The Bone Sparrow

by Zana Fraillon

  But Jimmie likes exploring the memories. When Jimmie wanders, her thoughts stop buzzing, and the ache at the back of her head disappears. She takes her pet rat, Raticus, with her, snug in her pocket or perched on her shoulder, hidden under her hair. It’s nice knowing she’s exploring with someone. She likes imagining who else walked where she is walking, or who else touched this exact spot. She likes imagining what they would have been thinking when they sat on this rock or climbed this tree or looked at this creek. She likes imagining what their lives are like. She likes imagining that some part of that person is still here, just a shadow of them, and that if she concentrates hard enough, then she could almost be that person. Just for a moment.

  Jimmie explores a lot.

  She explores the houses left to rot when the mines closed and everyone lost their jobs. There’s loads of stuff to find in those houses. Forgotten things hidden under fallen roof plaster or kicked under moldy carpet. Once Jimmie even found a pair of socks with ten twenty-dollar bills rolled up inside. Her dad said he would have to hand them in to the cop station on his way to work, but then Jimmie found the socks tucked into his drawer.

  She explores the road that winds its way out of town, past the bus stop that has only two times on the timetable, and eventually reaches the water. Some days, Jimmie bundles Raticus into her pocket and throws off most of her clothes and goes swimming, ignoring the EXTREME DANGER—ACHTUNG! CROCODILES INHABIT THESE WATERS. ATTACKS MAY CAUSE INJURY OR DEATH sign that sticks out from the bank. Jonah has read that sign to her often enough for Jimmie to know it off by heart. She just figures there isn’t enough meat on her to satisfy a hungry croc. Anyway, not many people come fishing around here anymore, and everyone knows that the crocs follow the fishermen.

  She explores farther up the hill, leaving her house behind her, wandering all the way to the edge of town, where the windows of the shops are boarded up or broken. The last shop to shut was the convenience store. Now it’s a fifty-minute drive to get a bottle of milk, meaning that more often than not Jimmie eats her cereal with water, or doesn’t bother with breakfast at all.

  There’s only one place Jimmie hasn’t explored. Down the hill. Down near the Center. Jonah and Jimmie had headed down there once, but stopped. There was a feeling down there. A sort of sadness in the air, and they’d both turned back without saying a thing about it.

  And then today at school, some of the kids had been talking. Saying how lucky those people were in the Center. How they had everything. Good clothes and thousands of toys and books and computers and teachers and doctors who lived right there in the Center so you didn’t have to drive for two days if you were sick. And one of the boys, Max, he said he saw a container get delivered to the Center, and inside it was full of brand-new bikes. Only a few kids at Jimmie’s school had bikes. The school used to have a couple for the kids to use, but they disappeared just about as soon as they’d come.

  “Are you sure about that container?” Jimmie had asked, and Max had spat in his hand to double promise. But Jimmie remembered her mum and dad talking about the Center when they first moved in. “It’s not right,” her mum had said, and Jimmie’s ears had pricked up. “That’s no way to treat people.” Remembering that, Jimmie couldn’t make sense of what Max was saying. It hadn’t sounded like the kind of place that would give out bikes. Maybe things had changed. Or maybe Max was just wrong.

  Now, lying in bed, the Center is all Jimmie can think about. Outside the wind has picked up, so it almost sounds as though waves are crashing against the dirt outside their house. The wind has never sounded like that before. And suddenly Jimmie needs to know. She needs to see what’s down there. So she grabs her mum’s book and her backpack and tiptoes down the stairs and climbs out the bathroom window, avoiding the creaking door so she doesn’t wake her dad, and starts down the hill. Past the gum tree that she climbs almost every day, past the rock where she once found a red-bellied black snake, past the termite mound that is taller than Jimmie is, and all the way to the bottom of the hill.

  It’s then that she finds the fence.

  It was Jonah who taught Jimmie to explore. Nothing could ever stop them. Especially not a fence. “A fence just means there’s something interesting inside,” Jonah used to say.

  And just because this fence has lights and cameras, and rolls and rolls of razor wire on top, that doesn’t mean she can’t get through. That just makes it more of a challenge. Jonah taught Jimmie how every fence has a weak spot—it’s only a matter of finding it.

  Jimmie sits in the dirt for a long time, watching the fence and the light and the shadows and the cameras, and then she moves toward the fence. She just has to find its weak spot, is all.

  I can’t sleep. All that sleep has been sucked right out of me. Now my brain is buzzing in and out, remembering what happened. Remembering Beaver. Remembering that I didn’t ask for a story. I have to ask for a story. Every night. That’s the rule. There are some rules that no one has to say. There are some rules you just know.

  But I didn’t ask. I want to wake Maá, to ask her, to say the words so it’s done and so we’re safe. So she remembers to think on her stories while she sleeps. So she holds on to the good. So she remembers Ba. So she tells again how he’s coming, even if she just tells it in her head, and not out loud. I can feel the panic sticking in my throat and crawling along my skin, and my brain is telling me to calm down because they’re just words, and I want to wake her but I can’t because then tomorrow will definitely be a tired day.

  I sit up in bed and look around, but no one else is awake. I can tell by the still and heavy in the tent. The Shakespeare duck tells me he’s awake, but I tell him he doesn’t count because his eyes can’t actually ever shut.

  “Rude,” he says back, and puffs himself up.

  Usually when the Jackets shine their flashlights around the tents, there are just as many eyes glinting back as not. After a bit the Jackets go and play cards and drink their drink and don’t bother too much except to come and wake us to check our IDs if they’re bored or angry or just want to mess about.

  But the nights when the Night Sea comes belong just to me. And tonight the thick quiet in the tent starts my brain wondering if maybe the Night Sea is on its way. I told Maá about this once when I was little, and she said it made sense. Maá reckoned that my Night Sea must pull everyone else’s waking in on its currents and wash back deep sleep, nice and pure. Maá says it’s because I listen to the earth. She says if everyone would listen to the stories deep down inside the earth, we would hear the whisperings of everything there is to hear, and if everyone did that, then just maybe we wouldn’t all get stuck so much. Usually thinking on that helps me get to sleep, and then I don’t know if the sea I’m hearing is the real Night Sea or just the one in my dreams.

  But tonight I can already hear the water lapping at the tent’s edge. And maybe, maybe the Night Sea will make it all right that I didn’t ask. Maybe the Night Sea will make it okay, what happened with Beaver. Maybe the Night Sea will show me how to get Maá to wake up again properly, so we can play jacks and she can let me win, or draw memory cards or make stick gardens or tell jokes. Maybe I will get to see Eli’s whale, as old as the universe and as big as a country, sing its song to the moon.

  I can hear those waves now, and suddenly I want that sea to float me up, to cover me in its waves and show me everything there is to see. And right now, I need that water. I grab the duck and crawl out from under Queeny and toe over the bunks, trying not to frighten the rats scuttling about. I push through the flap as quiet as I can.

  But there’s no sea. Not even a puddle. Just the wind blowing the top of the dirt to swirling, like it does sometimes, and right in the middle of the swirl, right outside my tent, right in front of me, is a girl. Like that red dirt had up and whooshed her straight from the ground.

  “Where’s the sea?” the duck says. “You promised me a sea.”

  “I never said promise. What I said was—” And then I shake my head and s
hove the duck in my pocket so that girl doesn’t think I’m totally bonkers talking to a rubber duck.

  The girl is just standing, watching me. I rub my eyes because what they’re seeing can’t make sense in my brain. But the rubbing doesn’t change a thing.

  There she is. Just a girl, standing right there and breathing in the night air. That girl, she isn’t one of us. I can tell just from looking. None of us has hair like that. Like a fire burning up from her head and frizzed straight out to the sky. None of us, excepting me and Eli, has shoes—but that girl does. She has a backpack too. And she’s holding a book. A real book.

  Then the girl leans down and pushes her hand deep into the dirt, like she’s feeling for a heartbeat. I wonder if she listens to the earth too.

  She looks at me and smiles.

  Maá used to tell me about my great-great-great-ba, from way back. He only had one foot, but he used to travel all over, healing everyone. Maá said he had a guardian angel, except the way she said it was, “He have luck wings. But it go, same as his foot. Ói, someday, Subhi, it luck wings comes back. Then we all be happy and luck again.” Queeny and I would laugh and Maá would laugh too, and none of us would know for real whether we were laughing about a lost guardian angel coming all the way to the middle of nowhere to find us, or at the way Maá talked all out of whack and tried to be serious.

  But when I see that girl, my brain jumps to thinking about our guardian angel, and for a moment, a long moment, I get to thinking that maybe that girl is our guardian angel. Even though it seems kind of strange that a guardian angel would wear pants with more holes all over than mine even and a shirt that is way too big, but maybe that’s to hide the wings, which are a definite must for any guardian angel worth their salt.

  Then that girl hocks up the biggest ball of snot I’ve ever seen—and I’ve seen some pretty big balls of snot being hocked around here—and she spits that snot right onto the ground. That’s when I know. Guardian angels don’t hock up snot.

  That girl and I watch each other for a while, and then she shrugs. A quick shrug. Like she’s been talking that whole time and has finally run out of things to say. I think she must be about to go. Her body turns away and she looks out into the dark. Then she stops. Like she’s remembered.

  “Do you have any bikes in here?”

  I shake my head. I remember the stories Eli told me about his bike, which was black, and how he used to ride it to school and to his grandma’s house, and that when he was riding it down a big hill it made him feel like he was riding on the wind itself. Every time he told it, I tried to imagine what it would feel like to ride the wind. But no matter how many different ways Eli told it, it never really felt real.

  But maybe I haven’t heard that girl right because a bike wouldn’t work in here. There are too many fences and tents in the way and not even a single hill.

  “Huh,” she says. “I knew Max was lying. So what’s your name then?”

  “Subhi. What’s yours?”

  The girl doesn’t answer.

  “Is that your book?” I ask, and wish I hadn’t because I know all the books in here and that isn’t one of them and who else’s would it be?

  “’Course it is. Why? Can you read?”

  I nod so fast that my head starts to aching again. “Hm,” the girl says, whispering something so soft to herself that I’m pretty sure I wasn’t meant to hear.

  Then she turns and walks into the shadows, her arms banging against her legs. “See ya,” she says, and I want to call out to her, to tell her to wait, because there is something about that girl that is like no one else I’ve ever met. Like no one I’ve ever even thought of. But no matter how hard my eyes search those shadows, it’s only her voice that is left. Like she’s up and turned invisible right there in front of me.

  It isn’t until I’ve been sitting there for a long time after that I hear a quacking coming from my pants. When I pull out the Shakespeare duck, he looks at me and says, “She didn’t even tell you her name.”

  When I wake up in the morning and think back on that girl, I wonder if maybe I dreamed her. It doesn’t make any sense that a girl from Outside could get her way in here. No sense at all. Sometimes that happens. Sometimes my dreams seem so real that it takes a while for me to tell real from dream when I wake up. Like the other day when I dreamed I had already lined up for my shower and when I woke I realized I had to wait in line all over again.

  But there is her hocked-up ball of snot, and there are her fingertip marks, still in the dirt. I put my hand on top. They are just about a perfect fit. I curl up next to the prints and close my eyes, letting the earth pull me deep down to its stomach and wrap me tight in all its whisperings. I don’t move, not until Queeny kicks me to come have breakfast because the bell has just gone for seven o’clock and the kitchen’s about to shut until lunch.

  When Harvey comes along the line with his security wand to check us all over, he asks why my face is covered in dirt. I tell him I’ve been listening for the stories from the earth. I don’t tell him about the girl.

  “He was just lying there, like his brain had melted,” Queeny adds, “and, actually, that explains a lot.”

  I can’t help smiling, imagining my brain melting into the dirt. I can’t think of anything to say back though. I never can. Not until it’s too late.

  But Harvey just scrounches down in the dirt and wipes the red from my face, his beeper wand hanging from his wrist, not even caring at all about the others going back and forth without being checked for security.

  “It’s not silly at all, kid,” he says. Even though he’s looking at me, I can see that he’s talking more to Queeny. “Do you know that there are seven different types of dirt? You can tell a whole lot about a place by that dirt under your feet. All about people and animals and the history of a place, just by—”

  Queeny shushes him with her hand, her face bright and open. “Seven types, hey?” For a moment, Harvey thinks she’s interested. “Do any of those types of dirt turn into a sea at night, then?” She twists her mouth into a smile and rolls her eyes.

  “Pft,” the Shakespeare duck says from my pocket. “What does she know? I bet she doesn’t even know that I talk.”

  Harvey and Queeny look at me then, like they can’t work out why I’m laughing.

  Seeing that girl all swooshed up from the dirt last night has somehow turned Beaver into a memory, with only the dried-out blood and lump grown up at the back of my head to remind me, so when Eli comes charging up, his eyes hard and dog mad, I can’t even figure on what he’s saying or why he’s angry. Not until he says, “If he touches you again, I’ll kill him. You hear me? I’ll find a way. When I see him, I’ll tell him—”

  But Queeny puts her hand on Eli and tells him to calm down and shush up and just forget about it, will ya?

  “What happened? Who did what?” Now Harvey is on at me too. I wish they’d all just shut up about it so I can get back to thinking about the girl.

  Eli looks at Harvey and his eyes are just about spitting. “Beaver. He hit him. Threw him against a wall.” Eli grabs me and pushes my head down so Harvey can see the lump at the back. Stupid Eli is making it hurt more. My eyes are about to water and I can feel my nose start to drip, and I wish they all would just let me be. But Eli, he won’t let go. He’s pulled me into him now, like it was Harvey that had shoved me instead of Beaver. “Who knows what he would have done or where he would have taken him if Queeny hadn’t been watching out? But don’t pretend like you care.”

  Harvey turns to Eli with angry twisting his face. I want to tell Eli that Harvey does care, that I know he does, and that I’m fine, but I can’t say anything. When I squeeze the duck in my pocket, he gives a little squeak to let me know he understands.

  Eli sniffs and nods like Harvey knows just what he’s on about. Harvey looks me over with his eyes darting all about my face, and then he turns and walks away.

  Queeny looks at my head. “You’d better clean that cut so it doesn’t get
infected and put germs all through your blood and make you die.” And now all I can think about is germs going all through my blood and making me die.

  The Shakespeare duck says he reckoned he could see the germs multiplying last night already, but he didn’t want to say anything in case I got scared. But what does he know? He’s just a stupid duck.

  Eli pulls me even closer and tilts my head down to look again. “Don’t be silly. Germs can’t kill you. But maybe we should go get it clean. Has your maá seen it?” And the way Eli is talking is making me think that maybe Queeny wasn’t being so stupid after all. Maybe that Shakespeare duck does know what he’s talking about.

  Eli rests his face on my head then and breathes out, long and slow. “I’m sorry, bud. I didn’t know. I would never have let you run if I’d known….” He lets go of me and reaches into his pocket. “Here. I got you something.” He pulls out three whole muesli bars, still in their wrappers and not even past their use-by.

  “There are boxes of them,” he smiles. “I heard them talking, the Jackets. They’re sending them all back because of the wrappers.”

  I can’t see anything wrong with the wrappers. Eli points to the name of the bars—Freedom Bars. “I guess they don’t want us getting any ideas, hey?”

  Queeny and Eli laugh as we leave the line and head for Eli’s tent, because who needs slimy porridge full of grit when we’ve got muesli bars for breakfast? All the while I’m thinking that I just need to get rid of Queeny so’s I can tell Eli about the girl.

  But when we get to the tent, we see the Jacket.

  He has a paper in his hands and Searching for Someone all across his face. Eli looks at me, and I can tell that we are both thinking the same thing. That Eli’s paper has finally come through. Eli’s been waiting a long time for his paper. It used to be that his cousins and uncle were in here with him. Then they found their maá all the way on the other side of the world, waiting for them where it snows all day and all night. Before they left, Eli’s uncle promised that Eli would join them—they just had to get through some more paperwork first, is all.