Birrung the Secret Friend
Read Birrung the Secret Friend Online
Authors: Jackie French
To Colin Mackellar, first chaplain to the moon and much loved successor to Mr Johnson, with gratitude
Chapter 8: The Screams in the Night
Chapter 13: Presents from Birrung
Chapter 14: I Tell You My Secret
Cheese
Sydney Cove, December 1789
I waited in the line outside the storehouse. Only two convicts were before me â big fellows with tattoos on their arms and dirty bare feet â waiting for their rations too. My tummy was so empty it couldn't even gurgle.
There was cheese in that storehouse.
I wanted that cheese so bad I could already feel the maggots wriggling against my tongue. Ma used to say that maggots meant food was going bad, but when your tummy is empty, maggots are just extra food. I'd been eating maggots with my cheese for the two years we'd
been here in New South Wales, and hadn't even got a tummy ache. Not from the maggots, anyways. Hunger ached worse than bad food.
Elsie and me hadn't eaten for all yesterday. The storehouse only gave out the rations on Saturdays and Wednesdays. I snuck out to get mine as soon as it got light and the drum went
rat-a-tat-tat
to call the convicts to work. The convicts in this line must be too sick to work. I hoped they didn't have the strength to grab my rations before I could get them back to Elsie. But they looked big.
Just about everyone in the colony was bigger than me. I was small, even for a ten-year-old. How can you grow tall on the slops fed to you in an English gaol or down in the dark and wet hold of a convict ship?
The man in front of me had his arm in a sling, but he looked as strong as a bullock. I wasn't going to let him take my cheese. And nothing else neither.
Elsie didn't get no rations, so we had to live on mine. We didn't have no way to keep them safe: ants or rats could eat them, or some thief nick them. So we ate our food as soon as we got it, even if we went hungry in between.
Only Bullock Man in front of me now. He was nearly as tall as the wild Indians who lived around the colony,
but soft looking, not muscled like them, from being chained for nearly a year down in the ships that brought us here, and probably from doing as little as he could since our arrival. Ma used to say most convicts were so lazy they'd eat their toe nails â or someone else's â before bothering to open an oyster.
Bullock Man peered in the storehouse door. The storehouse was made of mud, like almost every building in the colony, with big holes from rain and rats. If them holes get any bigger, I thought, those walls won't keep out robbers, not in a colony of thieves. They'd get our cheese â and all the other food too.
Food! I was nearly there. My tummy did rumble now.
The storeman measured Bullock Man's rations into his pannikin: three cups of flour, a lump of salt pork, rice. The storeman was a convict, like Ma had been. I was no convict. I'd been born free, even if I'd had to stay most of my life with Ma in Newgate Prison back in England, and come with her on the ship here.
Bullock Man stared at the rice and flour and salt pork in his pannikin. âWhere's me cheese?'
âAll gone,' said the storeman.
âGone?' demanded Bullock Man. My heart sank as low as my empty tummy. Rice and flour had to be
cooked! But me and Elsie could have eaten that cheese straight away.
The storeman winked at me. âYou got rice instead,' he told Bullock Man. âMake yourself a nice pudding.'
âWhat with?' Bullock Man demanded. He had a point. The governor and some of the officers had cows or goats with milk to make a rice pudding. Not the likes of me or Bullock Man.
Bullock Man bent down till his head was at the same height as the storeman's. He grinned, showing two black teeth and swollen red gums. âYou give me that cheese or somefink nasty is going to happen to you one o' these nights.'
The storeman grinned back. He had four teeth, long yellow ones. âYou might have been a high and mighty back home in Todger's Lane, matey, with your thief chums bashing folks over their heads to get their purses. But I'm boss of this storehouse. Off with you! Or you'll find I've run out of salt pork too on Saturdays.'
âYou ain't no better than me! You was a pickpocket! At least I had me cudgels. Better than a sneak thief.'
The storeman stopped grinning. âThis is a new land, matey. I got a responsible job. I'm king of the storehouse here. So hop it.'
Bullock Man didn't hop. But he did move away, muttering, to the corner of the storehouse. He pretended he was leaning on the building to rub his ankle. I moved up to the storeman, keeping a close watch on Bullock Man out of the corner of my eye.
The storeman grinned at me. âWell, Barney Bean, you been growing like a good little bean?'
I worked up a smile for him. You try living with a name like âBean'. âVery funny, sir.'
âYou still ain't got no pannikin?'
I shrugged. Some thieving Johnny had stolen my pannikin the night Ma died, and there weren't no more left in the stores to give out. Wasn't much of anything in the colony any more, except rags and lags and mud. Even most of the Indians had vanished since their plague. We'd been at Port Jackson for nearly two years now, and there'd been no store ship to bring us food and new clothes or spades or pannikins or even news. England and the whole world over the horizon could have vanished and we'd never know.
You can't boil dried peas or rice without a pannikin. That's why me and Elsie needed cheese. You don't need to cook cheese. And the storeman knew it. I held out my sheet of bark.
âFish or salt pork?' asked the storeman.
I hesitated. You got more fish than pork. But fish goes bad quick.
âPork,' I said reluctantly.
The storeman measured out my salt pork. I only got two-thirds of what a grown-up got. The pork was a square as big as my thumb, hard as a brick and dark as coal. It tasted like coal too. It took a lot of chewing, but didn't need cooking either.
Next he measured out my flour. It smelled a bit and wriggled with weevils, but they were no more trouble to me than the maggots. Elsie and me could mix that into damper with water from the Tank Stream and cook it in the ashes of someone else's fire â after everyone had gone to sleep, of course, so no one could pinch it.
It was too dangerous to try to keep our own fire going, even if we was cold, in case more thugs found us. Me and Elsie hadn't anything left to steal, except our clothes and a bit of food, but I was afraid that someone might hurt Elsie. Even if they didn't, a stranger would scare her bad. I reckoned Elsie had been scared enough already.
The storeman winked at me again. He held a tiny hunk of cheese, down low where no one could see it.
I could have eaten that cheese in one gulp. I reached
out to take it quickly, afore Bullock Man could see it. My hand trembled with hunger.
The cheese dropped to the ground. I grabbed it, brushing off the dirt.
I glanced around. Had Bullock Man seen?
He had. He stared at my cheese, like it was all the jewels of China. Then he looked at me. His grin spread right across his face, like butter melting.
Even a maggot would guess that Bullock Man planned to grab my rations as soon as I walked past him. But he couldn't attack me while the storeman was watching. The storeman really was a king, here at the end of the world.
Someone else watched me too â a girl walking down the muddy track. She was an Indian, one of the natives with black skin. There'd been hundreds of them around when our ships first got here, so many canoes on the harbour with the women fishing and cooking on their smoky fires right there on the water, and feeding fish to their kids.
The whole harbour had smelled of cooking fish. Sometimes I'd wished I was an Indian, so I could fill my belly with fish too. But back then I had Ma, who was the best ma in the world, even if she wasn't much good as a pickpocket. And then the Indians vanished,
except the dead bodies along the beaches. We'd waited for the plague to kill us too. But it hadn't. Just the Indians, lying dead on the beaches all around the harbour.
But here was an Indian again! A live one! She was clothed properly in a dress and shoes. A clean dress, all bright with tiny blue flowers on it, not the nothing colour of convicts' clothes.
She was tall, with lots of black hair all shiny in a halo about her head. She was the most beautiful girl I had seen in my life, even with the black skin and all. To be fair I hadn't seen many pretty girls. It was hard for a girl to look pretty in Newgate, or on the ships that brought us here, down in the dark in the water with dead rats and other stuff I didn't want to think about all rolling around us on our bunks.
There weren't many girls in the colony at all. Governor Phillip had sent most of the young'uns to Norfolk Island, to keep them safe from the convict men. In fact the only girl I knew at all was Elsie, and she was a skinned mouse.
The Indian girl smiled at me as she passed. She was fifteen, maybe. Her teeth were strong and white. Couldn't remember ever seeing teeth as strong and white as hers. Couldn't remember when I'd last seen a smile either.
Suddenly I forgot how much my tummy hurt with hunger, how the huts around me were crumbling from the rain. The blue sky seemed to dance above the harbour. For a breath or two everything was beautiful, the pale blue new leaves on the native trees, a flock of birds, red and green, yelling above us. I wondered if this girl knew how to sail a canoe, and catch fish, and cook it . . .
My tummy clenched. I shouldn't have thought about cooked fish.
When the plague back in autumn had killed just about every Indian in the world, Surgeon White managed to save two of them, a boy and a girl. Surgeon White had adopted the boy. This must be the black girl Ma told me the clergyman Mr Johnson and his wife were looking after. When we first came here, Ma'd said the Indians might all creep into the colony and at night murder us in our beds. But it'd been them that died.
I'd glimpsed the Indian girl far off, in her fine clothes, walking with Mr Johnson. But I'd never seen her close like this before, so tall and straight. Her smile was as bright as the sunlight after rain.
But I didn't have time to think about smiles and pretty girls. I had to get this food back safe to Elsie. And I had to eat something soon, or I'd go all wobbly and fall faint
in the muck on the road and some cove would steal my clothes too, and leave me with nothing except my teeth and some of the coves here would steal those too.