The Lost Child (13 page)

Mr Sweet is not very sweet. He has a grumpy face full of fat freckles that join up like a map with white bits underneath where the sea should be. His hair is faded orange with comb marks in the Brylcreem. There isn't much space between his eyebrows and hair so it looks as if someone sat on his head and squashed it flat. ‘You tell your Gran she won't get better mutton than this,' he tells Chicken. ‘Tell her I'll eat my own head if it's tough.' He wraps the chops in white paper and ties string around the middle, then twists it back the other way and snaps it fast with his fingers. ‘Three bob,' he says, slapping the parcel down hard, making me jump.

While Chicken fishes in his pocket for the money, a blowie buzzes past Mr Sweet's nose. ‘You let that in?' he asks me, but it sounds like he's telling rather than asking so I don't answer. Mr Sweet swats at the blowie with his swatter, misses it on the chopping block and sends up sawdust from the floor as he jumps about after it. Eventually it hides in the window and Mr Sweet leaves it there with the other blowies to buzz itself to death.

‘Well?' he says to Chicken. ‘Spent it at the cafe, have we?'

Chicken turns out both pockets and looks confused, as if the money might be in his ear, as if he's on stage with the magician who came to the Institute and pulled eggs and pigeons from the air. ‘It's here somewhere, it has to be. She gave me a note. Maybe I lost it.'

Mr Sweet says: ‘The only thing you've lost is your brains. Come here.' He leans over the counter and pulls off Chicken's handkerchief hat. Sure enough, the ten-bob note is underneath. Mr Sweet pings the register and takes out the change, is about to hand it to Chicken when he stops and reaches for his pen. He pulls Chicken over the counter by the front of his shirt and holds him there while he writes on his forehead. Part of me feels sorry for Chicken, whose ears are burning red. ‘There,' says Mr Sweet when he's finished, ‘no way you'll be spendin' the change. In case it's what you had in mind.'

Chicken's face is fiery red. He turns to the door and I see Mr Sweet has written ‘seven bob' in big blue letters right across his head. Mrs Bullfrog comes in then and I can't look at her without seeing her in the bushes with Mr Sweet, her big boobies, and Mr Sweet is so busy smiling and smoothing down his hair that he gets my chops quickly and hardly speaks to me.

Halfway home, I find Chicken dawdling on the road. He is playing in a puddle, a small one left over from last night's summer rain, hardly big enough to splash about in. I'm about to hurry past when I see Chicken's still got seven bob written on his head. And as there's no one around to see me talking to him, I stop and say: ‘You could rub that off.'

Chicken looks at me as if the Queen has stopped to speak to him, so all he says is: ‘What?' and ‘Why?'

‘If it wasn't written on your head, you could spend some of it on lollies and your Grannie wouldn't know.'

He looks at me for a long time, just standing there in his puddle. I can see that under his handkerchief hat, under the seven bob, Chicken has blue eyes just like the blue of Mr Sweet's biro. And I see they're nice eyes with soft brown lashes that curl up like my bride doll's do, and his mouth is soft too, and sad at the edges. I think of his mum running off with the Rawleigh's man and then his dad disappearing, and for the first time I wonder if he knows where they live. Does he ever visit them? Are they divorced? Does Chicken cry silently, like me?

The whole time I'm thinking this, Chicken just stands there looking at me as if I've said something so awful and strange and wrong—so not like what the Queen would say—that he can hardly bear it. But still I go on. ‘You could spend sixpence and I could find a pen and write six and six on your head. She'd never know.'

Chicken is not good at sums. But, although he looks at me and looks away and back again, I know he can add up that one. He kicks at the water and a splash hits my leg. It is warm, like a cat's tongue. It dribbles down my shin to my ankle and disappears into my sandal. After a long time, he says: ‘I don't like lollies.'

It's not true. I've seen him at the cafe selling bottles to get money and straightaway heading for the lolly counter. And suddenly I want to be the one in the puddle. I want it to swallow me up and suck me down into the mud where Chicken's blue eyes can't find me. But I just shrug and say, ‘Suit yourself,' and walk away.

I'm on the lagoon path when I start to run, lumping the meat on my hip, nearly dropping it. Tears rise in my throat. I can see the party people in Shorty's shed and Mum's sheets flapping on the line but the tears are bigger than me, everything is bigger without end and no hope for anything. Before the path reaches the road, I push through the reeds to the lagoon. There is a tree bent low and I throw myself over a branch, roll my stomach backwards and forwards on the soft paper bark. I have the feeling of Mr Sweet's knife slicing into my stomach and how deep can his knife go and can it slice out everything? When I look up, I see my father's house wobbling about on the other side of the lagoon and I hate him and his house and her living with him there, her ginger hair and long legs. With my hate I peel bark off the branch, long pieces that leave pink underneath. In no time at all, the branch is stripped bare. The new bark is pale pink, pale as Mum's new dancing dress that she's keeping for best. I'm still crying, but not as much now. And I can feel this quiet place inside that wasn't there before, as if it was filled to the brim and is now emptied out.

When I return to the path, Chicken has gone.

11

‘Your mother is the most common woman in Burley Point.' Colleen Mulligan says this to me in a parrot voice on the first day of school, sounding just like her mother might sound. She blurts it out as if she's been saving it up all the long Christmas holiday and couldn't wait to find me as soon as the bus pulled in.

At first I just stand there with an empty head, staring at her. I can't think of my mother as a common woman; I don't know what it means. Then I think: She's got it wrong; she must mean the Trollop. And in a muddle of thoughts, I remember Bridie Maguire who stumbles home drunk every night from the pub. I could believe Bridie was common if Mum hadn't told me she was once a mother with a little girl who died from drinking poison that Bridie left too low on a shelf. By the time I've thought about all this, Colleen has run off with Shirley, and Lizzie has gone to play with them too, leaving me alone beneath the classroom window, eyes pricking, hands shaking.

Divorce.
That's what she means. Divorce makes you common. I know this from the way my whole body turns hot with something cold and fearful underneath. I see Colleen far away near the fence with the others and want to pretend it never happened. At the same time, I want to run home to Mum and hide in our house and never go outside again, ever. To stop myself from shaking and running, I take my library book from my case and hide in the
Secret Seven
world. Soon I am the girl who runs away from home and cuts her hair short to become a stable-boy.

I am in Grade Three with Mrs Tucker as my teacher in the portable building with the Grade Fours. She is stricter than Miss Taylor and has a rule of never any talking or you go straight to Mr Tucker for the cuts. No one talks, not even Chicken.

The year has hardly started when she has to go to hospital. Mrs Gregory, who lives on a soldier-settler farm and used to be a teacher, takes Mr Tucker's Grades Five, Six and Seven, so that he can be with Mrs Tucker while she has her operation. It is serious, everyone says; she might die.

Our new teacher looks like a younger sort of Grandpa Ted, red face, brown sweater, shiny shoes on little feet. At assembly, Jimmie Lewis gives the bass drum a few quick biffs, Miss Taylor lifts her hand and we belt out the anthem.
God save our gracious Queen…
Then hands on hearts.
I am an Australian. I love my country. I
salute her flag. I honour the Queen. I promise to obey her laws.

The new teacher gives a blast on his whistle and waits for us to stop fidgeting. In the row behind, Chicken laughs but it sounds like a fart and forces everyone in the front row to suck in our cheeks and widen our eyes to keep our laughter inside.

‘Stand—At—Ease! I'm Mr Allen. Like it or lump it, Grade Three and Four, I'm what you've got while Mrs Tucker's in hospital. Do the right thing and we won't have any problems. Anyone want to argue with that?'

No one does. There's a long silence while we think about the difference between Mr Allen and Mr Tucker at school assembly. About the way Mr Tucker sometimes plays his violin for us. The way he wears his Bombers hat and scarf on cold days.

‘Atten-shun!' barks Mr Allen, and the boys on the drums let rip. ‘Left right left right no talking left right.'

Mr Allen waits at the door, whistle in his mouth. As Chicken marches past, Mr Allen clips him over the ears. Inside, he patrols the aisles with a heavy tread, tweaks Roy's ear half off his head, slaps a ruler hard against Shirley Fry's desk, makes her jump right off her chair. He tears a page from Lizzie's book, says it isn't good enough, start again. He laughs at Chicken's drawing and holds it up for everyone to see, but when we laugh a little, he shouts that
he'll laugh his head off if he wants and we'll get along just fine if we
speak when spoken to and not before, or after, or in between, and do
we have that clear?

Yes, Mr Allen.

He is everywhere. At my elbow, making my ears prickle and burn. In the playground, pushing in to play football with the boys. On the day Colleen's away and Lizzie lets me join in the skipping, he holds our rope and turns too fast, laughing as we get muddled and stumble out.

Next morning, I tell Mum my stomach hurts and I can't go to school. She says she'll give me a dose of castor oil. I notice how she doesn't wear rings like Colleen Mulligan's mother and I'm sure that doesn't help with being common; even Mrs Winkie wears a gold band when she's not really married because she's a widow. I can't tell Mum about Colleen saying she's common, so instead I tell her I don't like the new teacher. She comes out of her bubble and blinks at me. ‘What's wrong with him?'

‘He smells like Grandpa Ted.'

Mum leans on the table and puts her face in her hands. ‘I've found your report card from last year. You love school, you know you do.'

When the jungle sleeps the Phantom wakes. The quickest way to the back beach is over the track past Dad's house. In the summer mist, my breath is a cloud. After a night of drizzly rain, the lagoon is squashy around the edges and the ground squeaks where I walk on it. At Dad's side gate, I see Mossie gnawing a bone on the veranda. Right then Layle walks out the back door.

I run into the jungle behind the houses where there is no sound except firetails and finches chirruping in the mist. Soon I am climbing into the boobialla, using my school case to bash through branches speckled with moss, through spider webs spangled with watery beads, through wattles dripping dew. Soon I am standing on top of the world with only the sound of surf on the back beach and water trickling off leaves. Burley Point is a pastel drawing before me: the foreshore pines finger-rubbed green, the lagoon an egg-white cloud in the middle, our house half-hidden behind the kurrajong, the Scotts' between us and Lizzie's, Chicken's across the street, Shorty's behind ours, a ribbon of smoke from Mrs Major's chimney, and the red roof of the school behind Shorty's pines.

All at once, I wish I was sitting at my desk next to Lizzie, shooting my hand up:
Ask me. Ask me
. Way up here above the town, it doesn't seem to matter what Colleen and the others say about Mum or me. And I can't even remember why the new teacher's smell reminds me of Grandpa Ted except a thought of grey trouser legs. That thought makes me turn away from the town to the back beach where a man is fishing off the rocks, standing too close to the edge, the dangerous part where the swell can turn into waves without warning.

It's Pardie! I can tell by his blue cap.

Shoving my shoes and socks in my case, I leap off the dune, running and tripping and rolling to a stop at the bottom. While Pardie is casting out and concentrating, I leave my case on the beach and creep onto the rocks. The water is icy but I'm close behind him now and my heart is warm with joy at the sight of him. His hair is long under his cap and his freckles are honey spots you could lick. In his bucket, there's a pinkie and a good-sized flattie.

He turns with a grin. ‘Whaddya doing creeping up on me?'

‘Wagging,' I tell him.

‘That's pretty dumb.'

‘You're wagging. So who's the dumb one?'

He arches the rod over his shoulder and flicks, letting the line fizz out before it plops over the reef into the deep. Straightaway he decides it's not right, reels it in and does it again.

‘I'm older. You'd better bugger off. It's dangerous here.'

‘You're here.'

‘I know what I'm doing.'

There is a sudden feeling of everything changed and Dunc in the city and no one to talk to about Colleen, and being teased, and Mr Allen. I blurt: ‘It's not your beach. Or reef. Or sea. Or sky. Or anything.' I slosh away from him through rock pools full of sea slugs and starfish and trapped spotty tiddlers. One pool is as big as a lake; you could drown in that lake and be washed out to sea and who cares what Pardie Moon says.

‘Sylvie-ie-ie-ie!'

I am not listening; I am walking on feet with no bones. But when I look up from my sloshing, I see Pardie running towards me, mouth shouting, arms pointing. He is too late: all around the sea roars into a wave and rises out of the deep, so huge and blue that I am stiff with fear and slow thoughts. Yet still I hear the sound of my terror, the silence of sharks, a drenching heaviness. Then suddenly I can breathe again. The wave has gone and Pardie's arms are hanging over my shoulders, his hands holding clumps of weed, holding them as if his fingers will break; and I realise that Pardie is the weight pressing me into the reef, saving me from the sea sucking us backwards as if we are pebbles. I grab at weed too, our fingers fishbone-white, holding on for our lives. Then the rush of water has gone and we are left on the reef like stranded fish.