‘You’ll be sorry when we bring them home,’ threatened Young Jim. ‘If you don’t hunt them you can’t eat them.’
Elaine snorted. ‘I didn’t say I wouldn’t eat them. You find them and I’ll cook them. Fair exchange. I’ll even bring the water up for Ma instead of you.’
‘Fair enough.’ Young Jim grinned. ‘Come on, Bubba, before she changes her mind. I’ll sneak home and get some sacks and then we’re off.’
It was dark underneath the tree. It smelt musty and felt prickly on her feet. Barbara craned upward, trying to see Young Jim through the branches.
‘Look out below!’
It sounded like a bomb was crashing through the tree, landing with a thud of broken branches and dusty leaves on the other side. Barbara ran to look at it.
‘It’s huge!’ she yelled up to Young Jim.
‘Told you so!’ Young Jim sounded hot and breathless. ‘Stand clear. There’s another one just here.’
‘You be careful!’ yelled Barbara.
‘Go teach your grandmother to suck eggs! I’ve done this dozens of times. You just make sure you keep out of the way. If you get one of these on your head you’ll be flatter than a pancake. Here it comes!’
‘I’ll just find one more. Ouch!’
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Cripes! It’s these blasted prickles. I got one in my bum. Hey, don’t you laugh, it hurts.’
‘Well I’m not going to kiss it better, that’s for sure.’ Barbara poked her toe at the giant balls by her feet. ‘How are we going to get these home anyway?’
‘That’s what I brought the sacks for. You carry one nut and I’ll put the other two in mine. Think you can manage it?’
‘If you can carry two I can carry one,’ said Barbara with determination.
‘Huh, listen to her. They’ll make you a strong man in the circus next.’
‘Nah, I’ll just stick you in a cage and call you a gorilla and charge five dollars admission.’
‘Five what?’ Young Jim’s head peered down through the branches.
‘Dollars. Oh! Like pounds—you know, money, cash.’
‘Sure I know what dollars are. Yanks have them. You have dollars too, where you come from?’
‘Sure. Since—I’m not sure—in the sixties sometime.’
Young Jim laughed high up in his tree. ‘Crazy, crazy, crazy. Think anyone’d really pay five quid to see my face?’
‘Nah. Tuppence ha’penny maybe and even then they’d want their money back. You’ve got a face like the back end of a budgie.’
‘Garn! Where’d you hear that one?’
‘Gully Jack. He said Mrs Reynolds has got a face like the back end of a budgie and she plays the piano like a cockatoo with chilblains. All because she said his fiddle was out of tune at last Friday’s dance.’
Young Jim laughed. ‘Maybe I should sing then. You think people might pay to hear me sing?’ He began yelling at the top of his voice:
‘Hallelujah I’m a bum,
Hallelujah bum again.’
‘Hey, that’s the song that kid was singing!’
‘Well, I can sing it too, can’t I? I bet my voice is better than his…
Oh, people say bum,
Save the money you earn,
Well if I didn’t eat I’d have money to burn,
Hallelujah I’m a bum—’
‘Well, it’s louder anyway,’ commented Barbara.
‘Spoilsport. Come on…
Hallelujah bum again,
Hallelujah show us your garters, to revive us
again.
Oh why don’t you work, like other men do?
Well how can I work when the sky is so blue
…Just like Gully Jack isn’t it? Can you imagine him all shut up in an office?
Hallelujah I’m a bum,
Hallelujah bum again,
Hallelujah show us your garters,
—Barbara joined in—
To revive us again.
I went to the door,
To ask for some bread,
But the lady said bum bum
the baker is dead,
Hallelujah I’m a bum
…Hey, what’s up?’
‘Just got a bit of leaf in my throat,’ complained Barbara. ‘You going to stay up there all day singing, or what?’
‘Nearly got it.’ Young Jim sawed carefully with his pocketknife. ‘All clear below?’
‘All clear!’ The final nut landed near the others. There was a shower of dead leaves and bits of bark as Young Jim made his way carefully down the bunya tree, avoiding the sharp leaves as best he could, hunting out footholds in the rough bark.
‘Cripes, I’m glad I borrowed Dad’s old long pants. My legs’d be cut to ribbons.’
‘Just as long as you don’t tear his pants.’
‘He’d forgive me, as long as I brought the bunyas home.’
‘I wouldn’t bet on it’ Barbara gave one of the giant nuts a shove with her toe. ‘Sure you can eat these things?’
‘Sure I’m sure. I’ve brought them back dozens of times. You just throw them in the fire till they open and the nuts are cooked. You’ve never eaten anything till you’ve eaten bunya nuts.’
‘I’ve never heard of them,’ admitted Barbara.
‘Don’t they have bunya trees where you come from?’
‘Don’t think so.’
Young Jim began to stuff the giant nuts in the sacks. He seemed to be thinking. Finally he looked back up at Barbara.
‘Bubba, I was wondering. Would you go back now if you could?’
‘Go where?’
‘Back home.’
Barbara’s face shut cold and tight. ‘I don’t have a home.’
‘Of course you do, silly. Your home is here. You know what I mean—back to your own time.’
Barbara hesitated. ‘I don’t know. No. No, I wouldn’t. I tried when I first came here. I didn’t tell you, because you’d all been so kind. I sat down by the creek and tried to think myself around the corner.’
‘What happened?’
‘It didn’t work. Maybe I just didn’t try hard enough. I didn’t really want to get back.’
‘What about now?’
‘Now I want to stay here. This is home, like you said.’
Young Jim didn’t say anything. He just grinned, slowly and happily, and nodded. He went back to stuffing the nuts into the sacks.
‘Here,’ he said. ‘Think you can lift it?’
‘Sure.’ Barbara heaved it over her shoulder. It was heavier than she’d expected and awkward, bobbing around and hitting the back of her legs with every step. ‘I think I can manage it.’
‘Good girl.’ Young Jim hoisted his own. His knees bent under the strain, bulging like grapefruits. ‘We’d better get a move on then. I don’t like the look of the sky.’ He pointed towards the end of the valley. The clouds were massed like bright purple marshmallows, tinged with green.
‘Think there’ll be a storm?’
‘I reckon. Should have guessed there’d be one after the heat this morning. Looks like it’s moving up this way. I haven’t seen clouds like that since the first week we were in the valley. Dad’d only just got the vegie bed dug and the rain washed all the soil away. Came down in sheets.’ He peered at the sky again. ‘It’s getting darker. Come on, shift your tail.’
It was hard walking with a sack of bunya nut. The sun poured through the trees, ignoring the fat clouds at the end of the valley. The sweat made little gullies down Barbara’s face and neck. She should have worn a hat, she thought, except she didn’t have one. None of the O’Reillys seemed to wear hats, except when they were dressed up. Dad had worn a felt hat to the meeting, and Ma had worn a hat too, a funny one that only covered half her head with a bit of netting on the side, nothing that would keep the sun off. No-one here had ever heard of the greenhouse effect and the thinning ozone layer. Maybe they’d never even heard of skin cancer. Perhaps she should make a hat. If you could make your own hous
e and school and furniture surely you could make a hat. She could make everyone hats for Christmas presents.
The air felt wet already, too thick with humidity to push through. Barbara let her sack fall and tried to catch her breath. Young Jim shook his head.
‘Come on. We’ve got to get going. Look!’
The world was darker, almost shadowless. The sky was a dull, smooth grey above their heads and blackish-purple above the ridges. The air smelt like burnt electrical cord. A pair of currawongs darted towards shelter, their wings flapping heavily in the thick air. Thunder grumbled somewhere beyond the horizon.
They’d reached the creek when the rain began. Suddenly the air turned liquid, each drop so hard it stung their faces.
‘Drop the sack!’ yelled Young Jim.
‘What about the nuts?’
‘They won’t melt. We’ll pick them up later. We’ll drown if we stay out in this!’
They battled through the heavy air. Barbara tried to push her hair out of her eyes, but the rain thrust it back again. Her skirt clung to her legs as though it was trying to tie them together.
Ma was looking for them, standing outside the shack, a newspaper held above her head to shield her from the spray as the rain danced on the tin. She began to scold as soon as they were near.
‘No more sense than a pair of chickens! You’d think you were both old enough now to know when to come in out of the rain. And look at your Dad’s good trousers. Bubba, you get out of those wet things, there’s dry clothes out for you on the bed. You get that hair dry too. Young Jim, I don’t want to hear another word out of you till you’re dry. What were you thinking of, keeping Bubba out in the rain like that. There’s stew still hot in the camp oven, not that you deserve a drop of it.’
It was warm inside the shack, a smelly friendly warmth from lots of bodies. The little ones were on Ma’s bed, lifting up the canvas window so they could see the rain. Elaine handed Barbara the dry clothes—a skirt that looked as if it had been one of Dulcie’s, long and faded, and a jumper that might have come from Dulcie’s father, mended at the elbows, slightly frayed around the neck. It smelt of lavender and cloves, prickly, warm and dry.
Elaine watched her dress. ‘It’s all right, she’s decent,’ she yelled to Young Jim. ‘You can come in now. Here, Joey, you stick some newspaper in her shoes will you? They’re absolutely sodden.’ She shook her head. ‘You should’ve heard Ma when you weren’t back. She was afraid the creek’d flood and you’d be trapped on the other side.’
‘Do you think it’ll flood?’
‘Shouldn’t be surprised,’ said Young Jim, towelling his hair with a bit of sacking as he came in the door. He was in dry clothes too, the cut-off trousers Barbara had first seen him in and the same blue faded shirt. It seemed so long ago now, as though Poverty Gully was the only real world there’d ever been.
Young Jim knelt on the bed next to Thellie. ‘Look at that rain,’ he marvelled. ‘You’d think someone had turned on all the taps in heaven.’ He looked around. ‘Where’s Dad?’
‘Down at the school.’ Ma bustled in, a plate of stew in either hand. ‘You get this into you before you catch your death of cold. There’s more if you want it. Sergeant Ryan brought up some old tin from down the valley. Mr Henderson thought a verandah out the front would be a good idea. You can eat your lunches there when it rains.’
‘I suppose he brought it up in the police car.’
‘What if he did?’
‘I’d like to hear what Sydney’d say if they knew about it.’
‘What Sydney doesn’t know won’t hurt them. Sergeant Ryan keeps better order in this valley than the lot of them up there with their batons and arrests.’
‘That’s right, you tell them Ma.’
‘And none of your lip either,’ said Ma. ‘Or I’ll be making some arrests of my own.’ She looked up at the ceiling where a large fat drop of water was gathering. ‘If there’s any tin left over we could do with a few repairs. What I wouldn’t do to have a proper roof over us by winter.’
Barbara smiled to herself. She wondered when Gully Jack would come up. After dinner, probably. She couldn’t wait to see Ma’s face, and Dad’s.
Thellie edged over to Barbara and peered at her stew. ‘You still hungry?’ asked Barbara.
Thellie took her thumb out of her mouth. ‘No. Ma made me eat all my pumpkin. My tummy says it’ll burst if you stick a pin in it. I want a story. Will you tell me a story, Bubba?’
Barbara looked at her, her face still smeared with stew, her big eyes clear and happy. It was funny the way her old life was just a story to amuse the kids now. It was so far away it almost didn’t hurt at all any more.
‘Okay. What’ll I tell you? Hey, do you know about Big Macs, and pizzas, and video games, and—’
She talked between spoonfuls of stew, while the water thundered on the roof and slid down the sides of the shack. Young Jim sat whittling in his corner, smiling to himself as she talked. She put her empty plate down and Thellie curled up on the bed beside her. The other little ones curled up too, and the stories of her past life entertained them as it rained.
‘And the cars make so much noise it’s like an ocean, always roaring, and there are no horses on the streets at all.’
‘Not even pulling the baker’s van?’
‘Not even the baker’s van.’
‘Or the milkman’s either?’
‘Or the milkman’s.’
‘Where do you get the manure for your gardens then?’
Barbara was nonplussed. ‘Oh, I suppose people just buy fertiliser from the garden centre, or the supermarket.’
‘What’s a supermarket?’
Thellie could have been asking about fairy palaces, or dragons with scales like rainbow-coloured armour.
‘It’s a great big shop, a hundred times as big as Nicholson’s, with everything on shelves. You just walk down with a trolley and pick up what you want.’
Thellie bounced up and down.
‘And you don’t have to pay?’
‘Of course you have to pay, but not till you get to the checkout—that’s when you want to leave the shop. Not like down the valley where you have to ask the man behind the counter for the things you want.’
‘Can you get ice-cream in the super things?’ asked Thellie dreamily.
‘Of course. There’s whole freezers full of ice-cream, great big buckets of it, all different sorts, and frozen yoghurt and ice-cream cake and sorbet and…’
‘I’ve had three ice-creams,’ said Joey importantly. ‘One on my birthday two years ago, and one from the machine at the railway station when we came down here, and—’
‘I’ve had an ice-cream too,’ broke in Thellie.
‘Not as many as me you haven’t,’ said Joey.
‘Have so too. I’ve had—’
‘Finished,’ exclaimed Young Jim. He held up his carving so it caught the light. The lizard’s eyes were shut and its mouth was open. Its forelegs were long and straight and its tail curled around toward its head. Young Jim brushed the wood chips off his lap.
‘What do you think of it?’ He tossed it over to Barbara.
She ran a finger over it. ‘It’s beautiful. Look at its eyes and everything, and the way its skin folds under its chin. It’s exactly like the dragons down on the rocks.’
‘You keep it then,’ said Young Jim.
‘Can I really? But—’
‘Just rub a bit of dripping into it to stop any cracking,’ ordered Young Jim. ‘And don’t you let it get wet, mind, or leave it out in the sun.’
‘Hey, the rain’s stopping,’ said Joey. ‘Look.’
Barbara knelt on the bed and peered out the window. The rain had gentled to a thin, wet, mist. Fat clouds hung over the ridges, round as Dulcie’s scones. The first streaks of sunset lit the horizon, grey then pink, and gold below.
‘Almost like it’s morning just over the horizon,’ said Young Jim.
‘I suppose it’s always morning somewhere,’
said Elaine. ‘Come on, let’s go and see the creek. There’ll be a flood for sure!’
chapter twenty-one
Flood!
The air smelt clean, like freshly washed socks. Diamond raindrops shimmered in the casuarinas, and the bark of the gum trees shone cream and orange.
The kids raced down the hill, their bare feet pressing the wet dirt and grass.
‘Hey look, it’s not up yet.’
‘Won’t be long!’ yelled Young Jim. ‘Listen!’
There was a rumbling up the gorge as a wall of water swept around the bend.
The clear creek water was smothered by the flood, sucked under by the raging silt and mud and water. Boulders ground together like giant teeth as they rolled over and over under the swirling foam. The ground shuddered beneath their bare feet.
‘It’s frightening,’ whispered Barbara. ‘Everything so calm and peaceful then suddenly this comes from round the bend.’
‘Can’t hear you!’ yelled Young Jim over the noise of the water. ‘No you don’t, Joey. You keep away from the edge.’
‘I won’t fall in,’ said Joey indignantly.
‘Says who?’ Young Jim grabbed his hand.
‘Where’s Thellie?’ demanded Elaine. ‘Blast the kid, there she is over there. She’s heading for Gully Jack’s channel.’
‘Probably wants to see if it’s flooded too,’ said Young Jim. ‘Thellie! You come back here! Thellie!’
‘She can’t hear above the flood,’ said Barbara. ‘I’ll go and bring her back.’
‘Don’t be long!’ Elaine called after her. ‘It’ll be pitch dark soon.’
The grass along the creek bank was slippery, dark green and pointing upwards like it had drunk deep. The whole gully had changed. The groan of the water smothered the song of wind and leaves; the smell of the flood not the scent of bark and bush. The trees glowed as the light of dusk filtered through the raindrops on the leaves.
Somewhere around the Corner Page 14