A Small Free Kiss in the Dark (16 page)
‘Sometimes tribal people kill animals or birds to offer as a sacrifice to their gods, Max,’ I said.
‘Why would they want to do that?’
‘Well, it’s like giving up something good in exchange for something better.’
‘What sort of things?’
‘Things like . . . protecting the other members of the tribe or getting plenty of rain, that kind of stuff.’
‘But I thought Billy was killing Mona because we like to eat chicken.’
‘He is.’
‘Why did you tell me about that other stuff then?’
That made me laugh. I should have made it into a game, then Max wouldn’t have asked any questions.
Just before dark, Billy showed us what he’d been doing to his backpack the night before.
‘It’s a baby carrier,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen people wearing them in the city. Not exactly the same, but something like it. Try it out. Put Sixpence in. See, that’s where her legs go.’
He’d cut two holes in the bottom, one in each corner. When Sixpence was sitting inside the bag, all you could see of her was her legs sticking out the bottom and her chubby face looking over the top.
‘She looks like a little turtle,’ said Max.
‘I’ll take her tonight,’ said Billy.
I helped him put the bag on over his chest.
‘You’re supposed to put it on his back, dummy!’ Tia said in her smiling voice.
‘It’s better this way,’ I said, ‘because you can look at her whenever you want to.’
Tia’s pansy eyes looked at me slowly, then she tweaked my swollen nose gently between her fingers and kissed Sixpence on her brand new hair and danced away down the boardwalk like a feather in a storm. The rest of us followed, walking down to the sea with our provisions in my suitcase.
Billy lit the bonfire and I helped him make a hole in the sand beside it. When the flames died down a bit, Billy scooped out some red-hot coals and put them in the hole.
First we made Salvation Soup in the fruit salad tin. That was easy. We mixed Vegemite with hot water and added a packet of dried vegetables; corn and carrot, onion and peas. When the vegetables swelled up we put in some stale bread rolls. It didn’t matter that they were as hard as concrete because they went soft in the soup and made it thicker.
Billy had already cut the chicken down the middle so it was flat. He sprinkled it with salt and cooked it over the coals in the wire rack he’d made from mending wire. I tried not to think about Mona’s lovely face, because we hadn’t had meat for so long. Max and me got the drumsticks. Billy got a wing and the parson’s nose, because that was his favourite bit. It’s the part of the chicken where the tail feathers grow. Tia had breast meat and she found a small bone, shaped like a V.
‘That’s the wishbone,’ Billy said. ‘You’re supposed to dry it out for a couple of weeks before you pull it.’
‘I know,’ said Max. ‘Grandpa and me do it and I always get the biggest bit.’
‘Two weeks is too long,’ said Tia. ‘Let’s do it tonight.’
She sat on the sand with her legs crossed and she licked her fingers clean, slow and thoughtful, while we all watched. Then she held the wishbone in front of her, up against the inky sky. Her white hair streamed out like birds’ wings beside her moon-kissed face. She looked like a goddess. I stared, hardly breathing, with longing to be the chosen one. Then she pointed the bone towards me.
‘Skipper.’ I saw pearls in her mouth and the velvet cushion of her tongue and I heard the magic words come out of her. ‘Me and Skipper will break the bone.’
We joined ourselves together with unblinking eyes and a pinky finger each around the wishbone. Then we pulled apart with a sudden snap, and a tick of bone dangled from Tia’s finger. She closed it away in the palm of her hand like a charm.
‘Don’t tell anyone your wish,’ Max said.
Tia closed her eyes. I made a wish too. I wished that Tia would make the right wish and that it would come true.
After the wishing, Tia walked away on the wet and shining sand. The wind howled and the waves roared and her footprints disappeared behind her. She was gone too long. I should have gone with her and given her the silver necklace. The longer I had to wait, the stronger I imagined its power to be. Until Tia wore it, I was afraid something terrible might happen to her. Then I saw her coming back to us through a mist of salt spray, leaping and curling under the moon like the waves.
Sixpence slept and Billy cried while Tia danced. Then Max and me threaded pink and white marshmallows and chunks of tinned pineapple onto pieces of wire and toasted them over the coals.
‘Better get some sleep now,’ said Billy when we’d finished eating. ‘Early start tomorrow.’
‘Wait,’ I said. ‘There’s something else.’ I’d got ready to let Max go and now I had to do it. I drew a circle around myself.
‘Max,’ I said, ‘take your beanie off and come out here. Stand in the circle with me.’
Max stepped in beside me. The wet sand mirrored the sky and we stood in a garden of stars.
‘This is the Circle of Brotherhood,’ I said to Max. ‘A circle has no beginning and no end. That means that even when we are far away from each other we will still be brothers.’
We spat on our palms and did our secret handshake and then I undid the side pocket of my suitcase and took out the surprise. He gasped because it was so splendid. It was an Indian brave’s headdress. I put it on his head and the rooster feathers fluttered under the moonlight while I said a silent prayer to Max’s ancestors. I asked them to comfort him and whisper wise thoughts to him and guide his footsteps through the dust. Then I said the speech I had been practising in my head. I said it out loud so that everyone could hear.
‘This is the headdress of the brave, Max Montgomery; wear it proudly because you are very brave.’ Then I kissed Max because I loved him, and everyone I had ever loved before had gone away and I had never kissed them goodbye.
When I woke up next morning I felt the wrongness straight away. Sixpence was grizzling. I sat up and looked into the carriage called Hell’s Teeth. Tia wasn’t there. I got Sixpence and put her in with Max and me. It was a bit of a squeeze because I couldn’t put her on my chest. Then Billy came. The cold followed him inside and I smelt the salt and smoke on him and knew he’d been down to meet the travellers. I let my eyes creep open as slow as clam shells, and watched him feeling in all his pockets and looking on the floor of the Vampire’s Nest, where he slept, and on the platform where you wait for the ghost train that never comes, and I knew he’d lost something.
We didn’t have many things to lose. When you’re in a war or you’re doing a runner or when your friend is going away, it’s nice to have the same things in your pocket as you had yesterday. I closed my eyes hard and made a wish that Billy would find the thing he’d lost. That made me think about the wishbone and I wondered what Tia had asked for last night. I hoped it was the right thing.
Billy says everyone has light and dark inside them. When Tia’s light shone it almost blinded everyone. I was thinking about the night before and how her dance had been so beautiful it made Billy cry, when Sixpence started to cough. Then Max woke up.
‘Where’s Tia?’
I shrugged. ‘Gone,’ I said like I didn’t care.
Max put his finger out for Sixpence to hold. ‘She’ll be back,’ he said and I knew he was thinking about his mother.
Billy fed Sixpence and dressed her and then we packed our things, but still Tia hadn’t come. Max and me looked everywhere we could but we didn’t find her. We told Billy and then we went down to the boardwalk and I drew some pictures, but they weren’t as good as I usually did. I couldn’t concentrate. I wanted Tia to come back. I’d got myself ready to let Max go, and I didn’t want to have to do it all over again.
We waited. Trucks roared up and down the hill all day. Then the lights came on in the hotel. I was afraid then; afraid for Tia and for all of us. I wondered if they’d made her tell about us. If she did, it was my fault because I hadn’t given her the necklace. Maybe there was no right time. I should have just given it to her.
Then Billy said, ‘Can’t wait any longer, we’ll have to go.’
‘What about Sixpence?’ Max and me both said at the same time. But we didn’t say ‘personal jinx’, and we didn’t do a high five the way you’re meant to.
‘We’ll have to take her with us,’ said Billy.
‘What about Tia?’ I said.
Billy ripped a piece of builders’ foil off the inside of the shed and wrapped it around two bottles of warmed milk. Then he stuck them down the front of his jumper and buttoned his coat. ‘She mightn’t come back,’ he said.
I hoped he didn’t mean ever. ‘Couldn’t we wait till tomorrow?’
Billy looked to see where Max was and dropped his voice down low. ‘We might have waited too long already. They dropped another bomb last night. A big one.’
He lifted Sixpence onto his back. Max put his brave’s headdress on and we filled our pockets with stones. I held his hand when we got to the train tracks. We were heading towards the city where precision bombs flattened churches and libraries. I was going to give my best friend back to his mother. Billy had a baby who didn’t belong to him. He hadn’t found whatever he’d lost and none of us knew where Tia was. I felt the wrongness of all these things inside me like grit inside my shoe.
The wind howled like wild dogs along the electricity wires, and we looked every way trying to see more than the deep blue darkness. The cold bit into Billy’s bad leg and made him limp even more than usual. Sometimes we thought we heard voices – whispering, singing, crying voices – as we walked between the high, graffiti-covered walls. Sixpence was coughing again, and when we got to the north spur Billy stopped. For a minute I thought he’d tricked us; that he was taking us to the refuge.
‘Pull her hat down around her face,’ he said.
I pulled the tea-cosy right down and put the hole for the handle around the front, so Sixpence could breathe. Max and me laughed. It was the first noise we’d made for ages, and it sounded good.
‘Finished?’ Billy asked.
‘Yes,’ said Max, ‘you can just see her little nose sticking out.’
Billy started to sing as he walked:
‘I love Sixpence, pretty little Sixpence,
I love Sixpence better than my life.’
Then he whistled a bit and I looked into the distance, trying to see the fire in Albert’s tunnel. They say that on a clear, dark night you can see a candle burning from fifty kilometres away.
‘Are we nearly at Albert’s place?’ asked Max.
‘Must be close,’ said Billy.
‘Let’s guess how many cat-and-dogs, Max,’ I said. Max didn’t know that was how you counted seconds, I had to tell him. ‘Every time you say cat-and-dog, that’s one second,’ I said. ‘Like this: one cat-and-dog, two cat-and-dogs, three cat-and-dogs. See, that’s three seconds. Guess how many to Albert’s tunnel and then we’ll count. I say it will be . . . seventy-seven cat-and-dogs. No, one hundred and eleven.’ I picked a high number on purpose so Max would get a surprise when it was sooner.
‘I can’t count to that many,’ Max said.
‘Doesn’t matter, I’ll help you. What’s your guess?’
‘I say . . . twenty-six cat-and-dogs!’
I lost count a few times, but I got to two hundred and nineteen cat-and-dogs before we saw what was left of Albert’s tunnel. It used to be a square tunnel, made out of concrete panels, but something had landed on it and smashed one of the walls, and the roof had slid down. Now the tunnel looked like a crooked ‘A’. I didn’t want to go in there, but we had to because Sixpence was crying. Her voice sounded thick and strange.
‘She needs a drink,’ Billy said. He switched on his torch and shone it around inside. In the corner, where part of the tunnel had caved in altogether, I saw a heap of rags. I thought it might be Albert, but Billy flashed his torch away before I got a proper look. Then he took his backpack off. He passed Sixpence to me. ‘She’s hot,’ he said, feeling her forehead.
‘Should I take her hat off?’
‘No, just feed her while I get a fire going.’
He gave me a bottle and I crossed my legs and nursed Sixpence inside my coat the way Tia did. I had to be careful so it wouldn’t hurt too much, but I needed to feel someone warm and alive next to me. It wasn’t long before I started thinking about Tia. I wondered where she was and I hoped she had her red coat on and that she wasn’t scared.
Once the fire was going, Billy and Max and me ate ginger biscuits and drank tea, then Billy took out his Hohner. I lay down beside Sixpence with our hearts touching. I didn’t hear the strangers come. I saw their faces in the firelight and thought they were God’s red children. On the wall behind them I saw my primitive drawings and Max’s handprint and mine, together for always. I thought my prayers to Max’s ancestors had been answered and they had come to comfort him and whisper wise thoughts and guide his footsteps through the dust. Then I saw their faces; they were pale as ash and their eyes were like black holes. They looked like the living dead: like zombies.
I heard Billy talking. He sounded peaceful and I saw him take the ginger biscuits from Max’s bag and put the used teabags back into the water in the fruit salad tin. So I looked at the strangers through slits between my eyelids. There were two men, one old and one younger, a woman who might have been someone’s mother, and a boy who looked a bit older than me. They had bags and bundles and I saw that they weren’t really zombies; they were like us, God’s pale children. But I knew Billy would have helped them no matter what colour they were.