A man yells: ‘Free tickets to anyone who catches ’im!’
Mary is off like John Landy. Pardie, Dunc, all the big boys, Chicken McCready too, everyone yelling at everyone else to cut it off here, there, somewhere, but as the monkey bounces off a truck onto the grass, Mary is way out in front, racing across the clearing, Lizzie bobbing behind.
Before I can follow, everyone disappears into the muddy shadows beneath the tea-tree on the edge of the lake. The sun sparkles on the surface; on the far side, yellow dunes slide into the water. It is warm behind the cages with no wind and no one except me. The circus people hammer. The lion roars in his cage.
Then I hear a kitten cry.
I look behind the vans; it is tied to a wheel with a black leather lead and a red collar. It is the most beautiful kitten I’ve ever seen, more beautiful than our Fluff, a soft brown like Lizzie’s old cat, and with big yellow eyes. I pat the circus kitten and it stops crying. I tickle it under its collar, under its chin, behind its ears, until it purrs and tries to nibble my fingers. I think about how much Fluff likes Dad and he likes Fluff. I untie the circus kitten. I tuck my pound under the kitten’s bowl and leave a bit poking out for the circus people to see.
I have the best present for my dad.
2
On the pockmarked land behind the oval, the kitten sniffs down rabbit holes. At the rail tracks, it pulls on its lead and gives a loud miaow that makes my neck shiver. Before crossing the street, I scoop it into my arms. It is bigger than Fluff and has a horsy smell. It needs a good wash.
You’re mine now, I tell it. You’ll like living with Fluff and my dad better than a circus.
Hannigan’s veranda has red and blue tiles that are good for hopscotch. I don’t like the bee-swarming noise in the bar or the beer smell that creeps under the door, but I have a rest on the bench under the coloured glass window. The kitten stretches at my feet and licks its paws. I think about a kitten being a better present than a beer mug. I have to get it home before Dunc gets back from the circus. And I need a box with air holes in the side like Lizzie’s silkworms have for a house. I need a ribbon to tie up the box like a proper present.
Just then Augie Moon pushes out the door. He is Pardie’s father. He sways as he looks at me, as if I am swaying too. ‘Waitin’ for your dad?’ he says, and, before I can reply, he tosses his butt in the gutter and lurches off the step. ‘You’ll be waitin’,’ he calls as he heads down the path to the dunnies.
A dusty black car drives by, full of farm kids with laughing heads and arms and legs and beach towels hanging out of windows. They hoot and wave and make so much noise that the kitten takes fright and almost tugs the lead out of my hand. It hides under the bench and when I reach down it hisses at me with white teeth bared; it has a lot of them. I pull gently on the lead and whisper words like Mrs Daley’s sister whispers to her new baby. There, there, you funny little thing, it’s all right, you’ve got me to look after you, there, there. The kitten puts its teeth back in its mouth but still won’t come out. I remember Grannie Meehan’s kittens that were put in a bag with a brick and dropped in the dam at Bindilla, but I don’t want to think about drowned things so I get bossy and give the kitten a good hard yank.
It walks over the hill past Mr Hammet’s house, then hears something in the boobialla and drags its belly on the ground in a prowling stalk. I tell it we need to hurry and when it doesn’t, I bundle it into my arms and carry it like a parcel, down the slope, along the lagoon path, past Shorty Manne’s house. It doesn’t wriggle too much but when I try to open our gate, it twists and scratches, then leaps onto the grass. There is blood on my wrist but I don’t stop to lick. I pull the kitten up the drive, saying, Hurry, hurry, the whole time.
Mum is at the well behind the hedge. She doesn’t see me creep through the nasturtiums and into the old shed that backs onto Shorty’s fence. She doesn’t see me creep out again and return with a bowl of milk. She is dribbling a bucket of water over her veggie seedlings when I slide out of the shed and ask if she has a box with air holes.
‘What for? No I haven’t.’ Then from the well: ‘I need you in the tub. I want you fed and in bed before your father gets home.’
In the bath, I decide that when Dad comes in I’ll say I have to go to the dunny, then I’ll untie the kitten from the post. Already I can see Dad’s surprise. What’d I do to deserve this? He might even pick me up and swing me around like Blue Daley does with Faye. What a beaut. We’d better give him a name. Whaddya say?
‘How did you get that?’ says Mum, soaping my scratched wrist.
I almost tell her. It is hard keeping something so good locked inside. But then Dunc bangs into the laundry porch. ‘I’ve got a free ticket for the circus. I caught a monkey that escaped. I have to be ready at seven. I’m going with Pardie and Kenny.’
‘Get the milk,’ says Mum, ‘or you won’t be going anywhere.’
When Dunc returns from the kitchen with the billy, his eyes are as big as tombowlers. ‘Someone stole a lion cub. What if it escapes into the bush and becomes a sheep-killer like the Tantanoola tiger?’
‘What if you’re not home in time to go to the circus?’
‘What’s a cub?’ I ask when Dunc leaves. But already I know.
‘A baby lion,’ says Mum, towelling me.
‘What colour?’
‘Brown, I suppose.’
‘Where’s my black hole of Calcutta?’
‘It’s not yours. It’s in India.’
‘Where’s India?’
But Mum has finished answering and when I am dressed I let her feed me peaches and cream without once biting the spoon and telling her I am old enough to feed myself. I try to find her eyes, to ask what I should do about the cub, but she is lost in her bubble where she smokes her ciggie and feeds me in a dreamy way as if her bubble has floated away and I’ve gone too.
In bed, I pull up the sheet and squeeze my eyes tight. I try not to think about the lion in our shed but still I can hear it begging to go back to the circus; it is the sound of cats drowning in dams and tearing open bags and ripping my skin into soup-bone meat and no hands to save me.
Then Dad’s jeep stops at the gate and I poke out my nose. Mum has a tea-towel bunched in her hands. She sets Dad’s plate on the table. I hear him kick off his boots and splash water in the laundry trough. Then: ‘Bloody hell! What was that?’
Mum sucks her top lip right into her mouth; she does this when she has no words.
Then again: ‘Bloody hell! It’s a rat, big as a cat.’
Mum shakes her head and covers Dad’s plate with a saucepan lid. I follow into the laundry porch. Dad is bent over the trough, poking behind with a broom.
‘Watch out!’ he yells, jumping back. ‘It’s a rat, a big bugger.’ He has bleary eyes and a skinful of beer. ‘Get a trap,’ he tells Mum.
Mum says she won’t set a trap in case they catch the cat. She flicks on the light near the kitchen door. She says Dad’s tea is on the table getting cold. She says it might be an old house but they’ve never had rats before, it’s probably only a mouse. ‘You’re so worse for wear,’ she says, ‘you wouldn’t know what it was if it bit you on the nose.’
Dad is spread on the floor like a starfish, poking under the trough and the shoe cupboard in the corner. ‘I know what I bloody saw.’ He climbs to his feet and steadies himself with the broom. ‘It’s a bloody rat. And if it climbs into your bed, don’t blame me.’
Mum marches me back to bed and looks all around with a worried frown. When she is gone, I search with prowling eyes, under the dressing table, in the corner, in the dark place next to the wardrobe. Then I pull up the spread and look under my bed. Lion eyes stare back at me.
What now? Can I toss him out the window? What if I do and he grows up and steals sheep like the Tantanoola tiger did until he was caught and stuffed and put in a glass box in the Tantanoola Pub? What if Constable Morgan finds out and I am taken away like Lanky Evans was when he stole sheep? Since he’s been back, h
e has to live in a van in the caravan park because Mrs Evans won’t have him in the house, he’s a disgrace.
Dad plops onto a kitchen chair, pulls off his smelly socks and drops them on the floor. Once he rolled them in a ball and tossed them through the open door to the bedroom for me to catch like a football. Once he threw them out the kitchen window. Once they landed on the chimney clock and fell onto the stove. Tonight, he throws his pants at the sink. He takes off his shirt, rolls it in a ball and tries to hit the wall. Mum picks up his socks, his shadow legs and shirt and walks them to the laundry trough.
When Dad is in a throwing mood, I keep very quiet. When he is in a throwing mood, Mum talks to herself. ‘It’s stew from the lamb flaps. I thought we’d get some rain this morning, the garden needs it, but it blew over. I ran into the Old Girl at the post office, her ankle’s on the mend. She should stay off ladders at her age. Not that anyone can tell her.’
Then Dunc is back with the milk. ‘Look,’ he calls from the porch. ‘Look what I can do.’ He is blocked from my view by the frame of the door, except for his arm holding the billy.
He is doing his milk trick!
Mum turns from the stove. Dad’s fork stops at his mouth. Dunc’s arm is the spoke of a wheel, silver and shining, spinning up and around and over his head and still the milk stays in! He says it has to do with centrifugal force. He says I can’t try because I am a girl. He says the dangerous bit is when you slow down.
Just then Fluff shoots under Dunc’s feet and into the kitchen. From under my bed the lion cub gives a loud Mi-ao-ow-ow, more like a howl. Fluff’s fur bristles into a brush. He stands on stiff legs and hisses into the bedroom, hisses at me in bed, at the lion under the bed.
Dunc’s arm stops turning too soon, stops with a jolt. Milk splatters the table, the walls, runs down the dresser, slides over the lino and settles in a white-paint puddle at Dad’s feet. Fluff steps through the milk, flicks his paws and hisses some more.
Dad’s hand snakes out and scoops Fluff off the floor as if he is a ball of Mum’s soft black knitting wool. Pushing back his chair, he lifts Fluff above his head and throws him hard against the chimney wall.
Fluff is not as soft as knitting wool or socks. He cracks like a chopped mallee root before he falls to the floor. Before Mum closes the door.
Dunc opens his sloppy gob full of porridge and milk and mouths words at me that Mum can’t hear. ‘You’re a drongo fart,’ he says when she leaves the room. ‘How do you think it was for me? Having to take that cub back to the circus with everyone knowing I’ve got a thief for a sister?’
I wonder if hateful words can split open a head if there are enough of them. I wish his ears would fall into his porridge. I make myself look into his eyes so that he can read my mind but he is red-faced angry, as if he has been saving it up for a long time.
‘Don’t speak to me ever again,’ he says. ‘From now on you’re DEAD. Understand?’
That night I am dead and in bed before Dad comes home. Dunc has been sent to bed too but it is still light outside and I know he is reading comics or sorting his egg collection on the sunroom floor. I am colouring Noddy’s hat a nice bright blue. I am not wearing Dunc’s heart crown and from now on I never will. I am not sure how to get the colour right for Golly’s skin.
Dad’s jeep stops in the street and Mum fumbles his plate off the simmering saucepan and sets it on the table. Golly’s skin is really a kind of brownish grey. I can get the colour right by mixing black and blue. It is important not to colour too close to the lines.
Dad clumps in without taking off his boots in the laundry porch. His boots scratch the lino like chook claws. He shoves his plate and knife and fork into the centre of the table. Mum turns from the sink, her face a squashed grape. Dad arranges things that look like sticks, all around the table edge. When he’s finished, he stares at Mum without saying a word. I slide down in my bed and hide in the silence that squeaks up a storm on the roof, that is a ticking clock in Shorty Manne’s voice, that calls out to Mrs Shorty in spoggie talk.
‘That’s the last time you’re going to whip my kids.’ Mum folds the tea-towel into a cushion and turns away to wipe words off the bench, over and over. Then I know! She’s chopped up Dad’s whip! His Muswell Cup whip! His whipping-whip!
‘She’s a mongrel thief.’
‘She found a pound. I asked Mary Campbell. She thought she was buying you a present.’
‘She’s a mongrel liar, and a mongrel thief. Whatever people say about me, they’d never say that.’ He picks up a bit of his whip, a handle piece, plaited and thick. He is facing the doorway, facing me. ‘This…is the only thing’—his voice croaky as a frog—‘You knew…’ His eyes bulge too. I am afraid he might cry. I press fingers into my ears but still his croak breaks through. ‘Big Red… you bloody knew…the Cup…you knew…’
Mum stops her wiping and stands at the sink fidgeting with the tea-towel. Her fear creeps into my bed as if it has nowhere to go except into me. She says: ‘I’m not having my kids whipped.’
Dad gives a spluttery laugh. ‘I never touched her!’
‘You would’ve. If I hadn’t got her out of here. You did it to Dunc.’
‘It never hurt me.’
Now Mum splutters too. ‘You said you had welts for weeks.’
‘Toughened me up.’
Mum shakes her head, unties her apron and hangs it on a chair. From nowhere a piece of whip hits her hard in the back. I slide further down in my bed: now there will be yelling and no stopping. Then Dad is in the bedroom, flicking on the light. And straightaway Mum hisses, ‘Sylvie’s asleep,’ and flicks it off again.
Dad is at the wardrobe, grabbing Mum’s fairy dresses with the net petticoats that she wears to the dance. Hangers fall to the floor, and still he grabs more. ‘You and your fancy dresses. Workin’ my guts out floggin’ crays around the Mount. Floggin’ apples around here to make an extra quid.’ Mum grabs at her dresses but still he bundles more. ‘Everything saved for best. For one day. For never. Well,’ he calls as he stomps through the kitchen, dresses piled high in his arms, ‘never’s just come.’
As Mum runs after him, I leap onto her bed. My stomach wobbles in fright, but it is the best leap. Outside, a big bowl of stars hangs over our house; dresses are piled in the drive. Dad strikes a match. Mum’s dresses flare up in a fizz of flames, in a cloud of crackling and sparkling. Dad reels back and his shadow prances around the tank-stand, the shed, walks along Shorty’s fence. He is a giant with thrashing arms and legs and no head. Shorty’s dog barks at the giant, the stink of him, the blazing sky.
Slowly the flames die. The giant shouts: ‘Whaddya doin’? Get back to bed.’
Under my blanket, I choke on dead fairies. There is a cry in my mouth but no sound in my head. It is Dad’s cry, shouting at Dunc to go back to bed.
Then his jeep starts up. ‘Don’t come back!’ Mum yells from the back door. ‘Go and live with her. See if I care.’
Who is her?
Mum stands at the sink and looks out the window but it is black mirror glass and there is nothing to see except her face staring back. Sid McCready rides past on his squeaky bike. Dunc’s bed squeaks as he climbs in. Mum snaps the blind down fast and covers up her face. Through her fingers she sees me at the door and pulls a chair close to the stove.
‘All right,’ she says, ‘come here.’ She sits me on her lap and holds me tight. The fire is warm on my back but Mum is all cold bones and stiff arms. She squashes me close to the soft part of her neck where she smells of Pears soap and black nights.
‘It’s not much to ask,’ she says, squeezing me so hard that my bird cries out inside. ‘Not much.’
Mum tells Mrs Winkie about the whip and about the horse Dad gave her when they got married and lived at Bindilla, how he broke that horse in himself. ‘Knew it had a novice on its back. Tetchy the whole way. Then it just reared up and threw me. Split my head open on a rock.’ Mum searches through her hair with her fingers. ‘I’ve still got the
scar.’
‘Some present,’ says Mrs Winkie.
Mrs Winkie is really Mrs Winkie Campbell. Her chins wobble when she walks. She has tiny feet with pudding toes. She married her cousin, which you shouldn’t do because it makes your children slow. She has nine children—Mary, Lizzie and Colin—and plenty of others who’ve grown and left home. Sometimes Lizzie can be a bit slow. We are playing with our dolls on the floor and Lizzie wants to play mothers and fathers. She says I can be the father.
‘This is a game without fathers,’ I tell her.
Mrs Winkie says: ‘I remember when he turned up at my place with that whip in his hand. One of the times I was glad to be a good axe-handle wide. I stood in the door with Dunc crouched behind and I looked him in the face and told him a whopper without thinking twice. He’s not here, I said. Haven’t seen him since early afternoon when he rode past on his bike. I waited until I heard Mick drive off and I sent that boy home with three Hail Marys following him. And no doubt you had him in bed before Mick got back with his itchy whip.’
Mum snuffles a cry. ‘You did the right thing,’ says Mrs Winkie, reaching for Mum’s hand. ‘Don’t think you didn’t.’
Marilyn has wet her pants. I give her a good smack and Lizzie smacks her doll too. Our dolls cry out with wide staring eyes. They cry louder than Mum, drowning out her bird squeaks. I am deaf and dumb like the fat girl in the Hammets’ house.
‘He wasn’t always like it,’ says Mum.
‘The war,’ says Mrs Winkie.
‘It was only Darwin. Only for a year.’
‘He was there for the bombing.’
Mum wipes her nose and drinks from her Queen cup.
3
‘Get on with it, Cele,’ says Dad. ‘You’re eating into my drinking time.’
The Lost Child Page 2