The Lost Child (8 page)

Grandpa Ted is spread all over the end of the table next to me. When he breathes, I can see hairs moving in his nose. Joyce is Mum's younger sister, the grumpy bridesmaid in the wedding photo on the mantelpiece. Mum doesn't like her because she's the favourite who never says boo to a goose. Auntie Joyce has two boys who are my cousins but we hardly ever see them because we are not a close family.

Grandma Bess and Grandpa Ted sip their tea and dip their biscuits. I would like another gingernut to dunk in my milk but I'm afraid Mum's hand will reach out and stop me. Outside, a sprinkler swishes round and round. Through the window, I can see a high blue sky, cloud-speckled in one corner above the spotty curtain. I wonder if Lizzie can see the same clouds as me even though they're a whole day away from the city.

Grandma Bess opens the window. ‘Hot,' she says. ‘A hot September means early summer.' When she sits again, there are water droplets nestled in the fine black hairs above her painted lips.

‘A touch of the Dago,' says Dad when he talks about Grandma Bess. He says Dagos have black eyes and hair and skin, and the women have hairy legs and moustaches like men.

I slide off my chair onto the floor and pretend to pull up my socks. Grandma's legs sit beneath the cloth like two extra table legs. Dad is right: they are covered in black hairs. Grandpa Ted's legs are covered in pressed grey trouser pants. He has little feet in shiny shoes, polished patent bright, like Faye Daley's Scottish dancing shoes. Up close, I can see my face in the toes. But Mum's hand is yanking me up and I am glad to be out of there, away from Dago legs.

‘You're a big girl now,' says Grandma Bess. ‘What are you? Six?' I nod but now she is talking to Mum. ‘School must be a blessing. Time to yourself at last.'

They all look at me. Grandpa Ted's piggy eyes, Mum's sad, proud brown ones, Grandma Bess's blanked-out buttons. I turn to the window where the spotty curtain is blowing in the breeze, puffing in and out like the window's heartbeat. I look into the blue sky and past the speckled clouds to the misty part behind. I look all the way back to Burley Point where I belong.

Soon we are gone. Mum pulls me down the path. She says good riddance to bad rubbish. She says why did she think there'd be any help here? There never had been, never would be, and so much for family. She says she was stupid to come, she's got her pride and she's finished biding her time.

7

My father has gone. He has taken his brown skin and flashing eyes, his laughs and shouts and silences. He has taken his beer-man smell, his fishy stink, his whiskers in the basin. Now I sleep with Mum in her bed against the window wall. Dad's smell is in the curtains and the laundry trough, in the lounge room chair; it is in my head.

My father has gone to live with That Trollop Layle Lewis. Mum sent him away because he said he was going to Queensland by himself but she found out he went with that Layle Lewis. She couldn't speak to him, she said to Mrs Winkie in our kitchen, couldn't find the words. She said she told him in a letter that she wrote out many times, crossing out words, starting again.

When Mrs Winkie tried to stroke Mum's hand, she pulled away and said: ‘Can you believe it? Everyone knowing…and how many times…'

She looked at me playing on the floor and cried choking, silent sobs that she tried to swallow and, although she turned from me, I could see her shoulders heaving. I could hear mouse squeaks coming from her mouth. I could feel the empty part of her where my father used to be; it was in me too. Mrs Winkie put her big wide arms around my mother; they looked like the elephant and mouse in my storybook but without the trunk and tails.

My father is building a house on the other side of the lagoon where he will live with that Layle Lewis. Already the house has bones. Already he has planted a palm tree that he brought back from his holiday in Queensland. I swing on our gate and wonder, if Mum hadn't given him the letter, would we have the palm tree in our garden? And if we did, where would we have planted it because there's not much room with the pines along the fence and the kurrajong in the corner, and Mum's veggies taking up most of the slope next to the gravel drive. Perhaps she wouldn't have wanted a palm tree in the garden.

Our car bangs to a stop outside the post office. It is the new blue Austin that Dad bought for us before he went to live with that Layle Lewis. Dunc says if he was old enough he could drive it better than Mum. When I climb off the floor, white flowers are pressed against the windscreen, a fence post on the bonnet, blood on Mum's nose. ‘You all right?' she says.

Mrs Bloomers is at Mum's window. ‘What happened, Nella?' Before Mum can tell her, she pulls me out and prods and pokes and looks into my eyes and then does the same to Mum.

Mrs Bloomers is really Mrs Bloom, Mum's friend from the soldier-settler farm. Before she married, she was a nurse at Muswell Hospital. Sometimes she thinks she still is. Mum says it's a shame she doesn't live closer. Mrs Winkie says Beryl Bloom has tickets on herself.

‘Sylvie's fine,' says Mrs Bloomers, wiping blood off Mum's nose with her hankie. ‘What happened, Nella?' she asks again.

Mum doesn't seem to know. They walk around the car and Mrs Bloomers tells Mum she doesn't think there's much harm done and to reverse it out from under the tree. Then they try to prop the rail back on the post but it falls down and Mrs Bloomers laughs and says: ‘The council's got more money than sense, putting fence guards around oleanders. Be better off grading the roads.'

Mum peers up and down the street. Reggie Patchett is on his shop veranda having a stickybeak but there's no one else around. Mrs Bloomers says Mum'll have to drive up the hill and report it to Constable Morgan. She says to get some iodine onto her nose as soon as we get home. Then she says: ‘I heard about Mick. How are you getting on, Nella? By yourself?'

Mum opens the door and nods me in but the wing window is open and I can hear everything. ‘He'll be back. He just needs to get her out of his system. Then he'll be back.'

Why didn't she tell me? And if he's coming back, why is he building a house? Mrs Bloomers opens and closes her mouth. ‘You've got a lot on your plate, Nella. Come out to the farm and see me, anytime at all. Have a bit of a break. Come and stay. It'll do you good.'

As we drive off, Mum waves and waves.

On the last day of school, Dunc gets a black eye. Suddenly there's a fight and everyone's running to the far end of the tennis court. Before I'm close enough, Miss Taylor is pushing through a ring of boys, yelling: ‘Stop it! Stop it! You're not wild animals! Stop it!'

Then I see Pardie pulling Dunc off Peter Leckie, who has blood on his nose, and Kenny Sweet is holding Peter Leckie's arms behind his back. Miss Taylor says we don't have hooligans at this school and they're to report to Mr Tucker immediately. She pushes them in front of her the whole way across the quadrangle, her skin red and blotchy from so much yelling.

Kenny Sweet is the tallest boy in school. He looks over everyone's head until he finds me. ‘Leckie said your old man's shacked up with the town tart.' He says this loud enough for everyone to hear and, in the sudden hush, I want to disappear off that court like a lost tennis ball. I just stand there looking down at the ground, to dirt and worms underneath, to a cave where I could hide, maybe a hidden river flowing far below.

Lining up, everyone is talking too much, too loudly. Miss Taylor blows hard on her whistle and Lizzie whispers behind me: ‘It's true, though, isn't it?'

Suddenly my legs are too heavy to walk on. Miss Taylor waits until we're all seated then says,
Sit up straight, arms folded
. She says,
We don't have fights in our school and anyone who wants to start
one had better think twice
. She says,
We don't make judgments about
other people's lives, because we don't live in their skin, is that clear?

Yes, Miss Taylor.

Her eyes are an angry blue and she looks hard at everyone but never once at me. She says,
Living in a small town means minding
your own business and not spreading idle gossip, otherwise none of us
could live together, is that clear?

Yes, Miss Taylor.

She says to take out our readers and turn to the right page. Then she gives me a tiny, kind smile. And that smile is everything.

The Trollop is still in my father's system. He is living with her in Ron Quigly's bungalow; I've seen his jeep parked out front. Mum knows too. Sometimes I find her peeking through the fence, watching his house grow walls and a silver roof on the other side of the lagoon.

‘I'm not stupid,' she tells Mrs Winkie. ‘I could go back to school and get my Intermediate. There was nothing wrong with my compositions. I could write. Better than I could talk. I got good marks.'

Mrs Winkie says she has to run along.

‘I could have another baby,' says Mum. ‘If I wanted to. He'll be back. Then we will.'

I would like Dad back, but I'm not sure about a baby. And no other mothers go to school.

In the morning, Mrs Winkie brings us eggs from her bantam chooks. ‘I work harder than you,' says Mum to Mrs Winkie. ‘I mow my own lawns.' Then she drags the mower from the shed and mows the front lawn even though she mowed the day before. Mrs Winkie yells at her over the
click-clack
of the blades: ‘You're going to run yourself into the ground if you keep this up, Nella. You need to get a grip on yourself.'

Mum keeps on mowing.

Grannie Meehan has invited us to Bindilla to have Christmas with Uncle Ticker, Uncle Pat and Auntie Peggy and our cousins from the city. Only Dunc is going. Mum says Auntie Rose and Auntie Elphie are the only ones she's got any time for and they've both had a falling out with the Old Girl and they're not coming down from the city this year, so why bother?

On Christmas morning, I get a bride doll in a box. She has yellow hair and blue eyes and lashes that flap open with a
clack
. She has a white net skirt with a petticoat and frilly pants and a veil held on with a white-flowered comb. Dunc has a new cricket bat. He puts his face up close to mine and says my bride doll is an
a-bomb-in-a-shun,
you don't know what that means, do you?

‘No one will ever marry you.' He looks under my bride doll's dress and pulls her veil over her face. When Uncle Ticker arrives, Dunc drops her on her head on the bed. After they've gone to Bindilla, Mum tells me I've been invited to have Christmas dinner with the Daley kids. If I want to go.

Of course I want to go. Why didn't she tell me before? Did she forget? But if I go, what will Mum do? She is standing at the sink and I cannot see her eyes. Should I go?

‘I don't mind. I'm going to get stuck into the floor. It's a day like any other as far as I'm concerned.'

Not for Mrs Daley. For days we've helped her make decorations from strips of coloured paper and now they're draped around her kitchen and across the lounge room walls. Yesterday, Mr Daley cut a limb from a pine tree out near Five Mile Drain and Mrs Daley got the box of decorations from the wardrobe in her room.

I wanted to fix the manger, which had lost its sheep in the bottom of the box, but Faye said I could find the star for the top of the tree. I hurried to get this done because I wanted to hook the coloured balls on the tree's long arms. Faye said she was in charge and I could put the snow on the branches. The snow was cotton wool.

‘Not there,' said Faye when I'd finished with the snow and was trying to clip a shiny bird onto a branch. ‘It needs to be done properly.'

‘I can do it properly.'

‘It's not your tree.'

‘That's enough, Faye,' said Mrs Daley from the door.

‘It's not. There are tons more decorations to use up.'

‘You know what I mean.'

Faye let me do the manger. I found the sheep and pushed them into their sockets and laid the baby Jesus in his cradle bed. I fixed the palm-tree head and found the three wise men. Before I left, Mrs Daley pulled the curtains and switched on the Christmas lights so that I could see how the tree shone in the dark. She didn't tell me I'd been invited for Christmas dinner. Perhaps she did the inviting after I left, though I can't think how and when.

I want to take my bride doll to show Faye. ‘That doll is staying here,' says Mum when she's dressed me in my new pink dress and tied a matching ribbon in my hair. ‘I don't want it getting dirty.'

‘It won't get dirty. I won't put it down.'

‘No.' She lifts the kitchen chairs onto the table and sets them upside down around the edge. I wait by the door hoping she will change her mind but she takes a knife from the dresser drawer and kneels down on the floor. Then her arm sweeps out, out and back, out and back, peeling off the polish with each wide-armed reach, sending shavings in the air, onto her hair, the table and chairs.

Did she know my father would be having Christmas with the Daleys? When he walks in with beer bottles clutched to his chest, I see Mrs Daley watching me. But even though I'm sitting at the table, helping Faye fold red table napkins into double Vs, Dad doesn't notice me. He tells Mrs Daley that Layle's old man is on his last legs and if he croaks over Christmas it won't be before time. He says she'll be back the day after Boxing Day. His voice is loud and seems to bounce around the room like a tennis ball thrown hard against a wall. Blue Daley pours them each a glass of beer and they take it into the lounge while I keep on folding Vs.

Mrs Daley says the turkey is almost ready and we'd better get on with opening the gifts. I don't have a gift for anyone. Mum didn't give me any. Should she have? I am no longer sure how much I can trust my mother. She didn't tell me it was wrong to scrape the crust of toast across the butter dish; Mrs Daley told me that. And sometimes she says she can't remember things. Sometimes she says she forgets her own name. What if she's forgotten the presents?