The Lost Child (29 page)

A blur of faces peer at my potential. My neck prickles and I want to fall through a hole in the floor and never be seen again. At least my father is not looking at me: he's sitting at a table on the other side of the aisle, examining his hands. Outside the court, I did my best not to look at him. I tried not to see that the pants we were suing him for were baggy at the knees. That he looked thin and worn. As if I cared.

The magistrate tells me to sit. ‘And who's representing Mr Meehan?'

‘I am,' says my father.

‘I am, Your Worship.'

My father grins. ‘You are?'

A murmur runs around the room. ‘No, Mr Meehan,' says the magistrate, ‘I'm not. But I am
Your Worship
, so if you're presenting your own case, you'll address me accordingly. Stand, please.'

My father stands and leans on the table. Referring to a paper, the magistrate tells him that nine years ago when the court set maintenance payments, he had an inheritance of thirteen thousand pounds and an income, from operating a fishing trawler, of two thousand pounds per annum. Has anything changed?

‘Plenty,' says my father. He had money put aside, he tells the magistrate, but things have gone bad and he's had to sell his boat and he has no way of paying anything to anyone right now.

‘We've just seen it,' mutters Mum. ‘How could he have sold it?'

‘The best I can do is pay what I can if there's anything left over when the bloke from Port Lincoln coughs up.'

The magistrate says he's not interested in who coughs up what as long as my father pays a substantial amount of the arrears by—he looks at a page and chooses the third of February—and that regular payments are maintained thereafter. Case adjourned for a period of two months. Next matter, please.

Back in the street, Mr Drewe tells Mum he'll follow up with a letter. ‘You're a bloody dill,' says Dad, barrelling out of the court house, ‘if you think you can get blood out of a stone.'

Mr Drewe ignores him and shakes Mum's hand, mine too. When he leaves, Mum looks around helplessly. She has eaten off her lipstick and her lips are blue beneath. Winds off the farming flats whip along the street, snapping at our skirts, flapping the Christmas decorations already on shopfronts and telegraph poles. Suddenly she walks off and I'm forced to run after her, darting around people on the pavement, catching up outside the Farmer's Emporium where she's staring at wheelbarrows in the window.

‘Why'd you just take off like that?'

She still doesn't answer. The window is full of flickering television sets all showing a man and four women at a big desk. One of the women says a man's entitled to put up his feet when he arrives home from work. The others laugh and squeal and the man tells them they're a bunch of drongos.

‘Why did he sell his boat?' I ask.

When she turns, her face is bitter white: ‘For the same reason he burned the house down. Because he'd do anything to get out of paying me a penny. Because he can't tell the difference between me and you. And because he doesn't care tuppence about you.'

Elvis cares tuppence, ten shillings, ten pounds. Two days later he slows on Lagoon Road and waits up ahead, motor humming. I walk towards him on jelly legs. ‘Sorry about your brother,' he says and I notice the way he looks at me, hesitant, kindly. ‘Didn't know it was him…you know…'

I blush and look away and think:
What is wrong with me?

‘I finish night shift Friday,' he says, and when I look back I can see the kindness is mixed up with something different, maybe the same kind of wanting as me. ‘Got the weekend off,' he says. ‘Saturday, we could go for a drive to West End. Whaddya reckon?'

I reckon the moon is mine.

Four o'clock at the jetty he said and already he's ten minutes late. I watch shapes rippling in the shallows below and try not to feel as if the whole world knows I'm waiting for him. A ute turns at the roundabout, slowly, taking its time, but it's only someone from out of town who drives by in low gear without even glancing at me. What if he doesn't come?

Kelp on the legs of the jetty drifts and clings with the tide, strong and free like I want to be. On the sea wall, a cormorant spreads out its wings to dry and studies me with a beady eye as if it knows I've been stood up. I'm thinking maybe it would be better to leave than be stood up, when Chicken skids onto the jetty in a spray of pebbles and dust.

‘Whaddya doin'? Wanna go for a ride?'

Right then I hear Elvis throbbing down Main Street. By the time he rumbles to a stop at the jetty I'm standing by the side of the road, trying to act as if I've never met Chicken before in my life, pretending I can't see him gaping after the car as we drive off, tyre rubber screaming. Of course he'll tell Roy.

Thumping over Stickynet, Elvis nods at the rig. ‘Close to findin' it. Down to three thousand feet. Soon know if it's there or not.' He grins. ‘Didn't say that. Had to sign a clause sayin' I wouldn't. Between you and me.'

Between Elvis and me, there's a wide empty seat. ‘Whaddya doing way over there?' He pats the seat and I slide over timidly. He pulls me closer, tucks me right under his arm as if I'm a cushion.

He's changed his hair: he's lost the hair oil and curl; now he's all soft and shaggy. Elvis suited him better: he's too big to be a Beatle; he looks sort of silly. Chewing on a wad of Juicy Fruit, the wrapper there on the dash, he looks like Will Pickles from Coomandook. Suddenly I get a scared little lump in my throat and when he slows on a corner, I have a flash of opening the door and jumping out, but it's only a tiny lump that I force myself to swallow like medicine. Reaching across me, he turns up the wireless and taps a few beats on my arm with his fingers. The Beach Boys.
I get around, round, round, round…
Then he lifts my hand onto his knee and I tap a few beats on his leg too, like I know what I'm doing, which I don't. So I make myself sink back in the seat, trying to get calm. And I close my eyes for a second but maybe it's longer because when I open them, we've passed the turn-off and settled to a steady speed.

‘You hear Pardie Pansy's been back?'

Pansy? ‘Pardie Moon?'

His hand drops from my arm to my knee. ‘They reckon he took off with that relief teacher. Someone Allen?' His fingers climb up my leg, tickling, prickling, a million ants on a mission. ‘Heard Kenny and his mates really did him over for being a pansy before he left.' Pardie's face before mine, his panic to leave. The Four Seasons…
bi-i-ig girls don't cry-y-y…
Now his fingers at the leg of my shorts, poking, prying, my heart suddenly thumping too hard. ‘Wouldn't be him if his marble comes up. Wouldn't be me, neither. Who wants to fight slanty eyes?' Suddenly his hand's back on the wheel, changing gears. ‘I know a good place up here.'

I take a huge silent breath and let it out slowly. I see Pardie's face all battered and bleeding and have to force him out of the window. We're on a narrow track, overgrown with banksias and bracken that scratch at the car as we ram through. On a sharp corner, I'm lifted half-off the seat, thrown high and down again. Will laughs a silly-boy chortle, the sort I'd expect from Chicken or Roy. Further in we stop in a clearing full of casuarinas and she-oaks, dapples of sun trapped in the shade underneath.

The engine ticks into silence. He opens his window and lets the world in. I slide across the seat and do the same. The scent of she-oaks, dry and sweet, and far off the sound of surf running. ‘Ya know who owns this land?' He reaches under and slides the seat back. And when I shake my head: ‘Your Uncle Ticker.'

So?
He sits there looking all pleased with himself. For the first time I notice his leg jiggling on the edge of the seat, and I wonder if he's as nervous as me, but why should he be?

The seat is warm and sticky under my legs and Will is looking at me with his blue Elvis eyes, but all at once I can't tell if he's Elvis or Will Pickles, or some kind of big Beatle. And I get this odd feeling that he's not really seeing me either, that somehow he's muddled me up with Uncle Ticker, and having a Meehan in his ute is some kind of prize, like finding a fiver. But how could I be any kind of prize for anyone?

He takes out his gum and sticks it on the dash. A shaft of light catches his cheek and he looks suddenly young, like a boy, like Roy, and I wonder if he's got a sister, if she's older than him, or younger? Could she be the same age as me? But maybe all this thinking is a way to stop wondering about what happens next, what if I don't want it, not really, and how will I know what to do?

Suddenly he's leaning over and I'm leaning back and I'm lost in his lips, sugary sweet, and now I can't think of anything except how different his kisses are from Roy's little kisses, how hungry and dizzy and drowning. I'm slipping down on the seat and again there's that scared little lump in my throat that might be a scream, but that is crazy because the rest of me is tingling all over, every bit of me burning up with the taste of him. And somehow he's unzipping my shorts and, although I try to wriggle out from under his weight, I don't try very hard, that's the thing; part of me wants to tell him to stop, but I don't want to do that either, not really. And all through the pushing and pain, I know he wants me; he wants me that much. And when he lets out a shuddering groan, almost a cry, a whimper, I'm so surprised and happy that a whimper rises up in me too and I want to hold on to him forever and never let go.

But straightaway he's clambering out the car door, and when I pull myself up, he's standing under a she-oak, wiping himself with a handkerchief. My fingers find blood on the seat, a smell like squashed tadpoles. A great empty hole seems to have opened up in my belly, then a rush of anger that has nowhere to go except out the window with Pardie, with everything lost and gone.

The sea behind the dunes is running, running, shadows swelling beneath the she-oaks, finches bickering. I watch him turn and zip up. Back at the car, he angles his head at the side mirror and combs his new hair. ‘Bloody hell,' he says, checking his watch, ‘ya know what time it is?'

After we drive off, I wait for him to reach out and tuck me under his arm like he did before, but we're back on the main road, he's humming under his breath and he still hasn't looked at me, not once. In the corner against the door, I clasp my arms across my chest to keep warm. I think of Pardie being with Dunc at the lake and wonder why I haven't told anyone. I think: Everything hurts too much. And suddenly I hate the way Will Pickles sings under his breath, the shape of his ears. When he leans over to twiddle the radio, the Seekers singing
…a new world somewhere…
I think: I didn't know it would be like this. I thought he wanted me.
Me.
Then a rush of other thoughts: Does anyone get what they want? But what do I want? Not Will Pickles, that's for sure. If he doesn't want me, I don't want him. I hope his marble comes up and he has to do National Service, and if they send conscripts to Vietnam and he's one of them, I won't even care.

It's dark when we thump over Stickynet. Lights from the oil site bleed into the lake, red, yellow, green. ‘Wonder what's up?' The first words he's spoken. ‘Might drop you off and take a geezer.'

As we turn at the roundabout, I see lights in the Institute, Mr Stevens setting up for the Saturday night dance. I slide down in my seat and stay there until we stop.

At first I don't see Bill Morgan's car at our gate. ‘Shit,' says Will. ‘What's he doing here?' His mouth works overtime on a new wad of gum. ‘Better not tell anyone,' he says, leaning over to open my door.

‘What's there to tell?' I slam the door hard on his scaredy white face and watch as he drives off, tail-lights winking around the lagoon like a red-eyed fox before disappearing at the corner.

Why is Bill Morgan here? I smooth down my shorts and try to tidy my hair. What could have happened? And then I think: I'm only a couple of hours late: she wouldn't, would she? I wipe at my lips and rub at the whiskery roughness on my cheeks. Do I smell of him?

Bill Morgan is at our table drinking tea. Mrs Winkie. Lizzie too. All squashed into our kitchen with Mum standing by the stove. When I walk in, her eyes shoot about as if they're loose on their stalks and I'm hardly in the door before she pushes forward. ‘Where have you been?'

‘For a drive.'

‘Who with?'

‘No one you know.'

Her face is flat and furious. She looks as if she's going to hit me but Bill Morgan moves between us. He's not wearing his uniform and I realise I'm almost as tall as him. ‘Now, Sylvie,' he says in his sensitive cop voice, ‘things are tough enough for your mother without you doing a disappearing act. Got enough on her plate, wouldn't you say?'

They all stare at me and I stare right back. Mrs Winkie is the only one with anything near kindness in her eyes. It makes me think she knows exactly what I've been doing and, for the first time, I wonder what things she did as a girl. ‘You sure you're all right, Sylvie?'

But Mum jumps right in. ‘Where've you been? Answer me! You think you can just come and go as you please. You think—'

Whatever I'm meant to think, it's interrupted by the foghorn, winding up like a windy gale, howling all over town, louder and louder, wailing a warning to ships lost in fog. Except there is no fog.

‘What's set that off?' Bill Morgan pushes around Mrs Winkie to get to the door. ‘Sorry, Nella. I'll have to leave you to it.'

Mum looks short-changed. Bill Morgan's footsteps disappear down the drive to the sound of the foghorn wailing and wailing. But Mum's eyes are stuck on me as if there is no one else is in the room.

‘Come on, Lizzie.' Mrs Winkie pushes back her chair and whispers to me as she passes at the door. ‘Keep yourself for someone special, Sylvie. That's what I tell Lizzie.'