The Ten-pound Ticket (5 page)

‘He got a fever?’ he asked as he calmed his horse with the flat of his hand upon her flank.

She nodded.

‘Diarrhoea, vomiting?’

‘Yes, yes all of that, since he woke up this morning. I’m so worried about him. I don’t know what to do.’

Mitch Gunnerslake spat on the floor, ‘He don’t need a doctor, he’s got what Slade has got, been puking his arsehole up since last night. He’ll be right, plenty of boiled, cooled water that’s the key.’ With that he turned the horse and prepared to trot off.

‘Where’s Loulou? Is she not with you?’ Susie called after him, realising how much she had come to rely on her friend, the only one she had in this place.

‘She’s walking the last few miles back, needs to learn a bit of respect that one.’

Susie opened her mouth to ask questions and give vent to the anger that boiled in her veins, but he was already cantering off, leaving a plume of dust in his wake.

The knowledge that Slade was also sick calmed her, ‘Okay, okay.’ Susie tried to gather her thoughts, ‘Did you hear that, Nicky darling? It’s just a little bug. It’ll pass, you’re not the only one, it’ll pass and Mummy will be right here to make you feel better.’

She kissed his pink face, and it seemed to do the trick. Nicholas cried himself to the point of exhaustion and fell into a deep slumber in her arms. She pictured her own various childhood ailments, everything from mumps to sickness, all of which had been treated with a clean, freshly laundered bed and a mug of hot lemon barley. The memory of laying her head on a sweet-scented pillow slip made her tears pool. She cried into the still heat that shimmered on the horizon for a mother whose kindly nature existed only in her mind.

The next day, Nicholas had cooled, and Susie went in search of Loulou. It was unusual not to see her for twenty-four hours. As she approached her quarter, she noticed that the floral heap that lay on the new makeshift bed was dangerously still. The mattress was one of the many items that Susie had secretly taken out of the house, placing it quietly under the lurid bedspread on which Loulou had slept for most of her life.

‘Loulou? Hello? Elouera?’ she called her by this name sometimes, the formality made her friend laugh. Loulou groaned and rolled slightly to one side. Susie bent down and looked into the face of her friend. Susie gasped and cried out. Loulou’s eyes were swollen shut, her bottom lip, cut and bloodied and one of her very white teeth was missing. She had been beaten. Her feet that look like shredded meat; goodness knows how far and over what she had had to walk to get home.

‘Oh my God! Loulou, who did this to you? What happened?’

Loulou didn’t say anything for a moment. Her dress looked dirty and was spattered with blood. ‘This was Mitch wasn’t it? The fucking bastard.’

Loulou rolled back over into a little ball, and Susie, touching her friend on the shoulder, quietly left the room.

As Susie approached the veranda with Nicholas on her hip, she could hear Mitch and his buddies’ raucously singing ‘If You Knew Susie.’

Although it was late morning; Mitch sat on one side of the table, swigging from the neck of a bottle of brandy. She correctly guessed that this was not a very early start, but a very late finish, the residual celebration from the night before. His three whiskered-comrades slumped over their deck of cards and propped weak necks up on scrawny elbows. Susie fought her gag reflex as she got close enough to take in their collective stench. It was a peculiarly masculine smell of sweat, sex and alcohol that had the power to make her feel nauseas and petrified at the same time. He may have been in his seventies, but she had seen Mitch land a punch on a cattle hand and the boy had toppled like a wafer. He was fast and mean: two traits that worried her deeply.

‘Here she is!’ Mitch grabbed at his crotch and ran his tongue over his lips. It was always this way when he had been drinking. Susie had done her very best for the last seven months to keep out of his way. She cooked, cleaned, fetched and carried like a silent mouse trying to evade capture. She slipped in and out of his stinky bedroom with the greasy sheets in her arms in a giant bundle to be washed, dried and returned to the mattress before his grey, curly head hit the pillow. She swabbed the wooden and lino-covered floors with a mop dipped into a tin bucket, opening the windows and doors to allow the heat of the day to dry them. She toiled over potatoes and hunks of meat, often skinning and preparing it herself so that Mitch and the hands had something to eat after a long day. She was a skivvy, but not just any skivvy; she owed the meagre bread she put in her mouth and the roof over her head, indeed the very price of her passage, to this miserable, old, boozing bastard who had sponsored her arrival. She was trapped.

‘I need to have a word with you, Mitch.’ She gathered her son into her chest, partly to hide her form, which her boss insisted on staring at, but also to try and stop her body from shaking.

‘Well, what a coincidence, I need to have a word with you, in fact two words: get upstairs!’ he laughed loudly until he wheezed and banged the table top with a flattened palm.

Susie stood firm, trying not to lose her nerve, ‘I need to talk to you about Elouera, she’s been badly beaten. How could you do that to another human? She’s in a mess!’ Susie swiped at her tears, unable to get her friend’s damaged face and shredded feet out of her mind.

‘Is that right?’ he stuck out his bottom lip and scratched his chin.

She nodded.

He was silent, seemingly considering her words, ‘I have a dog, you seen her?’

Susie nodded again. She had seen the muscle-bound retriever that flew around the yard and leapt at her master’s whistle. He pointed a wavering finger at her, ‘If that dog disobeys me, I beat her. I beat her hard and guess what? She stops disobeying me! Sometimes it’s the only way.’

Susie felt her jaw drop open, ‘But Elouera isn’t a dog, she’s a person! And you are a despicable bully!’ she drew breath to continue, but it was pointless. Mitch was face-down on the table and out cold.

Usually when he passed out, Susie would slip back to her little hut where Loulou and Nicholas waited for her. She would hold her son tight and tell them both stories of a green and pleasant land that was far away. Her son had no idea what she was talking about, but was soothed by her tone and her presence. But right now, she didn’t feel like telling stories, didn’t feel like doing much at all. Her heart and head were heavy at the thought of Loulou’s suffering. Just when she thought she had been in this strange place long enough to bear it, some fresh hell emerged and she was proved wrong. Suddenly, an image of the Dorset beach at dusk swept through her mind. It was a stone’s throw from her parents’ house, and she would often wander down barefoot, enjoying the cool breeze that blew across the dunes as the weak, pale sun sank into the frothy ocean. Oh, how she missed it.

Every day, Susie planned for escape. But it wasn’t easy. Without money, she couldn’t bribe any of the hands to drive her and Nicholas to safety and without a vehicle she would die within twenty-four hours of leaving this godforsaken place, which was a good day’s drive from anywhere. That was assuming she could have got to a port or town without encountering the hundreds of men whose very livelihood was dependent on Mitch Gunnerslake and to whom they were all fiercely loyal. Without money to board a boat or pay for her passage, it was hopeless.

As night approached, she gathered Nicholas and, wrapping herself and her boy in one of their throws, she sat by her friend’s side on a pile of newspaper, feeding her sips of water throughout the night. Loulou spoke only once, in reply to Susie’s incessant questions. What she said was truly shocking.

‘I am nothing and it’s not the worst thing that’s happened to me here, not even close. You can’t think about it, or it will drive you mad. Trust me.’

‘You are not nothing; you are my friend, my only friend. I don’t know what I would do without you.’

‘Slade…’

‘Slade what? Did he do this?’ Susie was eager for an insight, but Elouera fell silent, slipping into a deep sleep.

As the dawn broke, Loulou sat up and attempted a smile. Susie had never been so happy.

Susie awoke to the sun of the Northern Territory beating down mercilessly on her tin roof, and realised that today was a special day: it was Nicholas’s first birthday. She thought about how much she had changed since giving birth to her precious son and coming all the way across the world in order to find him a better life. Susie smiled ruefully as she felt the sharp bite of her hip bones against her mattress on the floor, noted the concave hollow of her stomach and the edge to the reflection of her cheek bones. Her curves had been flattened, her bust gone, her muscle lean. She didn’t mind the changes; in fact with Mitch’s advances growing coarser all the time, they suited her just fine.

These days, Nicholas was walking on the wobbly legs of a drunk, stumbling from point to point with his eye on what he could grab next to steady himself. He was a sweet-natured baby, who liked to kiss his mummy’s face and could almost say ‘yes,’ ‘moo’ ‘Loulou’ and ‘sheeps’. They weren’t entirely clear, but he said them with such regularity and in response to most questions, that she and Loulou knew what he meant. He made his mother laugh and she was thankful beyond words that despite the conditions in which they lived, she still found joy in everything her baby boy did and said.

Susie lay still, thinking of that day twelve months before, when she had been cleaning in the hallway at the mother-and-baby home. She could remember every last detail with perfect clarity. She had reached up with a feather duster and removed cobwebs and specs of dust, visible only to the eagle eyes of Sister Kyna, from the wall lights. She remembered carefully removing the fragile glass cloche from a candle bulb as she had been instructed, using the duster to scoot around the fluted edge. Reaching up to replace it, her body had convulsed without warning, her hands jerked and the delicate glass shade hit the tiled floor, shattering into a million fragments. Her roommate Dot had rushed over, and Susan remembered the sound of the glass as it crunched underfoot. Dot had placed her hand on Susan’s lower back as she bent over, trying to ease the pain. Things had happened fairly quickly after that, a warm cascade of viscous water ran down her leg and splattered on the black-and-white floor, before she was marched to the infirmary.

She remembered the harsh strip light of the maternity ward and the rubberised doors that swung back and forth. The waves of pain that swept her body and took her breath away and finally, the sound of her babies, her twins crying in unison, it sounded like music.
Oh Abigail, happy birthday my darling girl. One whole year and I miss you as much now as I did then. Remember me Abigail, please remember me.

Susie cried all day. She couldn’t help it. This was not the birthday that she had dreamt of for her son, she had a vision of him sitting like a little prince among new clothes, fresh nappies, with one of those liquid filled teething rings that you popped in the fridge, a mini xylophone and a plastic ball rattle on a stick attached to a sucker that you spat on and stuck to a high chair tray, all the things she wanted to buy him. Every time she looked at Nicholas, she saw the gap next to him where his sister should have been. Even when Nicholas was presented with a cake that Loulou had made, an iced sponge cake with one proud, blue candle, Susie could not stop the tears from falling. She pictured a similar cake, with a pink candle, being presented by strangers to her little girl.

That evening, she and Nicky went for a walk. She had got into the habit of taking him down to the small lake at the back of the main house, behind the garden, where a big fat tree trunk made the perfect bench on which to sit and talk. Their daily jaunt was taken just before Nicholas’s bedtime, when the sun was sinking and the pinky hue of the sky threw a pretty veil over even the hardest of days. With his podgy hand in hers, they would totter along the five-hundred-yard-long track, twenty minutes there and only ten back, as he hitched a ride on his mother’s back. She chatted to him as she always did about England, grass and cricket in the park, about going to the beach and the tasty, prize-winning carrots that her grandpa grew on his allotment. Nicky listened with eyes wide, occasionally chewing the corner of the birthday card clutched in his hand, on which Elouera had drawn a big red heart – a reminder that he was loved.

Nicholas sped up and raced ahead as far as his chubby, little legs would allow, their seat was in sight. He dropped the card in his excitement, and Susie took her eyes off him for one second as she bent to pick it up. When she straightened, Susie swallowed the scream that hovered in her throat. Her son had stooped and gathered up a snake that he now held in both his hands.

Ignorant about the species in this strange land, she had no idea if this slithering creature could kill her son with one well-placed bite or was as harmless as a shrew. Her heart hammered in her chest just the same. She wished Loulou was with them. Studying its olive-green body, she looked for clues as to its nature. It had large eyes and what might its pale yellow throat and belly mean, was that a good sign? A bad one? Would a sudden movement make it strike? Fuck. She didn’t know anything. Her hands shook and her voice warbled. ‘Nicky, listen to Mummy, put that yucky snake on the ground and let’s go and find a bun! That’s a good boy. Put it on the floor and let’s go home!’

Susie watched as the reptile’s long, thin, tongue darted out towards her son’s hand, seeming to taste the air around it.

‘Fuck! Drop it, Nicky! Now!’

Nicky was nonchalant as he bent down and rested his fat bottom on his haunches, before purposefully placing the creature in the dust. It wound off at speed, leaving an S-shaped track along the scrub, and came to rest under a large spiky tree near their bench.

Susie ran forward and scooped her son up, kissing his face, ‘oh, Nicky, oh my love, I can’t stand it, I can’t stand the idea of anything happening to you! I can’t! You mustn’t pick up snakes. Never. They might hurt you!’

Nicholas wriggled free of her restrictive grip and waddled back towards the water, he was not about to waste their journey by going home without throwing sticks into the pond. He turned to see if his mum was following, ‘Fuck!’ he shouted with more clarity than she had heard him use in his speech before. Susie howled with laughter. ‘Oh that’s perfect. Bloody perfect,’ she whispered towards the heavens.