‘Oh, I already bought our tickets. If we don’t get this train we can’t get a refund and I worked so hard to save up for them. You know? Mum doesn’t want us to waste all that money.’
He chewed on a fingernail. ‘Well, okay.’
‘Grab your shoes.’
‘Is Claud driving us?’
‘It’s so early. I said we’d walk down.’
‘Okay.’ He rubbed his face. ‘We can’t forget anything,’ he said. ‘If we forget anything and we have to come back they’ll put us in jail and Mum won’t even visit because we left her behind when we promised to take her with us.’
‘Stop it. That’s not happening,’ I said. ‘But we do have to go. Now.’
He grabbed my hands, looked me dead in the eye, as serious as he’d ever been about anything. ‘There’s something I have to do first though. At Jason’s house.’
‘I don’t want to go back there.’
‘It’s just one thing.’
‘I don’t want you to go back there.’
‘It’ll take five seconds.’
‘What is it?’
‘I can’t tell you. It’s just a thing and I have to do it and I don’t want to say it.’ His frantic face, eyes flicking everywhere.
I sighed. ‘Okay. But you have to be so quiet, Ben.’
We closed Claud’s door – Raf’s door – and stood in the moonlight, Ben’s eyes big and his neck stamped with fingerprint bruises. The streets were empty. All the houses locked up tight, people inside in their beds with the radio on or someone snoring next to them. We walked to Jason’s house, out across the train line and over the canal and the bridge with its missing railings.
‘What are we doing here?’ I said.
Around the side, the gate was latched but not locked. Ben clicked it open. A bat flew over. We were like burglars, breaking into the worst house in the street in the dark shadows before daylight.
‘You keep watch here,’ he said.
‘If Jason sees you, it’s over. Do you understand?’
‘Yes. Let me go.’
‘I don’t want to.’
He snatched his hands away and hissed at me: ‘It’s just one thing.’
‘Okay. Sorry. Be so, so quiet.’
‘I will.’
I saw faces in the trees and under the parked cars and in windows, heard human voices in the cry of the bats and the owls. Tried to turn off the movie in my head. Kept an eye out for the guys making early starts to get into their utes. Stared at the stars, the way they came over the spinifex block and exploded, distant fireworks.
I imagined Mum hearing Ben in the house, crawling out of bed and seeing him there in the hallway.
Then he was back, dragging Murray’s chain, the dog yanking and pulling and whining. Ben said nothing. He closed the gate, dropped the chain, and let Murray limp-run blindly down the street. The air was so cold at night, without clouds to blanket it, but we stood there until the dog had disappeared around the next corner.
‘I want to say goodbye to Bilbo.’ He grabbed my hand, dragged me towards the spinifex block. I looked at my phone. ‘Do we have time?’
‘If we’re super quick.’
The pile of stones marking the spot had been scattered, but Ben knew where to find him anyway. He knelt in the dirt, put his hands flat on the mound.
‘Sorry Murray ate you,’ he said.
I stopped to look at the house, at its Hills hoist without its dog, at the tree in the backyard stretching into the sky. At the room in the front with the curtains closed, imagining the people inside, wondering what would happen when the sun came up.
The train line stretched out dark before us, moonlight striking the tracks. We walked along them with our bags thumping against our backs, the sound amplified a million times in the absolute quiet of the sleeping town. The station was still and silent.
‘The bushranger hiding place should be just by the entrance,’ Ben whispered. ‘The map in the book said it was near the gates but over to the left a bit.’ He blew out his breath in front of him. I rubbed my hands together, shoved them into the pockets of my jacket. ‘Here!’ It was roped off; a sign shouted DO NOT TOUCH. He slipped under the barrier and pulled on the trapdoor’s handle. ‘I can’t get it open. Help me.’
‘Maybe we shouldn’t.’
‘People will see us if we don’t.’
‘There’s no one here. We can wait in the waiting room, it’s warm there.’
He pulled again on the handle. The door didn’t budge, just groaned a bit in its metal skeleton. Ben’s shoulders dropped. ‘Fine.’
We sat in the back corner, tried to push ourselves right into the wall.
Sometimes a noise came from town, someone shouting or a glass breaking. A car engine started, then another, people driving out to the mines or the boats, pointing their headlights into the blackness. Animal sounds, too – a few bats talking and a pair of possums boxing on the train station roof, barking and hissing.
‘What’s that sound?’ Ben gripped his bag tight, white-knuckled.
‘It’s just possums.’
‘They sound angry. Possums have sharp claws. And teeth.’
‘They’re only angry at each other. Put your bag down.’
He shook his head, pulled his hood over it. Sank deeper into the metal bench with his knees up to his face. He seemed tiny and afraid. I wrapped parts of myself around him, the bits of me that weren’t shivering. The night seemed never-ending. My phone told us it was a quarter to five. More than two hours until the train.
‘We’ve got a while to wait yet, mate,’ I said. ‘Tell me something interesting. One of your facts.’
‘I can’t remember any,’ he said. ‘I was thinking of facts all day yesterday and then today I woke up and you told me we were leaving and I couldn’t remember them. It was like my head pushed them all out so I could concentrate properly on getting to the secret room at the train station.’
‘How about I tell you a fact, then?’
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I probably already know it but my brain has just forgotten it.’
I squeezed him. ‘I went to kindy with this girl called Mackenzie. She was mean to everyone, but especially to me. Said all kinds of bad things about my dad. Heaps of lies. She lied about everything. Anyway, she told me if you drank a juice box too fast, your brain would get air bubbles in it and you’d die.’
His eyes widened.
‘So this other kid decided to test it out. He had an apple juice and at recess we went down behind the swings and all crowded around him, and Mackenzie was standing in the middle going You’re gonna die, James! but he was trying to be really tough. As tough as you can be when you’re four, I guess.’ I thought of his face, all pinched into the middle, frowning like he was going to conquer the world. ‘You’ve never seen anyone drink one so fast. Fifteen seconds. Sucked so hard on the straw his lips kind of went back into his mouth.’
‘Did he die?’
I let the pause draw out. Ben stared right at me. ‘’Course he didn’t. He did a huge burp and we went back to the sandpit. Turns out you can drink a juice box as fast as you want and not die.’
‘I think I knew that fact already,’ he said, and turned back to the open doorway. That wind was so cold, like it had fingers made of ice and they were grabbing my legs. The freezer room popped into my head, Daryl swaying side to side, first his head and then his body catching up. I thought of him getting to work that morning, having to write the specials on the board himself. I thought of Jeannie, too, and the grandchild she’d been knitting for in Darwin.
Ben let his head drop onto my shoulder. The sun came bending around the station, dropping into the pit of the tracks. A few more cars got going, one playing loud music all the way down the main street, out onto the highway heading north to Port Augusta. From the raised platform I saw the ocean gleam, throw its white skulls into the sand. The town glowed orange and red in the sunrise. I took a muesli bar from my backpack and chewed on it and Ben’s head bo
unced up and down on my shoulder as I ate and he shivered the whole time.
‘How you feeling?’ I said.
His teeth clicked together. ‘Nervous.’
‘What’re you nervous about?’
‘Everything. Being far away from Mum. Not being able to find your nonno. What if we can’t find him?
‘We’ll find him.’
‘What if Mum comes after us and she can’t find us and then we try to get back to her but she’s looking for us so we never find each other again?’
‘She’ll know how to find us. I’ve got my phone.’
He nodded, satisfied. It was six o’clock. People would start to arrive at the station, soon, to head into the city for work. We’d practised our speech: our grandfather was sick in Adelaide so we were going to see him. Our mum was already there. She was meeting us at the station. I had to finish an assignment first otherwise we’d have gone with her.
A woman arrived, pink umbrella in hand. She talked into the palm of her hand, bounced on purple sneakers. She had black hair and the platform light reflected off it. Hair so shiny it was like a mirror. I touched my own hair, the ratty ends. Ben’s had grown past his ears. Things I hadn’t thought to notice before. She didn’t look at us, just talked into her hand and pressed a finger against the receiver in her ear.
‘I don’t think she’s from here,’ Ben whispered. I was relieved to go unnoticed.
It was just the three of us on the platform for another fifteen minutes. She smoked a couple of cigarettes, paced along the platform into her own nicotine clouds. Trucks came to life on the highway. Belted down towards the ports, or took their herd of cattle out to be made into dinners. Blew their horns closer to town than they were supposed to.
‘What time is it?’ Ben said. Eyes flicking around, bags carrying them. The day looked so long ahead of us.
‘It’s six thirty.’
‘Why did we leave so early?’
Mum and Jason were usually still in bed when we left for school. Door closed. We would be well and truly on the train by the time they thought to take a morning piss. ‘Because it was in the plan,’ I said. He nodded, and his legs went up and down like he was riding a bike.
Two men came to the waiting room door. Big guys, one with tattoos across his neck and under his collar and the other nearly bursting out of his shirt. They nodded to the woman in the purple shoes. The tattooed guy took a cigarette from his pocket and handed it to her.
They looked surprised to see us there, in our corner of the room. Looked at me, at Ben, and then at each other. Sat in the opposite corner, on separate benches but with their knees together, and drank from the same plastic coffee cup, one of those reusable ones with a coloured cap on top. Ben pushed our bags further under the seat and sat on the floor in front of them.
‘People think we’re running away,’ he whispered.
‘No one cares what we’re doing,’ I said, but the men looked at us and the woman paced inside her volcanic eruption, and Ben leaned hard against the bags so they were invisible. Six forty. I imagined Mum climbing out of bed, bleary. Jason snoring with his mouth hanging open. Mum in the kitchen, getting a glass of water. Looking out the back to the naked Hills hoist, no Murray chained to it.
My heart beat faster. Maybe she would notice the dog missing, come looking for us, to make us look for him.
I took a deep breath. She wouldn’t be awake yet. She’d get a drink straight from the tap in the bathroom, the way she always did. No one would notice Murray missing until Jason was up. Burning toast in the kitchen, shouting at Mum, seeing the empty yard. He might not even look for him right away. Might be relieved, first. One less thing to worry about. Our door would still be closed but he’d think we were at school by then, me taking Ben to the walking bus and then to my own bus, finding Raf behind the gate.
Air caught around the edges of my mouth. Tried to creep back in while I breathed it out. Raf streaking down the main road in Whyalla, making out with El in Port Lincoln. I didn’t even know what the places looked like but it was easy to imagine them there, together in the moonlight, ocean in the distance. I thought about texting him but it was so early. He’d be drooling into his pillow at whichever motel they were staying.
The men in the corner had their cheeks together. The tattooed one pushed his fingers between the other one’s fingers. They’d stopped looking at us. An older lady and a small child had appeared on the platform. The child held her nose near the smoking woman and said, loudly, ‘Smoking is bad for you.’ The woman ignored her. Grandma picked her up under her armpits and held the girl tight to her body.
Six fifty.
Mum had an alarm clock by her bed and sometimes it went off early in the morning. I could hear it from our room where I lay awake under the slimy curtains, wondering why she needed to be up at seven. Front door opened and closed, car started. I would lie awake and watch the ceiling move and twenty minutes later she’d be back, door banging shut, Jason grunting. It could be this morning. She could have set her alarm this morning.
Ben shook next to me. His body was limp with lack of sleep. ‘There are muesli bars in the bag,’ I said. ‘You should have one before you pass out.’
‘Three o’clock is really early.’ He pulled up his eyelids, let them stick to their heavy hoods.
‘It was your idea. To hide in the darkest part of the night, remember?’
He yawned. ‘Oh yeah.’
The train pulled in at sixty fifty-eight. It was two minutes early and that made Ben nervous. ‘Why is it early? Is it so they have extra time to get the police on board to find us? Is it because Jason called the train company and asked them to wait for him?’ He got up and jumped around a bit with his bag bouncing. ‘Trains are never early. Trains are late.’
The tattooed man said, ‘Settle down, lad. She comes when she wants,’ and his accent was round and wild.
Our seats were in the economy section, which included all of the train except the sleeper carriage. We found one we both liked in the middle car, which was nearly empty. I looked for Mum on the platform, in case she had come to find us, and couldn’t quite figure out if that would be good or bad.
At seven o’clock, the train picked up its legs and began to move. ‘Oh,’ said Ben, ‘they meant it leaves at seven,’ and he relaxed back into his chair, though his eyes kept moving around the empty seats.
Somewhere down the back, a baby cried and a low voice soothed it.
I touched Ben’s shoulder. ‘I’m going to call Mum now, okay? She’ll be awake and wondering where we are.’
‘Okay.’ He swung his legs, gave me a big smile. I walked down the aisle to the back of the carriage. Hid my voice in the rattle of the walkway between the cars. Watched Ben’s little head going up and down, safe in his knowledge we would all be together again soon.
Then I took out my phone, and I called the police.
*
Ben made a friend in the restaurant carriage. Her name was Evie and they sat in a vinyl booth and shared packets of chips. I bought one, then her dad bought one, then I bought another. Ben pointed out the window and explained the countryside to her. The silos tall with grain and the tumbling fishing boats and the wide fields of green wheat.
After three hours, the scenery began to change. I pressed my face against the window, watched the suburbs unravel around us. The train slowed as it wound through the outskirts of the city. Ben went to the toilet and changed out of his pyjamas.
We pulled into Adelaide’s central train station at lunchtime and its big clock chimed twelve while we climbed down the stairs. Ben took his school bag and became lost under it, a bouncing bit of blue canvas along the platform. We stood under the timetables for a minute, watched the numbers change. The familiar place names. The same smell – something like the dust from the street mixed in with the algae from the river. It felt strange to be back, like I’d left my body there all that time and only just re-entered it.
I’d been there heaps, caught the train up an
d walked into the mall with Kirrily, gone back the other way to the park and eaten fish and chips in the rotunda. And with Dad, of course. This time I took Ben out onto the closest main road and we went down the hill to find something to eat. We couldn’t keep carrying our bags forever. We’d get lunch, check in to a motel, have a good night’s sleep on real beds. That was the plan.
The police hadn’t been in the plan. Not the one we’d written together, anyway.
I checked my phone. Nothing but a notification from some game Ben had installed.
The street was jammed tight with people on their lunchbreaks, and we slipped into their moving bodies. They walked fast, had places to be. They swung shopping bags by their sides and their bones grunted in the cold air. A couple in front of us argued until she threatened to leave and they kissed. A guy behind us shouted into his phone, loud enough that people around us were staring at him. An old lady tapped him on the shoulder. Through her tight mouth, she said, ‘No one needs to know the shape of your bowel movements.’ Ben laughed.
We broke away from the crowd, slipped through the arcade to the McDonald’s behind the old cinema. I watched Ben eat, cramming a thousand fries into his weird little mouth. I had a salad and a frozen Coke, paid for it all on my card. I felt like a millionaire with all that money in there. Maybe we could even watch a movie on the rental things they had in the motel rooms.
‘Gotta go to the toilet,’ Ben said.
‘Thanks for sharing.’
I picked at my salad. The seats were hard and my back hurt from all the sitting we’d been doing so I pushed it up against the chair, straightened up. I closed my eyes for a second so I could think about something else. Nonno’s farm. The year we’d climbed the fence to steal peaches from his neighbours a kilometre down the road.
I heard a tray scrape right next to me. Opened my eyes and two guys looked back at me. They had their food spread all over the table and when they smiled I got a whiff of stale smoke. It made me think of Jeannie, just for a second.
‘Nice tits,’ one of them said. The big one, beanie pulled down half over his eyes and a ring through his lip. He took a bite of his burger. ‘What’s your name?’ Bits of bun and lettuce sprayed out at me and I said nothing.
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