by Simon French
“Julia was scared of her mum. I was scared of her mum when she got into our car that day.” Bon lifted his pen away from the page. “Julia said to me later that on the day her mum took her, everything seemed all planned out, because suddenly her mum had a different hair style and a different car. She had Julia’s hair cut differently too. There was another name on the documents Julia saw once or twice; someone else’s address. Julia’s last name got changed.”
“So she was never Julia Barrett?” My voice was close to a whisper.
“No,” Bon replied quietly, resuming his drawing, his mouth curved in a small smile. “She was Julia Mitchell.”
It took me a moment to absorb the sound of a different name. “Julia told you all of this?”
“Yes. It started when we gave them a lift. It was the first thing Julia said to me. So who are you guys running away from? She whispered that to me in the back seat, once our mums had started talking, because she could see all our things packed into the car, as though we were moving house. I didn’t know what to say to her, and then she didn’t say anything for a long time. But Julia was listening to my mum talking about not being able to look after me any more. She kept looking at me, and I could see she was really sad about something. We began to whisper things about places we had stayed and what we liked and didn’t like. But it was only when we reached town and found the caravan park that Julia whispered the most important thing. I was taken from my dad two years ago. I shouldn’t be with my mum. We were alone in the car while our mums were in the park office, paying for the cabins. At first I thought she was telling me a story. But when I knew she really was in trouble, I didn’t know how to help.”
“What about her dad? Wasn’t he already looking for her?”
“Probably. But he was working in different places and Julia couldn’t remember his phone number. She said to me that her mum’s parents met up with them a few times in different places. She thinks they were helping her mum keep her. They were coming to pick up the car after it broke down. They would get it fixed and back to Julia’s mum so they could leave again.” Bon stopped drawing. “Julia’s mum got jobs here and there, stuff like cleaning hotel rooms or washing up in places. And if people asked, she’d tell them Julia was being home schooled. Julia didn’t get much of a chance to be with other people. But once she was in our car, once she got here, she was tired of being a scared little kid who did everything her mum told her. She wanted to come to school again. She bought herself the bike.”
“I was there,” I said. “At the garage sale where she found it.”
“Julia got into really big trouble,” Bon said, “because she’d gone off for a walk without her mum knowing, and then come back riding a bike that she’d paid for with money from her mum’s purse. Her mum got really mad. She dragged Julia into their cabin at the caravan park.” Bon paused and took a deep breath. “I heard them arguing about it. Julia’s mum hated that bike, the same as she hated Julia being at school. She didn’t want her talking to anyone. Except Julia had already been talking to me. And finally she told Mrs Gallagher what her mum had done. So now,” Bon said, his voice quietly pleased, “Julia is back with her dad. Her mum would have had a good, bad surprise when the police came to visit. I’m glad about that bit. I’m glad her dad found her, too.” His shoulders dropped and he added, “But not that Julia has gone. I liked how we talked to each other. I miss that.”
Bon looked at his drawing. I watched him write a sentence beneath his picture, his scrawly writing clearer somehow. Was I getting used to reading it? The forces of evil were overwhelmed and life in the town gradually returned to normal.
My arm and elbow were on the table. I laid my head down and looked sideways at the library and at Bon as he drew. “Have you drawn any inventions lately?” I asked.
Bon closed his book. “Not for a while.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. The one new thing I thought of I haven’t worked out how to draw yet.”
“What is it?”
He took a breath. “It’s like … satellite navigation, except to find people – or to find just one person. You key in their details – their name, age, appearance, last known address – and the person finder tells you where to locate them, where they’ve moved to.” After explaining it to me in an almost too-quick voice, Bon stopped himself and looked away, embarrassed. “Something like that, anyway.”
I waited. “To find Julia?” I asked. To myself I thought, and Connor.
“Yes,” he said, looking back at his picture. “And Sam. I would use it to find him as well.”
I sat up again, remembering who he meant, the person who had once been my aunt’s boyfriend – the only one Bon had liked, as far as I could tell. “Why?” I asked.
“Because he was nice. Because I did drawings for him when I was little, and he always said how good they were.” Bon slapped his book shut, and then reopened it at the first page. “Because he gave me this.”
In the background, I heard the bell ringing for the end of lunchtime play. Bon pointed at the inside front cover. In all the times I had snuck looks at whatever Bon was drawing, I had never taken much notice of this part of the book. I saw an adult’s neat writing, which Bon traced a finger gently across. “There,” he said softly, and I followed the path of his finger, silently reading.
To Bon – be brave and determined, nurture your talent, draw your dreams. Sam Irvine.
“Are you two staying the night?” Ms Tabor called across to us, because suddenly we were the last kids left in the library, and now we were going to be late to our class lines.
“When did Sam give you this?” I asked.
“When I was seven. But I didn’t start drawing in it until I was nearly nine.” Bon paused. “After I visited your house, that time it was your dad’s birthday party. When I saw the toy castle in your bedroom, I knew what sort of pictures I had to draw. And when I met Julia, I knew what sort of story I had to tell.”
CHAPTER 19
Bon’s mum called.
It was me that picked up the phone when it rang in Nan’s kitchen, and my hello was met with a moment of weird silence. And then came her voice: “Is that you, Bon?”
“No,” I replied. I could feel the shock waves in my voice. “It’s me, Aunty Renee. Kieran.”
“Oh …” Another silence. “Is Bon there at the moment?”
“He’s outside. Him and Nan are getting the washing in. It’s going to rain soon.”
“I guess you think …” she began, and I could hear her take a deep breath before she continued. “I guess you think I’m a pretty bad parent.”
“No. No, I don’t. Aunty Renee?”
“Yes?”
“Are you coming to visit Bon?”
“I don’t know. Do you think he’d like to see me?”
“Yes. I think he’d like that a lot.”
There was another silence. I realised I was walking in small circles around the kitchen floor, and nervously wondered what I could say next. “Would you like me to go get Bon for you?”
“Yes. And Kieran …”
“Yes?”
“Thank you.”
I went outside and swapped places with Bon, and in the minutes afterwards, glanced up at the kitchen window once or twice to see how the phone call might be going. Bon wasn’t walking in nervous circles like I had; he stood quite still at the kitchen window – watching us, but talking with his mum.
I looked at Nan, who said, “It’s good she called. She needs to do it more regularly.” She smiled to herself then, and she reached for the last pegged shirt on the line. It gave me time to wonder that my aunt had actually called me by my name, that she had done the same for Bon. That she sounded calm. And that thank you might have been for more than simply fetching Bon inside.
Bon tapped the window glass, pointing at the phone and then at Nan, who left me to carry the washing basket upstairs. I came inside in time to hear her say to my aunt, “But don’t hesitate to give Bon a call
more often. He hasn’t heard from you in over a month. He needs to hear from you at regular intervals, and he needs to see you, too. We all do.”
It was enough for me to know from Nan afterwards that Aunty Renee was interstate again, that she was sharing a house with friends and had found a part-time job. And that, yes, she would drive up to visit Bon if she could take time away from work. I didn’t want to ask Nan about whether Aunty Renee was taking her medication, but I wondered whether it was making things different for her.
“Are you okay?” Nan asked Bon afterwards.
“Yes,” he answered. His voice seemed calm and matter-of-fact, and I couldn’t tell whether he was happy or sad about the phone call. I couldn’t tell whether he missed his mum or not, and even worried a little that he was wishing to be with her, rather than here with us. “I might go do some drawing and writing,” he simply said, and spent a long while that afternoon by himself with his book of maps and inventions.
I waited until much later to ask him. I waited until the quiet part of the evening when we were both in the room that had been for sleepovers, that was now Bon’s bedroom. I was still getting used to this different shape of things. There was still the set of shelves with the old books and toys, but there were new things crowded onto them as well, things that Nan and my mum had bought for Bon – books, a large set of drawing pens and a pad of proper art paper, a new desk, a chair and a large noticeboard where some of Bon’s artwork was already hung. His class photo was there too, and it was easy to spot Julia and Bon, their smiling faces.
“Was it good hearing from your mum?” I asked.
Bon lay on his tummy on the bed, drawing and writing. “Yes,” he replied, without looking up.
I was curious and persistent. “Did she tell you where she was and what she was doing, and everything?”
Bon nodded. “About her job, the share house, about visiting. And,” he added with a sigh, “she told me she missed me.”
The way he said it worried me. “Don’t you believe her?”
“I believe her.”
“Do you miss her?” I had wanted to ask that for more than a while.
“A bit. Yes.” His voice drifted a little, and then he said, “Most of all, I’d just like her to be happy.”
My space at Nan’s was now a mattress on the floor near Bon’s bed, and after sitting up on it to ask Bon about the phone call, I lay back and stared up at the ceiling, taking a few moments to think of something that might make Bon talk some more. Once, it had been as though he barely knew how to speak, but now I knew that he was full of stories and things to say. I looked across to the chest of drawers and saw a photo of Bon with his mum. It wasn’t a recent photo; they were both a bit younger. Bon’s hair was strangely shorter and sat on his head differently, and his mum was smiling in a way that somehow didn’t quite show happy. I tried for a moment to read what that smile could mean. She wore the same jewellery that I remembered her with at Dad’s party all that time ago.
Bon said it again, his voice soft and distant. “Most of all, I just want her to be happy.”
“What was it like moving around all the time and going to different schools?”
“Sometimes I didn’t go to school at all,” Bon replied. “It was just me and my mum. Nothing to do and no one else to talk to. So I don’t miss moving around and living in different places. I don’t miss that at all.”
I decided to tell Bon a kind of story as well. “That time you visited us that time with your mum and that guy in the big black ute, when you left, Nan was nearly crying.”
“Was she?” Bon’s pen stopped writing, and he looked down at me.
“Yes. She hadn’t seen you for so long and she didn’t know when she was going to see you again. When the ute drove away, it was only you that turned and looked back at us. I still remember that. You kept looking, all the way down the road, until the ute turned the corner and was gone. Until you were gone.”
Bon didn’t say anything for a while. His eyes were perfectly still, but I could see that he was thinking or remembering.
At last, he said, “Because I wanted to stay. I wanted to live here. Now I do.” His eyes met mine again. “I’m sorry I touched your toys that time, and messed up your room.”
Suddenly, that part seemed so distant and unimportant. “It’s okay,” I said. “Gina’s bedroom looks like that all the time.”
“I’m sorry I took your things,” he said.
I shrugged a reply that I hoped meant don’t worry about it. But I began to think about my medieval castle and its army of little people and horses. I thought about all the times I had played with them, had imagined the castle in a real landscape and had imagined the voices of the wizard, the royal family and the knights on horseback. I thought about what Bon had taken, and then about the pictures he had drawn, the story he had written to bring us together in his own imagination. Bon the Crusader, Julia the Fair and Kieran the Brave had travelled together and alone in pictures and in Bon’s scribbled handwriting. I wondered how that story was going to end.
“Nan gave me that castle for my eighth birthday,” I told him at last. “There was a movie about castles, knights and wizards that I used to watch over and over. I had a birthday party with kids from school. And somehow, Connor –” I stopped. It was still hard to say his name, and I had to think what to say next.
“Your best friend,” Bon said. “I remember.”
“Out of all the kids I invited, Connor guessed the right kind of gift. He bought me a set of horses and knights that matched the other figures Nan had bought to go with the castle.”
“Oh.”
I knew Bon was still feeling guilty about the stealing. I remembered how he had come to our town and come to us with no toys of his own. I added, “I don’t mind if you play with the castle whenever you stay at our place. Actually, I don’t play with it much any more.”
Bon blinked and frowned a little, as though I was making no sense.
“It’s okay,” I reassured him.
He hesitated and then nodded. “Thank you.” Then he said, “You’re smiling, Kieran. Why are you smiling?” He used the serious, precise voice I hadn’t heard in a while. “I’ve never seen you smile like that before.”
I changed the subject. “What have you written? What have you drawn?”
Bon hesitated. “Here,” he said, turning the open book to me so that I could see. Two knights stood at a high castle parapet that overlooked a village of tiny, crowded houses. They looked towards a far horizon with mountains the shape of those around our own town. And in that distance, two figures on horseback rode away towards the very edges of the picture. Underneath, Bon had written, And so Julia the Fair was reunited with her true parent. Bon the Crusader and Kieran the Brave returned safe to their castle, ready for whatever challenges lay ahead.
I nodded. “Is the story finished?”
“Not quite,” Bon replied. “But almost.” Suddenly, his eyes were wet and he wiped at them with the back of one hand. He closed the book and held it to his chest.
I woke quite early the next morning, just as the room began to brighten with daylight. Bon was up in his bed, asleep. I didn’t mind sleeping on the spare mattress down on the floor. It made the room taller and larger from where I lay, and it somehow made me feel younger and smaller. When I listened closely, I could hear Bon’s slow, steady sleep breathing. His head was buried under his blankets and only his plait showed, trailing almost over the edge of the bed.
I crept out to the kitchen. Nan was already at the table with a mug of tea and the morning newspaper. Bon’s woolly hat lay at the end of the table.
“You’re awake!” she exclaimed. “What about Bon?”
I shook my head, and sat down opposite.
“He sleeps a lot better lately,” she said, quietly pleased. “Not so much waking up at night or standing out here at two in the morning, staring out the window and scaring me witless.” She paused. “Maybe it’s a sign that he’s content. That he feel
s safe. That’s a thought I rather like.”
“He misses his friend, Julia,” I said.
“I know,” Nan replied. “You went through the same thing when your friend Connor left. So you understand how it is for Bon. And you can be there to help him.”
The purple bike was propped up on the back verandah, and Nan pointed to it. “He’s very excited to own her bike. It’s a special thing for Bon to have that, thanks to your father tracking it down. I think that fellow at the caravan park was hoping to keep it for himself.”
I gazed out the window at the bike that had been Julia’s, and then at Nan’s garden and the view beyond of the town. I was silent long enough for Nan to finally ask, “Are you okay, Kieran?”
“I feel different,” I said, knowing how lost my voice sounded.
“How?”
“I don’t know. Just different.”
Nan looked at me for a while and then answered, “Well, you don’t look any different. Or sound any different.” She watched me from above the brim of her mug and took a long sip. Then she asked gently, “Does it feel different in your head and heart, Kieran?”
I shrugged and then nodded.
“A lot has happened in a pretty short time, and a lot has changed. Life is a little different for all of us. It can take a while to get used to things changing. Are you bothered about Bon living here?”
I shook my head. “No, I think it’s good.” My eyes found the magnetic photo frame on the fridge door. It had three new photos in it now: this year’s school photos of Gina, Bon and me. “It’s really good,” I added. I reached over and picked up Bon’s woolly hat.
“I gave that a wash,” Nan said. “Perhaps the first wash it’s had in a very long time.”
I slipped a hand inside the hat and turned it around a bit, so that the bobbles waved and jiggled.
“It’s hand knitted,” Nan said. “I thought at first it was probably from a charity shop, like everything Bon came to us wearing. But there’s a name inside. He said someone gave it to him.”