A New Kind of Dreaming

by Anthony Eaton

  Not this time, though, Jamie thought, as he examined the man standing in the doorway. This guy’s gonna be different.

  In his mind he’d already decided that he could deal with Lorraine; he reckoned he had her number. Just say what she wanted to hear, look like he was staying out of everyone’s way and she’d go off back to Karratha happy. Looking at Archie, though, Jamie had the feeling that he wouldn’t be so easy to fool. For a start he was old. Probably double the age of any of the other foster parents. Jamie figured he must be in his seventies, possibly even his eighties; it was hard to tell. He had an ageless appearance, the look of someone who’s seen a great deal, and hasn’t let any of it worry him particularly.

  The old man took a small step into the room, nodding to Lorraine. There was nowhere for him to sit so he propped himself against a wall.

  ‘Jamie, this is Archie, who you’ll be staying with. His place is only a couple of minutes walk from here.’

  The old man looked straight at him. His eyes, which had been half-closed, were an almost electric blue, in stark contrast to his dark, sun-browned skin and shock of white hair. Jamie felt as though the old man’s eyes were not looking at his face or his appearance but were searing their way into his mind, into his soul. He sat paralysed, unable to speak or move or even to tear his eyes away from that steady, piercing gaze.

  ‘Archie, any problems getting the house set up?’ Lorraine was still talking, seemingly unaware of Jamie’s reaction.

  Archie didn’t reply, just turned back to Lorraine and gave a slight nod. This seemed to satisfy her. Released abruptly from Archie’s stare, Jamie felt himself sag.

  ‘Good. You guys might as well get going then. I’m sure that after four days on a bus Jamie’s anxious to settle in and stretch out a little.’

  It took a couple of seconds for Jamie to realise that she was speaking to him; he was still recovering from that searching stare. Why did he feel that in that brief look the old man had learnt everything that he needed to know about him?

  ‘Huh? Oh, yeah. Whatever.’

  ‘Well then.’ Lorraine rose and started around the side of the desk. Archie led them out of the cubbyhole; he seemed to know his way around. ‘I’ll be staying in town overnight so that I can get you settled at school in the morning. There are only a few students, and most of them are pretty young, I’m afraid; but Mr Scott is a nice guy – you’ll get on well with him. I’ll meet you here in front of admin at about eight tomorrow morning, okay?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Good.’ She opened the door to the verandah. ‘I’ll see you then. Thanks again Archie, I really appreciate this.’

  The only sign he gave that he had heard her was another of those almost imperceptible nods, and then Archie made his way down the steps, turned left, and started across the hard-packed ground. The old man was barefoot. Jamie began to follow, but Lorraine stopped him as he reached the bottom step.

  ‘Jamie.’ He turned. ‘Remember what we spoke about, okay? Your last chance.’

  ‘Yeah, okay.’

  The boy stepped out from the shade. The heat struck him violently, like being hit in the face. It seemed to be rising up out of the very ground. After the frigid conditions inside admin, it was like stepping from a freezer into a blast furnace. A brief dizziness swept over him, but he breathed deeply and the moment passed. Up ahead Archie was walking away through the haze without looking back, his bare feet not even leaving an impression on the hard red earth.

  Jamie almost yelled at the old man to wait up, but caught himself just in time. The last thing he wanted to do was let them know how out of place he felt here. That would be giving them far too much of an advantage over him, especially this early on. Something was disconcerting him, messing up his thinking. He’d have to be careful. Slinging his bag onto his back, Jamie started to traipse through the dirt. He didn’t try to close the distance, just kept Archie in sight and followed.

  They continued in this fashion for about ten minutes. It felt like an eternity. The dust quickly filled Jamie’s eyes and mouth, settling on his hair and sticking to his skin. The burning sun seared his uncovered arms and he itched inside his tight tee-shirt. Determined, however, not to give this old man with the strange eyes the satisfaction of thinking that he was winning, Jamie stayed silent.

  Something made him look up. Ahead, the wiry figure of the old man still plodded steadily through the shimmering heat, but now there was another figure too. A slightly built man, taller than Archie, and yet somehow less substantial, weaved his way towards them, staggering down the middle of the road.

  The man in the street and Archie passed one another. There might have been some brief exchange, but if there was the words were kept from his hearing by distance and the desert breeze. Archie gave no sign of stopping, no sign of hearing anything. He simply kept walking.

  The man wore the khaki uniform of the country police. It was crumpled and stained as though he’d slept in it, and covered in dust and dirt. The cop was clearly drunk, and Jamie couldn’t help glancing at his watch – nine o’clock in the morning. The policeman, noticing Jamie for the first time, stopped in the middle of the road and stood unsteadily for a second or two before finding his voice.

  ‘Hey!’ His voice was slurred and uneven. Jamie ignored him, taking his cue from Archie, and kept up a steady pace.

  ‘Hey, mate!’

  Jamie kept walking, being careful not to cast even a slight glance in the man’s direction. Drunk or not, a cop was not someone he wanted to mess with. The drunk’s voice floated after him.

  ‘You better watch out, mate. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. You watch out.’

  Resisting the urge to reply, Jamie walked on until the drunk cop’s voice faded into the distance behind him. The encounter had shaken him, and he was relieved to see Archie stop at one of the houses on the very edge of town and turn in through the gate. He didn’t check to see whether Jamie was alright, or even following. The old man walked up the red dirt path, climbed the steps, crossed the verandah and disappeared through a torn flyscreen into the darkness of the house.

  Reaching the end of the path Jamie paused. The house was unpainted and transmitted a feeling of lived-in disrepair. Rust marks streaked the metal roof, and the guttering at the edges of the verandah was pulling away. Jamie took in the neighbourhood. There wasn’t a lot to see. A few similar houses, a couple of them abandoned judging by the broken windows and holes in the walls. Over the road lay the rest of Port Barren, dotted across the flat scrubby plain towards the sea, and in the other direction, to the south behind Archie’s place, stretched the empty expanse of the Great Sandy Desert. Not a sound reached him. The whole place rested in a kind of deathly, unnatural stillness.

  Uncertain whether it was okay to just walk in, Jamie took a couple of hesitant steps. Behind the flyscreen, the front door was wide open, a rectangle of cool darkness. It looked inviting from where Jamie stood, slowly turning to toast in the blazing glare of the morning sun.

  A slight breeze stirred the air, and the flyscreen swung on its hinges. The heat and dust gave the morning a shimmering, surreal quality, like watching a film that has been slowed down and is slightly out of focus. Jamie approached the steps on unsteady legs, grabbing at the handrail for support. A sense of uneasiness and foreboding had settled upon him the moment he’d stepped off the bus, and now it permeated every fibre of his being. It was as though some unsettling energy was rising from the landscape, oozing up out of the dusty ground and decrepit shacks, drifting in the dirty, glowing air. Dizziness picked him up and carried him.

  Jamie gripped the handrail, his knuckles white, his palms sweaty, as wave after wave of nausea swept over him. His legs refused to move, to climb the three steps to the front door.

  At the very edge of his consciousness, somewhere out in the haze of his awareness, Jamie heard a car pulling up in the street beh
ind him.

  three

  ‘Great!’

  Parked at the curb was a dirty great F-250, with a light bar on the roof and a tarpaulin-covered lock-up cage on the rear tray. It was covered in red dust and road grime, and was so dirty that it was difficult to make out the ‘Police’ signs on the doors. On the front was a huge bullbar, complete with five enormous spotlights and a wired-on cow’s skull.

  ‘Shit!’ This was bound to be trouble.

  The front doors opened, and from the driver’s side emerged one of the largest cops Jamie had ever seen – not just tall, although he must have been about six foot, but also fat. Very fat. But despite his size, the cop moved with a lithe agility that surprised Jamie. As the policeman strolled through the dirt he smiled, not a friendly welcoming smile but a tight, nasty little expression that didn’t extend to his eyes. The nausea in Jamie’s guts, the tension in his neck and shoulders and the spinning in his head increased still further.

  ‘Well, you’re here, eh?’ For such a large man he had a surprisingly high and soft voice. ‘Been a while since we’ve had one of your type in town.’

  Jamie shrugged. He was pretty sure that he was about to get busted for ignoring the drunk cop, but he’d had a bit of experience with police and as a general rule they were just jumped-up city kids with a badge and a gun. If you kept your mouth shut and let them go on a bit you could usually work out what they were really like, and then deal with them more easily. This one was different – Jamie’d never come across a cop like this.

  ‘Quiet one, eh?’

  Despite his size the cop moved like lightning. With no warning his hand shot out and grabbed Jamie’s throat, the grip instant and vice-like. Jamie couldn’t breathe. He told himself not to struggle, not to put up a fight. Just let this bloke get it out of his system, he thought.

  The fingers at his throat were long and delicate, out of proportion with the rest of the cop’s body. For one insane moment, some detached part of Jamie’s mind dredged up a memory of his mother, of her hands, which were slender like the cop’s.

  ‘See, the thing is,’ the cop continued, speaking slowly, methodically, ‘we don’t like trouble much here in Port Barren. Don’t like havin’ our peace disturbed, so to speak.’

  His chest beginning to ache, Jamie fought the growing urge to kick out. Through blurring vision he noticed tiny details: sweat stains in the armpits of the cop’s uniform, a few specks of dandruff on the shoulders, the name badge above the left chest pocket – ‘Sgt E Butcher’. The cop leaned his pudgy face down and in until Jamie could smell his breath and see the individual beads of sweat rolling down from under the brim of the wide police hat.

  ‘There was another one like you. Problem kid from the city. Thought they’d send him up here so’s he’d be our hassle and not bother all those judges and lawyers down there. All sorts of trouble he turned out to be.’

  Spots and small bursts of light danced across Jamie’s vision.

  ‘Soon as he arrived in town things started vanishing. People’s property and such like. You listening to me, son?’

  Jamie made a dry choking noise, trying to suck even a tiny breath of air into his burning lungs. Butcher took this as a ‘yes’.

  ‘I tried to talk to him, reason with him, to help him see the error of his ways. You know the sort of thing. Some of the local boys even took him aside one night and had a quiet ‘chat’ with him – to encourage him to behave himself. Didn’t work though – that kid was trouble. Gave poor Lorraine a hell of a time, he did.’

  Jamie started to struggle against the suffocating grip on his throat. It was a futile effort. Butcher ignored the movement completely.

  ‘Strange thing though – after a couple of months this kid vanished. Just like that. Guardians woke up one morning and he’d gone. Hadn’t taken any food, no clothes. Nothin’. Just’ – he paused for the briefest of seconds – ‘vanished. Very mysterious. Did a bit of a search around town but naturally no one was inclined to look too hard. Figure he must have wandered off into the desert. Never find him out there of course – desert’s a big place.’

  He released his grip and Jamie dropped onto the hard dirt. He’d never have thought that the dusty Port Barren air could taste so good. Sucking in a huge breath, he tried to clear his vision. As he crouched on his hands and knees, Butcher squatted on the ground close beside him and whispered into his ear.

  ‘See, there’s a moral to this story. A lesson. I hope you’re clever enough to work it out, son, ’cause otherwise, well, you’d better be careful, watch out, that’s all I’m saying.’

  It was the second time in ten minutes Jamie had had that warning.

  Butcher walked back to the police truck. The Sergeant wasn’t alone. Leaning on the passenger side was another cop, a young bloke. He wore the same khaki uniform as Butcher, but his was cleaner and cared for. The seams on the pants stood out where they had been ironed, and his hat sat squarely on his head. He must have been there the whole time, seen the entire episode, but his face was expressionless. He stared blankly at Jamie, his eyes hidden behind a pair of mirrored sunglasses. Butcher didn’t seem bothered. He spoke sharply to his colleague.

  ‘Get in.’

  The young cop gave Jamie a last blank look, then turned and climbed into the passenger’s seat. Before getting behind the wheel, Butcher had one last thing to say.

  ‘Welcome to Port Barren. Stay out of trouble, eh?’

  port barren

  four

  A dim light penetrated the dirty fly-wire screens around the verandah. Lying on his bed, Jamie looked up through the dusty mesh at the few stars bright enough to cast their glow inside. The tight feeling, the uneasiness that had filled him the moment he’d stepped off the coach a week ago was still there, resting in the pit of his stomach like a constant, nagging weight. He hadn’t had a decent night’s rest since he’d arrived and tonight was no different – sleep was a long way away.

  ‘Bugger it.’ He rolled off his bed and made his way to the tap on the other side of the sleep-out. His ‘room’ was the back verandah of Archie’s place, which had been walled in with flyscreens. An old fridge and a sink stood at one end and a steel-framed bed at the other. The bed was soft and comfortable.

  Jamie took a chipped glass off the shelf above the sink and filled it. The pipes gave a rattle and a thump as he turned the tap. As usual the water was warm and had a faint metallic taste – during the daylight it looked cloudy.

  It was two in the morning. The night air was cool. Somewhere out in the desert a dingo howled. Jamie shivered even though it wasn’t really cold – it was never cold in Port Barren.

  He’d been to see Lorraine that afternoon. The first of his weekly check-ins. She’d been all smiles and cheerfulness.

  ‘Jamie. How’s it going? Getting along?’

  He’d nodded. Grunted some short reply. In fact, when he thought about it, apart from that first run-in with Sergeant Butcher he’d been managing pretty well. Archie turned out to be easy to live with. He barely ever spoke. He might have said perhaps three words in the entire week, two of them on that first morning, after Jamie had eventually staggered inside.

  He’d climbed the front steps, opened the screen door and found himself staring down a short dark passageway running through the middle of the house. After the glare of the sun outside, it had been like stepping into a cave. Even though it was probably hotter inside the house than outside, the gloom and dimness made the place feel cooler and somehow peaceful.

  ‘Hello?’

  His voice echoed down the bare hallway. In a doorway at the far end Archie’s head appeared. He’d nodded and Jamie, understanding the meaning behind the gesture, had joined him in the screened-in back verandah.

  ‘Your place.’ He was surprised by the old man’s voice. It wasn’t gravelly, weak and confused like most old people’s. Archie’s voic
e was deep and strong, with a timbre that seemed to resonate around the room.

  ‘Thanks.’ Throwing his bag down beside the bed, Jamie sat experimentally on the mattress. ‘It’s comfy.’

  Archie nodded a silent reply and went back into the house. Soon the sound of a kettle being filled floated through the screen door. Jamie unpacked his gear, taking a few minutes to get everything set up. He didn’t have too much – a couple of tee-shirts, some jeans, underwear and a toothbrush. When he turned again there was a cup of strong tea on the old formica-topped table by the passage door. No sign of the old man.

  That set the pattern for the rest of the week. Jamie barely saw his host from day to day, and when he did, nothing was really said between them – just the odd quiet offering of a cup of tea. Jamie liked the whole set-up. It was different from what he’d expected. More importantly, it was different from what he’d experienced. There’d been no laying down of the house rules, no curfew, no sincere ‘I want to be your friend but only if you’ll let me’ talks. Nothing like the usual. The house was always peaceful and there was no pressure on him. He could come and go as he pleased – the door was never locked.

  That was the only thing he liked about Port Barren, though. The heat and the dust were a constant pain. Everything was always coated in a layer of pink desert sand, fine and grainy. It drifted through the town, carried by the hot breeze that blew from the south out of the Great Sandy Desert. It was into the desert that Jamie found himself staring as he sat on the back steps in the middle of the night.

  There was no moon, but the light given off by the stars was enough to allow Jamie to see well away from the town. Out there were the big iron-ore mines that kept the whole region alive, but there was no sign of them from Port Barren. It was difficult to imagine the heavy machinery and burning lights out among the spiny bushes and rocky outcrops that loomed distant in the starlight.