by Joy Dettman
Two hours later Martin and Donny find them heading over the bridge to check the Budget Motel in Willama West. They are exhausted, but still holding hands, and even Alan is pleased to get into Martin’s ute. Donny buys them a bucket of chips each and a bottle of Coke to share and no one has to talk Alan into eating. He eats every chip and drinks most of the bottle of Coke too while Martin drives to the motel where he and Henry last saw Eva. She’s checked out. There are many motels in Willama, and one over the bridge. None is giving shelter to Eva or her car tonight.
‘They must have gone home. Quit while they were ahead,’ Donny says.
‘Drive him to Melbourne. She might give us the fifty thousand for a reward,’ Lori says around a yawn.
It’s too late and too far and Martin hasn’t got enough petrol or maybe he would. He’s still mad enough to do it. He doesn’t want to take the poor little bugger back to Mavis. That’s what he says, but Donny says, what’s the alternative? So back they go, over the railway lines, back to the madhouse.
They can hear Mavis going at Henry in the kitchen, but Alan is half asleep so they lead him in through the front door to the lounge bedroom where Neil is in his own bed. There are no spares so they put him in Lori’s bed.
‘Climb in with him, Splint. Look after him. I think he’s taken to you,’ Martin says.
She climbs in and snuggles down, yawns, thinks Alan takes up too much room, but at least he smells good. Even after the river and the walking, his hair still smells good, like expensive shampoo. She sniffs his hair and it cancels out the smell of socks. She sniffs, puts her arm over him as she fits herself into the limited space.
She sleeps.
A Best Friend
Mavis’s bad, mad eating moods are pretty awesome to live around, but they’re old news to Lori and the brothers. Not to Alan. Each day is an eye-opener, and each day his wide baby-blue eyes grow wider as he watches her stuff her face with chocolates and biscuits, potato cakes and fish and chips, custard, pancakes and tins of condensed milk. He doesn’t want to eat, doesn’t want to go to school, just wants to go home to Eddy.
Willama is a fire-breathing dragon, stalking him from sunrise to sunset, burning him with its breath and dazzling his eyes with its fire, eyes that won’t stop crying, though he’s doing it soft now, doing it outside, where the sheets on the clothesline reflect the dragon’s white-hot heat, and there are sheets on the clothesline every day because Alan wets the bed every night. Lori kicked him out of her bed that first night because no normal person over three ever wets beds in this house.
Henry buys a new set of bunk beds and the next weekend he and Martin wallpaper the west room with tough vinyl stripey stuff before setting up the new bunks opposite the old. Mick’s single bed is moved into the lounge room, then everyone gets to play musical beds – nearly everyone.
Greg and Vinnie now own a top bunk each, which will stop a bit of fighting. Mick gets the bunk under Greg, and Jamesy is moved in to sleep under Vinnie, due to he’ll survive Greg and Vinnie better than Alan would. Neil moves into Mick’s old bed, Alan into Neil’s, with the rubber mattress cover. Timmy, who still wears disposable napkins at night so doesn’t need a mattress cover, gets moved out of the cot and into Jamesy’s old bed and Matty goes into the cot, even though he’s sort of lost in it.
Lori doesn’t get moved. She’s the girl so she has to sleep closest to Mavis’s door – and why she can’t sleep in the bunk room instead of Jamesy, she doesn’t know. She’s the next biggest to Mick and she’s heaps bigger than Jamesy, and it’s not fair that she’s got to be stuck in the lounge room with the little ones, and bawling Matty too. It’s just not fair.
All day the house stands in the sun, windows open, collecting the heat, storing it up so it can roast people in their beds at night while mosquitoes suck blood and bodies toss and turn like oily sardines packed into a tin. All day Mavis rants and eats and smokes while Henry and the kids wait for her bad mood to pass. It will pass. Her eating moods always pass after a bit – though this one is lasting longer than most. And that’s Alan’s fault, because he won’t stop howling, and he won’t talk to her either; he runs away if she comes within two metres of him.
‘I’m your bloody mother,’ she yells. ‘You grew inside me, not her.’ He looks at that massive jelly mound of her stomach and has another fit of the screams. And who’d blame him? It would be better if she’d just leave him alone. And leave Henry alone too. He’s copping it every night, she’s keeping him awake every night and when he goes to work after getting no sleep, she goes to bed and sleeps most of the day while Matty bellows and Alan howls.
People can’t cry forever. They run out of tears after a while. People can’t eat forever, either. They run out of food in the cupboards and fridge and out of money; Henry is refusing to get Mavis’s child allowance money from the bank. Things settle down a bit and Alan starts acting like that last retarded Labrador pup Mavis adopted, except Alan is on Lori’s heels all day instead of Mavis’s. Every time she turns around, he’s behind her. He sits close to her each night at the table, though he still won’t look at a plate full of pumpkin, cabbage, grey broad beans and Henry’s stew. He looks at Mavis’s roast potatoes she cooks for herself. He doesn’t get them because if Henry cooks him roast potatoes, all the other kids will want them too.
This seems to be the year for forgetting birthdays. Alan’s tenth birthday gets lost sometime in mid March. No one remembers it, except Eva, who sends him fifty dollars which Mavis accepts gratefully. By the time Henry remembers, it’s too late for the usual bought cake and candles, and by March’s end, Alan’s eyes look bigger due to his face looking smaller and his hair being shorter – it and his feet smell like everyone else’s now, but he’s stopped most of his crying and as Mavis has no intention of ever sending him back to Eva, Henry gets him enrolled at school. He is put in grade five, two years ahead of Jamesy when he seems like two years younger.
Lori’s teacher still hates her, and some days Alan gets pushed through the school gate then Lori nicks off, goes home to find Matty bawling and Mavis sleeping. She plugs the bawl with a bottle of weak condensed milk or, if Mavis is out of bed and eating, Lori nicks off to town to watch the tourists and look for money, or just to prowl the supermarkets, pinching grapes and nuts. You can eat a lot of grapes and nuts without being noticed. Everyone tries them before they buy – it’s not really stealing. She’d like to test a banana too but she’s not game. She never gets a whole banana at home.
It’s really weird about Alan and school, though; like, it’s totally weird. He might be a bawling, bed-wetting two year old at home, but he knows everything at school – even when Captain Cook landed. Lori knows too much about many things, and not enough about Captain Cook, who she has to do an assignment on for homework, and because she can’t get away from Alan, he does most of it, even draws a picture of a sailing boat for her. He’s like a pup on a leash, but a useful and a nice enough pup. You can understand his writing too. She gets to almost like having him dogging her footsteps, maybe gets to even like him a bit, which is pretty easy to do with pups, because they make it plain obvious that they just love you.
There’s no more wandering around the river by herself, though, no more scaring the tourists by herself, and no more free thinking time either. If she goes to the river, Alan follows her, but it’s good having someone to swim with. She teaches him about the current, and how you never try to swim upstream, and how you never swim out to the middle if the speedboats are out. They’d cut you in half as quick as look at you. She shows him how, if you want to swim across the river, you have to start way upstream, and let the current help you across. He could already swim but now he’s an excellent river swimmer, which is different to being an excellent swimming pool swimmer.
So the weeks keep on going and the solicitor’s letters stop coming as regularly and Alan stops bed-wetting, which is around the time Lori discovers he is truly as mad as a rabbit because he actually loves his schoolteacher. No one, but no
one, even likes schoolteachers. And he doesn’t just know about Captain Cook and that sort of stuff. He can spell! And he’s truly excellent at maths; also, he knows things like where Turkey is on the map. His head must have been crammed full of school stuff by old Alice.
Anyway, Mavis finally comes out of her mad bad mood; she’s back to feeding Matty regularly and Matty is glad to be getting fed so he’s smiling and not quite as ugly as he was, or quite as fat, though he still hasn’t got any hair. She’s back to cuddling Timmy at night and watching the quiz shows. It’s a huge relief. Everyone is laughing again and so happy, and Martin isn’t talking about leaving home.
Alan has been in Willama for two months when Greg borrows Basic Instinct from the video shop. When Henry gets finished with the washing and the mopping and goes to bed to read, and when everyone under Greg has been sent to bed, Lori shows Alan how to creep out, how to stand with Vinnie behind the curtain in the passage and watch the video without being seen by Mavis.
He doesn’t know what those actors are supposed to be doing against the wall, though; he’s like a newborn baby about sex so Lori has to tell him heaps. Like where Matty came from, even, and how he got inside Mavis in the first place – how all the kids got inside her.
‘Eddy and I didn’t,’ Alan says.
‘You did so.’
‘We did not.’
‘You did so.’
It’s a bit like having a friend to talk to and argue with, having Alan at home. She hasn’t had a friend since about first grade, and she knows she shouldn’t do it, due to Henry said so, and Martin, who said he’d murder her if she ever told one single person about it. But in books, best friends tell all their secrets, and anyhow, Alan is more than a best friend, he’s a brother, so one Saturday afternoon she tells him Henry’s BIG secret, because what use is a secret if you can’t tell it to people?
‘Well, you’re not allowed to tell anyone. Ever. Spit your death and hope to die. And you’re not allowed to tell Henry or Martin that I told you, and you’re not allowed to tell the little ones – or anyone at school, ever, in a million years, even.’
‘Okay.’
‘Well, spit.’ He spits and looks over his shoulder just to make sure Alice isn’t still watching him. ‘We’ve got Aboriginal blood in us,’ Lori says.
‘Who?’
‘Us. All of us . . . except Mavis, and nobody knew until about a year ago because Henry got adopted, but his real grandmother was a light complexion Aboriginal, and his grandfather was a Indian man called Woden – ’
‘Didn’t he have a mother?’
‘Of course he did. Whose stomach do you think he grew in, moron?’ Lori says.
Growing in stomachs still has a way of turning Alan’s. His shoulders sort of hunch up, then he shakes his head. ‘You’re telling lies. Show me your tongue.’
‘I am not. And I will not. His mother’s name was Lily.’ The papers didn’t say much about Lily, but Lori’s imagination fills in the gaps. ‘She was actually an Aboriginal princess and she had long black hair, and she used to wear jeans and long diamond and ruby earrings from the West Australia diamond and ruby mine, because our tribe owned it first. She died when Henry got stolen. Actually, she tried to stow away on the plane that took him to England and she suffocated in the luggage compartment – ’
‘If you tell lies, your tongue turns blue and yours is blue. How could his mother be a princess if his grandfather was Indian and his grandmother was only part Aborigine?’
‘You don’t have to be black to be an Aborigine.’
‘I mean about being a princess.’
‘Well.’ Lori scratches at the dust with her foot. ‘Well, I don’t know, really, not about that, but she was. She probably got elected or something.’
‘Was Henry’s father Aboriginal?’
She squints at the sun, tries to remember what Mavis said when she got that brown envelope about the adoption last year – or maybe the year before. ‘I think the letter said he was a white boy. I think he was Henry someone – probably Prince Henry, and that’s how Lily came to be a princess.’ It sounds logical. ‘So, do you feel different now?’
‘About what?’
‘Like about Aboriginal culture and Captain Cook pinching Australia from you?’
‘He discovered Australia, he didn’t pinch it. Anyway, that’s stupid. How could I feel Aboriginal culture now if I didn’t feel it before?’
‘I do, and I hate Captain Cook like rat poison, and when I grow up I’m going to claim land rights in that diamond mine in West Australia and be as rich as Eva.’
Alan shrugs, walks off to the kitchen and comes back with Henry’s vegetable knife and four apples, which the kids collect by the bucketful, due to Bert Matthews’s two huge apple trees that lean over the vacant block fence and drop apples by the thousand unless the kids get to them first. Anyway, Alan sits down and starts cutting one into slices which he offers to Lori. ‘That’s about how much of an Aborigine you are – if it’s true.’
She eats the apple. ‘It’s true, and anyway, I hate fractions. Us Aborigines don’t think in fractions. If we want to be black we just say that we are – like Kelly Waters. She used to be white and then one day her grandfather said that his grandmother had black blood so now they’ve all gone black – Martin says it’s so Kelly’s oldest sister can go to university for free.’
He stares at her with his big blue eyes, sort of shrugs as he selects another apple. It’s seriously wormy, but good enough for what he wants it for. He cuts four quarters, calls one Henry’s grandmother and he sets her on the verandah, cuts a quarter in half and calls one bit Lily, places her down too. Another cut, Henry is a sixteenth, and one more makes Lori into a paper-thin slice. ‘You’d be about a thirty-second,’ he says.
She’s learning something here, though she’s not going to let him know that.
‘What about thirds and sixths? Say if Henry’s grandmother was a third?’
You can’t cut thirds into thirty-seconds but you can make a quarter and a third into twelfths. Fractions start to make sense. Lori watches each cut. She watches Henry’s grandfather, a full apple, placed down on a verandah board. And Lily, she gets to be half an apple this time. Henry, the quarter, joins them, then Lori, the eighth, is placed directly below Lori the thirty-second – and makes her look very small.
‘You’re more Indian – if what you said is true. Why don’t you say you’re Indian if you want to be someone different to who you are?’
She starts eating apple pieces, even the thirty-second, which isn’t a very big bite of an apple and not much of a claim on land rights in that diamond mine either. She’s got heaps more Indian blood, but who wants to claim land rights in India and die of starvation or get sold for sex?
They share the apples, squash the worms, then she shows Alan how to peel and eat apple seeds, which he has never done in his life; like, he didn’t know you could even eat them. Lori sticks a black apple seed on her forehead with spit. ‘Do I look like an Indian princess?’ she says.
‘You look like a skin-head Australian girl with an apple seed stuck on your face. Anyway, in Melbourne, it’s not what you look like, it’s how you talk. In Melbourne everyone comes from everywhere and you don’t even think about where they come from first, not if they talk Australian,’ Alan says, killing that plan too and peeling another apple seed. He likes them, says they taste like almonds.
What with his fractions and stuff he gives her a lot to think about; also, having him home has stopped the kids, white and black, from picking on her. Alan is a wide-eyed wimp, but he’s a tall wimp, and Jamesy, who isn’t tall, isn’t a wimp. It’s like Alan has filled up the gap in the family, like eleven and eight have got themselves welded together by Alan’s ten. Mavis did a good thing getting him home. She says she’s going to get the other one too, though Eva sure won’t be gullible enough to bring him up here again.
Alan is a bit soft in the head, due to all the schoolwork stuffed in there; he likes doing weird
stuff, like getting Jamesy and Neil to help build a cubbyhouse from the pile of bricks which Martin always reckoned he was going to use one day to build himself a bungalow. Everyone knows that his one day will never come now, because of Karen, so they can use his bricks if they want to.
They build the cubby under the peppercorn tree, which is behind the chook-pens at the back corner of Henry’s vacant block where the fences and the low branches make it private. Lori starts carting bricks too. She’s just doing it to keep Alan happy. That’s what she says to Mick, which isn’t the truth, because she’s having fun doing it, building it big, building lines of bricks for walls with gaps for doors. It’s like Alan knows how to make magic in his head as well as fractions, and his magic is rubbing off on Lori.
They make brick chairs and tables with the old palings the fence man tossed onto the junk heap when he built the new fence at the back. They get some old sheets from Henry’s rag-bag for tablecloths, and plastic knives and forks from Mavis’s Chinese takeaway, and they pick a few flowers and put them in a jar of water and sit it on their table. It’s like they’ve got their own house to go to. For the first time in her life, Lori plays tea-parties, fills Coke bottles with water and eats wormy apples. The magic gets so good sometimes that the water really tastes like Coke.
Maybe Alan is helping to turn Lori into a girl. But her chest bumps aren’t getting any bigger and she hasn’t got any hair under her arms and she still makes Henry cut her hair like the boys, so on the outside she still looks like a boy.
Then May is finished and overnight the rains come to turn dust into mud. To get to the loo or to the cubbyhouse they walk though mud, and Henry’s floors are covered in it. He mops a lot and the rain keeps on falling, like it’s been storing it up for months. The sides of the roads turn into lakes and getting from one footpath to the next is slippery.
Some days when they walk to school in the rain, Alan talks about Eddy and home, but it’s funny, because it’s not people things he seems to miss; what he misses most is being driven to school, and going to the cinema with Eddy, and flying in aeroplanes to Queensland for the holidays, and even to America once. And he really misses his drawer full of soft socks. The missing is getting less, though. He loves little Matty, tickles him and makes him gurgle, and Timmy, who used to spend half his life staring at Matty or wandering over the road to squat in Nelly’s garden, now follows Alan around like a pup.