Sydney Bridge Upside Down (20 page)

somebody else, somebody was always going to have a baby, somebody was always to blame for a certain road not being graded, somebody was always to blame for the district not getting a fair deal—I preferred the gossipy bits about people and the things they did to one another, and it did not matter when Mrs Kelly began putting in things like ‘you-know’ and ‘what-you-may-call-it’ into her stories, I could guess, or thought I could, what she was trying to hide. I noticed too that the men used words like
bloody
and
damn
after they had been drinking a while, and one night I even heard Dad use the word
bitch
, and neither Mr Kelly nor Mrs Kelly seemed to mind, Mrs Kelly talked so softly to Dad after it that I couldn’t hear what she said, and when I was in bed later I said
bitch bitch bitch
to myself until I fell asleep) and nobody will care what the scar-faced old man and the hollow-backed old horse do to me when they reach me. The hooves can trample on me and the boots can kick me, nobody knows, nobody cares. I must not wait in the grass. I must run for the trees. I stand, alone in the paddock, and I do not look back. I put my head down and I run for the trees. The swamp frogs are much noisier now, I hear them as I stand panting behind a tree, they drown out other noises, I can no longer hear the hooves and the boots. I might be safe here, there are trees all the way to the riverbank. If only there were a short-cut through the swamp from here—I look at the rushes, remembering. I was not far from here when I threw the present in. I could only hope it would sink or float away out of sight. I have never been back to check. What if somebody sees it floating there and fishes it out? What will he find? Flowers? A fur-coat?
A hat? An ornament? Or a joke present—like a leg of mutton? I cannot guess what Mr Wiggins thought Caroline would want from him. He would know it had better be something special, because he must know that Caroline did not like him and only something special could make her change her mind. I should have looked, only there wasn’t time, I did not waste a moment after running down the stairs, falling, running on. I must stroll past the swamp during the day, glance in and make sure the present is out of sight. If Sam Phelps will let me. If he doesn’t keep watching me. Where is he now? Where is his horse? The swamp frogs are quieter, maybe because the moon is still hidden. I hear a soft thud-thud, like the sound hooves might make on grass. I peep from behind the tree, look towards the works. I see nothing moving, unless that is something by the furnace-house, that could be something. Only the usual works shadows? I cannot tell. The breeze is much stronger, though. I look at the clouds and many of them are dark, and I can see hardly any stars. If I wait too long in the trees there will be a storm, I will be caught in it. I move on. I go from tree to tree, not looking back, keeping close to every tree-trunk. Now the wind is making more noise than the swamp frogs, it is making the leaves above me rustle, it is making the branches creak. I run faster, much faster than when I’d played Robin Hood games in here with the other kids, yet seeming to take much longer to reach the river-bank, the trees will never end, they go on and on ahead of me, I’ll never reach the river-bank (Now you can say this, dear Caroline. You can start another page and say that one day after school my mother called Cal and
me down from the passion-fruit shed and said she wanted us to go across to the store. She stood on the back porch to tell me this, and she handed me some money and told me what to get, and when I asked Cal as we went up the sidepath why he had stayed behind the tank-stand while our mother was talking he said it was because Mr Dalloway was in the kitchen and was probably telling her about him not being able to do his sums today. I said she didn’t seem to be upset when she was telling me what to get at the store, in fact she had the pink cheeks she usually got when she was pleased with something somebody told her or when she was excited. Cal said he hoped I was right, he said he could think of no other reason why Mr Dalloway should call. I said I couldn’t either, it wouldn’t be because of me since I had been doing all right at school lately, I was going through one of my good no-bopping times and was being spoken to politely by Mrs Kelly and other grown-ups. Cal and I talked about school, how it was not so bad some days and damned terrible other days, and Cal said today was one of the days when he would rather be playing at the beach than learning stupid sums, and I said we could go to the beach and have a swim as soon as we had got the things from the store— What things? I couldn’t remember what she had told me to get. I asked Cal what she’d said, but he said he hadn’t heard. He tried naming a few things, like butter and eggs and jam and sugar but I still could not remember. I said it was no use, I would have to go back and ask her. Luckily, we had only reached the river crossing when I realised I had forgotten, it would have been terrible if I got to the store and then found I didn’t know what to
ask for. Cal said he would wait for me. I said I’d run home and run back, it wouldn’t take long. But it took a bit longer than I expected it to. This was because the back door was locked when I got home, which was pretty unusual; I had to wait for my mother to open it. I had to knock several times before she opened it. ‘What are
you
doing back here?’ she asked, and her face was angry and red. She kept the door nearly shut, but I saw she was wearing her dressinggown, and that was pretty unusual for this time of the day. I said I had forgotten what she had asked me to get from the store. ‘Oh, three pounds of flour and two packets of cigarettes, never mind the other things,’ she said. Then she must have guessed that I had seen her dressing-gown and her bare feet, because she said: ‘I’m having a shower while you kids are away. There’s no privacy with you two running in and out. Anyway, three pounds of flour and two packets of cigarettes. Will you remember now?’ I said I would, and she closed the door. No need for her to be so crabby, I thought as I ran back down the road. No need for her to have a shower so late; if we got in her way so much, she should have her shower earlier. I told Cal this and he agreed that she shouldn’t have been crabby. If she was having a shower, he said, Mr Dalloway must have gone. Must have, I said. Then I thought it was funny I hadn’t seen him on the road when I went back. I decided he must have popped along to see Mrs Kelly about Dibs; Dibs had been having trouble with his spelling lately. And I thought no more about my mother taking so long to open the door. I forgot all about it—until a few months later) the storm will break before I reach the river, it is as if I am running in the same
spot all the time, yet I pass different trees and I am brushed by different branches. I must rest. I fall against a tree, grab the trunk to stop myself from flopping to the ground. When the noise of my panting stops at last I hear the sound of hooves back through the trees, and I do not wait to hear the other sound, I run on, the wind wilder than ever, the trees bending towards me, branches swiping me. Until suddenly I am at the river-bank. I can hear the river, I can see it rushing blackly by. Somewhere in the hills it must already be raining heavily, must have been raining a long time; I am sure there are logs speeding by in the river, maybe bodies as well. I hear thunder and look at the sky, and I know I will never see the moon again, the storm is beginning. I turn as the rain hits my face. I shout into the trees: ‘Go home! Go to your shack!’ They won’t hear me, I can’t hear my own words. I run on along the river-bank, and the wind is behind me now and I am going so fast I think I will fall at any second, or be blown into the river and swept out to sea with the logs. The thunder has stopped, the rain is heavy, mud spurts into my eyes. I stop to rub my sleeve in my eyes, and I hear sharp cracking sounds from back in the trees, and at first I think it is a pistol going off, then I realise it is the noise of twigs being snapped by heavy boots. The hooves are back there too. Soon the man and the horse will burst from the trees and chase me along the river-bank. But I will be safe if I get to the plank-bridge across the swamp. No horse can follow me there, and I can pull up a plank behind me so that the man will not be able to follow, either. It seems such a long way to the plank-bridge, though. And I can scarcely see where I’m going. I
must just guess whereabouts in the rain and the dark the bridge begins. I try to stop to turn, my feet can’t grip the ground, I skid, I slide in the mud. The bridge must begin around here some place, it can’t be far away, it’s in the rushes here somewhere, it must be somewhere near. I slide from the river-bank slope towards the swamp’s edge, and I splash through the water and my feet sink into the mud as I splash on. Then I see the bridge, I see the first plank. The plank seems to be floating, soon it will be beneath the water. The water seems to be rising too swiftly. I’ll never get to the plank in time (And say this, dear Caroline. Please say that I saw my mother kissing Mr Dalloway) and they can’t be far behind now, I won’t look, I won’t listen, I must keep staring at the plank, if I stare hard enough it will stay in place, it won’t float away through the angry angry wildly-waving rushes (Say I saw her, dear Caroline. Say I saw her kissing him. Say I saw them from the tank-stand. I saw them through the kitchen window. He had his hands on both sides of her head, his fingers in her hair, and he was kissing her. I saw them through the window. I was on the tank-stand. They were kissing in our kitchen. I couldn’t watch. I jumped from the tank-stand and ran out to the road) and as soon as I put my foot on the plank I lose my balance and I fall, I seem to spin several times before I sink into the swamp, I am in blackness, then my head is out of the water, I am reaching for the plank, dragging myself out of the slime and the awful-tasting water. I stand on the plank. I move very slowly. I stop. I move again. My foot slides but I do not fall. I stand still. I tell myself I will not fall. I am too strong to fall again. I can get across the
plank-bridge without falling. They cannot possibly catch me now (Say this as well, dear Caroline. Say that one day when I was on the back porch I heard them giggling and talking in the kitchen. They didn’t know I was on the porch because I was sitting below the window-sill, taking a splinter from my heel, concentrating on getting it out and not realising for a few moments that my mother had a visitor. I crept away, but not before I heard a word that puzzled me. I asked Dad about this word a few days later when I was helping him in the garden. It seemed all right to ask him then, he was very friendly to me that morning and I was pleased to be helping him, it was one of the days, one of the great days, when I enjoyed being with my father, just him and me, like the times when she was away with Cal, leaving me with Dad, happy times. I saw him put down the hoe, then rest on his crutch while he wiped some sweat from his forehead. I smiled at him, said I would take off my shirt soon, the sun sure was hot. He said I had better take care, I burned easily and sun-blisters were no fun. I said I would not leave my shirt off too long, long enough probably to get a few more freckles. He said he had freckled easily too when he was a youngster, he said he had huge freckles on his back that he’d got when he was only four or five. This, I thought, was my chance to ask about the word. Had he, I asked, ever been called Spotty when he was a kid? He laughed. No, he said, he had been called Freckles a few times, but he’d not had enough freckles to keep that nickname for long; many of his freckles, he said, had faded. He said I could expect the same to happen to most of my freckles; as it was, he said, I did not have nearly as many as
young Dibs Kelly. Good, I said. Had he, I asked slowly, ever been nicknamed Hoppy? He frowned. He wanted to know why I had asked that. I said I had read a story about an air ace in one of the Kelly kids’ comics, and this ace had lost a leg in a crash-landing, and a nasty character in the story had called him Hoppy and this had made the ace feel unhappy, but his friends came to his rescue and gave the nasty character a good hiding, they said he should be ashamed of himself for calling such a brave man Hoppy. I could have gone on like this a while longer, but I saw Dad nod, obviously agreeing with what the ace’s friends had done, so I guessed I could leave it to him to answer. He said he had been called various things in his time, but he could not remember being called Hoppy. Of course, he said, some nicknames were friendly and some weren’t, much depended on the way they were used, on how the person using a nickname felt about the person he was talking to. Hoppy, as I had probably guessed from reading the air-ace story, was not a friendly nickname, he said. None of his own friends had ever called him Hoppy, he said. They knew that he, like the air ace, would be unhappy if they did. On the other hand, he said, a man could not help making a few enemies during his life, and it was quite possible, though he had not heard of it, that one of his own enemies had referred to him as Hoppy, it was an obvious enough thing to call a one-legged man. He bent down for the hoe. I said I would never call a one-legged man Hoppy, it would be cruel. Good lad, he said. He went on hoeing. So now I knew what it meant when my mother used that word, when she said: ‘I promised to make Hoppy and the
kids some scones for tonight. Better let me go now, Pet.’ It meant she was my father’s enemy) unless I slip and fall into the swamp, Sam Phelps could catch me then, he could find me lying in the swamp and pick me up and take me to the river-bank and throw me into the river and let me be washed out to sea. Has he reached the beginning of the bridge yet? He might already be at the first plank, Sydney Bridge Upside Down watching while he comes after me. The wind cuts, the rain stings, the water streams down my body, my dingdong frozen. I steady myself, push the hair from my eyes, move on. I must be half-way across the swamp. The water is still rising, but if I can keep my balance I’ll be safe. Anyway, the frogs are silent and I can no longer hear the hooves and the boots. I’ll soon be across. I know this because I have reached the open part where Kingsley, our wonderful Muscovy, used to do his tricks. I don’t want to see Kingsley. I don’t want to remember him. Kingsley is dead. I didn’t mean to kill him. I meant to scare him, but I did not mean to kill him. I miscalculated. I landed on him instead of beside him. Whatever Susan Prosser said, I did not mean to do it. Poor dead Kingsley, poor dead Susan Prosser—I scream at the swamp, I scream, I scream. Sam Phelps screams back. He screams that he is on his way, he is coming for me, he is right behind me, he will lift me on to his horse and carry me off to the sea. You will never escape, he screams. You will never catch me, I scream back. I am too strong for you, I scream. I begin to run, guessing where the plank is, where the next plank is, certain I will keep running even if I miss the planks, I am too strong to fall (And if there’s room, dear Caroline, you can say this