Caroline slaps a steak onto my plate and hands me a knife and a fork. She’s wearing an opal bracelet I haven’t seen before; some present from Eddie, no doubt. He bought us all presents. Spoilt the girls rotten. His catch phrase was ‘It’s only money.’ I suppose he was right about that.
I pour some wine into the plastic caravan mugs we are going to leave behind. We listen to the fire spit and crackle, and talk nonsense for a while. Absorbed in the flames and this feast, I forget for a moment where I am.
Moni puts her plate down on the ground and says, ‘I can see a castle and a dragon and a tree.’
It’s a game we used to play, watching the fire, seeing what we could see.
‘I can see a pumpkin, a yawning mouth, and a dog’s head,’ Caroline says, looking at me.
‘I can see a family dancing, wings, broken waves on the sea.’
We keep on staring into the fire, saying what we can see, until Moni gets tired.
‘Are we really leaving tomorrow?’ she asks, as she follows Caroline into the caravan.
‘The plane is picking us up in the morning.’ I blow her a kiss.
Caroline sings Moni a bedtime song. I haven’t heard this one before.
Half a hundred days passed away
and still no footprints I can recognise
tracing shores we walked
familiar rocks seem strange
and the land is torched
with someone else’s light.
There is no way I can look to tomorrow
No way I can say
That a new dawn
Will be washing the old one away.
The song goes on, but I stop listening to the words, concentrating on the notes instead, feeling myself rise and fall with each rainbow of sound. When Caroline comes back out, she stands behind me. ‘Could you really see a family?’ she asks.
‘Did you see a pumpkin?’
She pulls her crate up close to mine and hunches down, holding on to her ankles. ‘Is this it?’ Her voice dies away as she stares into the fire, now half the size it was. ‘Dad always said I didn’t deserve you.’
‘Your father…’ There is so much I could say about Caroline’s father.
After a while I ask: ‘Did you love Eddie?’ I want the truth, even though, at this stage, I don’t think I really care.
‘Yes,’ she says, without hesitation. ‘Like a fool. It’s true what they say about not knowing what you’ve got until it’s gone.’
The way she looks at me, it’s hard to tell whether she is talking about Eddie or me.
She goes back into the caravan, returning with two boxes, and puts one down at my feet: Georgie’s clothes, a few toys, rolls of paper.
‘Don’t you want to keep any of this?’ I ask, flicking through the pictures: scribbles of colour.
Caroline flings the box onto the fire. She loses her balance as she lets go, falling in after it. Her hair catches fire. I drag her out and douse her head with a wet tea-towel to stop the flames. The smell of her burnt hair is repugnant.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ I kick the other box into the fire, out of rage. Her beautiful auburn hair is scorched on one side.
‘It doesn’t hurt,’ she says, dusting off the crate before she sits.
A silent hour passes as we watch the fire burn down to smoking embers. I think back to what she’s said, roll the words over in my mind. Did she mean Eddie or me?
‘Will you cut my hair?’ she asks, jumping up.
‘With these?’ I hold up my bandaged hands.
‘It doesn’t matter what it looks like.’
She fetches a pair of scissors from the caravan. Handing them over, she shifts her crate in front of mine and sits with her back to me. I snip off the ends first, managing to make a hacking motion with the scissors, afraid to do too much, and then gradually I start to make deeper cuts – I actually enjoy it – until she is left with a short back and sides. She looks so different; her face has hollowed out. But in an odd way, despite the roughness of the cut, it actually suits her.
She runs her hands over her head and says, ‘I’m going to bed.’ Before she goes, she throws her crate onto the fire and collects the plates, retreating with them into the caravan. I listen to her washing up. Eventually she turns the light out, and I am left with the dying fire. Thunder rumbles in the distance. It’s pitch dark. Every sound is amplified. This is what I imagine it would be like in a submarine, this echoing circular silence. The night air holds its breath, waiting to burst. I wish I knew how long Georgie had been in that shaft before … before what? When I close my eyes, I can see her on the road. Perhaps that was her way of saying goodbye? The longer I stay in Akarula, the more open to the world’s mysteries I become, because nothing makes sense when you think about it.
Moni wakes me up.
‘Mum cut her hair. She looks like Mrs Thompson. Come on, we have to say goodbye before the plane arrives.’ She drags me out of bed and stamps around outside impatiently while I get dressed.
‘Goodbye to whom?’ Doesn’t she realise that we are the only ones left?
‘Come on!’
‘Are you not coming?’ I ask Caroline, who is scrubbing the table. Her haircut looks coarser in the daylight.
‘I want to finish off.’ She flits from one side of the table to the other, her eyes darting. Finish off? We haven’t talked about what will happen when we get to Adelaide. I’ve rented a one-bedroom flat.
‘Don’t be long. Please.’
She starts hauling the cushions off the benches and wiping the plywood tops underneath. It’s her way of saying goodbye to a place.
When I step outside, the air is pulsing; there is a layer of swelling cloud, which makes the light syrupy. Moni insists on climbing Red Rock Mountain.
‘We’ll see better from the top,’ she says as we start the ascent, scanning the crevices and clumps of scrub grass for snakes.
She scrambles on ahead, turning round now and then to check I’m still behind her. The rock gets steeper near the top. I have difficulty hauling myself up. My hands feel raw; the bandages give no protection. In this light, the earth seems redder, lending a sharpness to the landscape; everything has a clear edge.
Moni is sitting on one of the flat rocks when I finally make it to the top. It takes me a while to get my breath back. There is quite a view. The bush stretches out as far as the horizon. You look differently when you’re looking at something for the last time. You look for the imprint, the soul behind the shape, the lines and marks that will help you to remember.
Moni plonks herself down beside me, pressing her body up against mine. ‘I know what happens to these,’ she says, holding the shell of a cicada between her finger and thumb, pointing through the lattice framework of skin. ‘You were right. It must be strange, getting a whole new skin. How often do snakes shed their skins?’
‘Once, twice a year. I’m not sure. We’ll have to look it up. Might be different for each species.’
She lays the cicada skin down where she is sitting and slips off to do some rock-hunting, leaving me to contemplate Akarula. The branches of the ghost gum tree seem to move to a rhythm of their own. I must visit Mr M in the hospital once we’re settled.
Moni bobs up from behind one of the rocks and scribbles something in her notebook. She pulls out a reddish-brown ground beetle from her pocket and makes a sketch, measuring it with her index finger before she lets it go.
‘I’ve got something for you,’ I say, waving her over. I show her the opal I found. ‘We can get it made into a necklace if you like, or a small hat.’
She grins, rolling it between her palms before dropping it into her pocket. ‘Thanks,’ she says. And then she mumbles something about Uncle Eddie and the colour of the sea, making it clear that I don’t need to understand.
We say goodbye: goodbye mine, goodbye street, goodbye birds, goodbye caravan. There are silent goodbyes for everything else. Moni takes a sip of water from her bottle before offering some to me.
‘They might be.’
‘Why did he drown?’
I’ve already thought of an answer, but when I start, this comes out instead. ‘Occasionally people decide to give up. He was a big dreamer, your uncle. When dreams get too big, they can swallow you. They can trick you into doing all sorts of things.’
‘Was he very sad?’
‘I think so. Do you know what you need to do when you’re sad – to stop the sadness growing?’ Moni shakes her head. ‘Hold a happy thought inside your mind, something that makes you smile, something really good. When you start to feel sad, you get it out and think about it, make it as big as you can.’
‘I know what my happy thought is.’
I wait for her to tell me, but she doesn’t. Whatever she is thinking plays around her eyes, making them sparkle.
We stand on the summit, staying absolutely still for a moment. That’s when the snake appears, a brown one, sliding over a rock not two yards in front of us, flicking out its tongue, hesitating, giving us time to get a good look before it slithers back into the undergrowth. Together we let out a celebratory howl.
‘Do you think it was poisonous?’ Moni asks, breathless with excitement.
‘Probably.’
‘I think it was.’
She races down the rocky face to tell her mother. I follow her, taking my time, not really wanting to reach the bottom.
The plane arrives just as I get to the caravan. Caroline is standing in front of the steps, her string bag draped over her shoulder, her sunhat shading the best part of her face. She is holding Georgie’s clogs. Moni leaps around her in circles.
As I go into the caravan, Caroline says: ‘I’ve checked the cupboards.’
There is not a scrap of evidence to suggest that anyone lived here. I close the curtains and pick up the suitcases, trundling them down the steps. Seeing me struggle, Caroline puts the clogs into her bag and takes one of the cases from me. ‘I can manage,’ she says. The three of us walk in procession up the road to the bend and head out across the scrub towards the airstrip.
‘I’d like to be a pilot,’ Moni says, skipping up beside me. She waves at Denis, a tall burly type who is standing in a cloud of dust. He comes over to greet us.
‘Maybe Denis can show you a few things.’
Denis takes the suitcase from Caroline and leads Moni up the plane steps. I’m on the steps myself when Caroline lets out a sob behind me. I turn to see her standing on the dirt track, her mouth fixed in a determined half-smile. She signals for me to go on. What is she doing? She can’t stay out here on her own? From the plane, I watch her take Georgie’s clogs out of her bag and carefully lay them on the ground. Denis calls for her to get a move on. He doesn’t know what she is doing.
She nods at him, walking around the clogs towards the plane with that half-smile anchored to her face. And then she makes her way up the steps and comes to sit down next to me, fastening her seatbelt like she did the day we went on the big wheel, our first real date, wearing the same shrunken expression. While Denis pulls up the steps, she takes off her hat, smoothing down what is left of her hair. Her lips are quivering.
As we take off, both of us watch Georgie’s clogs disappear into a cloud of dust. Moni, sitting up front in the cockpit, next to Denis, turns around to us and grins. I do a thumbs-up at her.
‘Heard about the abo getting hurt,’ Denis yells back as he makes a turn over the service station. ‘Nasty business. You’d think folk would learn. Did they ever find the bodies?’
He doesn’t know it was our child. All those times he flew us to Wattle Creek, I kept my mouth shut. It was always a relief to meet someone who didn’t know. We curve upwards, away from the street. Denis starts explaining the buttons and levers to Moni, shouting over the engine noise.
Caroline cries silently. I imagine taking hold of her hand, how it would feel.
Denis says, ‘We’re due some rain. You want to see this place when it rains.’
I close my eyes and picture Akarula filling up with water.
MONICA
After five days in Adelaide, we find this house. There’s a swing fixed to a big tree in the back garden. It’s much better than the flat we were staying in, which only had one bedroom, and no bath. People talked outside the window in the middle of the night and woke us up. Me and Mum slept in the double bed and Dad stayed on the settee. The whole place smelt of rubber bands. I found chewing gum wedged underneath the table. We were glad to leave.
I wish we could go back to England. I asked if we could go home, but Mum said we couldn’t leave Georgie in Australia on her own. She doesn’t understand that Georgie isn’t alive; she’s not dead either. I can hear her, but I can’t see her. It must be strange, being invisible. Mr M would know all about that.
Dad asks me if I want to go with him to Wattle Creek to collect our things from the doctor’s house. There’s nothing to do in Adelaide – until Monday, when I start school (it’s my birthday on Monday too) – so I tell Dad I’ll go. I want to see Mr M, anyway. Did you know Uncle Eddie killed himself?
We get up before the sun. Mum makes me drink some orange juice, and brews a flask of coffee for Dad. Her hair looks better since she went to the hairdressers.
‘Drink plenty of water,’ she tells me. ‘Have you got Mr M’s present?’
I bought him a wooden egg – it’s the size of a normal egg, only wooden. I’ve wrapped it in purple tissue paper. It’s in my rucksack, which Mum has; she’s packing sandwiches and drinks for our journey.
‘When do you think you’ll be back?’ she asks Dad.
‘Thursday. Friday if we get delayed. I’d rather not drive at night.’
While Dad is putting on his coat, Mum smokes a cigarette out of the kitchen window, tapping her ash into a saucer. I check through my rucksack to see if she’s forgotten anything. When I say goodbye, she squeezes me, kissing the top of my head. She won’t let go. I have to push her off. She tells me to say hello to Mr M, and her eyes go all watery.
We get into the van.
‘You ready, champ?’ Dad says, starting the engine. As we drive off, I wave at Mum, who is standing by the gate. Dad keeps his eyes on the road.
Wattle Creek is miles away. We sing for a while, but Dad can’t sing like Mum, so we turn the radio on. We pass through lots of small towns that get smaller the farther away from Adelaide we get. And the air heats up all the time. After hours of driving, we are back on a red chalky road. A herd of long-legged emus run out in front of us. Dad stops the van so we can get a look. They go so fast I don’t get chance to take a picture. (Dad’s given me one of Uncle Eddie’s old cameras.)
We can’t stop for long because it’s too hot. When we start moving again, I stick my head out of the window and feel the wind beat against my face like a giant fan. Flies hit the windscreen; every now and then Dad leans out of the van to wipe them off. There are dark spots in the blue sky, which are probably wedge-tailed eagles. You can’t really see them.
We drive all day. I count the termite mounds, which would look like witches hats if they were black.
‘We’re not far now,’ Dad says, as we join a tarmac road. My bum hurts from sitting, and I’ve got a pain in my neck from resting my head against the seatbelt. I watch the sky turn into raspberry ripple ice-cream as the sun fades away. There are lots of clouds.
At the outskirts of Wattle Creek it starts to rain, small drops at first, and then it hammers down. Dad drives through the town with his wipers on top speed. When we reach the doctor’s house, which is in a street of houses a bit like Akarula, I stand by the van, tilt my head back with my eyes closed and try to catch the rain in my mouth. Dad tells me to go inside – the doctor, Susan, has the door open – but instead I run up and down the street with my arms stretched out like a B52 bomber plane, firing at everything. The rain feels stone-heavy as it splashes down on me. Dad and Susan are laughing in the doorway, and then D
ad grabs Susan’s hand and pulls her out onto the street. The three of us jump in all the puddles and get soaking wet.
‘Call the coastguard!’ Dad shouts over the rain. It’s a line from a film.
‘Send him in, Jack,’ I shout back. A black and white film me and Dad watched years ago.
Susan says: ‘Come in before you drown.’ She’s the first to go inside.
After I’ve dried off and put my spare clothes on, we have dinner: some kind of meat stew with boiled potatoes. Dad and Susan talk as if they’ve forgotten that I’m sitting at the table.
‘I read your article,’ Susan says, pouring Dad more wine. ‘I liked the fact that you contacted the other families.’
‘I wanted to know how they were dealing with it.’
‘I was surprised by Billy Walker.’ (I don’t know who Billy Walker is.) ‘To admit in a national paper that he’d beaten his wife because she was pregnant with someone else’s child – that’s pretty brave. Did he tell you who he thought the father was?’
‘Nope.’
She fills her own wine glass.
I take another potato to soak up the last bit of stew. Dad and Susan have stopped eating. They’re both holding their wine-glasses up; the backs of their hands almost touch.
‘Do you miss him?’ she says to Dad. Her lips have gone purple in the middle from the wine.
Dad doesn’t answer. For a second their fingers touch.
‘What are you doing?’ I push my plate away.
‘Putting you to bed,’ Dad says. He sets his glass on the table and pulls out my chair.
‘Will you come too?’ I ask him.
‘In a bit.’
I say goodnight to Susan and then Dad takes me through the hall to our bedroom, which is full of things we brought from England.
I open one of the flaps on the box that is taking up most of the room. ‘What’s this?’
‘Something Uncle Eddie gave me.’
It’s funny Dad says that, because the giant camera inside sort of reminds me of Uncle Eddie. I have to climb over it to get into bed.
‘Do you like Susan?’ I say, when we’ve done all the stuff we normally do before lights out.
Swimming on Dry Land Page 16