by David Rain
Queen Noreen, like a judge in court, questioned the constable. The Adam’s apple bobbed absurdly – bob-bob, bob-bob, like the red red robin in that maddening cheery song. His name (she introduced him to the girls) was Constable Bonner, Mark Bonner, but Noreen Puce, remembering him as a toddler, could, of course, only call him Marky.
‘And how are you, Marky?’
Marky was fine.
‘Like it down the cop shop, eh?’
Marky liked it.
‘What’s that? Yous had a letter from Baz?’
Marky and Baz had been good mates. Real good mates.
‘See his plane,’ Noreen went on, ‘still there above the bed? Remember when he made that plane? Sticky fingers that day!’
Marky knew. Marky had been there.
‘Well, Marky, what’s all this about, then? Raffling a chook for the Cops’ Benevolent Fund?’
Marky shook his head sadly.
‘No chook! Marky, if you been standing here magging away when me window’s smashed in and half me stock’s gone up the Khyber, I’ll … I’ll have your flyballs for marbles, lad!’
The boy’s colour deepened. Had Mrs P. alluded to his private parts? Queen Noreen only cooed, ‘Marky, you’re such a tease!’ and not until she had subsided into smiling silence did Constable Bonner – stammering, acne pulsing fit to burst – set forth his theme: last night’s robbery in Crater Gardens.
How glad Skip was she was sick! She could be flushed, trembling, and it seemed quite in order. Honza twisted his hands; she wished he would stop. Marlo looked confused, and her confusion grew as the red-red-robin Adam’s apple heaved up words in a vomitous rush: words about the wishing well and water running away and evil acts with a hacksaw blade and evidence of a scuffle and bike tracks in the lawn, and this, this – big hands descended from the uniformed chest – this, I have to report, was found at the scene of the crime.
Scene of the crime: Marky’s eyes grew wide, as if he could not quite believe he had used the phrase, while Skip, slipping down in the bed, wondered how she could explain this Qantas bag that he uncrushed and held up, all the time (she was certain) fighting off the temptation to call it ‘Exhibit A’. But there was no time to think of alibis. Auntie Noreen had already spotted the name, in black felt pen against the bag’s white lining: HELEN WELLS.
Honza, by the door, almost broke into a run, but fear gripped him and he only scuffed a heel, grinning stupidly at Constable Bonner. Marlo’s eyes met Skip’s, horrified, amazed. From somewhere, Skip imagined, came a cattle-truck rattle: the sleepout had always looked like rolling stock; she had wished more than once that it would bear her away, across the far paddocks, never to return. But it was going nowhere. A spell had fallen upon the players, freezing them into attitudes variously expressing accusation, guilt, shame.
Noreen Puce broke it. ‘Deary me, Marky, you had me going!’ She gestured to the bed. ‘Baby Helen, a master criminal? I don’t reckon, do you? Laid up all weekend. Bad dose of flu. But even if she was full of beans I hardly reckon a little filly like this would be jumping down wishing wells in the middle of the night! Sugar and spice and all things nice, eh? And as for this old bag – this Qantas bag, I means, not meself, Marky! – it was pinched last week. Terrible, what goes on at that school. Yous blokes at the cop shop ought to be patrolling there. Up and down the corridors. Round and round the grounds. That’s what cops do in America. Saw it on telly. Big-city schools filled with wops and blackies, what do you expect? Here’s your bag back, Helen.’ And the fond aunt tossed it to the bed with girlish nonchalance. ‘I’ll tell you this, Marky’ – she leaned forward, eyes narrowed; a sausage finger poked the air – ‘you find what bugger stole poor Helen’s bag and you’ll find what bugger robbed your wishing well. That high school’s a hotbed of crime, make no mistake. Little buggers! Might as well be Yanks.’
Whether P. C. Bonner was satisfied or merely browbeaten by her logic was difficult to determine. He pushed out his lower lip, nodded sagely, and might even have thanked her for assisting him in his investigations had she not interrupted, asking him jauntily to stay for her Sunday roast. ‘How’s about it, Marky? Crack a few coldies with Doug, eh?’
The constable shook his head with regret. ‘On duty and all.’
‘Who’d have thought it, Marky? You all grown up and responsible. And I remember when you was just a little nipper, running round me yard with Baz. No pants on. Little winky poking out under your singlet.’
Little winky! The lawman, Skip realised, was defeated; he turned to go, then gestured to the F-111 that swayed in a breeze above Barry’s bed, and observed, his voice thick, ‘Don’t suppose Bazza’s been in one of them. Slogging through the jungle, he is, not flying up above. You know, Mrs P., sometimes I think of him and ask myself: why Bazza? Why not me?’
‘His number come up, love.’ Noreen Puce softened. ‘You’re fine young men, the pair of you, serving your country in different ways. Some have to fight the foreign scum, to keep Australia free. Some have to stay home and keep our own scum in line. Like them buggers I told you about, eh?’
Marky Bonner conceded this with a philosophical air. ‘I’ll see myself out, Mrs P.,’ he said.
Moments passed and his footsteps faded down the path. Skip looked at Marlo: Marlo looked at Skip. Honza, a grinning fool, seemed to think the danger was over. The side gate clunked.
Queen Noreen attempted to rise. One-two … one-two-three … Grimacing, she strained against the tight wicker. The drama of Marky’s visit had wedged the great lady all the more firmly into her ill-advised throne. Her face flushed. Leg-o’-mutton arms flapped like fleshy sails as she reared forward, shaking the floor. The chair lifted, protruding like a bustle from her mighty rump, but she burst out, oblivious, ‘Robbing the wishing well! Stealing from charity! You’d better have some explanation, Helen Wells!’
Skip’s brain spun like a car’s wheels in quicksand, and all she could do was whimper out useless denials as Auntie Noreen massed over her, electric with rage, then turned sharply and pointed. Heaped in a corner, revealed by the displaced chair, were the filthy clothes, smeared with slime, that Skip had discarded the night before – the smell, traced to its source!
Terrified, Honza slunk towards the door, but Noreen Puce would not let him go. A hideous bent-over thing, half-woman, half-chair, face bright enough to burn, she lunged at him, shrieking, ‘This is your doing, Honza Novak!’ and grabbed his shoulders and shook him, hard. ‘Dirty little wog – you come round here, perving on me niece through her window (don’t think old Noreen don’t know!), luring her into a life of crime and God knows what else. Jesus, I don’t expect much of yous Novak brats – reffo for a dad, slag for a mum – but this time you gone too far, and you better count yourself lucky I don’t shop you. Because I’ll tell you one thing, young feller-me-lad: if I sees you hanging round me niece again, that’s what I’ll do. Know what that means? Reform school, and about bloody time – cold showers, beatings, and some big boy’s stiffy up your bumhole every night! Don’t think you can put the blame on Baby Helen. No niece of mine’s going down. Everybody will believe it was just you, and it’ll serve you right for sniffing round good Australian girls instead of sticking to your greasy wog sluts. Got that? Got that?’
There was more in this vein, and neither Skip’s protests (‘It’s not his fault!’) nor Marlo’s efforts to calm her aunt (‘Aunt, please! You’re hurting him’) were anything but futile. On and on the waves of execration came – much of it directed more at Deirdre Novak than at her son – cresting each time with an urgent ‘Got that? Got that?’
So violently did Noreen Puce shake the hapless Honza that all he could do was grunt through clashing teeth, until, in rising rage, she flung him from her. The boy crashed to the floor, scrambled up, and rushed out the door; through all this, Marlo stood white-faced against the wall, while Skip struggled to rise from her bed. Could she have followed Honza, she would have: run alongside him, scaled the fence with him, escaped Auntie Noreen�
�s and never come back.
Auntie Noreen was straining, straining; shit-a-brick noises erupted from her throat as she struggled to free herself from the wicker bustle. ‘Nrrghh …! Nrrghh …! Marlene, help me …’ But Marlo had no need to act, for in desperation her aunt twisted, wrenched, and the chair clattered free. Her face scarlet, Noreen Puce plunged towards the door.
But she stopped on the threshold and turned back, eyes ablaze. Her words came slowly, levelly. ‘I’ll say one thing, and say it clear. Neither of yous girls goes round Novaks’ again. Ever. Got it?’
Skip could not speak. Her head throbbed.
Marlo gasped. ‘The play!’
‘Play! Yair, and making eyes at Pav all day. Or is it that poofter teacher from the school? Don’t think I don’t know what you get up to. Remember, Marlene, you’re under my roof. You’re working in me shop. I pays your bloody wages, and if I want to turn you and your thieving sister out on the streets, I bloody well will and who’s to tell me no? Nobody. You’re stopping indoors, the pair of you, till you learn how to behave. School and work! School and work, then home. Dougie can drive yous both. One bit of trouble from either of yous, and I’ll dob in Deirdre Novak’s brat before you can say Jack Robinson. Don’t look at me like that, Helen. I mean it. You’re a stupid, ignorant girl and I’m just doing what’s good for you. If you weren’t sick I’d drag you out of that bed this minute and beat you black and blue.’
‘You bitch,’ Skip said. ‘Fucking old bitch.’
Did Auntie Noreen hear this as she lumbered from the sleepout? If she did, she only added Skip’s words – weariedly, resignedly – to the teetering evidence that her mad sister’s kiddies were rotten to the core. The wicker chair, on its side, still lay where it had fallen.
Miserably, Skip sank into her pillow. Marlo stared at her with something between sadness and horror. Skip knew what she had done. Marlo, dragged out of school, forced to work in a hardware shop, had found hope in Howard Brooker. Without him, she would never pass her exams. She would never escape. Skip turned from Marlo’s gaze. If her sister had said ‘I hate you’ she would not have been surprised. She hated herself.
But Marlo, without a word, slipped away after Auntie Noreen.
Chapter Ten
Summer a-coming. Not long now.
Morning shadows stretch from the bluegums that rim the school fence. Brightness glares off the yellow buses as they swing into the grounds. One day, give it a few weeks, smoky haze will shimmer over the tarmac; flies will buzz like bees while the skies stand arrested, day on day, in unbroken pale blue. But for Skip Wells, aged almost thirteen, the world is grey.
‘See you this arvo, love,’ says Uncle Doug, as she hauls up her Qantas bag from the littered floor of his van. He winks at her, clicks his mouth. ‘Cheer up. Snot so bad.’
Snot so bad! Skip slams the van door. Slopes through the gates. The school-in-the-morning hubbub claws at her mind like scrabbling gulls. How many weeks of this torment remain? One is too many. Drag along this path, up these steps, down this corridor, open this locker, stuff in your things and crash it shut. Ignore taunts, stares. Fuck off, Maggie Polomka. Fuck off, Shaun Kenny – one step towards me and I’ll fucking deck you. Tough little bitch: that’s what they’re saying.
Monday morning. Stiffly she sits in the gas-tap home group, in turbanned maths, in Brooker’s English class, and sneers at Honza Novak if he turns around to look at her. No more Honza. No more anybody. Never, never.
Some slut says, ‘Skippy’s broken up with her boyfriend.’
Some whacker says, ‘Boyfriend? Fucking lez, she is.’
But something’s going on. Big announcement.
‘… That’s right, a time capsule,’ says Howard Brooker.
Light slants like balm across the yellow-white tables, scored and scuffed already, which replaced only recently the inkwelled desks that had borne in their scarifications a generation’s legacy.
‘Time capsule?’ Brenton Lumsden looks affronted.
‘Like Doctor Who?’ squeals Wayne Bunny, whose voice is breaking.
Kylie Cunliffe snorts. ‘Will we go into the future?’
‘Ten-nine-eight-seven-six-five-four-three-two-one-zero – blast off!’ yells Andreas Haskas, spit spraying in a glittering semicircle, fist, clenched whacker-style, surging skywards.
‘All right, all right.’ Brooker does his best to calm the class. See those hands, palms down, pressing something invisible? Shoosh. Shoosh. What’s he on about now? One hundred years, one whole hundred years since the Lakes was proclaimed a town. This calls, doesn’t it, for something special? Mark the occasion. Make it memorable. Stake a flag in the flux of time. The capsule, stuffed to the brim with pictures, objects, letters, is to be buried in Crater Gardens by the town hall, to be dug up by your great-great in another hundred years.
Now anybody clued up, watching this man-boy with his hippie sideburns, poofter shirt, medallion, hipster jeans with their big shiny belt buckle, might sense his degradation, his shame as he stands before these imbeciles, spooling out these platitudes as if every phrase that drivels off his lips doesn’t make him want to throw up. ‘No, no, we’re not going to the future,’ Brooker says cheerfully, ‘but the time capsule is.’ (Have his eyes – what a ham! – widened a little? What does he expect, intakes of breath?) The clued-up might guess, too, that sometimes in bed at night Brooker feels himself drowning and starts up, gasping, struggling for breath; that old uni mates are in London right now, pulling pints in pubs, pulling birds in discotheques, or trolling around on the Grand Tour in a beat-up V Dub campervan. This causes Brooker pain. Among the books in his boarding house bedroom is a tatty Lost Illusions, relic of some dreary course at Flinders University, with the passage underscored: ‘Neither distinctions nor dignities will seek out the talent that is running to seed in a provincial town …’ And he had once thought Adelaide was the provincial town!
‘Yes,’ Brooker says brightly, ‘imagine if you could read a letter from your great-great. Our task’ – he claps his hands, suggesting resolve, a can-do spirit, not a moment to waste – ‘is to write those letters for our great-greats to marvel over one day (sooner than you think!) when we’re all dust and ash, in their world of bubble cars and personal helipads and package tours to Venus. And that, class, is our project for this week.’
Brooker divides them into groups to discuss it.
‘I reckon it’s stupid,’ says Mag the Slag, whose blondish hair looks this morning as if a tub of margarine has been melted over it.
Their letters, Brooker enthuses, should have a theme. Here he comes now, working the room, bending over this and that yellow-white table, interrogating: ‘What about you, Maggie?’ (Flabby cheeks redden.) ‘Think of your life – what, in your life, would fascinate your great-great …’
‘Sir! Sir! Mr Brooker?’ Lucy Sutton offers her inspiration: music. She will consecrate to eternity (with pictures, clippings; even, if the envelope will allow, a 45-rpm single or two) the talents of Johnny Farnham, Jeff Phillips and Ronnie Burns.
‘Excellent, Lucy.’
Lucy Sutton beams.
Brooker draws Skip aside after the lesson is over. Leave me alone, she thinks. Don’t even look at me. Is he going to tell her how surly she’s become? (As if she didn’t know!) How she sits hollow-eyed in class, lower lip protruding, cheek pulped into an upheld fist?
‘Helen,’ he begins, ‘I’m concerned about your sister.’
Skip shrugs, both relieved and wary. ‘Marlo can’t come,’ she says without expression. ‘Can’t any more.’
‘I don’t understand why your aunt won’t see reason. Marlene’s Petra was shaping up so well. And her exams!’ His hand, as if sincerely, lands on Skip’s shoulder. ‘Your sister has talent. Real talent. Perhaps I could talk to your aunt.’
‘Or a brick wall.’ Skip pulls away from the hand.
Her time capsule letter weighs heavy on her mind. Who will read it in a hundred years? She has to write something, but the thought o
f Brooker reading it, red-penning it, handing it back for her to copy out fair, freezes inspiration. Through class after class she does fuck-all while Lucy Sutton, whose letter, exceeding all others in splendour, will be accompanied by a collage, scissors out Johnny, Jeff and Ronnie from back issues of TV Week.
Only on the night before they have to hand in their drafts does Skip stir herself. In a ragged Eagle, courtesy of the comics pile at the Institute Library, is a ‘Futurescope’ feature called ‘Standing Room Only’. In 1967 the entire population of the world, notes Lyall Watson, PhD, BSc (Hons), FZS, could stand heel-to-toe on the Isle of Wight. But two babies are born every second: 172,800 each day. By 2000 AD there will be twice as many people in the world; by 2200, one hundred times. How will humanity feed itself? First, Watson says blithely (this is a thought experiment, after all), we must eliminate all land wildlife, and use the land for farming. Second, harvest the seas: algae, don’t you know, is a rich source of protein. (All sea wildlife, too, will have to be ‘removed’.) But still the population grows. Food, food! is the cry. Where will it come from? Elementary, my dear Watson. More sunlight, that’s what we need! By 2400, enormous space mirrors, orbiting the earth, bring perpetual daylight and melt the polar ice. Sea levels rise. Temperatures soar. Oceans boil and evaporate away. Now all food is synthesised in laboratories. The whole planet is roofed over. All space is used for human habitation: one million million million human beings, thronging through air-conditioned corridors under a dome that spans the earth. Such is the world of AD 3000.
Skip copies Dr Watson’s words exactly.
Afterwards she feels sick, and feels sick again the next day when Brooker hands back her work in class. Says the flare of red biro: C minus. Impersonal. Far-fetched. Brooker has altered Dr Watson’s punctuation, and here and there a phrase.