When We Have Wings

by Claire Corbett

  ‘Fis?’ said Hugo, frowning. ‘Fis?’ He patted the grass. ‘Fis!’

  So that’s who you miss! Frisk. Do you even notice your parents aren’t here? Probably not. Peter played with you sometimes, as long as I was there too. But both of them were mostly too busy to look after you. Too busy to play with you. Too busy even to hold you.

  Peri looked up at the small-leaved trees filtering the sun. Apple trees, no flowers left, no fruit yet, in full late-summer leaf. Drifts of white-tinged pink petals in spring. In the evenings their white domes of blossom glowed as the light faded. ‘We lived on tank water, Hugo. That’s where we used to wash.’ She pointed to a long branch that stuck out towards the house. ‘Janeane hung an old canvas bag for a shower there.’ The warm water running down Peri’s body and the wind blowing over her as she showered was the best feeling she’d ever had. That and the cold creek pooling over stones, its water brown jelly where ripples and bugs wrinkled its transparent skin. She’d plunged her face into the water and let the jelly fill her mouth and eyes. Her skin smelled like rain.

  ‘We could go for a walk, Hugo. See if Janeane has any of her cows left. Or poor old Nutmeg, the horse, he’d have to be dead by now. I used to look after him.’

  But Janeane had told her not to go anywhere and Peri was exhausted. Her eyes closed where she knelt on the grass with Hugo. She picked him up and took him into the cool, dark house. Apart from shrinking, it hadn’t changed. More cobwebs between each slab of wood making up the walls. There, still with only a curtain for a door, was the alcove where she’d slept. She pushed the cloth aside and went in. Her old bed was still there, covered in papers and bits of old farm junk. She cleared the bed and sank onto it, the old bed now too small to hold her and her massive wings. One wing she folded beneath her, the other she opened out, letting it trail off the bed to the floor, Hugo tucked into her side underneath it.

  It was afternoon when Peri woke. Now the house was hot, tin roof popping as it expanded. The heat awakened a luscious smell, a fragrance woven so deep into her brain she was a small child again, waking in that room, seeing the light from the narrow window falling through dust, smelling the glorious scent drifting up from the floor. Linseed oil, soaked into the floorboards. She could hear Janeane moving around the kitchen, the click of the dog’s claws as he paced the verandah.

  After all these years, Janeane was just the same. Just as incurious, just as uncomforting, just as practical as ever. Peri’d turned up, needing help, clearly in some kind of trouble, and Janeane didn’t want to know. The less Janeane knew, the less she could betray Peri. The less she’d be implicated herself in whatever Peri was up to. And Janeane knew she was up to something. Everyone Janeane knew had business it was better not to poke your nose into.

  Peri thought about her time at the farm, when she hadn’t even realised that she’d been happy. At times, anyway. Janeane used to take her into the bush and tell her all about the birds and snakes they saw and how to check for ticks and how to get them out. She didn’t hug Peri after her nightmares; it never would have occurred to her. If Peri cried, Janeane waited for her to finish. Unlike Bronte, who reacted to Peri’s fear or anger by getting more upset more loudly than Peri. Bronte suffocated Peri with her own dramas. Peri understood later, caring for baby Hugo, that neither Janeane nor Bronte had a clue how to look after small children. Janeane spoke to Peri as if she were an adult, explaining how she grew the bananas, how she fixed her car, how to handle horses and cows, and Peri worked hard to understand and imitate her.

  By the time she was five, Peri fed and watered the farm animals. She could recognise problems with the old windmill by the sound it made. She’s more use around the farm than you are, mate, Janeane snorted at her sister and Bronte glowered furiously because it was true. Bronte preferred to go into town and stay overnight when she could get away or stay inside the farmhouse, drinking, when she could not.

  You’re the saddest child, Janeane had said to Peri. Don’t smile or laugh. I don’t know, is that normal?

  Even so, that was the happiest time, at the Owls, though Peri knew she was never more than a visitor. As Peri grew older she often thought that she must have remembered things about her mother and father when she first came to the farm at three or four, but those memories, never renewed by being with them, hearing their stories, seeing their pictures, had faded till she had nothing left except her nightmare. The whirl of grey feathers, the burning roof. Don’t move. You’ll fall. The voice her only memory. Where are Mummy and Daddy, what happened to them? she asked the woman in the car and Janeane and even Bronte. They said they didn’t know.

  Peri got up, twitched back the curtain. Janeane looked up from the kitchen table, where she’d been rummaging through Peri’s waistband.

  ‘Ah, thanks for bringing that in,’ Peri said, holding out her hand. So, Janeane was worried enough to be more inquisitive about Peri’s business than she let on. Shit, I am way too sloppy, leaving my stuff outside like that. Haven’t got the hang of this fugitive thing yet. Still, there’s nothing incriminating in there. Why would there be?

  ‘I haven’t done anything wrong, Janeane.’

  ‘Of course you haven’t. It’s just . . . the whole of the goddamn City not big enough for you? RaRA-land’s too small? No, no, you’ve got to go to the whole other side of the fucking continent. But sure, I believe you, everything’s fine. None of my business, really. Except I reckon I’ll have half the cops along the eastern seaboard dropping by for a chat.’

  Peri sighed.

  ‘So, then. Tea?’

  Sitting at the kitchen table on a stool that allowed her wings to sweep to the floor, Peri jiggled Hugo on her knee as she watched Janeane pour boiling water into enamel mugs.

  Janeane brought them over, set them down, then sat herself, sticking her long legs straight out in front of her, crossed at the ankle. She looked at Hugo. ‘Well, I can see the resemblance,’ she said to the baby. ‘I first knew your mama when she was just a few years older than you. Always figured her for the maternal type—should’ve seen how she spoiled my animals—but still, must say I’m surprised.’ She frowned at Peri. ‘Jeez, how old are you now? Old enough to be a mama, obviously. Still look like a baby yourself, though.’

  Peri was about to shake her head. No, you don’t understand, Hugo’s not—but saying that would be telling Janeane way too much. The fact she wasn’t Hugo’s mother was exactly the kind of information Janeane most needed not to know. If Janeane got too frightened she might force Peri off the farm with no help from her at all. Or, worse, Janeane might feel she had to tell someone, someone who’d take Hugo.

  ‘Ma,’ said Hugo. ‘Ma. Ma-ma-ma-ma-ma.’

  Peri smiled in spite of herself and hugged him.

  Janeane smiled mirthlessly, the vertical lines between her eyes etched deep.

  Peri sipped at her tea, keeping it well out of Hugo’s reach. She looked around the kitchen, remembering how the adults, Janeane and Bronte, and then Bronte’s boyfriend Shane, used to talk around this table and she’d listen as she lay awake in her bed in the alcove, the thin curtain failing to muffle their words. It was Shane who’d spoiled everything; Bronte followed him to his shack nearer the sea, in Pandanus, and insisted on taking Peri. Why? She could never understand. She was nothing to Bronte, just a nuisance.

  Peri had wanted to stay at the farm. At Shane’s she’d have to sleep in the glassed-in verandah. ‘Come with us, Aunty,’ she pleaded with Janeane.

  ‘I’m not your aunty,’ Janeane said through gritted teeth. ‘Stop bugging me.’

  And that night, as Peri had listened from her alcove, she’d heard Janeane say, ‘I can’t leave this farm, you know it as well as I do. Got to keep the business going. I’m a pharmer. I’ve got long-term deals with my clients. I can’t just change my mind, up and walk away. I’d have some seriously pissed-off people coming after me. You do know what pharmers do, Sh
ane? I’m sure Bronte’s filled you in on our little rural idyll up here in the hills, the industry that keeps this whole region solvent, though you townies like to pretend ignorance. So you know how it works, right? We grow pirated drugs and vaccines in bananas, splice the genes into our crops. We grow them in bananas because they’re easy to eat and there’s a huge market for this, it’s so much cheaper than the legit stuff.’

  Much later, living in Peter’s house, where she understood she’d begun her education all over again, the education for her real life, the life she’d longed and planned for, Peri realised it was painful for Janeane to become a pharmer but less painful than giving up the land altogether. Things Janeane had said to her as they walked over the farm came back to Peri and made sense; Janeane had not wanted to abandon the land. The decaying farms all around them disgusted her. What other work was there for her to do? If she didn’t pharm, she’d end up like Bronte.

  Peri never forgot the conversation she’d overheard because the worst time in her life began from that moment.

  ‘You don’t love me,’ she’d said to Janeane. ‘You’re not my aunty.’

  ‘That’s what I told you,’ Janeane had replied.

  Peri stared at Janeane now as she swallowed her tea. Did Janeane even remember saying that to her?

  ‘Do you ever go to the Venice?’

  ‘Don’t start,’ said Janeane. ‘That hole.’

  ‘I always remember something you said; you said it was a bit like Venice: dirty water where you’d expect the streets to be.’

  ‘The hell I did. At least when you left here you started going to school.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Janeane looked at her hands.

  Peri set her tea down. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘I was so happy when Bronte and Shane broke up. Guess that’s why Bronte thought I was a little bitch. I just assumed she’d bring me back here. To the farm. The bush. You.’

  Janeane blinked.

  The Venice. When Shane finally threw Bronte out, Peri had thought she and Bronte were going to live near the main beach in Pandanus. It was the most beautiful spot she’d ever seen, with its palms on dry mounds of rock rising at the north end, the rock pools on the southern end, and grass fringing the curve of sand. Further back, in the strip of shops across the road, stood the Naxos Cafe, the haunt of surfers and fishermen because it opened early and closed late. Peri loved the Naxos. Janeane sometimes took her there for a milkshake when she visited Pandanus.

  But Shane kept driving past the main beach, past the Naxos, the shops and the weatherboard houses, Bronte’s and Peri’s few belongings rattling in the back of his ute as he turned and bumped down a rough track. After a few minutes he pulled up at a gatehouse. Wire fencing stretched away from both sides of this ruined building, its every window smashed long ago. Peri wrinkled her nose at the stench coming from the piles of rubbish she could see behind the fence.

  Peri stared at a sign as they passed: The Venice Caravan Park.

  The sign, pocked with bullet holes, showed a faded picture of a man in a striped shirt poling a funny-looking crescent-shaped boat. Shane’s ute crunched over litter and Peri stared in horror as they passed a row of shacks leaning over a ditch of stagnant green water.

  Clothes were hanging in the open areas underneath the shacks and flapped from verandahs. Banana trees pushed up through the rubbish surrounding the stilts supporting the shacks. Women looked up from cooking fires which sent veils of smoke through the Venice and stared as the ute crunched over tins and paper and broken bits of wood.

  Shane turned right past a wall of rubbish and onto a muddy track heading towards the sea. When he stopped the ute and they got out in front of a small metal caravan, Peri could smell salt water as well as the rubbish; the stiff breeze blowing off the ocean carried the worst of the stench away. There was a constant shrieking as seagulls attacked the piles of rubbish. She looked around her in disbelief. Bronte had made a mistake, they couldn’t possibly live here; but no, Bronte was unlocking the caravan, carrying her things inside.

  Ragged children peered at Peri from behind a caravan and with a start she recognised an older boy from her school. Ryan: a bully and a thief. He often stole her meagre lunch, a lunch she’d scavenged herself from whatever was in the kitchen of Shane’s shack. Peri’s breath felt stuck. She yawned in anxiety, trying to swallow air past the blockage in her throat.

  True to form so far in her life, each change left Peri worse off than before. She dumped her bag in the caravan and stepped outside. Ryan came up to the steps, a few of the smaller kids following him.

  ‘Here now, eh?’

  ‘A few nights,’ Peri said, pushing her hair away from her face.

  Ryan’s smile flickered more briefly than the white flashes wheeling and diving over their heads. ‘Yeah, they all say that.’

  Ryan stood back as Peri came down the steps. He was thin and stunted. His hair was as dry as straw and his clothes were dirty. Peri tried not to smell him or the other little kids who now crowded around her.

  ‘My gang,’ said Ryan. ‘Water Rats. Show you round.’

  By the end of the week Peri’s scalp itched furiously with lice and she knew that Bronte was not going to take them back to the Owls. The Water Rats had shown her over most of the Venice. They’d shown her where the communal water tap was and explained she had to line up with her bucket by five in the morning if she wanted fresh water. They had shown her where the women and girls in the park relieved themselves, in the lee of a sand dune on the edge of the filthy lagoon seeping onto the beachfront.

  The Rats showed her where they lived: in rusting shipping containers, tents, ancient cars, packing cases and shelters woven out of grasses and branches, shored up with bits of board smeared with seagull droppings. It was hard to believe, but Bronte’s little caravan was one of the better places to live in the Venice.

  Most importantly, the Water Rats taught Peri to steal food. They showed her where the banana and papaya trees were, where each and every feral pumpkin and sprawling passionfruit vine grew. Mostly the Rats didn’t steal directly from shacks or cooking fires. The risk of a beating if caught was too great. Or they’ll set their dog on ya, Ryan warned. Hungry dogs roamed everywhere so Ryan taught Peri always to carry a sharp stone and how to aim it. Peri became a practised shot; all she had to do was raise her hand to make the dogs veer away from her.

  Peri was taller than the other Rats and so much of the stealing fell to her. During the second week the kids led her down to a shack unlike any other in the Venice, hidden in its own little jungle of breadfruit, mango and banana trees surrounded by scarlet wild ginger flowers. It was bigger, sturdier, with a balcony looking to the sea from its second storey. The window gleamed with real glass, unbroken, and the walls shimmered with aqua waves and emerald palm trees. Later she would understand that the unbroken glass in Mama’lena’s window meant she was important in the Venice; she was protected.

  ‘Go on,’ the Rats urged Peri, snorting and giggling behind their hands. Peri shrugged and moved towards the lowest hanging bunch of bananas. Just as she wrested it free, a hand descended with the weight of a sandbag on her shoulder. As Peri was spun around by a large angry woman, she saw the Rats disappearing over a dune of garbage.

  The woman dragged Peri into her shack and hit her hard on the bottom. Peri stared down at the woman’s orange and pink dress.

  The red sparkly scarf woven into the woman’s long black hair glittered as she yelled, ‘You a trouble child, ain’t you? Don’t you know stealing is wrong?’

  Peri blinked at her.

  The woman patted the heavy silver cross around her neck. ‘Well? Don’t you?’

  Peri nodded. Satisfied, the woman took the bananas, sat Peri down and gave her a cup of tea and a slice of bread with jam.

  Peri stared around the room in amazement. The walls were covered with p
ictures made from a rainbow of scavenged odds and ends. Some must have been of gods and angels, for they had wings; wings twisted from rusting wire and spangled with broken porcelain. A rainbow studded with butterflies and more angels arched right across the back wall. Peri stood up to examine it. The colours were made up of vivid scraps of plastic flowers and toys, torn pieces of milk carton, cardboard boxes and flattened soft-drink cans, shreds of ribbon from dolls’ dresses, blue and pink flakes of shell and shards of green glass, sandblasted by the sea.

  That was how Peri met Mama’lena.

  Mama’lena made Peri comb her hair to get the lice out while Mama’lena read her a chapter from the Bible. Peri learned this was the price of food from Mama’lena: you had to listen to words from the Bible. It was a price Ryan and the other Rats were not willing to pay but Peri didn’t mind. Every day she visited Mama’lena. She liked being read to. She liked having an adult pay attention to her. She even learned to recite Mama’lena’s favourite Bible verses back to her. You one of the few kids in here can read, Mama’lena commented. But you can’t sing yet. I’ll teach you. And she taught Peri hymns and songs from her village in the Islands. Peri didn’t understand the language but she loved the songs. Most often, they would sing Mama’lena’s favourite song, ‘Isa Lei’, until Mama’lena had tears in her eyes.

  ‘Isa lei, the purple shadow falling. That’s about my home,’ Mama’lena would say.

  Peri liked the haze in the shack from incense and the cooking fire and Mama’lena’s smell of smoke and soap, and she liked the feeling of Mama’lena’s warm solid arms when she hugged her. She didn’t like the other girl, an older girl of eleven or twelve, practically a woman, who also hung around Mama’lena and hissed little cow, stupid cow at Peri. Mama’lena scolded her, saying, ‘Neveah, leave that poor girl alone,’ when she saw that once again the older girl had pinched Peri or pulled her hair. But Peri was not easily dislodged. It would take more than Neveah’s jealousy to drive her away.