The Lost Child

by Suzanne McCourt

  ‘A bed,’ I say, resting my end on the ground. ‘For our cubby.’

  ‘I thought it was traps.’

  Behind me, Lizzie sniggers. Rabbit traps, I want to tell her. She thought it was Dunc’s traps rattling. What’s so funny about that? But my mouth is full up with rabbit fur and I don’t say anything. Yanking my end of the bed, I force Lizzie to follow me. As we cross the road towards the lagoon, Aunt Cele shoots around the corner.

  ‘Nella!’ she calls, braking to a stop, panting for breath. ‘I could smell your marmalade. As far back as Nobby Carter’s. I’ll do you a swap. Some of my muntrie jam. For a jar of your marmalade.’ She laughs as if it’s not much of a swap. ‘Good bed!’ she calls to Lizzie and me and, from her bike basket, she holds up a timber lamp. ‘Only needs a shade,’ she tells Mum. ‘Jude’ll fix it. She can fix anything.’

  ‘How’s Pardie?’ asks Mum.

  I have not seen Pardie since I’ve been home from Bindilla. One day after school, I went to his house but no one was there, not Augie or Jude, not Pardie or his dog, Rastas. He is a mystery.

  ‘All over the place. Won’t get a job. Worries Jude to death. Understandable, I guess…’ Her voice trails off and Mum brings the axe down hard on a log. ‘I think of you all the time, Nella.’ She lowers her voice, but I can still hear. ‘And Sylvie. How is she?’

  Mum doesn’t drop her voice at all. ‘Nine going on ninety. Always got her head in a book.’

  I pull Lizzie into the tea-tree. The lagoon is full to the brim and soggy beneath the weed. In our cubby, we lie on the bed and sing ‘A Pub With No Beer’, every verse. I like the way singing fills you up inside and you can’t feel anything except your bursting heart. Before going home, we tie cotton thread across the branches so we’ll know if Chicken’s been nosing around.

  Back on the road, Lizzie says, in a hurry, as if she’s been saving it up: ‘Your brother’s dead. He’s not floating around. He’s drowned. Everyone says.’

  ‘I know.’

  She stares at me with surprise and no pity. And I stare at her with my emptiness growing into an ache and I can’t wait for her to take her face away from me. When she leaves, my ache is without mercy. I will not believe what she says, what anyone says.

  In the kitchen, Mum is bottling her marmalade. My face in the glass jars is pop-eyed, fish-mouthed. I breathe in the smell of oranges and sugar and spice and everything nice. When Mum has finished, the jars are filled to the brim, shining and golden like a piece of the sun dropped onto the table. She says the biggest jar is for Cele. She says Dunc liked her marmalade better than anyone.

  It is the first time she has spoken his name since she’s come home with her short hair and slow way of talking. I don’t really know what to say. Except I like her marmalade too.

  When she’s watering the garden, I go to the spare room and look for Dunc’s things. The room is cold and empty of him. Then my eyes settle on the tea chest in the corner. Inside I find his school clothes folded neatly, further down his boots and shoes, then two small cardboard boxes full of cotton wool and eggs. And more. Two Phantom comics I’ve never seen. His pencil case. An old tobacco tin with Imperial Ruby and a picture of a Union Jack stamped on the lid. Inside: his pocket knife and three cat’s-eye marbles.

  His skull ring! I slide it onto my middle finger and press the metal bits behind until it fits. I’ll have to keep it well hidden. It’s not really stealing. He gave it to me, I’ll say if I’m asked.

  I burrow through the comics. I’m on the floor with an old Phantom when she looks in. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

  ‘Reading.’

  ‘No’—she snatches the comic out of my hand—‘you’re not! Who said you could just come in here and do what you like?’

  Kneeling on the floor, she bundles it all up, comics, shoes, clothes, all of him. She folds his shirts, neatly, grey short pants, the blue sweater Grannie knitted with the big white ‘D’ on the front. As she stands, the comics slide out of her grasp. Her mouth trembles. ‘Now look what you’ve done!’

  She smells of marmalade and garden dirt. My chest hurts. It is too heavy to hold. Can’t she see the weight of it? When everything’s packed away, her red eyes stare into mine. ‘I don’t want you in here. I want everything left as it was. Understand?’

  Behind my back, I rub Dunc’s ring: it is silvery cold and full of Phantom power.

  16

  Mum stands with her back to the stove, shivering, her pale pink dressing-gown hanging open like a loose skin. She asks me if I know what day it is. September the fifteenth?

  My toast has no taste. I haven’t remembered. Mum is frantic and fidgety like she’s got ants in her pants. Like her eyes want to bore right through me and blame me for it being a year since Dunc disappeared, for making him run away. She says how can we remember properly if there’s no grave, no resting place? It’s the not knowing, she says, not knowing where he is that makes it so hard.

  My heart flutters with hope. ‘You mean…he might be hiding somewhere?’

  ‘Hiding?’ She frowns for so long that I think her brain might be working too slowly, like it has since she’s been home from the hospital. Then her face clears and she snaps at me as if I’m crazy and she’s only just realised. ‘Why would he be hiding? If he was alive, he’d come home. How could he be hiding?’

  Because he’s run away and might not want to come home. Because he’s still upset with me. Because he might like living wild like an Abo. And because he might have gone far away and will only come back when he’s ready, and he’s not ready yet. I want to shout all of this at her, loud-mouthed and strong, so that she will stop believing Dunc has drowned. Can’t she see? I want to hurl the words at her head like she used to hurl saucepans at Dad. But I am scared of shouting and throwing, and her face is all furrows again, so I hide in my toast and she shuffles off to the dunny. Then I get dressed and hang around reading in the kurrajong tree while Mum hides inside, cleaning, cleaning.

  Pardie must know something. After weeks and months of him avoiding me, I was riding my bike along back beach road when I turned a corner and he was there, Rastas running beside him, no escape. I told him I needed him to take me to the Abo cave in case Dunc was hiding there—it all came out in a babble. Pardie kept walking, not even looking at me, but I pedalled beside him, faster, faster, asking if he was taking food to Dunc, if he was keeping the secret? Without warning, Pardie leapt off the road and ran into the tea-tree, whistling Rastas after him. Why would he do that if he didn’t know where Dunc was hiding? If he didn’t know something? For days I thought about telling Mum; now I’m glad I didn’t. She has given up hoping. But I haven’t.

  In the afternoon of Dunc’s anniversary, Mum sends me to the cafe for cigarettes. On the way home, I’m passing the pub when Dad stumbles out. ‘Lilies,’ he says, steadying himself against the door before easing onto the veranda. ‘Always bloody lilies on the gate. How many times do you reckon?’

  He stinks. Of beer and smoke and rain. Of mutton-birds thudding into their burrows full up with fish from far out at sea.

  ‘Lilies on the gate,’ he says again.

  I remember Grannie telling me they tie lilies on the gate at Bindilla whenever anyone dies. Did they do it when Dunc disappeared? Is that what Dad means?

  He peers into my face with his mutton-bird breath and dark sunken eyes, puzzled, trying to focus. My chest thumps at his closeness, but I can tell he hasn’t the foggiest idea who I am. In my hurry to get away, the front wheel of my bike knocks the seat on the veranda, lifting it out from the wall. He looks at that seat, confused, as if it moved by itself, as if there’s no sense to things moving. Close up, his eyes are pirate patches; they are Mum’s eyes and my eyes too, all of them filled with the awfulness of remembering.

  He is nothing to me. I tell myself this as I push my bike up the hill. It is his fault, all of it. I tell myself this again and again. I come down the other side at a run, trying to hold back, wrestling my bike to a stop at the bottom.
My eyes have started to leak. Dunc always fixed punctures for me, the tube in the bucket, bubbles marking the hole, glueing the patch. Should I ask Chicken or Roy to help? Can I do it myself?

  I’m ready to cross the road when Dad’s jeep crawls past, stopping up ahead where anyone coming around the corner could crash right into him. Then he just sits there. As if he’s waiting for someone. Could that someone be me?

  I cross the road quickly. At the same time, he lurches out of the jeep and stumbles around in circles as if he’s lost something right there in the gravel and dirt. The sun is setting, the light as bright as a searchlight; his hat is tipped back, his face, pants, shirt, boots, all of him lit up like a beacon. Then he drops down as if he’s kneeling to pray—but he wouldn’t, would he?—not with his feeling for apes?

  As he leans forward, his hat topples off; his forehead sinks onto the dirt. I want to run off and pretend I don’t know him. I want to leave him there to grovel in his own shadow. But tiny groans come from the road. Squeaks. Moans. Like a kicked dog might make as he crawls away from a boot.

  I look down at the mound of him. I don’t know what to do. Faye Daley could come out of her house any minute and see him. A car could come, he could be run over, anyone could come. And right then, Layle does come. Striding around the corner, swinging her shopping basket. The first time I’ve ever been glad to see her. ‘Mick!’ she yells. ‘What the hell are ya doing?’ Then she’s running. ‘Come on, get up, I’ll drive you home. Get up.’

  Hands under his arms, she tries to help him up. ‘No-o-o-o-o!’ he bellows. It is the wail made by calves at cattle sales when they’re taken from their mothers. The wail of someone fallen deep down in a well. But somehow Layle lifts him out of the well, jams his hat on his head and moves him to the jeep while he’s gabbing at her. ‘I looked away for a minute…just a minute…and when I looked back he’d just disappeared…there one minute and gone the next, how can you explain that? I couldn’t find him…I tried…I tell you I tried—’

  ‘Shhhh,’ says Layle, as if she’s talking to a baby. ‘It’s not your fault, you know that, and it’s a long time ago. Come on, get in.’

  And somehow he’s in the jeep and she’s brushing dirt off his face, slamming the door, grabbing her basket from the road and climbing in the driver’s side. Another glance at me. ‘It’s okay, Sylvie, you can go home now.’

  Then they’ve gone, and the sun has gone, and the road shines white in the fading light. But it’s not okay. How could he have looked away for a minute, and then looked back? Dunc was gone three days before they found his sock at the soak. And it hasn’t been a long time ago since he disappeared. It’s only been one year. So what was Dad talking about? How could he have been there?

  Then Pardie goes too. Mrs Winkie tells Mum he’ll turn into a juvenile delinquent in the city—if he’s not one already—what with his loafing around and not getting a job and wearing bodgie clothes. She says those bodgies and widgies should be sent off to the Nullarbor on a rail gang; that’d soon put a stop to their rocking and rolling. She bites on her Anzac biscuit and crumbs fall onto her chin. Given half a chance, she says she’d be out there marching with the Ban the Bombers because what happened in Hiroshima was just plain wrong. And as for that Khrushchev and his Sputniks; if the Yanks are stupid enough to make it a race, good luck to them. She’s never had much time for Yanks, not since the war, when she saw those soldiers on R and R in the city, turning heads with their fancy talk then leaving our girls in the family way to fend for themselves; don’t get her started.

  Mum sips her tea and sucks on her ciggie, both at the same time. She looks dizzy-eyed, as if Sputniks are spinning close to her ears and she can’t think properly.

  I think about Pardie at the school fete, just before he left town. Mum didn’t come to the fete even though I won first prize for Grade Five flower arranging. Colleen said it was favouritism because Mrs Denver Boland was the judge and my sweet peas came from her garden. So what? They had to come from somewhere. She didn’t know Mrs Denver taught me to arrange them on her sunroom table and that the spiky thing in the bottom of the vase belonged to her too.

  In the shelter shed, Roy had set up his gramophone and when Lizzie and I arrived, Pardie was dancing with Lizzie’s sister, Mary, rocking and swinging and whirly-gigging, better than anyone. Mr Allen was back because Mrs Tucker was sick again, but I’m in Mr Tucker’s class so I didn’t care. Mr Allen was watching and clapping along with everyone else to ‘Party Doll’, and Lizzie and I tried to jive along too but we couldn’t get the steps right and just ended up giggling and doing Elvis wiggles. Then I saw Pardie watching us and there was something about those eyes picking me out like a spotlight that made me stop dancing.

  Next thing, Mr Allen’s gone back to the city and Pardie’s left town without Rastas, or his Loving You LP. Only a pile of comics on our back step. Not even a goodbye.

  I hide in the kurrajong tree. Bridie Maguire stumbles past, tripping all over the road from too many shandies in the pub. I drop itchy pods onto her head but she has the luck of drunks and lurches away from every one of them. I hide from Lizzie, who walks arm in arm with Faye Daley under my tree, their long-legged shadows leading them down the road. I hide from Mum at the back door, her strangled scream. ‘Sylvie! Where are you?’ Another scream. ‘Sylvie!’

  On my leg I have a school sore with a thick brown scab. I pick at the scab and loosen it; I pick around the edge and let the blood ooze out. Smoke from the stove curls through the tree. It smells of black crows and turnip weed. Mum runs at the clothesline, pulls off sheets and tucks them under her chin, folds them in four and then four more. Blood trickles down my shin and drips onto the bark.

  Mrs Winkie persuades Mum to go to the Institute on Sunday to hear Billy Graham.

  ‘Billy who?’

  ‘The evangelist. It’ll do you good.’

  We put on our best dresses. Mum wears gloves, stockings, high heels and a little pink hat, the whole bit. Her hair has grown back and she’s had a fluffy perm: she looks like a pink carnation on long-stemmed sandal shoes. Mrs Winkie has saved us seats. On the back of her head she wears a feathered hat that looks like a green lorikeet.

  It is standing room only with everyone squashed onto the blue chairs where yesterday Lizzie and I saw Pillow Talk and Ma and Pa Kettle. The Daleys are there, but no Uncle Ticker or Grannie: Catholics are not meant to come but I’m half-Methodist because of Mum. Next to me is Mrs Bullfrog Fraser, but no Bullfrog. Chicken and Roy are in the front row with Sid and Grandma McCready. When Lizzie gives Chicken a wave, her mother slaps her hand down and says it’s the same as being in church and keep that in mind.

  On the stage, a huge poster of Billy Graham hangs over the screen. He is not like old Father Brennan or the Methodist minister. He has lovely golden-brown curly hair, sparkling blue eyes, perfect white teeth, a real movie star smile. Mrs Bullfrog shifts and sighs but we don’t have long to wait: soon a minister from the Mount leads us in the Lord’s Prayer, then Billy’s voice comes preaching out of the speakers.

  ‘And this great crowd here today is due to the spiritual hunger of thousands of people in this age of despair and discouragement. Nations are arming themselves to the teeth with hydrogen bombs, shaking their fists at each other, and it seems the world is about to come to an end…’

  It’s the first American voice I’ve heard, except in the movies and singers like Elvis and Jerry Lee. But Billy Graham’s voice is different, strong and syrupy like honey bees feeding off wattles on a spring day. There’s not even a cough or shuffle.

  ‘Many of you have come here with spiritual hunger and thirst. Many are here with burdens that cannot be lifted, problems that seemingly are too great to master. And you’re searching for an answer.’

  It feels as if he’s speaking just to me. Maybe it’s the same for Mrs Bullfrog because when I sneak a look, her mouth’s hanging open as if she’s died and gone to Heaven. Mum has shiny eyes as if she’s trying not to cry. Even Lizzie is s
taring at Billy’s poster in the same way that she drools over her Love Me Tender poster of Elvis on her bedroom wall.

  ‘I tell you there’s going to be a resurrection and all of those loved ones of yours who have died in the past in Christ, they’re going to be raised. And there’s going to be a glorious and grand reunion that day.’

  There are tears trickling down Mum’s cheeks. Is she wondering if Dunc is going to be raised? And if he died in Christ, and what if he didn’t? What if he believed in apes like Dad? I will not worry about this because I know that he is alive and one day he will be found. The music wells up and Billy Graham’s voice is reaching out and filling me with something big and fluttering.

  ‘Now Christ doesn’t promise to take your troubles away…but he promises a new dimension to your life, new strength, a new power…if you are willing to receive him.’

  A ripple seems to run right through the Institute and Billy Graham says: ‘By this open acknowledgment today, you’re saying I receive Christ openly in front of everyone as my saviour and my Lord. You get up and come quickly from everywhere.’

  Beside me, Mum stands and I do too, without even thinking. But Mrs Winkie hisses at Mum: ‘You don’t have to go, Nella, not if you already believe.’ And Mum sits down again. But Lizzie is pushing along the row and I’m following. I look around and see everyone’s shuffling up to the front and I’ve got Mrs Bullfrog pushing behind me, so I squeeze past Mum and Mrs Winkie and join everyone else in the aisle with Billy saying: ‘Hundreds are coming from everywhere. There’s plenty of time, just take your time. What a glorious moment this is.’ As I shuffle forward, it seems as if I’m drawn along on strings until I reach the stage and the minister from the Mount blesses me. I feel it’s a magic moment, a great wave, and I know that Dunc will be found, I just know. I float back to my seat with everyone smiling and some people crying, some standing right there and cuddling each other and, although Lizzie and I don’t do any of that, I feel everything will be fine from now on because God is on my side: Dunc will come home, Mum will go out more and be the same as other mothers, I will stop picking my shin.