The Lost Child (11 page)

‘I have to get a photographer,' says Mum. She lowers her voice but I walk to the dressing table where I can hear. ‘I have to set the two of them up in bed to get proof. That's what the law says. He's agreed, through his solicitor, to do it in a hotel in the Mount but if he could prove I was out of my mind, he'd be able to do the suing and say it was my fault, not his playing around. That's what he wants.'

It doesn't make sense to take photographs of Dad in bed with that Trollop. Who would want to do that? Would Aunt Cele? Suddenly I think of passing Dad in the street and how he never looks at me. How when I try to find his eyes, he turns his head away: he looks at the footpath and his feet; he lifts his head and looks at clouds racing overhead, at fat white summer clouds, at rain clouds from the south. To him, I am not even a mosquito or a scarab beetle.

In the kitchen, cups rattle and clink, a chair scrapes again. ‘It's a dirty business,' says Mrs Winkie. Later, when she leaves, Mum pulls down the blinds and turns into a mole.

In books, everything makes sense. From Lizzie's
Arthur Mee
Encyclopaedia,
I know about
The Crumpling of the Earth
and
The
Story of Rubber
and
Columbus in His Hour of Despair.
It is a cold night outside but Mum and I sit close to the stove in our nighties, ready for bed. In Mum's
Women's Weekly,
a film star called Grace Kelly has married a prince. I wonder if there are any princes in Australia that I could marry.

Mum is reading her
True Confessions.
On the cover, a man and woman are looking into each other's eyes. She has yellow hair, blue eyes and red lips. He has black hair, brown eyes and pink lips.
Why My Husband Will Never Trust Me Again. The Other Woman.
Threesome Tragedy. Hollywood Hounds.
Are the
Hollywood Hounds
dogs or men? I've read enough covers of Mum's
True Confessions
to know they are probably men. At least in the
Secret Seven
they have adventures called scrapes.

In the May holidays, Dunc comes home from the city with a surly face. When Pardie arrives to swap comics, Dunc locks me out of the sunroom. I kick at his door until my foot hurts then I spy from Dad's old room.

They're on Dunc's bed with their backs to the wall and I can read over their heads—
Archie
s and
Batman, Roy Rogers—
no new
Phantom
s
.
Soon I get bored and sit on the back step and talk to Georgie Porgie. Pardie comes out and asks how it was on the farm. Georgie slides along his perch and makes kissy sounds at Pardie, who puts his lips to the cage and kisses him back. It sends Georgie berserk; he kisses his mirror, attacks his cuttlefish and gives his bell a good rattling. When Dunc appears, Pardie and I are laughing our heads off.

‘What's so funny?'

‘None of your business.'

Dunc's mouth drops open. ‘Are you cheekin' me?'

Pardie grabs him by the arm. ‘Come on, we've got better things to do than hang around here.'

As soon as they've gone, I think of Faye Daley saying my father has a new dog. A scared sort of feeling shivers right through me and I dare myself to walk past his house, maybe even sneak up the driveway and spy on his new dog. I've never been before. What if I'm seen? I swallow my fright and leave without telling Mum.

His house is still not finished. There are bricks and timber lengths in the drive, a cement mixer, a big pile of rubbish. It is easy to get to the shed without being seen: it is full of crayfish pots, glass buoys, marker flags, his jeep parked in front. The house has a flat roof and three big windows with a view over the lagoon to our house on the other side. Already there is a veggie garden on the slope below the palm tree. I creep around the side of the house and hide behind a creeper trellis.

Dad and the Trollop are right there! Sitting on the back veranda, legs hanging over the edge, no shoes. She has red polished toenails; her feet are huge. They look like dead puffer fish. Mossie is as cute as Faye said. He has golden fur, fluffy ears and wriggles himself inside out trying to catch a reel on a string that Dad jiggles in front of him. ‘Good boy, Mossie, good boy. Clever boy!'

What a dumb name for a Cocker. If I was allowed a dog instead of a bird I'd call him Sunny or Scamp, maybe Sammy. And I'd have a smart dog like Blue at Bindilla, or a real dog like the Phantom's Devil.

Then Dad starts singing to Mossie, or the Trollop, maybe to both of them, maybe to himself. It's more of a hum than a song, with soft words, but straightaway I recognise my favourite tune from the Top 40 about the doggie in the window with the waggely tail. There is a sound in that song that sticks in my chest and I decide to find another song for my favourite, one that has nothing to do with dogs. Then Dad jiggles the reel too close to the edge and suddenly Mossie's upside down on the ground. Dad and Layle laugh as if it's the funniest thing they've ever seen. As if it's a laugh no one else can share. Layle's hand is on Dad's knee. As if it belongs there. Dad leans over, scoops Mossie up and settles him back on the veranda. Layle says something about dogs and men with big feet. She giggles and rubs against Dad's ear. Now Dad's hand is on her knee and she is all peaches and cream.

Next door, without warning, Mrs Jones turns on her sprinkler and it spits over the fence. I shift to escape the drips and Mossie's ears prick up, so I stand rock-still, hardly breathing, because dogs have ESP. And right then Dunc
—Dunc!—
walks out the back door. Eating an apple. Her apple! He sits on the veranda edge, almost touching her. What a traitor! But at least Mossie forgets me and leaps all over Dunc. I decide I'll tell Mum that he was here. But then she'll know I was here too. Faye told me, I'll say. Or Pardie. There are plenty of ways.

I slide quietly along the trellis into the veggie patch. I rip off a whole row of runner beans and scatter them in the street where they will be squashed by cars. They are nothing to me.

Nobby Carter's bed is pushed against the window and his head shines like a baby's skull without a tuft of hair. He is Betty Carter's father and older than Grandpa Ted in the city. I had another grandfather called Black Pat, who was Dad's father. There are photos of Dad's grandfather, Old Pat, and Black Pat on the dining room wall at Bindilla. Old Pat has a fat moustache and smiley eyes. Black Pat is all black hair and beard and black eyes. When Dad was a boy he pulled up the ladder and left him down the well. He says he didn't sit down for a week. I like Old Pat best because Black Pat has whipping eyes that follow wherever I move in the room, as if he'd like to whip me too.

Nobby Carter is reading a magazine in bed, a magazine full of girly pictures with boobies hanging out of bather tops, some with bottoms poked in the air. He lets the magazine drop and Lizzie and I spring back. Across the road, Lizzie's mother opens a window and looks out. We crouch down until she's gone then take another look and see that Nobby's hand is wide-awake beneath the blanket, jumping up and down like Chicken when he throws a fit at school and twitches on the ground. Suddenly Nobby's hand stops moving and he lies so still that Lizzie widens her eyes at me:
Is he dead?

What if he is? What if he isn't found until he's stiff and smelly like Lizzie's cat when it died behind the school toilet block? Who should we tell?

We tell Mum. She says she's not impressed. She says he isn't dead. She tells Lizzie her mother wants her at home and hands me the peg bag. She wrestles with a sheet, drags it over the line and steps sideways as I pass pegs. Clouds race overhead and sheets flap in my face. I beg her to go and see. She says she wouldn't waste her time.

Mum hates wasting time. She lumps the clothes basket onto her hip and tells me she's just done the floors and to wait on the back step while she butters Saos for lunch. She says I can take some to Dunc and Pardie. I study the pines beyond Shorty's fence but there are no bouncing boughs. In the pittosporum hedge, insects buzz like the bar at Hannigan's. In his cage, Georgie pecks at his cuttlefish. In the dirt next to the step, the earth is freshly turned: Dunc's rosella from the bush is buried there.
It's your fault,
yells Dunc inside my head,
he died because you didn't look after him
while I was at school.

It's no one's fault,
says Mum,
birds like that aren't meant to be
caged. You know that, Duncan. I can't think why you gave it to her
to look after.

I can't think either. I don't want to think. I can't walk and eat my biscuits while carrying Dunc and Pardie's so I lift my skirt and put them in my knickers and, although they scratch a bit, I can eat and stamp my feet to scare away snakes in case they've forgotten it's winter and they're meant to be asleep in their holes.

At the big pine, Dunc yells down. ‘Bring 'em up to us!'

He doesn't think I can. But this tree has withered skin and knobs close to the ground where Shorty has lopped off limbs. I use them as a ladder until I reach the first big branch. ‘Where are you?'

The branches shiver. ‘Shit, she's coming up.'

Soon my head is level with their branch.
Don't look down.
They have built a platform from old fence palings and are lying on a mattress they must have dragged from the tip. I pull myself onto their branch and prop against the trunk. When I reach inside my knickers, Dunc's mouth turns upside down.

‘In
there
?' He gags and chokes and shows off in front of Pardie. ‘We don't want them if they've been in
there
, do we, Pard?'

Pardie grins at me behind Dunc's head.

‘Get out of here,' says Dunc, flicking pages in a magazine. ‘We've got better things to do than eat your stinky biscuits. And I know you dobbed to Mum about me going to Dad's. See if I care. I go there all the time, don't I, Pard?'

Pardie nods and looks away because I am a dobber. I prop against the tree trunk and stuff their Saos in my mouth. They read Dunc's magazine and pretend they can't see me eating. The magazine has booby girls with bare bottoms and lipstick smiles.

‘Nobby Carter's got a magazine like that.'

Dunc looks up with wary eyes.

‘Mum won't be impressed,' I say.

‘Mum won't know.' He tucks the magazine down his jumper and climbs to his feet. ‘Come on, Pard, we're getting out of here.'

As they push past, I slide onto their mattress and lie flat on my belly. From a lower branch, Dunc reaches up and shakes the platform hard, singing: ‘I said shake baby shake—'

‘She'll fall,' says Pardie, but still Dunc doesn't stop.

‘M-u-u-u-m!' I scream.

Dunc looks through the branches to see if Mum's coming, then slides down the trunk as fast as a circus monkey.

‘What about her?' calls Pardie.

‘She got up. She can get down.'

Pardie makes a sorry face at me and follows Dunc down the tree. A gust of wind rushes past and makes the platform sway. I yell down. ‘Half-cocked! Half-cocked! Half-cocked! Half-cocked!'

‘I'll show you who's half-cocked,' says Dunc, turning back.

‘Half-cocked! Half-cocked!'

There is dust up my nose and there are crumbs in my pants. Again the wind shivers the platform. Turning, I reach down with my feet, then I reach further, but somehow I am dropping and a scream is dropping with me, loud in my ears, someone else's scream, someone not me.

‘I'm not going back,' Dunc tells Mum, traps on his shoulder, straddling his bike. ‘Grannie can do law herself. I'm going on the land. I don't need school for that.'

‘You're not old enough to leave school.'

‘Try and stop me.'

Mum looks up from her staking. She has forgotten to wear lipstick and her face has faded. ‘Duncan, you're thirteen, you've got another year to go. By then you might have changed your mind. You don't have to decide now.'

He gouges his front tyre into the gravel. ‘I've already decided.'

‘Don't do that.' Mum reaches for his handlebars but Dunc twists them away. Her hand hangs helplessly in the air. ‘If you do law, you'll be made.'

‘I'm not doing law. Uncle Ticker says I can work for him.'

‘You've asked him?'

‘Yesterday. Outside the post office.'

‘What do you think your father would say if he knew that?'

‘I know what he'd say.
Workin' on the land's a mug's game. Who'd
want to be stickin' their arm up a cow's arse and cleanin' up flyblown
sheep? There's no point anyway, the government gets it. You're better
off sittin' on your bum
.'

‘You've seen him?'

‘He said he didn't want to leave. He said you kicked him out.'

‘You wouldn't understand.'

He turns to me on the back step. ‘Show me.' He grabs my arm with the plaster cast and reads:
Sylvie Meehan. Age 7. Burley Point,
South Aust. Australia. The World. The Universe.
‘Dumb,' he says. ‘And you're not seven until next month.' Then he turns back to Mum. ‘Why isn't she at boarding school?'

‘Sylvie? She's far too young.'

‘You sent me away but you don't send her.'

‘I didn't send you away.'

‘You sent Dad away. You sent me. But you don't send her.'

Dunc rams his pedals and skids down the drive. His traps rattle and clank along the lagoon path. Mum stares after him for so long that my teeth ache. Then she rakes all around in big arching sweeps until everything is smooth and neat.

10

It is the law, so Mum said she'd get Constable Bill Morgan to put Dunc on the train if he didn't go back to school himself. Now she's gone to the city because Dunc has been getting into fights and stabbing his compass into his desk, which is destruction of school property and Mum will have to pay.