I thought of Kirrily then, hundreds of kilometres away studying Macbeth in the air-conditioning. The man in the tunnel, how he had jumped in front of the train on purpose. The way she described him with his legs sliced right off. I watched the twins on the sleepers, watched them waiting for the light to change.
‘Is it safe?’
‘Pretty safe,’ he said. ‘No one’s died yet.’
Seb or Al called out: ‘Nah, Gary did.’
‘Oh yeah.’ Raf nodded. ‘Yeah, Gary did die. But no one else has died.’ An in-joke I wasn’t part of.
Ellen walked down to the tracks and blew smoke right into Yardy’s mouth. He pulled her into his lap and she moved her hips against him.
‘Should we be watching this?’
‘Don’t be so uptight,’ Renée said, but she had her eyes half-closed too.
The lights changed from red to green. ‘Get up, dickheads,’ Raf said. Ellen kept grinding. Seb or Al yanked on her arm. Yardy shoved his tongue in her throat. Down the line, the boom gates sounded. ‘Seriously, get up.’ Ellen gradually untangled herself. Yardy smiled up at her, pants pulled tight across his crotch. The train sounded its horn at the other end of the tunnel and four of them scuttled up the embankment, leaving Yardy standing right by the tracks with the train rushing right past his nose.
‘Nearly hit my boner, man.’ They all laughed.
Ellen pulled a glass tube from her pocket and grabbed Yardy’s hand. ‘Time for the tunnel?’ He lifted her over his shoulder and they disappeared into the blackness.
‘What’s that about?’ I said. Raf shrugged. He ate a banana. Some kids kicked a football around on the oval and I watched it, yellow against the sky, pinging up and down like they were trying to get rid of it, but failing. ‘What’s the deal with Ellen anyway?’
Renée laughed. ‘Slut.’
‘Oh.’
‘She leads Yardy on but everyone knows she’s in love with our mate Rafferty.’ She ruffled Raf’s hair. ‘That’s right, isn’t it, Raf?’
‘Nope.’
‘You’re gonna take her to the Year 10 dance, she reckons.’
‘Yeah, nah.’
‘Says she’s got a pretty dress picked out just for you, the way you like it. Big slit up the back.’ She laughed again. I shifted uncomfortably on the fence. A bit of metal stuck into my leg. It stung, but I was afraid that if I jumped off, my dress would tear right open.
‘Just shut up, Renée.’
‘Bitch stole my last ciggie. You got any more, Rafferty?’
He shook his head. ‘I’d never get to play for the Crows if I smoked. You know that.’
‘Right. The Crows.’
‘Shut up.’
‘Have it your way. I’m going to find the others.’ She hopped down from the fence, slapped Seb or Al’s arse as she slipped into the tunnel.
‘Sorry,’ Raf said.
‘I might just head off,’ I said, tried to unravel myself from the fence without cutting myself open. I failed. The metal scraped right along the back of my thigh. ‘Shit!’ I reached behind with my hand; it came back red.
‘What’ve you done to yourself?’
‘Just a little scratch.’ It pricked and punched. ‘Argh, it hurts.’
‘Had a tetanus shot lately?’
‘No idea.’
‘Better get you down to the nurse then.’
He walked me back across the oval, grabbed the yellow football from one of the younger kids and kicked it over their heads. They all jumped for it at once, collided and collapsed in a puddle on the grass. In the distance, I heard the boom gates ringing.
The nurse had to lift my dress to see the cut, so she shooed Raf away and closed the door. ‘Where’d you do this?’ she said.
‘Over the back oval.’
‘The train line, right? You kids aren’t careful ’n’ that rusty fence is going to kill one of you one day.’
Raf lurked in the hall.
‘So, uh . . .’ I said.
He shoved his hands into his pockets. ‘Sorry.’
‘Not your fault. Just probably not my thing.’
‘What is your thing, Skye?’
‘Reading, I guess. Going to the park.’
‘I’ll tell you a secret.’ He leaned so close to me I felt the pulse of his breath. ‘Those are my things too.’
‘More than playing chicken with a train?’
‘Way more.’ He bumped me with his shoulder. ‘We could try doing them together one time. If you want.’ My stomach flipped over. He was so earnest, looking at me with his whole face. His body radiated. The muscles in his arms tensed and flexed. What did he expect me to say?
‘You probably wouldn’t like my books,’ I said finally. He kept staring at me. Smiled. Rubbed his hair with his hand flat.
‘Got my own books.’
We stood like that in the hallway for a minute or more. Him staring at me. Me trying to escape into the centre of the earth. When the bell rang, he touched my arm with the tips of his fingers and said, ‘We could start a club.’ Disappeared down the hall and around the corner.
I walked home along the train line. It went almost from school to Jason’s house, running parallel to the highway. The sleepers were dry and bloated, and they broke away in parts as I stepped along them. I would hear the train coming. The road was so flat it was impossible to miss, after it came out of the tunnel. The boom gates would tell me, anyway. I hoped.
Across from the train line the land was flat and dry. Wheat grew in its thin stalks, green and immature and thrown a bit in the wind. A chorus of wheat, an audience. I skipped along the line, slipping a bit on the rounded tops of the tracks, watched the way the wheat came with me. Beyond the fields the ranges started: rocks that shot out where the tectonic plates had smashed together, spewing these new mountains out of the old ground.
Maybe I would go there sometime. Get a car, drive out there with Raf and Ben for a picnic.
I reached the train station. No one was there but a skinny conductor with blisters on his face, and he sold me a cold lemonade for a dollar so I stood in the sun and drank it in three gulps, crushed the can against the brick wall.
All the roads met the train tracks in cul-de-sacs, brush fences rubbing up against the wire of the line. Each time I passed one I peered over. Tried to get a sense of who was down there, who lived there. In one street, a couple of kids kicked a footy, lost it over the wall to someone’s backyard. In another, a man and a woman stood on the footpath and shouted very close to each other’s faces until they were so close they were kissing.
Near Jason’s house, the train line went over the top of the creek along a narrow bridge. Some of the railings had come loose so I sat in the hole they had left and let my legs swing in midair. I could see Jason’s house from there, down the road a few blocks, on the corner opposite the empty block. The street was empty. A few shitbox cars without people in them. No kids coming home from school. It was like the whole street was poison, like no one wanted to be seen in public in Jason’s street.
The air came up from the creek cool and perverse, shoving its fingers under my skirt. I wished I’d worn tights. The winter hadn’t been too cold, but when the clouds lifted they took the blanket with them. I shivered. Thought about how nice it would be to sit here on the bridge with Raf. Let him kiss me behind my ears. Kiss his hands one at a time.
A person came out into the street; a little girl in a yellow jumper, and then a woman who might have been her mother, wheeling two bikes alongside her. They went across to the park. Even from the bridge, I could hear the little girl’s laughter. Like cymbals. It came sprinting down the road and went under the bridge and out into the wheat fields.
I had a memory like that, somewhere. Couldn’t quite grab it.
In the distance, the crossing signal sounded. Across the flat ground I could see the train hugging the coastline, headlights glossy in the low afternoon sun. I thought of Yardy and Ellen near the tunnel, their grabs for immortality, pulling up at only the very last ins
tant. The carriages disappeared into the tunnel. I stood slowly, pulling myself up with the metal barrier, walked a little closer to the end of the bridge. Thought again about coming here with Raf, dodging fate with him. The train emerged from the tunnel. It was a kilometre away, still, and it had to stop at the station.
The little girl and her mother rode their bikes back across the road. She had picked a bunch of flowers, purple ones, and she stuck them in her basket.
A horn sounded. The train came curving around the bend, close now; the thump of its wheels shook the bridge. I slipped through the cracks where the railings had fallen out and held tight to the handrail with one hand, stretched the other out into the path of the train. It rounded the corner. Its horn sounded again. All the wind building up under its wheels came rushing at me and I grabbed the railing with both hands and leaned my head back over the water and the train rushed by with its horn blasting the whole time, just a metre between me and the certain death of its wheels.
When it had gone and the bridge had stopped shaking, I turned around and the little girl was waving.
*
Ben was in the backyard, digging a hole with one hand, Bilbo in the other. ‘We’re trying to find water,’ he said. ‘Tortoises are very good at sniffing out water.’
‘I thought they only lived on land,’ I said.
‘They do.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘That’s why they need to be able to find water.’
‘Where’s Mum?’
He dropped Bilbo into the shallow hole. ‘Dunno. She went somewhere with Jason. In the car.’
‘And just left you here?’
‘I’m not a baby.’ Bilbo walked in circles in the hole, apparently more interested in climbing out than finding water.
‘’Course you’re not. I got you a finger bun,’ I said. ‘On the bench.’
He leapt to his feet, wiped his hands on his shorts. ‘With sprinkles?’ Face ablaze.
‘Of course with sprinkles.’
He disappeared inside, leaving Bilbo floundering in his hole. Murray cocked his ear, pulled gently on his chain, testing the resistance. He put his nose close to the ground. Bilbo rocked and dropped back into the hole, shell-side down, stumpy legs kicking the air. Murray’s throat rumbled. Ears went down. Bilbo made a throaty cry and Murray went off, barking and kicking at the ground, yanking at his chain until the line was almost bending under the force of him and Bilbo was bouncing around in the hole like a mercury droplet.
‘Murray!’ I scooped the tortoise from his almost-grave and propped him upright on the concrete. Ben returned with his face covered in icing. ‘Murray nearly ate your stupid tortoise.’
‘Dogs can’t eat tortoises.’
‘He was giving it a pretty good crack.’
Ben sat next to me on the concrete. ‘I can’t believe you got me two finger buns. One would have been enough. I’ve only got a little belly.’ He rubbed it.
‘One of those was for me!’ He pulled the other from behind his back and handed it over. When he smiled he had hundreds and thousands between his teeth. ‘Did Mum say when she would be back?’
‘She said we should get our own dinner,’ he said.
‘Big surprise.’
He was quiet for a long while, then, all curled up in his little body with the tortoise in his lap. He put Bilbo on the ground next to him, and the animal pulled all of its limbs inside and stayed that way.
On Friday night, Mum and Jason had some people around for dinner. Local dickheads and his brother Kurt, all pulling up in their Holdens with the engines practically dragging along the road. Mum sent us to the front room with bowls of pasta she’d cooked too long, and we watched some garbage on the TV but mostly listened in to their conversations from under Ben’s blankets.
‘Must be nice not to be alone anymore!’ Kurt was saying, banging his hand on the table. He coughed loudly. ‘Linda, you would not believe how long it’s been since Jase brought a woman home. How long d’you reckon, Jase? Five years? What was her name – Destiny? Harmony?’
‘Liberty.’ Jason’s voice was low and serious.
One of the women, then: ‘Liberty! God, she was such a slut. Used to come into Joe’s when I’s working there, y’know, after I had the kids and I had’ta get out the house so I didn’t go total farking insane. Remember, Tony, when I worked at Joe’s? He tried to molest me, y’know. In the storeroom.’
Tony hollered: ‘Explains why I got no action at home!’ They roared with laughter, Jason joining in when the joke had shifted to someone else.
‘She was a slut, though,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘You know I met her at the Paddington Hotel. In Richard Creek? Took her home and she made breakfast stark bloody naked.’ More laughter. Through the door, I saw Mum in the kitchen, her face screwed up over a pot of whatever her next course was. I went to get a glass of water, brushed up next to her for a second and she flinched.
‘Get back to Ben,’ she hissed.
‘You guys were together for ages though, right?’ That same woman.
‘Four years I reckon, Rach,’ Kurt said. ‘Got engaged for a bit, didn’t ya?’ Mum’s body grew rigid at the stove. ‘Yeah, must have. Asked if you could have the wedding in my front paddock.’
‘You’re right.’ Rach scratched her bleached head. ‘Dodged a bullet there, angel. She was loony bin material.’
‘Gotta check this stuff before you get your dick wet.’ That was the guy opposite Jason. Tattoos around his neck, words I couldn’t make out. He had his arm around a tiny brunette woman who kept her eyes down while she said something too quiet to hear. ‘Piss off, Cheryl,’ he said.
Mum dished out her main course, took plates of it across to the table with a big smile sewn into her face. Jason grabbed the first one. He used his cutlery like a caveman, holding his knife and fork in clenched fists.
‘Linda, babe, what d’you call this?’ Rach said, poking her plate with hesitation.
‘Corned beef,’ Mum said.
Jason gave a big whoop! ‘Well, it’s fucking disgusting.’ The other guys hooted, pushed their plates into the middle of the table. Mum had her back to me and she stayed there, still as boulders, while the others went out to smoke on the deck.
‘Never get a missus ’at can’t cook,’ Tony yelled. ‘Oi, Murray! How’s that foot going? Taught you a good lesson, didn’t we?’
Mum collected the full plates into a pile in front of her. I watched as she tipped a full pavlova into the bin under the sink, went back and cleared a space for her under our blankets. ‘What are you guys watching?’ she said, but she’d already sat down before I could answer.
For days afterwards, Jason ignored me. I watched him working, tried looking for clues, tried to figure out where he kept going. He was still out on Wednesday nights, sometimes until three in the morning. I heard him come back most of the time, the door slamming and Mum’s soft voice and his belt buckle hitting the floor. Most afternoons, Mum went for a walk to Kurt’s place a few blocks away, and I tried the handle on Jason’s door but it was always locked.
The weather turned foul. The block across the road was a mud pit and the spinifex turned from green to yellow to brown. I walked through it in the mornings to the bus stop on the other side, tired of waiting at the same bus stop in the same street with the same shitty house staring back at me.
Every day I went to school and every day I found a reason to leave a little early to get to Ben, until the teachers stopped asking and I stopped offering. Sometimes I got there in time to walk him home without a rope holding us together, and every day Mum and Jason were on the couch with their eyes bugging out of their heads, watching repeats of The Biggest Loser, Jason counting five-dollar notes into a metal container.
After a week, I applied for a job at the supermarket in town, and I didn’t have any experience but the owner didn’t seem to mind. He shook my hand with his sweaty one and told me he could offer me six hours a week. He spent most of his time in the Port Pirie store, he said, but he called in sometimes and
would be delighted to have me on board. I could start on Tuesday and he’d pay me $12.36 an hour.
‘I got a job,’ I said over dinner. Mum put down her fork.
‘Why?’
‘Because you told me to.’
‘Didn’t think you would, though. What doing?’
‘Working at the supermarket.’
‘Good for you. Ten bucks in my hand every week.’ She went back to her macaroni. Jason gave her arm a squeeze.
Raf cornered me after school before my first shift. His face was bright. ‘Footy tour soon. We’re going to Port Lincoln.’
‘Sounds fun.’
‘Join the girls’ team and you can come too.’
‘Can’t now. I’ve got a job.’
‘I forgot about that.’
‘Might save up for a phone though,’ I said. ‘At least you can call me.’
I changed into my uniform in the toilets, where a couple of girls were bent over the sink and talking loudly to one another. One of them had a boyfriend who’d cheated on her. They were going to find the girl who’d done it. I crouched on the toilet and listened to their voices, the flick of their cigarette lighters, their heels on the tiles.
I found a payphone in the main part of town and reversed the charges to call Kirrily. It had been ages since we’d spoken and when she answered she sounded very far away.
‘It’s me,’ I said.
‘Who?’
‘It’s Skye.’
‘Oh, hey.’
The line crackled. ‘Just thought I’d see how you are.’
‘Uh yeah, I’m fine. How are you?’
I took a deep breath. ‘Yeah, fine.’ A second of static; Kirrily’s voice buzzed in and out.
‘What?’
‘Not really fine, I guess. Not totally fine.’
‘Sorry, Skye, the line is really bad.’
The call dropped out. I hung the receiver back into place and stared at it for a while. Shoved my fingers into the dispenser in case someone had left change behind. Traced the graffitied window with my fingertips even though the words were meaningless. I picked up the phone again, called directory assistance and just listened. The man at the other end said ‘Hello? Hello?’ and hung up.
The Gulf Page 8
