The Lost Child

by Suzanne McCourt

  Josie has two brothers. The older one has thin hair, a wispy moustache, and works in a bank. Colin is about sixteen, with white-blond hair, a big nose and pimples. Josie’s father pours sherry into little glasses and lemonade for me. The bubbles get up my nose and make me cough and Grannie snatches my glass off the table and wipes where it’s been. Josie’s mother tells Colin to show me his eggs.

  ‘Eggs?’ he says, wrinkling up that nose.

  ‘Yes,’ she says with a warning stare.

  I follow him down the hall to a room with red velvet curtains and shelves of books to the ceiling. ‘Don’t touch anything,’ he grumps before leaving me there.

  I’ve never seen so many eggs. They’re in cabinets with glass lids, on a shelf below the books, three whole walls of them. Emu eggs in different sizes, glossy black, others bottle green. I would like to steal some for Dunc but I can’t think how I could hide them in the car because Grannie sees everything. And I’m too scared. Later I hear voices down the corridor, Uncle Ticker’s laugh. I notice he laughs a lot more when Josie’s around. I wait for Colin to return, for dinner to be over, for Mum to come home from the hospital.

  Driving back to Bindilla, Grannie says: ‘Why did you mention Mick?’

  ‘They know I’ve got a brother,’ says Uncle Ticker.

  ‘They don’t know there’s bad blood.’

  ‘Of course they do. They wanted to invite him. I had to tell them.’

  ‘Be interesting to know your version.’

  Outside the night is black and cold. Shadow trees and farmhouse lights loom out of the dark and disappear again. After miles of silence, Grannie says: ‘That woman has more front than John Martins. I’ll get through the wedding but you won’t find me palling up with her. The way she carries on, anyone would think she was getting married, not the daughter.’

  At Bindilla, she bustles me into bed. ‘Come on, it’s cold enough to freeze udders on cows.’ She pulls the curtains, stirring up a gust of icy air. ‘Weddings,’ she says. ‘All that frippery. And a lifetime to regret it. Well, let’s hope he doesn’t.’ She tucks me in and pulls the quilt up to my chin. ‘Say what they like about your father, at least he’s honest. And if someone’s honest, you can forgive a lot.’

  Doesn’t she know about our house, the fire? I curl in a ball beneath the quilt and think of emus stuck in mud. I don’t have a father. He is the space on the form that I leave blank when Mrs Tucker asks us to fill in Father’s Name. He is the spider’s web I break through every morning at the gate. He is dead flowers from the kurrajong that I kick off the path when they are squashed and brown.

  14

  It’s hardly big enough to swing a cat in—that’s what Mum says when we move in. There are two bedrooms, a kitchen and bathroom, with a porch in between. There’s no water connected so we carry buckets from the rainwater tank and still use the dunny in the old laundry shed that backs onto Shorty’s fence.

  There wasn’t enough money to build the front veranda so Mum has blocked off the door with the dressing table from her new maple bedroom suite. She sold the car to buy furniture. She said beds come before cars; from now on we can walk.

  The dressing table across the door stops us stepping into a three foot drop and killing ourselves in the process. So much for charity. She says this while she’s lugging buckets from the tank, while she’s painting undercoat on the bathroom walls. Also when she’s on her knees, polishing the lino in the bedroom that should be a lounge, but what good’s a lounge if we don’t have visitors? That’s what she says, so we have two bedrooms instead. The smaller one is for Dunc when he comes home for the holidays.

  ‘Why can’t I sleep in Dunc’s room when he’s not here? I’m eight. Lizzie has her own bed. Everyone does.’

  ‘It saves time,’ says Mum, puffing and polishing. ‘I only have to make one bed.’

  ‘I can make a bed, Lizzie makes hers.’

  ‘It’s less work only washing one set of sheets.’

  ‘I could wash them.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid.’

  I reach out with my foot and kick her hard in the head. I hate sleeping with you, I tell her. How do I know anything if our arms and legs are always mixed up and muddled? How do I know who I am if I’m always lost in your smell? Then I blink and she’s still on the floor, polishing, polishing. ‘You’re the stupid one,’ I say, leaving her there.

  At the woodpile, I lift the axe and smash it into a Mallee root. I smash and bash and make as much noise as I can but still she doesn’t come after me. Soon my bones get heavy, my arms droop; I drive the axe into a log and give up.

  Then I’m sick again. A car door slams in the street and Mum shoots across the floor, climbs over the bed and peeks out.

  ‘Bloody hell! They could’ve let me know.’

  In no time her apron and house dress are stuffed away in the wardrobe and she’s wearing the new dress with the swirly skirt from the catalogue.

  I sneak a look too. A blue car and silver caravan are parked out front. Grandpa Ted’s trying to close our side gate, lifting it half off its hinges when it hasn’t been closed for years. Grandma Bess has new purple hair. As they walk below the window, I can see every strand of Grandpa Ted’s oiled white hair, the red skin of his scalp beneath; I can see the big lumpy pimple with the whisker on Grandma Bess’s pink powdered cheek.

  ‘You could have let me know,’ says Mum at the back door. ‘I’ve got Sylvie home from school with bronchitis.’

  ‘Didn’t know ourselves,’ says Grandma Bess. ‘We’re not staying. We’re heading over to Melbourne in our new van. Aren’t we, Ted?’

  I can’t see Grandpa Ted but his grunts are inside my head, in the bed. Mum says she’ll make a cup of tea.

  ‘What on earth are you doing?’ says Grandma Bess.

  ‘We’ve only just moved in. The sink’s not connected yet.’

  ‘Well, you don’t need anything too big, not with just the two of you. And Duncan almost old enough to leave school.’

  ‘He’s not leaving school. The Old Girl’s paying for him to do law.’

  ‘Law?’

  Silence. Then Grandma Bess at the bedroom door. ‘Sylvie dear, how are you?’

  She doesn’t look at me; her eyes are peeking into the spare room, checking out Mum’s wardrobes, the pink curtains, the satin quilt. I close my eyes and pretend I’m too sick to speak. When I open them, she’s back in the kitchen.

  ‘Didn’t she have bronchitis last year?

  Mum is now sitting where I can see her. ‘They took her tonsils out but it’s made no difference. She’s got a weak chest. Like me.’

  ‘Auntie Jose had pneumonia. Lucky you didn’t get that.’

  Mum doesn’t look lucky. She peers into her tea and everyone speaks at once and I can’t hear any of it, and then Mum says: ‘I need more work, to make ends meet. More hours at the cafe would help.’

  ‘What about him?’ says Grandma Bess.

  ‘It’s like getting blood out of a stone.’

  ‘We told your sister she could do worse than marry a plumber. Bill’s got his head screwed on the right way, hasn’t he, Ted?’

  Mum’s head is not screwed on at all. It bobs into her cup and out again. It turns to me in the bedroom; her eyes are brown currant holes in a white cake face.

  ‘The Meehans always thought they were too good for us,’ says Grandma Bess. ‘Didn’t they, Ted?’

  Mum’s head jerks up. ‘You thought he was Christmas. You couldn’t get me down the aisle fast enough.’

  I cover my head with the quilt and breathe in pink air and stay safe from everything, until I hear chairs sliding back and the sound of Grandpa Ted’s voice, loud and cheery. ‘See you’ve been making jam. Could do with a jar or two if it’s going begging.’

  Don’t give him any! But already, Mum’s wrapping jam jars in the pink pages of the Border Mail, one after another, too many.

  Go, go! I tell them as they walk down the side path and struggle with the gate. Go and leave us alone
and never come back.

  As Mum changes out of her dress, she talks to the wardrobe. ‘Don’t see them for dust for over a year and then they breeze in just wanting to have a good squiz. Did they ever offer an ounce of help when I needed it? Have they ever been to see Dunc at school? No, not once.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell them you had pneumonia?’

  ‘What’s the point?’ She turns to the window and wraps her arms across her chest. ‘If you knew what he did to me—’

  There’s a creature on the ceiling, a shadowy lump that is the shape of Grandpa Ted, reaching down with greedy arms, reaching down for Mum, for me. Can’t she see?

  ‘Good riddance to bad rubbish.’ In the kitchen, cups clatter into the sink. Mum sits at the table; her head drops into her hands and her shoulders shake and heave.

  When Dunc comes home in September, his eyes skip from the towels on the ironing board to the boxes stacked against the wall. ‘I’m not sleeping here. It’s a girly room. What’s all this pink?’

  Mum lumps his case onto the bed and begins sorting his clothes, not answering him. When she leaves, I cringe near the door and see all Mum’s pink when I didn’t really see it before—even the gum-tree picture on the wall is a kind of pink.

  In just one term Dunc has grown pimples on his chin and a dark fur moustache on his top lip. I can’t stop looking at that moustache. It is the same as Dad’s but not stiff hair that needs shaving, not the same as men with dark cheeks and beards. It is too weird that Dunc could be a man.

  He catches me looking. ‘Whaddya gawking at?’

  I cross quickly to the boxes. ‘Pardie left some comics. He said he’ll come over later.’

  Dunc flicks through the pile and then shoves them back at me. ‘Read the lotta them.’ He turns to the window. Under his shirt, his shoulder blades are bony wings. He smells different too, like a warm horse, like a smoky tree might smell. Suddenly I think he might be blinking into the lace curtain the way I used to blink into The Magic Pudding at the hospital so no one could see me sniffling. What is wrong with him?

  ‘Kenny Sweet’s left school,’ I tell him. ‘He works in his father’s shop.’

  Dunc spins round. ‘You think I give a fuck about Kenny Sweet?’ I feel the punch of the rude word as he passes. ‘Anyway,’ he calls from the porch, ‘I’m leaving school too.’

  He is late home for tea. He pokes his vegetables around his plate and says he’s sick of eating rabbit, isn’t there anything else? ‘And I’m not sleeping in that room,’ he says when he’s finished playing with the rabbit. ‘I’d rather sleep in the shed.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ says Mum.

  ‘I’m not a girl.’ He flicks a look at me. ‘Let her sleep there.’

  ‘Let me, let me!’ I jump up and down and bang my feet on the floor, then I think of Dunc having to sleep with Mum in the double bed and just the thought of it makes me laugh, loud and crazy as Sid McCready.

  ‘Shut your fucking face,’ says Dunc, grabbing my wrist across the table and giving me a Chinese burn.

  I give a good bellow and Mum bellows too. ‘Stop that!’ Her face is white with two red spots on her cheeks. ‘And don’t bring that language into this house.’

  Dunc drops my wrist and pushes back his chair. ‘I won’t,’ he says as he heads for the bedroom, ‘and I won’t be sleeping here either. Now. Or ever.’

  Mum scrapes the plates and I rub my wrist and we strain to hear what Dunc is doing. I wish I hadn’t laughed like a ninny. Then Dunc is back with his school bag, a shirt sleeve hanging out.

  ‘Where do you think you’re going with that?’

  ‘Pardie’s.’

  ‘No you’re not.’ But he’s already outside. There’s a skid of tyres on gravel and Mum leaps across the kitchen. ‘Duncan! Come back here!’

  Silence. Mum returns and throws plates around in the sink, her face pink and stiff. In the kurrajong, spoggies are settling for the night, skittering about on our roof before chirruping into the tree. There are faint shouts from kids playing near the lagoon; I think I can hear Chicken shouting. It is getting too late to be out playing.

  Dunc returns next morning after Mum’s gone to work. I find him in the bedroom packing clothes into the big case he takes to the city—shirts, shoes, the Biggles book he borrowed from Mrs Major’s house. He’s packing his school books too, shoving everything in; it’s a mess. ‘Where are you going?’

  He doesn’t answer and I have to ask again. Still he doesn’t look up. ‘To live with Dad,’ he says.

  My heart thumps in my ears. ‘You can’t,’ I say.

  ‘Watch me,’ he says.

  I watch him pack his toothbrush bag, then his cricket bat squashed in on top. The thumping is deafening. ‘You can’t,’ I say again.

  ‘I can.’ He pushes down the lid and buckles the straps. ‘I can have my own room. My own dog. I can leave school. I can do whatever I want.’

  Words fall out of my mouth. ‘He burned down our house.’ I tell him this twice and when he still doesn’t look up, I say it again. ‘Dad burned down our house. Everyone knows.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid. It was an electrical fault.’

  ‘Morgan’s his mate. Ask Mum. Sid McCready was there.’

  He stands the case on the floor and looks up. ‘Sid’s mad. And you’re a liar.’

  ‘Ask Pardie, ask anyone. Everyone knows.’

  He touches a pimple with careful fingers as if it might pop. I see doubt smudging his smirk. ‘He wouldn’t.’

  ‘He did. He didn’t want Mum to have it. Everyone knows.’

  He stares at me as if he’s looking right through me into a fire with raging flames and angry heat and Dad skulking around with petrol and matches, as if he’s thinking, how do you burn down your own house? Then he balls a fist into his palm—thwack-thwack—and pushes past me without another word.

  ‘Half-cocked, half-cocked!’ I yell as he rides off, but he doesn’t even bother to look back.

  I slump on the step with all the power of my words emptied out, wanting him to come back and give me a Chinese burn, the pain of it. Later I see he’s forgotten to take his case and I pack everything away so Mum won’t know. When she comes home, I tell her he’s sleeping at Pardie’s and she grumbles about Jude not checking with her and tomorrow she’ll have a thing or two to say.

  Early next morning, Pardie arrives at our door looking for Dunc, his face a worried kind of white, his eyes not meeting mine.

  ‘Well, if he didn’t stay with you, where did he stay?’ says Mum. Pardie scuttles off like a rabbit with Mum calling after him, ‘Tell him he’s not staying anywhere tonight. Tell him I want him home here, right now!’

  In the laundry shed, Mum scrunches up newspapers to get the fire going under the copper, twisting and scrunching as if she’s wringing rabbits’ necks, Dunc’s neck. ‘I’ll kill him. Where did he go? That’s what I want to know.’

  My mouth is dry and scared but I make myself say it. ‘He said he was going to live at Dad’s.’ And straightaway: ‘But I didn’t believe him. I thought he’d gone to Pardie’s.’

  She stands with a flounce. ‘Well, you can just go and get him.’

  ‘Me? I’m not going there.’

  ‘Well, I’m not talking to her. Am I?’

  I’m halfway down the drive when I get worried and come back, wondering how to tell her, how to say it. He made me, I’ll say. He tortured me with Chinese burns till I cracked, that’s what I’ll tell her. She’s bluing sheets in the trough. ‘I told him…that…Dad burned down our house.’

  She lights another ciggie and squints through the smoke, and her words are not as bad as I’d feared. ‘Well, why shouldn’t he know?’

  Layle says Dunc didn’t sleep at their place. There’s a worried crease between her bushy brows and I have to look away quickly so she won’t see my worry too. Where did he go? Would he run away like he did from school?

  Dad comes to our house when the pub closes. Mum stands on the porch and her eyes skitter all
over the place as if she can’t bear to look at him. She tells him she has a bad feeling. Then her eyes shift to me in the kitchen, back to him and then back to me again. I think: If she tells him, I’ll say Dunc forced it out of me with the power of his mind. I’ll say he’s been practising to be a magician and can see what you’re thinking. Why not? I’ll say. Mrs Scott knows things from tea-leaves.

  ‘I can’t hang around here all night. Serves him right if he has to sleep under a boobialla.’

  ‘The least you can do is go and look. Or I’ll get Bill Morgan?’

  Dad grumbles off. ‘He’ll get a good thrashing when I find him.’

  After he’s gone, Mrs Winkie yoo-hoos down the path with jars for Mum’s marmalade. ‘Dunc still not back?’

  ‘Mick’s gone to have a look. I’ve told him to let Bill Morgan know but he’s probably got a skinful too. Useless, the two of them.’

  Later in bed, I close my eyes and see exploding stars and red vein things that wriggle in the blackness then disappear and I am still awake wondering if Dunc might have gone to Seal Island with Mr Hammet to change the lighthouse cylinder. Has Mum thought of that? And while Mr Hammet was winching the cylinder up the cliff, Dunc might have hurt his ankle in a penguin burrow and be lying there right now unable to get up and, no matter how loud he screams, Mr Hammet can’t hear because of the shrieking gulls and terns and mutton-birds.

  I am still awake when Dad comes back. ‘No one’s seen him,’ he says from the porch, the light above his head buzzing with midges. ‘Though I wouldn’t trust that Pardie Moon as far as I could kick him. Shorty and Augie had a drive around too, looked in the goods shed, under the lifeboat cover, flashed car lights through the scrub out near the lake in case he’s hiding there. He could be bloody anywhere. Bill says we’ll do a proper search tomorrow. Serve the little bugger right. He’ll high-tail it home when it gets cold enough.’

  Mum’s voice is a squeak. ‘What if he doesn’t?’

  ‘Well, he’ll learn, won’t he? Like we all bloody have to.’ He looks into the darkness beyond the doorway where I am a spot in the bed. ‘What the hell got into him? That’s what Bill wants to know.’