Snake Cradle

by Roberta Sykes

  My work became so routine that I lived just to dance and swim. There were a number of us dark girls who went to almost every dance and we’d enter jive competitions and win. These dances were held in halls around the town, and people often came with their children. Early in the night the children would be up on the floor dancing too, and everyone danced with everybody else, young, old, and in between. As the evening wore on, children were put down to sleep behind the long forms against the walls. Then the serious dancing would begin and we young bloods would shimmy, shake, and rock and roll. We’d spend days making ourselves special dance clothes, modelled, of course, on pictures in the latest magazines. Bill Haley reigned supreme. With Renata Pryor as my partner, we won a competition at the Norgate one night, and established ourselves as the Queens of Rock in the town.

  From time to time, I went to rodeos and began entering their competitions. I won the Ladies’ Calf-riding, but the prize was a cask of beer. Tradition had it that winners turn their cask on for their friends in the evening when the riding is out of the way. However, as the legal drinking age was twenty-one, which was still years away for me, I wasn’t even game to tell Mum that I’d won. I just let the other rodeo participants and their friends drink it.

  Mum constantly harped at me to find a boyfriend, get married and settle down. It was her big dream for all us girls. She said she was keen to pass responsibility for us over to husbands. Also, she wished that each of us would have three daughters, thereby receiving our punishment for the trials she said we had put her through. When I pointed out that I was only a teenager and happy to just keep on dancing and working for a while, she would bring up the names of two girls with whom I’d gone to school who had married at the age of fifteen, as though they were perfect examples for me to follow.

  On several occasions, Mum’s nagging turned into flaring arguments. I was supporting myself and I didn’t want to hear about how some man could take me ‘away from all this’. From what I’d seen, women weren’t taken away from anything except their freedom. Mum, herself, started work at dawn and she contributed to Arthur’s upkeep by paying all the bills and buying him cars, not the reverse. Dessie’s money, too, went to pay the household bills, and she and many other women I knew were expected to be punching bags for their husbands’ frustrations and inadequacies. The rows often ended with Mum striking me across the face, then breaking down and apologising. ‘I only want to see you happy,’ she’d say tearfully, as though marriage was synonymous with happiness.

  Val Ludgator was out of hospital and Dessie, Val and I used to rocket around in Dessie’s big station wagon, the three of us sitting on the bench seat in the front and Dessie’s children piled in the back. Sometimes we only had the little children with us, and at other times, Neville and Teresa, her two oldest, kept an eye on them at home and we’d go out by ourselves. Dessie had opened a book exchange, which I thought was a wonderful idea, and I happily relieved her at work from time to time because it gave me access to as many books as I could read, I was always wandering around with a bag of books in case I had a spare moment in which to do a bit of reading.

  One afternoon, the three of us were driving west down Flinders Street, heading towards my house, with Dessie at the wheel, Val on my left, and me squeezed in between them, as usual. The footpaths along the street approaching the Causeway were deserted, and I was gazing out at nothing in particular. Then I heard a deep voice say, ‘That place is going to burn down tonight,’ which immediately drew my attention, and I turned and saw that we were passing an old timber hotel on our right. Then I looked quickly at Dessie and Val to see which of them had spoken, and realised that they were both looking at me. The moment was so eerie that not one of us said anything about it. We didn’t question each other, but I was sure they thought it was me who had made the statement when I knew I hadn’t said anything at all.

  That night, the hotel burnt down. Dessie came over to the house in the morning to tell us about the big fire in the main street, but she didn’t mention anything about what we’d heard in the car.

  A few weeks later we were again sailing along the same street, and again my mind was pretty much blank, when I was shocked to hear the voice repeat the exact same words. ‘That place is going to burn down tonight.’ I didn’t bother to look around for the building the voice was referring to, because I realised the voice had come from my own throat. I clapped my hands over my mouth and began to protest, ‘I didn’t say that. I didn’t say that,’ but Dessie and Val just looked at me strangely and then at each other.

  Very early the next morning, I was woken by voices on the front verandah. Arthur had heard a knock at the door and, followed by Mum, opened it to find two policemen standing there. I could hear him answering their questions: that Dessie and Val had brought me home at five-thirty, that I’d been in all evening, and that I was asleep in my bed and, no, they wouldn’t wake me. Mum’s voice, softer but somehow more shrill, kept insisting that the police tell her why they were being questioned. Not long after, I had almost gone back to sleep when my bedroom door opened and I knew Mum was peering in through the darkness to check that I was still there.

  When I got up Mum had already left for the six o’clock start at the Central Hotel. Arthur greeted me with the news that another building had burnt down in Flinders Street, and that the police had come to find out if I had done it. I didn’t bother to feign surprise because somehow I knew that the building had burnt, but I had no way to say that I already knew without people thinking that I was either guilty or crazy.

  I made up my mind then that I was not to allow my mind to wander into a trance. I’d already become used to experiencing a fairly high level of kinetic energy around myself. I had often been afraid to go to sleep for fear of what I might dream or do. Sometimes I would wake up in the morning to find that during my sleep I had gone through my drawers and piled all my belongings up in the middle of the room, or written a poem, or made bizarre diary entries. I marked this down to sleep-walking and told no one about it, because I wanted to be normal. I didn’t feel abnormal but I often wished these sorts of inexplicable things would stop happening around me and to me.

  I didn’t know who had reported the prediction to the police. Although it could have been either Dessie or Val, or even somebody they may have inadvertently told, I began to suspect Val; mainly because I wanted so badly to trust Dessie. However, I could not bring myself to ask either of them outright, so I told myself the voice itself, and therefore the predictions, were my problem and that I’d have to deal with it.

  When Dellie came back from the Catholic home for girls in Brisbane, she was very sedate. She wore a corset, gloves and stockings, which we’d never even thought of wearing before, and which I still couldn’t countenance. She was aloof and in many ways seemed much older than when she’d left. We still enjoyed talking about the latest music and dance styles together, but the distance and experience had created a different head space for her which I found impossible to penetrate. She was no longer just my little sister. Even though we were nowhere near as close as before, sharing secrets and discussing every little item of gossip as though our lives depended on it, we trimmed our hair exactly alike and bought identical lipsticks and trinkets to heighten the similarity between us.

  Mum and Arthur made life very difficult for her, and I wasn’t surprised when she ran off again. Nor was I surprised when Mum asked me to go looking for her, even though it was immediately apparent that Dellie had left Townsville and headed south. Although I was still not yet seventeen, Mum promised to speak to the police if they picked me up on my travels. I decided to have a quick look in Rockhampton, then go on to Brisbane and stay with Aunty Glad.

  I’d been given a third motorbike, a Harley-Davidson, by a gypsy who was leaving Australia to return to Europe. Being of swarthy complexion, he had also been subjected to a lot of racism by the police and people generally in North Queensland. I’d met him at a few motorbike meets where he and I were the only two left out of pr
oceedings, he because he was dark and I because I was dark and female. We were only casually acquainted, and although he thought his bike was too big for me, when I kicked it over and rode it around the block, he had said I could have it because he didn’t have any more time to waste trying to sell it.

  The bike had been warm already when I kicked it over, and I was never able to start it again from cold. Mum, initially upset when I brought home such a big bike, used to look out the kitchen window and laugh as I took running leaps onto the pedal in my efforts to kick it over. The pedal would just rise up powerfully again and hurl me onto the ground. I thought, however, if I went off on any of the bikes, the police would be bound to stop me so I sold the lot off cheaply and left Townsville by train.

  9

  When I arrived in Rockhampton this time, I had a very different mind-set. Earlier I’d been scouting, merely looking around to see what was happening, and I felt it may have been my casual attitude which had attracted police attention. Now I was focussed on what I had to do. Before I left Townsville, Mum had told me that the police had been to see her again, as they, too, were looking for Dellie over something to do with her travelling companion.

  I left my suitcase in the luggage room at the railway station and bowled right up to the front desk of the police station. When I walked in, every head snapped up and turned towards me. It was obvious they thought I was Dellie. Two officers came to stand near me, menacingly; probably waiting to grab me in case I turned to run. I didn’t recognise any of them from my earlier escapade and it seemed apparent that none recognised me. Perhaps the staff had changed, I thought, or maybe this was a different shift.

  ‘I understand you’re looking for my sister,’ I said, with much more confidence than I actually felt, ‘and I want to know if you’ve found her yet.’

  ‘And who are you?’ asked one of the men who was standing by my side.

  ‘I thought I just told you. I’m Dellie’s sister.’

  ‘Well, you answer to her description. How do we know you’re not her?’

  ‘You think she’d be crazy enough to walk in here, knowing you’re looking for her? She’s also about five inches taller than me.’

  Some remained suspicious and there was a lot of eye contact and raised eyebrows being passed between them all.

  I leaned across the counter towards the officer who appeared to be in charge of public inquiries, groped in my bag and pulled out my pocket diary. I held it firmly in case any of them made a grab for it, and showed the officer the cover on which I had long ago written my name—Roberta Patterson.

  ‘Of course you can’t read it,’ I told the startled officer, as I fluttered through the pages to the entries I’d made in the train, ‘but you can see here on this page that I caught the Sunlander down last night, this was my seat number, and as I was on the train and it’s just left, I can’t also be Dellie coming down by car.’

  The atmosphere in the room relaxed a bit, and a few police even went back to their work. Finally, one of them took it upon himself to tell me that Dellie and her companion were thought to have passed through Rockhampton and were on their way to Brisbane. Roadblocks were expected to pick them up at any minute. I was told that, wherever she was stopped, Dellie would be taken to Brisbane. With this information, I thanked the policemen and left.

  The next Sunlander wasn’t due until the next day, and I felt an urgency about my mission, so I didn’t want to wait. I collected my case, made some inquiries, pulled a cap tight on my head and walked out to a truckstop service station on the Pacific Highway to try to get a lift. Mum would have hit the roof, I knew, but this was an emergency. The cap, I felt, disguised me and, being so thin and wearing jeans and a jacket, I thought I’d pass for a boy.

  I had a choice of trucks as, being late afternoon, truckies were preparing for their night haul to Brisbane. I picked a driver with a severe limp—in case of trouble. As it was, he chattered all the way about his wife and the funny things his kids said and did, and only when we were on the outskirts of Brisbane did he tell me that the cap hadn’t fooled anyone. I was glad to have chosen a decent family man because stories I’d heard about truckies had made me very apprehensive, and only my anxiety about Dellie’s precarious position had enabled me to surmount my fear.

  I had no idea how I’d go about trying to save her because I didn’t know the process or what she’d be charged with, but I did know that I would fight harder for Dellie’s freedom than I felt our mother ever had.

  I went to Aunty Glad’s house in South Brisbane. She’d received a letter from Mum telling her that I might be coming, so she wasn’t surprised to see me. She had a full house and I had to sleep on the lounge. Aunty Glad was a chain-smoker who sat up most of the night watching television, doing crosswords and reading, so catching up on the sleep I’d missed during the past three nights wasn’t really possible. We still didn’t have television in Townsville, and I found the droning sound of voices squawking from the box quite off-putting.

  I went to Central Police Station on the day of my arrival, where I learned that Dellie had been apprehended almost as soon as I’d walked out of Rockhampton Police Station. She’d been booked, although no one told me on what charges, and was already on her way back to Townsville under police escort. I was shattered and felt my trip had been in vain.

  Aunty Glad told me that there was nothing I, or anyone, could do now. She Invited me to stay and work in Brisbane until I heard from Mum and decided what I wanted to do.

  I looked for casual work because I didn’t want to get locked into anything, and I had heard that the Golden Circle cannery at Northgate employed women and girls on day labour. This sounded ideal, being hired every morning and paid every afternoon, but it also meant getting up at 5 am, leaving the house in the dark to catch the tram to the city, then transferring to a train to Northgate. The work, trimming the remaining eyes from mechanically skinned pineapples, was wet and sticky, and workers were issued with thick rubber aprons, boots and gloves. The big shiny knives the women worked with were kept constantly sharpened by men, who also did most of the cleaner and more attractive jobs around the factory.

  There were often other coloured women and girls working in the factory, and we automatically began to seek out each other’s company.

  When I was out shopping one Saturday, a young white lad who worked in a store began chatting with me. He invited me to join him and his friends to see a theatrical performance the next weekend and we arranged a time for him to come to the house to collect me. I was so happy—here I was, in Brisbane, and being asked out to, of all places, the theatre. At last I felt that my life was going to be like those people I’d watched in the movies and read about in books—being taken to wonderful places on the arm of handsome escorts. Aunty Glad, almost an exact replica of my mother as far as her attitudes on boyfriends and marriage were concerned, was ecstatic and during the week helped me to buy the perfect clothes for this date. When he tapped on the door, Aunty Glad almost knocked me to the floor in her rush to greet him. She said she wanted to establish in his mind that I wasn’t an orphan and had family to whom he’d be answerable.

  He didn’t have a car, so we walked down to the tram stop, laughing at the transparency of Aunty Glad’s concern. When we arrived at the theatre, I could see by the people dressed in their fancy clothes who were sweeping by into the foyer and standing around on the street, that this was a major production. His friends, none of whom I knew, were standing in a group and their surprise to see him arrive with a coloured girl was evident, though not unpleasant. Introductions were made and we waited outside for the last couple in the party to arrive.

  Two detectives, who were as obvious as if they wore signs, came to stand on the kerb, and after a few minutes I could feel them staring at me.

  ‘Hey, you!’ Everyone else turned around but I pretended not to hear, until I felt a hand on my arm and I was being pulled away. I was livid at being embarrassed in this way, but there seemed to be nothing I could do.
By now, everyone was staring at me and the police, and there were knowing nudges and querulous looks, some of distaste, being passed around amongst them. The detective took me over to the edge of the kerb.

  ‘Where’s your pass?’

  ‘What pass?’

  ‘Don’t give me that shit. Where’s your pass—or are you a runaway?’

  I frankly didn’t have a clue what I was being asked for, and since I wanted the excruciating humiliation to be over, I offered to get the theatre tickets from my date to show them.

  ‘Are you under the Act? What reserve are you from?’

  ‘I don’t live on a reserve. I don’t know what Act you’re talking about. You’d better leave me alone because my mother’s white.’

  It worked almost like magic. With little further ado, I was allowed to rejoin my new friend, although I got an intimidating finger-wagging and narrowed-eye stare loaded with meaning from the detective as I walked away.

  The atmosphere in the group had changed and even my date stood a little further away from me when I returned. The girls all wore neat frocks and the men white shirts and ties. I had a lot of time to examine them because, after I shrugged and said, Oh, nothing really,’ to their question about what the police wanted with me, I was left completely out of the conversation.

  I remember nothing of the show, which was my first theatrical event in Brisbane and one which I’d been very excited to attend. Throughout the performance my mind churned over everything except what was taking place before my eyes. At interval I didn’t even bother to join the group as they went out for drinks and sweets; I thought I’d let them have a chance to talk about me if they wanted. By the time they had slipped back into their seats for the resumption of the show, I’d already decided I couldn’t risk being so embarrassed, so I wouldn’t see any of them again.