by Simon French
“Another bloody mouth to feed,” Darryl grumbled once or twice, although he spent the first few days lugging the baby around and showing him off to friends. I could never really tell after that what Darryl thought about Dylan, except that he wouldn’t have him in the same room any more, because the crying woke him up. Sometimes it was the arguments that woke Dylan, and I watched Darryl take less and less notice of him and then of Mum as well.
But it was me who had been first, disappointing Darryl by not being a good footy player or a good fighter and the only time he really talked to me was when there was a reason to boss me around.
Sometimes, just sometimes, Darryl tried playing with the baby, whooping loudly and swinging him about. Mostly it surprised Dylan so much that he’d stare goggle-eyed at Darryl while this was going on, and other times, he’d get plain frightened and begin to cry – which was when Darryl would hand him over to Mum, saying, “Make him shut up, will you?”
Once, only once, I’d said, “I think the baby’s scared of that.”
Darryl had been swinging Dylan up and down like a dive-bomber, but stopped when I spoke. “What’s wrong with you?” he demanded.
“I think he’s scared,” I said in a not-so-loud voice and knew it was true, because Dylan was puckering up to cry.
“Oh, I’m sorry, Mr Expert,” Darryl said in the voice he used whenever he made fun of Mum or me, “but I don’t think it’s doing him any bloody harm. Do you?”
I think he’s scared. I think I’m scared.
There was no breeze and the sky was starting to darken. The stroller rattling over the road gravel was the only noise I could hear.
In a picture I saw as a blur in my head, there was the same stretch of road. And there was me, just me, and my feet were smaller and in different shoes.
Are you all right?
It was from the car that stopped beside me. I had been walking, walking, and my feet were tired. My eyes were sore from the sunlight.
Are you all right? Has there been an accident?
No.
The lady at the steering wheel leaned across to the open window to talk to me and the two blond children stared and stared.
This is the middle of nowhere. Where do you come from?
I don’t know. My mum left me here.
Well. It was an adult’s voice, organised. Let’s find her then.
I blinked my eyes back to the present, looked back and saw my house in the distance. I spun the stroller in a U-turn and stopped to pick Dylan up, but changed my mind and kneeled down beside the stoller instead.
“When are you going to talk?” I asked him. “Learn to talk so you say things to me.”
I started to rattle the stroller over the bitumen once more. “Learn to talk,” I told Dylan again. “You and me are the same, you know. You’re not going to be like your dad at all.”
We set off back along Bulldog Road.
CHAPTER 7
There was a new battlefield at Patrick’s place. His parents were working their way around the house in a slow, noisy circle, sanding, repairing and painting the bedrooms, lounge room and hallway. When I rode my bike over for a weekend stay, it was the kitchen that was now under attack. The stove and fridge were set up out in the hallway. Cupboards were off the walls, and there were tools and power leads everywhere.
“Told you it was a mess,” Patrick said as soon as I arrived. “Let’s get out of here. Mum and Dad said we could take the tent and the trail bike and camp out up in the top paddock.”
“The trail bike?” I asked, not so sure.
Patrick’s dad had other ideas. “If you guys are taking the bike out later, how about earning some petrol money first?”
Patrick groaned.
“C’mon. Make yourselves useful,” Mr Hetherington told us, “rip out this old lino for me.”
It wasn’t all that hard once we’d started. First, we levered the lino edges away from the floorboards with paint scrapers, until we’d gone right around the four sides of the kitchen. Then Patrick and I took it in turns to work the tacks and nails free with a claw hammer.
“Roll it up,” Mrs Hetherington said. “It doesn’t matter if it cracks. It was second-hand when we bought it to do the kitchen the first time.”
She and Mr Hetherington heaved the last of the cupboards away from the wall.
“In two weeks,” Patrick’s dad told us, “you won’t recognise this room.”
“I don’t recognise it now,” Patrick remarked.
“Some of the original kitchen furniture was out in the shed when we bought the house,” Mr Hetherington added. “That’s what we’re replacing this junk with.”
As Patrick and I lifted the lino away, sheets of newspaper that had been underneath came adrift as well. Patrick and I ignored them and went out to raid the fridge for fruit juice, but Mr Hetherington stopped to carefully gather the newspaper up. “Here you go,” he said, and gave Patrick a perfectly refolded newspaper. “Seven years old, all of this. You can laugh at all the horrible fashions and goings on in Parliament House. Good school project material.”
He said that about lots of things. Good school project material.
“Gee, thanks, Dad,” Patrick said, laughing and sounding completely ungrateful. “Just what I always wanted.”
He took the newspaper into his bedroom and dropped it on the desk next to his computer. We forgot all about it then as we began organising ourselves with camping gear.
“Do we have to take the trail bike?” I asked. “It’d be just as good on our pushbikes. Or even walking.”
Patrick had food and drink crammed into a small backpack and was struggling to get the strap done up. “Handle it, Steven. Think I’m gonna kill us both or something? That bike is the slowest thing since snails were invented.”
But I’d tried it already as a pillion passenger, hanging on to Patrick for all I was worth as we circled the home paddock where his mum’s goats were, screaming “slow down!” so that he’d screamed back, “Shit, Steve, I’m only doing twenty-five kilometres an hour!” And defeated, I’d stayed away from the trail bike after that, the same as I’d steered clear of Redmond Hall’s trail bike at the barbecue we’d gone to with Darryl. Chicken, Redmond had yelled as he’d circled the yard. Afterwards, we’d punched each other until there was blood, and it was Darryl who walloped me. Keep your hands off my kid! Mum had told him fiercely, and he had stopped being nice to her after that.
Me and motorbikes didn’t belong together.
“You’ve got your stackhat,” Patrick reassured me. “I’m not gonna ride like a maniac, it’ll be fun. You can’t be scared of everything, Steven.”
“I’m not,” I grumbled, watching as he loaded the tent pack and two sleeping-bags onto the trail bike’s carrier rack.
Mr Hetherington came out to the shed, gave the bike the once-over and kickstarted it. Then Patrick’s mum came outside too, and the two of them started giving out instructions.
“Only as far as the top paddock …”
“Only when you’ve both got your helmets on …”
“D’you think you’ll be warm enough? It’ll be cold tonight …”
“Stay under forty k’s an hour …”
“Use the fireplace that’s up there and make sure the fire’s properly out before you come back …”
Mrs Hetherington read my thoughts. “Are you okay about the bike, Steven?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I fibbed.
“Okay. See you in the morning.”
I straddled the seat behind Patrick. With the camping gear wedged behind me, it felt a bit safer, but as soon as he let the throttle out, I felt a familiar panic starting to take over. All the way to the yard gate, I kept my eyes shut and struggled not to shout out.
Patrick knew me better. “Haven’t got your eyes closed, have you?” he shouted above the racket of the engine, and glanced around just as I blinked them open. “Hah! Sprung!” he said, laughing.
So I gritted my teeth, hung on to the carrier
rack with tight fists, avoided the burning heat of the exhaust pipe near my leg, felt my brain shake as we rattled over the cattle grid – and survived the trip to the top paddock. Going uphill and dodging rocks and thistles was as slow as if we had been riding our pushbikes, and I forgot about feeling nervous.
“Told you to trust me,” Patrick remarked as he turned the motor off.
We spent a while following the boundary fence on foot, across the ridge top to where we could look back at bush and mountains to the west, and the entire Warrah Valley in the opposite direction. On one hillside were the remains of cattle yards and a chimney where a house had once been. We skated down over loose pebbles and climbed back later with tired feet, until we found the spot where the bike was propped. There was a little fireplace corral of stones on the bare ground and a small steel grate; we had camped up here once before with Patrick’s dad. This was the first time we’d been allowed up here alone.
“No snakes this time of year,” Patrick said as we set the tent up.
“This is like …” we said together.
“This is like,” I tried again by myself, “that trip to the goldfields we went on with Mr Holcroft …”
“Last year, yeah.”
Our whole class camped out that time, in a reserve near an old goldmining town. We had work sheets about rocks and prospecting; kids grumbled and copied each other’s answers. We hiked and dug and sang noisy songs and had kept making a racket in our tents after we had been told it was time for sleep.
Every minute more you lot are noisy is a minute earlier I wake you in the morning, Mr Holcroft had said in his loudest teacher voice.
“That was a good excursion, eh?” Patrick said.
“The leeches on Nerida Tan’s leg …”
“Joshua Shalvey having a big chunder on the bus …”
“Mr Holcroft’s face was as green as the plastic sick bucket.”
“No, the spew was as green as the plastic bucket. Mr Holcroft’s face was grey. Like he’d died from the fumes.”
“It was a good excursion.”
“You bet. We haven’t been anywhere this year yet. Be good if that one next term really happens.”
“Huh?”
“That excursion. Like Mrs Cale said, meeting the kids we’ve been writing to. Staying at their houses, hanging around with them for two or three days.”
Mrs Cale and her ideas. “My mum couldn’t afford to pay for an excursion,” I muttered, stabbing a tent peg into the soft ground.
Patrick looked at me for a moment. “Then you’d miss out on meeting your penfriend,” he said, and I couldn’t tell whether he was being funny or not.
“I thought she was someone I met before,” I said out loud without really meaning to. The idea sounded stupid now, and I hoped Patrick hadn’t heard. I should have known better.
“I remember, you said,” came his voice from the other side of the tent. “But how come you remember the name? What was so special about it?”
The cords for the fly cover were all tangled, and I sat down on the pebbly dirt to unknot them. For a moment I was quiet, trying to organise my thoughts, trying to decide whether or not to keep talking. “When we were on our way here to live,” I began, “with the car full of our clothes and stuff. And I didn’t know where we were going. I kept asking Mum but she wouldn’t tell me anything. And … something happened. I was by myself then. Lost.”
“What about your mum?”
“I … dunno. And this lady drove up in a four-wheel drive. There were two kids on the back seat and one of them was called Elise.”
“And?”
I shrugged. “That’s all I can remember. I think.”
Patrick was frowning and doubtful. “Is that all? It doesn’t make sense, the bit about you being lost. How come you were lost? You were in the car with your mum.”
This is the middle of nowhere. Where do you come from?
I shook my head. “I dunno.”
Both of us went back to untying knots. There was a breeze in the air and clouds rising above the sunset.
From somewhere away from us came an echo – “COO-EE!”
Patrick rolled his eyes. “My dad,” he said.
We stood up and yelled “COO-EE!” back.
“YOU OKAY?” came Mr Hetherington’s voice. We could see the roofs of the house and shed, but not where he was standing.
“There he is,” Patrick said, pointing, “over at the fence.”
“YES!” we yelled back.
There was something else called out to us, but not in as loud a voice. It sounded like “Don’t burn the sausages!”
“Your dad’s a nut,” I told Patrick.
“Runs in the family,” he replied. “I can show you how to ride the bike in the morning. If you like.”
“Ride it?”
“Y’know. Use the controls and pedals? Vroom, vroom?”
“I dunno …”
“Come on, it’s not impossible. And I promise not to laugh when you stall it.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“No, honest.” He paused. “I’m not like Darryl, I won’t make fun of you.”
I was breaking sticks and building a fire, but could feel Patrick waiting for me to reply.
“It’s getting cold,” I said.
“Has he gone for good?”
“Darryl? Yeah. Queensland.”
“What’ll your mum do now?”
“I dunno. We might have to move. I don’t think the car’s going to turn up.”
“Hope you don’t have to move,” Patrick said shortly. “There’s no one else in the valley worth talking to.”
We made ourselves sausage sandwiches and played Uno inside the tent until the torch batteries started to go flat. Finally, Patrick wore himself out and fell asleep first, which was just as well, since he’d been starting to do grotty things like farting loudly inside his sleeping-bag and burping.
Exactly like the excursion with Mr Holcroft, I remembered. Except that then, it’d been thirty kids making these noises in the dark, thirty kids laughing themselves silly. And Mr Holcroft’s voice shouting “Enough!” but with a funny sort of wheeze at the end as though he was trying not to laugh himself.
I grinned, and put the torch out of its misery.
With eyes closed, I listened to the tent flicking back and forth in the breeze and Patrick snuffling and snoring somewhere near my head.
Enough. I’d heard Mum say that to Darryl, too, the day she had finally gotten tired of his mates hanging around the house all the time.
“I wish she’d never met him.” I’d said it aloud, but not loud enough to wake Patrick.
Talking to yourself, Patrick would have said. First sign of madness, mate!
I buried myself deeper into the sleeping-bag.
I thought about our house. And then I thought about the house we had lived in a long time ago.
There had been stairs up to our room. It had been a game I played, climbing up, climbing down. I wasn’t allowed near the traffic.
Traffic. Noise. Voices, that megaphone. People running.
Me, walking. Where was that road?
All the voices and pictures in my head battled loudly for a while.
And the soft pattering of rain against the tent finally sent me to sleep.
In the morning we packed the sleeping-bags and wet tent back onto the trail bike and bumped down the hill through the home paddock. It was too wet and cold for Patrick to spend time showing me how to ride the bike, and on the way back, it began to rain some more. We were soaked by the time we got to the back verandah.
“What time did your mum want you home?” Mrs Hetherington asked me, “three or four this afternoon? We can throw your pushbike into the back of the ute and give you a lift back if it’s still raining.”
She ordered me into the shower and a set of clean clothes borrowed from Patrick, fed us a huge breakfast and let us watch movies all morning, while the work in the kitchen continued.
By afternoo
n, we were back in Patrick’s room and using the computer. He had a space adventure game I was getting pretty good at, and I spent some time on it by myself, trying to crack my previous score. The spacesuited figure on the screen left his doomed mothership, travelled to a distant planet, found the cave with secret passageways and traps – and I was past the limit of my previous game and into a stage that was new to me.
Behind me, I heard the rustle of Patrick reading the old newspaper. Every now and again, I heard him say, “Check this out,” or “These fashions look stupid,” but I kept my eyes and concentration on the screen.
“This looks like your mum,” came Patrick’s voice.
My space explorer was dodging a meteorite storm.
“This kid looks like you,” Patrick added.
“I’m trying to concentrate,” I grumbled, tapping cursor keys as quickly and accurately as I could.
But Patrick kept it up. “Police in the city yesterday arrested more than a dozen squatters …” he was reading something from the newspaper and I was starting to get annoyed.
“Shut up,” I grumbled, keeping my eyes on the computer screen.
Patrick’s reading voice droned on. “The squatters had been occupying the controversial World Tower development site in Victoria Street, currently a number of derelict houses. They had been occupying these for up to two years. Previous attempts …” he paused to see if I was listening, but I was trying not to. “Previous attempts to evict the squatters had failed, so the Police Tactical Unit was called in. One squatter, a man aged twenty-two, was injured and later hospitalised after he challenged the police action. Several police were injured in scuffles and a police vehicle was damaged. Four men and three women between the ages of seventeen and twenty-two were arrested …”
“Patrick!” I exclaimed, exasperated. “Shut up! This game is tricky enough!”
“A four-year-old boy was placed in protective care. Those arrested were charged with a variety of offences and will appear in court …” Patrick came and stood beside me, waving the newspaper page in my face.
On the screen, a meteorite scored a direct hit and my space explorer vaporised. Play again? the screen demanded.