by Tony Birch
‘Hey, Jesse baby. Help your mummy here, will ya?’
She tugged at her clothes. The buttons on her shirt popped off and shot across the room. She had a lace bra underneath that Ray had bought her. She lifted her legs from the bed and kicked her feet in the air until her high heels slipped off.
‘Take my dress off for me, Jesse.’
The cigarette in her mouth had broken in half.
‘Please.’
I walked out of the room to the sound of her calling my name over and over again.
The next morning there was just the two of us for breakfast. Rachel said I should have knocked on their door so we could eat together, ‘Me, you, and Gwen and Ray.’
‘Ray’s not there. He didn’t come back last night. And don’t you listen? I told you to stay away from him.’
‘Well, what about Gwen? I bet she’ll be angry when she comes down and we’re all finished.’
‘Bad luck for her. If she wants to get pissed and sleep in, it’s her fault if she misses out.’
‘Don’t say pee, Jesse.’
‘Didn’t. I said piss.’
‘That’s what I mean. But I’m not going to say it. I might go upstairs and wake her up.’
‘Please yourself. But I’m warning you, you know what she’s like if she doesn’t get her sleep. It’s more important to her than having breakfast with us. Anyway, I don’t care if she never wakes up.’
‘Don’t say that. If we didn’t have Gwen, who would look after us?’
I could have hit her right then.
‘Our pop. He was looking after us real good before she come back. And you know it. You wanted to stay with him as much as I did. Jon did a better job of looking after us than she does, and she made him go away. She doesn’t care about us. Never has. I could do better than she ever has.’
She jumped off her chair and ran from the dining room.
‘Where you going, Rachel? Finish your breakfast.’
‘To get Gwen.’
I leaned across to the table next to ours and picked up a glossy book with a picture of a bus on the front. I opened it. It had the prices and maps of bus trips from Adelaide to anywhere in the country. The price of a one-way ticket to Melbourne was only twenty-nine dollars, half the adult price. I stuck the book in my pocket.
Rachel came back to the dining room. I knew she wouldn’t have got far, trying to get Gwen out of bed. She sat quietly, twirling a spoon in the half-full container of yoghurt she’d left.
‘So, is she on her way down? Or doing her aerobics?’
I heard the jingle of Ray’s boots and looked up. He was wearing his cowboy hat and carrying a large picnic basket with the price tag dangling from the handle. He sat the basket on the table and put a hand on Rachel’s bare neck as he spoke to me.
‘Where is she? Your mother?’
‘Dunno.’
‘I said, where is she?’
‘I dunno.’
He sat down next to me as he stroked Rachel’s shoulder. He stuck the middle finger of his other hand under my chin, pushed upward and lifted it until we were looking into each other’s eyes.
‘I don’t know what it is with you, Jesse. For some reason you don’t like me. Haven’t I been good to you two? I thought we’d be good pals by now.’
I would have liked to tell him that I didn’t trust him as far as I could throw him. But I said nothing, seeing as he was digging a grubby fingernail into my skin. He pushed his chair back, picked up a rind of bacon from my plate and chewed on it. It looked like a rat’s tail, dangling from his mouth.
‘Now, you do me a favour, Jesse, and go upstairs and get your mother’s arse moving,’ he ordered, then turned to Rachel. ‘Because we’re going for a drive. And a picnic lunch. Would you like that, princess?’
She nodded and smiled, then noticed me giving her a dirty look. She dropped her head.
I stood up. ‘Let’s go, Rachel.’ When she didn’t move I pulled her chair away from the table. ‘Now.’
We ran into Gwen on the stairway. Her hair was all over the place and she was half asleep. I told her Ray was downstairs waiting for her. Her eyes lit up. She started fixing her hair, using her fingers for a comb.
‘Where is he?’
‘Eating breakfast. Says we’re going on a picnic.’
‘A picnic? Where to?’
‘Didn’t say,’ I said as I climbed the stairs, leaving her there. ‘Come on, Rachel. With me.’
I stopped outside our room and looked down at the pool. There was a bottle lying on the bottom, in a corner at the shallow end. Cyril would have missed it, or maybe couldn’t fish it out.
I lay on my bed and pulled out the book to read the timetable. There was a bus leaving for Melbourne that afternoon. I could be on it and gone.
I read about some of the other places I could catch a bus to, if I had more money, while Rachel sat in front of the mirror, brushing her hair and putting on lip gloss. She put on a pair of sunglasses she’d found down the side of her seat at the movies the day before. She kept smiling at herself in the mirror and pouting her lips.
When I heard Gwen outside on the landing I stuck the timetable under my pillow. She pushed open the door.
‘Off the bed, Jesse, and get moving. Ray’s gonna meet us out the back. I don’t want to keep him waiting.’
I didn’t budge, even when she yelled at me for the third time to get going.
‘I thought I might stay here,’ I said.
Rachel stopped brushing her hair. ‘But, Jesse, I want you to come with us.’
‘There’s nothing stopping you from going. I can stay here on my own.’
‘But I want you to come with me,’ she pleaded.
‘Yeah, I want you to come with me,’ Gwen copied her, in a baby voice. She walked around to the side of the bed. ‘You’re not staying here, sport. I don’t trust you. You’re cooking something up. Now, get up. You’re coming with us. It’ll be our first family outing with Ray.’
‘Family?’
‘Yeah, family. Soon as Ray and me are married that’s what we’ll be. A family.’
Ray drove up to the motel in the biggest car I’d ever seen. It took up two spaces in the car park. It was covered in red dust and most of the panels were dented. It was a Chevvie Camaro, an ‘American car’, he said, as he stood on the footpath admiring it while we waited for Gwen and Rachel to come downstairs.
‘No cheap Jap shit. And no anti-pollution gear to fuck her up. She was built when cars meant something.’
He dangled the keys in his hand.
‘Listen to this. I bet you haven’t heard a motor that grunts like this.’
He was carrying on like a kid trying to be my best friend. He jumped in the driver’s seat, turned the key in the ignition and put his foot to the floor. I could hear two sounds. One was loud enough to rattle the windows in the motel laundry across from the car park, while the other was so deep it sounded like it was coming from underground.
He left the car idling, got out and rested both hands on the warm bonnet. ‘If this car was a woman, she’d fuck you to death.’
He winked and flicked out his tongue like a slimy lizard. ‘You behave, Jesse, and I’ll let you ride her. Break yourself in.’
When Gwen saw the car she was just as excited as Ray. ‘This yours? I didn’t know you had a car.’
‘Not exactly. I’m owed money, so I’m holding onto it.’
‘You should keep it. I like it.’
She ran a finger across the bonnet, held it up and showed us the dirt-red spot on her fingertip. ‘It could use a wash, Ray.’
‘Na. Last car I cleaned up was knocked off the same day, out front of where I was staying. It was an omen. I’ll leave this one the way she is. She’s a dirty-looking bitch.
It’s what she’s got underneath that matters.’
He threw her the keys. ‘You like her. You can drive.’
Gwen drove while Ray pulled a piece of paper out of his shirt pocket, opened the glove box and searched around until he found a pen. He wrote on the piece of paper, mumbled to himself and did some finger counting. The picnic basket was sitting on the back seat between Rachel and me. When I was sure he wasn’t looking, he was busy concentrating on his mental arithmetic, I lifted the lid on the basket. It was empty.
Every couple of minutes Gwen would ask him where we were heading. He waved her on and said, ‘Keep driving. I’ll tell you when to turn off.’
We drove out of the city and into the country. We passed farms, places that made wine and a small town so old I thought I was in a movie set. Rachel said it looked pretty and asked if we could stop but Ray said we had to keep going.
‘We’ll stop at a place I know up ahead and get some food.’
It was a hot morning and Gwen’s love for the Camaro was already over.
‘It’s a long way to go for a picnic, Ray. We could have sat on the beach across from the motel and the kids could have had a swim. You could at least let me know where we’re heading.’
‘Stop your whingeing. It’s not much further. An hour. An hour and a half, max.’
‘An hour and a half? Fuck that. Rachel wants something to drink and I need a piss. We’re not waiting an hour and a half.’
We stopped at the next town. It had about half a dozen houses and a general store. Gwen drove around the back of the store and parked under a tree across from a tin shack with a hand-painted sign nailed to a door: ‘Toilet – Ladies & Gents’.
Ray handed me the picnic basket and some money. ‘You take your sis into the shop and stock up.’
‘What should I get?’
‘Picnic food, I guess.’
We filled the basket with packets of potato chips, soft drinks, chocolate bars and some made-up sandwiches. I was watching Ray through the window. He was talking to someone on the pay phone out the front of the store.
We were still filling the basket when he came in. He lifted the lid to see what we’d bought. ‘Look at all this shit. Junk food’s no good for you. You two need to take better care of your bodies.’
I reckoned Ray smoked about forty cigarettes a day. And he got whacked with Gwen most nights, on the drink and real junk. He was no health freak.
‘It’s not all bad stuff,’ I said. ‘I got us some sandwiches. And orange juice for all of us.’
I reached into the basket and pulled out one of the bottles. ‘See. One hundred per cent, it says. It’s good for you.’
Ray grabbed the basket and money from me and walked over to the counter.
‘You got any fruit, love?’
The girl behind the counter, who looked no older than me, was reading a fashion magazine. She was pretty and had an earring in her nose and a bolt through her eyebrow. She didn’t bother looking at us until Ray asked her a second time.
She pointed towards the back of the shop. ‘Had a few bananas yesterday. On the shelf next to the bread. That’s all we got. If there’s any left.’
Ray muttered ‘fucken bananas’ under his breath, and handed the girl the basket.
‘Lot of stuff in here.’ She smiled at Rachel as she put the prices through the till. ‘You must be hungry?’
‘I am,’ Rachel said. ‘We’re going to have a picnic.’
‘A picnic? Round here? That’ll be a first.’
When we got out of the store Rachel asked me if I’d seen the girl’s ring through her nose.
‘It would be hard to miss it, Rache. It’s right in the middle of her face.’
‘Did you like it?’
‘It’s just a ring. It must give her the shits when she has a cold and has to blow her nose.’
‘Did you like her? She was pretty. I think you liked her, Jesse.’
‘What would you know?’
‘Lots. I saw you look at her and you liked her.’
‘Get in the car.’
‘You liked her.’
We drove on until Ray ordered Gwen to take a turn-off, onto a dirt track. She took the corner too fast and had to hit the brakes to stop from slamming into a fence post. The back wheels of the Camaro drifted across the road and the car turned a full circle before we stopped in a cloud of dust.
Ray’s hat flew off his head and out the window. He punched Gwen in the arm.
‘What the fuck you trying to do? Get us killed?’
‘Knock it off. It was an accident.’ She jumped out of the car, slammed the door and ran around to the passenger side. ‘You fucken drive.’
‘Don’t worry. I’m going to.’
He pointed though the windscreen at his hat, caught in the wind, tumbling along the road. ‘But not before you grab that.’
The track was full of potholes and the Camaro shuddered and shook. It turned again and headed towards the sea. Before I knew what was going on we were driving on sand. It was smooth and flat. I looked out the side window. It was the weirdest colour.
‘Look at the pink sand, Rachel. Your favourite colour.’
‘It’s not sand,’ Ray said. ‘It’s salt.’
‘Yeah, right,’ Gwen said.
‘Serious. Same stuff that you put on your tomato sandwiches, before they’ve cleaned it up. My old man used to work here. Mined it. Hard work, it was. They used to shovel it by hand. Broke his back, doing that.’
‘You come from round here?’ Gwen asked.
‘Yeah. Lived out here for a bit when I was a kid. Back in that small town. It was a fucken hole.’
‘So, why we out here for a picnic? If it’s such a hole.’
He tipped his hat back on his head. ‘I want to take a last look round. Won’t be back again. I’m just sentimental, I guess.’
‘You headed somewhere, Ray?’
He leaned across the car and put a hand on her thigh. ‘I am, babe. And so are you. On our honeymoon.’
We pulled in alongside an open shed of old machinery. The roof and walls of the shed and the machines were a rust-red colour. Ray jumped out of the car, grabbed the picnic basket and leaned against the bonnet. He pointed to a wooden pier in the distance.
‘Let’s head over there.’
Perched along the pier were hundreds, maybe thousands, of birds. They were big and ugly and made an awful noise.
Ray took Rachel by the hand. ‘You like birds? I bet you do, honey.’
‘Some. But not big ones like those. They look scary. I like puppies best.’
Walking over to the pier the salt scrunched under my feet and the hot sun beat down on my head. When we got close the birds started screeching louder. At first it was just one or two of them, until they all joined in and the noise was deafening. Ray picked up a rusted bolt from the ground and hurled at them. It crashed against the pier wall. The birds took off and, for a few seconds, blocked out the sun. They flew over our heads and landed on the roof of the shed.
Ray slipped his shirt off and laid it down for a tablecloth. He took the food out of the basket and placed it on the shirt.
‘Here you go, kids. Dig in.’
The pier was covered in bird shit and it smelled bad. Gwen sniffed the air. ‘Great spot you picked, Ray.’
He laughed, took the top off a bottle of soft drink and had a long swig.
I looked at Ray’s body as we ate. He had a round scar on his side, under his ribs. It looked a bit like the scars on my shoulder except the skin was a darker colour to that around it, and it was sunken. Gwen was looking too. She leaned across and touched it. The tip of her finger fitted the hole.
‘I been meaning to ask you, Ray. How’d you get this? Never seen a scar so round and neat. It’s
kinda cute.’
‘Cute? Weren’t cute when I got it. A .38 put that hole in me.’
She quickly pulled her finger away like she’d burned it on a hot iron.
‘What’s a .38?’ Rachel asked.
‘You tell her, Jesse. You’re a smart kid. I bet you know.’
I did know but didn’t want to say. He was watching me closely. I was sure it was some sort of test, but didn’t know what would be the smart answer. I wished that Jon Dempsey was around so I could ask him. He’d know how to deal with someone like Ray Crow.
‘I dunno what it is.’
‘I just bet you do.’
With no warning he ripped his shirt from the ground and slung it over his shoulder. Food and drink went everywhere.
‘Jesus, what are you doing?’ Gwen screamed. ‘We haven’t finished.’
‘Yes we have. Grab what’s left and put it back in the basket. We have to go.’
When we got back to the car Gwen headed for the bushes. ‘I need another piss.’
She walked off into the scrub and Rachel trailed behind her.
Ray came up to me and fingered the scar in his side. ‘You know how I got this. Why didn’t you say?’
‘Cause it’s none of my business.’
He seemed impressed.
‘Good boy. Keep your mouth shut when you have to. Would you like me to tell you how I got a bullet in my side here?’
‘Like I said, it’s not my business.’
‘Go on. Take a guess.’
I thought that maybe the police had shot him in a robbery but didn’t want to say.
‘I really dunno.’
He put his shirt back on and tucked it in his jeans. ‘I got myself into trouble and was taught a hard lesson. Learned something out of that, to keep my trap shut.’
He put an arm around my shoulder and squeezed, a lot harder than he needed to.
‘You’re luckier than me. You’re a smart kid, Jesse. I reckon you already know that. And you didn’t have to get shot to learn.’
‘Where we going now?’ Gwen asked.
We’d headed back along the dirt road to the highway and Ray had taken another turn-off and crossed a railway line. Now we were driving towards some low hills in the distance.