Birrung the Secret Friend (5 page)

Elsie could make goat's cheese now, and goat's-milk yeast, to make the damper light, and a fish stew with potatoes and herbs from the garden that was so good
it could knock your stockings off. Mrs Johnson was teaching Sally more cooking too, because Sally had been a maid, not a cook or even scullery maid, before she'd done whatever crime had got her sent to New South Wales.

But Elsie still didn't speak, no matter how much Mrs Johnson coaxed her.

It was grand to sleep in a bed, to eat all I wanted. More than grand not to be scared all the time, to know Elsie didn't have to be scared any more either. But living with Birrung was best of all. Every morning when I woke up, I thought: There's going to be breakfast. Then my second thought was: Birrung will be there.

Birrung laughed all the time. Laughed at the men digging clay next door. Laughed when Mr Johnson brought in basket after basket of cucumbers, and got us to count them, which was a clever way of getting me to work out how to count to two thousand, because that was how many cucumbers there were. I learned how to eat cucumbers too. Ma and me had never eaten this ‘salad' stuff that the Johnsons liked so much, sliced cucumbers and lettuce leaves not cooked at all, but eaten with goat's cheese crumbled on top. I made a face first time I tried it. Took me a few mouthfuls to realise it was good — and Birrung laughed.

Birrung laughed at me too when I stared as she grabbed a big lizard by its tail and bashed it against a tree. Then I laughed when Sally screamed when Birrung took the lizard into the house, and wanted to roast it on the cook fire.

Birrung was like one of Mr Johnson's miracles. The whole colony was gloomy those days, stores running low and hard work they weren't used to, and strange trees and summer when it should be winter. Even Mr and Mrs Johnson didn't laugh much, especially as the baby Mrs Johnson was going to have got bigger. Mostly they looked tired, and sometimes a bit scared too, though they tried not to let us see it.

But Birrung laughed. No matter how weary Mr Johnson was after shouting a sermon in the wind, he smiled when Birrung laughed. We all did.

And whenever I got sunburnt picking corn, or a splinter in my finger splitting wood for Sally's cook fire, or missed Ma worse than usual, I'd think: Birrung has lost her family too. Lost her whole people. If she can laugh, then I can too.

Sometimes Birrung was just gone, all alone like when she first saw me. Don't think she told Mrs Johnson she was going either. She just went. But she came back,
bringing a fish or basket of native berries and once a big wild duck. Tasted good, that duck, but the berries were bitter, though I ate them because they came from her.

Christmas came, so hot the rocks felt like hearthstones.

Just about everyone in the colony turned up for Mr Johnson's sermon on Christmas Day, except for Sally, who stayed at home to watch the cooking pot, with the big frying pan out ready to bash any convict who tried to help himself to our Christmas dinner.

We sang hymns under the gum trees, almost louder than the big black beetle things that shrilled in the branches, and the seagulls that yelled on the harbour. I sat between Elsie and Birrung, in her blue and white dress. Birrung sang bits of the hymns too, and when we got to the Lord's Prayer, she knew every word.

I thought Mr and Mrs Johnson would have had Christmas dinner with the governor and the officers, but instead they walked back with me and Elsie and Birrung and one of the officers, Mr Dawes. Mr Dawes had just come back from trying to find a way to the big blue mountains in the distance, but he hadn't found it. He was as brown as a walnut.

We passed the new storehouse, with a tiled roof so thieves couldn't get in and steal the rations. The sun was
right above us now, so hot the air shimmered like it was melting. The harbour waves went
slap slop
against the rocks and sand.

Birrung laughed. She pulled the blue dress over her head and then her petticoat too. She dived into the water as bare as the officers' cheeks when they'd shaved for Sundays.

‘Abaroo!' cried Mrs Johnson.

I didn't know where to look. I'd never seen a girl without clothes on before. The native women had been too far away when we'd first come here for me to get a look at them. I'd never seen anyone without clothes on, except me. I shouldn't stare. But what if Birrung was drowning . . .

Birrung wasn't drowning. She popped up, her hair all pulled straight by the water. She held up a couple of mussels in their shells, and threw them onto the tiny beach by our feet, then dived under again.

‘You must excuse her . . .' Mr Johnson started to say to Mr Dawes.

Mr Dawes smiled. ‘There is nothing to excuse. She is too innocent to know nakedness is a sin.'

‘Abaroo likes play more than study,' said Mr Johnson.

I looked at Birrung, spearing through the water. I'd
never seen anyone swim before either, then flushed because everyone else had seen me staring at her.

Elsie gave a tug on my hand as though to say, ‘Come on.' Elsie had got fatter since we had been at the Johnsons'. She didn't look so much like a skinned rat now.

‘Why do you call her Abaroo?' I asked Mr Johnson.

Mr Johnson looked surprised. ‘That's her name.'

‘No, it ain't. It's Birrung. She told me.'

Mr Johnson smiled. ‘It's a heathen name. We must put it into the King's English as best we can.'

I looked around. The king owned all this, the whole colony, even though he'd never seen it. The big patch of corn, the beans, the melons and potatoes, the falling-down huts, the blue waves dancing on the harbour. And he owned the words we spoke too.

Birrung threw another mussel onto the sand.

‘I'll wait with her here,' said Mrs Johnson. She lowered herself down onto the tussocks under a tree. Her belly was real big now. She looked tired, like she could do with a rest before climbing the hill.

‘Are you all right, my dear?' asked Mr Johnson quietly.

She smiled at him and nodded.

So the rest of us walked up the hill. ‘Have we got Sunday school today?' I asked.

I knew we hadn't. I just wanted something to say, in case I looked awkward after staring at Birrung with no clothes on. After-church school was just for Sundays, when no one worked and had free time to learn to read and write and do their sums. Sometimes there were more than fifty people with me and Elsie, writing on one of Mr Johnson's slates or with Mrs Johnson helping them read the easy bits in one of their books.

‘Today is a holiday,' said Mr Johnson. ‘A true “holy” day. Did you know that is where the word “holiday” comes from? No one has work today. No hangings,' Mr Johnson added softly. Mr Johnson was always quiet when he came back from praying with the men going to be hanged. ‘A day of rest for all of us.'

Except you've had to give a sermon, I thought. Mr Johnson really did like praying and stuff, but it was hard work giving one of his sermons, harder even than digging in the garden. He had to shout loud enough for more than a thousand people to hear him out of doors, leading the hymns and things.

And it wasn't a day of rest for the convict on lookout on the headland, who had to make sure a supply ship didn't go straight past our harbour to Botany Bay, which is where the people back in England thought we were.
If that ship went to Botany Bay and found no trace of a settlement, they'd think we were all dead and vanished and sail away again.

And it wasn't a day of rest for Sally, because she'd been cooking . . .

I cheered up at that. I'd helped Sally pluck two young roosters, and helped Mrs Johnson stir the plum pudding, except it didn't have plums or dried fruit in it, but grated carrots from our garden, and berries Birrung had found, and honey that dripped from the honeycomb Birrung had brought back. Christmas dinner! Even at the governor's table they wouldn't eat finer than us.

It was more than fine. Sally cooked Mrs Johnson's recipes real well, for all she was a convict. Sally said it had been the drink that made her go bad back in England. There wasn't much alcohol left in the colony — and none for the likes of Sally — so she didn't have a chance to be bad again.

Oh, that dinner. The two roosters stuffed with damper crumbs and herbs from the garden, basted on a spit over the fire. Peeled potatoes roasted in pig fat in the Dutch oven and left to keep warm on the hearth. I'd never had potatoes all crisp like that before. Radishes and lettuces
and cucumbers with goat's-cheese dressing, and peas and beans from the garden, and no one made a joke about my name as we ate them. Mrs Johnson told funny stories about her family growing up, and Mr Johnson said how when he was eight years old ‘someone' let a mouse go while everyone was singing a hymn and all the women screamed and jumped up on the pews. I tried to think of any funny things in prison or on the ship, but there weren't none. So I told them about how the first time Ma went behind a bush here in New South Wales and lifted up her skirts a bird laughed at her and she got angry, thinking a convict bloke had seen her bare bottom.

‘You show yourself, you blaggard!' she'd yelled, while above the bird laughed and laughed, and me too.

‘We don't talk of things like that at the table,' said Mrs Johnson. But she was smiling too.

After that we ate the plum pudding, with goat's-milk custard all yellow from the eggs, and sarsaparilla tea to drink, made from the pink flowers up on the hill that Mrs Johnson had picked and dried. It was just the seven of us. The convict men only ate dinner with us when they were working.

‘And a surprise for you all,' said Mr Johnson, as Mrs Johnson poured out the tea.

He smiled as he went out to the storeroom where I slept. I wondered what it could be. It couldn't be big, or I'd have seen it.

It was a small sack, just like the others we hung from the ceiling to stop the rats eating the stuff inside. Mr Johnson opened the sack over by the bench. He poured some small dark red things into a bowl, and then put something orange on a plate with a knife. He carried them over to us.

Mr Dawes stared. ‘Cherries! And a tangerine!'

I looked at them curiously. I'd heard of cherries and tangerines, but never eaten any.

‘The first fruits of our orchard,' Mr Johnson said proudly. ‘It was worth bringing good-sized trees from the Cape.' The tangerine was a bit withered — he'd kept it especially for Christmas. He cut each of us a thin slice. It was funny, sweet and sour at the same time, but I'd have liked to eat more. We got eight cherries each, and they were even better.

I looked at the table with its cloth and empty platters and the rooster bones — I'd chew those after everyone else had gone to bed, if Sally didn't beat me to them — and thought about my happy belly and Elsie safe here next to me, not smiling but not looking scared either,
and most of all Birrung, so pretty and smiling in her blue and white dress, her hair still wet from the sea.

I thought: Who would ever believe that Barney Bean would be sitting and laughing with gentlefolk?

And when Mr Johnson bowed his head to give thanks again for the bounty God had given us, I think I almost understood.

Mr Johnson gave me one of his books to read after Christmas dinner. He had thousands of books, not just the ones on the shelves inside, but kept in sea chests in the shed so they didn't get wet when the roof leaked. He had brought enough books from England for every convict to borrow six at once, but he had to teach the convicts to read first.

I looked at the book. I couldn't even read the first word. I pointed to it.

Mr Johnson smiled. ‘
Dissuasions from Stealing
.'

‘I ain't a thief!' I said. I waited for Mr Johnson to say that Ma had been one — just about every convict here had been a thief. Truth is, I'd been too young when Ma was put in prison to know if she'd stolen anything or not. I hadn't asked either. All I knew was that Ma had done her best to keep me fed.

He didn't. He gave me a book about not swearing instead. That sounded more interesting — there might have been swear words I didn't know — but it was too hard for me to read. I pretended though, in case he sent me to fetch water for Sally and Elsie to wash the plates and pots, just enjoying sitting there, glancing up at Mrs Johnson and Birrung in her pretty dress reading their books too.

That's when I got the idea.

I waited till it was growing dark and everyone went to bed. It didn't get dark till late, being midsummer, so I had a long while to wait. Mrs Johnson and Sally and Elsie sewed after supper, and Mr Johnson went down to the hospital to take the sick people the remains of our plum pudding. I'd wanted it for breakfast, but then I thought about Mr Johnson telling us to be grateful for all our good things every time he said grace before a meal, and I tried to be glad I hadn't had my foot
chopped off or my head bashed in, like the folks in hospital had.