The Lost Child (21 page)

After Dunc's second anniversary, and then his third, I try to believe what everyone else believes: that he fell into Bunny's soak; that he floated into underground rivers and caves, which is why he couldn't be found by the divers. So what happened to his bike, I wonder? Did that fall in the soak with him? Not very likely. So I always come back to believing he's alive somewhere, he has to be. And one day he'll come home. When he's ready. When he's forgiven me. And Dad. Who I will never forgive.

There's a hard little lump inside my chest, in the cave of my heart where I keep all this hidden. When Dunc was here he used to tell me about the black men who once lived in caves all around Burley Point, the Coorong, all through the Bindilla Range. He said they lived under rocky overhangs and in wurlies made from bark and branches. There are scratchy old photos in a book at Bindilla of men with spears and women in wurlies. Uncle Ticker said these photos are Old Pat's guilty secret because he and the other early settlers killed off the Boandik people with flu and smallpox and sometimes poisoned flour.

In Grade Six, I know every English king and queen from William the Conqueror to our Elizabeth, but I don't know anything about the Boandik. There are no books about them in the school library, none in the Lending Library that comes once a month; there are only Uncle Ticker's whispered words and Old Pat's guilty secret. I wonder if Dunc is my guilty secret and if there is the same kind of whispering around town.
Where is he hiding
hiding crying crying dying dying?

There is a grave in the tea-tree outside the cemetery fence where Long Tom Dobbin, the last of the Boandik people, is buried. Dunc said he was a tracker who helped the police find lost children, runaways, escaped prisoners. He could read a footprint in the sand as if he was reading a story book. A bent blade of grass or a broken twig could tell him if a person was injured or limping, if they were carrying something, if they were thirsty or had recently eaten. If Long Tom Dobbin had been alive when Dunc disappeared, he'd have found him easily.

Long Tom Dobbin was buried outside the cemetery fence because he was an Aborigine. Uncle Ticker is fighting the Council to have his body moved and rightfully recognised.

‘At least he has a resting place,' says Mum, which is her way of saying Uncle Ticker would be better off fighting to find Dunc than trying to bury a black man with white people. And if she had the money, she'd have a plaque erected for Dunc on the side of the road near Bunny's soak. Why hasn't anyone thought of that? she says. Why hasn't his father?

Mum now works five days a week at the cafe, sometimes on the weekends. She says it helps to keep busy. Sometimes I start awake at night thinking Dunc has come home for the school holidays. Could it be a premonition? I crawl to the edge of the bed, far away from Mum's hungry hands. I pick at my shin.

America has a handsome new president, a Roman Catholic. He has a beautiful wife with strange, wide-spaced eyes who wears little box hats on the back of her head. Miss Taylor wore a beaded box hat to hold down her veil when she married Joe Marciano. She wore a white lacy dress with satin buttons halfway down her back and Joe Marciano's sister from the city was the bridesmaid in blue; there was no flower girl.

Lizzie and I watched Miss Taylor arrive at the church with her father and walk out with Joe. They both looked so happy and smiling that tears prickled behind my eyes. Lizzie said weddings always make you cry; she's been to five, she should know.

I still can't think of Miss Taylor as Mrs Marciano. I can't think why women have to change their names when they marry. Or why they stop working and stay at home, like Mrs Marciano does, cleaning her new green and white house on the corner of Main and Macklin streets, and making a new garden. When I ride past on my bike, she looks up and waves. She has one of those new transistor radios with her in the garden, tuned to ABC voices talking, talking, sometimes someone singing. Mrs Joe Marciano looks like a prisoner behind her green picket fence. It is not how she should be.

*

It is 1962 and I have started high school. Dunc has been gone four years; in September it will be five. Pardie has not returned to Burley Point, not even for a visit. Pardie's mum has left Augie and moved in with Cele. Mum says don't let me catch you anywhere near those two or I'll have something to say. Elvis has a girlfriend called Priscilla who is only three years older than me. Colleen Mulligan has gone to boarding school in the city; I catch the bus to Muswell High, and now I get my monthlies, which I could do without. Faye Daley gets whatever she wants, squash heels, denim jeans, a Malvern Star bike, and, as soon as a transmitter tower is built in the Mount, she'll be getting a television too.

Mrs Marciano has had a baby girl. A baby girl without arms.

I avoid walking past her house: I cannot bear the thought of her baby. But one day after school, as I come out of the cafe, she is right there, pushing a blue pram. ‘Hullo, Sylvie!' she calls, as if nothing's happened, as if everything's normal. ‘How are you enjoying high school?'

There is no way of hiding, so I walk beside her, keeping my voice chirpy, telling her that I like Latin best, that Maths is good with Mr Kerford, that next week in Science we're dissecting frogs and I'll probably faint or throw up on the floor. I don't tell her how terrific it is not having Colleen Mulligan sneering at me. Or that every morning when the bus leaves Burley Point, I become a different sort of me. I don't tell her that I love my school uniform and the long socks that mostly hide my shin. I don't tell her any of this because the whole time I'm thinking: I will not look in that pram.

But as we cross the street near the post office, the pram wheels get stuck on the kerb, which means we have to stop while I help Mrs Marciano lift it onto the path. And I get the quickest glimpse of a baby with a fuzz of black hair and a pink bunny blanket pulled up to her chin. I will not look again.

Next we're on the veranda of Reggie Patchett's grocery shop. ‘Would you mind waiting with her? While I duck in here?'

I can see silver threads in Mrs Marciano's shiny brown hair. I can see Reggie's double swing doors are easily wide enough for a pram.

‘Like this,' she says, jiggling the pram gently. ‘I won't be a second.'

That baby must have ESP. The doors are still swinging when she wakes up with a yawn and a snuffle, tosses her head from side to side and kicks at the blanket. I jiggle the pram. She gurgles and looks up at me. I push the pram backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, hoping she'll go back to sleep. But she smiles a big, gummy grin as if I'm the funniest thing she's ever seen. Then she does it again. And that little gurgling smile makes me smile too, which is why I stop pushing. I bend over the pram and see how pretty she is, with her mother's creamy skin and her father's black hair and happy black eyes.

‘She's beautiful, isn't she?' says Mrs Marciano at my elbow.

‘She woke up,' I say, springing back.

‘She likes you,' says Mrs Marciano, smiling into the pram, her mouth exactly the same shape as that little mouth that was gurgling at me. ‘She's such a good baby, such a happy little thing.'

Happy? How could she be happy?

‘I've got to go,' I say, giving a quick wave, almost running away.

‘Good luck with the frog,' she calls after me. ‘Let me know how it goes. Tania would love to see you again.'

Tania?
And then I remember Mum saying they called her Tania, probably after Tania Verstak, the first New Australian to win Miss Australia, and who might win Miss International.
Tania,
Tania,
I say to myself all the way home.
How could she be happy?
Again and again I swallow the taste of tears but it's not until I rush through the gate and climb the kurrajong tree that I give in, and I cry and cry for that little girl with no arms, wrapped in her pink bunny blanket.

Friday after school, Mum is home early. ‘Take this to the Old Girl,' she says, licking the envelope closed. ‘I need to keep in with her.'

At least it's a birthday card, not another note asking for money. I will not be that kind of messenger again. Grannie's down-turned mouth. Muttering about Mum and maintenance payments and why can't she manage. Shoving a fat envelope into my hands. As if it was my fault. As if I was contaminated by Mum's asking.

Riding past the fish factory, I hear the survey plane droning overhead and then following me down Main Street like a silver buzzard spying on the carcass of the land. I like the word
carcass
.
‘Let's carve him as a dish fit for the gods / Not hew him as a
carcass fit for hounds
.
'
I've learned this by heart for my English test. Here there are sheep carcasses rotting in paddocks because last year's drought has lengthened into winter and there still haven't been good rains.

It's only a matter of time before oil is found under the carcass of our land, that's what everyone says. If it's been found in Bass Strait, why not here? Already geologists are snooping around Bog Creek Road and Baldy's Flat, measuring whatever they measure to find where the oil might be hiding underground. Already there's a truck set up on Uncle Ticker's land, thumping away day and night, sending shock waves so far out that when Shorty pulls his pots near Ten Mile Rocks, he says the sea surface shivers like snakes under a rug.

After Uncle Ticker married Josie, Grannie moved into town. She said there could only be one hen in charge of the hen house and she'd better get out before feathers started flying. Her new house is on the foreshore with big picture windows to take in the view. Mum says she's welcome to it, and wait until the southerly busters hit, she'll have so much salt on her windows that she won't have a view. Or a garden. Because nothing grows that close to the sea.

Grannie has more birthday cards than last year. She arranges ours at the back of the sideboard, behind the open-mouthed fish vase with a bunch of red roses stuck down its throat. Hiding amongst her cards are photographs in silver frames.

‘How's school?' she asks as she scuttles off to the kitchen to make me a cordial. ‘Still top of your class?'

While she's gone, I look at her photos. Wedding portraits, others of my cousins in the city, the ones who go to posh schools, who I hardly ever see anymore. Since the divorce. Since I became contaminated. There's a photo of Uncle Ticker and Josie's wedding in the Mount with bridesmaids and flower girls in lemony green. Mum and I weren't invited. Because of Dad's bad blood. Or the divorce.

Where is my school photo? The one I gave her last year? There's a new photo at the front of Uncle Ticker's twins, Jamie and John, wearing blue bonnets and white buckle-up shoes. No photos of Dunc. None of me.

Can Grannie remember Dunc without a photograph? Or doesn't she want to remember?

As soon as I've finished my drink, she whisks my glass into the kitchen. Car doors slam. ‘They're here!' Grannie rushes to the back door. ‘Look at you,' she coos as the twins waddle towards her. ‘My little sailor boys, don't you look handsome, aren't you the most handsome sailor boys I've ever seen?' She scoops up John and gives him a big kiss, puts him down and gives Jamie a sloppy one too.

Uncle Ticker says I've sure grown and how's high school? Auntie Josie tells Grannie she bought the sailor suits at John Martin's in the city. Grannie takes the twins' hands and leads everyone to the front porch. At the door, she turns to me. ‘Hadn't you better run along now, Sylvie?'

Everyone waves, even the twins, because Grannie is crouched down, waving their hands for them. ‘Bye-bye, Sylvie,' she says in a silly voice. ‘Bye-bye, Sylvie. Byyyyyeee.'

I pedal fast to the corner. The wind off the sea slicks back my hair and makes my eyes water. When I look back they've all gone inside.

Cele takes an extra glass from the dresser and pops a champagne cork into the rafters.

‘Careful, Lia,' says Jude, taking the bottle and catching the froth in a glass.

Lia is Jude's special name for Cele. Somehow it turns her into a stranger with locked doors and hidden keys and a
Keep Out
sign for me. They are celebrating something special, though they don't tell me what.

‘Here's to us,' says Cele, showing me how to clink glasses. When I'm slow in taking a sip, she says: ‘Go on, it won't kill you.'

The bubbles make me sneeze, and my sneezing makes them laugh. Cele sips and says, ‘The Old Girl should mind her own business. It's my life I'm living, not hers.' Jude nods and the shadows beneath Cele's eyes soften into blue moons. ‘So,' says Cele, turning to me, ‘a little bird told me you've won a prize.'

‘Nothing. Only Form One Latin.'

She says Latin's not
nothing
and asks what I'm going to do when I leave school. I say I might get a job at the paper mill in Muswell; isn't that what everyone does around here? Cele looks at me in disbelief. ‘You can do better than that. You've got brains. Get out of here and get yourself a good job.' I forget and reach for my leg. ‘And you've got to stop that too.'

My face turns purple. The sore on my leg is incurable, that's what I tell everyone. The doctors are searching for a cure because just as it heals it breaks out again; it's a medical mystery. But if I said that to Cele she'd say I was starkers. Trying to act casual, I drink too quickly and bubbles fizz up my nose, making me splutter and giggle.

‘You look so much like Dunc when you laugh,' says Cele with sad eyes. ‘Doesn't she, Jude?'

Jude nods. ‘And like your father.'

I flush a stronger shade of purple. ‘Who'd want to look like him? He's a born loser.' I want to rip rip rip at my leg.

‘I don't think anyone's ever
born
a loser,' she says gently and Jude gives her hand a squeeze. ‘He was never the same after Darwin. That's what your mum says, so I'm not speaking out of school. People think war makes men out of boys but that's piffle.' Then she talks about Dad having a brother who drowned in a dam at Bindilla. I'm only half-hearing but I know this must be the boy in the photo at Grannie's. She tells me Dad was there when it happened. He was seven. She smiles with kind eyes. ‘He's not a monster, Sylvie. He's just a man.'