Ghost Child (15 page)

‘Her brother got killed.’

‘Her mum’s in prison.’

‘
My
mum says that everybody reckons
she
did it.’

‘Hey, freak, what happened to your brother? Why don’t you tell everyone what happened?’

The girls had formed a hostile circle around me. I felt hot and uncertain and, again, I had that feeling: run, Lauren,
run
, but the boys were yowling like hyenas at the door.

I needed a teacher. I could see from where I was standing that one was on the way, attracted by the noise. I waited for her to break into the circle, but she didn’t rush, she meandered, and even when she arrived, all she said was, ‘Okay, everybody, show’s over. Don’t hang around the toilets, it’s not clean, it’s not hygienic, why would you want to hang in here when it’s so lovely outside?’

The boys split. The girls, with Terri out front, strode past me with chins skyward. One of them knocked me with her elbow as she passed.

‘You okay, Lauren?’ the teacher said.

I was okay. I’ve always been
okay …
just not quite normal and not sure why.

Call me old-fashioned, but I’m the kind of guy who likes to read a newspaper. Mum says I started reading
The Sun
– the comics, anyway – when I was about six and I’ve kept up the habit ever since. Now I live in New South Wales I can’t get
The Sun
, so I have to get
The Telegraph
. I don’t get the
Herald
. My old man, Tony, tells me I ought to read the
Herald
, but in my opinion, a newspaper has gotta fit against the windscreen, so you can read it while you’re sitting in the car.

Anyway, I’m on this job site, north of Sydney, way up north, actually, with the
Telegraph
in the cab of the ute. I always start from the back, since in my view sport is the main news of the day. I’m turning toward the front, when suddenly, there’s this picture of a
very
familiar lookin’ chick. At first I think, ‘Oh, maybe she’s
one of the ex-girlfriends,’ but then I look underneath the picture and the name just jumps out at me:
Lauren Cameron.

Straightaway I think, ‘You can call her what you like, but that’s not Lauren Cameron. That’s Lauren
Cashman
and that, sir, is my sister.’ It had been a while since I’d seen her – twelve years, maybe more – but memory’s a powerful thing and I had no doubt: she could call herself Cameron or Kalamazoo, I’d still know it was her.

In the picture, she’s walkin’ down the steps of Sydney’s Coroner’s Court, and the story says something like ‘Sound of Love’. I didn’t quite get what all that was about, but I think, ‘Hey, wouldn’t it be fun to catch up? Maybe I should give her a call.’ Then again, I didn’t have her number. You might think the Department would have kept me up-to-date with her contact details, but if you do think that, you’ve got a skewed view of how the Department works. They probably couldn’t tell me their own phone number. So, no, I didn’t have her number. But I think, ‘How hard can it be to find out? The reporter that wrote the story will surely have it.’ I call up Directory Assistance and ask them for the
Telegraph
’s number, and then I ring up and after I get through all the bullshit – ‘Do you want to place a classified? Do you want editorial?’ – I get to an operator and I say, ‘I want to speak to the bird who wrote this story,’ and when the reporter comes on the line, I say, ‘That
photo you’ve got, Lauren Cameron, that’s not the right name, and I know, because that’s a picture of my sister. Her name’s Lauren Cashman, and I’m Harley Cashman, and I’m her brother, and I’ve actually lost touch with her and I didn’t realise she was in Sydney, because we’re from Melbourne, but I want to call her and have you got a number?’

I can tell the reporter’s a bit surprised, but I’ve got a way with women and eventually she says, ‘All right, if you’re her brother, why don’t you turn up at the Coroner’s Court because that’s where she’s gonna be, all week, cos she’s givin’ evidence at some kind of inquest, and she’s gotta be there,’ and I think, ‘Yeah. Okay. All right. Why don’t I do that? Give Lauren the fright of her life.’

So I say to my crew, ‘Can you guys finish up the job here? I gotta go to Sydney.’ And I’m thinking to myself, ‘No, this is gonna be too bloody funny, fronting up at court and saying, “Hi, sis.”’

Strange thing is I don’t call Mum. I can’t say why.

So I spend the rest of the day in the ute, driving down to Sydney and thinkin’, ‘On one hand, yeah, this is probably not such a good idea after all,’ and then, ‘Oh, actually, it’s a very cool idea,’ and, finally, six hours after I leave home, when I’m stuck in peak hour, I’m thinking, ‘No, I was right, this is a bad idea.’

But I’m stuck with it now so I park the ute near the Coroner’s Court and bunk down for the night. Then,
in the morning, I wander on down there. I have to go through a metal detector. I have to ask where the right room is. There are press everywhere, and then I see this girl standing there, this slip of a thing with a mop of white hair, shaking and looking absolutely terrified, and I think, ‘Yep, that’s my sister.’ Couldn’t be anyone else. I mean, we’re like a couple of snowballs, and the only difference is our size. I’m a big bastard. I take up a lot of space, even in a conversation. I’m the kind of guy, when I’m there you know I’m there, if you know what I mean. And Lauren’s not like that. She shrinks back. She’s part of the furniture. She’s small. Now I know her better, I can tell you everything about her is small. She talks small. She cooks small. She leaves me hungry. She has this dish she makes, where she cuts pork into tiny squares. It’s like we’re in a recession. When she writes, the letters are all scrunched together. I’ve got this fantastic signature. People are always telling me: how do you get that on the back of a card? And the first time I saw Lauren sign a bill for something, it was all tight, dark writing and it took her like, forever, to get the thing out.

Anyway, I bowled on up to her and said, ‘Mate, it’s me,’ and she looked at me blankly. That took me back a bit. I thought she’d recognise me. So I go, ‘It’s me, it’s Harley,’ and I can see she’s thinking, ‘Who is this lunatic?’

And then she bursts into tears. And I think, ‘Oh
man, what’s all this about?’ She just bursts into tears and kind of falls against me, and that kind of freaks me out. My idea had been, go down there, catch up with my sister – like, how cool is that? We’ll have a beer or whatever – and suddenly, she’s trying to get in under my jacket or something, and people are looking at us, and she’s saying, ‘I’ve got to get out of here. I gotta go, I gotta get home.’ And she’s off, and out the door, and getting into a cab, and this guy, a reporter, is saying to me, ‘Where’s she going? She can’t go.’ But actually, she did just take off and disappear, and I was off my nut about it, thinking, ‘Shit, what did they do to her in there? Or, like, was it me that freaked her out?’ But then I saw what they were saying about her in the paper and I thought, ‘Jesus, I better go get this girl.’

I tracked her down easy enough. She was livin’ in a shed out the back of somebody else’s house, and when I walked in, I found her curled up like a baby on her bed and she wouldn’t move. She was in a panic about photographers. She kept saying she didn’t want to be in the paper any more and, given that I’d had time to catch up with what was going on, I thought, ‘That’s just about inevitable,’ but after a while I managed to talk her around. I threw a jumper over her head and we got into the car and then we just drove. I figured, ‘I’ll head to Mum’s.’ I mean, I had two choices: take Lauren back to my place, up near the Queensland border
where I was sharing with a bunch of building guys, or take her straight to Mum’s. It was a no-brainer. We hit the freeway. At first, we didn’t talk much, we just listened to some music. I thought, ‘This is weird, she’s my sister and, like, we’ve got nothin’ to say to each other.’ It wasn’t really until we stopped at a petrol station, about an hour in, when Lauren got out of the car, with nobody around, that she started to loosen up. I remember this: she bought one of those plastic bags of mixed lollies, with some lolly teeth, and she put ’em over her own teeth and grinned at me with these fake teeth and that’s when I thought, ‘Well, she’s either completely lost it, or actually, it’s gonna be fine.’ And it was fine.

We got back in the car and continued along, talking crap, mostly – look at that horse by the roadside, look at the kangaroos, and Lauren told me a whole long story about how she met our dad once, and how he was into women and motorbikes, which was kind of interesting – and by the time the night came on I’d even managed to make her laugh a bit. But she was worn out. I could see that, so I thought, best thing to do is get her some sleep, so I said, ‘We’ll pull in at Gundagai. No point trying to do it in one go.’ See, it takes at least twelve hours to drive from Sydney to Melbourne, and Gundagai is as good as halfway. I’d planned to go two-thirds of the way, maybe even as far as Kelly Country – where the bushranger, Ned Kelly, had his last
stand before they hung the bastard – but Lauren was weary and I was, too.

She said, ‘Only if we can see the dog.’

It took me a sec to figure out what she was on about, but then I got it. The dog on the tuckerbox, that’s what she wanted to see. Myself, I’d seen it plenty of times, and I warned her it wasn’t much: just a statue, and a poor one, of a dog sitting on a tuckerbox, ears up, alert, exactly five miles from Gundagai – I know, because I’ve clocked it, and it’s just like they say in the song. I took the turn-off, and we pulled up and looked at the statue for about five minutes, and she said, ‘Well, okay.’ And I said, ‘Told you it wasn’t much.’ And then I said, ‘I reckon we better get a motel.’ We got back in the car and headed into town. There were four motels, and three had those neon NO signs above the word vacancy, but at the fourth there was no sign, so I went in to check it out and they had one room. I told Lauren we’d have to share, and she said, ‘Yeah, let’s share,’ like it was something I was suggesting.

I said, ‘When do you reckon we last slept under the same roof? Must have been twenty years ago?’

She said, ‘Probably.’ And then she looked at me, with this very strange expression – not panicked, just very strange – and said, ‘Do you remember anything about the house in Barrett?’

I said, ‘No.’

She didn’t say, ‘Do you remember Jake?’ I figure
she thought my first answer covered it. The truth is, I don’t remember Jake. How could I remember him? I was, like, three when he died. I know who he is, obviously, but remember him? No, I’d be lying if I said I did. Anyway, she looked for a second like she was going to say something else, but then she lit a cigarette and I thought, ‘Okay, whatever. It can wait.’

We checked into the motel and it was soon clear to me that we weren’t goin’ to be gettin’ any sleep. Somehow, we got a second wind, and we sat up, talkin’ and eatin’ the pizza we had delivered. Like everybody, she wanted to know what happened to my hand and, actually, that felt super weird, lying beside her in the bed talking about it, because how many times had I done that with a chick? Gotten the business over, laid back for the post-coital ciggie, and then been asked, ‘What’s the story with your hand?’

The story is this: I lost my right arm above the elbow when I was twenty. Technically, that makes me an ‘A2J’ – an above-the-second-joint, wrist and elbow amputee. Now, most people think that’s got to be the worst thing in the world, losing an arm, but I can tell you, it’s made precisely one difference to my life, and that is, I pull more chicks these days. No, it’s true. The ladies have been good to me since I lost the arm. It gives them something to talk about with me. I size ’em up, and decide what to say. Sometimes, I say I got attacked by a shark, which works better in
Sydney than in Melbourne, where, frankly, there aren’t that many sharks. Other times, I launch myself into a story, one that’s gotten better over the years. I put on this low voice, and I say, ‘I was walkin’ in the bush when I got trapped in a ditch and a bear was comin’ up on me’ – you wouldn’t believe how many chicks don’t question that, since we have no bloody bears in Australia last time I checked – but they just look at you wide-eyed, and then I go on, ‘So I’m lying there, in the dark, with these big yellow eyes comin’ at me, with branches around me breakin’, and I feel this tuggin’… on my leg.’

Then I pause, and they say, ‘Your
leg
?’

And I say, ‘Yeah. It was pullin’ my leg. Like I’m pullin’ yours!’ And of course, right then, they hit me with a pillow, and before long we’re off again.

The real story is, I fell under a train. Drunk as a lord I was, like I often am on a Friday night. I’d been in the pub and I’d had a few, and my idea was to walk home since I don’t drink and drive. But then I passed the railway station and decided to get the train. And I fell off the platform. That’s the unromantic truth. I fell off the platform and the train took the arm off, almost to the shoulder.

The thing the chicks always want to know, when I finally fess up the truth, is, ‘Can you remember it?’ I always say, ‘Mate, it was a top night out. I was legless. And now, of course, I’m armless!’

And once again, that usually gets us back to business.

With Lauren that night, I actually told the truth. ‘Yeah, I remember it. The roar, I remember. The arm not being there, I remember that. Looking down and seeing this flesh, all ripped and torn and bloody, and thinking to myself: that skin, it looks like lace. That blood, it looks like wine. I remember that.’

When I woke up after the surgery, I said to the doctor, ‘Mate, which arm?’ And he said, ‘Right,’ and that’s when I thought, ‘Oh okay, cool,’ because I’m a south-paw, always have been, so I just went off to sleep, thinking, ‘Yeah, that’s fine. They can have the right.’

They kept me in an induced coma for eighteen days, and when I came around, I saw that I wasn’t near the worst off on the ward. They had blokes who had come off motorbikes, who wouldn’t walk again. They had blokes who dived into creeks and hit their heads on rocks, and they wouldn’t walk again, either.

What did I have? Mrs Palmer and her five daughters were gone, but like I say, I never made much use of the right, so it was no biggie, really.

I had this cool nurse that helped me. Her name was Angelina, but straightaway, I started to call her Angel. She was just as a nurse should be, all big boobs and as old as me mum, and bustling around me. I actually told Mum, when I was still drowsy, ‘Mum, this woman, she’s not a nurse, she’s an angel. I met her in heaven, and she
was wearing a halo, and I brought her back with me.’

Angel was mocking me, saying, ‘You’re takin’ too much morphine, Harley. I ain’t got no halo. That was me hairnet you saw.’

Angel was the one who told me, ‘You blokes who have lost a limb, you go one of two ways. Either you start thinking your life is over, or you just carry on like you’ve dropped a wallet or something. I want you to be the second kind.’

She said, ‘Some people, they lose the soul with the limb. You don’t want to be one of those guys. When that happens, they don’t recover. They might survive, but not for long. They end up hooked on drugs, or wanting to kill themselves.’