‘I’m like Tom,’ I say, worried she’s about to review me, take me through some sort of social-work assessment. ‘You’re not far enough into your course to deal with me either.’
‘No, this is something else. Something else I’m working on.’ June pulls out a manila folder. From it she takes a sheet of paper and places it in front of me. The words are written in numbered paragraphs. I scan them; some are in another language. I try to pronounce the words in my head, but they are too long and the letters are in unfamiliar combinations. I can’t get my tongue around them. I read the ones I can, the words about Law and about language. About a camp and a promised husband taking on the name of the man who ran the station. Ceremony grounds and Law grounds. About sharing the Law, but making sure you let others know where you are going and what you are doing. June reads too, over my shoulder. She pronounces the words I can’t say.
‘That’s a good rule there, Mimi,’ she says. ‘A man must stay a long way from his mother-in-law.’ She laughs, and then the room is quiet again except for June’s breathing above me, and the fan, juddering now as though its blades are about to fly off its spindle.
‘This is my mother’s substance evidence. You know what the word substance means, Mimi?’
There’s a photo of June’s mother in the hallway. She is standing in front of a garden bed, small and strong, her grey hair pulled back and her A-line dress neatly hemmed just below her knees. I don’t know what to say. I think about the woman in the school office and I read the paragraphs again, not scanning now, trying to take in each word. June puts another piece of paper in front of me. It has long black lines through some of the sentences.
‘Buried words,’ June says. ‘They are just there, just one layer down, but we can’t get to them.’
It is a typed letter from an inspector to the Commissioner of Native Affairs. It is about a young girl, about five. A girl who is described as ‘very fair’. The inspector writes about wanting to keep the girl at his house before transporting her. He is worried about her being spirited away during the night.
June puts another document in front of me. A newspaper article.
‘The same girl,’ she says.
She reads each word carefully and I follow along in my head. ‘ “A particularly fine specimen,” ’ she says, her finger drawing an imaginary line under the small print. It is so small that I have to lean in to make out the words. ‘What a strange way to describe her. Like she should be dropped into a jar. Dropped into a jar and kept on a shelf, high up so no-one can reach her.’
‘Who is she?’
‘This girl is my mother’s sister. You know when I first met her?’
‘When?’
June paces back and forth behind me and then she pulls out the chair next to me and sits down.
‘I first met her at my mother’s funeral.’
I don’t know what to say. I just nod.
‘That’s when I first met your Aunty Grace too.’
‘So, Aunty Grace knew her?’
‘Yes. She knew her.’ June takes a piece of toast from the plate, turns it over in her hands and puts it back again. ‘They were related.’
June taps the pages down on the table as though she’s a newsreader. She puts them back into their folder. I think, for a moment, that this is one of her jokes, one that has missed the mark, but she’s not laughing, she’s not even smiling.
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Yes, that’s right,’ June says. ‘You don’t. That’s what I keep telling you.’
She stands up then, shakes out her wrists and ankles to loosen them, rubs some hand cream into her skin and takes herself off to bed. I take the cups and the plate to the sink and run them under the cold water. I think of Toby, asleep out there. Then, for the first time in a long time, I think of his dad. His dad and I sitting in a room with both sets of our hands on my tummy. I don’t know if we were holding Toby or hiding him.
• • •
Boondi Wars. I could have saved a fortune on party games. I should do a head count. I call out to let them know it’s time for cake. They crawl up from the crumbling red cliff. I see their heads first and then they scramble up and over in a rush of arms and legs and run towards the picnic table. It is covered in serviettes soggy with sauce, half-eaten hotdogs and fairy bread. Toby’s friends gather in a half-circle. They are slapping him on the back, ducking and weaving, chucking around a red ball of dirt.
June pulls herself up from Tom’s lap and holds her hands out. Tom reaches towards her and she heaves herself back until he’s up on his legs. The metallic Happy Birthday sign glints. Before I can cut the cake, the candles collapse into its centre, and it reminds me of a house that was partly swallowed by a sinkhole years ago, near where we used to live. I couldn’t relax after that, walking Toby down the path in his pram, imagining the disused mine shafts just below the surface, ready to consume us. I wonder if he’ll remember that town when he’s older. We moved on from there when he was almost five, the same age as the girl on the white page with blacked-out lines. They say you don’t remember anything before you turn five, but I know that isn’t true.
I carve into Toby’s birthday cake with a bread knife, then run the blunt edge of the knife against my tongue. The Boondi War comes to a standstill at the promise of more food, and I pass around slabs of cake. June grins and leads everyone in a raucous rendition of ‘Happy Birthday’. There are enough kids for a choir. The icing is mud on our hands. We lick between our fingers.
One of Toby’s new friends, Archie, picks up the red clay ball and dunks it in the bucket of water full of bobbing apples. He runs away and then he calls out to Toby. Toby starts to chase him. The others chase Toby. Tom sprints forward, his belly jiggling.
‘Silly old man,’ June says. ‘He’s already gone in the back leg.’
The ball flicks behind backs, lands wetly on thighs, smacks bare abdomens, spins through the air. Tom is on the ground now and Archie laughs and jumps on top of him. One by one the boys throw their bodies over each other. Toby hesitates for a moment and then climbs into the scrum. There he is. He is covered in red dirt, and beaming.
Lone Shark
They named me after a car. They being Mum and my step-dad, Morgan. I think being named after a car is pretty funny, and so does my Uncle Jack. Uncle Jack says it’s funny, but not funny ha-ha. Funny peculiar. I’ve stared at the letters in my name a lot and I’ve come to the conclusion that my name looks good on a page. When I see it written, it looks like it belongs to something that others would like to own. Something they would treasure.
I didn’t ever get to see that car. Not in real life, anyway. There’s a picture of it, though, in Morgan’s second drawer with his socks and a wooden bowl full of old coins and keys. One of those keys opens a locked box that Mum knows nothing about. In the photo, Morgan is leaning against the car and he’s wearing a fancy grey cap, dark shades and a toothy grin. He has one leg crossed over the other and pointy black boots on his feet. He always reminds me that that car was the best friend he ever had. A journalist had nicknamed it the Land Crab and that’s what Morgan had written on the back of the photo: Me and my favourite sort of crab. The car was roomy. It had Hydrolastic suspension, whatever that is. Whenever I take the photo out, I think about how joyous Morgan looks, like someone I might want to know, and I can sort of understand what Mum saw in him back then. I guess she couldn’t have been too fussy. I was already in her belly when they met.
Maybe you’re wondering about my real dad. You and me both. Well, I’ve asked about him a couple of times. Mum said he’s on one of those coal ships, steaming out to the horizon. She reckons he’s probably gone right off the edge by now. Last time I asked, she held up her hand as though she were stopping the traffic and it made me think of Mrs Avery, my teacher; she says that actions speak louder than words.
So, there you have it. Me and Mum and Morgan. It’s only in my mind that I call him that. To his face I call him Dad. And, on occasion, Daddy.
Do you want another funny peculiar? Here it is, then. As you can see, I’m a pretty good talker, but sometimes when I see a word on a page it gets jumbled. Even now. Like, when the word is spaghetti, I say bisgetti. When it is was, I say saw. Mum still tries to get me to read to her and I tell her my mind is jibber-jabbering. Mum and Morgan always tell me to quit it. Quit jibber-jabbering, Oar-sten.
Oar-sten. That’s how I see my name when they say it. I see a tinny with water seeping in and I’m in it, paddling to shore, but it’s sinking faster than I’m paddling. But when I write it, I imagine a white car with red-ridged bucket seats and hubcaps like mirrors, even better than the one in Morgan’s photo. Austin. Something people would like to own.
• • •
You know, for a long time I thought Morgan was a banker. That’s what he told me. That’s what I told my classmates. I told them that the customers really liked him. Over the years they’d given him cameras and televisions and jewellery. They must have thought he was pretty special. Once he brought home a pair of marcasite earrings that a lady had given him because she didn’t know how to save money and she needed Morgan to teach her. They were shaped like teardrops and they sparkled like a shattered mirror. I got Mum to write the word marcasite for me after she pierced the earrings through her ears. She hadn’t worn earrings for a long time and the holes had grown over. She scrunched up her face and forced them through and her ears bled. When I say the word marcasite, I imagine Morgan still has his Austin Land Crab. He has it parked out on the kerb and I take to its hubcaps with an axe. They splinter into sparkling jewels and he cries blood tears. It helps me remember the letters.
• • •
Here’s something for you. Every year we go on holiday to the same place. We go during school term, because that’s the best time. No kids, cheap rates. It’s a place called Sawtell. I’ve never had a problem with that word because I just say, if I saw it, I would tell them. When the letter w tries to creep up to the start, I push it back into the middle and the tell on the end holds it there for me, nice and safe. Mum and Morgan just don’t get it. ‘Isn’t it funny,’ they say. ‘Oar-sten can read Sawtell, but he still gets stuck on was. There’s just no rhyme or reason.’ Mum says the rhyme or reason bit and Morgan says, ‘He’s a funny bugger. Can’t blame me for that.’ They say all of this like I’m not there. Like I can’t hear because I’m looking out the window. I told Mrs Avery that Morgan called me a funny bugger and she said, ‘You know what, Austin? Sometimes people say things like that because they’re not very bright and they’ve run out of decent words. They’ve run out of decent words because they’re not very decent people. I’m saying this to you, Austin, and I’m asking you to keep it to yourself. I don’t want you to repeat it to your dad. It’ll get you and me into trouble.’ Mrs Avery knows how to say my name. She says it just the way it’s written.
• • •
Before our last holiday, Mum dropped me off at Uncle Jack and Aunty Simone’s house so she could pack in peace. Mum was wearing white pants and a green shirt with the marcasite earrings. When she turned her face a certain way, the skin on her cheek shimmered. Aunty Simone asked about the earrings and Mum said, ‘Oar-sten, stop hovering, give your mother a break.’ I went over to the garden wall and found my cousin, Mitchell, playing with his Matchbox cars. I guess you might think I’m too old to be playing with toy cars when I’m ten, going on eleven, but I had fun with them. I drove them along the powdery joins of the brickwork. Some of them spun out of control and crashed onto the concrete path. One landed in the pink berry hedge. I thought about the family inside just hanging there waiting to be saved. I imagined that I was the ambulance officer at the scene. I saved the kid and the mum but I didn’t have time to save everyone.
Aunty Simone had the window open and their voices travelled through the venetians.
‘They sign the paperwork right at the get-go and it’s all in there,’ Mum said. ‘He takes them on because no-one else will. Someone’s got to do it.’
‘Hope I don’t die before you,’ Aunty Simone said. ‘You and Morgan might come down to the morgue and rip out my teeth.’
Later that night, Aunty Simone tucked me into Mitchell’s trundle bed and I pretended we were brothers. She sat out at the kitchen table with Uncle Jack.
‘Don’t beat yourself up,’ my uncle said. ‘Perfect example of love’s blind.’
‘There she was all sparkle-arkle,’ Aunty Simone said. ‘Austin thinks his father’s some sort of investment banker. He’s just some dodgy shark preying on the weak.’
Uncle Jack offered Aunty Simone a glass of port and then they said some things I couldn’t hear and Aunty Simone laughed. She has a jangly laugh that reminds me of the silver bangles on her arm. When I have trouble with the word laugh, I imagine the letters written in silver loops that flow like mercury.
I heard Aunty Simone call Morgan a shark again. She called him a lone shark. I thought that was a pretty good way to think about him with his grey suit and his hair slicked back and his dark, dark eyes. Maybe Aunty Simone knows. Maybe she knows that when Mum’s out, he corners me. He corners me and I call him Daddy.
• • •
I think I should tell you a bit about our last trip to Sawtell. I’m sort of getting used to talking to you. We sat in front of the rocks overlooking Sawtell’s ocean bath. The night before, there’d been a king tide and the beach was littered with weed. The morning had been overcast but now the sun was high in the sky, so Morgan said we’d spend the day on the beach. He’d packed an esky with bottles of beer, and lemonade for me. Morgan put up an umbrella and Mum leaned against a rock and rolled her back into it as if trying to smooth out the cracks and ridges with her weight. She was wearing a floppy-brimmed hat and dark sunglasses. Her painted toenails looked like seashells. Morgan smoothed sun cream over her chest. He slid his fingers under the cup of her black bikini top and she smiled and swatted him away. ‘Do Oar-sten too,’ she said, but I told her I could do myself. ‘You’ll miss bits,’ Morgan said, and he rubbed the cream over my shoulder-blades. I wasn’t cold but the more he rubbed, the more the skin on my arms looked like chook skin. Chook skin all oiled up and bumpy and ready to cook. Mum said, ‘Oar-sten, you need some fat on you, you’re covered in goose bumps.’
Morgan stretched out his calves and rotated his neck. Just to let you know, he always does this before a walk. He likes to walk alone. Sometimes he’s gone for hours. It gives him time to think.
I watched him stride off and then I sank into my towel. Another thing you should know is that seeing the back of Morgan always makes me feel tired and glad at the same time. I don’t know if that makes sense to you, but that’s the way I feel.
Mum covered my face with a T-shirt and the sun pressed through it, a distant white ball surrounded by colours that flickered and shifted like beads in a kaleidoscope. That’s how Mrs Avery described me last term. She held me back at lunchtime and went through my spelling test: seven ticks and eight red dots. I told her how my mind jibber-jabbered. I told her how the letters sometimes swirled around the page like leaves in a current. I said that I had to imagine the words as pictures and sometimes even that didn’t work. I’d never told anyone that before.
You know what she said? She said she thought she knew why, and she would try to help me. She asked if I’d ever looked through a kaleidoscope. She said she loved the way the mirrors turned shards of glass or pebbles into combinations far more beautiful than the objects on their own could ever be. She said I was just like that, just like a kaleidoscope. I stood there and kept opening my mouth and closing it again. I wanted to tell her about Morgan. I wanted to tell her that things were getting bad. I reckon I would’ve looked like a fish to Mrs Avery. A fish in a bucket that couldn’t turn and had to gulp water pink with its own blood. I don’t know how people can fish on the wharf, all calm, looking out to sea, saying nothing. How can they just gaze out at the line where the ocean meets the sky when there’s something right next to them,
thrashing and gulping, almost alive?
• • •
I’m getting to the bit that I’m not sure I can tell you. I’m going to try. I’ll see how I go. The last time Mum was at her night class, Morgan came into my room. He looked at my Lego boats lined up in colours like a rainbow. My Lego is a problem for Morgan. He thinks I’m too old for it.
Leaning against my bed, he asked me how my day was. He asked me, all polite, and I said it was fine. I tried to picture him as the same man in the car photo, but he wasn’t anything like that man anymore. I looked at the deep grooves under his eyes and the dark shadows on his face. He was dressed up, really slick, and he smelled salty. ‘Fine, Thank you for asking, Daddy,’ he said. He asked if I wanted to play a game and I said, No Morgan, I hate your stupid games, but I only said that in my head. Out loud I said, ‘Yes, Daddy.’ ‘You choose,’ he said. I asked if we could play with my boats and pretend we were ship’s engineers. He said no. He always says no. He said he wanted to play tackles. We started with just knuckles and then we did arm wrestles. Morgan kept saying, ‘Start whenever you’re ready, Oar-sten,’ and I tried a bit, but not too much. Never too much. We played five rounds, then we got down to our singlets and jocks and we wrestled like real men. Morgan’s not big, not like Uncle Jack, but when he pushed me into the floor and pressed himself against me, I couldn’t breathe. He seemed much bigger then and his voice sounded like the voice of more than one man. Later, he made me some noodles with cheese and tomato sauce and he told me I was a good sport. ‘You’re a good sport, Oar-sten, but you need to man up a bit.’ That’s what he said. Oar-sten. When he said that, I paddled and paddled but I couldn’t breathe; the water kept seeping in.
• • •
Did you know that there are rules at the Sawtell ocean bath? You don’t even have to be a good reader to know what they say. There are pictures of dogs and bottles and people diving – and big red lines through all of them. It seems funny to me that the sign is there to make people think they’ll be protected. As if words and pictures can make a difference to the way people act. Over the years I’ve seen heaps of kids dive-bomb and slip on the rocks and drag each other under water. None of those things are on the sign. Once I saw a kid crying because he was bitten by heaps of sea lice, and his dad told him to get a grip. I didn’t even know what a grip was, and the way the kid was bawling and hopping, neither did he. I’ve seen a little girl crawl along the breakwall and sit in the space between the ocean and the pool with the water surging and spilling all around her. I remember Mum just looked on and said, ‘Where’s that child’s mother? One freak wave and that’ll be the end of her.’ Maybe that other mum just figured her kid was safe.
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