The Lost Child

by Suzanne McCourt

  What if he is? What if he isn’t found until he’s stiff and smelly like Lizzie’s cat when it died behind the school toilet block? Who should we tell?

  We tell Mum. She says she’s not impressed. She says he isn’t dead. She tells Lizzie her mother wants her at home and hands me the peg bag. She wrestles with a sheet, drags it over the line and steps sideways as I pass pegs. Clouds race overhead and sheets flap in my face. I beg her to go and see. She says she wouldn’t waste her time.

  Mum hates wasting time. She lumps the clothes basket onto her hip and tells me she’s just done the floors and to wait on the back step while she butters Saos for lunch. She says I can take some to Dunc and Pardie. I study the pines beyond Shorty’s fence but there are no bouncing boughs. In the pittosporum hedge, insects buzz like the bar at Hannigan’s. In his cage, Georgie pecks at his cuttlefish. In the dirt next to the step, the earth is freshly turned: Dunc’s rosella from the bush is buried there. It’s your fault, yells Dunc inside my head, he died because you didn’t look after him while I was at school.

  It’s no one’s fault, says Mum, birds like that aren’t meant to be caged. You know that, Duncan. I can’t think why you gave it to her to look after.

  I can’t think either. I don’t want to think. I can’t walk and eat my biscuits while carrying Dunc and Pardie’s so I lift my skirt and put them in my knickers and, although they scratch a bit, I can eat and stamp my feet to scare away snakes in case they’ve forgotten it’s winter and they’re meant to be asleep in their holes.

  At the big pine, Dunc yells down. ‘Bring ’em up to us!’

  He doesn’t think I can. But this tree has withered skin and knobs close to the ground where Shorty has lopped off limbs. I use them as a ladder until I reach the first big branch. ‘Where are you?’

  The branches shiver. ‘Shit, she’s coming up.’

  Soon my head is level with their branch. Don’t look down. They have built a platform from old fence palings and are lying on a mattress they must have dragged from the tip. I pull myself onto their branch and prop against the trunk. When I reach inside my knickers, Dunc’s mouth turns upside down.

  ‘In there?’ He gags and chokes and shows off in front of Pardie. ‘We don’t want them if they’ve been in there, do we, Pard?’

  Pardie grins at me behind Dunc’s head.

  ‘Get out of here,’ says Dunc, flicking pages in a magazine. ‘We’ve got better things to do than eat your stinky biscuits. And I know you dobbed to Mum about me going to Dad’s. See if I care. I go there all the time, don’t I, Pard?’

  Pardie nods and looks away because I am a dobber. I prop against the tree trunk and stuff their Saos in my mouth. They read Dunc’s magazine and pretend they can’t see me eating. The magazine has booby girls with bare bottoms and lipstick smiles.

  ‘Nobby Carter’s got a magazine like that.’

  Dunc looks up with wary eyes.

  ‘Mum won’t be impressed,’ I say.

  ‘Mum won’t know.’ He tucks the magazine down his jumper and climbs to his feet. ‘Come on, Pard, we’re getting out of here.’

  As they push past, I slide onto their mattress and lie flat on my belly. From a lower branch, Dunc reaches up and shakes the platform hard, singing: ‘I said shake baby shake—’

  ‘She’ll fall,’ says Pardie, but still Dunc doesn’t stop.

  ‘M-u-u-u-m!’ I scream.

  Dunc looks through the branches to see if Mum’s coming, then slides down the trunk as fast as a circus monkey.

  ‘What about her?’ calls Pardie.

  ‘She got up. She can get down.’

  Pardie makes a sorry face at me and follows Dunc down the tree. A gust of wind rushes past and makes the platform sway. I yell down. ‘Half-cocked! Half-cocked! Half-cocked! Half-cocked!’

  ‘I’ll show you who’s half-cocked,’ says Dunc, turning back.

  ‘Half-cocked! Half-cocked!’

  There is dust up my nose and there are crumbs in my pants. Again the wind shivers the platform. Turning, I reach down with my feet, then I reach further, but somehow I am dropping and a scream is dropping with me, loud in my ears, someone else’s scream, someone not me.

  ‘I’m not going back,’ Dunc tells Mum, traps on his shoulder, straddling his bike. ‘Grannie can do law herself. I’m going on the land. I don’t need school for that.’

  ‘You’re not old enough to leave school.’

  ‘Try and stop me.’

  Mum looks up from her staking. She has forgotten to wear lipstick and her face has faded. ‘Duncan, you’re thirteen, you’ve got another year to go. By then you might have changed your mind. You don’t have to decide now.’

  He gouges his front tyre into the gravel. ‘I’ve already decided.’

  ‘Don’t do that.’ Mum reaches for his handlebars but Dunc twists them away. Her hand hangs helplessly in the air. ‘If you do law, you’ll be made.’

  ‘I’m not doing law. Uncle Ticker says I can work for him.’

  ‘You’ve asked him?’

  ‘Yesterday. Outside the post office.’

  ‘What do you think your father would say if he knew that?’

  ‘I know what he’d say. Workin’ on the land’s a mug’s game. Who’d want to be stickin’ their arm up a cow’s arse and cleanin’ up flyblown sheep? There’s no point anyway, the government gets it. You’re better off sittin’ on your bum.’

  ‘You’ve seen him?’

  ‘He said he didn’t want to leave. He said you kicked him out.’

  ‘You wouldn’t understand.’

  He turns to me on the back step. ‘Show me.’ He grabs my arm with the plaster cast and reads: Sylvie Meehan. Age 7. Burley Point, South Aust. Australia. The World. The Universe. ‘Dumb,’ he says. ‘And you’re not seven until next month.’ Then he turns back to Mum. ‘Why isn’t she at boarding school?’

  ‘Sylvie? She’s far too young.’

  ‘You sent me away but you don’t send her.’

  ‘I didn’t send you away.’

  ‘You sent Dad away. You sent me. But you don’t send her.’

  Dunc rams his pedals and skids down the drive. His traps rattle and clank along the lagoon path. Mum stares after him for so long that my teeth ache. Then she rakes all around in big arching sweeps until everything is smooth and neat.

  10

  It is the law, so Mum said she’d get Constable Bill Morgan to put Dunc on the train if he didn’t go back to school himself. Now she’s gone to the city because Dunc has been getting into fights and stabbing his compass into his desk, which is destruction of school property and Mum will have to pay.

  ‘We’re going to Mick and Layle’s to play cards,’ says Mrs Daley. ‘You kids take your pillows. You can sleep on the floor if you get tired.’

  Mum wouldn’t want me anywhere near that Trollop. Doesn’t Mrs Daley know? In the back of the Daleys’ ute, I think of the Phantom riding past on Flicker, plucking me out of the ute and carrying me off to live in the Skull Cave in the Deep Woods. I think of how miracles can happen: how Mum might change her mind and let Dad come back to live with us and everything will be the same as before. I think of the whale that came into the bay and how we watched from the jetty and the whale had a baby stuck to its side like a big barnacle with a million silver bubbles floating behind. Then we arrive at Dad’s house and I still haven’t thought of how to escape from the Trollop.

  We step over planks and bricks in the drive, and Mrs Daley says, ‘Will he ever finish it?’ Off the back veranda, there is a big square kitchen with a view over the lagoon. At the table in the centre, Dad is shuffling cards with Pardie’s dad and mum, Augie, and Jude. As soon as we walk in, I look for Dad’s eyes but he doesn’t look back at me. Instead, he laughs at my plaster arm and says, ‘Who brought George Bracken?’

  Augie and Blue Daley laugh too. ‘It’s a lovely dressing-gown,’ says Mrs Daley, ruffling my hair.

  My dressing-gown is red tartan with a gold-tasselled cord. The Daley kids have
blue chenille. What is wrong with tartan? And who is George Bracken?

  Layle says she’s going to fry up some black duck that Mick shot. I decide I won’t speak to her the whole time we’re there, that is my plan. When she asks if we’d like to play cards in the bedroom, I don’t look at her. Faye asks if we can first see the sunken bath and we sit around the edge and dangle our legs over the rim. Faye says how fab it is, but all I can see is Layle’s big bra under the basin and my father’s overalls scrunched up next to it. Mum would never leave clothes on the floor and I wonder if Dad would rather come back to live with us because Mum is better than the Trollop at keeping things clean and looking after him.

  In the bedroom there’s a wardrobe with sliding mirror doors, a cow-hide mat on the floor, paint patches on the walls. I decide I won’t sit on that bed; instead I perch on the edge, but it has a slippery green spread and I keep sliding off. Faye knows all the card games. She says we’re playing Snap and begins shuffling.

  ‘Your Dad’s right. Boxers do wear dressing-gowns like that.’

  ‘Once I saw a picture of George Bracken in the ring,’ says Dawn. ‘He wore red shorts and a satiny gown, not tartan.’

  ‘Her father ought to know.’ Faye puts the cards down slowly and sneaks a look before turning them over. She wins every time.

  ‘Deal,’ says Dad in the kitchen. ‘We haven’t got all night.’

  Dot curls in a ball on the bed as if she wants to go to sleep. A grey speckled moth walks down the wall close to my feet. ‘Concentrate,’ says Faye, ‘or don’t play.’

  ‘All right,’—I slide off the bed and curl into my pillow on the cow rug—‘I won’t.’

  The moth flops onto the floor and skittles towards me. My father has kicked his slippers off under the table. He has a hole in the toe of his sock. Augie is leaning back, his chair balanced on two legs. He says: ‘See in the local rag your brother’s got another medal. Those who fought at Kokoda. Something they should’ve got sooner but didn’t due to some kind of enquiry.’

  With a little hop and flutter, the moth climbs onto the rug. Its wings are papery grey with black spots. Two long feelers flick at the air. Faye calls down. ‘I’ll let you shuffle.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You can play whatever game you want.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘They can weigh Ticker down with medals,’ says Dad, ‘but with your flat feet, Augie, you were one of the lucky ones. No one with any sense would’ve gone if they could’ve stayed put.’

  ‘You’re stupid,’ says Faye to me.

  ‘Leave her alone,’ says Dawn.

  ‘You should’ve got a medal for pushin’ Bert Leak’s kid into the drink and saving him from that bullet,’ says Augie.

  ‘Don’t try and make a hero out of me,’ says Dad. ‘Albie Fisher’s the one who should’ve got a medal. Ten quid and how many kids did he keep out of the firin’ line by sayin’ he needed them on the chicory flats? And you won’t hear me blamin’ Derm Murphy for buildin’ a dairy the day it all began. Never milked a single cow, white feathers dumped at his gate by the bucketful, but he didn’t end up with six kids dead in Borneo.’

  The moth stands high on its front legs and stares at me with hard black eyes. It is close enough to squash into moth dust. I could pull off its wings like Chicken does to blowflies in the shelter shed.

  ‘You know how many died in Darwin?’ says Dad, and I see Layle kick him under the table. Dad kicks her back. ‘Let him answer.’

  ‘A couple of hundred,’ says Augie, ‘that’s what they said.’

  ‘Try a bloody thousand. Maybe more. A total cover-up. That’s why I told ’em what to do with their medal. When they tried to give me a stripe, I gave it right back. I said, stick your promotion up your—’

  ‘—Khyber Pass,’ says Layle.

  Faye says, ‘You can lie on the bed. It’s more comfortable.’

  ‘I’m comfortable here.’

  ‘And don’t get me started on that bloody ditch Ticker’s digging.’

  ‘No, don’t,’ says Layle. ‘Come on kids. The duck’s ready.’

  We sit on a cloth on the floor and eat with our fingers as if it’s a picnic. Then I get lucky. ‘I’ve got the wishbone! I get a wish.’

  ‘Only if you get the big bit.’ And before I’ve even got a good grip, Faye has a finger inside the bone. ‘Ready?’

  The wishbone snaps but I’ve got the big piece! ‘What’ll I wish for?’ I say, waving it under Faye’s nose and thinking of a new bike, a yoyo, Derwent pencils like Lizzie’s.

  ‘Wish for a win in your next bout,’ says Blue Daley, snorting into his beer as if he’s said the funniest thing. Faye laughs too. Then Dad and Augie. Layle says they’re all stupid. Her voice sounds silky and kind and I forget my own plan and look at her for a quick second. Then I remember she is to blame for everything and I hope her throat will be squeezed tight by her own fingers. That is my wish.

  I find the photograph at the back of the dresser drawer, in a brown envelope. Dad and the Trollop. Sitting up in bed. Dad has angry eyes and shadow cheeks. The Trollop holding a bedspread up to her chin. It is too much to look. I bury the photo under pencils and pens, lacker bands, the ball of string I was looking for.

  When Dunc comes home for the September holidays, I show him the photo of Dad and the Trollop in bed. He looks at everything I couldn’t bear to see. He says: ‘You know what this means?’ I shake my head, listening for Mum in the garden. ‘It means they’re divorced.’

  ‘What’s divorced?’

  He looks at me as if I’m too stupid to believe. ‘It means Dad lives with Layle. That he likes Layle better than Mum. That Mum kicked him out. It’s more than a year since he’s gone. That’s how long divorce takes.’

  ‘Mum might change her mind. She might let him come back.’

  Dunc waves the photo at me. ‘They are DI-VORCE-D! It is forever. They can’t get back together again. That’s what divorce is.’ He turns to the stove. ‘You know what I think of this?’ He rips the photo in two. Then in four. Then in four again. He tosses the pieces into the fire and Dad is gone forever because that’s what divorce is.

  I am crying silently inside so that Dunc won’t see. He says he’s going to meet up with Pardie.

  ‘You said you’d run away.’

  ‘I did,’ he says at the door, ‘but the cops brought me back.’

  Why didn’t Mum tell me? What else don’t I know?

  ‘It’s not as bad for you. You hardly knew him. I was twelve when he left. How do you think it is for me?’

  After he’s gone, I wonder if Dunc cries silently too. But how would I know, how would anyone know, if our crying has no tears?

  Chicken McCready is walking past our gate. I take my time with the latch because I don’t want to talk to him. He has green teeth and smelly breath and sits behind me in class with candles hanging out of his nose. And I hate the handkerchief he wears knotted over his head even though it’s ages since he had chicken pox and his grandma shaved off his hair.

  When he turns the corner I lie in the dandelions like a star and listen to my heart beating in my ears. I think of Chicken throwing fits at school and how his tongue has to be found before he swallows it. And how he’s always hanging around and drawing his own hopscotch next to ours and talking to himself as he jumps from square to square, saying exactly what we’re saying in a girly voice. And slithering out of the tea-tree when we’re in our cubby. There’s a shiver in the rushes and we know it’s him. If we ignore him long enough, he goes home and plays in the old cars that sit on blocks near his back fence. They were his father’s cars before he disappeared. That was after Chicken’s mother ran off with the Rawleigh’s man. But I don’t think Chicken’s father ran off with someone like his mother did. Like my father did.

  I would like to run off too. But I can’t think of anyone to run off with, or where I’d go. I look at the sky and think I’d like to be an eagle flying high above Burley Point. And if I were an eagle with an eagle eye,
could I fly high enough to see the Coorong, and Dunc in the city? Could I sweep down and rescue him in my eagle feet? Could I see Betty Cuthbert being the Golden Streak in the games in Melbourne? Could I fly above Ten Mile Rocks and see my father in the Henrietta pulling pots? And if a storm came up, and his boat sank on the reef, would I tell anyone or leave him there to rot? Like Mum would.

  ‘Sylvieeeeee. I want you to go to Mr Sweet’s. There’s a note on the table. You’ll need to hurry or he’ll be closed.’

  I need to go to the dunny. Green light snakes through cracks and holes in the corrugated iron. Nasturtium stems snake through too and wave their green heads at me as if they are lost in the dark. I pull down my pants, sit on the stinky pan and keep my nose closed. From the box where Mum keeps her crosswords, I find one half done. Four down is Arc. I pencil in Curve. Eight across is Waver. I don’t know that, so I check the dictionary with the loose pages. Vacillate. It fits, and connects with five down: Wed. I know that too. I know more words than anyone in my class and now I have to remember to make mistakes in the spelling tests so that Chicken won’t say I’ve swallowed the dictionary. Mum knows more words than me but she still gets them wrong. Six down is not Marry. I scratch it out and write Match over the top. Then I can’t stand the stink so I leave the rest for her.

  Two forequarter chops, says Mum’s bird writing. I sit on the step and fold the coins inside the note. Georgie is hunched on his perch, feathers fluffed around him, not even a twitter. For the first time I think he might like to be out of his cage, flying free in the bush where we found him. What if I opened the door and let him out?

  ‘You had six down wrong,’ I tell Mum as she runs from the pump, bucket slopping. ‘It wasn’t Marry, it was Match. It didn’t fit with Vacillate.’

  ‘Vas-ssss-ilate,’ she says, throwing the water in a rainbow arch between the cauliflowers.

  ‘It’s spelt with a c in the dictionary.’