ALSO BY JENNIFER WALSH
The Tunnels of Tarcoola
First published in 2014
Copyright © Jennifer Walsh 2014
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or ten per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.
Allen & Unwin
83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218
Email: [email protected]
Web: www.allenandunwin.com
A Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available from the
National Library of Australia
www.trove.nla.gov.au
ISBN 978 1 74331 693 1
eISBN 978 1 74343 489 5
Cover and text design by Ruth Grüner
Cover images by iStockphoto, Shutterstock,
and Getty Images/Feargus Cooney
Typeset by Ruth Grüner
JENNIFER WALSH grew up in country Victoria, the youngest of three girls. When she and her sisters were not jumping off haystacks, they were reading. Their father also read aloud to them, starting with Great Expectations and Black Beauty and proceeding to stories he made up himself. Jennifer taught Philosophy at university, then English in secondary schools, and later worked in the theatre. After that she ‘accidentally’ became a writer of computer user guides, a job that took her around the world.
Crooked Leg Road is partly set in Balmain in Sydney’s inner west, where Jennifer lives in a very old house with her husband, actor Bruce Spence, and a sociable tortoiseshell cat.
NOTE: some of the places in the story, such as Dardania, Glenmaloi and the old house named Tarcoola, are invented.
Contents
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
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19
20
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38
1
IN THE warmth of the late afternoon, in dark green water that smelled strongly of salt and sea-life, David was swimming. He gave himself up to the hypnotic rhythm: a breath on one side, his ears filled with children shrieking, sudden splashes, urgent cries of birds; then turning his face into the water, where all he could hear was a rhythmic pounding like the sound of his own blood coursing through his body. Again and again, until he realised he’d covered several laps without being aware of it.
He wondered if you could doze off while swimming and swim on in your sleep.
He was amazed that he hadn’t discovered the joy of swimming until this summer. Other sports had always filled him with dread, especially ball games; he always felt too tall, too skinny, too clumsy, and the other boys were always ready to remind him of that. But when he swam it was in a world of his own making, soothing and remote.
Moshe, his grandfather, had suggested that he check out the Dawn Fraser baths, just a short walk from home. They had gone there a lot when David was very small, and he had fond, if hazy, memories of damp, greasy sand and icecreams on the splintery boardwalk. Moshe claimed that Dawn herself, the great Olympian, had once given him a lesson. If so, Moshe was not much of an advertisement for Dawn’s skill as a teacher.
David loved coming down through the park and looking into the green water deepening to black, swirling with sand. He had tried to swim down to the bottom once, bubbles streaming around his ears, but lost his nerve in the shadowy depths with nothing but darkness below him.
Last lap, he decided as he reached the pontoon and pulled himself up. At the little beach by the entrance, families were packing up their towels and clothes, preparing to leave. Soon it would be Easter and the pool would close for winter. He didn’t want to think about that.
The bald man who swam every afternoon lingered, ploughing steadily as usual from one side of the pool to the other. Sometimes he flipped onto his back and did a few laps gazing up at the sky, water streaming off his big round belly. David had never seen him on dry land and liked to imagine he lived in the sea, like a whale. There was the other regular, too, a woman who always had trouble keeping to a straight line.
He climbed the ladder to the sun-bleached boardwalk, pulled on his white school shirt and gathered his pile of stuff. There were four unanswered calls on his phone, but as he touched a button to investigate it gave a sad little chirp and died in his hand. So much for the battery.
He was at the house in less than ten minutes, his hair and shirt already dry. Moshe was in the kitchen, cutting up vegetables for dinner.
‘Where’s Andrea?’ asked David.
‘She didn’t show up.’ Moshe’s face was expressionless.
‘Oh.’ David looked at the little pile of books, still neatly stacked in the dining room. His grandfather always prepared carefully for the tutoring sessions with Andrea, and seemed to enjoy them. But lately it had appeared Andrea was losing interest, making feeble excuses and sometimes disappearing for days at a time.
‘I think she’s been trying to get me,’ said David. ‘Just wait a sec and I’ll plug in my phone.’
The four calls were all from Andrea, and she had left two text messages: ‘Call me!’ and ‘Pls call me!!!’
She answered on the first ring.
‘Where’ve you been?’ she demanded.
‘Swimming. You know that. What’s up?’
She sounded as though she had been crying. ‘Oh David, I was so scared. I hid in the bike shed at school for ages.’
‘What’s happened? What are you talking about?’
‘There were these men,’ she said. ‘In the lane behind your place. I was taking a shortcut, and when they saw me, one of them . . . I’m sure he was going to grab me.’
‘What men? Why would—’
‘I think it was a drug deal. I think I wasn’t supposed to see, so . . . I ran back to school, but I could hear them yelling behind me.’
‘What did they say?’
‘I dunno. It was in some foreign language.’
‘A drug deal?’ David couldn’t keep the scepticism out of his voice. ‘Behind our place?’
‘Yeah, something like that.’
Moshe was looking at him enquiringly. David gave an exaggerated shrug.
‘Andrea,’ he said carefully, ‘don’t you think they might just—’
‘You don’t believe me, do you?’ Her voice had gone shrill.
‘Sure I do,’ said David hastily. ‘But—’
There was a click in his ear as she hung up.
‘What was that about?’ asked Moshe.
‘Not sure. She says she got scared outside the house. There were some men, and she thought they were drug dealers, so she ran for it and hid somewhere. I guess that’s why she didn’t turn up.�
�
‘That’s a good story,’ said Moshe dryly. ‘Better than the one about her mum having broken her leg.’
‘That was silly,’ admitted David. ‘She did say she was sorry.’
Moshe went on cutting vegetables, his face expressionless.
‘I’ll talk to her again,’ offered David. He dialled Andrea’s number.
‘No answer,’ he said, secretly relieved. ‘She’s turned it off.’
‘It’s up to her whether she comes or not,’ said Moshe. ‘It’s no big deal. I’d just rather she didn’t make up crazy stories about bogeymen in the back lane.’
2
KITTY sat at the back of the bus. Further forward, a group of girls from her school chattered and shrieked with laughter. Most of them were long-legged Year 8s, with glossy, swinging hair in ponytails. There were also a couple of Year 7 girls she recognised: scary girls who talked confidently of things she knew nothing about. She pretended to be absorbed in a book, but she wasn’t really reading it. Reading on the bus made her feel sick.
She thought wryly of her parents’ pride and her own excitement when the letter had arrived to say she’d got into the selective school. It was everything she had dreamed of. Some of the buildings were a bit run-down, but in a dignified, scholarly way. At first she had felt at home, as if she really belonged, but that feeling had evaporated. All the other girls in her class seemed to know each other already, or at least to know someone, and they had all spent the first day hugging each other with shrieks of surprise and delight. Kitty knew David, of course, and some of his friends in Year 8, but that didn’t count. She smiled at her new classmates, but they didn’t seem to see her.
How did you make friends at a new school? The first day in Kindy she’d probably just gone up to someone like Rosa and said, ‘Will you be my friend?’ But high school was a minefield. You had to find someone else who was exactly the same sort of person as you. But what if you didn’t know what sort of person you were? All Kitty could see, when she looked around, was the sort of person she was not.
The boy at the other end of the back seat was also reading. She sneaked another look. It was that new boy – what was his name? Skender. He had arrived a few weeks into term, and she had noticed he usually sat alone.
The book he had open was Emil and the Detectives, one of her favourites. She wondered what he made of it. He was officially in her English class, but half the time he was somewhere else with other ESL students who were still learning English. On the rare occasions when he answered a question in class the teacher had trouble understanding his heavy accent. Kitty had to restrain herself from throwing her hand in the air and explaining what he had said.
Skender showed no sign of recognising her as they got off together, but Kitty had had enough of being invisible. She turned to him.
‘How’s the book?’ she asked.
‘Excuse me?’ He stepped away from her quickly, as though threatened.
‘Emil and the Detectives. I saw you reading it? It’s a great book.’
Skender was much taller than Kitty, and she had to peer up to see his face. He reminded her a bit of David, being skinny with straight, dark hair, but his skin was very pale. His brown eyes flicked over her and he clutched his bag as if trying to protect the book.
‘Yes,’ he muttered. ‘Good book.’ He turned and walked off quickly.
Kitty was left standing, her cheeks burning with embarrassment and anger.
‘What did he think?’ she asked herself crossly. ‘I was only talking about a book. It wouldn’t hurt him to be . . . to be . . . ’ But she couldn’t think what she wanted Skender to be, or what she had expected him to do or say.
When she got home, her brother Martin was in the kitchen making himself a snack. Kitty’s mood darkened even more when she saw Samantha Buckingham sitting at the table, waiting for him. Sam had already changed out of school clothes into spotless white shorts and one of those collared T-shirts with a little lizard on the front.
‘Hi Kitty,’ said Sam with her big, bright smile.
‘Hi,’ muttered Kitty.
‘How’s school?’ asked Sam.
‘Oh – you know.’ Kitty signalled 50-50 with her hand.
‘Yeah, tell me about it,’ sighed Sam. To Martin’s delight, she had switched that year to the local high school, so he was seeing her every day. Kitty thought it must be a bit of a comedown after the posh school she used to go to.
‘Let’s go,’ said Martin, cramming a sandwich into his mouth.
‘Mixed netball,’ explained Sam. ‘You should come, Kitty.’
‘Me?’ Kitty almost laughed at the thought.
‘You don’t have to be tall,’ said Sam earnestly. ‘It’s fun, and you get a great workout.’
‘I’ve got too much homework.’ Kitty grabbed her schoolbag and stumped up the stairs. Sam was always making remarks like that. Why didn’t she just come out and say she thought Kitty was fat?
She heard Sam’s tinkling laugh as they left the house. Laughing at her, probably.
3
ANDREA saw Martin and Samantha coming along the street, holding hands and whispering sweet nothings to each other. She backtracked into the fancy clothes shop that had just opened, and hid her face in a rack of silky dresses.
‘May I see your invitation?’
A snooty salesgirl in skinny black jeans and platform shoes had appeared, clipboard in hand.
‘Huh?’
‘This is a private function.’
Andrea looked around. There were a lot of well-dressed people holding wine glasses, and waiters were circulating with trays of sushi.
‘Oh, sorry. I’m – uh – supposed to meet my mum here.’
Andrea glanced hungrily at the sushi, but she saw the girl nod to a couple of hefty, black-clad men with shaved heads who were hanging around the door, so she pushed her way out into the street. Only now did she notice big bunches of black and white balloons tied around the doorway to the shop, and ‘Grand Opening’ signs stuck to the windows.
Martin and Samantha had disappeared. At least that was something. Sam seemed to be everywhere these days, lying in wait for Andrea. Since her arrival at the school everything had turned sour.
‘My parents have split up,’ Sam had whispered as she slid into the seat next to Andrea in Geography. ‘It’s lawyers at twenty paces.’ Andrea had said nothing, just put her head down and pretended to be engrossed in her work.
At first, Sam had worn the uniform of her old school, a long checked dress with a big white collar.
‘It’s St Ola’s,’ she explained to girls who gathered around in the playground. ‘It’s very exclusive. I had my name down even before I was born.’
It wasn’t long before the others girls had had enough of hearing about St Ola’s – the beautiful classrooms, the trips to Europe, the drama club, the parties – but Sam didn’t seem to get the hint. Nor did she seem to realise that Andrea wasn’t her new best friend, or notice that Andrea was going out of her way to avoid her.
With Sam’s arrival, everything seemed to go wrong in Andrea’s life. The maths teacher suddenly decided that they would do algebra all the time, with those awful letters instead of numbers. Andrea hated those things. They seemed to have been invented just to make her look stupid.
‘Right,’ Mr Carter had said, ‘x is the unknown number. Let’s say two x equals twenty-six.’ He wrote it on the board: 2x = 26. ‘So, Andrea, what’s x?’
She had been relieved. The answer seemed obvious.
‘Six,’ she said.
There were titters around the room, and Mr Carter lost his temper.
‘Go and stand in the corridor!’ he roared at Andrea. ‘Come back when you’re ready to take algebra seriously.’
In her tutoring session that night, she wrote it down for Moshe.
‘So x must be six, because it’s sort of saying twenty-six equals twenty-six, right?’
‘Ah,’ said Moshe. ‘You see, two x means two times x.’
/> He explained and explained how to think about the problem, but her brain couldn’t take hold of what he was saying, and she kept imagining what it would be like if Moshe got angry like Mr Carter, and made her stand outside the room.
Moshe never had lost his temper, but surely he would, sooner or later. He had explained so much to her, so patiently, about all her subjects, in the weeks he had been tutoring her. The arrangement was something to do with her father, who had made one of his rare visits to the city in the Christmas holidays. He seemed to know Moshe already, and had come to a New Year’s Eve party at David’s place where they all watched the fireworks from the balcony. There was a new painting in the hallway, and Andrea was astonished to discover that it was one of her father’s works, which David’s parents had just bought. She thought it must be a picture of the rough bush shack where he lived, crouched under towering trees. But she couldn’t be sure because she had only been to the place a few times.
Then one day Moshe had said to her, ‘Why don’t you bring your homework round here while David’s doing his swimming? We’ll knock it over together and then you can talk to me while I cook dinner.’
It was perfect, really. Nobody from school would wonder why she was spending so much time at David’s house, because he had been her boyfriend for nearly six months now.
After the x fiasco Moshe had written out a sheet of algebra problems for her to practise on her own.
‘We’ll go over these next time,’ he had said, ‘and then you should be on top of it.’
But she had put off the problems until the last minute, and by then she couldn’t make any sense of them, so in a panic she had invented a stupid story about her mother having an accident. Since then she would go into a panic whenever there was tricky homework, worried that Moshe would find out just how stupid she was, and sometimes she would call David and make some ridiculous excuse.
As she let herself into her house, a sound caught her ears: a man’s voice, low and urgent. She shrank against the wall, her heart hammering. Then a woman’s voice replied, and music swelled. It was just the television – someone had left it on.
Crooked Leg Road Page 1