Dad says, ‘That’s great, Princess.’ But he doesn’t sound like he thinks it’s great. He sounds like it’s a problem, and it is.
A party means taking a present and everyone will be dressing up, so we have to turn Grace into some kind of fairy, with wings. Friday after school instead of going to the beach we trawl the two dollar shops down at the mall. There’s plenty of vampires and skeletons and Spidermen but they’re sold out of fairies. And nothing in the two dollar shop is ever really two dollars.
It’s when we’re watching Better Homes that night that I get my idea. The woman who does the room renovations is stretching material over wire and sprinkling it with sequins to make butterflies to hang on the wall and I remember that Rebecca Blake has a big pack of glitter pens. Rebecca has so many pencils and textas and things that she’d never notice if I borrowed them for the night.
On Monday we have maths and reading and writing all day so Rebecca doesn’t get her giant panda-shaped pencil case out at all, but Tuesday afternoon is art and when everyone is packing up I manage to pinch three of the glitter pens and hide them under my jumper.
‘Come on,’ I say to Grace. She’s always sooo slow. She likes to dawdle across the road, smiling at Mrs Vargas and waving to all her friends. I feel like there’s a big red sign above my head saying ‘thief, thief, thief’, and I want to get to the car as quickly as possible. But when we round the corner the car isn’t there.
Dad’s never been late before. I tell Grace that we just have to wait and he’ll be along soon. It’s not like I’ve got a mobile phone he could ring us on to tell us he’d be late. We wait and we wait and we wait until it starts to get dark. Gracie won’t stop whingeing. First she kicks some stones around in the gutter until I tell her to stop, then she goes and sits under a tree. Then she starts to swing on the gate of a nearby house. I tell her to stop doing that too and a dog begins to bark at us. Then she says she needs to go to the toilet. I don’t want to take her to the toilet in case Dad comes while we’re not there.
So then she starts crying and says she has to go. ‘Go behind that tree over there,’ I tell her. ‘No one will see.’ But then she starts crying louder so I give in and we walk the six blocks to the park.
At the park she’s so quick in the toilet it’s like she wouldn’t have time to go at all, but she comes out smiling. ‘Let’s go and see if Uncle’s down by the river,’ says Grace.
I’m about to say no because I’m still worried that Dad will come back and we won’t be there but then I think that maybe Uncle will be able to ring Dad. I’ve got Dad’s mobile number written on a piece of paper in my wallet. I’ve never seen Uncle with a phone, but maybe one of the other men will be able to do it.
Uncle’s sitting at a wooden picnic table with a two other men playing cards. There’s a couple of bottles wrapped in brown paper sitting between them. Uncle sees Grace and starts to sing ‘G.R.A.C.I.E – Gracie-ah.’
‘It’s Gloria, ya plonk,’ says one of the other men.
‘Nah, ya name’s Gracie, isn’t it love?’ says Uncle.
‘The song,’ says the other man. ‘G.L.O.R.I.A – Glor – ia.’ He begins to sing, and Uncle sings the Gracie version, both of them trying to drown the other one out. I wait a while for them to stop, but they just keep getting louder and louder. I touch Uncle on the arm, and he flinches.
‘What do you want?’ he asks.
‘Dad didn’t come to pick us up. Can you call him for us?’
Uncle looks at me for a long moment. His eyes are bloody and seem almost sightless. ‘Your Dad’s missing? You better run. The welfare will be coming for you. The cops will come. You better hide. Run now.’
When he says run, he flaps his hands at us. He looks scary. ‘Run!’ he says again. And we do. I grab Grace’s hand and we race back through the park with our school bags bumping up and down on our backs. I’m not sure where we’re going, but we run anyway.
It’s getting darker. The trees reach out to us with long black fingers. I’m scared, but I have to be strong for Grace. Her hand is hot and sweaty in mine.
When we finally stop, I’m doubled over, winded and panting. Grace is panting too. ‘I’m tired,’ she says. ‘When’s Dad going to come?’
I don’t know the answer to that. I hope it’s soon. It’s really dark now. We walk back up the street towards the school, but Dad’s not there and there’s no lights on and it’s scary. We need to wait somewhere Dad might come and find us so I decide to head down to the main street. We walk past the library, but the doors are shut and only the security lights are showing so it must be after six now. I don’t know where to go until I remember the laundromat. It’s warm and light and open until ten o’clock. Dad will come and look for us there for sure.
We sit on top of the washing machines and watch the television until the news comes on and Grace gets bored. Then I remember the glitter pens. We’ve both got white T-shirts on under our school shirts. I take mine off and make Grace take hers off too. There are two wire coat hangers in a corner of the laundry. I stretch my T-shirt around one and Grace’s T-shirt around the other. Then I twist the handles of the coat hangers together and they’re a pair of wings – just like the butterfly wings the woman made on Better Homes and Gardens.
I give Grace the glitter pens and watch as she settles down happily drawing coloured spots on the shirts. Everything is going to be okay. Dad will find us soon I know; and tomorrow, tomorrow Grace will have wings.
About the author
Catherine Moffat lives on the New South Wales Central Coast and works as a librarian at the University of Newcastle. She has had short stories published in literary magazines including Australian Book Review and Australian Short Stories, and on Radio National as well as in a number of anthologies including The Mer-Creature and other stories, Things that are Found in Trees, Novascapes, The Lost Boy, and Shibboleth. During 2011 and 2012 she was a regular blogger for Meanjin and Overland as part of their Meanland project on the future of the book.
Catherine is a winner of the Katharine Susannah Prichard Speculative Fiction competition and the Wyong Short Story Competition, and has been shortlisted or commended for other prizes including the Margaret River Short Story competition, the Scarlett Stiletto, the Newcastle Short Story prize and the Elizabeth Jolley Short Story competition.
Catherine writes in a range of genres including crime and speculative fiction. Many of her stories have strong social justice themes and deal with the lives of people on the margins – at the edge of themselves and the edge of society. She would like to publish a collection of her short stories and to have the concentrated writing space and time to complete her two unfinished novels. And of course she’d be exceedingly happy if Cate Blanchett wanted to act in or produce a film of one of her stories.
552 to Reservoir
Eloise Young
Second Prize
Tommy swirled the paper cup and watched the anaemic tea slop up its sides. The bus kept lurching forward but if he timed it right, he could get the liquid to drop back on itself like the ocean’s pull as it sucked in and out, exposing rock and slime and VB bottles stacked in colonies under the jetty. Tommy didn’t trust the sea. It always seemed lurky and stagnant, hiding menacing objects and unknown creatures just below its surface. He imagined tentacles and tendrils that gripped his ankles and pulled him under like the cancer threatened to, lungs filling with water, limbs flailing against a cobweb of tiny bubbles. He shuddered. Tommy hated swimming. As a kid he had mainly endured the rising panic for the half hour afterwards; sitting with his dad on the crumbling retaining wall watching the fishermen flash nylon lines against the sun. Sometimes they’d had potato cakes and Tommy would lick each salt crystal from his fingers.
The nurse had handed him the tea after she’d taken his blood, with an efficient smile that drew up the skin around her eyes like a rumpled blanket.
‘We’ll send the results to Dr Chen. Okay, Mr Gregory? You’ll need to make a follow-up appointment with her to
discuss your options.’
The clinic walls were a patchwork of human ailments, papered with brochures for hepatitis, irritable bowel syndrome, cancer, bladder complaints, depression, HIV.
‘Are you at risk?’ a greying, coiffured woman asked from a flyer cover. The bottom section was covered so Tommy couldn’t see the disease that stalked this nice-looking lady, which touched her face when she slept and left yellow-ringed stains on her pillow. Tommy imagined the woman in a shaded, private room, where nurses glided in and out and tended to her, laying her earrings on the nightstand.
‘Yep, okay,’ he’d nodded.
Tommy finished his tea and folded the base of the cup in on itself so it didn’t drip. He put it between his feet and looked out the window as the bus pitched from side to side like an aluminum dinghy. Rain streaks separated into plump drops, then rejoined in rivulets that gathered momentum as they swelled. The drops had some kind of internal compass that brought them back together, Tommy decided, as though they couldn’t stand being alone. Squat brown brick houses lined the street, with grit-spattered wheelie bins standing guard as sentries, warding off outsiders. A few vacant lots stood out like missing teeth. A cluster of passengers shuffled to the exit and the doors opened with a weary sigh. The black rim of the rear-view mirror framed the driver’s eyes as he farewelled each person departing with a tilt of his head, and he held Tommy’s gaze in the reflection as the last passenger hefted her shopping trundler onto the road and stepped off. Tommy quickly dropped his glance and stared hard at his hands. A worker’s hands, he’d always thought proudly, like his dad’s – steady and precise, firm and resolute. You needed all those qualities to cut tiles straight and true, first time with no waste. But if things are defined by their function, by the tasks they complete, were they still workers’ hands if they didn’t work? Looking up, he saw the driver’s eyes smiling back at him. He curled the corners of his mouth up in an uncertain grin, hoping it didn’t look as awkward as it felt. A young guy was perched on the back seat, staccato beats leaking from his headphones, but otherwise the bus was empty.
‘Cold today.’ It was a statement, as flat and bald as the grey skies.
‘Yep,’ Tommy replied. ‘I don’t mind the cold though.’
It was true. He preferred the honesty of winter – it was trustworthy and dependable, and you knew where you stood with it. It was quieter, too, without laughter dancing in the wind and the sizzle of neighbourhood barbeques seeping through the windows. Chrissy had loved playing host, loved the crush and chaos of family and friends squashed into their place in Gladstone Park. He could picture her, handing out kabana slices and pizza to the kids in her poured-into white jeans, wine glass in one hand. Hoop earrings swinging as she responded to banter from the blokes; the fine line of her jaw as she knocked back another chardy. By the end of the afternoon she’d be soft around the edges and sloppy, slurry, and they’d inevitably have a fight about something stupid, like whether her cousin Stav was having an affair or not. He wondered if she still had parties and passed out fully clothed. He hadn’t seen the kids since January.
‘Where you off to now?’ The driver was peering at him in the mirror, the dark wings of his eyebrows in full flight.
Tommy hesitated. He had been on his way back to the unit but the thought of sitting in his freezing flat made him wince. As much as he liked winter’s defiant crispness, its bleak romance, the reality of having no heater was miserable. He’d laid towels on the floor to cover the tiles, which felt like giant slabs of ice underfoot, and used old tea towels to sponge dampness from the walls. Maybe he could kill a few hours at the library before it closed. That was always a good option.
‘Not sure – maybe just to the library. Reservoir.’
‘Ah, okay. They got a good history section there. I been many times.’
Tommy sensed a knowingness in the driver’s tone as he trailed off.
‘What’s your name, brother?’
‘Tommy.’
‘I’m Kamban.’
‘Kamban,’ he repeated, trying to mirror the emphasis.
‘It’s the name of a famous poet. Tamil.’
‘Tamil?’ Tommy weighed the unfamiliar word in his mouth.
‘From Sri Lanka . . . The north. Next to India.’
They’d stalled at the lights, waiting alongside cars and trucks like a herd of docile animals. Kamban drummed on the steering wheel, humming a tune that rose and fell and soared beyond this time, this place. Tommy noticed with a shock that the driver was missing the pinkie fingers from each hand.
‘What happened to your hands?’
The words hung in the air, and he immediately wished he could gather them in his arms and fling them from the bus.
‘Sorry,’ he murmured, ‘didn’t mean to . . .’
‘S’okay. The government did it. Soldiers. In Sri Lanka. They want to get rid of all Tamils.’
He paused. ‘Can still drive a bus though!’ His laugh erupted, catching Tommy off guard. He chuckled quietly and hoped it was the right response.
‘Last stop, brother,’ Kamban said, coaxing the bus around the depot’s concrete island. ‘Thought you want the library? It was way back.’
‘Oh, right.’ Tommy feigned surprise. They’d passed the stop ten minutes earlier and he’d sat still, not ringing the bell.
‘I’ll take you back.’
He took his Myki card from his pocket and motioned at the reader.
‘Um . . .’ He paused. ‘Got no money on this. Sorry.’
Kamban waved him away dismissively.
‘No problem, brother,’ he said, winking.
They rode in silence for a few minutes, slowing for a section of roadworks. The rain had eased to a damp mist and the lads were having a smoko break, leaning back on the bulldozers and rollers and chugging on bottles of Coke. It looked like an okay gig, Tommy thought as they passed. Maybe he could do it once he got the all clear from the doc. The caseworker he saw most often, Pru, kept trying to get him into call-centre jobs. ‘You don’t need computer skills, Tommy,’ she’d say when he protested his lack of experience. ‘They teach you all that. You’ve just got to have some common sense and be able to talk to people. You’d be fine.’
It wasn’t the fear of the unknown or getting shown up by twenty-year-olds that rattled him. It was the sheer monotony of working in one of these modern factories. You might as well be packing eggs into boxes or putting caps on toothpaste tubes, although Tommy supposed machines did all that stuff these days. But maybe that’s all life was meant to be – enduring the grimness and drudgery and disappointments stacked on top of one another until their edges wore smooth. Still, beggars couldn’t be choosers, he thought. He felt like a beggar, going in every six weeks to get his paperwork signed off and keeping the $643.80 payment – plus $78.15 housing supplement – landing in his account every fortnight.
‘You need to manage it better, Tommy,’ Pru had countered when he’d told her he ran out three days early every time. ‘I know it’s not a lot but you’ve got to make it work. Cut out the smokes and beers for starters.’
Tommy didn’t smoke and made each six-pack last two weeks.
‘It’s cheaper if you cook at home. Get a big bag of veggies from the market, or grow your own.’
Tommy sighed. What none of those ‘Feed your family for $5’ recipes Pru kept giving him mentioned was the impossibility of buying single serves of flour, oil, vinegar or salt. She didn’t seem to get that eating raw oats might seem appealing when you could choose to or not, but when everything else is shit and the fridge has stopped working and tomorrow will be just as hard and squeezed and oppressive as today, you just wanted something nice. Tommy imagined breaking through the slabs of uneven concrete in the communal backyard at the unit. The cement looked like pieces of stale bread and could probably be dug out by hand, he reckoned. But would anything even grow in the thin, silty soil? Tommy hadn’t said any of this. He’d sat in silence as Pru had talked about some back-to-work scheme he’d
be eligible for ‘once you’ve got a clean bill of health of course, Tommy’, her heavy turquoise bracelet and silver rings from India or Mexico or somewhere exotic, Tommy couldn’t remember, contrasting with the mottled brown of her freckles.
‘So, how long have you been in Australia?’ he asked.
‘Four years. But only eighteen months outside. Before that I was in detention centre. Maribyrnong, for two years.’
The familiar place name came out as a jumbled heap of consonants that Tommy almost didn’t recognise.
‘Wh . . . why so long?’
Kamban shrugged. ‘ASIO thought I was in Tamil Tigers because I knew someone.’ He pronounced the S with a soft ‘shushhhh’, wind through sugarcane.
‘But everyone knows someone who know someone. Jaffna – my home – is not so big. Doesn’t mean you fight. And they forget, or maybe not understand, that not all enemies of government are bad. If the government is doing bad things itself, maybe they have some people against them.’
He shunted the bus up along the kerb.
‘Here we are, brother. Library stop.’
‘Um . . . actually, think I’ll leave it for today.’
He wanted to stay and ride the bus with Kamban, stay here and just exist in this moment where before and after didn’t matter, where the world felt lighter.
Kamban shrugged and swung the bus back into the traffic. It seemed to get picked up and carried along like a stick in a fast-flowing stream.
‘Two years is a long time.’ He tried to make it sound like an observation, unprying. Kamban met his glance in the mirror.
‘It is. But the worst part of detention is not knowing. It could be two months, two years, twenty-two years. They don’t tell. Better to do five years upfront than two without knowing.’
Tommy nodded. His dad used to disappear for days, weeks at a time, and the uncertainty, waiting for the soft thud as he kicked his shoes off at the back door, had been harder to take than his absence.
Hope: An Anthology Page 2