the white people moved in. I think they murdered the Indians.’ My voice is shaky. I grab a piece of paper and start folding it into squares so I won’t have to look at Mum. ‘I think they even shot the little babies.’
‘Who told you that?’
I could take Mum upstairs and show her the cartoons, but I don’t want to. ‘This kid at school,’ I say. ‘He reckons that’s what happened.’
I lean over, snatch a tissue from the box at the end of the table, then wipe and blow my nose. ‘Guess I haven’t quite got over my cold,’ I say.
‘Poor little chicken.’ Mum hasn’t called me that in years. ‘It’s tough growing up.’
I can’t think of an answer to that, so I go back to folding my paper into smaller and smaller squares.
‘It’s human history, kid,’ Mum says. ‘Think of our street back home.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean the land wasn’t just lying there empty for the past thirty-thousand years, waiting for Europeans to come along and subdivide it into a suburb.’
In my mind I see our street before it was a street, when it was a hillside of lemon-scented gums on a hot January day. Little black kids with curls the colour of sand run around playing with sticks, never imagining that a long, dark metal stick could one day blow them to bits.
‘But you sound like you don’t even care,’ I say to Mum.
‘Of course I care!’ Her voice is too fierce for the middle of the night. ‘Unlike our esteemed Prime Minister, I’d be happy to say sorry a million times.’
I didn’t mean to make her mad. ‘Sorry,’ I mumble.
That makes her chuckle. ‘Sorry a million times?’ she teases.
‘Sure, make it a billion.’
‘How about making me a cuppa instead?’
‘Okay.’
While I’m waiting for the kettle to boil, I go out to the mud room to check on Poppet and the kittens. I pick up Alice to hold her close, the way I couldn’t the baby in my dream. What I see, in the moonlight from the window, makes me gasp. I carry her into Mum and put her down on the book in front of her. ‘Look what happened!’ I say.
My mother, who isn’t even an animal lover, sounds full of wonder. ‘It’s like a little miracle,’ she says, gingerly picking up the kitten.
Sometime during the night, when I was having that nightmare and talking to Mum about horrible stuff, Alice opened her eyes.
Monday 24 September
12.30 p.m.
‘Did you hear about that actress who killed herself?’ Amy asks. ‘I can never remember her name. Reese… Reese…’
‘Witherspoon?’ Jazz supplies.
‘No, she did it with a knife!’
It takes me a second to get it, then I start laughing. Jazz looks a little put out, then Amy punches him on the arm, says, ‘Gotcha!’, and he starts laughing, too.
It feels so good to be sitting between two normal kids. The creepy way I felt after I had that dream last night is finally starting to fade. It helps that Leon isn’t here today, so I don’t have to see the face that never smiles.
We’re in maths, the class everybody likes best because the teacher doesn’t make us do any work. He just writes what exercises we’re supposed to do on the whiteboard, explains as quickly as he can how to do them and then leaves us alone and only yells at us if we get really loud. He’s the football coach, so his main interest is planning strategies for the next game or reading the sports pages of the Des Moines Register. Sometimes when he gets bored with that, he tells us stories about his college days, which are pretty funny.
I wonder what Leon’s doing. When he’s at home, does he keep on drawing his morbid little scenes? Maybe he’s gone round to our house and snuck in and he’s adding some more blood and gore to his collage…
‘You’re obsessed with that guy,’ Jazz says darkly.
‘What? I didn’t even say anything about him.’
‘You’re staring at him even though he’s not here.’
I feel my face go red. I guess I was looking at the spot up the front where Leon usually sits.
Amy is drawing daisies on the inside front cover of her maths exercise book. ‘Looks like he’s put in his appearance at school for the year,’ she says.
‘Yeah,’ Jazz agrees. ‘He set a record coming for as many days as he did.’
I almost ask, does that mean he won’t be here any more? Thank goodness I clamp my mouth shut before the words get out. I don’t want to prove Jazz’s point that I’m obsessed.
‘Oh, I almost forgot,’ Amy says. She flips to the back of her exercise book and takes out two A4 sheets folded in thirds like a brochure. On the outside there’s a picture of a witch that I’ve seen on Clip Art. She gives one to me and one to Jazz. We unfold the papers and inside there’s another computer picture, one of those round, orange pumpkins with a face carved into it. There are also some words in large print, asking us to a Halloween party at Amy’s house on October 31st.
‘It’s still only September,’ Jazz points out.
‘I know, but I was bored so I decided to do the invitations early.’
A Halloween party… just like the kids on American TV shows. This is something I’ll definitely put in an email to Vi.
‘You’ve gotta come,’ Jazz says to me. ‘Amy’s Halloween parties are awesome.’
‘As if I wouldn’t!’ I say, folding up my invitation and sticking it in the pocket of my jeans.
4.15 p.m.
I’m standing at the kitchen sink, gazing out the window over the cornfield, eating an apple and thinking, What’ll I do for a costume? The other kids who’ll be at the party have had years of experience dressing up for Halloween. Guess I’ll ask Evan next time I talk to him on MSN. He can tell me what he’s gone as the last couple of Halloweens and maybe I could adapt something.
If all else fails I can always cut two holes in a sheet and go as a ghost. Although the sheets that came with this house all have flowers or geometrical patterns on them. Guess I could go upstairs and search through the linen closet, which is crammed full. Maybe down at the bottom there’s some old sheets left over from the 1950s or whenever it was they used to be white.
Escape from Year Eight Page 7