Forbidden Fruit (19 page)

I had to agree. It really wasn’t fair. Who, then, was the father of this child? Assuming that it wasn’t a rampaging case of stomach cancer. Or beri-beri from the restricted diet. I read on.

Dolly says that I should look out the window this morning and there was Manny. He waved and smiled. He is a nice boy. I talk to him every day. He worries about how I am. His mum has lots of kids and he knows about babies. But at least they didn’t stop me doing my exams. I was taken in the car right into the school grounds so no one would see me and the VCE coordinator, Miss Gennezano, let me sit in her little side office and do them, with a teacher watching. As long as it wasn’t my English teacher watching the English exam it’s all right. I haven’t had anything else to do for months but work and I think I did all right. I think I aced the chemistry exam. And physics. And maybe maths and even the English wasn’t as bad as I expected. So I do my exam and the car takes me home, and no one sees me. No one knows I’m there. Like a ghost. I used to like school. I’m so lonely. Miss Threadgold sat in my exams knitting and she has made me a shawl for the baby. I was so touched I cried and she hugged me. Mum’s coming up the stairs. Later.

Poor little thing! She must have finished her exams and decided to run away soon after them. I wondered what the precipitating factor had been. I read on and found out.

Mum came. She says that when the baby is born she’ll take it and say that it is hers. Then she’ll take it to America to visit the Holy Reformed Temple of Shiloh and have it adopted there. Then I can recover and go back to school next year and need never hear of the baby again. I don’t like this. I don’t like this at all. What does she want with my baby? She could have had more of her own if she wanted another baby. She never even liked babies—we all had a nanny and then we had Sandra.

I got up and made myself a cool drink with lemon cordial. I didn’t like this either. Brigid went on:

Well, I’m not staying. I rang Manny. I rang Dolly. She can give me all her money. It won’t be much because she buys so many books but she can borrow some from Sandra. I’m not letting Mum get her claws on my baby.

I smiled. Suddenly that lump had gone from a possible internal cancer to a baby—and ‘my baby’ at that.

And that was all. She never made another entry. I shut down the computer and closed the lid. Now what to do? It was nine o’clock and I ought to be going to bed but I was unbearably restless. Nothing from Daniel. I wandered over to the fridge and discovered that I was out of ice cream. That would never do. I found some sandals, picked up my backpack, and went out into the night.

Melbourne is one of the safest cities in the world, if you avoid King Street late at night. All cities have places like King Street, where youths from outlying suburbs come in to lose all inhibitions, get sodden or roaring drunk, and start fights which end in police cells and sore heads and the occasional death. I saw nothing more dangerous than the singing drunks outside Young & Jackson as I walked at an even pace around the block and into Swanston Street, heading for the 7-11 and a tub of chocolate and cherry ripple ice cream which had my name on it. It was warm
but not too hot. Melbourne looks very pretty in the dark. I had almost reached my target when I was swept up in a group of dancers. Patchouli and rose oil stunned my nose. Dreads or silky locks flying, shaved heads gleaming, skirts swirling, the freegans surrounded me and carried me along, protesting.

Protesting until someone said close to my ear, ‘We’re going to rescue Daniel,’ and then I forgot ice cream, hauled up my long skirts, and danced with them, a modified form of the Zorba dance, which covers ground really quickly and doesn’t give any impression of haste.

Which is all very well for the young and fit but somewhere around the top of RMIT hill I collapsed onto a street chair and puffed. They danced around me.

‘Corinna, Corinna …’ Someone was singing the Bob Dylan song after which I had been named. But there were new words. ‘He’s in the old brewery, just over there. Trapped inside, trapped inside! Gotta get the gate open, free him from his chains.’

‘How we gonna do that?’ I sang. ‘What do you mean, chains?’

‘We gonna dance there,’ returned the singer, ‘and make a mighty scene! If you get through the gate you can open it for us! And then we’ll find him, and maybe the girl as well.’

‘Deal,’ I said, running out of Dylan. ‘Guide me, o thou great Jehovah, Pilgrim through this barren land!’

‘Right you are,’ they sang in return, and I got up and we danced the rest of the way to the half-bulldozed, extensively ruined old brewery site, which had high chain-link fences all around it, and a very heavily weaponed security guard at the front.

We weren’t going to the front; banging tambourines and beating drums, we danced along the street, amusing or offending the citizenry as we passed. Now I knew what it was to be a Hare Krishna and resolved to throw a few coins into their box when they next passed me.

Then we split, leaving most of the freegans to howl and hoot while three of us—the beautiful man and the tough girl in the army fatigues and me—crept into a cul de sac where we were confronted by a gate.

‘Nigel,’ said the beautiful man.

‘Molesworth?’ I guessed.

‘Of course.’

‘Ivanova,’ said the woman in fatigues.

‘Commander Susan Ivanova?’ I asked. She must have been a baby when
Babylon 5
was on TV.

She nodded crisply. ‘I was Nike, but they all thought it was a sports shoes, not the goddess of victory. So I chose Ivanova.’

‘Good choice,’ I agreed.

Strange company. But meanwhile, there was Daniel.

I can pick locks. I could have taken this one with my eyes closed. In fact, I did close them, so I could feel the fall of the tumblers.

The lock parted, the gate opened.

‘Where is Daniel?’ I asked Ivanova.

‘Somewhere in the middle building. We’ve got torches. Come on. Quietly.’

And it had been such a nice slow uneventful day until now. I like slow and uneventful.

Perhaps it is because of their own fierce love of
freedom that cats have always shown a strange
sympathy for prisoners.

Beverley Nichols
          
Cats’ A.B.C.

Luckily, I have never been afraid of the dark. I can see quite well in it. Possibly this is because I spent a chunk of my childhood without any artificial light. And the things in the dark were nothing like as scary as the things in the light.

The gate silently swung shut behind us. Ivanova the military girl and Nigel the beautiful boy and I crept into the shadow of the crumbling red-brick building and conferred.

‘He’s probably in there,’ said Ivanova. ‘We can get to it by sneaking along the sides of the buildings. Then we’ll just have to run the last bit and hope that security is still watching the dancers.
Hoping they’ll do something illegal so they can arrest them and get their hands on all that sweet female flesh. This way.’

I followed. What had happened to Daniel? It was not like him to be taken by surprise. Unless he was concussed. Or drugged. I thought of those clear eyes clouded with pain and dragged my fingertips across the rough surface of the brick to provide a bit of distraction. My nerves had now screwed themselves up to what Lady Macbeth called ‘the sticking place’ and I wanted to run and strike and scream, not sneak. I wondered what weapons I had. In my backpack, I had a Swiss army knife. I had a flask of water, a snack bar—useful if Daniel was hungry or thirsty, but not offensive, even though the snack bar was of that really impacted muesli. I had documents, money, a torch, a folding shopping bag, a packet of tissues, a notebook, biros and pencils, and—aha!—an aerosol spray can of Fern Forest Household Deodorant, which the grocery man had delivered instead of the pump spray and I had intended to swap. I didn’t think I could stab anyone efficiently with the pocket-knife, or indeed at all, but I was betting that a face full of Fern Forest might distract the boldest. And they would smell nice, too. Not to mention that nice heavy torch which I hadn’t had to use yet. I was following the pale patches on Ivanova’s camouflage shirt. I wondered why the freegans were taking all this trouble to rescue Daniel. If this was some street-theatre freak of their own, I was going to be very cross.

Darkness and not a lot of noise. Scurrying of small feet in the walls. I wished I had worn more suitable clothes for creeping about ruins in the darkness. Something about the size of a pterodactyl passed overhead and I cringed. It hooted.

‘Powerful owl,’ said Nigel. ‘Hunting possums.’

I checked for my heart, but it hadn’t really leapt out of my breast.

We reached the edge of the ruin and looked across open space. Ten, maybe fifteen paces to the alcove in the red-brick construction which would hide us from the view of the guards while I, presumably, picked the lock. I shoved the spray can down the bloused front of my lacy top, grasped my pocket-knife in hand and, when Ivanova gave the signal, ran like the wind.

Screams of laughter came from the gate. There was no shout of ‘Stop thief!’ or whatever it is people shout these days. I was packed into the portico with Ivanova at my side bruisingly tight and I fumbled for the lock. There was a bolt. I drew it. Then there was a lock, and shaking and panting, I tried to persuade it to open.

It seemed to take years. It was rusty and unwilling to move. I dropped the knife. I found it after frantic scrabbling and tried again, wrenching the tumblers around by main force. I tried swearing, I tried cursing, I tried spraying some of my Fern Forest into it and it finally yielded. Then we dragged it open with a groan like the expiring moments of a very large dinosaur and Daniel was in my arms.

‘Quick,’ hissed Nigel, and we ran back across the open space, through the little cul de sac and into the nice legal street. I even locked the gate behind us.

Commander Ivanova stowed the torches in her bag and danced into the singing multitude without a backward glance. Nigel kissed Daniel and then me and joined her. The noise and laughter faded away. The freegans were gone like a dream. I was left holding my very own dear Daniel in my arms, wondering what had just happened.

Didn’t matter. I started to walk us away, down the hill, towards Insula and safety. After a few paces a parched voice said, ‘Have you got any money?’

It was so unexpected that I laughed.

‘Yes, shall I get you a drink?’

‘Buy me a Coke?’ he asked, sinking down onto that identical street sofa on which I had reposed an unlikely amount of time ago. God, less than half an hour. I obtained the Coke, shaking myself down before I went into the cafe. I was a little blotched and bruised, but nothing serious, and my pretty boho clothes had survived intact.

Daniel drank a whole bottle of Coke without stopping, then absorbed all the water in my flask. Apart from being very dehydrated, he did not seem to be injured, except his hands, which were bruised and had a lot of skin knocked off. He was also very dusty, a ruddy powder of old brick. I wasn’t going to ask him what had happened until he wanted to tell me, so I went back for some more fluids. After the third bottle of water he stood up.

‘Food,’ he said hungrily, through my snack bar.

‘Steak at home or shall we stop along the way?’ I asked.

‘Corinna, I adore you,’ he said. ‘Steak at home. Hamburger to get me there.’

He ate the hamburger in three bites. I managed to grab a couple of chips before they too went the way of all flesh. He had obviously been imprisoned without food or water for all the time he had been away. But the food was doing him good. He walked more freely and faster, so that I had almost to run to keep up with his long legs. That steak was clearly calling him home.

He noticed that I was flagging and slowed down. A tram clanged past. It all seemed so ordinary. RMIT students, people from apartments walking little dogs, patrolling policemen, families with children whining for ice cream. Just Melbourne on a summer night.

‘How, O Worker of Miracles, did you manage it?’ he asked. ‘To whom should I be giving supplications?’

‘The freegans,’ I told him. ‘They gathered me up when I was just going out for ice cream and told me they were going to rescue you, so I went along to pick the locks. I’m good at locks.’

‘You certainly are,’ he said with deep admiration. ‘How did they know I was in trouble?’

‘I don’t know. They work in mysterious ways. Are you hurt?’

He gave a rueful smile which made my heart turn over.

‘No, just my pride. I couldn’t get out. My phone is lost who knows where. And that building must have been the liquor store. No windows. Thick walls. Only one door, and it was bolted. I could have stayed there until I mummified. By the smell of the place someone already had.’

‘Nearly home,’ I said. ‘Who shut you in?’

‘Manny,’ he said. ‘Manny and Brigid. They found out that I am employed by her father, and before I had a chance to reassure them, Manny just shoved me into the store and shut the door. I fell backwards and by the time I got up I was locked in. I am so embarrassed.’

‘Don’t be,’ I said. ‘You’re not a superhero. You’re not supposed to expect the people you are trying to help to attack you.’

‘Even though they frequently do,’ he pointed out.

‘Yes, even so. How did they look?’

‘Rough,’ he said slowly. ‘He’s worn to a shadow and she’s so tired she can hardly move under her heavy load. They’re dirty and they’re hungry. And now they’ve gone, and God knows where. They’d been in the old building for a week at least. And now I’ve scared them away. Dammit!’ He kicked an inoffensive tram stop.

‘They may not have gone far,’ I pointed out. ‘In fact, they can’t have gone far. You need some more food and some rest and then you can put out the word to start looking for them again. Come along,’ I said, and he yielded to the pull of my hand on his arm.

I have never seen anyone eat like Daniel after a twenty-four-hour fast, not even Timbo or Jason. The steak vanished, as did three potato rösti and a whole pot of pasta bolognese with extra cheese, and he only started to flag when I produced more bread and more cheese and a rather good tabouli.