Dreaming of Amelia

by Jaclyn Moriarty

  ‘Roberto,’ I say, carefully. ‘He’s a convict.’

  ‘Yes. He is. And you think he’s not happy because of this?’

  Not a stupid man so he must want something else.

  ‘He’s happy sometimes,’ I try, ‘because he talks about his friend Phillip and the other guys, and like on St Patrick’s Day they all got trashed. And he likes seeing how the farm’s, you know, shaping up.’

  Roberto gets an intense expression.

  ‘But then again,’ I say, ‘he could be telling these happy stories to Maggie so she doesn’t worry. He could be keeping his darkest thoughts out of his letters.’

  Roberto makes a horse-snorting noise. I think he means it’s a good point.

  ‘He talks about how much he’s missing Maggie,’ I say, ‘and he tells her it’s too hot, and the colours are reds and golds but he wants the green, green grass of home.’

  ‘The colours, ah. And what else do you think he might miss about home, our Tom?’

  I have a think about that.

  I say, ‘Well, he’d be missing his mum. He’d be missing having her around to say goodnight each night.’

  Roberto’s face gets a penetrating look, and I get a spooky feeling that he thinks I’m talking about my own mother.

  I now have two things to say.

  (1)

  I was not.

  (2)

  I hate those TV shows where characters talk about one thing, such as their patient on the operating table (let’s say they’re a doctor), then you realise they’re actually talking about themselves. The patient’s open heart surgery is nothing compared to their own messedup heart, or whatever. It’s selfish. And means they’re not concentrating, which is medical negligence.

  So, let me clear this up right now. Everything I say — you can take it at face value. Thanks.

  The fact is, my mum moved away three years ago and I’ve just about forgotten how it was, having her around to say goodnight. Also, to the best of my recollection, she didn’t say ‘goodnight’. She said, ‘Sleep well’ or ‘Sweet dreams’ or ‘Can you shut the computer down before you go to bed?’ or ‘Turn that down a tiny bit, would you? That’s better, thanks’, or ‘See you in the morning’ etc (I could go on). Never just a plain ‘goodnight’.

  So, you know: touché (is what you say to me)(I think).

  And when Mum moved away she asked if I wanted to come. But I chose to stay with Dad. So, if anyone’s got a right to a broken heart here, it’s my mum.

  Back to Roberto’s office, with his eyes incorrectly in my head.

  To get them out of there, I point to the blacked-in circle on my paper and say, ‘Do you reckon that my dad’s a black hole?’

  Roberto can be surprising.

  ‘Tobias,’ he says. ‘What’s a black hole?’

  ‘A black hole,’ I go, ‘it’s, you know, in space — one of those big black holes . . .’

  Roberto’s still looking.

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s, you know, if someone’s a black hole it means they’re in a really black mood, I mean, they’re a real downer.’

  ‘That’s what it means?’ he says.

  Turns out, I don’t know for sure. I just assumed that.

  ‘Okay,’ I go. ‘You got me. What’s a black hole?’

  Roberto gives his shrug and says, ‘You got me too.’

  Then he sends me away to research black holes.

  Oh yeah, and the history of Ireland.

  WEEK 3

  Third week of term I did the research.

  Both are straightforward.

  Black Holes

  A black hole is a something that happens when you get so much stuff crammed together into one small place that the place can’t handle it any more so the place goes ballistic and turns into total, mad darkness.

  History of Ireland

  See definition of black holes.

  Sometimes I wonder why I don’t do better at school.

  Thursday night of Week 3, Roberto’s playing pool with my dad when I get home. Dad looks at his watch, and looks at Roberto, and they both raise eyebrows at each other. Then Dad chalks his pool cue and shoots.

  It’s not that late, just after one.

  I tell them about black holes and the history of Ireland. I mean, I tell them the above.

  They both laugh but Dad’s drunk, and I see something in Roberto’s eye, maybe disappointment when I give my history of Ireland. Just a flicker and I think, yeah, he’s right. That was just: reductive, witty, ha ha, aren’t I clever, calling Ireland a black hole?

  That’s what I see in the flicker in Roberto’s eye.

  Or maybe it’s just that Dad’s cleaning up the table as I speak.

  Whatever, I decide to tell them the real History of Ireland.

  As I see it:

  History of Ireland

  Okay, so you’ve got your basic green and misty country with stone walls, sheep and fairy folk. There’s something kind of weird and tilted about it. The fairy folk are real, for a start, not imaginary. That’s my understanding. Anyway, England goes: now that country looks pretty, we might take it! (That was their way in those days.) So they took it. But, like I said, something tilted there, and so it slipped right out of England’s hands. England went, huh, how did that happen? They took it back, it slipped again, they took it back, it slipped. And so on. Each time England held on tighter and Ireland tilted more.

  Now, when I say that England held on tighter, I mean they tried various things, such as making it the law that Ireland was theirs; taking away the land from the locals; shipping in English people to own the land instead; massacres; asking nicely if they could have the country please. And so on.

  I mean, they gave it their best shot.

  So, in the end, they won! They got Ireland! (More or less.)

  Meanwhile, in Ireland there were a lot of unhappy people. Cos they didn’t own their country. And they’re all, like, poor, cold, hungry, you know, depressed. Like 20 people, no blankets, crammed together in a leaky mud hut. While the English owners lived in mansions and ate scones with jam and cream. And if the Irish people said, ‘Can I have a crumb from your scone?’, the owner had them whipped and put a cap of burning pitch onto their head. More or less.

  The Irish people didn’t get on that well with each other either. The non-Catholics hated the Catholics, was the main issue, as I see it. You can’t blame them for that. If I understand correctly, Catholics do not believe in contraception. So, you know, sex is not relaxing.

  Anyhow, it was against the law for Catholics to own land, go to school, vote, join the army or own a horse worth more than five pounds. Which was harsh.

  In the end, the Irish people tried an uprising. Shot some English people, burned down their houses, and then the English people were super pissed so they shot Irish people, tortured them, burned them, hanged them, and so on. And everything went to hell.

  So, like I said, a lot of stuff, a lot of issues, crammed together into one small place and the place goes ballistic and turns into total, mad darkness.

  And, in conclusion, that’s the history of Ireland.

  ‘That’s my boy,’ says Dad. He leans over, sinks the eight ball, winning once again.

  ‘More things probably happened though,’ I say. ‘I stopped researching at 1799 when Tom came to Australia. I think things happened after that.’

  ‘Things might have happened after that,’ Roberto agrees, teeing up to start another game.

  We played pool until four in the morning.

  I remember a couple of things.

  One was that Roberto talked Dad into a blind date with a woman he knows.

  The other was I won the last five games. The booze always catches up with the old guys in the end.

  WEEK 4

  Athletics carnival this week.

  Everyone waiting to see Amelia and Riley’s new superpowers.

  Word on the street was, they were going to (a) throw javelins to China,
(b) run as fast as cheetahs, or (c) blitz the egg-and-spoon.

  They didn’t even show.

  Coupla buddies of mine, Liz Clarry and Cassie Aganovic, cleaned up.

  I was proud.

  Other emotions I had this week included the opposite of pride.

  I’m referring, in particular, to the Wednesday, the day that the Year 12 report cards were issued.

  Closing the curtains on that day, and moving on.

  On Thursday the emotion was terror.

  A tertiary information day was held in the assembly hall: presentations, booths, flyers, what-have-you.

  The future stood in our assembly hall and let me know it wasn’t mine. So. You know. Terrifying.

  Anyway, Friday morning I felt what you might call intrigued.

  Is intrigue an emotion? Why not.

  Because everything was linked. (In my mind anyhow.)

  Let me take you through it.

  Well, for a start, I was half-asleep.

  I should maybe have mentioned earlier that Term 2 was a party term. A girl in my year whose parents were away held parties on random nights at her mad mansion home. The parties were wild.

  So Friday morning I was half-asleep.

  I had a free period and was doing some reading for my History project, and I came across a reference to an Irish prison called the Black Hole.

  Spooky, right? Me and my new interest in black holes, and one shows up in my history research.

  But it also made me realise that my definition might have missed something. See below.

  Black Holes

  Stuff crammed together into one small, mad, ballistic darkness, and be very, very careful of this darkness because if you go inside you NEVER GET OUT.

  Cos a black hole is a prison.

  In actual fact, those black holes in space were not even named black holes at first. I think they were called frozen stars. But then this guy suggested we name them black holes, thinking of a famous event called the Black Hole of Calcutta, which was when 146 people got locked up overnight in a small, crowded prison and the next day only 23 were left.

  So, I guess black holes started out as hellish prisons.

  Anyway, I’m thinking about this issue, and I’m thinking there’s more links because you’ve got these poor Irish peasants all crammed together into their little leaking hovels with no windows and no chimneys, like poverty is their prison. They’re going mad and they can’t escape so their houses are black holes. And then you’ve got people trying to escape by, you know, stealing sheep (like my Tom), or becoming supercool rebels (like my Phillip). But they all got thrown into prison, so that’s more black holes. Some got tossed from the prisons onto ships that were headed to Australia.

  Such as the ship called the Anne. Crowds of murderers, druglords, poor folk who stole to get their dinner, and superhip rebels who had some way-cool secret handshakes — crowds of them — all crammed together in the deep, dark, dirty holds of ships. An iron grate dragged over their heads.

  That’s more black holes, see?

  Not surprisingly, the last thought I had that morning, as I fell asleep at the table in the library, was about my dad. I was thinking: is he a black hole? I mean, is he a prison? Did Mum mean she couldn’t escape?

  But she did escape. Ran away to Brisbane with a guy she met at work, and now they’ve got a two-year-old named Polly. And Mum’s so happy she can’t stop showing me photographs of Polly on her mobile, which is fair enough. The kid’s cute: at least, her nose is cute. It’s just like mine.

  So maybe Mum meant that Dad’s a black hole now. That he turned into total-mad-dark prison-black-holeness after she left? (Which means it was kind of unfair — Mum, the one who made him a black hole, calling him on it like that.) And does that mean I’m the one who can’t escape? Because I’m living with the black hole, my dad? Does Mum mean I should run away like she did, run to the sunlight up in Brisbane?

  But then I’d miss my friends. Not to mention Dad. I mean, Mum’s okay cos she’s got the new guy and the Polly, but Dad’s got nobody but me.

  So, anyway. That morning intrigued me right into my dreams. It was like there were links from Tom Kincaid to black holes to Irish peasants to the ships to Australia to black holes again to my dad and then to me. I felt like I could reach out and shake hands with Tom. Ride a black hole back in time.

  But like I said, I was hungover.

  WEEK 5

  I found out something else about black holes this week.

  Black Holes

  When you get trapped in a black hole you change. There’s this superpowerful gravity dragging you in, and whatever part of you is closest to the black hole gets dragged in faster than the rest of you, so basically you arrive stretched out of shape. You never get back to normal. And this is called spaghettification.

  That’s another link between my dad and black holes: my dad makes some great spaghetti pastas.

  WEEK 6

  This week at my school there was a Shakespeare festival and a cross-country race.

  I know this because I just looked up the school’s online calendar.

  I have no memory of either event.

  I do remember one helluva party at that mad mansionhome I was mentioning.

  The party was on a Wednesday night, and I remember it in pieces.

  There’s one piece where I’m in the living room chatting to my buddy, Emily, and out of the corner of my eye I see Amelia and Riley. They’d just arrived, I think. Those two have the most intense gaze you ever saw. If this were a story about aliens, I’d say their eyes were artificially enhanced.

  I shifted a bit, to see what it was that had attracted that laser-vision stare.

  It was Lydia, on the couch.

  She hadn’t noticed them.

  I don’t know why, but something about that moment made the goosebumps rise up on the back of my neck.

  Then I happened to see that Lyd was sitting next to her exboyfriend, Seb. A space between the two of them about the size of a plank of wood. Made me sad. Those two used to be the real thing. And that got me thinking about spaces between people who are meant to be together. From Amelia and Riley, watching from shadows, standing as close as two people can get without touching, to Lyd and Seb, a hand’s width apart on the couch, to my mum and dad, a whole state apart — and then to Tom and Maggie, oceans, countries, hemispheres, destiny between them.

  That piece of the party disappeared into a couple of beers.

  One last piece: a conversation in a closet.

  Maybe ten of us in that closet, trapped in the dark. (Don’t ask.) Had a few bottles with us so we were fine. And at one point somebody, I think it was Amelia but it might have been Riley — those two are sometimes the same person — anyway, one of them started a conversation about shadows.

  We talked about shadows for three hours.

  I thought so hard and deep about shadows that night. I mean, a shadow is something that’s there but isn’t there. Your shadow is real, you can see it on the ground or on the wall, but it’s actually nothing. It’s only there because you’re there, because of your presence. But, guess what, it’s also only there because of absence — your shadow shows up because you’re blocking out the light.

  A shadow is the absence of light.

  You remember the history of Ireland? I said that Ireland was a country of fairy folk, and as far as I could figure, the fairies were actually real?

  Well, one of the ‘fairies’ I read about was something spooky called the Fetch.

  You know what the Fetch is? It’s a shadow.

  It’s the shadow of any real person. You see the shadow wandering around without its person. It’s like, there’s your mum across the street, hi — but then you realise, no, it’s not your mum, it’s just her shadow. You go cold all over when you realise it. Then the phone rings in your pocket and it’s somebody telling you your mum’s just been in an accident and they’re not sure if she’ll make it — at which point you go even colder.

 
The Fetch is an absent presence: it comes to warn you someone’s going to die.

  So, I remembered the Fetch while I was sitting in that closet, and a chill ran straight from the base of my neck down my spine.

  Then my mind bended in half and I got another link — you remember I said that a black hole is a prison and nothing can escape? That includes light. Light can’t escape and that’s why a black hole is black. A black hole is the absence of light.

  Wait.

  Black Holes

  A black hole is the absence of light.

  So, a black hole is a shadow. A Fetch is a shadow. It was happening again: black holes and Irish history slipping back and forth across my mind.

  And sitting in that closet, I realised that this was not intriguing.

  It was horrific.

  Why had I not seen it before? Those Irish fairies, bringing news of death; those black holes, sucking you in, stretching your limbs, locking you forever in a big, dark, silent absence. It’s all part of one long chain of horror. Irish peasants getting hanged, drawn, quartered, thrown onto ships, chained up in rotting black holes beneath the deck.

  Then they arrive in Australia and it’s a black hole of its own. They work all day, they can never escape, do anything wrong they get whipped. Here’s a couple of lines I found in a logbook of people who got flogged:

  William Hughes, refusing to work, 25 lashes, back much lacerated, but very little blood; appeared to suffer great pain during his punishment but did not cry out, having stuffed his shirt in his mouth.

  That image — a guy stuffing his shirt into his mouth so he won’t cry out while they thrash him — I can’t get it out of my mind.

  And somehow it all seems connected to my dad. Like this great dark shadow that no one can escape is sitting in my house and trapping him.

  It’s like I brought the shadow into my house with my research.

  I realise that makes no sense.

  The timing is upside down. Dad’s a black hole, according to Mum, and then I did the research.

  But time, in that closet, was distorted. I knew for a fact that it was my fault that Dad was a black hole — I turned him into one by reading about Irish history, Irish fairies, and black holes.