by Simon French
“You kidding?” he answered, but I’d already started back.
We followed the Bulldog Road’s loop back to almost where we’d started. There were no more glimpses of sunlight, and by the time we reached the old school, it was misting rain.
Sagging wire surrounded an old tennis court, the weather shed had tipped over and the playground was a jungle of grass and weeds – but the old stone school building looked fine. When we had last explored, there had been broken windows, the doors kicked in and graffiti sprayed all over the inside walls.
“The windows are fixed,” Patrick said as he thumped onto the verandah. “New doors and locks and stuff, too.”
We pressed our faces to the window glass. Inside the big single room were piles of boxes, a bed in pieces and other bits of furniture. One corner of the room had a fireplace, and there was a sink and workbenches at the other end.
“Living in a school,” I said, “it’s bad enough being at one just on school days.”
“Whoever it is … isn’t here yet,” Patrick replied. “See the middle window over there?”
“Yeah?”
“That’s where I sat when I was here in kindergarten. Me and Yvette Hamilton. The other kids in our group were Year One and Two. There was a nature table over … there, and next to this window, all the computers and books.” Patrick sat down on the verandah and looked out at the misting rain and the weeds. “And this playground, mate, it was tops. Mrs Northcott let us play nearly everywhere.”
“How come you remember so much?”
He shrugged. “Dunno. I just do.”
“But you were only … five?”
“Don’t you remember when you were five? It’s not that long ago, really.”
“Half my life ago.” But could I? The flat above the pub where Mum and I lived for six months before we found our house. My mum’s car. But before and after that, a blur – like being four, five and six had not really happened. Like opening my eyes the tiniest bit and seeing things out of focus.
“I remember you when you were five,” Patrick said, “no, six maybe.”
“Yeah?” I leaned on the verandah railing. In the distance beyond the road, I could see my house. Was Mum still watching TV?
“I remember,” Patrick continued, “you were strange when you first started at the school in town. Didn’t play with anybody. Pushed and kicked and cried. How come?”
I could feel myself getting cranky, and shrugged.
“And the first time you stayed over at my place. You were crying in your sleep and it woke me up.”
I knew that. And Mrs Hetherington came in with a drink of water and sat with me a while.
“Shut up,” I told Patrick in a quiet voice.
He stood up and leaned on the railing next to me. I thought he’d been making fun of me, but his voice was serious. “My mum was worried about you, y’know. I think she still is.”
“So?”
“So …” he began, but stopped and sighed. “You don’t know where you and your mum came from, it’s like you just … materialised. It’s a mystery, Steven. You should try to solve it or something.”
I stayed quiet.
Patrick gave up. “Wish there was a McDonald’s around here, eh?”
“Jeez, you’re weird, Hetherington.”
“I’m starving. Got any food over at your place?”
“Dunno. Maybe.”
“C’mon, you have to know. You live there.”
“Might be some.”
“So do we have to go out and mug a few rabbits and cook them up or what?” And he laughed at his own funny line.
Both of us jumped down the verandah steps and went crashing through the grass to where our bikes were.
Elise.
I’d managed to finish my reply in time to jam it into the big envelope that Mrs Cale was posting off.
My best friend is Patrick Hetherington. He lives on this big farm near my place and his parents run a computer shop in town. We challenge each other to computer games and ride our bikes everywhere. His mum was going to teach me how to ride a horse too, but we haven’t got around to it yet. Patrick talks a lot and drives me crazy sometimes, but he is an okay mate. He’s watching me write this so I’d better say that. I’ve heard your name somewhere before. Write back soon.
From your penpal (I’m a boy, hope you don’t mind. Bad luck if you do.)
Steven Matovic.
Elise. I lost track of how many times I said it to myself, waiting for the blurred pictures in my head to come clear and tell me everything.
CHAPTER 5
“All those kids are rich.”
“Which kids?”
“Ones we’re writing to,” Patrick said. “They’re rich.”
“Maybe some of them aren’t.”
“The ones I’ve heard about are. Big houses, horse studs. Someone’s dad’s got a Porsche. Everyone’s mum’s got a Mercedes.”
“Aw, come on. Patrick!”
“Well, some of them have, then. The kid I have to write to got a new computer for getting a good report card.”
“Your parents run a computer shop! And you’ve got three computers in your house.”
“But that’s different …”
“Okay, okay. But you do all right. Your house is bigger than mine. You’ve got your own bedroom and it’s the size of a barn.”
“Your mum’s prettier than my mum.”
“Your mum’d belt you one if she heard that. Anyway, your dad is …” I caught myself out. Your dad is. My dad is – where?
“What’s my dad?” Patrick was impatient to be told.
“Urn. I dunno. A nice guy; he rescues tortoises.”
Patrick laughed at that. “You big dag, Steven.”
For a few days at least, the letter I’d sent off was out of my mind and I got on with all the usual things. Like not sleeping in on school mornings. And worrying that Dylan was going to be left in his cot all day, because Patrick’s mum had told me that wasn’t a good thing. When I tried telling that to my mum though, she just got cranky and told me to mind my own business.
“But it is my business!” I’d shouted when I came home one afternoon and found Dylan stuck in his cot with another wet nappy and a wet face as well. “Don’t you care about him?”
All she seemed to do was sit with her magazines or in front of the TV. And this week, after Katrina had driven Mum into town to collect her pension cheque and do the shopping, a new pile of magazines and rented movies had come home. And even though Katrina tried to help Mum out, the house was a mess. There was still the rubbish of cigarette butts and empty beer cans that Darryl had left behind, and now, a growing pile of smelly washing in the laundry and a sinkload of cups and plates in the kitchen.
“Leave it!” she would tell me whenever I tried to help. Just when things could be normal again, she was acting in ways I didn’t understand. I wanted to shout back at her and slam doors and stuff, but couldn’t make myself behave the way Darryl used to.
“Just leave me alone,” she’d say in a quieter voice, “I need time to think.”
“That’s what you always say. Always the same thing.”
But she’d be lost in her magazines and crosswords by then and I’d be left with anger bubbling inside me like boiling water.
At school I tried not to let the anger show. I fidgeted and daydreamed and gazed and thought. It was nearly always Mum and Dylan I thought of first; if Darryl was ever going to turn up again, if our car was ever going to be found.
I was surprised at how much I remembered about that car, at how much I could picture now – all the speckles of rust and the holes as well, the dent in the front bumper, the smoky exhaust and the cracks in the dashboard.
“Where’d we get the car?” I’d never thought to ask before.
“It belonged to a friend. He gave it to me before …” Mum stopped, as though she’d forgotten the rest of the answer for a moment, “before we left the city.”
And I remembered a
long, long drive. I fell asleep in the front next to Mum and the seatbelt had left a welt across my face.
Get out of the car! Whose voice?
Don’t you remember when you were five? Patrick had asked. But I couldn’t be sure.
“Are you still with us, Steven?” Mrs Cale would say. It was always me she said that to.
“Yeah, wake up, Matovic,” Redmond Hall usually managed to add.
Even without Darryl, I would have hated Redmond Hall. He was easier to avoid at school, but there had been a time, with Darryl, when we had spent every Friday evening in town at the Farmers Arms Hotel – and so had Redmond Hall and his parents. So every Monday at school, kids would hear from Redmond about the Friday before. Even before lining up time, he would be loud-mouthing.
“The machines at the Arms are a snap! I got 240 000 points on that Space Conquest one the other night!”
Redmond and the kids that hung around with him would gang together at the bottom of the Year Six stairs and tell other kids where to go if they came too near.
“And what does Matovic do at the pub all night?” Redmond would say in an even louder voice, because me and the kids we hung around with were nearby in the playground practising basketball shots, “Nurses his baby and sits with his mummy! Wimp!”
Which usually had me telling Redmond where to get off and adding, “Why don’t you go and bully a few little kids? Steal someone’s canteen money or something?” Which was the best reply I could manage, because he was always in trouble for things like that.
But saying anything like that to Redmond Hall meant he’d get back at me later on, somehow. I’d find my lunch in the bin or my pens snapped in half, something rude written in my exercise books.
“Didn’t your girlfriend write to you?” he called out in the classroom the day the second lot of letters arrived.
“Redmond Hall,” Mrs Cale said as she walked around the room handing letters out, “if I had a box of merit stickers that read “I am a pain”, I know who I’d be awarding the first one to.” And she gave him one of her laser-beam glares. That shut him up for a bit.
When the big envelope was empty, Mrs Cale looked at me and shrugged. “Sorry, Steven – looks like you’ve missed out.”
“I can tell you’re really disappointed,” Patrick said to me with a grin. And I nodded back. But really, I was.
Our room, for once, looked cleaner than any museum. It was Education Week, and the two school days so far had been taken up with practice sessions for today’s Open Day. Not that anyone minded getting out of lessons to practise where to line up and where to sit when the parents all came to school to check out our classrooms and watch us dance or sing.
Our room had every bit of wall space taken up with art work and projects, and our desks had the best of our books open. One part of the back wall was nothing but our writing: stories, poems and rough or final copies of the letters we were writing to penfriends. There were a few photos of penfriends and where they lived, graphs to show our interests versus their interests – but there was nothing of mine hanging up.
“I don’t want to, Miss,” I told Mrs Cale when she asked for a rough copy of my only letter to pin up with the others.
“Why not, Steven?”
“It’s not very good.”
“It looked all right when I saw it.”
“It’s not, Miss. It’s rubbish.”
“Come on, Steven!” she said with a laugh, not giving in.
I tried a different tack. “Sometimes letters are private, Miss.”
It wasn’t the best thing to have said, since the rest of the class was listening and instantly began going mental.
“Woo, Matovic’s writing private letters to his penfriend …”
“Beauty, Steven …”
“Show us what you wrote at recess, mate …”
“Enough!” Mrs Cale hollered. She gave me a funny look. “I’ll have one of the stories you’ve done for creative writing instead, then.”
At home I finally asked my mum, “Do we know anyone called Elise?”
She shook her head. “Not as far as I know.”
“A kid, a kid called Elise. My age.”
Mum gave me a funny look and replied, “No,” in a voice that was flat and final.
“Are you coming along on Open Day?” I asked her then, because she’d missed them the last two years running.
“I haven’t got a car any more, Steven. How can I?”
“Patrick’s mum’d give you a lift,” I suggested, although I knew she’d pull a face at that.
“She reminds me of … a mother,” Mum said once.
“But you’re a mother,” I’d pointed out, not understanding. This time, Mum only shrugged.
“What about Katrina?”
“Steven,” she replied impatiently now, “you know Katrina works.”
“Not if she’s got a flexiday …”
“… and I’m already depending on her for giving me lifts in and out of town.”
I pushed on. “Should come along,” I told her. “Our grade’s gonna do these bush dances. They’re really fast and tricky. If one person stuffs a dance step, there’s a major disaster. It’s good fun.”
“Buy me a new car as an early Christmas present,” she told me, “then I’ll be able to make it along.”
I knew then that I couldn’t depend on her, that she wasn’t really interested in what I was saying. I didn’t even bother to look around for her after we’d left our classroom to go down to the main playground where all the parents were arriving. We sat in lines for a special assembly, and while Mr Robinson the headmaster spoke to everyone about education and stuff, I gazed backwards and forwards at the faces of the parents. I saw Patrick’s mum and plenty of other people I knew, but my mum was nowhere to be seen.
After the speech came the songs and displays. Then infants kids did all those drippy songs and dances that even I remembered from when I was six or seven. There were songs and drama from the Year Three kids and a gymnastics display by the Year Fives. It was our turn then with the bush dances and we organised ourselves into lines and couples. Once the music started through the playground loudspeakers, there was no time to feel embarrassed about leaping around in front of so many people; the two dances were really quick and you had to change partners all the time. We all managed pretty well, except Redmond Hall who mucked up a partner change and suddenly had to dance by himself. Mrs Cale was over at the edge of the crowd pulling a face and rolling her eyes. It was just about my favourite part of the day.
When it was all over and the parents had wandered through the classrooms, everyone was out in the playground once more; it was lunchtime. In the stampede back to our room to get lunches and drinks from bags, I’d lost track of where Patrick had gone to eat. I stood at the edge of the crowded playground trying to spot him, but it was impossible.
Suddenly there were hands across my eyes. “Guess who?” said a voice behind me.
It was Katrina, looking like a drip in her check-out girl’s uniform. And Mum and Dylan were right next to her.
“You’re here,” I said, especially to my mum, “you came along after all.”
“Of course I’m here,” Mum replied. “Think I’d miss seeing you dancing? Once in a lifetime experience.” She held up a small plastic carry bag. “Brought you some takeaway Chinese for lunch. Anyhow, it’s pension cheque day and Katrina and I have spent her lunch hour checking out real estate agents.”
We sat down on a patch of grass near the school’s front fence. Katrina had made a New Year resolution to give up smoking and was noisily crunching peppermints. I could smell them from a mile away; it was like sitting next to a tube of toothpaste. Dylan was struggling to get out of his stroller, so I rescued him and put him on the grass beside us so he could crawl around. It was only when I started on my Chinese meal that I thought about what my mum had just said.
“Real estate agents? How come?”
“Because,” Mum said with a sigh, “it’s
over three weeks since the car went missing and I don’t really think it’s going to turn up in one piece. So there’s no choice, really – we’ll have to move into town.”
“I don’t want to,” I said through a mouthful of chicken and almonds.
“D’you think I want to?”
“Mum,” I said, feeling the crankiness rising, “you’re giving up too easily.”
“You think I want to give that house up? No way. But we can’t live twenty kilometres out of town without a car.”
“Get a job. Again.”
“How? It’s easy to say when you’re a kid. It’s more complicated when you’re an adult. Anyway, a house in town is something we can share with Katrina. Right, Katrina?”
“Mmmm,” Katrina answered with feeling, “my parents can’t wait for me to leave home.”
“Lucky you’ve got parents,” Mum said quietly.
“I don’t want t’move into town,” I repeated, but no one answered.
This is what you stole from us.
I’d meant to tear that page out of the back of my homework book, but it was still there, and that afternoon in class I read the list through again.
You rat. I hate you.
“Make yourself useful,” snapped Mrs Cale, jolting me out of my daydreaming. “There should be some work sheets photocopied and waiting for me down in the office. Could you get them for me?”
“Can Patrick come along too?”
“You’re a big boy, Steven. Go by yourself.”
I shrugged an apology at Patrick and made a short, grateful escape from the classroom. A tiptoed sprint along the empty corridor and down the stairs brought me to the school’s main office. The photocopied sheets were ready and I was about to make a much slower return to my classroom, when Mrs McPherson, the office lady, called me back.
“Letter for you here, Steven,” she said, and held up a small envelope.
“For me?” I asked like a complete dummy, even though I could see my name on the envelope in clear print.
“You’re the only Steven Matovic I know of around here,” she replied. “Now don’t waste time getting back to your room.” Mrs McPherson was good at bossing kids around.