The Lost Child

by Suzanne McCourt

  And as always, I’m half-believing, half-dreaming that it might be Dunc because I still see him everywhere. Driving a truck past Muswell High. A flash of his face at a window of a bus in the main street of the Mount. Once in the Reedy Creek footy team playing at Burley Point—until he ran right past me and turned into someone else.

  But it’s not Dunc. It never is. It’s the FJ Holden ute that’s been cruising around town for the past week, all turquoise duco and polished chrome. Faye Daley says it belongs to Will Pickles, a muckraker on the rig who comes from a farm up near Coomandook. She says he’s the spitting image of Elvis and, as the car slows in front of me, I see that she’s right: Will Pickles has an Elvis curl that flops onto his forehead like a wobbly black tongue. He has thick black lashes, a dimpled chin, and a lazy Elvis grin. And that grin is grinning at me.

  My heart thumps louder than the drill on the rig, louder than when I’m in the pictures with Roy, or when the new boy at school smiles at me. They’re boys. Elvis is eighteen, maybe nineteen; he’s a man.

  I itch to pull up my socks. To be Priscilla with a hive of black hair. Sandra with a cute Gidget smile. Anyone except Sylvie Meehan minding a five-year-old kid on Stickynet Bridge.

  With another lazy grin, Elvis winds up his window and flattens his foot. ‘What’s he want?’ says Jimmie.

  Me, I think, licking his dust off my lips. Please let him want me.

  At seven months, Tania could use her stumpy arm to lift herself off the floor and crawl like a crab. At ten months she was walking. At twelve months she could toddle after a ball, bend over and clasp it to her chest. At fifteen months, she could kick it to me. Joe said Pele would have to watch out, whoever Pele is.

  At eighteen months, Tania has a bush of black curls and pink cheeks that turn red when she gets angry: she gets angry often, lying on the floor or lawn or footpath, kicking and screaming. Then she picks herself up and lets me dust her off. With lungs like that, Joe says she’ll be an opera singer. Move over Maria Callas. If Joe picks her up when she’s angry, she thumps her stunted arm at him. He says she’s so strong that soon she’ll be taking on Cassius Clay and Sonny Liston, both of them together. And if she doesn’t end up in the ring, she’ll be Miss Universe, that’s how gorgeous she is. Whaddya reckon, Sylvie?

  I reckon Joe is sometimes plain crazy. Crazy stupid, not crazy mad. Once I took Tania to the playground and a kid called her a spastic. I don’t think Joe understands that his daughter is a cripple. That she will be teased at school.

  Mostly, when I’m babysitting, I push her down Main Street to the foreshore rotunda where we watch the sea and boats and gulls. One day I show her a spider building a web between two rotunda posts. I tell her about the frosty morning at Bindilla. How overnight hundreds of spiders had spun webs on the low grass and, as the sun came up, the paddock glittered like a silver sea, just like the sea in front of us. Another time, I tell her about the black men who used to live in Burley Point before the whalers and farmers came. Slit up your eyes, I tell her, and you can still see them spearing fish off the rocks. She scrunches up her face and says she can. I tell her about their shellfish middens on the back beach, how in the warm hollows of the dunes you can feel tribes of them sitting around camp fires, having a good feed of shellfish or wallaby. I say I’ll take her there when she’s older and she can see for herself. ‘Lub you, Silby,’ she says, kicking her shoes excitedly against the footrest.

  Tania has just started saying this—to her mum and dad, to Joe’s old black dog—but it is the first time she’s said it to me. ‘Love you too, Tarnie,’ I manage, despite a tug in my throat.

  Next time we’re in the rotunda, Grannie comes trudging along Beach Road. She has a good look at Tania in her pusher and says: ‘Pretty enough. But what sort of life’s ahead of her?’ She drops down beside me and takes off her shoe to rub at her bunion. ‘The Marcianos might have been here for a while but they’re still Italians. In Rome one of them pinched me on the backside. Bellissima this and bellissima that. I stood on his foot with my heel. That put a stop to his bellissiming.’

  As I push Tania home, I wonder how anyone can think an old lady like Grannie is beautiful. And how Joe can think Tania could grow up to be an opera singer, or win a beauty contest. I wonder if you believe something hard enough, does it happen, despite everything.

  *

  In August, Mum loses her job at the cafe because Mrs Trotter’s sister is returning to Burley Point and needs the work. ‘Said she was sorry. Said she hoped I’d find something else. There isn’t anything else!’ Mum chews on her bottom lip as if she’s trying to taste it. I hate the way she does this, it makes me feel sick. ‘The Co-op’s a closed shop…wives and widows and married women every one of them. Not that I’d be caught dead picking fish.’

  My homework poem leaps off the page. Tyger! Tyger! burning bright / In the forests of the night…

  ‘And I wouldn’t be caught dead working at Hannigan’s either. You might have to leave school and get a job.’

  ‘I’m not leaving school. I’m going to be a teacher.’

  Mum stares at me with fiery tiger eyes, forcing me back to my poem. When the stars threw down the spears / And watered heaven with their tears…But the words blur and Mum snaps down the blind and starts the washing up.

  When the school bus gets in, Elvis is sometimes parked near the cafe. Or crawling down Main Street. Or accelerating towards the beach, sometimes doing a wheelie that dirties his duco. Soon I know his shifts, two weeks on days, two weeks on nights. Nights are best because he’s usually hanging around when I get home from school. With Cele’s old Brownie, I have an excuse for hanging around too.

  Mostly I take photos of things close up—seed pods on a bidgee widgee bush, the crisscross pattern of the jetty legs from underneath. Cele says I have an interesting sense of perspective. She shows me how to compose a shot using the rule of thirds. Mr Kerford lets me photograph him hanging out of the school bus and one of my shots from sports day is used in the school magazine.

  Right now, I’m interested in shells. I photograph a cowrie on the beach where the mine washed ashore in the war and the men from the city were killed when they tried to blow it up. This was just before the war ended, before I was born. While I’m on the beach, Elvis drives past so I tear back to Hannigan’s and photograph the lacy iron on the balcony. He leaves for the rig without even glancing across the street.

  I haven’t picked my shin for three months and the scar is starting to heal. I am growing my hair. I change my part to the other side but it makes me look lopsided so I change it back again. I hate my gawky neck; it doesn’t seem to match my face. I squeeze lemon juice onto my freckles every night for two weeks. It makes my nose peel. In the bedroom mirror, I practise different ways of smiling—full teeth, half teeth, Mona Lisa smile. Every way makes me look kind of crazy. Why would he want me?

  Under my desk, I hold the paper plane ready. Mr Kerford leans into the blackboard and draws a triangle with an exterior angle in white chalk. He circles the angle in red then begins the calculation, talking, explaining. ‘If the exterior angle is ACD and the adjacent angle is ACB, I want you to find the value of the pro-numerals in—’

  It lands on his neck like a wasp. It’s so quick, I almost don’t know I’ve done it. Perhaps I didn’t. Perhaps it was Chicken or that boy from the farm out near Furner—please let it be one of them, not me.

  Mr Kerford turns. ‘Who threw it?’

  Silence. Stealthy looks. Slowly I raise my hand.

  ‘Sylvie?’ Surprise. Then a quick frown of disappointment. He can’t believe it—neither can Lizzie sitting next to me with her mouth hanging open—nor can Roy who gawps at me from the front row.

  My face is a furnace. Why did I do it? I’ll have to say it was an accident. That I’m learning origami and it just slipped out of my hands. He won’t believe me. He’ll think I’m crazy. Maybe I am?

  ‘Stay behind,’ he says.

  Already my throat’s closing up and my heart�
��s beating so hard that I can’t even hear Lizzie’s whispering. Somehow I ignore her nudges and concentrate on indices and angles. You can hide in numbers forever if you want to. Words too.

  ‘Sylvie?’

  He’s standing next to my desk, Old Spice aftershave, brown corduroy, so close to my nose that I could turn my head and sniff his leg. Why would I even think that? Outside, the playground shrieks. He sits on the desk opposite but I don’t look up. I’m feeling too stupid, too sick.

  ‘It’s not like you,’ he says softly. ‘Is everything okay?’

  I’ve got dirt under my nails like a five-year-old. What can I say?

  ‘Did someone dare you?’

  Glancing up, I see Van Gogh’s sunflowers waving at me from above the blackboard, next to the portrait of the Queen. ‘Fibonacci numbers,’ I say desperately. ‘I was wondering why rabbits breed in that number sequence. Sunflowers and shell spirals too.’

  He stands. Please don’t go. I stare at his corduroy leg, willing him to stay, remembering how he leans over my desk, the way his red pen marks my page. The way—just once—his hand brushed mine.

  ‘How about I revise it next week?’

  There’s a smile in his voice. He’s not angry! Quickly, bravely, I look up. I manage a choked kind of thank you. As I walk past, he reaches out and tousles my hair. He touched me!

  Mum finds a few hours’ work cleaning for the Bolands. For someone who likes cleaning our house, she doesn’t much like cleaning theirs. She says beggars can’t be choosers. I’d rather be a chooser.

  After school, I meet up with her leaving the Bolands’. Her corns are playing up and I dawdle behind, pretending she’s not my mother with her limping feet. Out of nowhere, Grannie Meehan comes barrelling along the lagoon path, out of breath. She nods at me and plunks her basket on the ground.

  ‘Nella,’ she says, looking over her shoulder as if she’s afraid someone might hear. ‘Can’t you find something better to do than house cleaning? How do you think it looks for me, living around the corner from the Bolands? You’d be better off back in the city, wouldn’t you?’

  Mum stares at something behind Grannie’s head. ‘Sylvie’s doing well at school,’ she says eventually. ‘And Dunc’s here.’

  ‘Dunc’s gone. And Sylvie’s a girl. She’ll end up married.’

  Mum and I give Grannie’s lace-ups a good going over. Bossy boots. I wait for Mum to say something but she’s taking her time. Grannie glowers at Mum; Mum holds her ground. ‘I’ve got work to do,’ she says at last. ‘I can’t stand here talking all day.’

  Grannie’s mouth clamps shut like a trap. Mum limps off and I follow. When I look back, Grannie is powering along the lagoon path.

  Mum says she won’t move back to the city in a pink fit. She says Grannie’s as hard as nails and everyone knows it. For the next week, she goes crazy scraping polish off the lino and starting again. She scrubs the bath and skirting boards, she picks dirt out of the cracks in the cement steps with the sharp end of a knife. She says I’m a dreamer, that I need to grow up and face a few things, that life’s not for sissies. I say: A sissie’s a girl, so what am I, a boy? She says I’m getting too big for my boots and I need taking down a peg or two. I hate the way she nibbles on her toast. I hate her blood on the sheets; we still sleep together and always seem to bleed together. I hate myself for not fighting to sleep in the other room. I hate myself for hating her.

  Then she hears Hannigan is looking for a housemaid-waitress; she swallows her pride and heads up the hill. When she returns, her face is flushed, alive. ‘It’s the riggers. He needs me to do the beds, be there for lunch, have a few hours off then go back for tea. You’ll have to eat straight after school, and do the washing-up. It won’t hurt you.’

  Elvis has a room at Hannigan’s.

  One night I set out my homework books on the table: it’s soon after she starts working there and I’m not really planning it, not even thinking it, but the minute I can’t find my pen, I’m out the door and heading up the hill to the pub. Bev Carter’s mother waves me through the fatty stink kitchen into the cool dark dining room.

  Mum is a white-apron dot in the far corner. ‘What are you doing here?’ she hisses across the tables. When I tell her, she says, ‘We’ve got plenty of pens. Did you look?’ She seems lost and little in the big room. ‘Wait out there. I’ll find one when I’m finished.’

  In the foyer, noise from the bar is an animal roar. I’m tracing the gold swirls on the red carpet with the toe of my shoe when Layle sails out of the Ladies Lounge, lines up the front door and steers herself through. Before she can see me, I push open a door next to the stairs and find myself in some kind of storeroom with crates and glasses, a broken bar stool. It takes me a second to realise there’s a half-open hatch and I can see into the bar.

  My father is sitting right there, barely an arm’s length away! I flatten against the wall. Augie’s there too. And the rigger they call Wombat after Steppy Jones’s father, who has the same bushy beard in the Council Chairman photo on the Institute wall.

  ‘My old man used to reckon we were sitting on swamps of it,’ says Augie, wiping off a froth moustache with his hand. ‘Ticker’ll be worth a bloody fortune.’ He turns to my father. ‘You thought of that?’

  Dad frowns into his beer. ‘Problem is finding it,’ says Wombat. ‘It’s a bloody lottery. Twenty feet too far one way, a bad break in the strat, and you can drill forever and never see a drop.’

  Without warning, Dad lifts his head and brays at the ceiling. ‘I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. You’ve come here halfcocked. There’s no oil here. Anyone who thinks otherwise is a bloody idiot.’

  ‘Same as the parrots, Mick?’ yells Bullfrog, further down the bar. ‘Same as they’re all gunna disappear?’

  Everyone laughs and jeers and cheers and I can feel myself heating up in the cupboard, heating up for him being so stupid.

  ‘You’re the one who’s half-cocked,’ yells Bullfrog. ‘Why’d they be spending this sort of dough if they hadn’t checked everything out?’

  ‘Because they’re bloody greedy mongrels, Taylor, same as you. And mongrels’ll do anything for money.’

  Bullfrog looks like he’s going to push down the bar to get to my father but someone stands in front of him. It’s Dessie Martin’s father. He owns the soldier-settler farm that borders Bindilla and he hates all Meehans since Uncle Ticker drained the swamp and destroyed his best lucerne block. ‘Ya wouldn’t know if your arse was on fire, Meehan.’

  Everyone cheers. My father elbows Wombat out of the way and I’m afraid he’ll punch Dessie’s dad but instead he sweeps glasses and ashtrays to one side and leaps onto the bar.

  ‘Get down,’ orders Hannigan in his ex-cop’s voice. ‘Don’t put your boots on my bar, Mick. I’m warning you.’

  Hands on hips, Dad points a toe, threatening, teasing, enjoying himself, anyone can see. Then he yanks off his boots, drops them to the floor and laughs down at Hannigan. ‘They’re not on your bar.’ And lifting and pointing, jumping and twirling, he spins round and round in a mad Irish jig.

  My cupboard is suddenly hot with no air, the stink of beer. Why won’t he stop? And then he does, abruptly, as if he was just doing it to get their attention. He yells down the bar: ‘You know they’ve been finding oily blobs around here for years and thinking it’s oil. My old man used to find it in the swamps at Bindilla, his old man before him. They still find it on the Coorong. It’s why it’s called coorongite. They’ve done tests, it’s nothing but algae, not bloody oil. You know that, Augie. When we were kids we used to scrape it off our boots. It’s a bloody weed.’

  Someone roars: ‘Doesn’t mean the real stuff isn’t here.’

  ‘Doesn’t mean it is, either. That’s why you’d be fools to get your hopes up. You’ll end up lookin’ stupid.’

  ‘You’ll be the one lookin’ stupid,’ yells Bullfrog, ‘cause Ticker’ll be raking in the moolah, not you.’

  Dad’s off the bar in one lea
p. At the same time, Mrs Hannigan’s voice shrieks over the noise: ‘Kennedy’s been shot!’ Her words sink like a rock into a deep ravine. ‘In Texas. In a car.’

  President Kennedy? A mumble grows into a shriek of disbelief. I want to shriek too. He’s too young! He can’t be shot! Then above the shock and muttering, Hannigan yells: ‘Time, gentlemen! Six o’clock! Time, please!’

  Suddenly everyone’s pushing and shoving, and Dad’s back at the bar with two, three, then four pots lined up before him. Hannigan’s wife is pouring and passing, froth running off glasses. ‘Awlright! I’m not deaf! Wait ya turn.’

  I can see Dad’s throat pumping and guzzling, he’s that close. Watching, I think: Doesn’t he care? Then: He should pay for what he’s done. There’s a sudden noise in the foyer that might be Mum so I slide quickly out of the cupboard.

  Elvis! On the bottom step. Pulling off his boots. That same lazy smile. Teeth divine. My legs turn to jelly and I can’t think what to do, I can’t move. Then I see Mum at the dining-room door. ‘President Kennedy’s been shot,’ I blurt. She ignores me and glares at Elvis as if he’s the devil, instead of someone whose bed she makes every morning.

  ‘Here’s a pen,’ she says. ‘Now get yourself home.’

  Elvis gives her a goody-boy smile. ‘See ya, Sylvie,’ he whispers as he heads up the stairs.

  He knows my name!

  19

  I wish I looked like Nancy Peters. She has perfect skin and honey-blonde hair and walks with a Marilyn wiggle. On the other side of the catwalk, Faye Daley whispers something to Colleen Mulligan and stares into my camera lens. I get suddenly interested in photographing Nancy because I can’t bear Faye’s cat’s-got-the-cream face that she’s been wearing ever since I saw her talking to Elvis near the bathing sheds. Snap. Snap. As Nancy turns at the end of the catwalk and walks back to the rotunda, Lizzie says, ‘You look a bit like her.’