‘How did you get that big cut on your cheek?’ Isha asks.
‘Is it cut?’ She presses the inside of her wrist against the cut. ‘It got scratched by one of those branches,’ she says, and points to a small tree.
‘Do you want a ride on our raft?’ Tarak asks.
Kristie tosses away the pear core and pushes herself up from the ground really fast, like she is a runner in a race.
‘I’d love a ride on your raft,’ she says, and shoves her suitcase back into the hole in the tree trunk.
Kristie doesn’t feel like a stranger, like one we should worry about. She is far too nice and friendly. Strangers can be friendly but not the way Kristie is friendly. Also, she is not too old, like she’s older than us but not as old as someone older.
‘Let’s row to the middle of the lake,’ she says, as we climb onto the raft and push away from the shore.
We have our rafting agreement with Jonathan, but going to the middle of the lake with Kristie is something not in the agreement, so it’s like a special case. We row out and pass Hooka Island and then Gooseberry Island, and Kristie tells us they are nature reserves for birds and plants. We all do bird calls to see if the birds will come and land on our raft but they don’t. Kristie points to the spot on land where her great-grandmother had a dairy.
‘My grandmother says she was one scary lady,’ Kristie says. ‘Could shoot a gun and ride a horse and all that. Her first husband died and she ran the dairy with her brother and half-sister. But then she met my great-grandfather and he was like the son of this fierce Aboriginal warrior and they had a pile of kids together and one was my grandmother. The dairy was right there, see, where that factory roof is with the red stripe.’
We all look at the factory roof.
It seems small, like it’s not a factory roof at all, but a roof on a toy factory.
Everything is different away from the foreshore. The bays shrink and loop alongside each other. And the trees are smaller. Only Mount Kembla and Mount Keira grow bigger, because now I can see the shape of them.
We stop rowing and let the raft drift. Kristie lies back and points at the sky.
‘There’s a seahorse,’ she says.
We scramble to lie down next to her, four bodies spread-eagled, Zeus at our heads.
‘There’s a cow,’ Isha says.
I see the fat bubble cloud he means.
Tarak points upwards. ‘Two cows.’
‘What about you?’ Kristie asks, putting her hand on top of mine and linking our fingers together. ‘What do you see?’
I am all hot in my chest because because because the thing is I haven’t spoken since we found Kristie. I don’t know why. Sometimes I get so I can’t even say one word, even though mostly I can talk and talk. I point to a cloud near the horizon that has two large flaps and a long white tail trailing off into the sky.
‘A stingray,’ Kristie says.
Kristie has a really gravelly voice. Way too gravelly for someone as skinny as she is.
‘Stare at the sky long enough,’ she says, ‘and you see all kinds of things you didn’t see before.’
Kristie has a very pretty face, even though she has a bruise. She has this really dark spot near her lips and her lips are like really red and her eyes are like really brown.
We lie on the raft and watch clouds until Isha’s watch alarm buzzes. It’s time to go home. Ever since Jonathan found out that Tarak and Isha’s dad was looking for a job he’s been the one making us lunch. Kristie leans up on her elbows and inspects Isha’s watch.
‘My mum’s,’ he says.
‘She died,’ Tarak says.
Kristie sits up properly, looks to Tarak then Isha, waiting for them to say more.
‘Killed herself,’ Isha says.
His eyes are in the middle, not slanting down, so he’s not lying.
A breeze makes tiny ripples all around the raft.
‘Isha found her,’ Tarak says.
‘Man, that’s bad, hey,’ Kristie says.
She takes Isha’s hands and puts them between her own but he won’t look at her.
‘She just got sad,’ Tarak says.
‘Yeah, right, thing is, some mums do get sad,’ Kristie says.
She makes it sound like any mum can get sad and die. I put my arms around my knees and and and rock back and forth.
I wonder what it’s like to have a mum that has killed herself.
‘So hey, what does your dad say about all this?’ Kristie asks Isha.
‘Not much,’ Isha says. ‘But he left his girlfriend in England and we came back to Australia.’
‘Ah,’ says Kristie. ‘See, right there, that says it all, doesn’t it? You get what I mean?’
Isha and Tarak both nod.
I don’t get what she means but I don’t say that.
‘Your dad’s got a girlfriend, your mum’s not happy. Why would she be? But shit happens between parents. Let me tell you. My parents got divorced when I was your age. Same thing. Only it was my mum left my dad. You can’t take sides with your parents.’
The water laps at the edge of the raft.
‘What’s the best thing you did with your mum?’ Kristie asks.
Isha’s eyes flick sideways to Tarak. ‘Run,’ he says. ‘We used to go running every day.’
‘She was a fitness freak,’ Tarak says.
‘We’d run around Hyde Park,’ Isha says. ‘If we did the run with her then we’d get ice-cream. Dad said it was bribery but she said it was pay-off.’
‘There you go – run. Or maybe eat loads of ice-cream.’ Kristie lies back and puts her arms behind her head like a pillow. ‘She’ll be out there watching you, so make sure you do those things she loved doing with you.’
Isha looks at his watch and gasps. Too much time has passed since his alarm went off. It was only yesterday that Jonathan said we were the best, most reliable adventurers he had ever known. But now now now we are really late for lunch.
Kristie says we can just row fast all the way back and maybe not be too late, so that’s what we do. First we drop Kristie at Swamp Park.
‘Back to my tree,’ she says, and jumps from the raft onto the shore.
‘Are you going to stay here all day?’ I call, as we push away from the bank.
‘Maybe all night too,’ she shouts.
Tarak promises he’ll bring her half of his sandwich. She waves to us until we raft around the point.
When we get back to my house, Isha and Tarak’s dad is sitting at the kitchen bench talking to Jonathan and the good thing is we don’t get into trouble for being late.
‘Ganesh, meet Bel,’ Jonathan says, introducing me.
Ganesh leans down to shake my hand. He smells like Dettol. ‘So this is the young lady I’ve been hearing so much about.’
Ganesh’s lips are really pink. He has hair that sticks out all over the place, like he’s just been electrified. Or like he is a wild man. But everything else about him is neat. Like he has a neat suit on and a neat white shirt and a neatly tied tie and his shoes are shiny and clean and neat. It’s like his wild self has been squashed into neat packaging. Aiko says if I want I can pick up on people’s personalities by looking at the way they dress but I’m not sure I can pick up on Ganesh’s personality.
‘I’m sorry but I have to drag the boys away for the afternoon,’ Ganesh says to me. ‘Their aunt has unexpectedly arrived for a visit.’
Isha and Tarak groan and I know why because now we won’t be able to go back and see Kristie, but we don’t say that.
‘Your aunt is waiting for you,’ Ganesh says in a voice like buttery milk.
Jonathan and I go with them to the gate and watch them walk down the street.
Jonathan sways back and forth with his hands folded in front of him, which is what he does when he’s having a think.
‘They’re good boys,’ he says.
He puts his hands on the back of my head and steers me inside like a cow.
By sunset clouds cover
the sky. I can’t see the star Venus like I sometimes can. The sun disappears and it’s pitch black outside so no good for playing. I sit at the kitchen counter with Aiko and Jonathan, eating dinner – Pad Thai which is Jonathan’s pièce de résistance. There’s a lightbulb dangling above the counter and it makes a circle of light around us like in a spooky movie. Aiko teases Jonathan about his hair that he has in a topknot. She says it makes him look like a samurai. Aiko and Jonathan are already in night-time tracky dacks and tee shirts and I’m already in my PJs and the television isn’t on yet so if I block out Uncle Ray and Maxine’s dog barking from next door, it could just be us in the world. If my parents were gone, dead maybe, it would be like all the sound gone from the world.
‘Bel?’ Aiko says.
‘Cold,’ I say, so she doesn’t know why I’m shaking.
We sit on the sofa and turn on the TV. I curl close to Aiko. She gives my shoulder a squeeze and pulls the rug around us.
‘What will happen when you die?’ I ask.
She wants to know where that question came from.
‘My mouth,’ I say.
‘When I die,’ she says, ‘and that won’t be for many moons yet, I’ll be put in the earth and there I’ll decompose. Worms will eat me and I’ll eventually become part of the soil.’
When I ask how many moons before that happens, she doesn’t answer, she just says, ‘No one is going to die, okay?’
I go to sleep sitting next to her on the sofa which I like to do sometimes and later Jonathan carries me to bed and kisses me on my forehead and says, ‘Sweet dreams, sweetheart.’
When Isha, me and Tarak land at Swamp Park the next day it’s so dark it’s almost like night. Above, there are swirls of blue-black clouds. Isha and I pull the raft onto the sand and lay the oars on top. We are all wanting to see Kristie, because she is she is she is this interesting person to us. We tramp along the path and through Dead Tree Patch.
The dark clouds part and the sun comes out and the day is full of shiny things.
Spider webs shine, like shiny necklaces.
Leaves shine a shiny green.
The wild grasses have drops of dew on them that catch the light.
But when we come to our fig tree Kristie is not there, nor is her suitcase.
At the base of the tree we inspect the damp leaves that are faded like her tee shirt. Zeus sniffs around trying to find her scent.
‘She said she might sleep over,’ I say.
‘She probably went home to her boyfriend,’ Isha says.
But we don’t know where her home is.
In case Isha is wrong, because he admits he can be sometimes, we search the park for Kristie. We go into groves and stand listening to the slow plop of water. Zeus noses his way into thick bushes. He finds dirt paths we’ve never even explored yet. We run along the banks of the stream all the way to Mullet Creek and back again, but no Kristie.
We spend the rest of the morning looping ropes across the branches of the fig. We have to raft home for lunch but after eating Jonathan’s cheese sandwiches like Speedy Gonzales – a cartoon mouse character who spoke with a Mexican accent saying Arriba! Arriba! which is Spanish for Go on! Go on! and who was in fact a Mexican mouse on TV when Jonathan was a kid like I am a kid – we’re off again.
The sun is nearly to the escarpment, like floating above it, when we finally have the ropes set and climb the fig tree, right up to the second-to-highest branch. Standing on the branch, I can see over the dead trees, over the red and green roofs of the houses, over the tin roofs of the factories, even the one with the red stripe that was where Kristie’s great-grandmother had her dairy farm, and through the Port Kembla smoke stacks, to the sea all grey and scowling.
I twist to look behind me. The escarpment cuddles all the houses and looks like a giant woman lying on her side. Like the roofs and roads and electricity wires are the swirly part of her dress, and the mountains are her curvy bits. And down from her body trickles Dapto Creek, that snakes around and becomes Mullet Creek, that twists here and there then pours into the lake where all the water swirls around like in a big shiny tub before it tips into a little stream that rushes out to the sea.
Every day for the rest of the week we row to Swamp Park and every day we climb our tree and every day I stare out at the lake. Jonathan says it’s good to do things every day and that is what the long holidays are for, to get bored, so that when something comes along that is an anomaly, which is something that is out of the ordinary and not like anything else, then we, meaning we humans, appreciate it.
Kristie is an anomaly maybe, although I don’t tell that to Isha and Tarak because it’s a big word and before the holidays started Miss Schubert said it was my extensive vocabulary that made Julie Flint want to stick pins in me. Miss Schubert told me to keep using big words but I didn’t know they were big or so big or I didn’t think about them being big or not big but now I do think about it so maybe I won’t use big words any more.
Every day I search for dragonfly nymphs, because because maybe something special will happen with Kristie if I am the one to witness a dragonfly’s first breath.
But I don’t see one.
Sometimes a stranger comes into your life and then they are gone and you miss them.
On Saturday of the second week of January, we row to Swamp Park but it’s too hot among the dead trees so we go back out on the water. We row around to the next bay where there are tumbledown houses that could be great film sets for sci-fi movies. One has green palms and old rusted car parts, this other one is like a jungle, and has old tyres and and and giant plants that could eat us maybe. In the last garden – the one full of weeds – we see her. Kristie. She has her hair piled on top of her head like a crown and is lounging on a rug. A man is lying with his head on her lap. We wave and pull our raft up onto the bank and run across the grass.
‘Greetings, friends,’ Kristie says.
Zeus plonks himself down and rests his head between his paws, staring at the man.
‘This is Ned,’ Kristie says. ‘Ned this is Bel, Isha, Tarak and Zeus.’
Ned opens one eye and looks at Zeus, and then at me and Isha and Tarak. ‘Hey,’ he says, and then closes his eye.
‘He’s really tired,’ Kristie says. ‘We’ve yanked out our kitchen, see there.’ Kristie waves behind her to a pile of green cupboard doors tossed on top of a mountain of bricks. ‘Knocked down a couple of walls. Now we’re both done in.’ The bangles on her arms tinkle like a musical instrument. Kristie smiles at us, then stares for ages at a piece of loose thread on her jeans.
We stand there and watch her but it’s like she forgets we are there.
‘Want to raft?’ Tarak finally asks.
‘Not today, angel,’ she says.
‘Oh,’ says Tarak, in his disappointed voice.
Another long silence.
Isha and I look at each other. What is going on?
Tarak says, ‘You sure?’
‘The raft might make me dizzy.’ Kristie laughs even though nothing funny has been said. ‘Hey, how about I make my intrepid explorers a lemon drink?’
Kristie doesn’t wait for an answer but lifts Ned’s head from her lap and places it on the rug like it’s a precious object. She pushes herself up from the ground, takes hold of Tarak’s hand and leads him inside. Isha and I follow.
‘Kristie is acting like the druggie girl that visits Lenny-the-biker,’ I say to Isha.
‘She’s not on drugs,’ he says. ‘Look at her eyes, her pupils haven’t shrunk to pins. That’s how you tell.’
‘She’s acting weird.’
‘You’d act weird too if you’d just pulled out a kitchen,’ Isha says.
All that is left of the kitchen is bits of pipe and wire, a tap and a sink, and some rubble from the knocked-down walls. Incense is burning that smells like BO. There’s a fridge and table in the hallway. Kristie fills the water jug from the tap and then squeezes lemons into it. She uses her hands to squeeze, not a plastic squeezer
like Aiko. She adds six heaped spoons of sugar, and then stirs really fast, and then pours the lemon drink into glasses that have striped patterns on them. We take our drinks into the lounge room. We have to push through a plastic shower curtain to get there. There’s no furniture yet because Kristie and Ned are still renovating but there are paintings stacked against every wall. Long strips of shiny material hang from the curtain rail in front of the window and the breeze makes the material swirl around me when I stand near it.
Tarak tells Kristie about the waterslides that Ganesh has refused to take him to because the cost is exorbitant.
‘Everyone thinks it comes down to money,’ Kristie says to Tarak. ‘But money is just a way to get from A to B. Promise me you won’t grow up obsessed with money.’
‘I promise,’ says Tarak.
‘You don’t get obsessed with it, but you have to deal with it.’
‘How come you have so many paintings?’ Isha asks.
‘Because we sell them,’ Kristie says.
‘How do you sell them?’ Isha rolls open a canvas that is just red and black lines.
‘We go to a house up in Sydney and a rich lady there invites all her friends and they buy them. I am like the token Aborigine,’ Kristie says. ‘Only most of them think I’m not dark enough. I have to tell them my father is like royal blood, which he is, because back in the day his grandfather’s grandfather was a king for the whitefellas.’
‘What’s a token Aborigine?’ Isha asks.
‘So we get all these paintings from Central Australia but these rich whitefellas want a real-life Aborigine there to authenticate them. So I get paid to say, Oh yeah, this is a painting about the rainbow serpent or whatever and I tell them the story and I show them a picture of Aunty or Uncle holding up the painting. And I say, See, here is Aunty who painted this. So I’m like token. I stand in for whoever painted the painting. And these rich whitefellas don’t care that it’s like a different country that my people come from. Most times they go, Oh Kristie, what an amazing story, and then they buy the painting and then Ned makes money and then I get paid. It’s a bit of smoke and mirrors, but it’s for a good cause, hey, because it sells the paintings, right? Because the paintings are the real deal. Like we’re not faking that bit.’
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