‘Look at this shithole,’ Ben said, eyes glossy, and for the first time ever, Mum said nothing because he was right, it was a shithole.
We rolled through in Jason’s old Ford, saw the jetty with tugboats moored to it like they were its children, and the street was full of kids with their clothes plastered, damp with rain, to their bodies. We drove down to the water, where a marina rocked back and forth. A couple of guys in floppy hats had fishing rods in the water, but mostly they were drinking from crumpled cans and slapping their knees. At the end of the jetty, someone was hunched over, feeding scraps of food to a little brown dog. The houses along the foreshore were older, and had pretty verandahs with curled iron eyelashes. People sat on their porches. Ben waved to them; they didn’t wave back.
‘How many people did you say live here?’ I said.
‘Four thousand, give or take.’ A group of guys in school uniform walked by, barefoot, kicking a footy around. ‘Take, mostly.’
‘Is that even enough to have a school?’
Mum snorted. ‘Nah, Skye. We’re gonna send you both down the mines.’ Jason laughed, touched her arm.
‘Out on the fishing boats,’ he said.
‘Funny.’
Mum’s arm came into the back seat, slapped my leg. ‘We’re guests here,’ she said.
The rest of the main street was a bunch of shops with metal signs: two chicken shops facing off on opposite sides of the road, a corner shop, a bakery, an old electrical goods store probably still selling VCRs. As we rounded the corner, a doctor’s surgery. People milled around in front of it. Some of them shouted at each other. There were no traffic lights. We pulled up at a GIVE WAY sign and a car rolled along in front of us, gleaming under the rain clouds. The whole place was old. Old buildings. Old people. A man with his face screwed up walked a dog across a roundabout. Somewhere, a clock started striking eleven o’clock.
Jason’s house was a fair way out of town, over a bridge and across the road from a bit of flat land that someone might have wanted to make into a park, once. Now it was mostly green and yellow spinifex. We stood in the driveway with our bags in our hands. The house was a cream brick one with a flat tin roof and a satellite dish sticking out like an ear. He had a corrugated fence with a few paint smears, and over it we could see a Hills hoist with faded towels dancing. At the back, a gum tree stretched into the huge sky.
‘Get your shit out.’ Jason pulled open the trailer; it creaked on its hinges. ‘Gotta take this back before four or they’ll charge me an extra day.’
Ben and I would share a bedroom, he told us. Ben’s bed had Thomas the Tank Engine bedsheets. ‘I’m ten,’ he said. The house had three bedrooms but Jason needed the one at the front for his business and under no circumstances was he going to run it from the living room. Ours was at the back, in an asbestos extension with a sliding door out to the garden, where a sad-looking dog walked laps around the clothesline.
‘Who looks after the dog when you’re not here?’ I said.
‘My brother Kurt pops in. He’s happy s’long as he’s got a bone.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘Kurt. I said that.’
‘The dog’s name?’
Jason spat into the kitchen sink, wiped his mouth on his sleeve. ‘Murray.’
We stood in our bedroom, faced the window that overlooked the busted shed in the yard. Ben slipped a cardboard box under his bed and said he was going to have a lie down.
I spent the afternoon circling Murray. He was a wiry thing, just some bones with sinew wrapped around them. Black face with a white stripe down the middle. He might have been a Border Collie in part of him, and a Kelpie in another part, and maybe a Jack Russell in another part. One of his front legs was twisted out of shape. I threw a stick to him but he did nothing. He didn’t lie down once. From time to time he walked a full lap of the clothesline and came back to where he’d started, and under his feet he’d walked a crater into the dirt. I wondered how long he had been chained there, how old he was, whether Jason ever took him to the empty lot across the road.
Over dinner – Mum burned some chops and slapped lettuce on top – I pushed him for more information.
‘Where did Murray come from, Jason?’
‘What’s that?’
‘Murray. Your dog. Where did he come from?’
‘Oh. This guy out of town. Lives on a station. His dog got knocked up and he had these pups.’ He chewed on his charcoal meat. ‘Said they could work but I never saw any work getting done. You see him working?’
‘He seems sad,’ I said.
‘Yiannis said dogs can live for seventeen years in captivity, if you get the ones that don’t have hip problems,’ said Ben. ‘Does Murray have any hip problems?’
‘Nope,’ said Jason.
‘He’s going to get some pretty fast if you keep leaving him chained to that clothesline,’ I said. ‘His paw is all bent out of shape. Don’t you think you should take him to have it looked at?’
‘Vet’s not in,’ he said.
‘What does that even mean?’
‘Only one vet in town. This guy Grovey. He’s gone to visit his sister in Whyalla. You want me to train as a vet?’
‘I’ll train as a vet,’ said Ben.
It was strange to sit around another person’s dinner table. It was bigger and older and its legs had been made to look like curvy women. Jason’s living room was in the middle of the house, outside our bedroom, and overlooking the yard. He and Mum sat on one side of the table, us on the other, and my chair rocked when I moved. The whole time, I was forced to look out at Murray, who stayed standing with his ears down.
After dinner I washed dishes alongside Mum. It was dark outside. Murray’s low whine came from the yard while I cleaned.
‘Does he at least have a kennel or something?’ I said.
‘Who?’ Mum said.
‘Jason.’ She slapped my arm. ‘Murray, obviously.’
‘How should I know?’
‘Just thought you might know something about him. Maybe Jason mentioned him. Like, during your D&Ms.’
‘Shut up, Skye.’
When the washing up was finished, she and Jason went out to the front porch and sat there with their heads close together. I listened with my ear against the window, itchy on the mesh curtains, but couldn’t make out much of what they were saying. They held hands. Mum laughed a bit and her whole body moved.
‘I don’t get why she likes him.’ Ben appeared next to me and I jumped. He didn’t smile, just let out a deep sigh from his shoulders to the bottoms of his footed pyjamas.
‘It won’t last,’ I said. ‘It never lasts.’
Her laughter again.
‘It might,’ he said.
‘It won’t. We’re a set, me and you and Mum. Jason doesn’t want a set.’
Ben sat next to me on the couch. ‘What if you leave, and then I’m just a pair with Mum and not a set anymore and we find out Jason doesn’t like sets but he does like pairs? And I have to live in Port Flinders forever even though I don’t think there’s ever a Royal Show here so I can never have another Bertie Beetle again?’
I put my arm around him. ‘Won’t happen. I’m not going anywhere.’
Later I lay awake inside my pink sheets and listened to the noises of the house. The thudding from Jason’s room, Mum’s pitchy voice. And the soft crying from under Thomas the Tank Engine.
I pulled open the curtains, slimy in my hands. The scenery was so unfamiliar it could have been an alternate reality. I blinked at it, tried to connect it to the other parts of my brain.
‘One night down,’ I said quietly. Ben stirred in his bed.
I untangled Murray from the clothesline. He stood, stared. One of his eyes seemed larger than the other, bulging. I reached out with a closed fist and he stepped towards me with his nose in the air. ‘Good boy,’ I said. That seemed like the kind of thing to say, even though we’d never had a dog. We’d had a little cat on the sly, until it jumped out the w
indow and ran down to Dyson Road, where its life abruptly ended.
The sliding door clunked shut behind me. Jason.
‘The hell, Skye? What are you doing?’
‘I thought Murray might want to go for a walk. Just down the road.’
‘Oh yeah? You some kind of dog psychic?’
‘No, I just thought because he’s been chained up here. At least since we met you. I’m guessing longer, by the looks of him.’
‘You reckon a dog like him wants walks?’
I looked back to the dog, quaking on his skinny legs. The blankness of his stare. The drooping tail. And somewhere in his face, the vague idea that he might lash out at the man who’d contained him, given half a chance.
‘Who knows? I’m betting he’s never been on one.’
‘Know what? Take him. See how far you get.’ He stood in the doorway with his arms crossed.
I sat on the ground with my face level to the dog’s. He had beady eyes, the smaller one mustard yellow and the swollen one the same but ringed at its pupil in red and blue. I moved between the different lines of sight, trying to catch his gaze, but the more he looked back at me the clearer it became that he couldn’t see me at all.
‘Murray,’ I said. ‘Come on.’
His head cocked towards the sound of my voice. I couldn’t find anything like a lead, so I wound the chain around my hand and tried a few steps with him. Just to the end of the yard. He hesitated, resisted the chain, limping on his bad foot. At the fence, I kneeled down to speak with him face to face and a deep growl came from the back of his throat.
‘Murray,’ I said again. The growling grew. A tiny thunder. He took a couple of steps back, pulling on the chain, and I let it slacken in my hands. He backed off further. Tripped on his busted foot and fell onto his haunches. Growling gave way to a high whimper. I took the chain and reattached it to the clothesline.
Jason laughed. ‘What’d I tell you?’
I pushed past him, into the putrid living room. ‘Your dog is blind.’
Mum rubbed her hands, the way she did when she was nervous. ‘Let’s do something nice today,’ she said. Ben sat at the counter, eating burnt toast with brown goo on it.
‘Lots of fun to be had in Port Flinders, do you think?’ I said.
‘I know!’ Ben slammed his glass on the bench. ‘I can show you how to train a grasshopper to carry a flower on its back. Yiannis showed me.’
Mum stared at him. ‘Thought more like going to the beach. Or a market? Jase, is there a Sunday market?’
‘Dunno.’ Jason frowned at his phone. ‘Can’t go anyway. Work today.’
Mum rubbed his hand. ‘Do you need my help? I can help.’
His face cycled through a few emotions before he settled on: ‘No.’
‘Right,’ she said. ‘No worries.’
There was a bus in our street but it didn’t run on Sundays, so we walked to the bridge that led back into town. Ben’s feet hurt. Ben’s legs hurt. Ben’s arms hurt.
‘You’re making my head hurt,’ Mum said.
The foreshore of the original port was clean and pretty, with rows of chairs facing the water and a few people drinking from paper cups. Other people, too, leaning against the pylons of the jetty with their heads inside a cloud of smoke, shouting sometimes at each other and sometimes at the rest of the people on the beach. The day was grey, dulled, but the air was warm and Ben went wading out with his pants pulled up over his knees. Mum and I watched him together, his funny little head bouncing up and down.
‘He’ll be all right here, I reckon,’ she said.
‘Oh yeah? What makes you say that? All the other kids living in our street, coming out to play with him?’
‘You don’t have to be so negative all the time.’
‘Maybe his dad can come to visit?’
‘Shut up, Skye.’
‘I thought I might take him to the library. They have this thing they get kids to do now, at school. Reading, I think they call it.’
Mum picked up a handful of sand and looked as though she might throw it at me.
‘Go on,’ I said. ‘Can’t make things worse than this.’
She threw it into the air. It came straight down again.
Ben squealed. ‘I think a jellyfish swam past me!’ he shouted. ‘It hurts! Do you think it stung me?’ He came running from the water with his thongs still on. ‘Are the jellyfish deadly here? They’re deadly in Darwin. Do you know what you should do if a jellyfish stings you?’
‘What?’
He pulled down his pants, jocks and all, lifted one leg perpendicular to his body. ‘You should wee on it.’
And so he did. Me and Mum stood there on the Port Flinders foreshore, watching Ben piss on his skinny knees.
‘School starts tomorrow,’ Mum said. She had her hair pinned back and the grey roots had been freshly covered.
‘Can’t wait.’
School was a bunch of little buildings held together by a bit of old clay. It backed onto the Spencer Gulf itself, right where the ocean ended and the sludge began, and that might as well have been the edge of the world. I crossed the dry football oval in my second-hand dress and the dirt kicked up behind me and I had never felt so alone.
My homeroom was twenty-two pissed-off kids and a young teacher with a long neck and dark eyes. As far as I could tell her plan was just to watch us until we eventually shut up and sat down. Everyone had a desk already so I sat close to the front, near the window, hoped no one would notice me. Thought of my Lady Macbeth lines. Wondered who was reading them in my absence and doing it worse than me, probably.
‘Skye Teller?’ The teacher surveyed the class over her roll book.
I shrunk into my chair and raised my hand.
‘New, right?’
‘Yep.’
‘From Adelaide?’
‘Yep.’
‘Great.’ I was the last one on the list. While others disappeared into the hallway, she came over to my desk.
‘Have you done work experience yet, Skye?’ she said.
‘No.’
‘Everyone does work experience in Year 10. Most of the kids in your class have organised theirs already.’
‘Where do I do it?’
‘Up to you,’ she said. ‘You’ve got a bit of time to figure it out.’
‘Okay,’ I said, thought about getting some work experience at any of the places we’d driven past on the way in. Chicken shop work experience. Centrelink office work experience. Fishing work experience.
I took my new timetable into the hall, walked along the rooms in search of some kind of numbering system. Knocked on the window of the administration office, and a woman in a tight skirt came out to look me up and down.
‘You in trouble?’
‘A little. I don’t know where I’m supposed to be.’
‘But not in trouble, trouble? Not here for detention?’
‘No.’
She walked back into the office and shut the door. I didn’t knock again, just sat and watched the clock tick. A few times, other students got sent into the hallway. One came to the window with a bee sting and the woman in the skirt put a bit of ointment on it.
‘Should I be doing something?’ I asked her.
‘You got a bee sting?’
‘No . . .’
‘Then this isn’t gonna help you.’ She disappeared again.
Third period was PE, so I took a guess and went back out to the football oval. I recognised some of the others from the morning: a blond guy with a hooked nose that looked as though it had been broken a few times; twin girls with different haircuts; the guy I’d sat next to in homeroom. He came over and introduced himself: ‘Raf,’ he said. ‘Can’t remember your name.’
‘It’s Skye.’
‘Skye. That should be hard to forget. It’s everywhere, right? Sky?’ He smiled at his joke. ‘You like footy?’
‘Sure, I like footy,’ I said.
‘Should be right then. Mostly we just kick it around
a bit but Mr Oates lets us have a friendly at the end of class. Mixed teams usually.’
I was so bad at it. No surprises. Mr Oates was nice enough, stopped with me for a couple of minutes and showed me how to hold the ball with the pointed bit facing out, how to connect it with the top of my foot. I learned to do a hand pass, and one of the other girls explained how to do a chest mark without getting ‘whacked in the tit’. And at the end of the class, as promised, we had a friendly match, ten on ten. Raf was on the other team. I didn’t know if he was any good, but the other guys seemed to pass it to him a lot, and he could kick it pretty straight. I walked up and down the side of the oval, hoping the ball would keep well clear of me.
It did, mostly. But with a minute to spare, someone ‘kicked it from the side of their boot’ (they shouted this loudly, so everyone knew it had happened) and it bounced at weird angles towards the out of bounds line. Towards me.
Chasing after it: Raf. I made a kind of grab for it and sort of nearly got it. Raf pointed up. ‘Sky!’ he shouted, smiling. Then he lunged at me, grabbed my waist with both hands and threw me to the ground. We both lay there for a microsecond, and he said, ‘And this? Ground,’ and laughed. When he helped me up, his hands were rough and warm. Somebody shouted, ‘Holding the man!’
At the end of the school day, people gathered around the bus stop and smoked cigarettes behind their hands. Everyone did it, so it just looked like one big cloud. Like the bus stop was on fire. I waited on the other side of the road with my bag between my knees. The rain had stopped but the ground was wet and I felt it soaking into my dress.
I wondered about Ben’s day. His school was walking distance, just a couple of streets. They had one of those stupid walking buses going, tie all the kids together with ropes. He’d love that. He’d be right up the front making everyone look at landmarks he’d invented.
My bus arrived. I sat near the back and pressed my nose against the window, breathed a little cloud to obscure the town I’d ended up in. Drew a little heart in it with my finger, to remember where I’d been.
The Gulf Page 5
