I’ve chosen The Complete Works of Wordsworth and I, the Aboriginal. An excellent choice, said Mrs Truman when I returned from Ivy’s Books and told her what I’d selected. Seated again, I open the covers and read:
Sylvie Meehan, Dux of 3A.
Sylvie Meehan, Intermediate English Prize.
When I glance up, Mrs Truman is smiling proudly at me from the steps near the stage, but I can tell from the look in her eyes that she knows there’s no one there to see me receive my prizes. I open Wordsworth and read a line over and over: Her eyes are wild, her head is bare / The sun has burnt her coal-black hair…
‘Your mother would be very proud of you,’ says Mrs Winkie on the way home. ‘It’s a shame she couldn’t come.’
Her eyes are wild, her head is bare / The sun has burnt….
In Burley Point, the sky is black with no stars and only a smudge of moon behind cloud. Mrs Winkie drops me at our side gate. As she drives off, the clouds move, exposing a full yellow moon that shines on the lagoon like a lantern. But the clouds are fast moving and, as I walk down the path, the moon fades, leaving a strange glow on the surface as if the moon has disappeared under water.
I sit on the step in the darkness for a long time, holding my books to my chest, hoping she’s lying in bed worrying about me. But of course I get too cold and have to go inside. And although I thump around in the dark, although I tread on her legs as I climb into bed, she doesn’t really wake up. Yet still she reaches over. I wriggle away and try to throw off her arms, but in the end—because I’m cold—because it’s easier—I change my shape to fit hers and let her cuddle me to sleep.
*
A few days later, a strange thing happens as I’m walking past my old school. It’s a steamy hot afternoon with cicadas shrilling all down the street. A sudden gust of wind slaps them into silence. As if he’s right there beside me, I hear Dunc saying they’ve been stuck underground for anything up to twenty years and wouldn’t you sing up a storm if you were finally free?
I lean on the school fence and my eyes travel from the big old red brick building to the shelter shed and tennis court, the basketball hoops. And suddenly there’s a memory of running across the playground on another hot day, perhaps in my first year of school. I feel myself falling, sprawling, the softened asphalt oozing black beneath my hands. And as clearly as if it was happening before me, I see Dunc hurrying to help me up. ‘You’re all right,’ he says before running off with Pardie.
The cicadas start up again in ear-splitting splendour. But something is different. And after a while, I realise what it is: I’m not waiting for Dunc to come home anymore. He is right here with me.
After Christmas, Roy’s cousin comes from the city. Phil has long arms, horrible sunburn and terrible pimples. He looks like a Daddy-long-legs, spotty and scabby. He says he went to the Beatles concert and next day had the best possie outside their hotel, right behind a cop. When they ran for their car, he reached out and touched George. With this finger, he says, holding it up like a prize, this very finger.
Walking home from the beach with Roy and me, he sees my father’s jeep parked outside the post office. ‘Is it for real?’ he asks and he’s off, half-running, half-hopping, trying to stay in the shade of the pines so the soles of his feet won’t burn. It’s a scorcher. When we catch up, he’s sliding his hand along the bonnet, practically drooling. ‘It’s in really good nick. You know whose it is?’
I’m about to tell him when I see my father standing just inside the post office door, his back to the street, Uncle Ticker facing him. Dad is half a head taller than Uncle Ticker and, although my father is older, Uncle Ticker has more grey hair. At first I think he’s talking to Uncle Ticker and I’m so surprised I just goggle. Then I realise Dad is deliberately blocking Uncle Ticker’s path, and Uncle Ticker is deliberately blocking his: it’s a stand-off. Dad’s not shifting, and Uncle Ticker’s not shifting either.
Behind Uncle Ticker’s head, the big black hands of the post office clock are pointing to one twenty-three. Mrs Patchett hesitates on the steps as she enters: everyone knows Dad and Uncle Ticker haven’t spoken for years. I cringe behind the telephone booth, my face hot and hurting. And now my father leans in close and says something that makes Uncle Ticker’s eyes flit around as if he’s afraid someone might hear. Suddenly, unexpectedly, Uncle Ticker steps aside and Dad pushes into the post office as if he’s just won the lottery.
Uncle Ticker crosses the street and climbs into the Bindilla truck. Dad returns to the door and yells after him, ‘Done the dirty on anyone lately? Ya gotta be family for that?’
When I look back, Dad’s face is puffed up and purple. It’s the first time I’ve seen him since the day at the church and I can’t believe his splotchy cheeks and pocky nose. ‘Keep your pimply fingers off that!’ he bellows at Phil before disappearing inside.
When he comes out a few minutes later, Roy is trying to drag Phil away from the jeep. ‘Is it for real?’ asks Phil again, staring at Dad.
Dad drops a parcel onto the front seat. ‘It’s not bloody plastic, if that’s what you mean.’
Back at the mailboxes, he stabs his key into a box and bends to peer inside. ‘Ya finished sorting?’ he yells into the opening. After a moment, he slams the box closed and wrestles with the key, pulling and jiggling. Suddenly he stops and curls against the wall, his head on his chest. Roy looks at me as if I should know what to do. I shrug like I’m not embarrassed out of my mind.
‘You okay, Mr Meehan?’ says Roy, stepping closer.
‘Course I’m bloody okay.’ He eases up, his voice thin and reedy.
‘You don’t look okay,’ says Roy.
‘Mind ya own business.’ Turning back to the box, he reaches for the key and begins jiggling again. ‘De-e-e-e-ll! How many times have I told you this lock needs oiling? How many bloody times?’
He’s still hanging off the key when Dippy Dell appears at the door. She’s called Dippy because even before you’ve asked a question, she nods; even if the answer is no, she nods. When she sees Dad at the mailbox, her head threatens to nod right off her neck.
‘Some of them are a bit temperamental, Mick, it’s best not to…’
‘Tempra—bloody—mental! It’s needed fixing for months.’ He steps back unsteadily. ‘Go on. You get it out.’
Dell steps around him as if he might bite. Reaching up, she gives the key a delicate wiggle and it comes free, easy as that. Without a word, Dad takes it. His face is grey and sweaty and he leans against the wall, breathing heavily. Dell’s head dips furiously. ‘You…you don’t look well, Mick. Would you like me to…to telephone Layle?’
‘What for?’ He pushes off from the wall. ‘Get the lock oiled before tomorrow or I’ll do it myself.’
Phil is still at the jeep, stroking the metal rail behind the passenger seat. ‘Did you get it in the war?’
I’m afraid Dad will blast him right off the street. ‘Afterwards,’ he says, climbing in. ‘They were selling ’em off cheap.’
‘It’s in good nick.’
‘Doesn’t get much use, driving around here.’ He turns on the motor and raises his voice above the roar. ‘Maybe take ya for a spin. If I get time. If I don’t cark it.’
22
‘Why do I have to go? Why didn’t you tell me before?’
‘Because I didn’t,’ says Mum.
What sort of answer is that? We’re on the way to the Mount to sue the pants off my father. As the train crosses Stickynet, we see the Henrietta bobbing about on her mooring and we watch it slide out of sight.
In the court house in Muswell, I’m the star exhibit, which I only discover when Barry Hodge, who left school a year ago and now works in the court, announces in a voice that’s loud enough to be heard on the street: Meehan versus Meehan.
After Mr Drewe, Mum’s solicitor, tells the whole world about our case, he nods at me to stand. ‘The young lady in question is in court today. She is fifteen years of age and excels at the local high school where s
he is in Form Three. If she is able to stay at school, she has potentially a very bright future. Mrs Meehan submits that her daughter should not be denied such opportunities as can be provided by a father’s support.’
A blur of faces peer at my potential. My neck prickles and I want to fall through a hole in the floor and never be seen again. At least my father is not looking at me: he’s sitting at a table on the other side of the aisle, examining his hands. Outside the court, I did my best not to look at him. I tried not to see that the pants we were suing him for were baggy at the knees. That he looked thin and worn. As if I cared.
The magistrate tells me to sit. ‘And who’s representing Mr Meehan?’
‘I am,’ says my father.
‘I am, Your Worship.’
My father grins. ‘You are?’
A murmur runs around the room. ‘No, Mr Meehan,’ says the magistrate, ‘I’m not. But I am Your Worship, so if you’re presenting your own case, you’ll address me accordingly. Stand, please.’
My father stands and leans on the table. Referring to a paper, the magistrate tells him that nine years ago when the court set maintenance payments, he had an inheritance of thirteen thousand pounds and an income, from operating a fishing trawler, of two thousand pounds per annum. Has anything changed?
‘Plenty,’ says my father. He had money put aside, he tells the magistrate, but things have gone bad and he’s had to sell his boat and he has no way of paying anything to anyone right now.
‘We’ve just seen it,’ mutters Mum. ‘How could he have sold it?’
‘The best I can do is pay what I can if there’s anything left over when the bloke from Port Lincoln coughs up.’
The magistrate says he’s not interested in who coughs up what as long as my father pays a substantial amount of the arrears by—he looks at a page and chooses the third of February—and that regular payments are maintained thereafter. Case adjourned for a period of two months. Next matter, please.
Back in the street, Mr Drewe tells Mum he’ll follow up with a letter. ‘You’re a bloody dill,’ says Dad, barrelling out of the court house, ‘if you think you can get blood out of a stone.’
Mr Drewe ignores him and shakes Mum’s hand, mine too. When he leaves, Mum looks around helplessly. She has eaten off her lipstick and her lips are blue beneath. Winds off the farming flats whip along the street, snapping at our skirts, flapping the Christmas decorations already on shopfronts and telegraph poles. Suddenly she walks off and I’m forced to run after her, darting around people on the pavement, catching up outside the Farmer’s Emporium where she’s staring at wheelbarrows in the window.
‘Why’d you just take off like that?’
She still doesn’t answer. The window is full of flickering television sets all showing a man and four women at a big desk. One of the women says a man’s entitled to put up his feet when he arrives home from work. The others laugh and squeal and the man tells them they’re a bunch of drongos.
‘Why did he sell his boat?’ I ask.
When she turns, her face is bitter white: ‘For the same reason he burned the house down. Because he’d do anything to get out of paying me a penny. Because he can’t tell the difference between me and you. And because he doesn’t care tuppence about you.’
Elvis cares tuppence, ten shillings, ten pounds. Two days later he slows on Lagoon Road and waits up ahead, motor humming. I walk towards him on jelly legs. ‘Sorry about your brother,’ he says and I notice the way he looks at me, hesitant, kindly. ‘Didn’t know it was him…you know…’
I blush and look away and think: What is wrong with me?
‘I finish night shift Friday,’ he says, and when I look back I can see the kindness is mixed up with something different, maybe the same kind of wanting as me. ‘Got the weekend off,’ he says. ‘Saturday, we could go for a drive to West End. Whaddya reckon?’
I reckon the moon is mine.
Four o’clock at the jetty he said and already he’s ten minutes late. I watch shapes rippling in the shallows below and try not to feel as if the whole world knows I’m waiting for him. A ute turns at the roundabout, slowly, taking its time, but it’s only someone from out of town who drives by in low gear without even glancing at me. What if he doesn’t come?
Kelp on the legs of the jetty drifts and clings with the tide, strong and free like I want to be. On the sea wall, a cormorant spreads out its wings to dry and studies me with a beady eye as if it knows I’ve been stood up. I’m thinking maybe it would be better to leave than be stood up, when Chicken skids onto the jetty in a spray of pebbles and dust.
‘Whaddya doin’? Wanna go for a ride?’
Right then I hear Elvis throbbing down Main Street. By the time he rumbles to a stop at the jetty I’m standing by the side of the road, trying to act as if I’ve never met Chicken before in my life, pretending I can’t see him gaping after the car as we drive off, tyre rubber screaming. Of course he’ll tell Roy.
Thumping over Stickynet, Elvis nods at the rig. ‘Close to findin’ it. Down to three thousand feet. Soon know if it’s there or not.’ He grins. ‘Didn’t say that. Had to sign a clause sayin’ I wouldn’t. Between you and me.’
Between Elvis and me, there’s a wide empty seat. ‘Whaddya doing way over there?’ He pats the seat and I slide over timidly. He pulls me closer, tucks me right under his arm as if I’m a cushion.
He’s changed his hair: he’s lost the hair oil and curl; now he’s all soft and shaggy. Elvis suited him better: he’s too big to be a Beatle; he looks sort of silly. Chewing on a wad of Juicy Fruit, the wrapper there on the dash, he looks like Will Pickles from Coomandook. Suddenly I get a scared little lump in my throat and when he slows on a corner, I have a flash of opening the door and jumping out, but it’s only a tiny lump that I force myself to swallow like medicine. Reaching across me, he turns up the wireless and taps a few beats on my arm with his fingers. The Beach Boys. I get around, round, round, round…Then he lifts my hand onto his knee and I tap a few beats on his leg too, like I know what I’m doing, which I don’t. So I make myself sink back in the seat, trying to get calm. And I close my eyes for a second but maybe it’s longer because when I open them, we’ve passed the turn-off and settled to a steady speed.
‘You hear Pardie Pansy’s been back?’
Pansy? ‘Pardie Moon?’
His hand drops from my arm to my knee. ‘They reckon he took off with that relief teacher. Someone Allen?’ His fingers climb up my leg, tickling, prickling, a million ants on a mission. ‘Heard Kenny and his mates really did him over for being a pansy before he left.’ Pardie’s face before mine, his panic to leave. The Four Seasons…bi-i-ig girls don’t cry-y-y…Now his fingers at the leg of my shorts, poking, prying, my heart suddenly thumping too hard. ‘Wouldn’t be him if his marble comes up. Wouldn’t be me, neither. Who wants to fight slanty eyes?’ Suddenly his hand’s back on the wheel, changing gears. ‘I know a good place up here.’
I take a huge silent breath and let it out slowly. I see Pardie’s face all battered and bleeding and have to force him out of the window. We’re on a narrow track, overgrown with banksias and bracken that scratch at the car as we ram through. On a sharp corner, I’m lifted half-off the seat, thrown high and down again. Will laughs a silly-boy chortle, the sort I’d expect from Chicken or Roy. Further in we stop in a clearing full of casuarinas and she-oaks, dapples of sun trapped in the shade underneath.
The engine ticks into silence. He opens his window and lets the world in. I slide across the seat and do the same. The scent of she-oaks, dry and sweet, and far off the sound of surf running. ‘Ya know who owns this land?’ He reaches under and slides the seat back. And when I shake my head: ‘Your Uncle Ticker.’
So? He sits there looking all pleased with himself. For the first time I notice his leg jiggling on the edge of the seat, and I wonder if he’s as nervous as me, but why should he be?
The seat is warm and sticky under my legs and Will is looking at me with his blue Elvis
eyes, but all at once I can’t tell if he’s Elvis or Will Pickles, or some kind of big Beatle. And I get this odd feeling that he’s not really seeing me either, that somehow he’s muddled me up with Uncle Ticker, and having a Meehan in his ute is some kind of prize, like finding a fiver. But how could I be any kind of prize for anyone?
He takes out his gum and sticks it on the dash. A shaft of light catches his cheek and he looks suddenly young, like a boy, like Roy, and I wonder if he’s got a sister, if she’s older than him, or younger? Could she be the same age as me? But maybe all this thinking is a way to stop wondering about what happens next, what if I don’t want it, not really, and how will I know what to do?
Suddenly he’s leaning over and I’m leaning back and I’m lost in his lips, sugary sweet, and now I can’t think of anything except how different his kisses are from Roy’s little kisses, how hungry and dizzy and drowning. I’m slipping down on the seat and again there’s that scared little lump in my throat that might be a scream, but that is crazy because the rest of me is tingling all over, every bit of me burning up with the taste of him. And somehow he’s unzipping my shorts and, although I try to wriggle out from under his weight, I don’t try very hard, that’s the thing; part of me wants to tell him to stop, but I don’t want to do that either, not really. And all through the pushing and pain, I know he wants me; he wants me that much. And when he lets out a shuddering groan, almost a cry, a whimper, I’m so surprised and happy that a whimper rises up in me too and I want to hold on to him forever and never let go.
But straightaway he’s clambering out the car door, and when I pull myself up, he’s standing under a she-oak, wiping himself with a handkerchief. My fingers find blood on the seat, a smell like squashed tadpoles. A great empty hole seems to have opened up in my belly, then a rush of anger that has nowhere to go except out the window with Pardie, with everything lost and gone.
The Lost Child Page 22