The Lost Child

by Suzanne McCourt

  Aunt Cele moves her camera stand and looks into the box on the top. ‘Be eating into a lot more if you’d had to book in at the Institute like everyone else.’

  ‘Wouldn’t have got me within cooee.’

  ‘We know that, don’t we, Nell?’

  Mum makes a clucking sound in her mouth and fluffs out my dress. She says it’s a good opportunity, and good of Cele to take our photos in her own time. Cele says she’ll get better shots here because the Mechanics’ Institute is a dark hole even with backdrops and lights set up on the stage. Though it’s not as bad as some of the places they have to use, travelling around some of the towns.

  We are arranged against the sunroom wall, down the garden end, away from Dunc’s bed. Dad’s leg is close to mine. His hand rests on his knee. I try not to look at that hand. He didn’t mean it, he was drunk, says Mum inside my head. My stomach is a heavy lump. Dad has had a bath and put on his grey suit. ‘Hasn’t seen the light of day since Spog Ward’s funeral,’ he tells Aunt Cele.

  Aunt Cele straightens his tie and smiles into his eyes. ‘Well, that’s a crime, Mick. You look a million dollars. Doesn’t he, Nell?’

  Mum pulls up my socks and folds down the tops. I wonder if a million dollars is the same as a million pounds but I don’t ask.

  ‘Pardie’s got a new Phantom,’ says Dunc. ‘He’s waiting to swap.’

  ‘Well, let him wait,’ says Mum.

  ‘Pardie Moon’s a weirdo,’ says Dad.

  ‘Mick!’ says Mum.

  Aunt Cele puts her head on one side. She has slip-sliding blue eyes and red lips. ‘Sylvie, smile. You look gorgeous. You too, Nell. Two pretty pink peas in a pod, same eyes.’ She looks into the camera. ‘Heads up. Ready now? Watch the birdie. Chee-ee-se.’ She snaps, flashes, snaps. ‘Lovely,’ she says, ‘and cheese again.’ And we cheese and flash and blink, all of us, and Dunc by himself, and me by myself, and Dunc with me and both of us holding hands and cheesing even though I am dead, and then one of Mum and Dunc and me.

  ‘Now one with Sylvie, Mick, and that’ll just about do it.’

  Dad looks at his watch. ‘I’m already done.’ He stands, squashing my skirt against his chair as if it is a frill-necked lizard neck that he can stomp on if he wants, as if it is nothing. I fluff out my skirt until it is a perfect frill and I am a mouth in the middle that will bite off his leg if he steps on me.

  ‘You’re hopeless, Mick. Can’t sit still for a second. Same as when you were a kid.’ But Aunt Cele smiles at Dad and he smiles back with boy-shy eyes, the way he never smiles at Mum or me.

  Mum tells Dunc to change before he goes out to play. In the bedroom, she widens her eyes and smiles at herself in the mirror. She is beautiful, like the Queen, everyone says. I am freckle-nosed with a small mouth, squinty eyes and my dead ends. Lizzie has straight black hair. Faye Daley and Colleen Mulligan have sausage curls. I am the only one with a perm.

  ‘Come on,’ Mum says with a sigh, ‘better get you changed too.’

  In the kitchen, Aunt Cele says she’ll have a beer like my father. He is still wearing his suit. ‘So who’s this galah you’re travelling around with, Cele?’

  Mum says I can have a biscuit outside. I dawdle near the door and she says she can see through walls and doesn’t want crumbs on the floor. I sit on the back step and listen through walls but I can only hear Dad and Aunt Cele laughing with loud bursts and no words in between.

  Over our fence, on the other side of Shorty’s house, I can see Mrs Major bending around her backyard. She is Wanda the Witch. The dead rose bushes in the front garden are witch’s wands, everyone knows. The well with the tin cover near the back door is where she drowns children—probably Mr Major too because no one’s ever seen him and that’s why the well smells. And the creeper all over the lean-to has a crow’s nest hidden deep in the tangles and everyone knows black crows never nest in towns unless there’s a witch with a cat who needs them for spells.

  Two rosellas swoop into our peach tree and fly off again. Fluff is buried under that tree. Mum says if Lizzie asks about Fluff, I’m to say he ran away. Mrs Winkie knows about the whip and Mum’s dresses but not about Fluff. Mum says the world doesn’t have to know everything. Fluff gets stuck in my throat and makes me cough. Not another cold. What’s wrong with you? There are ants running around my sandals and crawling through cracks in the cement. I put my head between my legs and think about ants living together in one big nest and how I’d like to live in the Skull Cave in the Deep Woods with the Phantom and his family and have Phantom powers.

  Right then Dunc and Pardie bang out the back door. Pardie has a stack of comics with Dunc’s new Batman on top. Dunc forgets he’s not speaking to me. ‘Stay out of my room. You’re still double-banned. And don’t go near my comics.’

  Pardie gives me a secret smile, and a Dick Tracy.

  ‘Give her Wonder Woman,’ says Dunc.

  ‘No, it’s new.’

  ‘It’s girly stuff.’

  Pardie’s face pinks up.

  They are going nesting and when I ask if I can go too, Dunc talks to Pardie as if I’m not there. ‘Can she ride five miles on a two-wheeler? Can she climb a tree?’ He jumps on his bike and rolls down the drive, legs stuck out either side like a fathead dingbat. ‘Sylvie Alice Cackie Poo-ooo…Sylvie Alice Cackie Poo-ooo…’

  I blink at my Dick Tracy. It’s the one about Tonsils in the underworld. The baddies are trying to make him jump into a pool with a man-eating barracuda.

  ‘He doesn’t mean it,’ says Pardie.

  When I look up, he finds a Phantom and gives me that too. At the gate, he looks back and waves. I love his red hair, the way it blows in the wind like a Jesus halo. Sometimes I wish I could have him for a brother instead of Dunc.

  I watch them cross the road. The lagoon is full to the brim with oily brown water and fat ducks everywhere. My eyes are full to the brim but no one can see. I wish Dunc would take me nesting in the tea-tree where he finds the spotted plover nests, and in the dunes behind the surf beach where there are blue wrens, spoggies and red-beaked parakeets. I wish he would dink me out past Five Mile Drain to the bottom paddocks of Bindilla where hawks and crows and wedge-tailed eagles live in the eucalypts. And I would hide amongst the heaths and bracken without making a sound and watch for emus on the farming flats. They’re so stupid, I would tell Dad when we got back, that half the time they lead you straight to their nest. And I wish Dunc would let me help him carry the eggs home. I would take off my sock and carry them in the toe, the small ones in my mouth. I would arrive with bulging cheeks and spit the eggs onto his bed—if he would let me, which he doesn’t. But I have watched from the spare room, which is Dad’s bedroom, with the window to the sunroom. I have watched Dunc take a sewing needle and prick the eggs at either end. Then he leans over a bowl and blows gently, trying not to blow too hard in case the yolk and egg-white slime come out too quickly and make a ragged end. And when the yolk is blown, he checks for the spot of blood, the bird that might have been. Sometimes it is too late and all the blowing in the world can’t get the yolk to move. Then he breaks the shell and flushes out a white-boned thing with bulbous eyes and frail blue claws, a heart and transparent things beneath a pale pink skin.

  Dunc has the best collection of birds’ eggs in all of Burley Point. He keeps them in shoeboxes on the shelves next to his bed where I am double-banned.

  He has gone. I could sneak in. I could look for his skull ring. I could lie on his bed and read his Phantom comics and smooth the spread when I had finished.

  I am ready to go in, when Mrs Winkie comes down the side path with Lizzie. ‘You two play here,’ she says, opening the wire door and walking right in. ‘You there, Nella?’

  Lizzie and I follow into the kitchen. Aunt Cele is trying to lift her camera legs but Dad says for once in his life it won’t hurt him to be a gentleman and he lifts them for her. He says hullo to Mrs Winkie but his eyes slide over Lizzie and me. He is still wearing his good shoes. I know his toes inside tho
se shoes are as white as crayfish meat. I wish his toes would grow into crayfish legs and get caught in a crayfish pot and cooked and cracked open at the fish factory and his white toe meat plucked out by the women picking fish: that is my wish.

  When he has gone, Lizzie and I are allowed to have biscuits at the table.

  ‘So what’s her story?’ says Mrs Winkie.

  ‘Photographer’s assistant. All over the state.’

  ‘Separate rooms at Hannigan’s?’

  ‘What’s that got to do with it?’

  ‘Just wondering what else she gets paid for.’

  Mum’s eyes smile over her cup. ‘She wants to take more photos of Sylvie. Wants to work by herself one day. That’s what she says.’

  ‘Big ideas,’ says Mrs Winkie.

  Aunt Cele drives fast around corners and laughs a splintery laugh. She wears pants like a man and a brown scarf at her neck. Along Main Street, the tops of the Christmas-tree pines poke into a pearly sky. At the beach, she slams the car door hard and says, ‘I love Burley Point, don’t you?’

  I am a dumbcluck without a tongue. On the moorings, the dinghies are waiting for the boats to come in. The sea is soapy green and speckled with sun spots. Surf is spraying up a mist on Eastern Beach and all around the bay to West End. I follow Aunt Cele over the foreshore lawn to the sea wall, which runs all the way from the jetty to Stickynet Bridge. Gulls wheel and scream above the fish factory then settle on the rotunda roof and fly off again.

  ‘Scat,’ says Aunt Cele, waving her arms and running from their flapping wings. She lifts me off the sea wall and pulls me along the beach but she has long horse legs that gallop over the sand. There are pillows of black kelp everywhere. I trip and fall.

  ‘Upsadaisy.’ She brushes sand from my knees and finds a sponge washed in on the tide. ‘Look at this.’ She throws it to me to catch like a ball. ‘Let’s build a castle.’ And while I do, she clicks at me. ‘Look,’ she says, ‘Sylvie, look,’ and when I do she click-look-clicks.

  ‘Now the back beach.’ She pulls me along the sand, past rocky reefs and pools full of green lettuce weed. On the path over Poppy’s Lookout, wind tears at our hair and flattens our faces into monkey masks. From the headland, we look across to the lighthouse on Seal Island where Mr Hammett has to take the gas bottle to keep the light flashing at night. Aunt Cele says there is no land between us and the bottom of the world where everything is white ice and there are penguins as big as men, but I know this already because Dunc has told me.

  Turning around, we look down on Burley Point. ‘Almost an island,’ says Aunt Cele and, although I’ve never thought of this before, I can see what she means. There is water on three sides of our town—the big scoop of bay with the long jetty and beach where we play, the back beach behind, the houses squashed in by Lake Grey with pale scrubby dunes where the town ends, the farms a blur far away.

  ‘Water everywhere,’ says Aunt Cele and she tells me that Lake Grey is one of a bracelet of lakes linked to the Coorong in the north. I have a gold bracelet with a key heart and chain that I keep for best, and I’ve seen the Coorong from the train on our way to the city. She says there are underground rivers and caves, with swamps and lagoons that dry and disappear and reappear. This is true about the lagoon. It is a brown egg in the middle of Burley Point. But she is wrong about the salty lake near the dunes where we learned to swim; it never dries up.

  ‘Who’s that?’ says Aunt Cele, dropping my hand.

  It is Pardie’s mum, high on Postman’s Rock, standing close to the edge; I can tell by her red hair. But Aunt Cele doesn’t stay to find out. ‘Wait here,’ she says before charging onto the back beach.

  I follow, running to catch up. On the Rock, she creeps up behind Pardie’s mum and grabs her. ‘I’ll let you go,’ she says as Pardie’s mum struggles to get free, ‘if you won’t…’ She nods at the cliff.

  Pardie’s mum laughs like a parrot, a screech, then silence. ‘There’s a stingray down there, a huge one, trapped by the tide.’

  Aunt Cele is a popped balloon. ‘Careful,’ she tells me as we walk to the edge. And in a rock pool below, drifting and swaying in the shadowy weed, is a huge black stinger.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ says Aunt Cele. ‘I thought you…’

  ‘I don’t think I’d do it that way,’ says Pardie’s mum.

  ‘No,’ says Aunt Cele, ‘it’s too…’

  ‘…far down.’

  ‘…cold.’

  ‘…dangerous.’

  Now they both laugh, silly and soft as the pigeons in the goods shed. As we step back from the edge, Aunt Cele says she’s my aunt and Mick’s cousin and why haven’t they met before? Pardie’s mum says she’s married to Augie, who fishes with Mick. She opens her hand and gives me five creamy cowries she’s found on the beach.

  Aunt Cele says: ‘I’d love to photograph you.’

  Pardie’s mum giggles and says the boats will be in soon and she has to get to work.

  We watch as she walks along the beach, her footsteps following on the wet sand.

  ‘What’s her name?’ says Aunt Cele.

  ‘Pardie’s mum,’ I say.

  When I turn five, I go to school with Lizzie Campbell, Faye Daley and Colleen Mulligan. We are the mid-year intake for Grade One, in the same room as the other Grade Ones and Twos with Miss Taylor, our teacher, and the blackboard divided down the middle for the two grades. I know the answers to the Grade Two sums but I don’t say anything. Dunc is in Grade Six in a different room and his teacher is the headmaster, Mr Tucker. I walk to school with Dunc but he doesn’t play with me because I am a girl.

  In my double-lined exercise book, I write rows of beautiful ‘f’s, trying to keep their backs straight, curving their hats, tying them in the middle with bows. If my ‘f’s are the best—better than Lizzie’s and Colleen’s, better than Roy Kearney’s and Chicken McCready’s—I will get an elephant stamp. I will take my book home to show Mum. Dunc and Dad might see.

  Miss Taylor says: ‘Beautiful work, Sylvie.’

  Miss Taylor is as beautiful as the ‘f’s she writes on the blackboard. She has creamy white skin and glossy brown hair like the pageboy in the story about the king’s court. Her voice is soft but firm and even the big boys in Grade Two know not to be naughty.

  When I show my ‘f’s to Mum, she says, ‘I could have been a teacher. Margaret Taylor’s not that bright.’

  ‘So why didn’t you?’ says Dunc. He grabs my book and looks at my ‘f’s but he’s humming and doing hip swivels, not looking properly.

  ‘Because,’ says Mum, lighting a ciggie, ‘I didn’t have a grandmother offering to send me to boarding school. I had a mother with bad nerves. I had to leave school as soon as I could and I was lucky to get a job as a telephonist, that’s why.’

  ‘I’m going to Muswell High,’ says Dunc, dropping my book on the table, ‘same as Pardie.’

  ‘We’ll see about that.’

  ‘Good ‘f’s,’ says Dunc, sliding towards the door on his socks.

  He spoke! I’m not dead!

  Later, when Grannie Meehan comes to visit, she brings us meat from Bindilla. I show her my ‘f’s and she says: ‘I had the best copperplate of anyone in my class.’

  Aunt Cele’s photos are on the table in a brown envelope, with no airbrushing. Grannie holds them close to her nose because she’s left her glasses at home.

  ‘How’s Dunc? Still top of his class?’

  Mum says he is. She unpacks Grannie’s meat; it is a dead sheep. Grannie doesn’t visit very often because she can’t drive a car or truck and has to wait for Uncle Ticker to bring her into Burley Point. Uncle Ticker doesn’t come inside with Grannie because a long time ago he had an argument with Dad and they don’t speak. Before their argument, Dad and Mum lived at Bindilla and Dad used to ride his horse into the pub. The horse could find its own way home to Bindilla with Dad drunk on its back, the whole twelve miles, crossing Stickynet Bridge and following the path around the lake to the bottom paddocks, never
once getting lost or tossing Dad off.

  Grannie squints at Dad’s photo. ‘He could’ve done law, he had the brains. All he wanted to do was ride horses. How’d he end up fishing, that’s what I want to know? And blessed with that voice. I wanted him trained, I told you that, didn’t I?’ Mum nods and slides bits of dead sheep onto a plate. ‘Wouldn’t listen. Might as well’ve saved my breath.’ She takes the next photo from me. ‘Boys need a father to whip them into shape, simple as that.’

  Mum sucks in her top lip and turns to the sink. Grannie studies the photo of Dunc and me. ‘Maybe Dunc’ll be the one. I’ll pay to put him through law, you know that.’ Then she looks back at Dad’s photo. ‘Well, let’s hope he makes a go of fishing. Horseracing’s for kings. And fools. And he’s long past singing for his supper.’

  Mum takes ages washing her hands. Grannie puts three spoons of sugar in her tea and stirs up a flurry.

  ‘I suppose you’ve heard about Cele? She’s left Jack and she’s squatting in the sand hills out near Stickynet in that old shack of Spog Ward’s? Have you seen her?’

  Mum shakes her head.

  Grannie says: ‘After all I did for her. You can’t keep running, that’s what I told her when she called into Bindilla the last time she was here with that dodgy photographer. And you know what she said?’

  Mum doesn’t know.

  ‘She said: Sometimes the gas oven looks pretty good. I told her not to talk rot. Her father ruined her, traipsing her around the world at fourteen when she should have been in school. More like a wife than a daughter. Only thinking of himself, that’s what I said. And you know what she said?’

  Mum shakes her head again.

  ‘A ruined woman, that’s me. I said you will be if you don’t do the right thing by Jack, he’s a good man and a good husband, and you won’t do better than a banker. He could’ve gone to Tokyo, did you know that? She could’ve gone too. Now she ups and leaves. Well, there’ll be no welcome mat for her at Bindilla. Marriage is for life and that’s that. And what’s she come back here for? That’s what I want to know.’