The other one was smaller, and he disappeared a bit into his chair, like he was trying to hide from himself. He had a grey hoodie with a symbol on it I’d seen before but couldn’t remember where. He asked me, too: ‘What’s your name?’ but with his mouth only open on one side. Maybe he didn’t want to ask at all.
I thought of Raf pointing to the clouds.
‘Leave me alone,’ I said. They both laughed, whacked the other’s shoulder. The smaller one fell forward under the force of his mate’s hand and banged his elbow.
‘Piss off, Kieran,’ he said.
Ben appeared next to me, school bag in hand. ‘Come on, mate,’ I said. ‘Time to go.’
The big one slapped my jeans as we left, sucked his tongue between his teeth. No one said anything, though the place was packed.
We decided to go back up the road towards the hills. The Botanic Gardens were there, and we could have a rest for a bit before we had to get serious about finding a place to sleep. The internet said there was a motel down on West Terrace, and we could even get an orange juice delivered to our room. We just had to get back there by five to check in.
So many people. It had been months since we’d seen so many in one place. They crammed onto buses, smoked in packs outside the university gates, crossed the road on the green light buzzing like rows of soldiers. We weaved our way through them, trying to find the habit again.
The Botanic Gardens welcomed us with big iron gates. We’d been there heaps of times when Ben was little, probably because it was free. Mum had taken a picnic down to the pond with the lily pads and we’d pretended to get lost in the rose garden. Once, Dad had brought me to an Alice in Wonderland play. Not a normal play, but a performance that went through the whole garden. We had to follow it around, like we had gone down the rabbit hole as well. Kids from my school were there and we all laughed and chased after the white rabbit until afternoon tea was served.
Ben and I walked right through the gardens, around the kiosk and the duck pond, where families picked at loaves of bread and threw croutons into the water.
‘They shouldn’t do that,’ Ben said. ‘Ducks aren’t supposed to eat bread. They’re supposed to eat snails and mealworms, but if you feed them bread they fill up on it and they don’t have any room for snails and mealworms so they die of malnutrition.’ He scowled at the families. A couple of dads looked up at us, just a split second to register the way our family was different from their family. Pushed their prams back to the kiosk, probably got a latte to take out to the deck.
We made our way through the back gates, over the road and onto the grass. A couple more families in groups, folding tables set up with potato salad and bowls of bright jelly. Kicking a footy around. I put my hand in my pocket, took out my phone to send a message to Raf. It was one thirty. I put the phone back in my pocket, thought of Raf and Yardy and El all laughing about me. Stupid Skye. Too scared to stay home so she ran away.
‘Don’t they have jobs to go to?’ I said.
Ben shrugged. ‘Maybe they like being with their families more.’ I tried to read his face, but it was plaster. All his feelings crammed up inside him.
‘We could watch a movie in the motel tonight. They have pay TV, I think. We can pick up some of that gross coloured popcorn from the supermarket on the walk back.’
‘Okay,’ he said. A bus came around the crescent, dropped a load of schoolkids off at the zoo entrance. They dropped into line in their yellow uniforms like dandelions, marched in through the learning gate while a teacher barked at them. All laughing at once, a chorus of childhoods.
The police would have been to the house by now. They must have. Mobilised their units or whatever it was they did on TV, rammed the locked door of the spare room to find Jason’s gear. I tried not to imagine Mum but I did anyway, shouting at them to at least let her put some clothes on, being led away from the dirty house with her dressing-gown flapping open. Handcuffed? The skin around her wrists would be dry where she got eczema in winter. Bags under her eyes. Watching from the back seat of the cop car while they searched Jason’s house, unless they took her back to the station first. Would they take both of them together, or separately?
Was she afraid?
The fig trees curled out around us and the wind was fresh and dry. At three o’clock, the roar of lions came across from the zoo. Feeding time. Ben mimicked their low rumble. One of the groups kicked a ball towards us and a girl came running after it. She chatted with Ben for a minute and he told her about footballs and how they were made from pig’s bladders. She told him they were about to go to the beach to see the whales. I watched the families in the park, trying to see what it was that glued them together.
‘Can we go see the whales?’ Ben said.
‘What whales?’
‘That girl who was just here said there were whales at the beach. Can we go see them? I’ve never seen whales. I saw their skeletons at the museum once but never actual whales. Did you know that you can suffocate a whale if you sit on its blowhole? Imagine if they got a penguin stuck in it.’ He took a deep breath.
‘Ben! Okay. We can go and see the whales.’
We walked down along the river, watched a rower shoot along with his wooden arms. We waited, same as anyone else, trying to blend.
‘I haven’t caught this tram since I was a little kid,’ I said. ‘Dad took me on it to go to the Show. Twice, I think. It was a different one then, though. An old one. It rattled a lot.’
‘I’ve never been on it.’ Ben looked down the street, copying the four other people at the stop who were also looking, like they could make it come faster if it knew they were waiting. It came into view around the main square, pulled up a couple of minutes later with a squeal. We took a seat near the back so we could see everything. Ben pulled my head right down to his. ‘Are people looking at us?’ he said.
Maybe they were. Flicking their eyes over the top of us.
‘No,’ I said, but I thought I saw them do it anyway, sometimes frowning and looking at their phones but never talking. Most of them got off at South Terrace and disappeared into office buildings. ‘They’re gone now anyway.’ We were both quiet, then. I felt the day before squeeze me, all the energy I’d had to EARN MORE MONEY and to leave Port Flinders leaking from the parts of me that were still upright, which wasn’t all of them. Leaned against the window with my nose pressed into it. Felt a bit sick, all the scenery flicking past. The tram stopped a couple of times to let someone on or off but I slipped low into my seat, trying to be invisible, to be inconspicuous. Ben watched me and did the same, but then we were two kids trying to be invisible on a tram on a school day, which was worse, so he told me about whales while I tried not to fall asleep on the window.
The tram glided to a stop at the beach and its familiar smell – salt, sand, ice-cream – overwhelmed me.
It smelled like breathing.
People had gathered at the end of the jetty. Some of them had binoculars, like tourists on a boat, but the whale was close enough to see without them. Its dark shadow under the water, the rocky mountain of its wet back in the sun. Ben squealed when he saw it. Charged right at the barrier and hoisted himself up, half-fell over the side in his excitement.
‘Careful!’ A man pulled on the back of Ben’s jumper. ‘You fall in and that whale might eat you.’
‘Oh, no,’ Ben said, spilling over with glee. ‘That’s a southern right whale. They don’t have any teeth, they just suck in krill like this.’ He clenched his teeth and noisily drew saliva between them. ‘Also, they have the largest balls of any animal in the world.’
We laughed – me, and the man who’d saved Ben from the whale, and the woman standing next to him. All of us laughing there in the late-winter sunlight, not thinking about how the police had come and taken Mum away with her dressing-gown open.
The man looked at us again. Looked at Ben’s jumper and at his own hand. Poked the woman next to him and said something right into her ear.
‘Mum would like t
his, don’t you reckon?’ Ben said.
‘Yeah,’ I said, not looking at the whale. ‘Let’s bring her, when she gets here.’
‘She’ll be here soon.’
‘Really soon.’
The people eyed us like they knew us, up and down, whispering to each other. After five minutes no one was looking at the whale except Ben, hand up to his face to keep the sun out. A woman in a yellow dress had her phone to her ear, facing away from us but with her eyes pointing right at us. The man next to her squeezed her hand. Her face lit up red and nervous, like she was trying to chew her lip right off. A murmur went around – not words, just a hum from one person to the next.
‘Ben,’ I said. ‘Maybe we should move on. Try calling those numbers, see if we can find Nonno.’
He looked right out to sea. The whale blew a spout of water high into the air, and Ben clapped and whooped but the rest of the crowd mumbled, grunted, murmured some more. The woman in the yellow dress slipped away from her husband and down along the jetty, stood on the kerbside as though waiting for someone.
‘Ben. I really think we should go.’
He clapped his hands. ‘There is a baby one! Look, Skye! See, when the big one moves out to sea a bit you can see the other shadow next to her?’
‘It’s great, mate.’ I grabbed his hand. ‘Let’s go.’
A car pulled up. Dark windows, extra antennas, the whole bit. Two men got out, straight and tall, pulled on their hats and adjusted their belts.
Cops.
The woman in the yellow dress pointed to the jetty. To us. Ben yanked his hand away from mine, shouted: ‘I’m not ready to go yet!’ and people turned to look at him, then to the police, murmured and hummed and buzzed in their one collective lump of people not minding their own business, and I tried to pull Ben away but he’d wrapped his legs around the jetty railing and he would not budge.
The numbers from the page I’d torn out. I hadn’t meant to memorise them but that was the thing about looking at them over and over, trying to find the courage to dial them, thinking of my dad, G Esposito, Seaford Downs. They flew round and round and I grabbed them as they shot through, ten numbers I’d read until my eyes fell out and had forgotten to forget, and I pulled my phone from my pocket, watched the cops come bumping through the crowd with their shoulders forward, shoving people into the barriers, coming right for us. Dialled the numbers, one after the other in the order I’d remembered, let my finger hover over the green button for a second or maybe two seconds, reached for the words I would say to him when he answered.
They moved right past us, the cops. Went to the ice-cream van by the barrier and bought a couple of soft-serve cones dipped in chocolate. The whale breached and landed heavily on the waves. No one was watching us at all.
17
DAD HADN’T KNOWN where Nonna was buried. He must have, once, but we didn’t visit her until I was eight and she had been dead then for twenty years and he had forgotten. When we went to the cemetery he stopped the car at the booth by the gate and asked for directions.
‘We don’t do directions anymore,’ the man said. ‘We give out GPS coordinates. You can program them into your phone.’
We followed the GPS coordinates to a wide lawn with rose gardens around the outside. She had a plaque on the ground with her name on it and DEARLY MISSED underneath. He stood in front of it for ages. I had a posy of white carnations from the supermarket so I put them on the plaque and I stood, too, not knowing when we were supposed to stop.
We got to the motel by four thirty, waited in line behind some people with backpacks who talked quickly in another language. It would be sixty-two dollars a night and there was no minimum stay. The guy at the check-in counter looked from me to Ben and back a couple of times, then at my bank card, then back to me.
‘Just the two of you, then?’ he said.
‘We’re going to a conference,’ I said.
‘Oh yeah?’
‘It’s a dinosaur conference,’ Ben said. ‘We’re going to see a presentation about how they know dinosaurs had feathers.’
The guy behind the counter’s name tag said STUART. He frowned.
‘We’ll only be here for a couple of days,’ I said. ‘Our dad’s coming too, he’s just paying the taxi driver.’
‘Yeah,’ Ben said. ‘He’s paying the taxi driver.’
‘He told us to check in. You know, save some time.’
‘How old are you?’ Stuart said to me. ‘Fifteen?’
‘Me? Oh, no. Eighteen.’
‘You got some ID?’
‘It’s in the taxi. With our other stuff.’
‘Not in those bags you’re carrying?’
Panic. ‘These are just clothes.’
‘Lot of clothes for a couple of days.’
Ben said, ‘We need different clothes depending on which dinosaur we’re talking about.’ The guy behind the counter stared at him.
‘Where are your parents?’
‘We told you, paying the taxi driver.’
‘And your mum?’ He leaned closer. A short line of people had gathered behind us. ‘Come on, guys. Cut the bullshit.’
No story came to me. I looked for one, frantic. Our mum was having a baby. We were foreign exchange students. We were Jehovah’s Witnesses. The line behind us murmured and shifted. Ben tugged at my t-shirt. All the words I knew were stuck in my throat.
The police hadn’t taken us to their station. It was weird – the first thought I had about that was that Ben might have liked it. Uniforms, flashing lights, criminals. He probably had a few facts about police stations. Serial killers, maybe. But they’d taken us to an ugly brown building instead, down behind the Town Hall, pushed us past people in suits eating salad from containers. They’d asked me a few questions while Ben stared at a toy box in a windowless room, and taken us out to a waiting car with a woman inside.
I watched the social worker from the back seat, the way she frowned into the road, the back of her neck flushed pink. She took us out through tree-lined streets and past unfamiliar parks and schools with ovals that could host the Olympics. We came to a stop outside a white plaster house, pine trees and gums all around it, parrots shouting from them. I got out. Took my bag from the boot, and Ben’s, too. He still hadn’t said a word. Not on the drive, or any time before that. I kept thinking I’d lost him, without the sound of his stories to orient me.
We lined up, like we were waiting to go into a classroom. Two women appeared at the door, flung it right open with big smiles on their faces. I reached behind me to squeeze Ben’s hand but couldn’t find it. The social worker pushed my shoulder a little, gave me a shove towards the door.
‘Hello,’ the women said, in unison. One had dark, cropped hair and a mouth that curled up at the sides. The other was a ginger, red hair bursting out of her head like an abandoned doll. A dog came running up behind them, poked its head between the redhead’s legs, and the house loomed warm and golden. A proper house, with a hallway and lights along the walls that lit yellow instead of blue. A rug running from the door to the back room.
I took a deep breath and looked these strangers up and down, not sure what they could offer us, or what they planned to. Ben took my hand and it shook, so limp, a flag on a stick.
‘Come in,’ said the buzz-cut woman, shouted ‘Perry!’ at the dog, and to us said, ‘I’m Lavinia. Please, for the love of God, call me Vin. This is Therese.’ In the front room a fire crackled. The house smelled of it, of the charcoal and the logs. And it smelled of something else, too. Biscuits or cakes, like it was trying too hard to be a proper house. Vin led us down the hallway, into a glossy back room with leather couches and windows all the way around, a white kitchen with silver appliances, a tartan dog bed tucked away in the corner. Through the windows I saw crouching trees with their bare branches, and a swimming pool with the cover on.
‘Fancy,’ I said, not meaning to. Ben’s eyes were wide, red at the edges.
‘If you come back this way,’ said Therese, �
��I’ll show you to your rooms.’ She slid across a door at the edge of the kitchen, which opened into another hallway. ‘We built the extension last year. You get your own door out to the garden so you can head out there anytime. Maybe not in the middle of the night, though, this time of year.’ She smiled at us, turned the handle of the first door.
‘This is yours, Skye.’ Vin put her hand on my shoulder. All the comforting was going to make me lopsided.
But the room. The room was perfect. It took me a minute to get it all inside my brain. A white bed with white sheets, bedside table with a yellow lamp shaped like a monkey. Chair in the corner, bookcase next to it overflowing with spines and covers and pages. A purple throw rug over the chair and a speaker dock for a phone. On the ceiling, a glass chandelier. Not a posh one, but star-shaped and glittering. I dropped my bag by the bed and lay down on it with my hands folded across my stomach. My heart raced under them. Raced and shouted but I watched the chandelier move with the breeze through the door, hypnotic.
‘You don’t have to do anything right now.’ Vin had her hand on the knob. ‘Take as much time as you need.’ She closed the door behind her. Near-silence. I pulled out my phone, tapped out a few words to Raf. Stuff’s gone pear-shaped. Miss you. Deleted them. Pressed the call button, hung up straight away. Flicked through to a photo of the two of us at the spinifex block with the universe above our heads.
I shut my eyes and the train came rushing through, its horn sounding across the wheat fields. The ground bucked beneath me, the steady rumble of the carriages over the tracks. Waiting for the train to pass. Watching it head into the distance with all its people on board, over the bridge, by Jason’s house, past the tip. A dog walked the streets, scrounging for food in total darkness, limping into three good feet. The train was gone.
My eyes flicked open. A tree rapping against the window. A bird, a small one, crooning on the fence. No train.
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