A Small Free Kiss in the Dark

by Glenda Millard

  For a day and a half after we’d been to the beach, the rain hardly stopped. Most of the time it bucketed down, and even if Max had made up his mind about his special outing we couldn’t have gone. Most of the time we couldn’t see any further than the roller-coaster but we could still hear muffled sounds. Whenever the rain let up we’d look out the skeleton’s eyes to see what was happening up on the hill.

  Weapons of Max destruction change scenery fast. They flattened the palm trees on the Boulevard so the roots scraped against the sky and the leafy tops were pressed flat into the ground like gigantic prehistoric fish-bones. Loaded trucks crawled up the corkscrew road and soldiers stacked sandbags where the palm trees used to be. At night the lights came on in the hotel but during the day, even when it wasn’t raining, you couldn’t tell if anyone was watching from behind the shiny windows.

  When the rain finally stopped we needed to find food. But first Billy bent a flap of tin on the back fence and made a secret entrance, so no one from the hotel could see our comings and goings, even if they had binoculars. We never went under the big teeth again. We walked along the boardwalk beside the sea, until we were out of sight of the hotel, before we crossed the road.

  The supermarket was a lot further away than the shops behind the Boulevard. The front doors were boarded up, but the glass was smashed and it was easy to get underneath the planks. Inside it smelt disgusting because of the food rotting in the fridges and freezers. The shelves were almost empty, but there were a few people inside. I wondered where they came from. Were they like us, living somewhere they thought no one else would think of, or did they have homes to go to? They didn’t look up when we came in, they just kept stuffing things in their bags like they were in the Great Supermarket Scramble or something.

  We’d decided to hunt for canned or dried food because we knew we weren’t going to find fresh things any more. Max found cans of something that looked like dog food, but it was for people.

  ‘It’s meat substitute,’ said Billy.

  ‘Has it got dead horses in it?’ Max said.

  ‘No. No horses, dead or alive, no donkeys, no sheep, nothing with four legs or even two legs. Only legless things go in this stuff,’ said Billy. He squinted his eyes up and tried to read the small writing on the side of the tin. ‘It’s made out of nuts and . . . other things that are good for you.’

  ‘Have you ever eaten dog food?’ asked Max.

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Might you?’

  ‘You never know,’ said Billy.

  We took as much as we could find from the supermarket. We even had to undo the expansion zipper on my suitcase to fit everything in. We’d never done that before. It felt like we had to because that’s what everyone else was doing, but it still didn’t seem right.

  ‘It’s for emergencies,’ Billy said, like I’d accused him of something, only I hadn’t said a word.

  ‘What sort of emergencies?’ Max’s possum eyes were shining and he twisted his hands together.

  Billy shrugged. Then he said, ‘Visitors. You never know when we might have visitors.’

  It was a long walk back to Dreamland. Max got tired and we stopped to have a rest. Max and me sat on the footpath while Billy picked some oranges off a tree that was leaning over the fence from someone’s backyard. He filled up his pockets and his backpack.

  ‘Don’t the people in that house want their oranges?’ said Max.

  Billy sat down next to us and took his pocketknife out. ‘There’s no one living there.’ He peeled the skin off the orange carefully in one long strip. It made me think about the competitions me and Dad had, using Minties wrappers. We used to see who could tear the paper into the longest strip without breaking it.

  Billy gave the peeled orange to Max and handed his knife to me. It felt warm in my hand.

  ‘Want to have a go, Skip?’

  The handle was made from mother-of-pearl. I held a rainbow in my hand. Billy showed me how to hold it so I wouldn’t cut myself.

  ‘How do you know nobody lives there?’ said Max. His face was dripping with juice.

  ‘There’s no one in any of these places; they’ve all been evacuated.’

  ‘What’s evacuated?’

  ‘They’ve told everyone to leave.’

  ‘How do you know?’ I asked Billy.

  ‘Albert Park said so.’

  I wiped my hands on my pants. The bird started flapping inside me.

  ‘It’s No-Man’s-Land. A bit of land in a war zone, where no one’s supposed to be.’

  ‘How come we’re here, then? Why didn’t you take us north like the others?’

  Billy’s hands knotted up. ‘Why should I?’ His voice went cold and hard. ‘I never had anything before this all started. I’ve lived in No-Man’s-Land for thirty years.’

  I felt like I’d done something wrong, like I’d hurt Billy. He put his head down between his knees. I didn’t know what to say. Billy got up after a while and put his backpack on. Then he started talking like he’d never left off.

  ‘Besides, we’ve gotta wait till the lists go up.’

  ‘What lists?’ I’d almost forgotten.

  ‘Red Cross, missing persons lists.’

  Max’s mother was a missing person. The bird folded its wings and I felt empty.

  When we got back to the House of Horrors, Max and Billy started to unpack our provisions and I sneaked off to check on my books. I hadn’t told the others where they were. I heard that in some places they torture you in a war. They drip water on you and shine lights in your eyes and burn you with cigarette butts, and they ask you questions until you tell them what they want to know. I didn’t want Billy and Max to get tortured until they told where my stolen library books were. Sometimes when people get tortured they say things that aren’t even true. Once, when I might have been eight or nine, some boys held my head down a toilet and flushed it until I said I loved Alex Winter, who is a boy. I only said that because I didn’t want to get drowned. But I didn’t think Billy or Max would tell a lie even if they were getting tortured.

  After I knew the books were safe I went back to help the others. That’s when we heard the baby again. I looked out of the two holes in the wall that were supposed to be a skeleton’s eye sockets and I saw the girl. The baby’s face was dark pink from crying, like the inside of a watermelon. I looked around at Billy and he looked at me and we both had ‘what are we going to do?’ looks on our faces. Then Billy got a tube of condensed milk that he’d found at the supermarket. He put it in his pocket and we went out our secret exit and over to the carousel. The girl had the baby up over her shoulder and was patting its back but it wouldn’t stop crying.

  Billy took the lid off the tube of sweet milk and held it out.

  ‘Here,’ he said, ‘it’s milk.’

  The girl’s eyes looked like purple flowers in her white face. She held the baby on her knees while Billy squeezed some thick, yellowish milk onto her little finger. Then she put it into the baby’s open mouth. It was lovely when the crying stopped. Max got into the Chariot of Peace and sat down beside the girl, and after a while he reached out and gently touched the baby’s tiny and perfect fingers.

  ‘Little fingers, starfish fingers,’ he said softly as if he was afraid even the sound of his words might hurt the baby. Then he touched his finger to the baby’s nose. ‘Little nose!’ It was like Max had never seen a person smaller than himself. ‘Can I give her some milk?’

  ‘Got to have clean hands, Max,’ said Billy. ‘Babies have to have everything clean, else they get sick.’

  We all watched the baby sucking and I hoped the girl had clean fingers.

  After a while Billy said, ‘Got a bottle for the little ’un?’

  The girl didn’t answer. She held out her finger for another squeeze of milk, and Billy gave her some. Then he passed the tube to me and got out his harmonica and started to play. After a bit the baby stopped sucking and went to sleep.

  ‘What’s her name?’ asked Max an
d the girl looked at him and shrugged her shoulders. Then the lights came on in the hotel and she shivered and wrapped the baby up inside her red coat. She stepped down off the carousel. I saw the look on Max’s face and I hoped he didn’t ask her what I thought he was going to. A baby needs a proper home and a lot of other things that we couldn’t give her and, besides, none of us knew how to look after a baby properly.

  I gave the girl the tube of milk. I wished she didn’t have to go out under the big teeth, but I didn’t know if it was safe to tell her about the secret entrance. She took the milk and walked away into the night, and all we knew about her that we didn’t know the night before was that she had eyes like pansies and skin like the moon.

  That night I dreamt a skyful of stars but when I looked closer the velvet dark was filled with babies’ fingers: tiny starfish hands opening and closing.

  Next day the sun came out, red against the blue, like the rose in one of Salvador Dali’s paintings. The hotel lights, No-Man’s-Land and missing persons lists became distant things like the shark-fin ships and the ransacked city.

  Even Billy seemed happier. He said there were things we needed to attend to.

  ‘What things?’ asked Max.

  ‘Things to make life easier,’ he said and he got a look of mystery on his face.

  First we hung our blankets outside in the sun to dry because there were leaks in the tin roof of the House of Horrors. Then Max and me stacked our supplies up on the wooden framework inside the tunnel, because we hadn’t got it all done the night before. It was like a shop. We put the cans on the bottom: alphabet soup because it was Max’s favourite, tomato for Billy and me, peas, creamed rice, and a giant-sized can of fruit salad. Max and me arranged the jars from littlest to biggest: Vegemite, peanut butter and then pickled onions. The boxes and packets took up the most room: there was porridge and potato flakes, long-life milk, sugar, biscuits, noodles, muesli bars, dried fruit, matches and another tube of condensed milk. We hung the packet of marshmallows on a nail. I wondered how long the food would last us and if there would be anything left in the shops when we ran out.

  Once we’d finished, Max and me went outside to see what Billy was doing. We couldn’t see him but we heard noises coming from a tin shed that wasn’t much bigger than a cupboard.

  ‘We’re in luck!’ he said when he saw us at the door, and we went inside to see why. There were buckets and bits of wood and cans of paint and all kinds of tools in there. Billy had his coat off and he was doing something to the coffee-vendor’s trolley.

  ‘What are you making?’ asked Max.

  ‘A wigwam for a goose’s bridle,’ said Billy. That was what he always said when he didn’t know the answer to something or he didn’t want to tell you. Billy looked as if he knew exactly what he was making that morning, so I guessed he wanted to surprise us.

  ‘What’s a wigwam for a goose’s bridle?’ said Max.

  Billy put a bunch of nails between his lips. He looked like a catfish. I think he did it so Max couldn’t ask him any more questions.

  ‘A wigwam, an Indian’s tent, a tepee, a wigwam, wigwam, woo, woo, woo, woo, woo!’ I drummed my fingers on my lips and made Indian sounds, and I danced out the door and into the wintry sun and Max followed me. We tore strips of rag off the flags on the dodgem cars and tied them around our foreheads. We threw our jumpers off and stuck our fingers in the mud and painted each other’s faces and chests with ancient symbols of war and peace. Then we crept through Sideshow Alley where all the yellow ducks lay dying with bullet holes in their tin hearts. We were silent and stealthy and our arrows were swift and deadly as we tracked our mortal enemies through the dark. I could see Max’s heart beating like butterfly wings under his skin and I knew he was scared, but he didn’t cry because Indian braves never cry. We went outside to find our faithful steeds and then I saw the enemy, sitting on my pinto pony.

  The girl in the red coat was back again.

  11

  The truest thing

  The dancing girl wasn’t really the enemy. I was glad she’d come again even though she was so pale and quiet and teenage. That was before I saw her dance. I didn’t know that she was a bit like me on the inside except she had her dancing and I had my pictures.

  Max and me covered up our ancient symbols with our jumpers when we saw her, and we went and told Billy she was back. He was screwing something to the coffee trolley.

  ‘Is she?’ he said. He didn’t look at us but I got an idea in my head that the girl in the red coat was the visitor Billy had been expecting. ‘Leave her be, she mightn’t want company, yet.’

  We looked at what Billy had made and I thought maybe there really was such a thing as a wigwam for a goose’s bridle.

  ‘What is it, really?’ asked Max.

  Billy thought a bit before he answered. ‘It’s a multipurpose kitchen appliance. See, you put your water in the sink bit and then you put your metal cover over the top of it and light your fire down here on the bottom shelf.’

  Billy was like the handyman on Sam Kebab’s television, showing us how everything worked. ‘So you can warm things up on the top bit or cook over the coals down the bottom and, bingo! you’ve got your hot water for free! I thought I might take a sheet of plywood off the tunnel wall so we can use it from inside when it’s raining.’

  Billy’s invention was brilliant, but it seemed like he was going to a lot of trouble if we weren’t staying long.

  ‘We’ll leave it here for now, though,’ he said, and I knew he was being careful because of the girl, even though by then she must have guessed we were staying somewhere close by.

  ‘Is it lunchtime?’ asked Max.

  ‘If you can wait till I get a fire going, I’ll warm your soup. There’s a plastic bucket in the shed, Max, run and get it for me. You come with me, Skip.’

  We crept under the platform at the back of the House of Horrors and went inside. Billy took another piece of mending wire from one of the carriages and then he passed me the big can of fruit salad and some alphabet soup and we went outside again. Inside the handle of Billy’s pocketknife there was a nail file, a tiny pair of scissors, a screwdriver and an opener for tins that didn’t have rings on them. He took the lid off the tins we’d brought outside.

  ‘Pass me the bucket, Max,’ he said, and he emptied the fruit salad into it. Then he poked a small hole in each side of the empty can, near the top, and threaded the wire through the holes to make a handle. ‘There, now we’ve got a decent-sized saucepan to cook in.’

  ‘Can I have some fruit salad while we’re waiting?’ asked Max.

  ‘There’s no rule against having seconds first,’ said Billy. He always called dessert ‘seconds’.

  ‘Do babies like fruit salad?’

  ‘Only when they’ve got teeth, Max,’ said Billy.

  ‘Don’t they have any teeth when they’re born?’

  ‘No, they have to grow them.’

  ‘Huh! What do they eat, then?’

  ‘Milk. They just drink milk.’

  ‘Boring!’ said Max.

  Billy lit the fire and Max got a takeaway coffee cup and a plastic spoon and helped himself to some fruit salad.

  ‘Are these real cherries, Skip?’ he asked.

  ‘It says so on the tin.’

  We emptied the alphabet soup into the fruit-salad-tin saucepan and then put in some water. When it was warm we sat in the sun behind the tunnel and ate it out of foam coffee cups. Max tried to get all the Ms out first, but it was hard to catch them. We had two cups of soup each, and there was still some left over.

  ‘Want a bit more, Skip?’ Billy asked.

  I shook my head. ‘I’m full.’

  Max was full too, and so was Billy. He tipped the rest of the soup into a cup and put the lid on.

  ‘See if the girl wants it,’ he said and gave it to me. ‘Better wash that war paint off your face first; might scare the baby.’

  Max came with me.

  ‘We’ve brought you some soup.’
I held the cup out.

  ‘It’s alphabet,’ said Max.

  The girl slid down from the pinto, took the baby out from underneath her coat and laid it on the seat in the Roman Carriage of War. Then she took the cup from my hands and sat down next to the baby. It was wrapped up in a blanket with blue dinosaurs on it, so you couldn’t see its starfish hands, only its face. It looked like one of the cherubs carved on the carousel, except it was sleeping. I wondered if babies dreamt and what they dreamt about. Max got into the carriage and sat opposite the baby, then I got in and sat next to Max. The girl sipped her soup and didn’t look at us. She said, ‘Where’s the old man?’

  ‘He’s around,’ I said.

  ‘You live here?’

  ‘No.’ Max looked at me and I felt my face get hot, even though it wasn’t really a lie.

  ‘Are you the baby’s mother?’ said Max.

  The girl didn’t answer. She took another sip of her alphabet soup and then another one until it was all gone. Then she leant back against the chariot and folded herself and the baby into her coat, closed her dark eyes and shut us out.

  We went inside. Max and me drew on butchers’ paper and then I showed him how to fold it to make cranes, which are birds, not machines, and they’re supposed to bring good luck. When I looked out of the skeleton’s eyes again, the girl and the baby were gone, so Max and me helped Billy take a panel off the back of the House of Horrors and put his new invention in place. Then he lit the fire, and that night we washed ourselves with hot water and soap and dried ourselves by the coals. When Max and me went to bed, Billy blew into his harmonica. He played all the places he’d ever been, all the sights he’d ever seen, the people he’d loved and the ones he hadn’t. He played the blue times, the red, the yellow and the black.

  You might think what I tell you next is all a dream, or that I’ve imagined it. I can’t help it if that’s what you think, but I swear it’s true. Sometimes the truest things are the hardest to believe.

  Maybe it was the moonlight leaking through the holes in the roof that woke me, or perhaps it was the music. In the part of me where memories are kept there’s a small black box. I don’t know how it got in there. It’s just a plain, ordinary box and its corners are worn smooth. But when I look inside I see that it’s lined with crumpled silk, I hear music that makes my heart ache, and a china ballerina in a pure white dress dances around and around and around. The music was playing in my head when I woke up.