The Lost Child (5 page)

4

Other times I've looked under his mattress, in the jar with his marbles, but never in the boxes on the shelves next to his bed. They are labelled in Dunc's curly writing.
Red Wattle Bird. White
Browed Scrub Wren. Rufus Bristlebird
, which Dunc calls
Hopping
Dolly Bird
because sometimes they fly so close to the ground that they look like little dolls hopping along. Would he hide his ring under an egg? I lift a lid. Inside are five eggs on a nest of cotton wool, marbled blue and pink, spotted black and white.
Grey Shrike
Thrush. Butcher Bird. Red Brow Firetail Finch.
No skull ring. I lift more lids.
Singing Honeyeater. Silvereye. Tawny Frogmouth. Rufus
Bristlebird.
Still no ring.

A shadow at the window of Dad's room! I jump back with guilty speed and press against the wall, harder, flatter. Mum making up his bed? Or has Dunc come home from Pardie's?

Dad! He should be pulling pots? I flatten smaller, my head a spin. Then the door opens and he walks right in. ‘Whaddya up to?'

‘Looking.'

Taking the box from my hands, he sits on Dunc's bed.
Common
Coot. Hooded Plover
.
Superb Blue Wren.
He lifts out a willy-wagtail egg.

‘One of the few that build two nests a year. Ever seen one?' I shake my head. ‘Here.' He pats the bed next to him. I don't move. He looks up and beckons with his head. I sit beside him carefully, warily. He smells of Brylcreem and whiskers and the soapy scent of his shaving brush beside the basin.

‘They're this big.' He shapes his thumb and forefinger into a small circle. He smells of something secret like a bird's nest might smell of if you sniffed inside when the bird had left. ‘Made out of grass and cobwebs and hair. When they're building their nests you see them cleaning the cobwebs off rafters and gutters and flying back with full beaks. Good-looking nests they build too, smooth and strong, you'd think they were made of cement.' He returns the egg to the nest and examines another. ‘When I was a kid, I saw them build a nest inside a dog kennel. You know why they did that?'

‘They liked dogs?'

He laughs, more like a snuffle. ‘Maybe. Could be. Mostly it's because they're not stupid, they know they're safe near a dog. Safe from rats and cats and foxes. And dogs don't seem to mind birds chirping above their heads. Whaddya think about that?'

I think he holds that egg gently as if it might break. I think he has fingernails bitten like Lizzie's. I think he might like Willy Wagtails better than me and my head is a muddle and the cat's got my tongue.

‘Once I saw them build a nest in a shed at Bindilla where a pair of Sparrowhawks were camped. Hawks are mouse-eaters and the Willies knew they were safe there too. Another time, they built a nest on the tractor and every time I drove the tractor, they came for a ride.' Is he telling a lie? When I look up his black eyes are smiling into mine. ‘It's true,' he says before I look away. ‘When the eggs hatched, the young came too, squawking their heads off.' He replaces the egg in the box and carefully fits the lid. ‘I reckon those Willies learned to fly a whole lot sooner than they should've.'

He returns the box to the space between
Brush Bronzewing
and
Western Whipbird
. Then he reaches to the top shelf and takes down a box marked
Emu
. ‘This'—he opens the box and holds it out so that I have to stand and move closer—‘is one of the best emu eggs you'll ever see. I found it for Dunc at Bindilla.' Again he sits on the bed and places the box on his knees, carefully lifting out the egg. ‘You want to hold it?'

It is warm and light, greenish black, a precious thing. ‘You probably don't know this,' he says, ‘but every season emus lay several batches of eggs. And you know who sits on the eggs?'

‘The mother?'

‘The bloody father. Doesn't even get off the eggs to eat, and loses half his body weight over eight weeks. And then he's the one who raises the young. The female goes strutting off to find another mate and lay more eggs.'

He takes the egg from my hands and places it back in the box. ‘Sometimes nature gets things a bit wrong, but that's how it is. Anyway,' he says, returning the box to the shelf, ‘you'd better be careful. You'll be in the poo with Dunc if you break something.'

When he's gone, I sit on the bed, empty of air. I hear him whistling in the kitchen, his footsteps on the drive, then his singing. ‘
…shake hands with your Uncle Mike, me boy…da da,
da da, da da…you're welcome as the flowers…da da…'
The car drives off. I think of him taking baby Willies for a ride on the tractor, their squeaky beaks and scrubby feathers.
Da da, da da,
da da.
‘Haven't I told you to stay out of here and leave his comics alone?' says Mum. ‘Put them back where you found them. You're staying with the Daley kids while I go to Muswell.'

Mrs Daley is the tiniest mother I know; she comes up to Mum's shoulder. I like Mrs Daley but not Faye, who bosses me around worse than she bosses her sisters, Dawn and Dot. Faye and her sisters are the dead spit of each other, only one year apart, with the same curly brown hair. At the Institute Fancy Dress, they went as Snap, Crackle and Pop, wearing big cereal boxes decorated by Mrs Daley. I wore my bathers and Mum wrote ‘Miss Burley Point' in red lipstick letters on a white satin sash. I threw up in the dunnies and smudged the words and had to go home with Mum pulling me by the arm and not speaking.

In the sunroom, I take my time and read Dunc's new
Phantom
. The Ghost Who Walks is feared by bad men everywhere. When Mum calls out again, I stack the comics next to Dunc's bed. The Phantom moves as silently as fog. At the door to the Deep Woods, I wait with the cunning of a fox and a thousand eyes and ears.

In the kitchen, Mum is dying. ‘I'm dying on my feet,' she tells Mrs Daley. She puts her head in her hands and talks to the table but the Phantom can hear a whisper through the jungle. ‘I have to see a solicitor. Get some advice. He's playing around with that trollop again, I know he is.'

‘What's a trollop? What's a solicitor?'

Mum lifts her head and stares at me.

The Phantom can knock a flea off a warthog at a hundred paces without hurting the beast. There are no warthogs in Burley Point but Bullfrog Fraser and his deckhand are first in with their catch, pushing their trolley along the jetty then crossing the road to the fish factory. Bullfrog's muscles bulge and the legs of his frog tattoo threaten to leap right off his arm.

He says: ‘Hullo, Blue Daley's kids.'

Faye, Dawn and Dot stop licking their toffee apples long enough to singsong: ‘Hullo, Bullfrog.'

‘Mister Bullfrog, to you,' he says with a croaky laugh.

Bullfrog has a bigger beer belly than Denver Boland, who is the Council Chairman and lives with Mrs Denver in the biggest house in Burley Point, opposite the beach. Bullfrog lives with Mrs Bullfrog Fraser near the Point. He doesn't speak to me because Dad says he's a creep. My hand is hurting from the toffee burn. On the trolley, the bags are piled three high, wet and dripping. Feelers, legs and beady eyes poke through the hessian and the crays thrash about inside. They smell of dead rabbit bait and deep, rocky reefs. Bullfrog lumps his cray bags onto the weighing machine which stands guard outside the fish factory door. I hear the crunch of broken arms and legs and wonder if the hurt from my burn could be as bad as broken crayfish legs.

Mrs Daley is picking fish, filling in for Merle McCready, Chicken and Sid's grandma, who is sick. We wait just inside the door while Ron Quigly lifts the big basket with the pulley chain from the boiler in the corner. Mrs Daley is first in with the others, scrambling to get the biggest spiders as soon as they're dropped hot and hissing into the trough, grabbing them before the steam has time to clear. Gert Nobel and Hazel Bird push past Pardie's mum, who doesn't seem to care. In their white rubber pinnies and boots and gloves, they look like factory ghosts, their hair tucked inside plastic hoods. Mrs Daley lugs her crate back to the picking table and beckons us over. Already she is separating tails and spiders, smashing her hammer onto claws and poking out meat with a long skewer spike. In no time she fills a box with cray meat, slaps it onto the roller belt and begins again, cracking, poking, picking. Faye yells in her mother's ear and because we weren't meant to be making toffee by ourselves, I keep my hand hidden behind my back. The fish stink is up my nose and when Mr Quigly starts hosing the floor I push out the door.

On the jetty, I lean over the rail and watch sunlight rippling the shallows below. Three gulls are riding the swell, chests puffed out in full sail. When I look up, Aunt Cele is standing outside the fish factory door, talking and laughing with Pardie's mum. Then Dad's jeep swings round the roundabout. His hair is swept up like a cocky crest and I wonder why he didn't go out with the other fishermen to pull his pots, and why Dunc is with him, and where they've been, and where they're going. And I see how they look like each other and I wonder if I look like Dad? Or Mum? Or anyone? And why Dad looks at the jetty but doesn't see me, and why he doesn't want me for a sunbeam like Blue Daley wants Faye?

When he's gone, I blink dust from my eyes and see that his boat and Bullfrog's are the only ones riding their moorings.
What
are we going to live on,
says Mum inside my head,
if you don't pull
your pots for three days? What about us?

‘Come on,' calls Faye. ‘I've got the lines. We're allowed to go to Stickynet.'

The inlet is full of secret underwater things swirling near the surface. Halfway along, we find the shady place where roots reach into the water. It is quiet except for dragonflies
whip-whipping
as they dip and dart, and sometimes the rumble of a car crossing the bridge. On the lake, there are pelicans and black swans with fish-hook necks and, further out, a fisherman pulling his net, his dinghy heavy in the water.

There is no bait. Faye says we should get a stick and dig for worms. She doesn't say how to carry them back when we find them or who is going to put them on hooks while they're still wriggling. I walk along the edge of the inlet, poking about, not finding anything. On the corner where the track disappears into the tea-tree, two cars are parked in the shadows. One is Dad's jeep.

When the jungle sleeps, the Phantom wakes. The jeep smells of dead soldiers and garage grease. On the back seat, there's a girl with big boobies smiling a faded smile from the cover of the
Post
. There's a green army blanket and a glass lobster pot with broken rope webbing, and on the floor in the front, a squashed packet of Camel ciggies. The other car is new and blue.

Where are Dad and Dunc? On cat's paws, the Phantom moves through the Deep Woods, taking care not to rustle the reeds. She creeps under hangings of Old Man's Beard. Suddenly, a low grunt behind a whiskered curtain and she folds into the trunk of a tree. Only a fool crosses the Phantom: she takes a silent step and parts the curtain a slit. A man's bottom in the air! Two hands with painted nails, pink as salmon fish, are pressed into his skin. They're doing the same as the dogs at Bindilla. The lady lifts her head and I see it's Mrs Bullfrog Fraser without her Sunday-school clothes! But who is the man? A bull ant climbs up his leg. ‘Shit!' he says, bucking up, slapping his knee.

It's Mr Sweet the butcher, Kenny's dad! But who's minding the shop? Mr Sweet has the stick thing between his legs and two hairy eggs either side that bounce on the ground as he scratches. Mrs Bullfrog props on her elbows and her boobies drop down to her belly. Then a car starts up.

Dad's jeep! I can tell by the way it revs and roars. Mrs Bullfrog and Mr Sweet look at each other like rabbits with heads cocked to the side. And I'm off like a rabbit too, hopping over dead branches, leaping through reeds, twisting around trees. I creep along the bank. I am The Ghost Who Walks.

Of course Faye sees me coming. ‘Where were you? We've caught two flatties. You're s'posed to stay with us till your mother gets home.'

I think of telling her about Mrs Bullfrog and Mr Sweet but a whisper can go around the earth so I don't say a word. She is lobbing her sinker into the middle of the inlet when the train whistles out near Big Tree turnoff. The cold words of the Phantom can chill a tiger's blood. ‘My mother
is
home,' I tell her.

The train noses out of the scrub and slows on the bridge. Sometimes the Phantom has to leave the jungle and walk the streets of the town like an ordinary girl. As I run along the bank, Faye calls after me. ‘The toffee was an accident! Tell your mother it wasn't my fault!'

Uncle Ticker is parked at our gate in the Bindilla truck, which means Grannie is visiting. Because Uncle Ticker is not a brother's backside, he is waiting in the truck. His ciggie flies out the window. ‘What've you done to your hand?'

‘Hot toffee,' I tell him, jumping on his butt to stop it smoking.

He winces. ‘Sore?'

‘Not as bad as before.'

He looks up the drive. ‘They've been at it for half an hour. Give her a hurry-up, will you?'

At the back door, I hear Grannie's voice, loud and bossy like she gets when she's ruling the roost with Uncle Ticker. ‘Divorce?! You're not the King of England with that Wallis woman. You can't just make your own rules and cast your wife off like an old shoe. I have to live in this town too. Have another kid. That'll get things back on track.'

Then a crash like a falling chair. ‘That ponce at the gate might like you running his life but I don't. Why don't you piss off back to Bindilla and mind your own business?'

Grannie barrels out the back door in her bunion shoes, blackbird hat, spotty dress. She beckons me down the drive and leans into my face. Her breath smells of scones, mulberry jam, milky tea.