The Gulf

by Anna Spargo-Ryan

  ‘Okay, let’s ask them. Someone must have seen him.’

  We went everywhere. Into the pub, which wasn’t open yet but still had a sad old man with his head down on the bar. He grunted, and the publican polished the space around him while he spoke to his glass. She hadn’t seen a kid. Not a kid in a red jumper, or a kid in a hat, or a kid with pelican shoes. We went to the supermarket, where Daryl’s eyes went all over Raf, and Jeannie said, Everything all right, love? but the automatic doors were already closing and I thought of Raf asking me, just for a second, if I should call work, but there was no time for that. We went to the chicken shop, and the other chicken shop, and the doctor’s surgery, in case he’d had an accident and someone had taken him in, and the train station, where a woman waited to be taken somewhere else, and down to the jetty. But he wasn’t building anyone into a sandcastle. He wasn’t getting stung by a jellyfish. He wasn’t anywhere.

  A shadow was suddenly on us. It had a thick smell, a corpse smell. The drunk from the pub. He lurched towards us with his arms out, missed Raf’s shoulder and went stumbling into the sand, fell to his knees.

  ‘You right, mate?’ Raf shoved him with his shoe. ‘Bludgers.’

  The backs of my knees were suddenly warm. I turned around, came face to face with him, dick out, pissing on my shoes.

  ‘Are you serious?’ Raf kicked the sand into his face, into the hole where his mouth had opened into laughter. The morning collapsed on me. And then the week on top of that, took me by the shoulders and forced me to the sand, too, into the wet sand.

  Raf went down the list, putting furious lines through the places we’d been.

  ‘School,’ he said. ‘We haven’t tried his school. We should have gone there first. Why didn’t we go there first? It makes so much sense that he’d be at school. He wouldn’t want to get in trouble. He’d definitely go there. Quick! Skye, come on.’

  My heart pounded, out and around the corners and across the creek and past the caravan park and to the final stop of the walking bus. The school gate croaked behind us, slipped into its compulsory latch. The woman at reception blinked, pushed her glasses up her nose. ‘Ben Teller?’ She clicked around on her computer. ‘Wasn’t here at the bell.’

  My heart dropped. ‘Did anyone call to see where he was?’

  She clicked a few more times. ‘Says we left a message with his father.’

  ‘Right.’ I thought of Jason, turning over his five-dollar notes on the glass table, letting his phone ring out in the next room. I burned from head to toe. Couldn’t catch my breath all the way, like it had stuck to the top of my throat. ‘We’re going to have a look around.’

  ‘Is something wrong?’ she said. Saliva caught on the hairs above her lip. Droplets on a leaf.

  ‘Yeah, something’s wrong. My brother is missing.’ Raf slammed the door behind us. The receptionist blinked out, put the phone receiver to her ear.

  ‘Those clouds look bad,’ I said.

  Raf squeezed my hand. ‘He’s a resourceful kid. I bet he’s found a dry spot somewhere.’

  We hunted past the kids bottled into their classrooms, their fishy mouths opening and closing with lessons.

  In the corner of the playground, near the boundary, under the fence with the wattle falling over it, I saw his little shoulders. Their right angles, the way they hunched over his whole body, as though he hadn’t grown into them yet. He was facing away from us but he’d brushed his hair so it shone.

  ‘Raf! Raf, he’s over there.’ I pointed. We ran and tripped and collided with our relief. Ben looked up at us.

  ‘I was looking for your parrot,’ he said. ‘Parrots can live to be a hundred years old. Yiannis says people who live to be a hundred years old can’t even go to the toilet on their own. He says they have to carry a bag around in their pyjamas.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ I said, breath in torrents.

  ‘His papou is a hundred and one years old. Yiannis helped him go to the toilet once. He said he smelled like if an underwear drawer had bird crap in it.’

  ‘Ben!’

  He gave a crooked little smile. ‘Anyway, I wanted to show Bilbo where I come at lunch.’ He pulled the tortoise from behind his back. ‘We’re not supposed to bring pets to school but he’s so quiet I just keep him in my bag under my desk and if my teacher asks what the scratching noise is I just tell her I have nits.’

  ‘We were worried about you,’ I said. ‘I went to get you out of bed and you weren’t there.’

  ‘But I was at school.’

  ‘But it wasn’t even seven thirty.’

  ‘I got up early so I could find some frogs. I heard them during the night. Did you hear them? When it rains all these frogs just appear from nowhere but it takes a few weeks for the tadpoles to hatch and it rained the whole time when we first got here so I’ve been waiting for them.’

  ‘Did you find any?’

  ‘Nah. I found a big centipede, though. Most centipedes don’t have a hundred legs. I don’t know why they call them centipedes.’

  ‘I nearly called the police.’

  ‘They might have brought their dogs with them. They’re called K-9, did you know that? There’s a whole squad of dogs and they’re called K-9 because it sounds like “canine”. Don’t you think that’s clever?’

  ‘Super clever.’

  ‘They could’ve taught Murray some manners. Right and wrong.’ His shoulders shook. In a quiet voice, he said, ‘I did run away, today. I went to school but I was still running away. It was just the only place I could think of running away to.’

  Raf took out his phone and I heard Claud’s panicked voice answer.

  ‘He’s at school,’ Raf said. ‘We’re here with him.’ Ben pushed his nose under my arm, stuck his little head out at me.

  ‘I’m a tortoise,’ he said. ‘You smell weird.’

  On the other end of the phone, Claud let out all her breath and I heard her echoing voice: ‘Where was he? At school? What a bloody legend.’

  *

  Daryl was waiting for me by the automatic doors. Shirt pulling near his bellybutton, hands on his hips.

  ‘You’re late,’ he said. ‘What the hell was that stunt earlier?’

  ‘It’s only nine thirty. I had an emergency.’

  He raised his eyebrows. ‘An emergency, huh? What kind of emergency?’

  ‘Probably none of your business.’ The words fell out, waiting for him to grab them and shake them, but he didn’t.

  ‘It is when you’re on my payroll.’ He handed me the texta. He was amped up, all this positivity leaking out of him. He moved quickly, easily, like something was lifting him off the ground.

  ‘Why’re you so happy?’

  ‘You should know,’ he said, and jabbed his finger into my ribs. I winced; Jason’s fist, the bruise that stretched from bellybutton to breastbone. ‘I’ve got a promotion. They’re moving me to head office. Pay rise, too. Thirty-two dollars an hour.’ He puffed himself out, his accordion sides, until he was shaped like a gold trophy. ‘How about that?’

  ‘Great.’ I crossed out the old prices, wrote in the new ones. Put a sticker over the part of the meat that had turned grey in the freezer, so no one would notice it until they got home.

  ‘It’s in Port Pirie. They’ve got me starting the week after next.’

  ‘Good for you.’

  He dragged a crate along the floor, sat on it with his eyes pointing up to me. ‘That deal we made, though.’ His fingers made their way to my left hand. I kept scribbling with the right one, crossing out the numbers and writing new numbers. His sweat on my skin. The ragged breaths popped out of him as clouds in the cold room. I said nothing. ‘Skye. I put myself on the line getting you these hours. We had a deal.’

  Five dollars. Three dollars. A pack of steaks that expired yesterday, cross it out, put a sticker over the date. Six dollars. Four shiny chicken breasts, half price. His hand on my hand. The cold air, pulling my throat open to get past the rising bile. Eleven dollars for a lamb leg. Two s
chnitzels at seventy per cent off. I put them aside to buy myself later. The clock in the freezer room said it was nearly ten.

  I thought of the money growing in my account. Tried to remember what I’d said to Daryl that day, exactly what I’d promised him. I looked down at him, his hair slicked back in a greasy wave, bags under his eyes, trousers pulled tight across his thighs.

  ‘No we didn’t.’

  He smiled, squeezed my hand harder. ‘I scratched your back.’ He had his other hand on the back of my head and he pushed hard against it. ‘You gotta scratch mine. It’s only fair.’ He gave my hair a sharp tug, pulled my mouth right into his lap. The smell. Shit. He let go of my hand, unzipped his fly. Blackness. The whir of the freezers. The texta still in my hand like a knife. Both his hands on the back of my head. I couldn’t breathe, didn’t want to, couldn’t get the air into my chest but felt every bit of his wet skin on my cheek, on my neck. Tried to pull my head back against his hands. Tried to turn my face away but couldn’t. Tried to get my brain together. He let one hand go from my head, just enough, and I bit the chafed flesh inside his thigh.

  He jumped, pushed the crate away. ‘You little bitch,’ he spat. Someone was shouting in the store. ‘This isn’t over. I should fire you.’ He limped out, heavy on the side where a little bitch had got her teeth into his skin.

  After he was gone I pulled up my shirt, touched my skin where purple and blue had bloomed across my abdomen. EARN MORE MONEY.

  I wrote the numbers, faster and faster, eight dollars, six dollars, a dollar fifty. Grabbed the bin and coughed my empty guts into it, the hot rash of reflux in my throat. Crossed out the numbers, put the stickers on, shook the texta to get the ink moving. In the freezer room, the outline of him still hung where he’d been, bits of his sweat stuck to the frozen air.

  Ben and I sat at the kitchen table with the notebook open. It was dark already. Mum and Jason had taken the new car somewhere, told me again to keep out of his stuff and balled up his hand while he said it.

  ‘It doesn’t have to be perfect,’ I said. ‘The plan. We can figure some of it out when we get there.’

  ‘I still think it’s weird Mum never mentions it.’

  ‘But it’s a secret. Would you go around talking about a secret all the time?’

  He gasped. ‘Me? Never!’

  ‘So you understand.’

  He chewed on his pen. ‘I think we should leave at four o’clock. Nighttime is darkest before the sun comes up so if we leave at four it should be very dark and then the neighbours won’t see us. If the neighbours see us, they’ll probably tell Jason and then he’ll come after us.’ He wrote FOUR OCLOCK (A.M.) in big letters on an empty page.

  ‘I looked it up and the train is at seven. We can hide in your bushranger bunker if you want, but I don’t think it really matters. No one from school will be there yet. I mean, who catches the train at seven o’clock in the morning?’

  ‘Maybe adults going to work in Port Pirie?’ Ben wrote ADULTS –> PORT PIRIE with a few question marks. ‘It will be cold. It might be warmer if we stay in the bunker.’

  ‘We can figure that out when we get there, I guess.’ I took out my own pen. ‘So we catch the train at seven, and it gets us to Adelaide right before lunchtime. About four hours. Then we can transfer from that train to the other one, which will take us into the city.’

  ‘Then what?’

  We sat in silence. I flipped to EARN MORE MONEY. Ben added GO TO NONNO’S FARM and was quiet again.

  ‘How will we find him?’ he said finally. ‘Did you find his address?’

  ‘No,’ I admitted.

  ‘Didn’t you call him?’

  ‘Not yet. I wanted to wait until we were definitely coming.’

  ‘Are we not definitely coming?’

  ‘We are, definitely.’

  ‘So shouldn’t we tell him?’

  When I was about five, Dad turned up at the apartment we were living in, down near the marina. Ben wasn’t born yet, but Mum threw her huge belly around every corner and in the afternoons I rubbed her feet in front of the TV. That night Dad knocked on my window. His face took up the whole thing, smiling and trying to pull the blinds apart. Get your bag, he said. And I said maybe we should ask Mum first, tell her where we were going so she didn’t worry. Nah, he said, with his eyes all lit up, she’ll just say no. Easier to ask someone to forgive you.

  ‘He’ll be excited to see us,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to spoil the surprise.’

  Ben turned a couple of pages. Underneath ADULTS –> PORT PIRIE, he wrote SURPRISE SKYES NONNO.

  ‘When we get to the main train station, we can go to one of the motels and stay there for a night. You’ll be tired. It’s a long way to go on the train and we should have a rest before we go up to the farm. Nonno will probably make us work right away, picking oranges.’

  ‘It’s not orange season,’ Ben said.

  ‘Well, something. He’s probably still got some goats or chickens or something that needs looking after. He must be old by now. Sixty at least.’

  There was a noise in the street and we both turned to look at it. Ben closed the notebook. Waited a few seconds with our breath clamped in our chests. Nothing.

  ‘We might even spend two days in the city. I thought I could take you to the zoo and the museum. Stuff we haven’t been able to do since we moved here.’

  ‘That sounds good,’ he said, and wrote GO TO MUESEUM on the paper.

  ‘Once we’re with Nonno, he’ll help us with the next bits. Mum will get you booked in to school, and me. I can get a part-time job somewhere and we can make new friends and live on his farm until Mum finds us our own place. You’ll like it there.’

  ‘Tell me about the farm.’

  I told him what I remembered of the last times I’d been there. The way the breeze came down the hill and into the valley and shook the fruit around. The neighbours, far down the road, calling to each other and singing. The smell; wet eucalyptus and pine needles and dirt being turned over. A pub down the road that served roast lunches on Sundays and the local shops with sky-high vanilla slices and waiting for Dad to come out of the petrol station.

  ‘Mostly it’s just quiet,’ I said. ‘Not quiet like it is here, like the rest of the world doesn’t exist. Just peaceful.’

  He closed his eyes. ‘Peaceful sounds nice.’

  I took the notebook from him, turned to a new page. ‘The main thing is that we’re all there. Okay? We don’t need to think of all this stuff right now, but we do need to stick together.’ I drew a really bad pair of stick figures and made them hold hands. ‘People might come looking for us.’

  ‘Who? Jason?’ he said.

  ‘Maybe. Maybe other people from here. If they do, I’m not going to let them separate us. Okay?’

  ‘Okay.’ He grabbed the pen and drew a third stick figure – straw for hair, like Mum – then yawned. ‘I hope Mum comes home before I go to sleep,’ he said. ‘So I can hug her.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I miss her.’

  I put my arm around him. ‘I know this is a bit scary. We’ll be fine. Mum will love being at the farm with us.’

  ‘Yeah, I know.’

  Moonlight slid between the curtains and fell in shards across his Thomas the Tank Engine sheets. His small body, the tiny curve hidden there. I took out the notebook again. Turned to the page with the plan.

  At the bottom of the page I wrote a few more words. A secret plan of my own.

  15

  FOR AGES I CARRIED a photo of Dad in my pocket. Me and him on a merry-go-round. One weekend Mum did the washing for the first time in her life and the photo was in there, in my jeans, and then the water came through and it wasn’t anymore.

  Raf’s footy tour was due to leave on Sunday. They were going all around the Gulf, up to Port Augusta and down to Whyalla and all the way to Port Lincoln, where the final was. The guys and girls had separate buses but everyone knew what happened when they got there – the post-game parties an
d the midnight streaking down the main streets.

  He arrived early in the morning. Ben answered the door, whispered ‘Raf!’ as loudly as he dared and attached himself to Raf’s leg. Raf was smiling. He put his hand out and I took it, found my memory in the rough edges of his fingers and his warm palm.

  Mum and Jason were sitting out on the back verandah, talking to Murray and maybe to each other, so we lingered in the doorway for a minute. Ben stared at us. I wanted him to leave, give me a second to think about what I could say to Raf. I wanted to tell him about Daryl and the supermarket, but the words didn’t come and the TV was too loud.

  ‘When do you get back again?’ I said instead.

  ‘End of the term,’ he said. ‘Goes into the school holidays if we win the whole thing. They take us down to Adelaide to go to the Royal Show.’

  ‘Oh, cool.’ My chest got tight. I tried to say I would miss him. A bit of spit just came out instead, landed on my t-shirt.

  ‘We probably won’t win, though.’ He squeezed me closer. ‘I mean, I might, but the rest of the guys aren’t taking it very seriously this year. Dicks.’

  ‘Hey, Raf.’ Ben sat on the floor in front of him. ‘When you get back, maybe we can catch the train somewhere all together.’ He looked at me and tried to wink. ‘Have you been to Alice Springs? Did you know in summer it can be fifty degrees in Alice Springs? I think that’s hot enough to cook an egg on the road. Maybe you wouldn’t want to eat it though, if it’s been on the road. Dirt and stuff.’

  Raf smiled. ‘Sounds good. It’ll be the holidays so we’ll have heaps of time to do whatever you like.’

  There was a knock on the sliding door to the verandah, and Mum called out: ‘You kids here?’

  ‘Let’s go,’ I said. ‘Over the road. Find another hopping mouse.’

  ‘Ooh yeah!’

  We walked across to the spinifex block and I lay with Raf on the dead grass and the sky was so big, sheets and sheets of cloudless eternity.

  ‘So,’ I said. ‘Two weeks.’

  ‘Two weeks.’

  ‘What are we going to do?’

  ‘Sext?’

  ‘You do that?’