Aliens In The Family (11 page)

Jake looked over her shoulder. She had imagined Bond would be standing with Lewis and Dora drinking some orange juice and being almost normal—but it was true, he was gone. She could see the horses tied to their rail, she could see the slope beyond rising up to touch a pale blue sky, but Dora was right. There was no Bond.

"He might have gone off for a moment to... you know!" suggested Jake. Dora was horrified. Somehow she could never bring herself to believe that beautiful people might even actually need to go to the lavatory.

"Do you think so?" she asked Jake trustingly. She had come to realize that because someone looked like the Lone Ranger it didn't mean they couldn't think carefully.

"We'll wait a minute, just in case," advised Jake, "but I don't really think that's it. I think it might have something to do with the electric snakes."

"The mild lightning," Dora corrected her, not relishing the thought of electric snakes. "Suppose he has gone? What will we do?"

Jake did not answer at once. She did not know. She found herself thinking that Bond had become so strange and such a responsibility that there was a sort of temptation to let him simply vanish from their lives. But that was being cowardly again. She simply shrugged and said, "Perhaps Lewis has seen him."

Philippa sipped her hot tea and glanced over at the two girls. "They seem to be getting on just fine," she said. David nodded hopefully. As parents they were so involved with their own various family difficulties that they did not notice that Bond was missing.

"He's gone," Jake said. "Bond's gone."

"Gone?" repeated Lewis looking very distressed. "Which way?"

"He said he was being followed," said Dora, "but there's no-one else around."

"At least he hasn't taken his horse," commented Jake. "Perhaps if he really wants to go, we should let. . ." She trailed off under Dora's reproachful stare.

Webster's Bush, lapping like the tide below them, had swallowed up Bond. He must have simply got off his horse and walked off without the slightest hesitation into the shadows. Now there was only the bush looking back at them, dense and silent, not giving away any secrets. The clearing spread out behind them to the lip of the valley of ruined trees and made way for the sky. On either side of them it fell away into Webster's Valley.

"He might be playing a joke," said Jake doubtfully, not believing it for a second. Bond didn't possess that sort of playfulness, and besides, he just didn't understand how impossible it was to walk away into thin air. Soon the time would come for them to ride on. There would be an empty horse and questions asked. There would be a search, confusion, and eventually tempers would be frayed. If he was still not found, perhaps a bigger search would be organized—helicopters, and policemen with dogs. There was no way that David and Philippa would just ride back home not bothering about where he had gone, leaving Bond forgotten and lost to the world.

"I think he's gone down to the creek," said Dora decisively. "In the bush the creek would act as a sort of road. He'd go down till he reached the creek and then walk along it."

Jake agreed that this was quite probable but just where had he gone into the bush? She looked from one side to the other, biting her thumbnail.

"We have to look for him," hissed Lewis. "We must find him." He sounded extremely upset, almost hysterical, as if he was the one who would be blamed and punished for Bond's disappearance.

Though he kept his voice low, his anxiety was felt by Philippa who looked over at them and called, "Is everything O.K., kids?"

"Yeah—we're just going to explore the bush for a little while," said Dora quickly.

"Don't go too far," said David, good-humouredly. "We'll have to move on shortly."

Jake turned to the other two. "Let's try here," muttered Jake. "If I was going into the bush, I'd go down here."

Following the sound of the creek they entered a strange, drifting, cobwebby world, but the cobwebs were actually lichen. The native beech and fuchsia were trimmed with a torn, grey-green lace so delicate that its edges appeared to vanish smokily into the air. Lichen smudged the firm edges of trunk and bough.

"They're pleased we're being friendly," observed Dora.

"Who are?" asked Jake.

"Our parents. They were so busy watching how we were getting along, they didn't even notice Bond wasn't there!"

"They would've soon enough," said Jake grimly.

The three children slid down over banks heavy with fallen leaves, ferns and grasses. Branches extended like hands to touch them as they struggled by. There was no proper track, but the soft sound of the running stream was their guide.

"This is hopeless," said Jake, looking into the forest which surrounded them. "Even if we
were
on the right track we could still easily miss him."

"But we've got to try!" Lewis said, bouncing with anxiety. "I don't want Bond lost!"

"I don't want him somewhere on his own where his enemies can get at him," added Dora.

"We mightn't make much difference in that case," snorted Jake, though she knew that they were so tied to Bond that they had to find him. She could imagine the police asking her:
How long did you say you'd known this boy? Where did you meet him?
She could visualize the headlines in the newspapers and imagine the endless questioning, even as she remembered Bond's mind moving through hers like a tree of fire.

They slid down yet another bank. Dora landed on her feet,then stood motionless. "Listen!"she said. They each stopped and listened. There was a settling sound as the bush through which they had just scrambled quietened down again. But beyond that was a silence so huge that all the sounds they could hear—the voices of birds and of the stream below—accentuated it. In the city there was always a lot of noise; cars crossing and recrossing via roads and motorways, motorbikes leaping away as the lights turned green, dogs barking and radios blaring out music, while in the air planes droned like distant insects, and beyond all the noises which had names was another sound—a constant breathing made up of a thousand unnamed sounds which somehow ran together into a daylight hum, reassuring everyone that the city was still alive and working. But here, behind the bird call and the rustle of the leaves and the liquid voice of the creek below them, there was nothing but a crouching silence into which they were crashing in their search for Bond.

Lewis listened for a few seconds then pushed on anxiously. The girls could see him a few metres further down the slope, no longer as a whole boy, merely as patches of colour amidst the leaves.

"Suppose there was a spirit in the bush that would help us?" said Dora hopefully.

"There probably is," replied Jake, "but how do we make it notice us? At home it's quiet all around just like this, and I like it most of the time, but it couldn't care less about me. Oh well. Bond can't have much of a start on us."

They pressed on, following what they could see of Lewis. The babble of the creek grew louder and louder, until at last they could actually detect the movement of water. A little further on, they scrambled down another little slope to find themselves suddenly confronted by a narrow, stony stream. Lewis was slightly ahead, looking back at them.

"Here's a footprint!" he shouted excitedly, as though he had traced a clue in a birthday party treasure hunt. "Lots of them! They're full of water." He did not wait for the girls to catch up with him but moved quickly on, stalking Bond. Moments later, Dora and Jake reached the same spot, cast a cursory glance over the footprints in the flat, muddy sand on one side of the creek, and set off after Lewis. Once around the bend the bush closed in more snugly about them and they saw a series of bush pools, turned to clouded amber by the shafts of sunlight filtering down through the trees.

Entranced, the two girls picked their way carefully, pushed together by the narrowness of the creek bed, sometimes going one after the other, sometimes pressed shoulder to shoulder. Here in this deep, silent, lonely place Dora looked at Jake and found herself able to ask the questions that she had long dreamed of asking, since that time when Jake was still a long-haired promise in a photograph.

"Were you sorry when David and your mother split up?" she asked, and though she had tried to speak in a low voice, her question came out with a rough edge to it that immediately made her feel shy in that old bush silence. But Dora badly wanted to know the answer, for she understood her own life best when she compared it with other people's lives. She had always been curious about Jacqueline-in-the-photograph, whose life seemed as if it might be an unknown reflection of her own. Looking sideways she saw Jake look startled, nervous and then sort of far away, as if she was trying to remember.

"They said it had to be," she answered at last. "They said it'd be for the best—for all of us. I think David's happier but my mother isn't."

"David told Philippa your mother was the one who wanted to leave," said Dora, timid but persistent.

"I don't remember how it all happened. I was only a little kid—nine years old—and they didn't tell me a lot, or else I don't remember it if they did. They didn't get on too badly or anything, I don't think, but the happiest time for my mother was before I was born. She didn't really want ever to grow up, or become a mother and have to do all the things mothers do. But when she broke up with Dad she found out that going home to her parents was different from what she thought it would be."

"In what way?" asked Dora with trepidation, feeling water seep into her sneakers as she trod carelessly in soft sand. Although she was afraid Jake might become angry at her questions, she couldn't contain her curiosity.

"Well, she was an only child and my gran and granddad thought she was wonderful. She was pretty too... she still is, in an old sort of way."

"Like my mother," interjected Dora, "except my mother doesn't try to make the best of herself."

"My mother's called 'Pet'. She likes that name, probably because that's what she wants to be—someone's darling pet." Jake began to speak more fiercely. "I think my Dad might have been like the man in the Curly Locks rhyme, but promised her wrongly. Anyway, she says he did."

"How does it go?" asked Dora, frowning as she tried to remember the rhyme.

"Curly Locks, Curly Locks, will you be mine?

You shall not wash dishes nor yet feed the swine," quoted Jake.

Dora remembered, and joined in with the last two lines triumphantly.

"But sit on a cushion and sew a fine seam.

And feed upon strawberries, sugar and cream."

"Tracks! More tracks!" called Lewis from a point not far ahead. Dora discovered that she had completely forgotten that they were supposed to be finding Bond. The rhyme had given her a very good idea of what Jake's mother must be like.

"When I was little," continued Jake, "she used to recite that rhyme to me and she'd say, 'That's what your Daddy promised me'." Jake shrugged. "Anyhow, 1 don't think anyone should ever promise that—a lovely life of strawberries!"

"Only rich people could do that," said Dora, patting her own hair to feel if it was curly enough. "Mind you, it works."

"What works?" asked Jake, bewildered.

"Curly hair! The man in the poem wouldn't have promised her strawberries and cream if her hair had been straight," said Dora as if it was beyond all doubt. "Well, not unless she had a good cut."

They had almost caught up to Lewis, but now they paused to study the footprints in the mud. "It is hard to tell—suppose they're not Bond's?" said Dora uncertainly.

"Who else would be walking here? We haven't seen or heard anybody else all day. Webster's ghosts? They don't leave prints. Ghosts don't have weight." Lewis was just a couple of metres ahead of them now and they followed on, picking their way cautiously.

"My granddad had a stroke," Jake went on after a moment. "He's not exactly crippled but he can't move around very well. He's the one who needs looking after. And my gran isn't too well either. So you see, neither of them can look after themselves properly, let alone look after Mum. Every now and then she talks as if she came home to look after them but I know she didn't. Even now she doesn't do much around the place."

Dora thought Jake's mother sounded awful, and thought how nice it must be for David to be free of her and living with Philippa and two nice children. Then she felt that since Jake was confiding in her, she should reciprocate with a confidence of her own. "My father met someone really pretty and went off with her," she offered. "He just left home one weekend."

"My mother was dreadfully upset when David married again," Jake answered. "I think she always thought he'd be there for her to go back to if things didn't work out. She cried a lot. But anyhow—not to worry! It's all over and done with now."

There was a new sound in the air. Dora thought she could hear a big truck being driven slowly over distant hills, a soft monotonous murmur that seemed to echo. "Where are we going? How far do we follow?" she asked, looking around as if she had suddenly woken up and was surprised to find herself still walking through the forest. "How can he have got so far ahead?"

"He might be around the next corner," said Jake. "Lewis, can you see anything?" she called.

"There's a waterfall over here!" Lewis called back. He looked over his shoulder, a worried frown on his face. "Come on! I don't want Bond to get lost."

"We've come quite a long way," said Dora fretfully. "David and Mum will be wondering where we are." They turned the bend and saw the stream grow flatter and wider. High above them narrow, silver streaks of water bracketed the upper rocks then flowed together, foaming, down into the wrinkling pool in front of them. "How will we get up there?" asked Dora despairingly.

"There are plenty of rocks sticking out the side. We'll be able to climb up easily," said Jake confidently.

Lewis stood at the base of the waterfall gazing upwards, his hand resting on a mossy branch as if it was the back of some green, furry animal. Then he began to climb sure-footedly, as if he had climbed up those rocks many times before. He seemed to know instinctively where to put his feet and hands. Jake and Dora followed, one on either side of the waterfall. Suddenly Bond's voice rang out from the air above them. He was actually standing on the lip of the waterfall, looking down at them.