My daddy come here from Arkansas in the US of A. That’s why they call me Yankee. Yankee Peterson. (Seems the folks around here don’t know that Yankees come from up north.) They reckon I talk funny, but I can’t hear it. My daddy came here in the 70s to work up at Avon Dam, liked the place and stayed. Married a local girl, Irma Brownhead, and stayed married through some brimstone and hellfire, but some golden honey days, too, until she died of a nasty bug about five years later. Not before she had me, though. Then Dad married Kelly Locke, another local girl, but she grew a belly one spring, and there were complications, and it didn’t go too well for her down at Wollongong Hospital.
After that they wouldn’t let him marry nobody else from around these parts. Said they were running out of girls. So now there’s just him and me, and I guess I do talk a bit like him.
But the locals don’t take all that well to outsiders round here. Even ones that was born here, like me.
My real name’s Jake. I’m fourteen. I’ll be fifteen in June. None of that matters, but I thought you’d like to know.
I doubt you’ve ever been out this way but if you had you would have passed the Coaltown School. The Coaltown Area School it says, in huge embossed letters, on the low concrete fence that runs along the front, but I don’t know anybody as calls it that. It’s the one on the road from Pheasants Nest, before you get to Avon Dam.
The school is the blue building, right on the main road. It was painted bright blue in the 1960s by Barry Tucker, the principal at the time, and that colour still shows in the photos that line the foyer. But decades of sunlight and dust, tossed around by the wheels of the passing cars and sheep trucks have muted it down till now it’s somewhere between the deep blue of the Bass Strait, and the clear cyan of the Southern Australian sky.
It was February, which might have something to do with what happened because it gets stinking hot around Coaltown that time of year. And heat’s been known to do strange things to folks.
It was just after 7 o’clock. That would be 8 o’clock by your reckoning, ’cos of daylight saving. We never really did go in for that much around here. Big City Fools tinkering around with time, my dad always said. ‘You can’t put time forward an hour,’ he said. ‘Time just does what it darn well wants.’
So it was still 7 o’clock round these parts and the whole bunch of us are out, kicking a football around the schoolyard, when we hear the sound of running footsteps, then the big double gates of the school burst open like the swing saloon doors in those old western movies, and Tony Two-Cows Tinkerton runs in.
I’d love to tell y’all the tale behind the Two-Cows nickname, but that’d never fit in these few pages. And you’d probably not believe it anyway.
There was just the usual gang kicking around at the school. No flash city kids down from Bargo, roughing it at Coaltown so’s they’d have a story to tell when they got back home.
Gordie was there, running around after the rugby ball, broken leg in a cast and all. He’s a young fella, Gordie, barely thirteen. Had more broken bones in those thirteen years than the rest of us put together. Bear Mossman, a huge kid from Two Bridge had the ball, and Gordie was trying to tackle him, but the cast made it impossible for him to catch the Bear, and to be honest he wouldn’t have had much of a chance anyways against him.
Not everyone was playing with the ball. There was Vernon and Rufus Harball playing coin footy on the old stone wall with a two-dollar coin. Two-dollar! They always were a bit flash, those kids. Will Wildwire was sitting in the old tyre swing that hung from the Oak Tree, sound asleep. That wasn’t unusual. He could, and did, sleep anywhere, anytime. Mainly in maths. Charlie Shortfoot had taken his shirt off with the heat and was lying down in his old grey singlet on top of the stone wall, fanning hisself with a copy of the Mercury. That’s the newspaper from the big smoke over at Wollongong.
Charlie’s brother, Kingi, was sitting on the front steps of the school with me, telling me a story. He’d started on the tale when I rolled up after dinner at about 6 o’clock, and wasn’t really getting any closer to the end. But I guess that’s how we tell stories down here, where the grass grows at a leisurely pace and the summer evenings last all night. They say that even the wind moves slowly when it gets to Coaltown.
When you get a story, you get all the detail that goes with it. And all the little details that go with the big details. It’s just a regional NSW kind of thing, I guess, but you can’t cut straight to the chase. That’d be like eating a meat pie without the gravy and the mushy peas. It might fill the hole but it sure don’t taste the same.
And then, like I said, young Tony Tinkerton ran in and he looked scared.
Nobody I knew – and I knew all the folk around those parts – had ever seen Two-Cows look scared before. Unless you counted the time his mom caught him playing doctors and nurses down on the river bank with Deirdre Whitford, the principal’s daughter, and he came running down the highway in just his Y-fronts with his mom screaming along right behind him.
That may not sound all that scary to y’all, but you haven’t met his mom.
He was a bit soft, Tony Tinkerton, but he didn’t scare easily.
But that evening at the Coaltown School, Two-Cows busting in caused quite a commotion. Vernon’s mouth dropped open in shock. Rufus had just flicked the coin in the air for a try and was spinning for a conversion, but his shot went wild and I’ll be darned if it didn’t shoot straight into Vernon’s mouth. He promptly swallowed it. Serve them right for playing with a two-dollar coin.
Kingi and I turned around, Will woke up, and even the Bear stopped running and looked up to see what the heck was going on. Gordie Longmarch ran straight into his big backside and bounced off, falling flat on his back. There was a cracking sound from his brand new cast.
I suppose it would be only right to tell you that the locals around Coaltown don’t take all that well to strangers. You might have already figured that out for yourself. If you want the time of day in Coaltown you look at the clock in the roof of the derelict old post office and hope that it’s still working. Ask a local for the time and he’s likely to just aim a finger at the clock for you. If you’re lucky, that is.
I guess that’s why them flash city folk from Bargo tend to put their foot down a little harder on the gas when they pass through Coaltown on the way from one hectic business meeting to another.
There were no city folk that night travelling through Coaltown and that turned out to be a darn good thing ’cos otherwise news of what happened might have leaked out and maybe even found its way into the Mercury.
All kinds of ruckus would have broken loose then, I guess. The big papers up north would have picked it up and pretty soon there would have been them radio fellas with big fluffy microphones with letters on them, and them TV reporters sticking cameras up our asses. And I guess the overseas folk wouldn’t be far behind, like that channel they show on the big TV in the local pub, where we sometimes sneak in to watch the footy.
I can’t tell you that would be a good thing for Coaltown. Not a good thing at all.
But it didn’t matter, ’cos, like I said, there weren’t no city folk passing through that night. No outsiders (’cept for me).
Tony Two-Cows said, ‘You’re not going to believe this,’ and then just stood there with such a dumb-ass look on his face that I almost thought he’d finally blown a head gasket, and turned back to the funny story I was hearing from Kingi Shortfoot about a hill-country farmer from Riverton, but then I noticed the thunder at the back of Tony’s eyes and I realised that this was more than just a smash-up on the highway, or a fire in someone’s hay barn.
We all grabbed our bikes, ’cept for Bear, who was driving his old man’s quad-bike, and Gordie, who we strapped onto Bear’s lamb tray so’s he wouldn’t fall off.
The rest of us raced off after him as Tony Two-Cows pointed us in the direction of the Coaltown bridge.
&nb
sp; The bridge runs across the mighty Avon River, just before the picnic area. The moon was full and up in the nor-east, which meant it licked those hilltops with silver and grinned back up at us off the river itself. That gave the whole place a bit of an unearthly look before we got anywhere near the bridge.
We just about lost Gordie before we got halfway there. Bear hit a bump and a corner at the same time, and Gordie went sliding off the tray, but Bear stretched out one of those pine tree arms of his and pulled him back on board before any harm came to him.
It was Charlie who first heard it. He had good ears did Charlie Shortfoot. Don’t get me wrong, a river at night rushing under a bridge is a noisy place. But there’re some sounds you expect to hear when you’re approaching the Coaltown bridge, and some sounds you’d be alarmed to hear.
This sound wasn’t neither of those. It was just plain, darn wrong.
‘What the heck is that?’ Charlie stood up on his pedals and cocked his head to one side.
We all listened and it was suddenly clear, even over the rumble of the quad.
‘That doesn’t sound human,’ I said.
Kingi said, ‘Well it doesn’t sound like a machine.’
‘Darn straight,’ I agreed.
I ain’t going to try to describe the sound for you, but I can tell you that it cut right through to your backbone, like running your fingernails down the old blackboard in the hall at the school.
We rounded that last corner before the bridge and the sound filled the air like a hot wet blanket. We came up over the crest of the small hill and Bear slammed the brakes on so hard that all of us pedalling along behind him were skidding and sliding so’s not to run into the back of him. I slid right over, rubbing most of the skin off my left knee and so it was a minute or so before I got to see what Bear had seen from up front.
The sight that greeted us all was enough to lift even Gordie Longmarch out of the tray. ‘Holy, freaking, shivers,’ he said, got out of the tray, slipped over on the gravel and laid himself out on the road for a moment or two.
Actually that’s not quite what he said, but I wouldn’t want to offend anybody now.
The only thing to do from there was to head on down to the bridge. We couldn’t turn back. Fear, or bravery, had nothing to do with it. What we saw was impossible, and yet there it was, right in front of our eyes. We went down to the bridge because we were drawn to it, and not in a way that you could just turn away from.
We got back to the school just before midnight.
‘What are we going to do?’ I said. The question must have been on all of our minds, but I was the one to stick it out there. In the air. Where it couldn’t be ignored.
‘Nothing,’ said Kingi.
‘Gotta do something,’ Bear said. ‘Can’t do nothing.’
‘Well the first thing we’re going to do is to make a promise not to talk about what we saw up there,’ I said. ‘Not to anybody.’
‘We gotta tell someone,’ Tony said. ‘Police maybe.’
‘What the hell are the cops going to do?’ Kingi asked.
‘It ain’t none of their business,’ I said. ‘It’s not a matter for the police.’
‘The army then,’ Bear said.
‘Like that’s gonna help.’ Vernon Harball and his brother were taking turns to shiver. Like they were passing the shiver back and forth between them. It was hard not to watch.
‘There must be some government department,’ Will said.
‘There isn’t a government department for that,’ Kingi said.
‘I say we go back.’ And I was surprised as all hell that those words had come out of my mouth.
‘No way,’ Vernon and Rufus said simultaneously.
‘No effing way,’ Charlie agreed.
‘I think we gotta,’ said Kingi.
Everybody looked at him. If there was ever a leader of our little gang it was Kingi. We all respected him. We all looked up to him. Bear would have wrestled a crocodile if Kingi had asked him to.
I was kind of relieved. We had to go back, but nobody was going to listen to me. I was an outsider. Kingi was a local.
‘Not at night,’ Tony said.
I know I keep saying how soft Tony was, but on this we were all in agreement. If we went back, it had to be during daylight.
‘Tomorrow,’ I said.
I didn’t get home until after midnight and I just quietly let myself in. Door wasn’t locked. Doors were never locked around Coaltown. I locked it after me though. Went and shut all the windows, too.
My daddy was snoring in the front room with the television on and a half glass of warm beer on the side-table. Nothing unusual about that, which was good. I needed something normal. Something to help me get a grip back on reality after what I just seen.
I poured his beer down the sink and turned off the TV. Let him sleep where he was. Then I did my nightly check around for snakes, little buggers have a way of sneaking in during the day, and took myself off to bed.
Didn’t sleep a wink.
Got up at 7, didn’t even feel tired.
Warmed up Weet-Bix for breakfast. Ate it all, too. And a second helping. Hungry as a mule.
Finally got up to the school around 7.30.
Everyone was there. I knew they would be. Don’t ask me how because we hadn’t talked about it the night before. But we were all there.
I think Will Wildwire had slept at the school. He just hunkered down under the jungle gym.
We all looked at each other and I think we all knew that if we didn’t do it right away, we wouldn’t do it. Ever. And it had to be done.
So we went. All of us.
We went in daylight because we were afraid of going there in the dark, but it was dark when we got back to the school, and we probably should have all gone home to our beds, what with school the next day and all. But none of us would have been able to sleep anyway, so I suppose it didn’t matter no how. ’Cept maybe Will. He’d be able to sleep, I guess.
We must have really been rattled I guess ’cos nobody said a darn thing. We just sat there and looked at each other.
I felt different. I felt – changed.
Looking back now, I don’t think there was a single one of us that wasn’t changed in some way by what happened up at the Coaltown bridge.
Gordie came back white as a newborn lamb, and believe it or not, never broke another bone in his life.
Vernon and Rufus quit school and started working full-time on their dad’s farm. I never did find out what happened to that two-dollar coin, but I’m sure Vernon’ll have a story to tell me about it some day.
Bear Mossman’s hair turned white. At the age of fourteen! Took about a week. But that fine mop of black hair was white as snow before the end of February.
Tony Two-Cows joined the army. Anything to get out of town I guess. Couldn’t handle it. Always was a bit soft, that kid.
And the rest of us, Will, the Shortfoot boys and me, all dealt with it in our own way. Other things changed, too. Like the way the locals looked at me. Things like what happened can bond folk together in unexpected ways. I became one of them, a local, never mind where my daddy was born.
Well, I expect you’re probably keen to know what we saw, and what happened up at the bridge.
But, frankly, we Coaltown folk keep pretty much to ourselves. Wouldn’t want the Mercury to latch onto it, as I said, or all kinds of hell would break loose around here.
What I’m trying to say is that I’d love to tell you. I really would.
But I can’t.
You’re not a local.
It’s Sunday. Only eleven shopping days till Christmas!
Yay.
I’m an elf. Not the Middle Earth kind with a bow and arrow. That would be cool. No, I’m the Santa kind.
When I answer the phone at the call centre I’m su
pposed to put on an elvish voice and pretend to be one of Santa’s little helpers. Then I listen to some whiny kid telling me all about what Christmas presents he or she wants this year.
The kids believe the lie. That I’m really an elf. That you can phone Santa’s secret base at the North Pole. That Santa really flies around at Christmas with a sleigh full of presents. That Christmas is a time of peace and joy.
My shift starts at 8 am, but I’m late. I just couldn’t generate the enthusiasm to get out of bed this morning. It’s 8.08 when I walk in.
Mark and Christine are the other happy little elves on shift today. They’re already chatting to the next round of suckers. I wave at them as I arrive, a few minutes late, and take my seat in my little cubicle.
‘Hey, Steve,’ Christine says. Mark just nods; he’s already on a call.
My elf name is Cheeky. Mark’s is Jolly and Christine’s is Bouncy. The names were given to us when we got the job. I have to grit my teeth every time I say mine.
Mark’s an engineering student. He’s older than me, about twenty, fat, furry and funny. I think he really enjoys this job. He’s always putting on silly voices and having pretend conversations with Mrs Claus to entertain the kids. I’d hate him for being such a Pollyanna, except you can’t hate Mark. He’s engaging and likeable. Not my idea of an engineer at all.
Christine’s Korean and has only been in the country for three years, but has no accent and better English than me. She also speaks French and Italian and can get by in Latin. (Very handy if you happen to run into some Ancient Romans.) She’s awesome – makes me feel stupid. Not on purpose. Okay – she’s lovely. But she’s so smart that all the rest of us have to bask in the glow of her intelligence. She’s good with the kids. She never says yes or no, no matter what they ask for.
She gives me a sweet smile and I manage a tired one back as I pull on my headset and adjust the microphone.
The room we work in is just an office. One of hundreds in a tall tower building that houses mostly lawyers and accountants. There are four cubicles, although only three of us on duty at any one time.
Stubborn Seed of Hope Page 10