February (11 page)
Authors: Gabrielle Lord
‘But signing over the house,’ protested the
other man, ‘that’s being too generous. You’re forgetting your own interests—your own security.’
‘Listen, I can’t expect you to understand. This is my brother’s wife,
Tom’s
wife and family we’re talking about. They’re all I have. They’re all I care about. I feel I have to do it.’
‘I can tell you’ve made up your mind, Rafe. Very well. Come around to my office tomorrow and we’ll do the paperwork.’
‘I know Tom would have done the same for me. I mean, if I’d been in a similar situation.’ There was a pause. ‘This coffee is undrinkable,’ he added.
A moment later, I heard the scrape of the men’s chairs as they got up and left.
I let out a huge breath. I hadn’t dared to breathe during that conversation. My mind was spinning. Rafe was signing over his mansion to my mum? I felt a mixed-up rush of gratitude and guilt.
‘That was way too close! Did you hear all that?’ I asked Boges when I could speak again.
He nodded. ‘See? You’ve been way too hard on him, dude. His heart’s in the right place. He just has a seriously messed-up way of showing it.’
‘You were right,’ I said, almost numb with shock.
Boges sat opposite me scratching his head
like he was trying to put all the paranoid pieces together.
He looked at me, waiting for me to say something.
‘I think,’ continued Boges, ‘he’s been trying to hold everything together—to deal with everything alone.’
Just like me, I thought.
There was no-one around as I slipped through the fence near the railway yards and made my way back towards the big stormwater culvert. The crickets stopped their chirping as I sneaked past them in the long grass.
My mind was still whirling from seeing Rafe earlier. I felt such confusion and guilt in my stomach.
I hurried down the sloping drain. I’d sleep here for a few more nights, I thought, and then go back to suss out the St Johns house.
I sat up in the alcove in the drain, the drawings spread around while I stared at them by torchlight. I was trying to work out what the half-woman, half-lion sphinx might have meant. Had my dad been trying to warn me again about the dangerous woman he mentioned in his letter? The beastly, answer-demanding Oriana de la Force?
The sounds of the city echoed through the drain, and my mind began replaying the moment I’d turned and seen my double staring at me. Had he seen something in me that scared him? Maybe he knew that seeing your doppelganger meant doom.
I’d risked going for a swim off a rocky cove not far from Dolphin Point, a spot where people rarely swam because of the strong currents that often whirled around there. When I first dived into the water it was pretty calm. It felt so good and refreshing to be underwater and free, but I could also feel that the ocean was growing rougher by the minute.
It was a stinking hot day and as I floated on my back and looked up at the sky I saw that in the southwest, thunder heads were building—huge grey cauliflowers of cloud with ominous, flattened tops. Time to go.
I climbed up the rocks and hurried to my backpack, secured in a cave-like hole well above the high water mark.
I moved as fast as I could, knowing that I
needed to get back to the stormwater drain to grab my stuff before the downpour.
Just as the first heavy drops started to hit the hot black tar of the roads, I made it to the tunnel. The roads hissed and steam lifted like ghosts. It was going to be one of those storms that dumps thirty millimetres on the city in half an hour.
I climbed up into the alcove and took out the plastic folder with Dad’s drawings. I forced my sleeping-bag into my backpack and wondered how I could best stow the drawings. I was thinking that maybe I should secure the folder on the outside of the backpack with octopus straps, when I heard voices echoing through the drain.
I grabbed my torch, jumped down from my alcove—my backpack and the drawings in one hand, torch in the other.
Now the voices were loud—there was a roughness and a nasty edge that I knew meant trouble. One guy in particular had a very ugly laugh. I hesitated, wondering for a moment whether I should try to leave by the main drain,
running straight into them, or avoid them by going down one of the smaller tunnels.
It was too late. Three guys appeared, emerging from the main drain into the small clearing before the other two channels branched off. They looked surprised to see me. Their surprise quickly turned to aggression.
‘What are you doing here?’ asked the leader, a tall guy with his black hair slicked back, a scar running through his left eyebrow, and what looked like a permanent sneer on his narrow lips.
‘Yeah, we rule the drains. Who do you think
you
are?’ The other two echoed from each side of their slick leader. Generally rats ruled the drains, but I thought it wouldn’t be a good idea to say that.
The other two guys were smaller than the first. The shorter, stout kid, was dressed in military-style gear, while the other guy had a shaved head and was squeezed into tight black jeans and a striped singlet, like some sort of urban pirate. They stood there, snarling at me while my mind raced for a way to deal with this.
I knew this scenario too well. I’d faced it plenty of times in the schoolyard. A gang of guys looking for a fight. A fight that they can’t lose—three against one.
‘What’s in that bag?’ demanded the sneerer, making a lunge for my backpack. I jumped back quickly, out of his reach.
‘And what’s in the folder? Give us a look!’
I knew this game, too. If I didn’t give them what they wanted, they’d jump me and grab it anyway. If I
did
give them what they wanted, they’d jump me just the same. You can’t always talk sense to bullies, Dad once told me.
‘Give me that!’ barked Scarface.
‘No way,’ I said, taking a step back, putting more distance between me and them, so I’d have more room to move.
‘You’d better,’ said the guy with the shaved head, taking a step towards me.
‘Why don’t you come here and get it!’ I said, playing for time, my mind working furiously for a strategy. I needed to deal with the leader first. If I could get him down fast, the other two wouldn’t be too hard to sort out. I heard Dad’s voice in my head: ‘Watch their hands, and you’ll see the punch coming before it lands.’
‘Come on,’ I taunted, ‘if you want it so bad, come and get it!’
I glared hard at Scarface, keeping his hands in my peripheral vision. I wasn’t feeling any where near as tough as I sounded, but there was no way I was giving my backpack to these losers.
The threesome looked surprised at my attitude, and Scarface’s neck and face flushed red, his hands moving fast into furious fists. I braced myself, muscles surging with adrenaline.
He swung at me and before he knew what hit him I’d doubled over and charged my head into his gut like a battering ram. I heard him grunt as he went flying backwards, hitting the deck hard.
I kept going, avoiding his flailing arms and legs as he scrambled to recover his balance and his wind. But I was already gone, leaving them all behind me, racing away towards the Y-intersection.
I threw myself into the left-hand branch.
Scarface’s swearing and the shouted threats of the others thundered down the drains.
This drain was smaller and more sloped than the main one. As my feet pounded along, the enraged footsteps of the three in pursuit pounded even louder.
‘C’mon! Dogs! Freddy! Get the little scumbag!’ Scarface yelled to the other two.
I had no idea where I was heading. They were gaining but I could hear something else—a sound I couldn’t identify. It wasn’t the distant rumble of trains; it was something else.
I kept running. I was passing dark entrances
to other much smaller drains, on my left and right, but they were too small to climb into. Water was starting to trickle from these small drains and onto the floor of the one I was running through. I knew that a city the size of mine would have kilometres of drains beneath it, but I hadn’t realised just how extensive this underworld was.
Soon I was splashing through ankle-deep water. But still the footsteps behind me persisted.
The rumbling was getting louder and I suddenly understood what it was. It was the accumulating sound of dozens of drains rattling under the surge of the water that was pouring down from the city’s gutters! Smaller channels were emptying their contents into larger ones; the larger channels in turn sending cascades of water into the huge culvert system.
The water was now halfway up my calves and it was getting harder to run. The guys after me were finding it harder, too.
I was starting to worry.
Give up, you morons!
We all needed to get out of the drain! I remembered Dad telling me that fast-running water, once it gets over your knees, is far more dangerous than it seems.
The drain was becoming steeper, sloping down towards someplace I didn’t even know.
Even the strongest swimmer would find it hard to do battle with the combined tide of thousands of tonnes of water that were descending on the roads, footpaths, and freeways of the city. I was struggling to stay in control. The sound of rushing water echoed loudly throughout the drain and I couldn’t tell whether I was being chased anymore. All I could hear was the roar of the rising water.
Now I was in big trouble, being bumped along by the powerful surge of the fast-flowing water. It knocked me off my feet and I struggled to hold the folder with Dad’s drawings and the torch up over my head to keep them dry. When a huge surge of water suddenly hit me, I lost my balance completely, and both the torch and the folder flew out of my hands.
As soon as the torch hit the water it went out, throwing me into total darkness. I yelled and struck out in the rising drain water, which carried me along like a bodysurfer. I blindly stretched out my arms and fingers, desperate to find the plastic folder. I was only thinking about the drawings.
The power of the surge was pushing me along faster than I could ever swim. It bumped and crashed me against the walls. I had no idea where the drawings were. I was screaming in the
dark, hurtling along, shouting for help but there was no-one to hear me.
Ahead of me I thought I could see bluish light.
The light was getting stronger. Now I could see a grilled entrance above the chop of the ocean. The drawings were lost. By now they’d be somewhere off the coast, sinking to the bottom of the sea. And I could be joining them any moment.
The surge pushed me faster and faster towards the grille and the ocean. But then I saw something that I could scarcely believe. In front of the grille was a mesh screen, catching plastic and rubbish. And slap bang right in the middle was the folder! I crashed into it and grabbed the folder. The mesh screen busted out on the impact of my body, and flew down to the seething ocean below. I hung onto the sides of the grille with one hand, the folder in my other, while the gushing water tried to tear me down.
I clung there for a long time, my head barely above water, my fingers turning wrinkled and white, but I didn’t let go of that grille or the folder.
After what felt like an eternity, the water began to subside. Eventually the water level dropped completely, putting my feet back onto the hard ground.
