Dust

by Christine Bongers

  Gave me goose bumps.

  I stole a look at Mum, wondering if my whopper penance had deflected the Kapernicky threat.

  She was absorbed in the hands folded in her lap. Dad said Mum had beautiful hands when she was young. Before the work, the kids, the farm. She absently rubbed a thumb along the now roughened skin, her lips taut, mind elsewhere.

  A surge from the old pump organ announced Father coming up the aisle, my cue to escape. Dad called it the Good Book and I had to admit, it wasn’t half bad.

  ‘Aren’t you finished that yet?’ Punk flicked at it with an almost clean nail. ‘You’ve been at it since you were five.’

  I figured that, at an hour a week, fifty-two weeks a year, it’d probably take me ten years to finish. I’d given up reading it in order ages ago because too much Old Testament fuelled my naturally vengeful spirit. I needed to water it down with some random New Testament forgiveness, or the ongoing battles with Punk spiralled way out of control.

  Swear to God, it should be a safety requirement that children keep their exposure to God in the Old Testament to a minimum.

  If you get on the wrong side of Him, He’ll turn you into a pillar of salt, strike you down with plague and pestilence or let you all drown in a forty-day deluge, soon as look at you.

  Freaks me how God and Jesus manage to live together in the same house. They are so way at opposite ends of the tolerance spectrum.

  While Father droned on I treated myself to some broad-based religious instruction. A bit of OT eye-for-an-eye, full-on waking fantasy about snapping Punk’s wrist; then an NT cool-down, with a parable after Communion about forgiving your enemies.

  I came up for air just in time to see Big Hairs palm something from Dad.

  You beauty. Mass was ended.

  Time for our just deserts.

  chapter 8

  Big Hairs galloped at the head of the pack up the stairs of the Jambin shop.

  With its post office out front, it stood out among the half-dozen or so buildings that straddled the Burnett highway and straggled around the railway crossing. Rebuilt on stumps after the 1942 floods lapped its front counter, it now looked proudly over a dustpan that stretched to the raggedy tree-line marking the dry creek bed half a mile away.

  The Kenny kids from Goovigen had beaten us there and were already squawking like cockatoos along the verandah railings, slobbering down ice-blocks till all they had left was stick and splintered tongues.

  Inside it was kind of gloomy. Not a place for lingering. We’d grabbed our Paddle Pops out of the front freezer and were jostling at the back counter when Fred Cooper emerged from behind the fly-strap curtain.

  ‘The six of you got the same thing?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Cooper.’

  The boys took off, leaving me holding the dollar bill from Dad. Fred Cooper squinted at it, one lid hanging over an eye socket that was empty today.

  ‘Ninety cents,’ he growled.

  I handed over the money, my arm rattling a saucer next to the till. Fred Cooper’s glass eye rolled over and stared unblinkingly up at me.

  I reared back, right onto someone’s foot.

  ‘Sorry.’

  I swung round and found myself trapped between Fred Cooper’s glass eye and a couple of strangers.

  ‘G’day, dearie.’ The old bloke pushed forward, eyes crinkling on a level with my own. At five foot six-and-a-half, we were exactly the same height. His rubber-band lips stretched wide revealing teeth spoiled by tobacco.

  ‘Here’s your change.’

  I spun back towards the counter. ‘Thanks, Mr Cooper.’

  ‘Take it outside, I don’t want any sticky damn mess in here.’ He nodded at the two behind me. But when I tried to slide past them, the taller man blocked my escape.

  ‘You’re Billy Vanderbomm’s girl, aren’t you.’

  It wasn’t a question but I nodded, eyes skating around him. The district was full of people who loved a chat just because they knew Mum and Dad.

  ‘I’m Morrie Kapernicky.’

  The air busted out of me. My punishment for lying in Confession: a Kapernicky bent on revenge.

  Then it hit me: he couldn’t possibly know about the germs game; nobody did but Mum and it wasn’t the kind of thing she’d want to spread around.

  And what was the worst Aileen could say about me? That we’d traded veiled insults during prefixes and suffixes?

  He tilted his head at the old bloke. ‘This is my Dad, Alf.’

  The old man showed me some more of his bad teeth.

  ‘Hello, Mr Kapernicky.’ The automatic response seemed to amuse his son.

  ‘Call me Morrie.’

  He was younger than Dad, with blond hair hanging long behind his ears. A chipped front tooth made him look even younger when he smiled. He scratched at where three buttons hung open down his chest. The smell of rollies and Brut made me realise he was too close, and a sudden heat flushed up my neck.

  ‘’Scuse me.’ Punk pushed between us and spun me round. ‘Where’s the change? Dad says we can share a packet of lollies.’

  He grabbed my clenched fist and prised back my fingers to reveal the forgotten ten-cent piece.

  ‘Give it here.’ He turned to Mr Cooper. ‘A packet of mixed lollies, please.’

  The Kapernickys melted back to the magazine rack. Morrie picked up a Man magazine and started leafing through. With Punk at my side, I felt a sudden confusion, a sense of two worlds colliding.

  Morrie winked at me over the top of his magazine. Punk sauntered off, oblivious to the knowing grin that followed us both out.

  ‘What do you want?’ Punk had already skimmed off the cream from the little white bag in his hand. ‘A banana? Caramel bud?’

  ‘I don’t care. Anything.’

  He pulled up, frowning, as Big Hairs and the little boys mobbed him. ‘What’s up with you?’

  He surrendered the lolly bag without a struggle: he’d already palmed a couple of bullets and milk bottles, and a Black Cat bubblegum glistened wetly between his teeth.

  ‘Those men, they were Kapernickys. Aileen and Janeen’s …’ I hesitated. Dad and granddad wasn’t quite right.

  Punk glanced back inside the shop, then gave me a top view of his half-chewed Black Cat. ‘So what? They got nothing to do with us.’

  I tore my eyes away from the wet bitumen in his mouth and shot the empty doorway a long dark look. ‘I guess not.’

  Punk looked down at the hand hanging at my side. ‘Your Paddle Pop’s melting.’

  Oh man!

  In the car on the way home, two caramel buds and a Paddle Pop had sweetened my mood.

  I forgave Punk for cracking my wrist – sometimes he knew not what he did – and chalked up yet another win for the Parables over the Old Testament. Besides, he had rescued me from the Kapernickys, not that he knew what he was doing there either.

  Mum glanced round. ‘I saw the Kapernickys’ car driving off from the shop. Were the girls with them?’

  I shook my head and turned away from her questioning look to a moving picture of drought, ten years deep. Bleached straggles of dead grass clawed at the edges of hard-crusted dust bowls. Heat shimmered above barren paddocks.

  A curled ball of dead spiny anteater blinked past on the edge of the bitumen.

  My gut lurched. I recognised that urge to protect a soft underbelly, to curl up at the hint of threat, to fan out the spikes and tough it out.

  Not that it helped against a truck tyre.

  I closed my eyes, the heat of the window pressed against my cheek. Half-listening to Mum talking about how old Alf Kapernicky had been on his own a long time, about how it would do him good to have Morrie home at last, see him settled with a family.

  ‘Do you think we should be a bit more neighbourly?’

  She was talking to Dad, across the top of the little boys’ heads. ‘Call on them after church next Sunday?’

  My eyes snapped open, my belly curled and the barbs erupted.

  Dad grunted, his e
yes fixed on the road.

  ‘They’re not church people. Probably be on their way to the Sunday session at the Jambin pub.’

  When he didn’t say anything more, she turned to me in the back seat.

  ‘Well, maybe those girls could do with a friend. And you, young lady …’

  I stared rebelliously, my back to the window.

  ‘You can’t keep playing with boys all your life. Maybe it would do you all some good to get together.’

  She glanced at Dad. ‘At our place. See if we can’t get them over for a visit.’

  I stewed over what she said, but for some reason, Aileen and Janeen’s faces kept slipping away and it was Morrie Kapernicky’s foxy grin that loomed large in my mind.

  He was like that big carpet python we found in the dairy, the day we were supposed to be helping Dad dip the cows for ticks.

  Dad wouldn’t let us near it – snakes gave him the heebie-jeebies. But a working man who was giving Dad a hand pointed to a big bulge in its belly – reckoned it was harmless as long as no-one smelt of mice.

  He lifted it with two hands and let it wind itself round his arm, over his shoulder, down his back, under his armpit, across his stomach. Said we could touch it if we wanted.

  I couldn’t take my eyes off it, rippling and sliding over the dusty checked flannel shirt and filthy work shorts. Flowing like a river of oil along the folds in the fabric.

  Mesmerising, compelling. Impossible not to reach out a hand, feel the unexpected dryness, the glide of muscle under skin –

  ‘So what d’you reckon?’ Punk jabbed me with an elbow. ‘About saying the lying bit last? Reckon it covered everything we didn’t say in Confession? Or did it just cover what we did say?’

  It took a moment to catch him up, before the memory made me grimace.

  ‘My penance was huge, so it must’ve covered everything for me. Including everything I haven’t even done yet.’

  Punk’s eyes lit up, an ominous grin sliding across his face.

  If I’d been thinking less about the Kapernickys, I might have recognised that glow for what it was.

  A warning light.

  chapter 9

  ‘OK, Little Girl. Choose.’

  ‘I don’t want to choose. Let me go, you freak!’

  He had me pinned in a one-armed armlock under the tank stand. Both my arms were immobilised, but he still had one free to thump me with.

  His voice sounded reasonable, pitched low, right next to my ear.

  ‘Come on, it’s easy: chinese burn, horse bite or a corky. And remember, if you don’t choose, you get all three.’

  I hated that he was stronger than me. That he had the upper hand. That I was trapped in an unwinnable position. That all the options open to me sucked.

  So I did the only thing I could – screamed and stomped at his bare feet.

  But his two-step was too quick for me.

  ‘Bad choice.’

  His hand flicked out, stinging the back of my thigh, then knuckled a quick corky into my right bicep. I yelped and rubbed my throbbing arm. But I wasn’t thinking fast enough: he’d freed my arms for a reason.

  Two hands clamped my left wrist, twisting it hard in opposite directions. Just as quickly, he was dancing away from my furious kick and backhander.

  He pointed a finger between my eyes.

  ‘I told you to choose, Little Girl.’ He laughed and was gone.

  A familiar ugly tightness in my chest exploded in a scream, long and loud, at his disappearing back.

  I collapsed back against one of the wooden stumps holding up the tank stand, slid down till my bum hit the dirt and buried my face in my cast.

  Something … everything … was changing.

  Punk was bursting out of himself. Energy buzzed and snapped around him, as though it had to get out of his system, or it would fry him alive.

  He’d turned into a human cattle prod – jolting me every time I went near him. The more I fought back, the more he arced up. Gave him an excuse to ramp up his fun. I wasn’t sure it was even personal most of the time. It was just something for him to do.

  Maybe Mum was right.

  She’d given me the talk. A copy of The Catholic Guide to Becoming a Woman. Two Fibs bras with gold anchors between the cups. And a packet of Modess.

  Maybe it was time to start playing with girls.

  I picked at the fraying edge of my cast.

  Just not the Kapernickys.

  My fingers worked at further softening the handpiece. It was turning green, my gauntlet. Made me think of Green Lantern from the Justice League of America comics that made the trip to Beasley’s newsagency in Biloela worthwhile.

  Anything that doesn’t kill a man makes him stronger.

  I flexed my fingers, feeling the resistance of the plaster as I stared out at the dust haze hovering over our paddocks.

  The same must be true for girls.

  Especially for girls with five brothers, one of whom is a maniac.

  I pushed myself to my feet, the solid comfort of the tank-stand warming my back as I straightened my shoulders.

  I would tough it out. I would get stronger. And in the meantime, I’d stay out of Punk’s way, before he killed me completely.

  chapter 10

  I holed up in the smallest room in the school.

  Dark and shuttered against the light. A place to be alone with a thousand lives I’d never live. A thousand places I might never see. A thousand years or more of time, squeezed between the covers of a thousand books that lined the walls of the smallest room in the school.

  My hand ran along the wooden shelves, feeling the way they braced themselves to support the spines of all the worlds I’d already visited.

  A dirty fingertip traced my journey from the gosh-Ann-where’s-Timmy jolly hijinks of the Secret Seven and the Famous Five, flowing through the Billabongs of Mary Grant Bruce, to discover What Katy Did and what she did next.

  I had followed Anne from Green Gables to Avonlea and on to the Island, visited Uncle Tom’s Cabin and joined in the adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. I’d cried for Old Yeller, Black Beauty and My Friend Flicka. Shivered with White Fang, heard the Call of the Wild.

  I promised this dark little room a long time ago that I would discover all its secrets. Every single one. Even those stories I didn’t care for would have their chance, their covers opened, their pages turned, so that the light could fall on their Boys Own silliness, the faded diagrams of the combustion engine, the chirpy history of the Automobile and the serious business of Bee-keeping in Schools.

  It was a lucky dip, where every child won a prize. Sometimes top shelf, sometimes not. But a prize nonetheless. To be savoured or discarded. Alone in the dimness. Away from the shrill squawk, the push and shove of schoolyard tempers. Away from everything and everyone.

  I bent to put Jane Eyre back on her shelf and froze, the book still in my hand.

  A foot stuck out from behind the next row of bookcases. Bare and calloused like my own. Beaten brown by the sun.

  My sanctuary. Invaded.

  I walked to the end of the bookcase and peered round to where she sat propped against the wall, one knee hugged to her chest, an open book balanced on her outstretched leg.

  I couldn’t see the title, but recognised the shape of the lines on the page, the ink sketch of the trickster fox from Aesop’s Fables.

  Her face was shadowed by a fall of dark hair. Her eyelids flickered, but only as far as the book I still held in my hand.

  I started to back away when her voice softly snagged me.

  ‘Why do you think they were so cruel to her? Her aunt and cousins?’

  My heart thumped. I’d asked Mum the same question. She’d been busy folding washing and said it had been too long since she’d read Jane Eyre. I’d have to figure it out for myself.

  I paused, not sure if I wanted to talk to her. But I’d only just finished the book as the bus pulled into school. I hadn’t quite left Jane’s world behind, and k
new I wouldn’t until I found a replacement and turned back the covers on a new bedtime story.

  ‘Because she was different. To them. And she refused to be what they wanted her to be.’

  She considered what I said and nodded. ‘And they didn’t want her in the first place. She was an orphan. So they had to take her. Even though they didn’t want to.’

  I tried to make out her eyes behind the shaded bars of her fringe, but they looked too quickly away.

  ‘They were cruel people,’ she said. ‘And Jane had no-one to protect her. That’s why they could get away with it.’

  Janeen Kapernicky turned back to her book and seemed to disappear into it as I looked on.

  It always irritated me when my mother told people that I would read brown paper if it was all I could get my hands on. Now, as I watched Janeen Kapernicky lose herself in a book, I had the first faint glimmerings of what she had meant.

  It was as though I no longer occupied space in Janeen’s world. Something had shifted – in the order of things – and I was now the intruder, the one disturbing someone else’s sanctuary.

  I backed away and slipped Jane Eyre onto the worn shelf where I had found her. I stood undecided for a moment, wondering if I should go. A quick glance over my shoulder made up my mind. Janeen’s foot was gone. Sucked into the other world that had claimed its owner.

  It was enough. I was alone once more, in the hush, in the dark. Alone but for the dust that danced like fairies in a blade of sunlight slicing under the window blind.

  The shelves spread before me, wooden arms open, alive with possibilities.

  Worn carpet scuffed at the dust on my feet as I moved forward to accept their challenge.

  The bell clanged loudly underfoot, echoing up through the thin carpet.

  I’d run out of time. Treasure Island, it would have to be.

  I tipped it out of line, just as Janeen Kapernicky walked past, head down, hair veiling her face.