Sydney Bridge Upside Down (13 page)

‘He tripped,’ Dibs said. ‘He went too fast into the dinghy and fell out.’

‘If you pushed him, boy—’ I said.

‘I didn’t push him,’ Dibs said. ‘Did I, Cal?’

Cal breathed in quickly a few times, then said: ‘I tripped.’

‘You were lucky,’ I said. ‘You nearly drowned.’

Sam Phelps took Cal up to the wharf. I stayed behind to help Dibs free his foot, which was cut and swollen, then I went up the steps. Dibs crawled after me.

The packing-cases Captain Foster had mentioned were being unloaded from the
Emma Cranwell.
Cal was sitting
on a box. Sam Phelps stood beside him. They were watching the sailors.

Sam Phelps looked hard at me. ‘Now you know why I don’t want you boys on the wharf,’ he said. ‘After this, you’ll stay by the woolshed.’

He said this very firmly, it was the angriest I’d ever heard him speak. I was the one he looked at when he said it. He must think I was to blame for Dibs trapping his foot and Cal nearly drowning.

‘It was an accident,’ I said. ‘I didn’t do it.’

‘There’ll always be accidents with you about,’ he said, keeping up this hard look which seemed meant to frighten me. ‘You stay off the wharf.’

‘He was drowning,’ I said. ‘I saved him.’

‘Stay off this wharf,’ he said, turning away.

‘What do you know?’ I asked Dibs. ‘He’s blaming
me.
’

Dibs was sitting on the wharf, rubbing his ankle. ‘Must be because you’re the eldest,’ he said. ‘Or because he doesn’t like you.’

‘I’ve done nothing to him,’ I said. ‘Where do we have fun now? They won’t let us play anywhere. See what you kids have done!’

‘Don’t blame me,’ Dibs said. He pointed at Cal. ‘He’s your brother. You should look after him.’

‘I got other things to do,’ I said.

‘Like goofing about with your cousin, eh?’ Dibs said.

‘Be careful, boy,’ I said. Then I saw that Cal was very pale. I put my arm around him. ‘Are you feeling sick, Cal? Want to go home?’

‘I’m watching for a while,’ Cal said. ‘Mr Phelps said I could watch.’

‘All right,’ I said, looking at the ship, looking for Caroline. ‘We won’t tell Dad about this,’ I said. ‘He’ll only get angry.’

‘I won’t tell him,’ Cal said.

‘I’m telling somebody,’ Dibs said. He looked up at me cheekily. ‘Guess who?’

‘Don’t tell your mother,’ I said. ‘She’ll tell Dad.’

‘Wrong guess,’ Dibs said.

‘Can I have a turn?’ Cal asked.

‘If you like,’ Dibs said. ‘Three guesses. Harry’s already had one of his.’

‘I’m not playing,’ I said.

‘I guess Buster,’ Cal said.

‘Right first time!’ Dibs said, looking amazed. ‘You’re smart, Cal. Smarter than Harry. Guessing right first time! What do you know, Harry?’

‘I wasn’t playing,’ I said.

‘I guessed Buster because I knew about him coming home,’ Cal told me. ‘Dibs said before—’

‘Don’t tell him,’ Dibs said. ‘You know what I said about a ride on the Indian. You know who’ll want a ride if he sees Buster first.’

‘I wasn’t going to tell him, Dibs,’ said Cal. He spoke as if
he
shared secrets with Dibs, which was pretty odd because
I
used to share them. A good many times lately, I now realised, Cal and Dibs had been off having fun together, and I was too busy thinking of Caroline and being with her and listening to her to notice that Dibs was no longer as annoyed about Cal as he used to be. They were only kids, of course. Even so, Cal was a traitor to say he wouldn’t tell
me about Buster, especially since I had just saved him from drowning.

‘You said you’d let me know when Buster was coming,’ I told Dibs. ‘So we could ask him about some ammo. What about that promise, eh?’ I did not speak angrily, I was more sad than angry that they had kept such a secret from me.

‘I haven’t had much chance to tell you,’ Dibs said. ‘You don’t play with us now. If you’d been in the cave yesterday I could have told you. That’s when I told Cal.’

‘What about the pistol?’ I said. ‘Have you kids been looking at it?’

‘Only once,’ Dibs said. ‘Just to make sure nobody had pinched it.’

I didn’t believe that. I bet they’d had more than one look at the pistol. It had been hidden under some rocks at the back of the cave ever since we had found it; nobody would pinch it. I could see through Dibs. He hoped to get some ammo from Buster and use the pistol without telling me. That was why he did not want me to know Buster was coming home after so many weeks.

I had given up asking when Buster was due back. I used to ask Mrs Kelly whenever I saw her, then Dibs told me one day that Buster had had a row with his father and nobody in the family knew for sure when they would see him and his Indian again, and his mother was sick of being asked about him. Dibs promised to tell me whenever he had news of his big brother. I believed him. I stopped annoying Mrs Kelly with questions.

Now I wished I had kept going to the cave with them, I wished I hadn’t missed so much of the fun. But even
as I wished this, I looked at the
Emma Cranwell
to see if Caroline was in sight. She wasn’t.

‘Anyway,’ I said to Dibs, ‘why tell Buster about Cal nearly drowning? Why would he want to know that?’

‘So he’ll give Cal a ride,’ Dibs said. ‘Bet he gives him a long ride when he hears about it.’

‘He’ll probably take me to the store,’ Cal said. ‘Probably buy me some toffees.’

‘Seems pretty strange to me,’ I said. ‘I save you from drowning, yet you get the reward!’ But if it stopped him from telling Dad about his narrow escape I didn’t care how many toffees he got.

‘Think I’ll look at the packing-cases,’ Cal said, getting off the box. ‘Mr Phelps doesn’t mind if
I
look.’

‘What do you know?’ I said to Dibs. ‘He thinks he’s everybody’s favourite. I bet nobody would make a fuss of me if I nearly drowned. I bet nobody would dive in and save me.’

‘You can say that again,’ Dibs said, jumping up and following Cal before I could bop him.

Those two kids certainly annoyed me. I forgot Dibs’ broken promise, though, when I sneaked along for a look at the packing-cases two of the sailors were lifting into the freight wagon.

Written on each case was:

THIS SIDE UP

MR D. S. NORMAN

^c
/
_o
SCHOOLHOUSE

CALLIOPE BAY

I knew what this meant. It meant Susan Prosser had
been right. Mr Dalloway would
not
be back next term. We would have a new teacher.

Before she died, of course, I was getting around to believing Susan Prosser when she said Mr Dalloway had gone for good. It was after she died, when I discovered what a fibber she was, that I decided she must have been fibbing about Mr Dalloway. She had fibbed about the budgie (‘What budgie?’ asked Mrs Prosser when Dad, at my suggestion, offered to look after Joey), and she had fibbed when hinting at what she would write to my mother about Caroline and me (the letter said nothing about our running game), but the packing-cases showed that she had not fibbed about Mr Dalloway. This all suggested that she really had been pretty dippy, she certainly wasn’t as clever as she pretended to be. How could I feel sorry for her? I did not feel sorry for her, I did not care now.

And now I did not mind waiting for Caroline, either. It was right for her to meet her old friends. They would let her go eventually. After all, one of these days she’d go for ever; that day, at any rate, had not yet arrived.

I moved from the wagon and sat on a bollard to wait for Caroline, and I did not follow Dibs and Cal when they went aboard the ship to look at the engine-room.

I was glad I waited. For, when the sailors at last guided Caroline and her presents up the gangway, I was the one she hurried to, I was the one she kissed.

And why should I care about the dirty looks Sam Phelps gave me, as if warning that I could not expect a ride behind Sydney Bridge Upside Down? Caroline would make everything all right.

I
T WAS
not until we were aboard the Reo that Mrs Kelly, old purple face, had her idea. She said we should have invited Sam Phelps to come to Bonnie Brae with us, it would be a big treat for a man who lived such a lonesome life. Dibs groaned and so did I, but this only seemed to encourage her. She left her seat beside Caroline—Mr Kelly had put two long stools on the Reo’s tray—and pushed past us to the cab. She leaned round the driver’s side of the cab to tell Mr Kelly about her idea. He said it was a mad idea.

‘It must be years since Sam was last at Bonnie Brae,’ she said. ‘What a treat for him to see the place again!’

‘Come off it,’ said Mr Kelly. ‘You’ll want us to give his nag a lift next. I hear there’ll be a gallop or two. What about it, Frank? Would you put your money on Sydney Bridge Upside Down?’ We could hear him laughing with Dad along there in the cab.

‘I hope you haven’t forgotten what happened to Mrs Prosser,’ Mrs Kelly told Mr Kelly. ‘People were content to
let her live a lonely life, afraid to leave the house, hiding. And see what happened to her!’

For a few seconds there was no sound from the cab. Then Mr Kelly got out and came round to the back of the lorry. He put a hand on the tailboard, looked along the road towards the wharf.

Mrs Kelly worked her way to the tailboard.

‘We’ll be late, Mum,’ Dibs said as she went by.

‘Late for what?’ she asked. You would think there was no carnival at Bonnie Brae and we were all sitting in the Reo for the fun of it.

Dad hopped along and stood beside Mr Kelly.

‘What do you reckon, Frank?’ asked Mr Kelly after they had looked down the road together.

Dad glanced at Mrs Kelly. ‘I don’t reckon he’ll want to come. He was saying yesterday how the horse seemed out of sorts. He won’t want to leave that horse alone all day. You know what he thinks of Sydney Bridge Upside Down.’

‘There you are then,’ said Mr Kelly, looking up at Mrs Kelly. ‘Do we try to save Sam from being lonely? Or do we leave him here so his horse doesn’t get lonely? Which is fair? What do I do now?’

‘I suppose you’d better not bother,’ she said, looking at Dad as if she didn’t believe what he had said.

Dad looked up at her as if he had simply been telling the truth. Then he followed Mr Kelly back to the cab.

‘He would have come if we’d asked him in plenty of time,’ Mrs Kelly told Caroline as the Reo moved off.

‘Not if his horse was sick,’ Dibs said. ‘Mr Baird was right about that.’

‘I’m talking to Caroline,’ Mrs Kelly told Dibs. She said to Caroline: ‘Mr Phelps has few pleasures nowadays. I understand he was once a keen reader. Now, my husband tells me, he never opens a book. His main interest in life is his horse.’

Caroline nodded. ‘He’s a dear old horse.’

‘Boy, he had to pull some big loads the other day,’ Dibs said. ‘All those cases for the new teacher. Must have a large family, eh?’

‘A large library, very likely,’ Mrs Kelly said. ‘It’s books that take the room and make the weight. It will be interesting to have a well-read man in the bay. For a teacher, Mr Dalloway was surprisingly ill-read.’

‘Cut talking about school,’ I whispered to Dibs. Monday, when the term began, was much too close. I wanted to forget about it. I would forget about it by having a great time at the carnival.

Mrs Kelly gave me another of her looks when she saw me whispering to Dibs. I’d had many of these looks lately, which was why I never called on her nowadays; I had the feeling that if I turned up expecting a piece of bread and some of her plum jam, she would tell me to clear off. I couldn’t think why she looked at me like that; I used to reckon she was friendly, much more interesting than Dibs to listen to.

She said nothing right now, maybe because I forced myself not to look at her. I looked over the side at the road. Then we were at the river crossing and the other kids were looking over the side too, reaching down to see if they could stir the water, wondering if the lorry would
get stuck. But the river was shallow today and Mr Kelly whizzed the Reo across.

Even so, there was one bad thing about it—I was reminded of how Mr Wiggins’ van sometimes got stuck in the river, and this reminded me of Mr Wiggins, which of course was the bad part. Trying to cheer myself up, I thought there was also a good part—Caroline was coming to the carnival with us and not with Mr Wiggins. She did not care about the lady’s man.

I risked looking at her. The risk was that Mrs Kelly might interrupt the look and make me feel bad.

Caroline was wearing a white dress, also a blue cardigan. The cardigan was Mrs Kelly’s idea; she said, when Caroline came out to the Reo wearing only the dress, that although it was a sunny morning the day might very likely turn cool by late afternoon. I thought the cardigan was a good idea too, it seemed to go so well with Caroline’s hair and eyes, it helped to make her beautiful.

She smiled at me. And Mrs Kelly did not notice the smile because she was looking at the cab, probably trying to send a warning thought to Mr Kelly not to go so fast, the Reo sure was zooming along now.

We zoomed past the old house without chimneys and if Mrs Kelly hadn’t been with us I would have told Caroline about that house and why, according to Dad, it had no chimneys. When I was smaller, Dad had told me the house had no chimneys because the people who lived in it did not believe in God. He meant brick chimneys because I had later discovered, when I did some exploring after deciding his explanation did not sound right, that there was actually
a tin chimney at the back, like the one on Sam Phelps’ place near the wharf. I guessed Dad had been trying to scare us into going to Sunday school. Now that there was no Sunday school, or church, in Calliope Bay, he did not mention God. This suited me, since I had not been fond of Sunday school. Of course I believed in God, and I trembled when I thought of the huge books in the sky, the ones in which anything you did down here, especially anything awful, was described. I did not think of them often, I could go for many months without thinking of them. Actually, I reckoned some things were not put in the books; it seemed impossible for
everything
to be noticed from so far away.

Next we zoomed past the waterfall track, and I remembered that Caroline had still not been to see the waterfall, something had always happened to stop us from going, like her feeling too tired, and now the holidays were nearly over and we still hadn’t been. And now that the holidays were nearly over, how much longer would Caroline stay with us? Maybe until my mother came home, whenever that was. It seemed my mother had become sick in the city and did not think she should travel all the way back to Calliope Bay until she was quite well. Naturally, I did not want her to be sick too long, but if it meant Caroline could stay I guessed I could do without a mother for a bit more. Cal was the one who missed her; he kept asking Dad when she would be home. He didn’t know when he was lucky, that kid.

Not long after we had zoomed past the store we heard a horn tooting on and on in the distance, then nearer, then right beside us, then behind us. The tooting must have
been meant to make us stop, but Mr Kelly slowed the Reo for only a moment before he was zooming on again. From the start, of course, he would have seen who was doing the hooting, but those on the back of the lorry had to wait, though not for long. Because Mr Wiggins’ van seemed to flash by, then it was far back down the road as we zoomed on.

Before we turned a bend we had time to see him pull up and change direction. Now he was following us.

‘Unusual for Mr Wiggins to be down this way on a Saturday,’ said Mrs Kelly.

‘I bet he can’t catch Dad,’ Dibs said. ‘He hasn’t got a chance now.’

‘Your father should have stopped to see what he wanted,’ Mrs Kelly told Dibs. She stood, meaning to head for the cab, but the lorry was swaying and she sat down again, almost crashing on Caroline.

I caught sight of the van just before we turned another bend. Mr Wiggins was chasing us, all right.

I looked at Caroline. She didn’t notice me looking. Mrs Kelly did; she gazed back at me.

Mr Wiggins chased us all the way to Bonnie Brae. He did pretty well to keep not too far behind, seeing it was mostly such a bendy and narrow road, and we looked into deep and rocky gullies as we zoomed along, we looked at the sea far below, at huge breakers. It was a dangerous road, but Mr Kelly had been over it plenty of times and so had Mr Wiggins. Once or twice I thought Mr Wiggins was catching up, and when this happened I could not help looking anxiously at Caroline, but it turned out all right
because the Reo moved ahead again and, like Dibs said, Mr Wiggins didn’t have a chance.

Well, I knew why Mr Wiggins had been bound for Calliope Bay and I was more than ever glad now that Mr Kelly had taken no notice of Mrs Kelly’s mad idea about bringing Sam Phelps; if we had waited for Sam Phelps, Mr Wiggins would have had time to reach Calliope Bay. And although I was sure Caroline would not have got into his van, I hated imagining how he would have looked as he tried to tempt her into it, I had seen him looking at her plenty of times. I had not always been able to keep Caroline out of sight when Mr Wiggins visited the bay, though I made sure I was near whenever he called at our place, he could never be alone with her. No matter how hard he tried to be alone with her I was always there, watching and listening. I had to admit that he sometimes made her smile, as he made Mrs Kelly and other women smile, and this annoyed me so much I once asked Caroline what exactly Mr Wiggins had said to make her smile, and she told me it was not really what he said, it was the saucy way he said it. I asked her to give me an instance of this, and she thought for a while, then told me he had said he was longing for the day when her slip would show, and she agreed there was nothing funny about such a remark, but she had smiled because of how he said it. I was none the wiser, of course. Heck, I’d been by his van when he had said the same sort of thing to Mrs Kelly and she had smiled too, it must simply be that Mr Wiggins had a secret way of looking at girls and women when he said stupid things, they themselves did not know how he
trapped them into smiling. Hypnotism maybe.

We were only about a mile from Bonnie Brae when somebody else joined the chase—Buster Kelly on his Indian. Dibs spotted him first; he saw Buster whizz past Mr Wiggins’ van when we were on a straight stretch, then the Indian came roaring up behind the lorry, and there was Buster grinning up at us while we waved. It was fun to see Buster again, he was a decent fellow. I had been very disappointed when he had not arrived home a week ago, as Dibs had said he would, and my disappointment was not only because I couldn’t ask him for some ammo for the pistol, or even because I couldn’t get a ride on the Indian, it was mostly because he was a decent fellow who did not mind talking to kids and did not get bossy with them.

‘Buster, be careful!’ Mrs Kelly called when he took both hands off the handlebars to show what a great rider he was.

That only made him clasp both hands above his head as he whizzed along behind us.

‘He’s a daredevil, that Buster,’ Mrs Kelly told Caroline. Caroline smiled. This was the first time she had seen Buster, and I could tell she did not mind smiling when she saw him, she did not try to stop herself from smiling as she did with Mr Wiggins.

Buster was taking risks. The road might be straight here, but it was not very smooth and the Indian did some jumping while he kept his hands above his head. He did not wear a helmet, either. Like all the Kellys, he had ginger hair, and now it was blowing about in the wind, sometimes falling over his eyes. Buster did not care, though; he
kept right up behind the Reo, grinning at us most of the time, putting on a horrified look whenever the Indian hit a bump.

He probably would have followed us all the way into Bonnie Brae if his mother had not kept pointing and shouting to him to be careful. Suddenly he frowned back at her, put both hands on the handlebars, took the Indian to the outside of the road and whizzed on past the lorry, out of our sight. We could hear the roar of the Indian fading ahead of us as he sped on to Bonnie Brae.

Back along the road, Mr Wiggins was still in the chase, but not gaining.

‘First thing we do at the carnival is look for Buster,’ Dibs said. ‘Bet I find him first, boy.’

‘Bet I do,’ I said.

‘I’ll try that Death Ride place,’ Cal said. ‘That’s where Buster liked going last year.’

‘Now we all know where to look,’ said Dibs, staring at me as if I hadn’t already guessed where to look for Buster, as if he had hoped to keep Buster to himself and Cal.

‘Or he might be near the merry-go-round,’ Cal said. ‘That’s where I’ll look first.’

He didn’t fool me. I had seen the look he gave Dibs. So Cal would rather stay friendly with Dibs than let his own brother get to Buster first! What a brother to have, I thought. Because he did not like Caroline as much as I did, he preferred to be friendly with Dibs. I had been wasting my time ever since that day at the wharf; ever since then I had done my best to be friends with them, going to the caves with them, playing on the rocks with them,
looking for swamp frogs with them—and it had made no difference, they still wanted to keep me out of their fun. All right, if they went on like this, I would pay them back. For instance, I could tell Dad about the pistol, I would rather give up the pistol altogether than let those kids have it. Or I might pay them back in another way, there were plenty of ways of paying kids back.

They fell in about the Death Ride, anyhow. Because there was no Death Ride at this year’s carnival. I discovered this as soon as we got there, and without running off like Dibs and Cal to look for it. I simply asked a red-coated carnival official how to get to the Death Ride, and he told me there wasn’t one because so many motor-bike fellows had crashed last year, there had been a lot of complaints about broken skulls, fractured arms and legs and other injuries.

I decided to wait a few moments at the Reo before looking for Buster. I could check on what Caroline wanted to do. I could be her guide, there was plenty to see in Bonnie Brae at carnival time.