Lyrebird Hill (29 page)

‘You’re bleeding.’

Dusk was falling, and one by one the stars were coming out. I shifted on the log bench, sliding one foot behind the other, out of sight. ‘It’s nothing. Just a blister.’

‘Blister, my arse.’ Pete removed the tea towel he’d tucked into his jeans as a makeshift apron, and kneeled at my feet. With surprising gentleness, he cupped his fingers around my ankle and stretched out my leg, bending nearer to examine my instep. ‘It looks more like you’ve been gored by a wild boar. I’m afraid I’m going to have to operate.’

‘What about dinner?’ I asked, looking hopefully over at the barbecue. Tonight we were having roasted garlic salmon with vegetables and salad, and the aroma wafting from the cast-iron bush oven was driving me to distraction.

‘Food will have to wait,’ Pete said. ‘Don’t move, I’ll be back in a flash.’

He ducked into the house and was back a moment later with a large first aid kid. He took out gauze bandage, nursing scissors and a tiny bottle of Betadine.

‘I’m just going to give it a squirt with this,’ he explained, unscrewing the Betadine. ‘It might sting, so don’t say you weren’t warned.’

I shut my eyes.

You’re bleeding.

The antiseptic liquid burned my raw skin. I shifted focus: the warm rough squeeze of Pete’s fingers on my ankle as he applied a strip of gauze; the tickle of his hair against my bare leg when he bent to retrieve the scissors; the rhythm of his touch as
he wound the bandage gently, smoothly, and with infinite care, around my injured foot.

The murmur of wind in the casuarinas reached me, and my attention wandered. All of a sudden I was twelve again, racing along the river’s edge and up the hill, into the dark shadows of the pine forest.

‘Hey, Roo. You’re bleeding.’

The Wolf pointed at my T-shirt sleeve. ‘Did you cut yourself?’

We were sitting in the patchy shade of a black cypress pine that grew at the base of the Spine. The ground beneath us was carpeted brown with needles and dotted with hard little pinecones.

I examined the splodge of blood on my sleeve. ‘It’s nothing.’

The Wolf frowned and leaned closer, bumping his bony shoulder against mine. ‘You’d better let me have a look,’ he said. ‘You might need stitches.’

I shoved him away, and the words popped out before I could stop them. ‘I’ve just scratched my scar.’

Curiosity lit the Wolf’s eyes. ‘You have a scar? Let’s see.’

‘No way.’

‘Come on. I’ll show you mine.’

‘Yeah, right. As if you’d have anything
this
ugly.’

The Wolf wiggled his eyebrows. ‘You’d be surprised.’

‘And
you’d
be grossed out.’

The Wolf hitched up his jeans leg to reveal a shiny coin-sized patch below his knee, pink against the tanned skin. ‘Snakebite,’ he said proudly.

My breath got stuck in my throat. ‘How come you didn’t die?’

‘I cut across the bite with my penknife and sucked out the venom.’

I couldn’t stop staring. ‘Mum says you shouldn’t cut a snakebite. She says you have to bandage up the limb and wait for help.’

The Wolf pulled a face. ‘Hard to wait for help when you’re deep in the scrub and no one knows where you are. Anyway, check this one out.’

He slid down his sock to expose his ankle, revealing a zigzag like a red lightning bolt. ‘Croc attack,’ he boasted. ‘A real monster of a thing, too. Dragged me right under, had me in the deathroll. I only survived on account of being a champion swimmer.’

A glimmer of disbelief made me scrunch up my face. ‘Really?’

The Wolf flashed his canines in a devious smile. ‘Would I lie to you, Roo?’

‘Yes!’ I rolled my eyes, but secretly I was impressed. I looked hopefully back at his leg. ‘Any more?’

Rolling up his T-shirt, he displayed a tanned stomach where a pink line hooked around his right hip. ‘This one nearly finished me,’ he said seriously. ‘Fifteen stitches. I was in hospital for yonks.’

‘What happened?’

He waggled his eyebrows again. ‘It’ll cost you.’

I had twigged by now that he might – just
might
– be pulling my leg about how he got all those scars. But it didn’t matter; he had
scars
. None as bad as mine, but it was a relief to know he wasn’t perfect.

‘All right, I’ll show you.’

‘Promise?’

‘Cross my heart and spit in your eye.’ I nodded at the pink line on his hip. ‘So, how’d you get it?’

‘Wild boar.’

My mouth fell open. ‘Get away!’

‘It’s true.’

‘What happened?’

‘We were pig hunting. My brother’s dog flushed some piglets from a hollow, and the sow went wild. Me and my brother ran like buggery, but just when I thought I was safe, the sow charged out from behind a tree and went for me.’

My brows shot up. ‘You have a brother?’

The Wolf picked up a pinecone and snapped off a spur. ‘Sure. He’s twenty-five. I haven’t seen him in yonks. He’s in jail for armed robbery.’

I stared. ‘What about your mum and dad?’

‘Mum died. I still see Dad sometimes.’

‘Why don’t you live with him, instead of with Mrs Drake?’

‘He’s mad.’

I stared at the Wolf in amazement. A million questions were suddenly hammering my brain, but the Wolf had gone very still, apparently fascinated by his pinecone. A weird sort of silence spun around us. I felt uncomfortable – not because of what the Wolf had told me about his family, but because of the deep frown carved into his normally cheerful face.

The silence between us grew. Currawongs burbled in the branches of a nearby tumbledown gum, and from the distance came the quiet roar of the rapids.

‘I like Mrs Drake,’ the Wolf said suddenly. ‘She bought me these jeans. I’ve never had new jeans before.’

‘They’re cool.’

‘She gave me all this other stuff, too. Gear that Bobby grew out of, football jumpers, T-shirts, that sort of thing. I’ve even got my own room.’

Mrs Drake lived on the other side of the Hillard farm, and mostly kept to herself. Her husband had died a long time ago, before Mum and Jamie and I came here to live.

‘What’s Bobby like?’ I asked.

The Wolf shook his head. ‘Up himself.’

‘How do you stand living there, then?’

‘Most of the time it’s just me and Mrs Drake. Bobby’s hardly ever home, he’s too caught up at uni. Anyway, I’d much rather be there than at the home.’

That was the first time I’d ever heard the Wolf mention the boys’ home in Newcastle. I waited for him to give details, but he was staring pointedly at the sleeve of my T-shirt.

‘Come on, Roo,’ he reminded me. ‘I showed you mine.’

Taking a deep breath, I lifted my sleeve. The Wolf shifted nearer, and let out a soft whistle.

‘What a beauty! How’d you get it?’

‘A dog bit me.’

The Wolf pulled away and looked at my face. ‘Cripes, that must’ve hurt. How old were you?’

‘Six.’

His eyes went wide. ‘I bet you had a gazillion stitches.’

‘Only twenty-five. And surgery. And lots of time in hospital.’

He whistled again. ‘I can’t believe I’ve known you all this time and you’ve never shown me before. Whose dog was it?’

‘My dad’s.’

‘Did it get put down for attacking you?’

‘Well, my dad . . . it was . . . I mean, he—’ I hung my head, suddenly faint. Clawing my fingers into my jeans legs, I tried to breathe away the memory.

‘You okay, Roo?’

I nodded, but I wasn’t okay. Not really.

When I was little, Mum took Jamie and me to see a puppet show in Armidale for the school holidays. There’d been a brightly painted stage with trees and a lake, and wooden puppet-girls wearing swan costumes. The puppets – marionettes, Mum had called them – had danced across the painted lake, faster and faster as the music rose. Then one of the swan-girl puppets got tangled and her strings broke. She fell limp, her wooden body hitting the stage with a clatter.

That’s how I felt now. As if my strings had been snipped.

‘Roo, what’s up? You’ve gone all pale and quiet.’

I gulped a breath and opened my eyes – when had I shut them? The Wolf was staring at me, his eyes a hand span from mine. He collected a strand of my hair and wound it around his finger, gave it a gentle tug and smiled.

‘I thought you went somewhere.’

‘I did . . . kind of. I’m back now.’

He gave a soft growl, then sprang nimbly to his feet. He reached for my hand, and as we stood in the shade of the cypress he began to transform.

‘I didn’t bring the nighty,’ I admitted. ‘Do you think the Beast will mind if I wear jeans?’

The Wolf considered this. His change was almost complete; he was no longer a boy. His eyes blazed and fur was beginning to sprout on his face. His nose was long and sharp and he had whiskers.

Baring his teeth, he snarled. ‘You’ve got ten minutes to escape.’

Without wasting another breath, I turned my back on the terrifying creature and ran for my life.

Pete finished tying off the bandage and stood up, his shadow rippling over me. ‘This time tomorrow, you’ll be right as rain.’

I looked up at him, shading my eyes from the sun.

‘Have you ever been bitten by a snake?’

I don’t know why I said it; the question kind of blurted out of its own accord. Pete must have thought me crazy, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that the boy emerging from my forgotten past and into the brighter light of these new incoming memories had grown into the man who now stood before me.

Pete’s brow went up, then he grinned. ‘Nah. Their fangs’d snap off in my leathery old hide. Why do you ask?’

‘Never mind.’

He narrowed his eyes, and his lips twitched into a secretive little smile. ‘Although I did,’ he added quietly, ‘get attacked by a crocodile one time.’

‘Nasty.’

As he went back to the barbecue I thought I heard him mutter something about being a champion swimmer.

A flush shot into my cheeks, and I busied myself inspecting the dressing he’d just applied to my foot, picking at the edges of the bandage, loosening a thread and worrying it free.

Of course, I couldn’t just come right out and ask.

What if he said yes? What if he remembered everything that had once happened between us, while I was still mostly in the dark? When I was twelve, life had been precarious. I wasn’t popular like my sister. Rather, I was tubby little Ruby Cardel, always the last one picked for a team, the weird, quiet girl at the back of the class, the one who sat alone at lunchtime.

I glanced at Pete from the corner of my eye.

He was whistling – not a happy tune, but some disjointed rendition of a Nirvana song that made it sound like a dirge – as he scrutinised the sizzling salmon, then reached for more twigs to fuel the barbecue flames.

If my suspicions were right – and Pete was in fact my childhood friend the Wolf – then my stay at Lyrebird Hill had the potential to become tricky.

I drew the loose thread from the bandage weave and rolled it between my fingers. Gradually, my recall was trickling back, but I wasn’t yet ready to play my hand without knowing the full score. Something had definitely happened between us; the only trouble was, I couldn’t remember if it had been good . . . or better off forgotten.