Birrung the Secret Friend

by French, Jackie

  ‘More potatoes?’ asked Sally.

  More? I had three helpings of them potatoes, eight big fat ones, and some more of the boiled red things. I was as full as I’d ever been in my life. It was a better sort of being full than a tummy of oysters too.

  Then Sally pulled out another big round cloth from the pot, and inside it was a plum pudding. It was the first time I’d met one of those, but me and that pudding became good friends fast. I didn’t even feel sick from eating so much.

  The convict men went back to their own hut then, as it was after work hours for convicts. They said they had their own garden to work in there, though I reckoned coves like them would just put their feet up. If there’d been a pub, they’d have gone there, but one of the things the colony didn’t have much of any more was beer or porter, so there weren’t pubs neither.

  I pushed my chair back from the table. ‘What happens now?’ I asked.

  What happened then was that Sally showed me where Elsie would sleep, with her in one of the lean-to rooms out the back. I would sleep in the other, with the big sacks of potatoes and strings of onions and a crock of goat’s cheese. I imagined sleeping with all that food around me. I reckoned I’d have the best dreams in the world.

  Mr Johnson made me what he called a camp bed, lengths of wood with cloth strung between them. Whoever heard of a gentleman making furniture like a carpenter? Mr Johnson grinned when I said that, as though I’d said something funny.

  Elsie had a proper bed that had been used by the Johnsons’ servant Elizabeth. But Sally said she’d been whipped for insolence and sent to Norfolk Island. I wasn’t sure what ‘insolence’ was exactly, but I was going to take care not to get it. This place was too good to lose, for me and Elsie too.

  And then it was time for ‘supper’, which was cold potatoes and the goat’s cheese, not yellow and sour like the old cheese from England in the storehouse, but white and soft. And we could eat all we wanted, even the cheese. Let me tell you, cheese tastes better when it ain’t wriggling.

  And then Mrs Johnson tried to get Elsie to talk, but Elsie just shook her head. And Mr Johnson prayed again. And then we went to bed.

  CHAPTER 5

  Two Mysteries

  I couldn’t sleep. I tried to tell myself it was because I ate all that food. But it wasn’t. I’d never slept alone before, except that one night without Ma after she died, before I found Elsie.

  At last I got up, and went out to the privy. The moonlight shone on a white path made of crushed shells, so it was easy to see the way in the starlight without a candle. Even the privy here didn’t stink. Sally had told me to put down wood ash whenever I used it, to stop the flies and smells.

  I finished my business and stepped outside again. The breeze from the harbour was cool. A bird hooted back in the bush. At least I hoped it was a bird, and not an Indian ghost. Clothes flapped on the line. One of them was Elsie’s old dress. Now that it was clean I could see it was pink.

  How had Elsie come by a pink dress? She had to have come on the convict ships. There weren’t any white people in the whole land till we’d come here, and there had been no ships since. Convicts and their children only had the clothes we were given on the ships, all white or grey and checked jackets to begin with, but stained and mud coloured now.

  Was Elsie the daughter of a soldier? I shook my head in the darkness. I’d thought about this before, trying to solve the mystery of where she’d come from. If Elsie was a soldier’s or convict’s daughter, I’d have seen her about the colony. There were so few of us you saw everyone sooner or later. And even if her ma and pa had died, the soldiers looked after their friends’ families too.

  So why hadn’t I ever seen Elsie? And if she was a convict’s brat, like me, how had she got a pink dress? Us convicts had been given good clothes aboard ship — I’d even had two shirts till someone nicked my other one. But none of them were pink. Colours were for rich people, or at least richer than most of us here — gentlemen’s daughters or wives like Mrs Johnson.

  I sat on a patch of grass by the back door. There was a lot to think about. How long could Elsie and I stay here? I’d work hard for a safe bed and food for the two of us. But I was ten and small. And I ate a lot. Mr Johnson would be better off with a big convict man than me to dig his garden.

  But the black girl lived here, like she was their daughter. The Johnsons didn’t seem to have children of their own. Maybe . . . maybe they’d adopt me and Elsie . . .

  No. Ladies and gentlemen like the Johnsons don’t go around adopting boys like me, even if they let servants eat at the table with them. But Elsie?

  Elsie wasn’t pretty like Abaroo, even now she was all cleaned up. She was as thin as a stick with the wood shaved off, and her face all pointy from hunger. But she used her knife and fork like a lady.

  The back door opened. In the dark I could see a white face and a white petticoat. Elsie.

  ‘Hoy,’ I said. ‘You ain’t running off, are you?’

  I was never sure how much Elsie understood, but she understood that. She pointed down to the privy.

  ‘Well, good. This is a right good bunk we’ve got here. Need to make the most of it.’

  I heard Elsie’s feet go down to the privy. The privy door shut, then opened again. Then plunk, she sat beside me.

  She leaned against me. It was just habit, because we had curled up together for warmth before, though tonight was hot.

  ‘You all right?’

  She didn’t answer. Elsie never answered. She didn’t even nod. But I could see her face in the moonlight and it didn’t look frightened. Elsie was sitting out in the open and not even trembling.

  Another face appeared at the door and looked out. A dark one. Abaroo wore a white petticoat too. Her bare feet were soft on the grass as she walked over and sat next to us.

  I felt a bit lost, with her being so dark, so pretty and so strange. At last I said, ‘It was you, weren’t it? You threw the stone at that convict to stop him catching me. You followed me. You brought Mr Johnson to get us.’

  ‘Yes. I find you.’ Her voice sounded like Mrs Johnson’s, like a lady’s. I supposed she’d copied Mrs Johnson’s way of speaking. But her voice was husky, and sort of singing. I thought of the black and white bird that sang in the strange tall trees. Abaroo’s voice was as pretty as that bird’s.

  ‘Why did you bring Mr Johnson to us?’ Hadn’t she realised that if the Johnsons wanted children in their house, they might tell her to go if they had us?

  Abaroo laughed. She didn’t answer. Elsie sat very still next to me, listening.

  ‘Why they take us?’ I demanded. ‘We’re just two more mouths to feed.’ A man with three vegetable gardens in the colony was rich. But even three vegetable gardens couldn’t feed the whole colony, and Mr Johnson had a wife and a baby coming to feed too.

  Abaroo paused, as if she was working out my words and what to say. At last she said, ‘Good people. They share makes happy.’ She screwed up her face. ‘The be re al gal —’ (I think that’s what she said) ‘— are not share people.’

  ‘Be re al gal,’ I said slowly. ‘Is that us? White people?’

  Abaroo nodded.

  Well, she had that right. Most be re al gal in the colony would rather steal than share. They’d been sent here because they were thieves. This might have been the convicts’ second chance, but most didn’t seem to want to take it.

  ‘Do you . . . do you think Mr Johnson’ll let us stay?’ I felt Elsie go stiff next to me and begin to tremble. It would be hard to go back to our hut after this.

  Abaroo looked at me and Elsie as if she’d never thought that they might not. ‘Yes.’ She sounded so certain I felt like a big rock had fallen off me. Beside me, Elsie relaxed too.

  ‘Well,’ I said. ‘We better go inside.’ I helped Elsie to her feet. And then I said, ‘Thank you, Abaroo.’

  It was hard, thanking a girl, a black girl. I’d never got into the habit of thanking people before, even Ma, though when we buried
her, I wished I had. I didn’t even like to think how much I was thanking this girl for now. For our lives, maybe.

  She looked at me for a moment, then laughed. ‘My name not Abaroo.’

  ‘But Mr Johnson said it was.’

  ‘My name . . .’ She said something so fast it was hard to catch.

  ‘Dibrung?’

  She said the sounds again.

  ‘Birrung?’

  She looked at me, as if I hadn’t quite got it right, but she knew I wasn’t going to, no matter how many times she said it. I reckoned Birrung was closer to her real name than Abaroo, anyhow. And then I thought: The native gibber must be another language. People use different words in other countries, don’t they? I’d never thought the Indians could have a language; reckoned they just made sounds like birds.

  If Abaroo — Birrung — had a language, I could learn it. She and I could talk together and no one else would understand.

  It was too much to think about. Too much had happened in one day.

  Abaroo — Birrung — took Elsie’s hand. I watched the two girls go inside. And above us the moon seemed to sing a lullaby, just like Ma had done, as it played among the clouds.

  CHAPTER 6

  Staying Put

  So we stayed there, Elsie and me.

  It wasn’t all potatoes and goat’s cheese and clean sheets every week. (I’d never even slept in sheets. Me, Barney Bean, in sheets!)

  There was hard work too, digging up tussocks to make new garden beds and learning what was a weed. Turned out that’s what Mr Johnson’s garden magic was — hard work, watering and weeding, when most in the colony just hoped someone else would do the hard stuff and the rain would come from the sky.

  Mr Johnson didn’t whip me even when I pulled out baby cabbages by mistake. He just showed me how to put them in again and give them a drink of water to ‘settle them back’, his voice all kind and gentle like he enjoyed teaching me.

  Learning about plants was as interesting as I thought it would be. Who’d have thought a giant orange carrot could grow from a seed like a speck of dust? Or that potatoes grew under the ground and you had to dig them up? I wondered who was the first person who ever thought of digging up the ground to see if there was food under there.

  But there were other things to learn too, indoor stuff, that weren’t so interesting. Mrs Johnson looked sweet and gentle, but she had iron inside her too. When she asked me to do something, it got done. How to speak and hold my knife and fork and not to swear, which was hard because I didn’t even know I was swearing back then. And how to read words on a slate then in the books, and learn the stories about God and Jesus and the others.

  But the stories were good when she read them to us, especially the smiting bits, and Roman swords, and this one where Jesus turned two fish and five loaves of bread into enough food to feed a multitude. That is still one of my favourite stories, that one. We could have used Jesus in the colony. Mr Johnson said He was always there, but I can’t say I noticed Him around much, except in the clergyman’s house. But I never said that to Mr and Mrs Johnson.

  Elsie learned her letters too, faster than I did, so fast I wondered if she already knew them. Her writing on the slate was all neat and curled, not snail tracks on a cabbage leaf like mine. Elsie was getting stronger every day, with all the potatoes and scrambled eggs and stews. Seemed she knew how to do a lot of things now she had food in her belly and was in a proper house. She could stir pots without being shown how and scrub floors and even take up the hem of the dress Mrs Johnson gave her so it didn’t drag on the ground.

  Elsie could peel a potato too. I’d never even known that gentlefolk like the skin off; and, as for peeling, I nearly cut my thumb off the first time I tried. Mrs Johnson was teaching Elsie to cook, not just pease pudding and boiled cabbage, but gentlefolk’s foods like pancakes, with our flour ration (Mr Johnson got Elsie a ration now too) and eggs from our hens and milk from the goats.

  Elsie could make goat’s cheese now, and goat’s-milk yeast, to make the damper light, and a fish stew with potatoes and herbs from the garden that was so good it could knock your stockings off. Mrs Johnson was teaching Sally more cooking too, because Sally had been a maid, not a cook or even scullery maid, before she’d done whatever crime had got her sent to New South Wales.

  But Elsie still didn’t speak, no matter how much Mrs Johnson coaxed her.

  It was grand to sleep in a bed, to eat all I wanted. More than grand not to be scared all the time, to know Elsie didn’t have to be scared any more either. But living with Birrung was best of all. Every morning when I woke up, I thought: There’s going to be breakfast. Then my second thought was: Birrung will be there.

  Birrung laughed all the time. Laughed at the men digging clay next door. Laughed when Mr Johnson brought in basket after basket of cucumbers, and got us to count them, which was a clever way of getting me to work out how to count to two thousand, because that was how many cucumbers there were. I learned how to eat cucumbers too. Ma and me had never eaten this ‘salad’ stuff that the Johnsons liked so much, sliced cucumbers and lettuce leaves not cooked at all, but eaten with goat’s cheese crumbled on top. I made a face first time I tried it. Took me a few mouthfuls to realise it was good — and Birrung laughed.

  Birrung laughed at me too when I stared as she grabbed a big lizard by its tail and bashed it against a tree. Then I laughed when Sally screamed when Birrung took the lizard into the house, and wanted to roast it on the cook fire.

  Birrung was like one of Mr Johnson’s miracles. The whole colony was gloomy those days, stores running low and hard work they weren’t used to, and strange trees and summer when it should be winter. Even Mr and Mrs Johnson didn’t laugh much, especially as the baby Mrs Johnson was going to have got bigger. Mostly they looked tired, and sometimes a bit scared too, though they tried not to let us see it.

  But Birrung laughed. No matter how weary Mr Johnson was after shouting a sermon in the wind, he smiled when Birrung laughed. We all did.

  And whenever I got sunburnt picking corn, or a splinter in my finger splitting wood for Sally’s cook fire, or missed Ma worse than usual, I’d think: Birrung has lost her family too. Lost her whole people. If she can laugh, then I can too.

  Sometimes Birrung was just gone, all alone like when she first saw me. Don’t think she told Mrs Johnson she was going either. She just went. But she came back, bringing a fish or basket of native berries and once a big wild duck. Tasted good, that duck, but the berries were bitter, though I ate them because they came from her.

  Christmas came, so hot the rocks felt like hearthstones.

  Just about everyone in the colony turned up for Mr Johnson’s sermon on Christmas Day, except for Sally, who stayed at home to watch the cooking pot, with the big frying pan out ready to bash any convict who tried to help himself to our Christmas dinner.

  We sang hymns under the gum trees, almost louder than the big black beetle things that shrilled in the branches, and the seagulls that yelled on the harbour. I sat between Elsie and Birrung, in her blue and white dress. Birrung sang bits of the hymns too, and when we got to the Lord’s Prayer, she knew every word.

  I thought Mr and Mrs Johnson would have had Christmas dinner with the governor and the officers, but instead they walked back with me and Elsie and Birrung and one of the officers, Mr Dawes. Mr Dawes had just come back from trying to find a way to the big blue mountains in the distance, but he hadn’t found it. He was as brown as a walnut.

  We passed the new storehouse, with a tiled roof so thieves couldn’t get in and steal the rations. The sun was right above us now, so hot the air shimmered like it was melting. The harbour waves went slap slop against the rocks and sand.

  Birrung laughed. She pulled the blue dress over her head and then her petticoat too. She dived into the water as bare as the officers’ cheeks when they’d shaved for Sundays.

  ‘Abaroo!’ cried Mrs Johnson.

  I didn’t know where to look. I’d never seen a girl with
out clothes on before. The native women had been too far away when we’d first come here for me to get a look at them. I’d never seen anyone without clothes on, except me. I shouldn’t stare. But what if Birrung was drowning . . .

  Birrung wasn’t drowning. She popped up, her hair all pulled straight by the water. She held up a couple of mussels in their shells, and threw them onto the tiny beach by our feet, then dived under again.

  ‘You must excuse her . . .’ Mr Johnson started to say to Mr Dawes.

  Mr Dawes smiled. ‘There is nothing to excuse. She is too innocent to know nakedness is a sin.’

  ‘Abaroo likes play more than study,’ said Mr Johnson.

  I looked at Birrung, spearing through the water. I’d never seen anyone swim before either, then flushed because everyone else had seen me staring at her.

  Elsie gave a tug on my hand as though to say, ‘Come on.’ Elsie had got fatter since we had been at the Johnsons’. She didn’t look so much like a skinned rat now.

  ‘Why do you call her Abaroo?’ I asked Mr Johnson.

  Mr Johnson looked surprised. ‘That’s her name.’

  ‘No, it ain’t. It’s Birrung. She told me.’

  Mr Johnson smiled. ‘It’s a heathen name. We must put it into the King’s English as best we can.’

  I looked around. The king owned all this, the whole colony, even though he’d never seen it. The big patch of corn, the beans, the melons and potatoes, the falling-down huts, the blue waves dancing on the harbour. And he owned the words we spoke too.

  Birrung threw another mussel onto the sand.

  ‘I’ll wait with her here,’ said Mrs Johnson. She lowered herself down onto the tussocks under a tree. Her belly was real big now. She looked tired, like she could do with a rest before climbing the hill.

  ‘Are you all right, my dear?’ asked Mr Johnson quietly.

  She smiled at him and nodded.

  So the rest of us walked up the hill. ‘Have we got Sunday school today?’ I asked.