The Gulf

by Anna Spargo-Ryan

  I breathed out. Slept right through dinner, and when I woke, the first strokes of sunrise had lit up the fairytale window.

  A different woman came to see us the next day. We sat in the front room with the fire going, and she rested her hands on a folder open on her lap. Ben wouldn’t sit next to me. He stared at this woman from the other couch. I wanted to reach my hand out to him but his body was all closed up inside itself. Wanted to ask him about his room, whether he’d slept like I had, dragging heavy and safe into the floor.

  ‘Skye?’ The woman pointed to me and nodded. She had a striped shirt on and the collar went right up around her ears, like she was trying to hide in it. Like a tortoise. A jab of sadness in my ribs. ‘And Benjamin?’ Ben nodded, weird mouth all bunched up.

  ‘I’m Yasmin.’ Yasmin. She was soft and pretty. And young. Younger than Mum, no wrinkles around her eyes. She spoke with a bit of an accent; American but not. ‘I guess you know why you’re here.’ She said it like a joke, her voice going up at the end, then coughed into her fist. ‘The thing is, Skye’ – she looked down at her notes – ‘you’re sixteen. The law says sixteen-year-olds are allowed to look after themselves, but not other minors. Do you understand what that means?’

  ‘Yeah, my mum’s deadshit boyfriend is legally better at caring for Ben than I am.’ Ben kept sitting, so upright it was like he had a wall behind him. Politely. Still and quiet, mouth zipped shut.

  ‘If that were true, you would be with him, and not here.’ She pushed her hair behind her ears. ‘I’m just here to meet you both. I’m what they call a case worker, which is a fancy name for someone who helps to look after you for a while.’

  ‘We met a bunch of you yesterday,’ I said.

  She shifted in the chair. ‘The department sends me to make sure you’re safe and that we can get you back into the best possible situation.’

  ‘Are you sending us back?’

  ‘No. There are . . . complications at their end, at the moment. You’ll probably be here a bit longer yet.’

  Ben’s chest moved in and out, faster and faster. He stared straight ahead and his breaths were puffs of anger trying to smash their way out. His hands had gone white from clenching. Mouth forced down, eyes pinched together to keep the feelings in.

  Yasmin’s folder was much thicker than the one the social worker had yesterday, and she flicked back and forth, searching for the information she wanted to give us. She told us about Vin and Therese, the other kids they’d looked after, how experienced they were, how nice the neighbourhood was. She told us she would come to see us every day for the first week, then twice a week after that until we were settled.

  That was a lot longer than the ‘couple of days’ they’d told us about at the department building. Ben stared. I knew he heard them, too, the words she was choosing to leave out. Words like ‘six months’ and ‘foster care’. We’d seen the kids in the system, when we were living in the flats. They’d disappear for a couple of months because someone put a cigarette out on them, and then they’d come back. Sit on the porch steps the same as before, but different as well.

  Yasmin didn’t tell us where Mum was. Didn’t tell us whether they’d taken her away with her dressing-gown flapping open, whether Claud had been there too, whether Jason had gone in a separate car. I tried to ask her but the questions came out in different words; I tried to say ‘Is my mum in prison?’ and it came out as ‘Do you have a business card?’ and I tried to say ‘Why didn’t she protect Ben?’ and it came out as ‘Where’s the nearest corner shop?’

  She had all the answers to those questions. The corner shop was down this road and left at the end, near the park. Her business cards were still being printed but she would give me one as soon as they arrived.

  Folder closed. We had enough information for one day.

  I walked Yasmin and her folder to the door. She stepped out of it, then turned back to face me.

  ‘Bye,’ I said.

  ‘You can call me Yas.’ She reached to put her hand on my shoulder but ran it through her hair instead. ‘Let me know if you’ve got any other questions, in the meantime. Vin’s got my number.’

  I thought of fruit-picking at Nonno’s farm, of the numbers I’d memorised from the phone book. ‘Yeah, I have another question.’

  ‘Go for it.’

  ‘Why aren’t we staying with my nonno?’

  ‘Nonno?’

  ‘My dad’s dad. He lives not that far from here.’

  She frowned, reached for her folder. ‘They didn’t mention a dad’s dad.’

  ‘I don’t get why we wouldn’t just go to him. We used to stay there heaps. He lives on a farm.’

  ‘The department is pretty thorough about these things. If there was someone else you could go to, they would’ve found them. Is he old? Maybe he’s too old.’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. Last time I saw him he was still picking fruit. Old people couldn’t do that, could they?’

  ‘I’ll find out for you, okay? Vin and Therese are really great women with lots of experience. They’ll take good care of you both, for now.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Part of my job is to help figure that out. I’ll be back tomorrow and I should have more information then, okay?’ The day was bright and it clipped the edges of her face. ‘Try to relax. Get your things unpacked.’ She closed the door. Ben hadn’t moved.

  Therese made a casserole for dinner and we all sat around the table, including their dog, which lay across Vin’s feet, and their cat, which perched on the dresser behind Vin’s head. She looked like an evil villain. I tried to catch Ben’s eye, to show him, but he stared into his bowl of meat.

  ‘So.’ Therese gave us both a big smile. ‘You’ve probably guessed I have a super boring job. An accountant. But did you know Vin’s a zookeeper?’ She was talking to us like we were babies, but Ben’s eyes went up. ‘Yep. She works with all the native Australian animals. Don’t you, Vinnie?’

  ‘Koalas. Echidnas. Platypuses.’

  I looked over at Ben. ‘Platypi?’ I said.

  She shrugged. ‘They’re very shy. You’re lucky to see one, let alone two.’

  Ben’s body vibrated, like it was full of platypus facts he wanted to share.

  ‘I haven’t been to the zoo for ages,’ I said. ‘We were near it the other day, when we first got back. Heard the lions roaring. But we didn’t go in.’

  ‘I can take you,’ Vin said. ‘If you like. We get in for free.’ She was looking at Ben, just with her eyes. ‘I’m bringing home some babies in a couple of days. Echidnas. Round-the-clock hand feeding.’

  Ben’s chair scraped along the floor, his knees going up and down.

  ‘What are baby echidnas called?’ I said, to her, and waited for him to take the bait.

  ‘Puggles!’ he shouted, threw himself across the table at Vin. The cat leapt off the dresser. ‘Baby echidnas are called puggles. Did you know Australia is the only continent in the world that has monotremes? All their babies hatch out of eggs and then they feed them with milk. The other one is platypuses. Did you know when scientists first discovered a platypus they thought it was a hoax? They thought someone had killed a duck and sewed its beak to a beaver and just invented the whole animal because they’re like otters but they live in burrows and lay eggs but they’re also mammals?’ He took a deep breath and turned to me. ‘And it is platypuses. Not platypi.’

  ‘I think both are correct,’ Vin said gently, and she was smiling. Ben ate a big forkful of casserole.

  ‘And,’ he said, mouth full, ‘it’s octopuses too, or sometimes octopodes but never octopi.’ He looked at Vin. ‘Do you have any octopuses at the zoo?’

  ‘No octopuses.’

  ‘Pythons?’

  ‘Lots.’

  He took a deep breath. ‘Tortoises?’

  ‘Yep. We have Aldabra tortoises. Giant tortoises.’

  ‘They can live to be two hundred.’

  ‘Is that right? They’re hibernating a
t the moment but I could take you to see them when the weather’s a bit warmer.’

  Ben nodded. ‘Maybe.’

  After dinner we sat for a bit in the front room, fire still going. Therese had the big armchair by the door and Vin was on the couch. Ben sat next to her. He leaned towards her, just a little. Enough for his ear to connect with her shoulder. She didn’t do anything, just let him leave it there, both their faces lit by the stupidly textbook glow from the fire.

  ‘Lavinia,’ he said.

  ‘Call me Vin,’ she said.

  ‘Do you mind if I call you Lavinia though?’

  ‘Not a bit. Benjamin.’

  ‘Lavinia, if you take us to the zoo, will the other kids know we’re just staying with you for now?’

  ‘What other kids?’

  ‘The other kids visiting the zoo. Because our mum is coming really soon and if we go to the zoo with you and then go again with her, people might get confused and think she kidnapped us.’

  ‘Not a chance. All kids at the zoo care about is seeing the lions and going to the kiosk.’

  ‘Not even those tiny monkeys with huge eyes?’

  ‘Mandarins?’ I said.

  ‘Tamarins?’

  ‘Oh yeah, tamarins.’

  ‘Some of them care about tamarins,’ Vin said. ‘They might just think I’m your cool auntie, if they think anything.’

  ‘Okay.’

  He relaxed the way he did with me, with the logic and science of the world explained. He moved his head from her shoulder to the space under her arm, and she let her hand rest on the small of his back.

  On my couch, there was just me.

  My phone beeped. We’re in the semi-final!! Can’t wait to see you. Raf’s bright face wide open, Yardy next to him with a cigarette hanging from his lips.

  *

  Yas came back the next day. The three women sat at the kitchen table, left the door half-open like they wanted me to hear what they were saying. I pulled myself up on a stool by the door. Rocked back and forth while I listened.

  ‘Benjamin will be going back to school on Monday,’ Yas said. ‘We have a place for him at St Eleanor’s Primary.’

  ‘And Skye?’

  ‘Glenside High. But she won’t go Monday. I have to take a statement from her first and I don’t want to do it while Benjamin’s here.’

  ‘Then when?’

  ‘Tuesday.’ Yas’s folder opened, paper rustling. ‘I’ll take her out to do it, if you can get Benjamin settled in. He’s in Judy Russell’s class.’ The sound of something sliding across the table.

  ‘Oh, she’s so nice. We had Richie with her, remember, Vin? And Ava, I think.’

  ‘I remember. She is nice!’

  ‘Why do they need a statement?’ Plates collided, one of them whispered Shit!

  ‘They think the call might have come from her. The mother says Skye didn’t have a phone, though.’

  ‘She does have one. I saw her tapping away on it last night.’ Silence, then: ‘Why does it matter?’

  ‘She says the kids didn’t know what was going on. She’s contesting the protective order, saying she was keeping them safe the whole time.’

  ‘Can she do that?’

  Yas was quiet for a moment. ‘I mean, I guess she can try whatever she wants. The boyfriend’s locked up, the house was full of paraphernalia. It’s going to be an uphill battle for her one way or another.’

  ‘Especially if she was high the whole time.’

  My heart skipped a beat.

  ‘The police say she wasn’t.’

  ‘That’s something, at least.’

  ‘Tea?’ said Therese, and there was the clinking of china and things shuffling around. Ben’s door cracked open.

  ‘Are you okay?’ he said.

  ‘Shh.’

  ‘I found this book in my room about the universe. It’s old, though. It doesn’t even have anything about the “Curiosity”.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The robot they sent to Mars.’ He closed the book. ‘What’re you doing?’

  ‘Listening.’

  ‘Are they talking about us?’

  ‘Kinda. Why don’t you go back to your room?’

  ‘I want to sit with you.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But I want to hear.’

  ‘Tough on those kids,’ Vin said.

  ‘No, you don’t.’

  ‘Just let me sit with you for a second.’ He tried to shove his head under my arm.

  ‘Could you just go away?’

  He stepped back, mouth turned down. ‘Sorry,’ he said, like I’d pulled out his whole heart. I reached into the space he’d made between us.

  ‘I’m sorry. Ben. I’m sorry. Come here.’

  He walked to his room and closed the door. I stared at it for a bit, the polished white wood. His perfect room behind: safe, quiet, his.

  ‘Yeah,’ Yas was saying. ‘You know how Skye was skipping school to work full-time? The guy, her boss’ – paper rustling – ‘Daryl O’Mara. He’s in hospital. Assault. Kicked a guy’s dog and the guy punched him back, apparently.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘Quite a place, this Port Flinders.’

  We had our first weekend in foster care. I couldn’t stop thinking of it like that, foster care. The way the house always smelled of baked goods, the way you could always hear laughter from the park down the street. It was like being in one of those TV shows, a perfectly manufactured life that was actually an experiment.

  Ben had forgotten our argument. Not forgotten, probably, but filed away in his encyclopaedia of things. I saw him there in my head all the time, the hurt in his face. Sometimes I came out of my room and sat with him at the kitchen table and we looked into the backyard together, and he told me the things he knew. I recognised some of the stories – things about bees tied to balloons and making tear gas from pumpkins. Sometimes I came out of my room and sat at the kitchen table and watched Vin show him pictures of the animals she worked with.

  ‘These are the babies,’ she said to a photo of echidnas, their spiny jellybean bodies.

  ‘Puggles,’ Ben said.

  ‘They’re orphans. That’s why I’m hand-rearing them.’ The link was blatant and I thought of Mum and Dad and Nonno and all the people who hadn’t hand-reared us. My body burned under this layer of fatigue but I sat next to Ben and he took the pictures one by one and looked at them all. He picked one out to show me.

  ‘This one is a sugar glider,’ he said. ‘It uses flaps of skin to glide from one tree to the next.’

  ‘Membranes, actually,’ Vin said. ‘It’s called a patagium.’ Ben frowned. Committed the word to his brain, stored it away.

  Sometimes I came out of my room and watched him with Therese at the kitchen table, pulling out his skinny hands and painting his fingernails blue and red. It was the only whimsy she had, she said, painting fingernails. Accountants didn’t have much whimsy. Ben let her do it, fingers splayed and flat on the table, watching her neat, organised strokes and breathing in the chemical smell.

  ‘Ethyl acetate,’ she said. ‘That’s the smell. Most people hate it but I secretly love it.’ She winked at Ben, painted his smallest fingernail red as guts. I watched him store that away, too, in his Dewey Decimal mind.

  I thought about what I could teach him – how to mark down meat in a supermarket freezer, how to listen out for the train coming, how to leave behind the only guy who’s ever liked you. Nothing useful.

  Sometimes I came out of my room and sat by the front window and stored my own stuff away instead. I watched the people go past with their different families and their animals and kids on shoulders and babies in strollers and bubbles and laughter and all the things people took around with them and filed it.

  Ben’s room had floor-to-ceiling bookcases, box after box of toys. At night I took something from the shelves and climbed in next to him and he read aloud from books with inscriptions in them. He asked me if I was angry, and I said I didn’t know what
I was so he hugged me and told me it was okay to not know all the time.

  ‘Mum will be here soon,’ he said.

  ‘Right.’

  ‘She just needs to figure out her complications.’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘How long, do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘A week?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  And at night I waited, in my own perfect bedroom, for a knock on the window. Jason’s bald head, Mum’s claw hands on my monkey lamp.

  Ben was small inside his blue uniform, track pants loose around his waist and jumper with cuffs past his wrists. Therese asked what we would normally have in our lunchboxes and I told lies for him: chocolate, chips, raspberry lollies. Lunch orders, usually. Pies with sauce, or pasties if we needed to get our daily vegetable intake up.

  Vin took him in her work ute. Bound him up in the back seat of the cab and he waved to me with a big smile on his face.

  I waited by the window for Yas’s car to pull up, alone in the house. I thought of leaving, slipping out that shiny white door and catching the train down to Kirrily’s house. Finding the man with his legs cut off. I thought about it for ages, his head exploded all over the tracks, not sure why I was thinking it but doing it all the same. I opened Raf’s text again. Tried to type something back to him, something that said Congrats! but also COME GET ME and WE RAN AWAY AND THEY FOUND US. I went with Congrats! He sent back a thumbs-up.

  It was after ten when Yas arrived. Hair pulled back, serious business suit on. ‘Let’s go down to the shops. There’s a café there that does a great milkshake.’

  The ache was catching up with me, Ben and my plan on the table outside Joe’s with our paper straws. Mum crept into my brain again with her dressing-gown flapping.

  We walked to the café. The sun had come out, bright and delighted. Everything had a gumleaf smell. I stepped on the lilly pilly fruit and felt it burst beneath my shoes.

  Yas pulled me into a seat by the window. She spread her papers all over the table: Mum’s police photo, Ben’s class list, a report from my old school. ‘Have a seat.’

  ‘Sure,’ I said.