The Lost Child (2 page)

Then Dunc is there, yanking me out with strong arms, thumping me on the back.

‘Shit,' he says as I cough and choke. ‘Didn't I tell you to stay on the beach? Didn't I?' Thump, cough, thump. ‘Shit,' as he leads me ashore and sits me in the shelter of the old boat that lies on its side in the sand. ‘Shit,' as he wraps his towel over my shoulders with kind, clumsy hands. But when Pardie and Kenny come to gawk: ‘Now stay here, like I told ya. And don't tell Mum.'

When they leave I watch the jetty dancing on criss-crossed legs all the way to the end. The cold has climbed up my nose, even my hair shivers. I try to find Dad's boat in the middle of the others, but although the
Henrietta
is the biggest in the fleet, there are too many boats. The sun warms the top of my head but my teeth still rattle in fright and my fingers are witchetty grubs, wrinkled and white. Then, as I dig in the warm sand, right there under my hand is buried treasure, paper money with the new Queen's head on it.

I run to the change sheds. Two big girls are smoking in the dunnies but I dress with my back to them and don't let them see my money. I leave my bathers and towel in the old boat with Dunc's towel, then I run along the sea wall, past Denver Boland's big white house, past the rotunda and the harbourmaster's house, over the road to Mrs Cronk's shop.

Mrs Cronk looks like a fox with bushy, red hair. Her eyes behind her glasses are bigger than her mouth. Her shop is opposite the playground, near the roundabout with the big pine. Once she told us to stay off the slippery slide if we couldn't use it properly, that we'd break our necks going down backwards. Faye Daley gave her the rude sign and Mrs Cronk called out that she'd wallop the living daylights out of us if she had more time. Her shop smells of mothballs. The holiday people who stay in the rooms above smell the same. So do the cottons and wool and knitting needles, the hats and beach towels.

My friend Lizzie is at the counter with her big sister, Mary, who is home from boarding school in the Mount for the weekend. ‘A pound!' says Mary when I show her my money. ‘Finders keepers. What are you going to buy?'

‘A present. A present for my Dad.'

Mrs Cronk looks at me with her magnified eyes as if she recognises me from the park. Then she says she has just the thing; it is a piece of round glass with the Queen's head inside. She says it is a paperweight to put on your papers. I can't think why Dad would want the Queen sitting on his paper because when he's finished with it, Mum tears out the crossword and screws up the pages to start the fire. Mrs Cronk says one day it will be a collector's piece. Mary and Lizzie don't say anything and when I look up, they are at the shop window.

‘The circus,' says Mary, grabbing Lizzie's hand, turning to me. ‘Want to come?' Then she sees my pound on the counter and Mrs Cronk's fox fingers scratching towards it. Mary gets it first. ‘Don't lose it,' she hisses as we push through the door. ‘You give it away when you buy something.' She pulls Lizzie and me past the petrol bowser.

All the way from Stickynet Bridge to the harbourmaster's house, people are running off the beach to watch the circus crawl into town. Dunc is propped on his bike across the road when he should be looking after me and not letting me out of his sight for one minute. I want to show him my pound but he is blocked from my view by a car with fins bigger than the white pointer Dad caught off West End. Then vans with curtained windows and trucks with high sides covered in painted lions and clowns with fat lips and sad eyes. Then an elephant on a tray truck with chains on his feet and one angry eye that looks right into mine. And a camel with a long waving neck and yellow teeth, but no real lions or tigers or monkeys or bears.

Mary says they are inside the cages with boards on the side and we have to get to the oval to see them unloaded. She says there are jobs and free tickets but we have to hurry.

‘Come on!' she says as the last truck turns at the roundabout pine. Pardie, Dunc and Kenny are already tailing the trucks and vans on their bikes. She says we'll take a short cut and yanks Lizzie and me across the street, through the park and under the pines near the fish factory. At the goods shed, with its wide-open doors and black hole under the floor that sometimes hides tramps and once a dead dog, she pulls us onto the railway track. ‘Hurry!' she says, showing us how to jump from sleeper to sleeper.

I don't like this two-handed closeness. I try to get free but I am tied to Mary like an extra-long arm. I am afraid the train will come and we'll be squashed flat but when I look back there are only two rail tracks running into the scrub and a huge blue sky above.

When we get to the spot behind the oval where the circus sets up, Dunc and the others are already there. ‘Damn, shit, damn,' says Mary, going straight to the man in the cowboy hat. He says she is too late, that he has all the help he needs. Mary says she worked for him last year, doesn't he remember? He says for God's sake he travels all over Australia, does she think he remembers every kid he meets?

‘I'm not every kid. You said I was the best girl worker you'd ever had. You put your hand up my jumper and told me I had the juiciest apples you'd ever seen. Remember?'

Lizzie and I look at Mary's apples. So does the man. ‘Creep,' she says, pulling us away from him.

Lizzie and I pretend we can't see angry tears on Mary's freckles. We follow her past the monkey's cage without stopping; Mary says she hates their red bottoms. Behind the vans, the circus people are stringing up clotheslines and unpacking pots. A lady with yellow hair says: ‘Clear off out of here.'

‘Make me,' says Mary, and we run, cheeking and giggling, towards the clearing where the big tent is spread on the ground with circus men banging in pegs and Dunc lumping a hay bale towards the animal cages. Then a loud shriek and a fur ball leaps onto a van before running along the top and swinging onto a cable connected to a trailer.

A man yells: ‘Free tickets to anyone who catches 'im!'

Mary is off like John Landy. Pardie, Dunc, all the big boys, Chicken McCready too, everyone yelling at everyone else to cut it off here, there, somewhere, but as the monkey bounces off a truck onto the grass, Mary is way out in front, racing across the clearing, Lizzie bobbing behind.

Before I can follow, everyone disappears into the muddy shadows beneath the tea-tree on the edge of the lake. The sun sparkles on the surface; on the far side, yellow dunes slide into the water. It is warm behind the cages with no wind and no one except me. The circus people hammer. The lion roars in his cage.

Then I hear a kitten cry.

I look behind the vans; it is tied to a wheel with a black leather lead and a red collar. It is the most beautiful kitten I've ever seen, more beautiful than our Fluff, a soft brown like Lizzie's old cat, and with big yellow eyes. I pat the circus kitten and it stops crying. I tickle it under its collar, under its chin, behind its ears, until it purrs and tries to nibble my fingers. I think about how much Fluff likes Dad and he likes Fluff. I untie the circus kitten. I tuck my pound under the kitten's bowl and leave a bit poking out for the circus people to see.

I have the best present for my dad.

2

On the pockmarked land behind the oval, the kitten sniffs down rabbit holes. At the rail tracks, it pulls on its lead and gives a loud
miaow
that makes my neck shiver. Before crossing the street, I scoop it into my arms. It is bigger than Fluff and has a horsy smell. It needs a good wash.

You're mine now,
I tell it.
You'll like living with Fluff and my
dad better than a circus.

Hannigan's veranda has red and blue tiles that are good for hopscotch. I don't like the bee-swarming noise in the bar or the beer smell that creeps under the door, but I have a rest on the bench under the coloured glass window. The kitten stretches at my feet and licks its paws. I think about a kitten being a better present than a beer mug. I have to get it home before Dunc gets back from the circus. And I need a box with air holes in the side like Lizzie's silkworms have for a house. I need a ribbon to tie up the box like a proper present.

Just then Augie Moon pushes out the door. He is Pardie's father. He sways as he looks at me, as if I am swaying too. ‘Waitin' for your dad?' he says, and, before I can reply, he tosses his butt in the gutter and lurches off the step. ‘You'll be waitin',' he calls as he heads down the path to the dunnies.

A dusty black car drives by, full of farm kids with laughing heads and arms and legs and beach towels hanging out of windows. They hoot and wave and make so much noise that the kitten takes fright and almost tugs the lead out of my hand. It hides under the bench and when I reach down it hisses at me with white teeth bared; it has a lot of them. I pull gently on the lead and whisper words like Mrs Daley's sister whispers to her new baby.
There,
there, you funny little thing, it's all right, you've got me to look after
you, there, there.
The kitten puts its teeth back in its mouth but still won't come out. I remember Grannie Meehan's kittens that were put in a bag with a brick and dropped in the dam at Bindilla, but I don't want to think about drowned things so I get bossy and give the kitten a good hard yank.

It walks over the hill past Mr Hammet's house, then hears something in the boobialla and drags its belly on the ground in a prowling stalk. I tell it we need to hurry and when it doesn't, I bundle it into my arms and carry it like a parcel, down the slope, along the lagoon path, past Shorty Manne's house. It doesn't wriggle too much but when I try to open our gate, it twists and scratches, then leaps onto the grass. There is blood on my wrist but I don't stop to lick. I pull the kitten up the drive, saying,
Hurry,
hurry,
the whole time.

Mum is at the well behind the hedge. She doesn't see me creep through the nasturtiums and into the old shed that backs onto Shorty's fence. She doesn't see me creep out again and return with a bowl of milk. She is dribbling a bucket of water over her veggie seedlings when I slide out of the shed and ask if she has a box with air holes.

‘What for? No I haven't.' Then from the well: ‘I need you in the tub. I want you fed and in bed before your father gets home.'

In the bath, I decide that when Dad comes in I'll say I have to go to the dunny, then I'll untie the kitten from the post. Already I can see Dad's surprise.
What'd I do to deserve this?
He might even pick me up and swing me around like Blue Daley does with Faye.
What a beaut
.
We'd better give him a name. Whaddya say?

‘How did you get that?' says Mum, soaping my scratched wrist.

I almost tell her. It is hard keeping something so good locked inside. But then Dunc bangs into the laundry porch. ‘I've got a free ticket for the circus. I caught a monkey that escaped. I have to be ready at seven. I'm going with Pardie and Kenny.'

‘Get the milk,' says Mum, ‘or you won't be going anywhere.'

When Dunc returns from the kitchen with the billy, his eyes are as big as tombowlers. ‘Someone stole a lion cub. What if it escapes into the bush and becomes a sheep-killer like the Tantanoola tiger?'

‘What if you're not home in time to go to the circus?'

‘What's a cub?' I ask when Dunc leaves. But already I know.

‘A baby lion,' says Mum, towelling me.

‘What colour?'

‘Brown, I suppose.'

‘Where's my black hole of Calcutta?'

‘It's not yours. It's in India.'

‘Where's India?'

But Mum has finished answering and when I am dressed I let her feed me peaches and cream without once biting the spoon and telling her I am old enough to feed myself. I try to find her eyes, to ask what I should do about the cub, but she is lost in her bubble where she smokes her ciggie and feeds me in a dreamy way as if her bubble has floated away and I've gone too.

In bed, I pull up the sheet and squeeze my eyes tight. I try not to think about the lion in our shed but still I can hear it begging to go back to the circus; it is the sound of cats drowning in dams and tearing open bags and ripping my skin into soup-bone meat and no hands to save me.

Then Dad's jeep stops at the gate and I poke out my nose. Mum has a tea-towel bunched in her hands. She sets Dad's plate on the table. I hear him kick off his boots and splash water in the laundry trough. Then: ‘Bloody hell! What was that?'

Mum sucks her top lip right into her mouth; she does this when she has no words.

Then again: ‘Bloody hell! It's a rat, big as a cat.'

Mum shakes her head and covers Dad's plate with a saucepan lid. I follow into the laundry porch. Dad is bent over the trough, poking behind with a broom.

‘Watch out!' he yells, jumping back. ‘It's a rat, a big bugger.' He has bleary eyes and a skinful of beer. ‘Get a trap,' he tells Mum.

Mum says she won't set a trap in case they catch the cat. She flicks on the light near the kitchen door. She says Dad's tea is on the table getting cold. She says it might be an old house but they've never had rats before, it's probably only a mouse. ‘You're so worse for wear,' she says, ‘you wouldn't know what it was if it bit you on the nose.'

Dad is spread on the floor like a starfish, poking under the trough and the shoe cupboard in the corner. ‘I know what I bloody saw.' He climbs to his feet and steadies himself with the broom. ‘It's a bloody rat. And if it climbs into your bed, don't blame me.'

Mum marches me back to bed and looks all around with a worried frown. When she is gone, I search with prowling eyes, under the dressing table, in the corner, in the dark place next to the wardrobe. Then I pull up the spread and look under my bed. Lion eyes stare back at me.

What now? Can I toss him out the window? What if I do and he grows up and steals sheep like the Tantanoola tiger did until he was caught and stuffed and put in a glass box in the Tantanoola Pub? What if Constable Morgan finds out and I am taken away like Lanky Evans was when he stole sheep? Since he's been back, he has to live in a van in the caravan park because Mrs Evans won't have him in the house, he's a disgrace.