Mud Girl (8 page)

She hears a cry. “No! No!” whimpers a voice. The screen door slams into place. There's a lower voice, murmuring, then the little voice again, crying. “No.”

The murmuring voice rises. “Dyl. I have to. You have to.”

Abi's out of the bathroom. “What is it?”

Jude is standing in the kitchen, and his son is wrapped around his legs. That must be the Velcro action Jude told her about. The boy's eyes are round and his mouth is in a matching “O.” “Please,” says Jude, “can I leave him with you? Mum's sick and I've got to work. There's nowhere else I can take him.” As he speaks, his son's whimpering grows louder. Abi almost misses Jude's last words.

She starts to say something about Mack's Coffee, but Jude is bent over trying to un-Velcro his son. “I have a job interview,” Abi says, not quite yelling, but now the boy is howling.

Jude looks at her. His eyes are round and dark, and he mouths words, but she doesn't know what he says. Then he's gone.

She feels a fury – a frustration so intense – she digs her nails into her hands. But now the boy is at the door reaching for the doorknob. It doesn't turn.
Jude must be outside, holding it.

The boy tries again and again, then collapses in tears of defeat. His
T
-shirt is thin, and she can see his ribs heave with sobs. Outside, Jude's boots pass over the walkway, quick on the wood.

She hears movement behind her, and when she turns, she sees Dad looking on, his brow knotted.

“What do I do?” she whispers.
Don't expect an answer.

“Sit with him,” Dad says. His voice is gruff: first words of the day.

She lowers herself slowly to the floor and sits right next to the boy, but doesn't touch him. She has the feeling that if she does he'll howl even louder. After a couple of minutes, his sobs begin to subside. Still she doesn't touch him. She feels frozen, though she finds herself staring at the soft brown of his curly hair and something in her chest feels tight. He moves his head onto her knee and he's absolutely still, like a rabbit hiding in the brush. Then he shudders, and begins to breathe again.

Abi looks up to see if Dad is still watching. Imagine that: Dad coming up with how to do something. Who needs advice columnists? Just ask Dad.
Dear Bill Jones…

He is watching and his hands are fumbling with his glasses. “They sure can wail.”

“Enough to wake you,” she says.

“Who is the little bugger?” Not unkindly.

“He's Jude's.” “Jude?” Dad looks puzzled, but doesn't seem to want an explanation. He turns back to the
TV
and changes the channel.

Abi doesn't know how long Jude's boy and she are like that, sitting on the floor, his head on her knee. Time passes – Dad watches an entire sitcom – and the boy sits up.

“Shuice!” he whispers.
What?
He goes to the fridge, pulls at the handle. “Shuice!” Now it's more of a whine.

“Why didn't you say so,” and she pours some apple juice into a cup. He says something like “ang” – must mean “thanks” – and tries to pull himself up on a chair. Juice everywhere. That whine starts again. The sound makes her feel like covering her ears and hiding in her room.

“That's okay,” she says.
Just stop whining. Please!
She mops up. “This house is very spillable.” That's probably not something you're supposed to say to a kid.

Soon as she opens her mouth, his eyes are on her. She doesn't know how much he understands, but he listens. She pours a second cup.

“Danma sick,” he says, then gulps his juice.

“D-a-n-m-a,” she repeats. “Of course!
GRANDMA
!”

He frowns at her peevishly, as if to say, “That's what I said!”

Then, in one movement, he's down from the table, across the floor and looking out the window. The river.

“I have something for you.” Somewhere around here there's that old life jacket. There's a bench by the door. She lifts the seat to look into the box. Gumboots. Was she ever a little kid who walked in the mud holding the hand of that man who spends his days in that chair?

She scoops out the fluorescent orange vest with its safety collar and loops and buckles. How she'd hated this vest. She always loved to swing her arms when she was little. And she paid for it too, with knuckles bruised on doorways, but she would have settled for those bruises over these straps.

She pulls open the zipper, and feeds the vest over one of the boy's arms, around the back, over the other. He doesn't fight her, but his narrow shoulders bunch, and one hand begins to pick at the strap. She takes it from his hand and draws it up between his legs to hold the vest in place; he's such a little guy, with such a nothing-there body, the vest could slip right off him. She remembers the buckle of this strap now: it wouldn't hold, and here, attached to the side of the vest edge, is the pin that Mum always used to keep it in place. With the memory comes an image of her mother's
hands, tanned the colour of honey, and slim. There was always a sureness to them that never seemed quite to fit with the rest of her.

She hooks the strap into its buckle and tightens it just as her mother did, and that's when he begins to struggle. His struggle is silent though, as if by his saying nothing, she'll not notice what he's doing.

“You have to,” she says and remembers those were Jude's words to him. How often does Dyl hear those words? She fastens the pin.

He frowns and looks at her as if trying to make sense of nonsense. Then he begins to pull at the vest, at the strap, the pin – the pin is old and gives way, and there's a ping of metal as it flies across the room. He yanks the strap until it's hanging like a tail behind him. Then he stands tall; he has scared himself a bit, she's sure of it, but there's triumph in him.

“Okay,” she says, a little disarmed and even slightly in awe of his performance. “Let's go play in the field.”
I might have to tie a rope around your waist, though.

But no, he shakes his head. More shuice is what he wants. His request is another whisper. Does he ever speak up? The longer he's here in her house, the wider his eyes grow. He seems to be more apprehensive with time, not less. She fills the cup again, then sets about looking for a ball or something – anything – to play with.

There's an empty cereal box, a couple of tins, and in the corner is a heap of stiff, yellowed newspaper. “Paper boats,” Abi says, pleased with this bit of inspiration. He has no idea what she's talking about, and stands there with his hands wrapped around the cup, that frown moulded to his face. So far, she can picture his face in distress, running over with tears, or like this – all creased and closed. Maybe a paper boat will bring a smile. She begins to fold.

Funny how it comes back, the folds, the turns. She and Dad used to make them all the time, lower them to the river, see how long it took until they disappeared into the white sun.

The boy holds his, while she makes one for herself.

“One for Dad,” he says, and he looks at the door.

Should she tell him it might be a while? She doesn't even know how long Jude will be.

“All right.” She continues folding.

“One more,” he says when she's done. And “one more” again. He takes each as it's finished and puts it next to the last, nose to nose. His little fingers are precise. She didn't know little kids could move like that. He waits, moving with a little hop on first one foot, then the other, back and forth, while she folds the next.

“I'll fill the sink now,” she says.

He looks panicked. “No! One more!”

“We might run out of paper,” she says, but he looks at the thigh-high stack of classifieds –
EMPLOYMENT
(lots of red-pen circles) – and she starts to laugh. “Okay, maybe not!”

She plugs the sink, and turns the tap on.

“No, no!” He's followed her, cup of juice still in hand, and grabs hold of one of her legs. Even with just one arm, he has an amazingly tight hold.
Velcro-kid, right?

“I can't fold boats all day!” She leans over to free herself, and up comes the juice – yellow pours down the front of her white shirt.
My white shirt. Job interview.
Her yell makes him drop his arm, step back, and his face is fearful. The shirt sticks to her skin as she struggles with the buttons. “Oh no,” she says. “Oh no!”
I probably sound like Rhodes. But what am I gonna do?

The boy is edging backwards, away from her, and she only begins to register the fear on his face, and then the phone rings. She's pulling off the shirt. The sink is filling. Might as well throw the shirt in. She rolls it in a loose ball, and it lands in the sink as she picks up the receiver.

“Miss Jones?” asks a voice on the other end. Grumpy.

“Speaking.”

“It's after eleven,” says the voice, then waits.

Who?

“You needn't bother coming for your interview.” The voice is stiff.

“But…” she begins, but he's gone. The job, too.

A sound does break through the rush in her head: the sound of the back door clicking closed.

“Dyl!” she calls, her voice squawking as if she has a reed instrument stuck in her throat. “Dyl!” She hurries after him.
No. No. No. Can't be.

She can't see him when she steps onto the deck.
No. No. No. Can't be. There's been no splash. Not that she's heard…

She forces herself to go to the edge, to look into the water. She doesn't want to see what she expects to.

But there's no little body in the water. Maybe he's gone under, sucked down…or he's beneath the boards. She gets down, lies on the boards. She can feel the rough wood against her midriff.
Oh yeah, I'm in an orange-stained bra.
She looks through the cracks. Just dark water.

She hears a sound. A lilting sound. A sort of hummy-singsong in the field. She gathers herself up. There he is, in the midst of the grass, some of it high as his waist. As she nears him, he turns to her. In one little mitt of a hand he's got a clump of dandelion buttons.
Rhodes's flowers
, is all she can think, as she takes his offering. She kneels in front of him, and can hear her own breath. His eyes are on her, and are again filled with fear. Not his, but hers this time. He must see it in her.

“Don't ever do that again,” Abi says, her voice like a rusty saw in wood, and then she's shaking. Couldn't stop if she
tried. He frowns – how many times a day does this kid frown? There's just too damn many thoughts in his head – and he tentatively stretches his arms around her shoulders. Her sunburned skin is still sore, but she doesn't pull away. Not until she hears the car horn honking, the catcall. Then she remembers what she's wearing. Or rather, what she's not, and she hurries him to the house.

Her shirt is like a great yellow-streaked balloon, bubbled and floating over the edge of the sink. The telephone receiver beeps from the counter where she dropped it as she ran for the back door. She can see the door to Dad's bedroom opened just a crack and her guess is that he's gone for a nap, probably with his pillow over his head as he sometimes does. Water is everywhere, and she splashes through to turn the tap off. She picks up the shirt, and wrings it out right over the floor. She thinks how you're probably not supposed to swear in front of a two-year-old, but Dyl stops her blast in his own way.

“Boats!” he cries, and before she can stop him, he's dived onto his front and is lying full-length in the water, two paper boats floating at the tip of his nose. “See! See!” he shouts out. He looks up at her. “See? See? Boats!”

She stretches out opposite him. The water is deliciously cool on this July day. “I see,” she says, and nudges a boat into race position. She shows him how to blow the little crafts – he
does, huffing and puffing, with his bum in the air – and it isn't until the boats are soggy and the water has mostly seeped into the floor, that the front door opens, and there's Jude.

“What the…”

“Daddy! Boats. See!”

But Jude is staring at Abi in her bra, and she feels awkward as she gets to her feet and goes to her room for a sweatshirt to pull over. When she comes out, Dyl is trying to convince Jude to be a wind for his soggy boat, but Jude is shaking his head.

“Got to go, Dyl. Daddy's tired. We were busy at work. We're still trying to find a – ” He breaks off as he sees her. “Thanks, Abi. My boss really needed me for a few hours. I think he would have fired me if I hadn't come in!”

She nods numbly, and all at once they're gone, and the house is quiet. She's left with a soggy floor – nothing new in that, though – sad paper boats, and a question: What were they still trying to find at Hood's Paint?

Ethereal

E
thereal. Extremely delicate and light in a way that seems too perfect for this world.