“… She smiles,
And speaks his name
Aloud.”
I finished reading and there was a moment of silence before the polite applause began.
The lecture theatre was filled with the other finalists and their families and friends, so there was a battle between wanting to sound like good sports, and being a little disappointed at not winning. I guess I would have felt the same.
Except that I’d won.
The professor who had presented me with the medal was saying how pleased he was with the entries, and how next year …
But I didn’t hear any of it.
I looked across at Miss Vegas. She held up the envelope which contained the five hundred dollar book voucher — which did make Mr Parnell very happy — and I held up the one containing the trip tickets.
She was smiling, and I guess I was too. I had every reason to be.
But the words of the poem were still going around and around inside my head, and I tried to force back the vision of my father, trapped forever in a world of Creature dreams, trapped in the shadows he had always driven back, unable to move upwards into the light.
The speeches were over. I slipped the medal into my pocket and moved off the stage to join Miss Vegas and the others for supper.
22
TANJA’S STORY
They kept Mr P in hospital a fair while, looking for side-effects, but he was fine. And Lisdalia’s prize came in real handy.
The factory gave her mum some time off during the September holidays, and the three of them flew up to Queensland and did all the touristy things — Dreamworld, Movieworld, Noosa: the lot. Lisdalia brought me back this daggy hat from the Big Pineapple, and she keeps threatening to make me wear it. And I keep threatening to show Michael the picture she had taken with the life-saver on Noosa Beach. I sort of … borrowed it — for insurance.
Of course, her mum isn’t working any more. As soon as he could (which was much sooner than the doctor wanted), Mr P got back to work, and so far, he’s doing fine. Scratch one career in biscuit-packing.
Lisdalia winning that competition had another side-effect, that had nothing to do with sun and surf and life-savers.
About a week after he got home from the hospital, Mr P asked her to sit down and read the poem to him. I don’t think he would have understood too much of it — hell, I don’t myself, even after she sat down and explained it to me! But when she'd finished, she said, he just nodded and smiled, pulled out this small narrow box from his pocket and gave it to her. He didn’t say a word, just gave it to her. And inside, when she opened it, she found a pen. Not a cheap one either. They still didn’t have any money to spare, but he’d gone out and bought her one of those expensive gold-plated jobs that you twist in the middle to open and close.
You can judge for yourself what it means, but I don’t think, when the time comes, that she’s going to have to put up too much of a fight to get into Uni.
Mind you, for now it hasn’t changed things around here a whole lot. Mike and I were over there the other afternoon, “studying”, and Mr P yells out from the lounge room for a cup of coffee.
We were right in the middle of this really hard Maths problem, or rather, Lisdalia was; I was just watching, and Michael was studying his latest copy of “Hoop”.
“Can’t you get Tony to make it?” shouts Lisdalia. “I’m in the middle of —”
You get the picture.
She’s grounded for a week, so now we’ll have to do our own homework — or get her to do it at lunchtime.
By the way, what’s the difference between Shane Thomas and three dollars worth of horse-manure …?
First published 1994 by University of Queensland Press
Box 6042, St Lucia, Queensland 4067 Australia
Reprinted 1995, 1996, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2006
www.uqp.com.au
© Brian Caswell
This book is copyright. Except for private study, research, criticism or reviews, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any foram or by any means without prior written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.
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This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
Cataloguing in Publication Data
National Library of Australia
Caswell, Brian
Lisdalia.
I. Title.
A823.3
ISBN 978 0 7022 2667 0 (pbk)
ISBN 978 0 7022 5796 4 (pdf)
ISBN 978 0 7022 5797 1 (epub)
ISBN 978 0 7022 5798 8 (kindle)
Lisdalia Page 7