Dog Gone
Published by Avant Press in 2010.
1000 Whitehorse Road
Private Bag 2014
Box Hill VIC 3128
The author welcomes your feedback via:
[email protected]
www.carolepoustie.com.au
Copyright of text © Carole Poustie, 2010
All rights reserved. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced or stored by any process without prior written permission of the publisher. Please apply by e-mailing:
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Cover design by Les Thomas and Ann James.
Illustrations by Andrew McLean
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Author: Poustie, Carole.
Title: Dog gone
ISBN: 978-0-9804484-5-0 (pbk.)
ISBN: 9781742982083(ePub.)
Target Audience: For primary school age.
Dewey Number: A823.4
Digital edition distributed by Port Campbell Press
www.portcampbellpress.com.au
For Margo
(My Grandma â Hilda Margetts)
Chapter 1
I couldn't open
the present. Not now, not after hearing the news. And certainly not with Mum and Molly gawking at me. I couldn't bear the thought of anyone else seeing what he'd chosen for me until I'd seen it myself.
I needed time to get over the shock. We'd open it later, in my room, Lucky and me. I pushed the pile of presents aside and stood up. âI'm going for a walk with Lucky. I'm not in a birthday mood anymore.'
âOkay.' Mum looked at me blankly, as if she'd heard my words but hadn't taken them in. âOkay, then.'
âDo you want me to come?' Molly's eyes were welling with tears.
âNo. You stay with Mum. I'll be all right. Come on, boy.'
As soon as he heard the word âwalk', Lucky started to wag his tail, running back and forth to the front door. I clipped on his lead and headed for the creek.
Then we walked. For ages.
The tears started at the footbridge. They wouldn't stop.
Grandpa was dead.
It was my twelfth birthday and I'd been in the middle of opening my presents. Unbelievably, the one I was about to open â I actually had it in my hand â was Grandpa's. The postman had delivered it that morning.
The phone had rung and Mum went to answer it. She came back into the room, her face the colour of milk. It had been Gran with the bad news.
A heart attack.
I couldn't believe it.
When we got back from our walk, I couldn't open Grandpa's present straight away. I waited all day and unwrapped it in my room before I went to bed. Lucky was eager to help. Inside the padded post bag was a parcel wrapped in rainbow birthday paper. Gran would have chosen that. Stuck to it was a card with my name on it in Grandpa's handwriting. On the outside it had a boy fishing â I was crazy about fishing â and inside, some birthday wishes signed with love from Gran and Grandpa. Underneath, in brackets, Grandpa had written:
This present is from me. Gran will give you hers when you come up in the holidays. She is still knitting it.
I could tell by the shape and feel that it was a book. That wasn't surprising. Grandpa was a poet. He always gave me books. Ever since I'd been little, he'd read me poems. It was important to hear poems read aloud, he'd said. It didn't matter if I didn't understand them.
Just enjoy the swish and swirl of words dancing off the page.
Maybe this was a poetry book. It was smaller than a novel and had a hard cover. I ripped open one end of the paper and Lucky helped with the rest. While he ran off around the other side of my bed with a huge chunk of the paper, shaking it from side to side as if he was trying to kill it, I held the book in my hands, thinking of Grandpa.
The tears started again. I cried so hard my whole body shook. Lucky looked up at me with his head to one side. He dropped the chunk of paper and jumped up on the bed. He practically sat on top of me and leaned his head on my knee.
âGrandpa's dead, boy. I can't believe it. He's dead.'
The book had a bright orange cover with the word â
Journal'
on the front. I flicked through the pages which were blank, apart from a fishing rod and a bucket with some fish in each corner. Inside the front cover Grandpa had written a note:
Dear Ish,
A place for your poems
Poetry - the best words in the best order
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Love Grandpa
Paddock after paddock
of sheep and brown muddy dams zoomed past as I sat in the back of our car on the way to Gran's. Occasionally, there was a vineyard or rows and rows of wheat in perfectly straight lines. My sister Molly sat in the front, arguing about something with Mum, but for the most part I'd blocked out their voices, preferring my own thoughts. Lucky had his head out the window, getting his ears blown off.
It didn't feel like three months since Grandpa had died. It felt more like last week. I got the journal he'd given me out of my bag and turned to the first poem I'd written, about the times we'd gone fishing together.
Photo
Sitting on our log
by the river
my Grandpa, my dog
and me
not moving
not talking
just fishing
This was the second time we'd been up to see Gran since Grandpa had died. The first was for the funeral. I was looking forward to spending the holidays with her, but it wouldn't be the same without Grandpa. He was always out the front, waiting, when we arrived. And after a hug, I knew what he'd ask first:
Written any poems?
No one ever asked me that anymore.
Last holidays he'd promised that next time I came up, he'd show me the old well down the back of the garden. It had been covered over with dirt for years, and I didn't even know exactly where it was. There'd be no chance of that now. Gran hadn't been happy because it was full of junk and probably crawling with spiders and snakes.
Mum's voice cut across my concentration like someone shaking me awake from a dream. âIsh? You're quiet in the back.'
âI'm reading.'
âGood book?'
âMy poems, that's all.'
There was a load groan from the front seat. âNot your stupid poems again,' Molly cut in, âthey don't even rhyme. You should get out more. Boys should be on their skateboards or out playing footy, not writing poems.'
âWhat are you talking about? I brought my skateboard. Look.' I held it up, as if I needed it for evidence.
Molly turned around and rolled her eyes at me. âIt's all Dad's fault.'
âWhat do you mean by that?' I asked.
âHe shouldn't have left. If he was a responsible father he would've stayed and taken you camping on the weekends and done outdoor things with you. Then you wouldn't need your silly poems.'
âMolly, that's enough,' Mum said. âThere's nothing wrong with Ish writing poems.' Mum smiled at me in the rear-vision mirror.
Molly believed a poem wasn't real unless it rhymed. I used to think that, too, and I could never find the right words. But Grandpa showed me how to write free-form poems, which don't need to rhyme. It made writing poetry so much more fun. Sort of like writing a story with a snippet on each line.
Molly also believed that Dad would leave. She said it was on the cards. I'd seen her slip into the tarot-reading tent at the Mind and Soul Exhibition. Mum was too busy trying on hand-made pixie sandals to notice. Later, Molly told me she'd been visited by a dark truth â a family member would soon be embarking on a journey of self-discovery. Well, if you apply that to Dad going to live in Sydney, I suppose she was right.
You didn't need tarot cards to work out that things were bad between Mum and Dad. The writing was on the wall, if you ask me. Or in the air. The atmosphere at our house was getting blacker by the day, full of their angry words. So it didn't surprise me when Dad left. But it still sucked.