by Tony Birch
It was big and heavy and I could hardly get my arms around it. I wrestled it like a bear down the road, back to where we were living, a rundown farmhouse out behind the airport. We were just off the old highway that runs in a straight line all the way from Melbourne to Sydney. A freeway had gone in further up from us and our road took only a few trucks. It would have been a quiet place to live except that the planes from the airport went straight over the house about a hundred times a day and rattled the windows. It was peaceful at night, and quiet, except when a storm rolled in from the west and it sounded like another plane coming over, as the wind tried to tear the tiles off the roof.
Gwen had a job dancing at a beer barn along the highway called ‘The Road Train’. It was stuck between a used car yard and takeaway food place. A neon sign out the front advertised ‘Topless Asian Hostesses’.
When I got up of a morning and went into the kitchen the smell of cigarettes and booze would be hanging around. It was also in Gwen’s hair and her clothes and on her skin. The men at the beer barn left that smell on her. I felt bad that maybe she was dancing topless too. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, so in the end I asked if she was taking her clothes off.
‘Of course I’m not.’
‘I bet you are.’
‘I told you, I’m not.’
‘I don’t believe you. I saw that sign out the front.’
She ended the argument by slamming her fist down on the table and screaming in my face, ‘Do I look fucken Asian?’
She never got out of bed before lunchtime and left for work in the afternoon. She’d sold our car for bond and rent and had to walk to the bus stop where I’d found the TV. Her boss, Larry, dropped her back at the front gate early in the morning. Whenever she was away Rachel and me were left at the farmhouse on our own. I didn’t mind her being away, except when the storms came, and the old house got thrown around like a boat. If the wind moaning through the house didn’t keep us awake, wild dogs howling off in the darkness did.
As soon as she heard the first cry of a dog Rachel would jump down from her bunk and slip under the blankets next to me as quietly as she could. She knew that if she didn’t make a nuisance of herself, the better chance she had of staying. I was usually awake anyway. I would never have told her so, but I was just as frightened as Rachel, and felt safer myself with her warm body pressed against mine.
Gwen carried a red plastic wallet everywhere she went, in her handbag, filled with photographs of herself, taken when she was younger, when she first started dancing. She flipped through the wallet every chance she got just to be sure she’d once been beautiful. One time I heard her talking on the phone, telling whoever was on the other end that she was too old and ugly for the game. She’d been knocked around and it showed on her face. She was worn out.
On warm days she would sit out back in her underwear, slap her thighs and tummy and ask us if we thought that she still had a good body.
‘I’ve still got it. What do you reckon?’
Rachel would tell her she looked as beautiful as ever. I didn’t think she looked good at all, but I always kept my mouth shut. There must have been something about her that was still attractive. She made as much in tips as she did in wages and men still came around asking after her, even if they were older and looked worn out too.
At first the picture wasn’t too good on that old TV I brought home, like watching a giant snow globe. But it beat having no TV at all. The problem with the picture got solved when Gwen brought a fella home from the pub the next week. He stayed the night and made himself useful the next morning by fixing the telly. I stood in the kitchen and watched as he ran a piece of wire from the back of the set, out the window and onto the roof, where he hooked it to the downpipe. The new picture wasn’t perfect. But it was a lot better than it had been.
His name was Jon Dempsey and he looked mean. I was getting Rachel’s breakfast when he came out of Gwen’s bedroom wearing jeans and a singlet and introduced himself. He was covered in tattoos; Gwen’s boyfriends always had tattoos. She said it made men look tough and sexy.
He stood in the middle of the kitchen, spread his arms out and turned his hands over to show us he had nothing to hide. He lifted his eyebrows.
‘And you two are . . . ?’
Gwen had taught us to keep our mouths shut and not answer questions to strangers. I wasn’t going to open mine for someone I’d never met before. When neither of us spoke he shrugged his shoulders like it didn’t matter to him, filled a bowl with Weet-Bix and milk, and sat down at the table. We watched him closely as he ate. He chewed the food slowly, like he had all the time in the world. When he’d finished the cereal he lifted the bowl to his mouth and drank the slops. It left a milk moustache across his top lip. He looked silly but I knew better than to tell him so. I reckoned he could chop the table up with his bare hands if he felt the need.
He smiled across at us and tapped the tabletop with his knuckles.
‘I’m gonna be straight with you kids. I’ve only been out of the clink for four months. Your mum says that maybe I can stay here for a bit.’
He rested both hands on the table, flattened his palms and looked me in the eye.
‘Is that all right with you? I hear you’re the man of the house.’
I looked down at the picture of flowers at the bottom of my empty bowl. Gwen had come home with plenty of dodgy-looking men over the years and Jon was scarier-looking than all of them put together. He had a shaved head and scars crisscrossed it like a railway map. He also had a piece missing from one ear and rock-hard muscles under his tattoos.
He told me some time later, when I got to know him better, that most of the tattoos had been done in gaol. I thought that maybe they’d been done in the dark as well, but kept the idea to myself. His shoulders and what I could see of his chest were a mess of initials, names, dots and numbers, and drawings of animals I couldn’t recognise.
Rachel was so frightened of him, that first morning, she ran out of the kitchen into our room, slammed the door behind her and hid under the bed. When she wouldn’t come out Jon got down on his hands and knees next to the bed and flicked his cigarette lighter on and off. He waved a ten-dollar note in front of her eyes but she still wouldn’t budge.
Gwen had a habit of latching onto men who were good with their fists, and Jon didn’t look too different. I didn’t exactly hide from him, like Rachel, but I made sure to stay out of his way when he moved into the farmhouse later that day. He took off after breakfast and came back a few hours later carrying everything he owned in an old bag. That night after tea he stood up from the table and announced he was going to get a job and pay his own way. I soon learned he was like that; always saying whatever was on his mind, and loud enough that we all heard it.
He walked the half-hour to the shops the next morning, bought a newspaper and went through it looking for work. He rang some places and cleaned himself as best he could for a couple job interviews. No one would hire him.
‘I got no fucken hope,’ he screamed one afternoon after he’d got back to the farmhouse with dust on his boots and the clean shirt he’d put on that morning soaked with sweat. I was sitting on the front step watching Rachel ride around in circles on a rusty two-wheeler we’d found in the yard when we moved in. Jon sat down next to me, pulled the polka-dot tie from his neck, ripped it in half and threw it on the ground.
‘They say I’m “legally bound” to tell them I’ve been inside. Parole officer has some fucken idea I’ll be rewarded for my honesty. Well, fuck that. It’s got me nowhere. It’s the same shit every place I go. I tell em I’ve done years, they take a couple of steps back and look at me like I’m Charlie Manson.’
‘Who’s Charlie Manson?’
He kicked the ground.
‘A hippy serial killer.’
‘He kills hippies?’
‘No. He was
a hippy. Sort of.’
Gwen stayed on at The Road Train and Jon settled into the farmhouse. He did the cleaning and cooking, some fixing up, and kept an eye on Rachel and me. I was at a school twenty minutes away by bus and made my own way to and from the house. Rachel’s school was a ten-minute walk if you jumped the creek behind the house, walked across a paddock and cut through a new housing estate and a big sign that read: ‘And only twenty minutes from the CBD – door to door’. When Jon first saw the sign he laughed. ‘Twenty minutes? You’d need a rocket up your arse.’
He wouldn’t let Rachel walk to and from school alone. Once she got over her fear of him Rachel was happy that Jon was waiting for her by the gate when the bell went at the end of the day. She told me she could tell by the way they looked at him that some teachers and parents didn’t like Jon.
‘They stare at him. But only when they don’t think he’s looking back. When he does they go all red and turn the other way.’
Before Jon came to stay with us Rachel had been a quiet kid, afraid even. It didn’t help that Gwen was forever telling her how bad the world was, and how something terrible could turn up out of nowhere and bite you on the arse just when you were thinking how good things were going. She said people were not to be trusted, even your friends, because they’d likely be the ones doing the biting.
Rachel had believed every word Gwen said and kept to herself. After Jon came along kids in her grade wanted to know all about him. She told me Jon reminded one boy of the road warrior in his Nintendo game. Rachel nodded her head and said, ‘Yeah, he is, a warrior. And a killer. He’s been in gaol for killing people. Lots of people.’
I reckon that Rachel’s classmates believed every word she said about Jon. She told me they would stand back and watch as he picked her up with one arm and slung her on his shoulder to piggyback her home.
We did lots of exploring through the paddocks with Jon on weekends. He would tell us stories as we walked. He told us that before he went to gaol for the first time, he’d been in and out of boys’ homes for most of his life.
‘There were not many foster places back in them days. No pretend mums and dads for me,’ he told us when we were walking back to the farmhouse one afternoon after yabbying down at the creek. Rachel was riding on his shoulders and I was lopping the fat purple heads of Scotch thistles with a piece of rusted wire.
‘I was locked up by the time I was twelve. They might have called it a home but it was run by screws with batons and steel-capped boots. They belted the shit out of you the same as they would a grown man.’
He stopped and looked across the paddock and thought about another time.
‘I know kids that went off their heads in there. More than one of them knocked themselves off.’
He said he wasn’t ashamed of having been in the homes, or prison, and would never hide it from anyone who asked him.
‘Even if it cost me. Like not getting any of them jobs. I done my time and I owe nobody nothing.’
He never once spoke about the reason he’d gone to gaol, so I guessed he must have been ashamed about something he’d done.
We were sitting on the bank of the creek another afternoon, keeping one eye on our yabby nets and the other on the sunshine, when he spotted the three round scars on my left shoulder.
‘Seen scars like these before. How’d you get them?’
I’d been in foster care myself, just once, when Gwen was off the plate on speed. We hadn’t eaten for a couple of days and to stop me nagging her about it she’d given me money to take myself to the movies. When I got back I found Rachel in the bathroom, asleep on some dirty towels. Gwen was sprawled out on the couch. She had no clothes on and her skin had turned grey. I tried waking her up but she didn’t budge. I thought she might be dead, until I heard her moan a couple of times.
I should have called an ambulance but I was hungry and there was no food in the cupboards. I changed Rachel’s dirty nappy, put some clean clothes on her, sat her in the pusher and wheeled her down the street to the milk bar. The shop owner was an old man who could only talk by putting a microphone up to a dark round hole in his throat. He caught me stealing a loaf of bread and some sausages from the freezer. But not before I’d grabbed two chocolate bars and shoved one into Rachel’s mouth and eaten the other one myself.
He locked us in the shop and called the police. They could have charged me but didn’t. The way we looked, dirty and hungry, maybe they felt sorry for us. We were handed to the welfare at the police station and Rachel and me were separated for the first time in our lives. She was the only person I knew in the world other than Gwen, and I felt sick being away from her. I didn’t know where they’d taken her and felt bad because it was my fault in the first place for getting caught.
I was sent to a foster home run by a woman named Claire. She took care of three other kids and had looked after dozens of others. There were photos of them stuck up around the house. And nice letters from the ones who’d moved on and wanted to let her know how grateful they were and how they were getting on in life.
On my first night in the house I was sure I’d be jumped by one of the other kids. Even though it was a hot night I slept with my clothes on and my jacket zipped all the way up to my neck. Nothing bad happened to me that night, or the night after, so on the third night I took my clothes off and slept in my underwear.
‘What’s this got to do with the scars on your shoulder?’ Jon asked.
‘He’s getting there, Jon,’ Rachel said.
‘You heard this story before?’
‘Yep. Heaps of times.’
Jon listened as I told him how I’d been at the house for a week when Claire sent the other kids off to the local pool and called me into the kitchen. She sat me down and told me I had some ‘trouble to answer for’.
‘You’d done the wrong thing?’ Jon asked.
‘Nup, I hadn’t. She said I’d been stealing food from the fridge in the night. I hadn’t stolen anything, and said so, but she didn’t believe me. She screamed at me and said I was a liar and a little thief.’
I put my hand over the scars and rubbed them like they still hurt.
‘When she couldn’t get me to own up to stealing, she told me I’d be punished double because I’d lied too. She got angry, held me down and burned me with a cigarette. Three times.’
‘She was a bad lady,’ Rachel piped up, while Jon nodded quietly, as if he understood what I’d gone through.
‘Doesn’t surprise me, what happened. The bitch. Did you lag on her?’
‘Yep. I didn’t want to. I’d never told on anyone before. I waited for my next meeting with the social worker and told her. Do you think I shouldn’t have told on her?’
‘Well, lagging’s wrong. No one wants to be called dog for the rest of their life. But you were just a kid and she’d tortured you. You done the right thing, Jesse.’
Jon believed every word of the story. Just like the social worker had when I’d told her. Gwen had believed it. And Rachel. Even though the story frightened her, she liked hearing it again because it was the cigarette burns that got us back together.
But not a word of the story was true.
Claire, the foster mother, was a nice woman. Her house was clean, the food was good, and the other kids were mostly okay. The only thing she kept on at me about was getting me to eat with my elbows off the table when I was using a knife and fork. I could never get the hang of it.
I missed Rachel and never stopped feeling bad about what had happened to her. My plan was to get back to her by running away, until one of the other kids at the home, Noah, told me it was a shit idea.
‘If you split from here and get caught they’ll only drag you back. Even worse, they could put you in the lockup. You’ll never see your sister then. By the time you’re out she could be anywhere. You want her back, you got to make yo
urself the victim, not the crim.’
Noah lifted his shirt and showed me a jagged scar in his side, just under his ribs.
‘Did this with a piece of glass at the last place I was at. Blamed it on the manager. I rang the cops myself when he had some of the boys out on a hike. They let me go home to my mum in a couple of days. It was easier than them finding another place for me, even though she was using heaps.’
The next night Noah and another boy at the house, Tran, who always smelled of piss because he wet the bed, held me down and burned me three times with a cigarette. It hurt like hell, but was worth it. I was out of there and back with Gwen before the scabs had come off. And a few weeks later, Rachel came back too.
Jon did the cooking at the farmhouse. He could fry up a breakfast, do a roast of a Sunday, and sometimes made what he called the ‘B division version of the dagwood sandwich’ for lunch. The ingredients were layers of cheese, tomato and onion and lots of salt and pepper, stuck between two pieces of white bread.
Jon could even bake a cake. One Saturday afternoon he walked all the way to the shops and came back with a brown paper bag carrying his ‘secret ingredients’. He ordered us to stay out of the kitchen while he cooked. I could hear him banging away with pots and pans.
‘What do you reckon he’s making?’ I asked Rachel.
She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Dunno. It’s not near teatime yet.’
A little later he called out to us, beating a drum roll on the edge of the kitchen sink with a couple of forks.
‘Take a look kids. This is what you come up with after two years in the prison kitchen. Couldn’t find a baking tin, so I greased an old biscuit tin I found in one of the cupboards. Thought I might have stuffed it up. But she’s a beauty. Wish I had a fucken camera.’