The Gulf

by Anna Spargo-Ryan

Yas pulled a bit of paper from her folder. ‘So, I’m sorry to do this to you.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘But we’re going to need to take a statement. Nothing scary. A few things about life at home and why you left. You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to, though. No one can force you to say anything.’ She reached for my hand. ‘You’re not in trouble.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Yeah, I know. Why would I be?’

  ‘You’re not.’

  ‘Yeah, you said that.’

  She smiled, flagged down the waiter to ask for a latte and a vanilla shake. We sat uncomfortably.

  ‘We’ll just have a chat,’ she said finally.

  ‘Okay.’

  She laughed awkwardly, a little hiccup of a thing. We sat in the window together, like we were mates. That was part of her whole deal, getting chummy with us so we trusted her. I didn’t. Not yet. Another drone from the government. It was impossible to know either way.

  ‘So, here’s what’s happening. This is stuff I’m comfortable telling you, you understand, because you’re older. But I don’t think Ben needs to know any of it yet, okay? Can we just keep it between the two of us for now?’ She smiled, so I nodded. ‘What’s happened is, after you left, the police had reason to go to your house.’

  ‘What kind of reason?’

  ‘They had a, uh . . . suspicion. They had a look around, and they found some things that shouldn’t have been there. Especially with you and Benjamin living there.’

  I asked the questions I thought she wanted me to: What kind of things? Why did they take her in? What does it mean to get out on bail? But I knew it already. Daughter’s instinct.

  ‘The police will have their own ideas, but I need to know what you know about what was happening in the house. Like I said, you don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to, but it might help us figure out what to do next.’ Pause. ‘And then the other part is – and you really need to keep this from Benjamin for now – your mum is going to ask us if you can live with her again.’

  ‘Up there?’

  ‘Probably not. It’s still early days, but she has a case worker too, like you. It seems she’s hoping she can move back to Adelaide, find a place here for you all to live together.’

  The apartment, Amir and Ben running in the canal. The water against the rocks. The far-off cry of the train. The train. The way it had dislodged Ben when he didn’t hear it the day we started our plan, the haunted sigh of it across the fields. And then the commission flats, the kids with their eyes hanging open in the stairwells and Ben flying down the drive on his trike and –

  ‘What kind of place?’

  Yas shrugged. ‘It could be any kind of place. A unit, a house. The important thing is that she has a stable place for you guys to go. But even then, we have to make sure it’s safe for both of you.’ She put her hands on top of mine, carefully, as though I might attack her. People kept doing that. Touching my shoulders, my hands, my elbows. Bodyguards. ‘It’s important that everyone is fully aware of the potential risks. Do you understand? I want to hear your version of the story so I know whether you’re likely to be in danger again.’

  It was Ben I thought of. All the time. Tucked away in his room in the extension, shoving square pieces into square holes. I was exhausted by the burden of taking him away from Mum but also of not protecting him from Jason. He didn’t get it. He knew so many things, but not these things.

  ‘We only left because of Jason.’ Anger welled in me, in its red rapids. ‘I don’t know anything about this other stuff you’re talking about.’ The stuff in the spare room, the afternoon I’d watched Mum through the door. Jason’s fingers on Ben’s skin. I couldn’t stop seeing it.

  She frowned. ‘The most important thing, Skye, is to be really clear about what happened while you were living there. Nothing you say will jeopardise you or Ben.’

  ‘What about me and Ben?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What if I do say to you, yeah, Jason tried to crush my brother’s windpipe because he threw a toy car at a window?’

  ‘Did he do that?’

  I paused. ‘That’s not the point. Will you take him away?’

  ‘Jason?’

  ‘Ben. Will you take Ben away? If I tell you what really happened, is someone going to put him in some kind of hospital for kids with really fucked-up childhoods?’

  ‘Oh, Skye, no. Look’ – she scratched her head; flakes of skin dropped onto her neat dress – ‘you’re sixteen. Our system says sixteen-year-olds can live as adults, if they want to. But you don’t have to. As long as you want to be with Ben, you can be with him. None of us are going to separate you. Okay? You’re not in trouble.’

  ‘Why do people keep saying that?’

  ‘We’re just trying to figure out what was going on there. How far this – what was going on.’ She put her phone on the table. ‘I have to record our conversation, okay? Why don’t you start from the start? How did you know Jason?’

  I told her some of the things. The auction and the move and the rain. Murray and Bilbo. Not Raf’s text messages, or how much I needed to see him, but the new car and the trip to Wallaroo. Jason counting out his five-dollar notes, throwing the table into the TV cabinet. The almost-faded bruise across my ribs. I told her about the train, the cold morning waiting for the train in the dark. Waiting and waiting for the train to come and take us to our new life that was actually just our old life.

  We went through the park, stopped at the edge of a duck pond to watch a mother duck with her tail of ducklings. The spring air was everywhere. Pollen, suffocation. The trees along the creek had exploded in veils of pink flowers and I couldn’t escape the smell of it; that newborn, hopeful, renewed smell. Yas sat on a rubber swing and gave a little shove back and forth. I took the one next to her and did the same.

  ‘Swings, huh?’ Yas said.

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Haven’t been on one since I was a kid.’ She kicked up the bark with her sandals. ‘So, hey,’ she said, still swinging. ‘I did some searching. For your dad’s dad.’

  I stopped my own swing. ‘And?’

  She threw her head back, let out a big sigh.

  ‘Your nonno died, Skye. A couple of years ago. I’m sorry.’

  My plan: EARN MORE MONEY, GO TO NONNO’S HOUSE. All that time I’d imagined him at the end of this long and shitty journey, the way he would welcome us into his house and make us feed his animals and prune his plants and stay out of his way, but only because he was old. For a minute my eyes ran hot with tears but then they were gone, pushed down with all the other unfair bullshit that had happened.

  ‘And what about my actual dad?’ I was yelling but I didn’t care, didn’t care that kids were staring at me from their safe little playgrounds. ‘He left us, you know. I was like, seven, and he left us and that’s why all this bad shit happened, isn’t it? If he hadn’t left us I could have stayed with him on weekends and no one could have forced us to go with Jason and that dog would never have eaten Ben’s tortoise.’

  Yas let her feet drag in the bark. ‘He was the first person we looked for. I promise. But he’s just dropped off the map.’

  ‘Fuck, Yas.’ She didn’t say anything, just got off her swing and came and put her arms around my shoulders and swatted the air and the blossoms almost bloomed in real time while my chest burned. Eventually she said, ‘I have to take you home,’ and I didn’t even bother asking which home she meant.

  Vin had picked up the baby echidnas. She had them in a cat box with thick blankets, and she invited me to look inside before she even spoke to Yas. ‘They’re only a couple of weeks old,’ she said. I said nothing. She looked over my shoulder, frowned, turned back to me. ‘Biscuit? I got those ones you said you guys always had, with the three kinds of chocolate.’

  ‘No thanks.’ The front door closed. I sat next to Vin and poked my fingers into the cage. Would they bite me? Would I even feel it?

  ‘We can talk about it,
if you want to. Or not. Totally up to you.’

  ‘Nope.’

  She put her hand on my shoulder and it hissed on my skin, my need for somebody to parent me, to care for me, shot right through my arm and into my chest and lodged in there, so I let her even though it burned.

  She went to pick up Ben later in the afternoon. He went to the cat box first, opened the door and put his hand in there. He’d pushed his sleeves right up.

  ‘What happened to their parents?’ he said.

  She stuck her finger through the grate door. ‘Same as all the others. Humans. Someone probably found these in a pouch after they hit the mother with their car.’ She smiled. ‘They always say it was someone else, though. Just found them on the side of the road! Can you imagine! Hitting an animal and driving away!’

  Ben’s eyes were wide. ‘No, I can’t imagine!’

  Dinner gurgled on the stove. I went to my perfect bedroom, lay on the perfect bed and watched the stars on the ceiling spin around and around.

  They’d told me I’d start school the next day. Not the one from the plan near Nonno’s farm – Nonno’s old farm, Nonno’s once farm – but a big one down the road with more than a thousand students. I couldn’t imagine that many people at once, and me dropped in the middle of them.

  My phone: we won! will be in Rads on Thurs. I thought of the night at Yardy’s, sitting on the end of the jetty listening to his dreams. Claud in her warm house with the front light on.

  I wrote, I’m here already, and he wrote, I know.

  18

  TWO YEARS AFTER Dad left, we had a concert at school. I was in the orchestra, banging a triangle with a stick. We’d been practising for months, every lunchtime on a Wednesday in the assembly hall.

  Mrs Sadananda, had asked us for suggestions for songs. Said it might encourage parents to come along if we were playing their favourites. I didn’t ask Mum for her favourite but I knew Dad loved Elvis. Mrs Sadananda printed a big list of his songs and asked me to show her which one he liked the best.

  ‘“Hound Dog”,’ I said.

  On the night of the concert, Mum ironed my uniform and did my hair properly with a ribbon. There was a big crowd of parents. Rows and rows of them, encouraged to come along because we were playing their favourites. ‘Hound Dog’ was right there in the program, after ‘Enter Sandman’. I played the triangle better than I’d ever played it before. When we were finished, I looked and looked for my dad in the audience. Mum told me later his favourite was ‘Blue Suede Shoes’.

  *

  School had the same tall gum trees as Vin and Therese’s house, brick buildings and clusters of people everywhere. Circles on the lawn like séances, kids with their closed-in friendship groups. I thought of Kirrily first, always finding me in the yard at lunch. Then Raf, Raf, Raf, the burnt oval and the guys on the railway tracks. A different planet.

  Parts of it were the same. Go to homeroom, sit through the roll. They must have had the ‘foster kid’ memo because I didn’t have to introduce myself even though I had a little speech planned. Hi, I’m Skye – Raf again, pointing up – and I ran away from my mum’s druggie boyfriend to protect my brother. I was even disappointed not to be able to say it, not to see the looks on their faces.

  There were classes as well, must have been, but by the time the morning was over I couldn’t remember them. I sat at lunchtime in a garden bed with the trees shading it, pulled out the bag of junk food I’d tricked Therese into packing. Thought about Nonno dying on his farm with his stupid goat. Thought about that housekeeper finding him bowed over his kitchen table. Thought about the fruit trees growing wild without him, or cut down to build new things, or being picked at by strangers. I thought about what I’d said to Yas but mostly what she’d said to me, about Ben not being taken away. Of course he could be. Probably even more likely since I’d tried to kidnap him.

  I went to some more classes. Opened my box of homemade food under a different tree, and another different tree. Talked to a girl waiting behind me in the bathroom – she had a brother, too, but he was older and no one had lifted him off the carpet by his throat.

  Each night I lay in the white bed and imagined myself climbing through the window and never coming back.

  *

  On Thursday morning I listened to a man in a cardigan talk about revolutionary wars until I couldn’t listen anymore and picked up my bag and left. No one said anything, not him or any of the kids taking notes or the ones on their phones. There was a bus stop further down the road and I waited with my whole body crunched into the bench. I’d never just blown off school to catch a bus, not like this without a reason. I took a seat near the back and it rolled along to a shopping centre, where I became anonymous. Nothing weird about a sixteen-year-old wagging school. I was just like every other kid with free periods or notes to get out of PE. Classical music played from invisible speakers, not too loud; everything soft and vanilla and easy.

  I still had nine hundred dollars in the bank. I tried to find the urgency I’d felt to earn it, the life-or-death feeling of getting out. But it wasn’t there, not surrounded by women with blow-dried hair and children wearing tiny versions of adult clothes. None of it seemed to matter. Jason locked up, Mum trying to pull her dressing-gown closed. Murray limping his way between Sad Tom’s and the butcher in search of a feed.

  It was like a hallucination I’d had.

  In the shopping centre there were heaps of stores I’d never had enough money to shop in. Clothes actual teenagers wore, not hand-me-downs or stuff from the op shop. Brand names and real jeans. I reached for my bank card.

  I bought a maxi skirt with a blue floral print, cross-over tops with gold and silver embellishments, a shirt with lemons all over it that showed my stomach. I bought distressed skinny jeans and boyfriend jeans and shorts up in my arse crack, and something called a shift dress and another thing called a skater dress, and black ballet flats and silver ballet flats and a lace-up bodysuit.

  I stared at my reflection in every single thing and tried to see it the way others might. Wondered what Raf would think of me in half-see-through stripes. In an embroidered bomber jacket I just saw Mum in the driveway in her dressing-gown, trying to pull herself together. I took it off. Bought a pair of rainbow thongs and a wide-brimmed hat and a beach towel shaped like a watermelon. Tried to breathe in between.

  At the store by the supermarket I chose a tiny pair of pink flamingo studs, tapped my card on the machine and waited. Stretched my fingers out of their tight grip around the bags.

  The chick looked at me and looked at my card. She had one hand on the store phone. ‘Sorry, it’s been declined.’

  I took in the spread of bags around me, breathed in whatever perfume they were pumping through the air-con and said, ‘Finally.’

  Yas’s car was parked out the front. I dropped my bags by the front door, clicked it open slowly. She was alone, standing at the hall table with something in her hands.

  The plan. That notebook Ben had chosen. She peered into it like she’d never read anything so interesting in her life.

  EARN MORE MONEY.

  She paused on a couple of the pages, frowned, made a note in her diary.

  GO TO NONNO’S HOUSE.

  And on the last page of the plan, towards the back with a few pages between so Ben wouldn’t be suspicious. She stopped there, looked and looked at it, sighed deeply.

  CALL THE POLICE.

  ‘Can you take me to the Show?’ She dropped the book, tried to pretend she hadn’t by crossing her arms and talking fast.

  ‘Skye. Didn’t see you there. You’re quiet. Wow. How was school? Good?’

  I ignored her. ‘I mean, I could catch the tram but maybe I’m a flight risk. That’s what they call it, right? A flight risk?’

  She slipped some papers into her folder. ‘The Show Show? With animals and stuff?’

  ‘Right. Showbags. Laughing clowns.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I’ll pretend I didn’t see you re
ading my private notebook just now.’

  ‘Oh, the Show. On my way home, as it happens.’

  ‘Great. I’ll get changed.’ I gestured towards the pile of shopping. ‘Must be something to wear in all of this.’

  We got in her little red car and drove through the city. All the people. I still hadn’t got used to it, the way they buzzed around with all their different reasons.

  As we pulled into the showgrounds, she looked across at me. ‘I have to put a recommendation to DECD, about your mum having visitation rights. Are you sure there’s nothing else you want me to say?’

  I thought of Ben in his bedroom with puzzles meant for babies and about the constellation on my ceiling. ‘No.’

  ‘I know you called the police,’ she said. ‘You won’t be in trouble.’ And the car squeaked to a stop, its tiny engine resisting the bitumen.

  ‘Here’s good,’ I said. The ferris wheel loomed ahead of us, smaller than I remembered. Yas slipped me twenty dollars from her purse.

  ‘Call Vin when you’re finished, yeah? She’ll come and get you.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Don’t mention it.’

  The sounds hit me right away – combined shrieks of happiness and fear and too much sugar. The grinding of the big wheel making its way around, the megaphone announcements at the arena, the thock of the woodchopping. It smelled of sausages on sticks and fairy floss. Parents came out with kids dragging behind them, whining about not wanting to leave or not getting enough showbags or not having some other thing they were lucky to even know about.

  I was early by a couple of hours so I took Yas’s twenty and bought myself entry. Took myself to see the baby animals, sat with fluffy chickens and a staggering lamb and watched a cow give birth to another cow. I found the produce hall and grabbed a bit of every sample I could find, stuff I’d never tried before like pâté and possum meat and organic apple cider. The people behind the stalls were glossy, city people. It was nothing like I remembered. I took as many sausages on toothpicks as I could manage, tried to make myself invisible in the crowds.