Why had David been so dubious about her story? Couldn’t he tell how upset she was? And he hadn’t even tried to call her back.
He hadn’t exactly accused her of lying. Maybe he just thought she was mistaken, running away for no reason. But if he had seen those men and the way they’d looked at her, the deliberate way the short, fat one with the beard had started towards her . . . And then the harsh voice of the other man, the way he had yelled, the strange words. She heard it all again in her head, and she trembled.
There was a third man, she remembered, who put a hand up to hide his face when he saw her, as though he thought she might recognise him. He was small and weedy with sparse reddish hair combed back, and glasses. She had come into the lane to find it blocked by a white van, and when she squeezed past she had come upon the weedy man in a huddle with one of the others, the taller one, who was handing him something. The weedy man had quickly put the object into his pocket, but she was sure it was a wad of money. She was right by David’s back gate by then and her first thought was to take refuge in his garden, but when she touched the gate the other man, the short one, had rushed towards her, and there was something terrifying about the way he reached out, the look on his face. He had spoken sharply, looking straight at her, and the other man had shouted something back. It was a strange-sounding language, like Elvish. She couldn’t imagine where they were from. As she ran, she heard the taller man repeat what he had said, his voice rising. That last word – vyzair, it sounded like – was something to do with her, she was certain.
Well, there was someone she could talk to, someone who would listen without any doubts and give her the sympathy she needed. She picked up her phone and dialled.
4
MARTIN came home hot and sweaty from pounding around the netball court. Some of those girls played hard, so he was also a bit bruised. There was a pool in the apartment complex where Sam lived and she had invited him for a dip, but it was nearly dinnertime and anyway he preferred to stay away from Sam’s little brother Oliver, who was a bit of a pain.
He had a quick shower and came downstairs.
‘Come and help me set the table, love,’ called his mother. ‘Kitty’s talking on the phone.’
Kitty was hunched in a corner in the hall, cradling the phone to her ear.
‘Are you sure it was money?’ she was saying, keeping her voice low. ‘Okay, but they wouldn’t be able to . . . What was that word? No, just make sure you go in the front way.’ She noticed Martin and dropped her voice to a whisper.
‘So how’s the lovely Samantha?’ enquired his father later, helping himself to salad.
‘Good,’ said Martin. It was always best to say as little as possible.
‘Is she settling in at school?’ asked Martin’s mother.
‘Yep.’
‘She’d make friends pretty easily, wouldn’t she?’ pursued his mother.
‘Yep.’ Martin supposed that was true. Sam always seemed to be with other girls. He had even seen her with Andrea, which was a bit of a surprise, but now that he thought about it, Sam was good with people.
Later, when they were clearing the table, he asked Kitty, ‘Who was that on the phone?’
‘Huh? No one.’
‘Just before dinner, you were talking to someone on the phone.’
‘Oh that.’ She quickly piled up dishes and headed for the kitchen. ‘Andrea.’
‘What was it about?’ asked Martin, the next chance he got.
‘Nothing.’
He was obviously not going to get any more out of her, so he gave up. From the living room he could hear his father’s raised voice.
‘God spare us! Why don’t they just come out and say that Anthony Yu is buying his way into power? I tell you, this state is going to the dogs, and this useless program is not doing anything to help. Current affairs? Don’t make me laugh.’
‘Dad,’ called Kitty, quick to take advantage. ‘I think there’s something good just starting on Channel Ten.’
Martin rolled his eyes at her as their father came into the kitchen and switched on the kettle.
‘You kids should be in there watching,’ he said. ‘Maybe you’d learn something about the real world.’
‘We know,’ said Kitty. ‘Anthony Yu’s the next Premier, right? He’s going to beat Mrs Buchanan. But isn’t he really nice?’
‘He needs to be more than nice,’ grumbled her father. ‘Anyway, it’s Joe Rozman who’ll have the real power.’
Kitty opened her mouth to ask another question. Behind their father’s back, Martin frowned and shook his head at her. Trapped between his father and the sink, he could just imagine the unwanted information with which he might be bombarded before he could make his escape.
5
COMING towards the school the next day, Martin spotted Andrea just ahead of him. The warning bell was blaring and kids were running from all directions, but she strolled along nonchalantly, her bag over her shoulder.
‘How’s it going?’ said Martin, catching up and sauntering beside her.
‘Hey! Okay, I guess.’ She slowed down as they turned in at the gate. ‘I wanted to talk to you.’
‘Yeah?’ Martin pricked up his ears.
‘It’s about Sam.’
‘Sam?’
‘Yes, Sam.’ Andrea’s face was grim. ‘She’s like . . . Do you think you could tell her she’s not my best friend?’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Well, she’s always . . . she follows me around, and she’s always wanting to sit with me. She’s crowding me, you know?’
‘What?’
‘Just tell her to lay off me.’
‘I can’t tell her something like that!’ Martin was horrified. ‘Anyway, that’d be . . . she might think that was a bit mean.’
‘Marty, I’ve been having a bad time, all right?’ He was even more horrified to see tears in Andrea’s eyes, but before he could say anything else she had bounded up the steps to her first class.
Consumed by curiosity, he managed to track her down at lunchtime. She was sitting on a bench overlooking the water, glumly chewing a Vegemite sandwich. He sat down beside her.
‘What’s going on?’ he demanded. ‘What’s bugging you?’
‘I think I might be in danger. I saw something I shouldn’t have seen.’
‘What! When?’
‘Yesterday, after school. There were these men, and they were doing some sort of deal, you know? They saw me looking, and one of them came after me.’
‘Where was this?’
‘In the lane behind David’s place. I was on my way there, to . . . um . . . I was going to have dinner with them.’
‘Are you sure these men saw you?’
‘Yeah, I said. One of them came towards me, he was going to grab me.’
‘Did they say anything?’
‘The other one yelled something. It was some weird language.’
‘But why do you think they . . . ’
Sam appeared in front of them. Andrea hunched her shoulders.
‘Hi!’ said Sam.
Andrea pulled up her feet and hugged her knees, staring morosely ahead.
‘We were just . . . talking,’ Martin said weakly.
‘Anything wrong?’
‘Nooooo.’ Martin glanced at Andrea. She glared at him. ‘Well, actually . . . Andrea got a bit of a scare yesterday. Some men tried to grab her.’
‘No!’ Sam clapped a hand to her mouth. ‘What happened?’
Andrea gave an exaggerated sigh and told the story all over again.
‘Oh my god,’ Sam started exclaiming, even before Andrea had finished. ‘Oh my god. Were you wearing your school uniform?’
‘Well – yeah.’ Since the last crackdown, Andrea had been wearing something resembling the school uniform.
‘Oh my god. You know what this means, don’t you?’
‘No,’ said Martin and Andrea, almost in unison.
‘It’s me. They thought you were me. Oh, wait till I tell my
mum. They saw the school uniform and they thought you were me.’
‘You?’ Andrea was indignant.
‘Of course,’ said Sam earnestly. ‘’Cos I sometimes go home that way. That lane’s kind of a shortcut to our building.’
‘But Andrea doesn’t look like you,’ objected Martin. Sam was small and pretty with shiny blonde hair. Andrea was – well, she was Andrea. True, her hair was mostly blonde at the moment, almost white except for the purple bits, but it was chopped short at the back, and she was several centimetres taller than Sam.
‘Oh my god.’ Sam wasn’t listening. ‘My dad always said . . .H e always told us to watch out for stuff like this. He said if anyone ever tried something we had to scream and run. Kidnappers, see?’
Martin and Andrea were staring at her, open-mouthed.
‘Kidnappers,’ persisted Sam. ‘Because my dad, he’s – like – he’s pretty well-off. That’s why we were hardly ever allowed out when we lived with him.’
‘So.’ Martin was thinking it through. ‘When you tell your mum . . . ’
‘She’ll probably have to hire security for us. Oh, what a pain.’
‘Sam,’ said Martin. ‘We’ve got lots of plans for this weekend. Do you think you’ll still be allowed to go?’
Sam looked stricken. Behind her, Martin could see Andrea smirking.
‘What’ll I do?’ wailed Sam. ‘I can’t miss the netball game tomorrow. We’ve been training so hard. I’ll call Mum and see what she says.’ She pulled out her phone.
‘No, hang on a minute,’ said Martin. ‘Why don’t you wait a couple of days, and maybe Andrea can keep a bit of an eye out, see if those men are still around. Maybe she can find out what they were really up to. Right, Andy?’
Andrea nodded, grinning.
‘You’ll be with me all weekend,’ Martin reminded Sam, ‘and we’ll be in places where there are lots of people. I’m sure they won’t try anything.’
‘So you don’t think I should tell my mum?’
‘Just give it a couple of days. No use getting her all worried for nothing, is it?’
‘I guess.’ Sam was wide-eyed. ‘But you’ll have to come by my house every day to pick me up, right, Marty? I’m not going out by myself.’
‘Fine.’ He put his arm around her. ‘That’s fine.’
The bell rang.
‘Don’t worry, Sam,’ said Andrea, unaccountably cheered up. ‘Detective Andrea’s on the job.’
6
KITTY laughed so much it hurt. ‘You should have let her tell her mum,’ she said. ‘Can’t you just imagine her coming to school with a couple of great big bodyguards, and them squeezed into the desk behind her?’
The two girls were stretched out on the bleached pontoon at the pool, dabbling their hands in the water and listening to the rhythmic splashing as David swam steadily across and back.
‘Yeah,’ agreed Andrea. ‘And they’d be frisking all the teachers.’
‘And in class the teacher would say, “Why haven’t you two got your hands up? Don’t you know the answer?” ’
‘And they’d say, “Is it x plus y?” and the teacher would say, “Go and stand in the corridor!” ’
Andrea seemed delighted with her own joke, and Kitty grinned.
It was mid-morning on Saturday and the tide was out. Andrea was wearing a faded bikini that had belonged to her sister, tied as tight as it would go but still baggy on her. Her hair was spiky with sand and salt. Kitty had slipped a white cotton shirt over her one-piece, but she could feel the sun’s warmth soaking into the backs of her legs. She squinted across the sparkling water at small children, their faces obscured by sunhats, playing on the narrow beach. A shriek reached her ears as a little boy dumped wet sand on another’s head, and she saw the father come running.
‘Seriously, though,’ said Kitty, ‘do you think they could’ve been waiting for Sam? She lives just at the bottom of the hill.’
‘Oh, why does everything have to be about her?’ said Andrea crossly. ‘Every time I turn around she’s there. At school, at your place, in the street. She takes over and spoils everything.’
‘Like the thirteenth witch,’ murmured Kitty.
‘Well, Martin’s under her spell, anyway.’
‘Yeah, it makes me spew,’ said Kitty. ‘Maybe it’d be good if her mum thought she was in danger. She’d get locked up and we wouldn’t see so much of her.’
‘Yeah, but who’d want to snatch her?’ grumbled Andrea. ‘I don’t think it’s that. I reckon they were doing something dodgy and I wasn’t supposed to see.’
‘You said that other man was hiding his face. Do you think he might have known you?’
‘Dunno,’ said Andrea. ‘I’m sure I’d never seen him before.’
David reached the pontoon and paused, looking up at them.
‘Come back in,’ he called. ‘It’s great!’
‘Ewww,’ said Andrea. ‘There’re jellyfish.’
‘They won’t hurt you.’ He splashed her and she jumped up, making the pontoon wobble.
‘Anyway, I’m going to get an icecream.’ Kitty headed for the ladder up to the boardwalk. ‘If everyone says I’m fat, I might as well be fat.’
‘Who says you’re fat?’ laughed Andrea, following her.
‘Sam.’
‘I swear,’ said Andrea, ‘if I had the money I’d put out a contract on her myself.’
7
A COUPLE of days helped Andrea to calm down, but she was still nervous about going near David’s house, and determined to stay well clear of the back lane.
She had been unsure about what to say to Moshe, but after school on Friday she was trailing along Darling Street hoping to find her mother in one of the pubs and scam a bit of money for something to eat, when a familiar voice greeted her.
‘Well, well, well! I’m just on my way to pick up a book for you.’
Moshe stood in front of her, a bulging green shopping bag over his arm. He was dressed for the unseasonable heat in baggy old shorts, with his wild grey hair trapped by a shapeless hat. Her spirits lifted when she saw him.
‘For me?’
‘Yes, remember you said you’ve never read Seven Little Australians? I can’t find our copy, but my friend Peggy has one.’
‘Oh. Isn’t that book a bit . . . old-fashioned and boring?’
‘Hush your mouth, young lady! I challenge you to say that again after . . . ’
The rest of his words were drowned out as a phalanx of police cars swept down the road towards them, lights flashing and sirens wailing. Andrea clapped her hands over her ears.
‘Ridiculous,’ grumbled Moshe. ‘There’s some rumour the Premier is coming here soon with a few VIPs, so they must be practising their security. Either that or they’re trying to drive us all out of town. Watch out, they’re coming back.’ Sirens screamed again as the police cars sped back the other way.
‘Moshe,’ said Andrea when it was quiet again. ‘You weren’t about to tell me what happens in that book, were you?’
‘Well, maybe just a little bit. See, there’s this girl called Judy. You’ll really like her, and she . . . ’
‘No, Moshe, stop. That’s called a spoiler. It’s not going to make me like the book, okay?’
‘You’re right. Spoiler, eh? I do like new words.’ He chuckled. ‘So, I’ll be seeing you on Monday?’
‘Sure, I’ll be there.’
He wandered off down the street, mumbling contentedly. ‘Spoiler,’ Andrea heard him say. ‘Yes, very nice.’
She didn’t see him at all over the weekend, although she spent a lot of time with David, first at the pool and then, on Sunday, at the Back to Birchgrove festival in the park.
It had rained overnight, but by the time she arrived with David’s family, late in the morning, the sun was shining in a cloudless sky. The park was looking its best, the wet grass bright green, swathes of flowers lining the neatly swept paths. The flags and banners that had been put up to mark the occasion were dripping, and
some of the colours had run.
As they arrived many other people were pouring in from all directions, and a bunch of children were playing band music in the rotunda, conducted by a large lady swathed in scarves and beads. Some men had driven a truck onto the grass and had a noisy machine going at full throttle, pumping up a bouncy castle. Mothers with small children were already lining up for rides on a couple of Shetland ponies and the air was sharp with the smell of horse dung.
David’s parents headed straight for a row of art and craft stalls. Andrea and David followed their noses to the food area, where they found Kitty in an agony of indecision.
‘Have you ever had Himalayan food?’ she demanded. ‘It looks great, but there’s also gozleme, and the queue’s not that long.’
‘I’ll line up for gozleme if you like,’ said David. ‘We can have a bit of both.’ They were all addicted to the gozleme prepared at the market by friendly Turkish ladies, who would stretch handfuls of white dough into rectangles, fold them over a delicious mixture of spinach and fetta and slap them on a sizzling hotplate to cook while you waited.
As Kitty and Andrea studied the unfamiliar Himalayan menu, a family trailed past. There were three boys, the biggest one about their age, the younger two scuffling over a soccer ball. Behind them, the mother struggled with a grizzly little girl and a baby in a pram. The father, striding at the head of the procession, sported a luxuriant black moustache. The mother and the girl were wearing long-sleeved dresses with cotton trousers underneath, and the woman had a scarf draped over her hair and around her neck. Just as Andrea had made up her mind that the father was not being much help, he reached down, scooped up the little girl and placed her on his shoulders. Her wails changed instantly to gurgles of delight as she buried her fingers in his hair.
The oldest boy glanced at Kitty and smiled as he passed. Kitty gave a little wave and quickly turned back to the menu. Her face was pink.
‘Who was that?’ said Andrea.
‘Just a boy at my school. He’s new.’
‘You’re blushing.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ said Kitty. ‘I think we should get some of those dumpling things. Do you like the look of them?’
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