The Lost Child (15 page)

Our house has gone. No walls, no roof, a blackened square, like the picture of the Hiroshima bomb that Miss Taylor showed us in the old newspaper with the heading,
All Living Things Seared To
Death.
We stand in the yard, Mum and me and Mrs Bloomers, staring in the sun.

‘Nothing,' says Mum. ‘Nothing left. Nothing.'

Nothing
is the stink of gunpowder and burnt meat on Guy Fawkes night when the council has a bonfire beside the lagoon; it is the smell of fairy dresses, shrivelling and frizzling. There is nothing but the hole where our house used to be. I walk up the sunroom steps where there used to be a door.

Dunc's eggs!

All at once I am glad that Mum made me leave Georgie Porgie with Lizzie to look after. I kick at a blackened bit where there used to be a wall. Fine black ash sifts up in tiny mushroom clouds.

‘What about Dunc's eggs?'

‘Everything's gone,' snaps Mum. ‘You've got eyes, can't you see? We've got nothing but what we stand up in. Nothing.' She glares down at me as if I have lit the fire, as if it's my fault. She is wrapped in her fake fur coat even though the day is warm. It is not fur pretending to be a fox with tiny feet and toenails, like Mrs Winkie's got, more a shorn brown skin, a pale, scared bear. I turn from her frightened face.
It is not my fault
.

The path next to the Scotts' fence is covered with blobs of broken glass, blue and green, red and mauve and clear. I collect them in my skirt until I have a belly full of coloured glass, heavy as Denver Boland's beer gut, heavy as my heart.

‘The leadlight windows,' says Mum, ‘Melted in the heat.'

I collect more glass. I spread the pieces on the path and group them together in their matching colours.

‘Nothing insured,' says Mum. ‘I didn't renew it. Didn't have the money.'

‘We'll get a fund going,' says Mrs Bloomers. ‘You've got to stop worrying, Nella, you'll make yourself worse.'

I have five piles of lead glass winking in the sun. From each, I choose pieces to take back to the farm. ‘I don't want that rubbish in the car,' says Mrs Bloomers, stepping over me.

Maggies in the pines are singing up a storm. The smell of the Hiroshima bomb is up my nose. I want the coloured glass to melt back into windows, our house to rise up from the dirt. I want Mum to yell and curse like Mrs Winkie does when she burns the toast. But Mum is walking down the path ahead of me, a hunched brown bear still saying, ‘Nothing. Nothing.' And there is nothing in my throat except dry spit, and nothing in my head except crackling fumes and spitting flames swallowing our house with fiery tongues while people run in the street and fetch buckets, and everything is too late, everything is blowing up in our faces as we sleep in our beds on the Bloomers' farm, safe from fathers and fires.
At least he didn't torch it with us inside.
And everyone watches with red eyes and the heat pushes them back and what can they do? What can anyone do?

I lift my foot and scatter the glass. I kick it off the path and under bushes into the blackened dirt. Then I jump on any bits left; I smash them into a million pieces. When every single blob is broken, I follow down the path.

Mrs Bloomers is holding Mum's arm, leading her to the car. As we climb in, Sid McCready comes rolling down the road. Because he has a screw loose, he talks like a big baby. ‘Hey, watch out!' he yells. ‘Sid is coming.' As if we didn't know. He is panting when he gets to us, his head all Brylcreemed black and shiny by Grandma McCready, who still looks after Sid although he is a man. ‘Next time,' he says with shining eyes, ‘there'll be a fire with Guy Fawkes and rockets and bangers and crackers…Mick says next time I can let off the rockets…'

Mum turns from the car. ‘What did you say, Sid?'

‘He didn't say anything,' says Mrs Bloomers, trying to get Mum in.

I wind down my window. Now Sid is chanting: ‘Pardie Moon and Mick and the moon—'

Mrs Bloomers says: ‘Off you go, Sid, there's a dear. Don't hang around here.' As she climbs in, she says: ‘He's harmless really. But you never can tell.'

I can tell. Mum can tell. Even Sid McCready with a screw loose can tell.

The car rolls down the hill and gathers speed. Mrs Bloomers is talking, talking, but Mum and I aren't listening. We are looking across the lagoon at my father's house where he is standing on a ladder, painting his guttering blue.

13

Mum says she hates the smell of other people's stuff, and we'll make do with what we had at the farm. She hides the box under the seat that folds down to make our bed then looks at the kerosene heater and says they're dangerous things and we might as well go to bed and read. But when the wind squalls in from the sea and rocks the van like a baby's pram, she blows out the lamp and cuddles me close, and we are safe and warm in our caravan world.

I wake to her scream: ‘God, the roof's sprung a leak!' She bumps about in the dark and lights the lamp, grabs the bucket, the piss-pot too, and sets them on the floor to catch the drips. ‘God,' she says, ‘what'll I do?'

God must have suggested the tarpaulin in the shed. Mum pulls on her dressing-gown and grabs the torch. ‘Stay here,' she says as she opens the door. The light from her torch streaks past the window like a lighthouse on a wet night, searching and safe, despite the storm all about. Then she's back at the door with the tarpaulin in her arms, her hair plastered to her head, and her face potato-white.

‘Put on your raincoat!' she screams. ‘And your rubber boots. I need you to help.'

The rain in my face smells of seaweed and salt and the dead cat they found under the post office hedge. Mum has leaned the workmen's ladder against the caravan, and is pointing to a pile of bricks that she's carried from where our new house is being built. ‘You need to pass these up. Understand?'

She struggles up the ladder with the tarpaulin flapping behind. At the top, she tries to spread it out but the wind picks up an end and slaps it about. As I climb up, I drop the first brick and she screams, ‘Brick!' and ‘Brick!' and ‘Brick!' again. When she has the tarpaulin half-anchored, she moves the ladder and climbs up again to reach across the roof and bully it into place. ‘Brick!' she screams, and ‘Brick!' and ‘Brick!' again, until soon the van is wearing a canvas hat held down with brick hatpins.

Inside, we strip off our clothes. Mum puts on the kettle and dries my hair, refills our hot-water bottles and belches out the steam. Back in bed, we listen to the wind as it bickers and brawls, to the silence of thunder far over the sea. I wonder if the blocks beneath our wheels will hold and what will happen if they loosen while we sleep and the caravan rolls down the drive and hurtles through the tea-tree into the lagoon? Will it float like a ship or sink beneath the choppy waves? And if it bobs to the other side, will Dad rescue us or leave us there to drown? And what if he comes in the night and burns down our van? It is raining again, heavy like hail. Maybe everything is too wet to burn.

In my dream a log truck is driving at me and I try to run but my feet won't move and I'll be squashed flat. I thrash awake and my nightie is a sweaty tangle, Mum's arm wrapped too tight around me. When I get free, my heart is a jungle drum
—boom—
boom—boom. Go into the jungle and call: the Phantom will hear.
Soon the dream fades into a smudge of half-remembered things.

The wind has stopped battering. In the listening silence, Mum begins to cough.

‘They know he did it,' says Mum. ‘Or they wouldn't be so keen to reach into their pockets to build us something new. You can't tell me they don't know.'

I tell her I don't want to live in Wanda the Witch's house and why do we have to? She clutches a hot-water bottle to her chest and asks how do I think it makes her feel, living off handouts and knowing every Tom, Dick and Harry will want her undying gratitude as soon as the new house is finished? And she's not Wanda the Witch, she's Mrs Major to you. And we're lucky Mrs Major's in Melbourne for a few months helping her daughter who's had a baby, because otherwise where would we live? And have I ever thought about anyone except myself for one single minute?

Mrs Tucker is back at school with one kidney: everyone has two but one is enough to keep you living. Lizzie puts her ruler exactly down the centre of our desk and says not to touch her half. When Mrs Tucker looks up, Lizzie blinks at her with innocent eyes but as soon as she looks away, Lizzie inches her ruler further over. I push it back. She inches it over.

Colleen has made a Gang of Four against me with Faye, Lizzie and Shirley Fry. When I come near, they run off screaming: ‘Wi-ii-i-tch!' At playtime, I go to the seat under the pine tree with my book, or sometimes I play with Chicken and Roy Kearney, but then the gang yells, ‘Boy lover!' Roy says to ignore them because they are jealous.

Roy has nice even teeth and freckles on his nose like tiny spots of gold. He's almost as smart as me in class, and his father has a racehorse like Dad once had. He lives in a big house out past the oval with white painted rails and a special galloping track. Sometimes he has a horsy boy smell, but there is also a nice shampoo scent in his hair, clean and fresh as open windows. I am not a boy lover but if I was, Roy would be the one.

One playtime when Miss Taylor is on yard duty, and I am playing Brandy with Chicken and Roy, she comes over and asks how I like Grade Three. She says she's heard I'm still top of my class and sometimes doing Grade Four work. Colleen and the gang run past but when they see Miss Taylor their running slows to a guilty slink. Miss Taylor follows them with her eyes and says softly: ‘You know, Sylvie, there are some people in Burley Point who think your mother is a very brave woman.' She pauses, then adds: ‘I think you're pretty brave too.'

I don't know how to understand this and my face pinks up. The Phantom is brave and so is Julie Walker; Superman and Wonder Woman are brave, and also the boy in the city who rescued his baby sister from their house when it was on fire. Miss Taylor smiles at me and walks away. But her smile stays with me for a long time, even when I go home to have lunch with Mum because Wanda's house is next to the school and it is easier. Lizzie goes home for lunch too and runs past Wanda's house without stopping, probably because Colleen Mulligan said she should. I snap off a dead rose stick in the front garden and whap it around my head. If it was a witch's wand, I'd turn Lizzie into a lizard that gets squashed on the road and dries out like an old shoe, and I'd do the same to Colleen too.

Inside, Mum is on her knees, washing the kitchen floor. ‘I should be in bed,' she says with a cough.

‘Why aren't you?'

‘Why do you think?' She pulls herself up by the table leg. ‘It doesn't wash itself, you know. Clothes don't wash themselves. Food doesn't appear on the table like magic.'

My sandwich has. I eat it while she's emptying the bucket. On the table there's an envelope with photos of Dunc and me inside. Cele's photos. ‘Why'd she give you those?' I ask when she returns.

‘They're copies; the others were burnt in the fire.' She puts her face in her hands and starts crying slow tears. ‘I'm going to bed. Don't be late home.'

Before returning to school, I creep into the bedroom. Mum is a tiny mound beneath the eiderdown, hardly there at all.

Dad came in the night and burned our house down.
I want to spit the words out so that Dunc will know what really happened. How long will I have to be the keeper of the secret? We stand where the fence used to be, watching Shirley Fry's father and Mousie Tibbet, the carpenter from West End, hammer an asbestos sheet onto the frame of our new house.

When Dunc came home for the holidays, Mum told him the fire was an electrical fault. She said she didn't tell him in a letter because she didn't want to worry him. She said I was not to say anything about Sid because with his screw loose, how did we know it was true? So did Dad light the fire, or didn't he? I was too frightened to ask.

Dunc doesn't seem as upset as I thought he'd be. He says the house would've gone up like a bomb because everything in it was combustible. He says fires need oxygen, fuel and energy to get started; it was a theory invented by a French man but anyone with half a brain could've worked it out. He says he'll start a new egg collection straightaway because he'll be fourteen in a few months and when he's working he won't have time for collecting eggs. I look at him closely to see if he's telling the truth. He is taller than before and has grown soft fur on his face like a day-old chicken. I wish I could see right under his skin, under his blood and veins and bones, right inside his brain, so that I would know what he's really thinking, his secret thoughts about everything.

That night he says Wanda's house is an accident waiting to happen. He says the saggy ceiling above our beds in the sunroom will probably fall in and I'll cop the worst because the saggiest bit is above my bed. He says the rainwater tank is half under the house: can't I hear the water lapping? He says the floor's probably rotten and our beds might fall through while we sleep. He tells me he'll soon have a farm of his own and he'll run five hundred head. It is hard to sleep with worrying about the water under the floor.

When Mum's at work, Pardie comes around and Dunc belts out ‘Bye Bye Blackbird' and ‘The Sheik of Araby' on Wanda's pianola. Pardie gives Dunc a box with ten eggs for his new collection. There's a hopping dolly bird, a singing honeyeater, even a western whipbird. Before he returns to school, he finds a blue wing's egg out near Bunny Brennan's soak. It is his rarest and best egg.

I have kept the secret of our house.

The Phantom Julie Walker would not let her mother spoonfeed her dessert, not when she's just turned eight. With one flick of her head, she'd twist the spoon from the offender's grip. She'd spit custard into the baddie's face. She'd use the spoon as a deadly weapon and stab the baddie between the eyes until she begged for mercy.