A Small Free Kiss in the Dark

by Glenda Millard

  Sixpence woke up and screamed with fright at the noise. I grabbed her out of the carriage and pressed her face against my chest to smother her cries. I shoved my free hand in my pocket and squeezed the tube. Milk went everywhere. Outside, the engines died and boots clattered on the concrete. Sixpence sucked in some air. I slid my finger in her mouth and she screamed again.

  I had to do something or she’d get us all killed. I shoved her into Billy’s arms and pushed him and Max towards our secret entrance. ‘Get out, wait on the beach!’

  The boots came closer.

  I jumped off the platform and rolled underneath the wooden slats, pulling the suitcase after me. Strips of light fell through the cracks onto my face, and splashed over the walls.

  ‘Ghosts!’ I heard someone say, and the others laughed. The torch went out and I lay under the platform until my heart stopped banging and the truck roared away into the night.

  This was the most dangerous plan I’d ever done, and already things were going wrong. I prayed that Billy would be waiting on the beach, that he’d seen the disappearing tail-lights, heard the rumble of the truck. I’d told him that the signal would be the sound of shattering glass. Would he listen for it? Would he come then or would he chicken out again?

  Quiet as Archimedes’s leopard, I crept beside the Carousel of War and Peace. I passed the pinto pony with the moon on his stirrups and the wind in his mane, and I wished that Tia was sitting there in her red coat. I moved on; past the Dodgem Cars and the tin ducks in Sideshow Alley, and still she wasn’t there. Then I rounded the corner and saw the other truck nosed right up to the refreshment pavilion, and suddenly I knew where Tia would be.

  The lights of the truck beamed a spotlight on the stage, and I stood in the shadows watching her dance. I can’t remember if it was the smoke or the movement I noticed first. When I turned, I saw the orange glow on the end of a cigarette and I knew Tia and I weren’t the only ones there. Two soldiers were sitting in the corner on plastic chairs, and another one was standing behind them. I pressed my back against the broken lattice wall but they were all watching Tia and hadn’t seen me. Then the soldiers who were sitting down started to clap, but not in the way people do when they think you’ve done an excellent job. They clapped slow and loud. Gradually, like the ballerina in the music box, Tia stopped dancing, as though she couldn’t hear the music inside herself any more.

  One of the soldiers who’d been clapping said something. When the man standing behind him walked towards the truck, I saw it was the skinny young soldier. He opened the door and reached inside and music came belting out. Then he lit a cigarette and disappeared himself into the dark. The others clapped louder and louder until Tia started dancing again, only this time she wasn’t dancing to please herself; she was dancing to please the two soldiers in front of her.

  One of them got up on the stage and ripped his camouflage shirt off. He whirled it around his head and then threw it on the ground and starting dancing with Tia. He undid the buckle on his belt, snaked it out and cracked it like a whip. The other one got up then and pulled Tia hard against him. She put her hands on his chest and tried to push him away but he laughed and pulled her back and kissed her roughly. I thought about the kiss that Tia had given me for free and I wondered if the soldier knew that she was only fifteen. I had to stop myself from screaming when I saw what they did to her next.

  I didn’t know how to help Tia. The only thing that was going to save us was the truck. But Billy wasn’t there to start it. I backed slowly away from the pavilion, crept behind the truck and down the side towards the open door. Then I saw something unbelievable: a set of keys hanging in the ignition. I knew straight away what to do. I’d steal the keys and then lead the soldiers away from Tia. I knew they had guns, but there wasn’t time to come up with something better. All Tia had to do was hide and wait for us. I’d double back to the beach and find the others once I’d given the soldiers the slip. Sooner or later they’d leave, and when they did, we’d be waiting to drive away.

  My muscles tensed for a quick getaway. I closed my hand around the keys, turned them, ever so slowly, and pulled.

  Instantly, the lights died, the music stopped. Soldiers burst through the door of the pavilion, shouting, pulling their clothes on, grabbing their guns. I ran, dodging between the rides, twisting and turning in and out of shadows and moonlight, through the hall of mirrors – fat boy, thin boy, short boy, tall – rolling under the shooting gallery, bullets ripping through the tin ducks, real bullets. Stay away, Billy, don’t come, not yet. Behind the Dodgem Cars, lungs on fire. Lose them, double back, into the House of Horrors. I crawled under the platform to Dracula and the ghosts, lay still and prayed that Tia had got away, that Billy, Max and Sixpence were safe.

  Silence, silence except for the thudding of my heart. Then Tia screamed and I flew to the spy holes. She was on her knees, her hands pressed together in front of her like she was praying. The soldier behind her jerked her head towards him with a handful of her hair. I saw the pistol in his hand and I knew he was waiting for me to show myself.

  All Tia had done was what they wanted, and all I had done was watch. Surely they weren’t going to kill us. Couldn’t they see we were children? Didn’t they know we had no weapons? Maybe if I gave them their keys back? Was that a fair trade: our freedom for Tia’s life? I didn’t know, I only knew that I couldn’t let Tia die.

  I burst from the House of Horrors. Tia saw me first.

  ‘Run, Skip, run!’ she shouted.

  I threw the keys as hard as I could. They curved up into the midnight blue. For a split second the soldier looked up as they tumbled towards him like a falling star. In a single, swift movement, Tia rose on her knees, arched her arms over her head and drove her fists into his chest. He staggered, then crumpled and fell face down. Tia started towards me. She didn’t see the other soldier taking aim from behind the broken lattice, or the young one near the truck. Too late, my scream ripped through the night, jagged as saw-teeth between the shots.

  The young soldier rolled his comrade onto his back and stared for a few seconds at the knife handle sticking out of his chest. Then he stood up, dropped his gun next to the other soldier, the one he’d shot, and ran behind the pavilion, vomiting all the way.

  I flung myself down beside Tia, remembering the wrongness I had felt on the morning Billy discovered his knife was missing. It was only a small knife with a handle made of shell. It was blunt from opening tins and picking locks and other useful things. I didn’t think you could kill a man with a knife like that. But Tia did. She did it so the rest of us could get away.

  Lights blazed at the hotel, engines revved, doors slammed and sirens howled. I grabbed the keys off the ground, but what to do? There was only me. I’d never driven anything. Where was Billy? Where were Max and Sixpence? Would they come? Should I leave Tia and try to find them; come back later?

  Trucks wound down the corkscrew hill. The young soldier stopped throwing up. He’d seen me.

  Then Billy walked out from behind the carousel with Sixpence on his back and Max beside him, and everything we needed for our one last chance.

  ‘Get in, Max!’ I hissed. ‘We’ve got to leave. Now!’ I didn’t want him to look at Tia and the dead soldiers.

  Billy and me put our hands together underneath Tia and moved her across to the truck, but we couldn’t lift her high enough to put her in the back.

  The other trucks were closing in.

  I wanted to be with Max. I wanted Billy to drive us away before it was too late, but I couldn’t leave Tia there.

  I saw the young soldier running towards us. Three guns lay on the ground between us. Billy’s eyes met mine, our hands gripped tight underneath Tia. His face looked afraid, like my heart. Then the soldier did something I never thought he’d do. He took Tia in his arms, but not like the other soldiers; he took her from us with gentle hands, lifted her up and laid her down in the dark next to Max. He took off his big coat and put it over her. After he helped Bi
lly up, he put his hand out to me and I put the golden keys into it because I knew he’d figured out that he was on the Third Side.

  21

  Pennyweight Flat

  Sandbags scattered and barricades splintered as the truck hurtled through the first checkpoint. We lay low in the back as bullets sizzled past us. The soldier took a crazy, twisted route, nosing through narrow streets in silent suburbs with no streetlights and no headlights. Our truck driver was a murderer. They were looking for him because he did the worst thing: he killed a comrade; killed him for a beautiful fifteen-year-old girl who stuck a blunt pocketknife into a soldier’s chest so that her baby daughter and her friends could go free. He did it because he was on the Third Side, that didn’t believe in war.

  I wondered if it had been Tia or me that he’d killed, would the others have tried to hunt him down? I wondered if he’d been sent to war, like Old Thomas was, or maybe he was like my dad and thought it would be an adventure. All I knew, with every part of me, was that he was in a war he didn’t want to be in and no one was going to tell him he could go home.

  I held the torch while Billy wrapped Tia in torn sheets to stop the bleeding. But with each new strip of rag he added we saw the blood soak through, redder than her coat. We covered her with the soldier’s coat again and then Billy and I lay, one each side of her, trying to keep her warm, trying to stop her from moving while the truck swerved and swayed through unfamiliar streets. Sixpence slept on my chest, warm and soft and alive in her pouch, and Billy held Max in his arms. I closed my eyes tight and tried to hear the music that was inside Tia, but all I could hear was the sound of her lungs trying to squeeze her heavy red breath in and out, in and out.

  Through the night we drove in a tangle of waking and sleeping, nightmares from hell and holy white dreams. In my waking I thought about the soldier and wondered if he knew where he was going. I remembered his pale, sweating face and his shaking hands when I gave him the keys. I saw Billy sit up like a grey ghost and look out into the darkness. He bent low over Tia and made the sign of the cross the way he had on poor Bradley Clark. I wanted to tell him he was wrong, that he’d made a mistake, that Tia was still alive. But I knew it was only my own body heat making her warm.

  Billy took Old Thomas’s cigarette from inside his coat. He struck a match and the tiny flame flickered and died. I smelt the smoke and saw it drift away. After he finished his cigarette, Billy tapped on the window that separated us from the driver and I felt the truck slow down. The cabin door opened and Billy passed Max down to the soldier, then he crawled back on his hands and knees to me.

  ‘Skip!’ I heard him whisper, and smelt the sour smell of cigarettes on his breath. I knew he wanted me to get in the front with him and Max, but I kept my eyes shut. ‘Wake up, Skip.’ Billy shook my arm. I opened my eyes a crack and looked at him. ‘We’ve given them the slip,’ he said. ‘They’ll never find us now. Come on, come inside the cabin, it’s warmer there.’

  I shook my head, so Billy took Sixpence with him and left me there.

  Before the truck drove off again the light came on in the cabin and I heard Billy talking. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but I guessed he was telling the soldier which way to go.

  I combed the knots out of Tia’s hair with my fingers, and told her I’d keep my promise to take care of Sixpence, and I cried. Then I lay down and thought about the slap-up meal and the wishbone, and I wished I’d tried harder and pulled stronger, because I would have made the right wish.

  I don’t know how long it was before I felt the truck slow down and turn off the highway. The wheels crunched over gravel. I looked through the window in the back of the cabin and out through the front windscreen. The soldier turned the truck’s lights on and I saw a small white bridge. He slowed the truck down even more until I thought we were going to stop. We rolled forward and the planks of the bridge groaned as we drove slowly across. Then the headlights shone on a sign that said Moonlight Flat. The soldier flicked the lights off again and the truck crawled slowly up the road until we reached the top of a small hill. A sign said Pennyweight Flat Children’s Cemetery.

  A pennyweight is a measure of gold. If you had a piece of gold that weighed one pennyweight it would be about the size of a small fingernail. This means that a pennyweight of gold is a tiny treasure. It doesn’t matter how big or how small a treasure is, it’s still a treasure.

  At the Pennyweight Flat Children’s Cemetery the ground is full of treasure. Miners came there to find gold in eighteen hundred and fifty-one. But over the next six years, two hundred people got buried at the cemetery. A lot of them were the miners’ babies and children, and some of them were the mums and dads. This is true; I read it on the sign I saw when I got out of the truck.

  I climbed out first, and then Billy got out with Sixpence, and the soldier lifted Max down onto the stony ground. Next he lifted Tia out and carried her through the small silver gate. We followed him, in single file, between the mossy rocks that the miners had arranged around their most precious treasures. Max and me spread the red coat on the ground and the soldier laid Tia down beneath the stars. We opened a bottle of water and washed away her blood, and when we were done we sat back and let the moon shine itself all over her, and we saw that Tia was full of light. Billy said that when we die the darkness leaves us.

  ‘We’re pure and perfect then,’ he said, ‘the way we are when we’re born.’

  Max and me spread our blankets on the ground and we laid ourselves down beside Tia. We held her hands and looked up at the millions of stars. The night was hushed and holy and we stayed with Tia until morning came, and we were not afraid.

  By sunrise the soldier had scraped a hole in the ground for Tia. Billy unwrapped his Hohner. He curled his fingers around it and closed his eyes and played the blessing song. When it was over we lay Tia in the ground, among the fingernails of gold.

  22

  The most

  important thing

  After we’d said goodbye to Tia we went back to the truck and climbed into the front with the soldier. Billy looked at the book of maps and pointed out which way we should go.

  The wheels hummed lullabies on the liquorice road and Max and Sixpence were soon asleep. Sixpence had learnt to suck her thumb, her cheeks had cooled and the rattle in her chest had almost gone. I rested my chin on her fairy-floss hair and closed my eyes.

  This time my head was empty of dreams. When I woke again, a long time later, the truck had stopped by the side of the road. I looked out and saw a dirt track winding through the tall and bending grass. At the end was an old white house.

  ‘Max,’ I said, ‘wake up, Max!’

  Max put his fingers under his glasses and rubbed his eyes, and then he looked out the window. ‘See, I told you!’ he said.

  Billy opened the door and elbowed me in the ribs. ‘Out you get.’

  I climbed down and parted the grass with my hands, searching for a small white post. When I found it, I checked the letters and numbers I’d written on my hand. I had to be sure. The others watched me from the truck and I yelled out, ‘Chuck us Dad’s coat, Billy!’

  He tossed the coat through the window and I opened the gate and let the soldier drive through. Sixpence waved her starfish hands and smiled her toothless smile and I thought about the promise I’d made to Tia. I rode the rusty gate back to its leaning post and watched the truck for a while, bumping slowly towards the house in the distance. I put my hands up to the sky and looked with both my eyes at the same time. I saw the way the light fell and where the shadows lay. Then I chased the truck along the dusty track through Gulliver’s Meadows and my heart was a dancing red kite.

  One day I’ll give the silver necklace to Sixpence and I’ll tell her about Tia. I’ll tell her how beautiful she was and how brave. And I’ll tell her the most important thing of all: that her mother loved her better than her life.

  About the author

  Glenda Millard has written picture books, short stories and novels for chil
dren and young adults. She began thinking about the main character for this book after noticing a newspaper headline ‘Urban Tribes’, and she wondered what life would be like for a young homeless boy, living with people thrown together in circumstances beyond their control.

  Glenda is fascinated by the way chance plays its part in our lives. She says: ‘Nearly forty years after I left school, I discovered that one of my high school teachers had restored a carousel. Having always loved carousels, I was intrigued and spent a wonderful day with my ex-teacher, learning about the very labour-intensive process of restoring carousels. Subsequently, I went to Geelong and rode on that carousel. Later, on a wet, grey day in June, I went to St Kilda and rode the carousel at Luna Park. I wrote a story about a carousel horse, which will soon be published as a picture book. And when I started writing A Small Free Kiss in the Dark, the memory of my carousel ride on that misty day in June came back to me and seemed a perfect setting for my novel. By situating much of the story in a fun park, I hoped to juxtapose the location with the events that took place there. While the backdrop for this story is war, my intention was to capture the indomitable nature of hope, even in dire situations.’

  Glenda Millard lives in the Goldfields region of Central Victoria. Her book The Naming of Tishkin Silk was an Honour Book in the 2004 CBC Book of the Year Awards and was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. Layla Queen of Hearts was a winner in the 2007 Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards and was shortlisted in the 2007 CBC awards. Her picture book, Kaito’s Cloth, was also shortlisted in the 2007 Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards.