Dust

by Christine Bongers

  A second book toppled out next to mine as she yanked open the door.

  On an impulse, I grabbed both of them off the shelf.

  ‘Janeen. Wait!’

  She stopped and turned, the light at her back shrouding her face in darkness.

  I hesitated, an awkward arms-length away from her.

  ‘Here.’ I thrust out the book like an offering. ‘See if you like this.’

  She turned it over in her hands, opened the cover and slowly scanned the contents.

  I began to babble a little, just to fill the silence.

  ‘It’s myths and legends from other lands. Scandinavia. Greece. North America. All over the place.’

  I edged past her into the blinding sunlight, words tumbling out.

  ‘Some of the stories you’ve probably read before, but there’s heaps of others. Different stuff. A lot are kind of freaky, but I don’t know, it just seemed as though you might be into this sort of thing. Some of it’s weird as and kinda nasty too –’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  I swung round at the irate words snapped out behind me. Aileen Kapernicky’s hot eyes bored into me.

  ‘You calling my sister weird, Vanderbum?’

  ‘No. I was just …’ I stopped. I didn’t know what I was trying to do. But clearly, it was a mistake. I pushed past her, trying to escape the embarrassment of misunderstood intentions.

  ‘Hey, I’m talking to you!’ She shoved me back against the doorjamb. ‘Think you’re better than us, don’t you, Miss Vander-smartarse!’

  I broke her grip, blood pounding in my ears. ‘Better than you, Kapernicky? That wouldn’t take much –’

  ‘Stop it. Both of you!’ Janeen stepped between us, her voice dropping as she steered Aileen away. ‘She didn’t mean any harm. She was trying to be nice –’

  ‘Her?’ Aileen spat out the words. ‘She doesn’t give a damn about us! She’s a cow!’

  ‘Me?’ I tried to get past the solid mass of Janeen on the narrow verandah. ‘You’re the freak, Kapernicky! You and your shiny new Dad –’

  The look on Janeen’s face barely registered as Aileen’s murderous face filled my vision, her words biting into me.

  ‘You can talk, Vander-scum. With your old man. Ever ask yourself what he’s doing here? Hiding out in the arse-end of the earth? A million miles from his own family. Ever wonder what he did back there to get kicked out?’

  I lunged past Janeen, grabbing a fistful of dark split ends, the world closing in on me. Only dimly aware of the developing chant, rallying a drumbeat of feet across the sun-hardened planks of the verandah.

  Fight. Fight. Fight. FIGHT!

  chapter 11

  I drilled the old inkwell hole in my desk with my finger. Alone in the classroom while everyone else played games outside.

  Mr O’Driscoll had seen me go for Aileen. Had dragged both of us into the classroom. Had made everyone else, including Janeen, line up outside while he got to the bottom of whatever the dickens we thought we were doing, going at each other like a pair of feral cats.

  Aileen Kapernicky told O’Dribble that I’d called her sister weird. And that when she’d said her family was no weirder than mine, I’d gone crazy.

  ‘Cecilia, is that true? Is that what happened?’

  It was just the three of us in the classroom. But it might just as well have been two. I was locked in a death glare with Aileen Kapernicky and wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of repeating what she’d said about my dad.

  Mr O’Driscoll sighed. ‘Look, I know it’s hard for you to admit that you’re in the wrong. But I’m sure Aileen knows you’re sorry about what happened. She knows that you can’t solve problems with your fists –’

  ‘She wouldn’t know shit if it jumped up and bit her on the bum.’

  Mr O’Driscoll’s face darkened.

  ‘That’s enough, Cecilia!’

  He stabbed a finger at the door. ‘Aileen. Please wait outside.’

  He said nothing more as she sauntered out, directing a nasty grin back my way. The silence stretched out, long after the door closed with a click behind her.

  ‘I’ve received back the Year Seven test scores.’

  I blinked at the sudden change of subject.

  ‘Do you remember sitting it with your brother? Just for fun, to see how you’d go?’

  I nodded. Mr O’Driscoll had let me work with the Seventh Graders all year; reckoned he’d run out of Year Six work for me long ago.

  He looked thoughtful. ‘Maybe it’s time for you to take on some new challenges. Might keep you out of trouble.’

  Black-framed glasses bit into the clippered sides of his head, magnifying the seriousness in his eyes. But it didn’t prepare me for the measured threat of his next words.

  ‘Maybe I should talk to your parents. See what they think.’

  He seemed to take some satisfaction at my slump of dismay, because he straightened, his voice becoming brisk.

  ‘Right. There’s something I want to show the two of you before I take that rowdy mob down the oval.’

  He walked over to the door and ordered Aileen back inside, then unlocked the cabinet containing our specimen collection.

  Hidden in among the snakes coiled in methylated spirits, drilled and blown emu eggs, butterflies skewered on boards and assorted nests of twigs and mud, was an egg-shaped rock I hadn’t noticed before. Plain, with a ridged and pitted surface in a dull dappled brown, it was small enough to fit comfortably between his two hands.

  He turned and handed it to Aileen.

  ‘A friend gave this to me; thought my students would find it interesting.’

  Her eyes lit up, but I couldn’t see past Mr O’Driscoll’s broad back to discover the cause.

  ‘Amazing, isn’t it? That something so beautiful could lie trapped inside such an unlikely exterior.’

  I fidgeted at his back, until he turned, placing the rock into my hands. My fingers locked round it, instantly discovering what he had chosen to conceal.

  The rock had a hidden face, shiny and flat against my palms. I turned it over and was startled by an electric blue, vivid in the polished heart of the stone. The crystalline shape of a blue horse – mane and tail flaring – raced against a pale background, poised for flight from a rock prison.

  Mr O’Driscoll watched my reaction. ‘Appearances can be deceptive, can’t they?’

  It had the simple raw power of a cave painting: all the more shocking for the unnatural hue of the fleeing figure etched in rock.

  Aileen’s voice burst in like an unwanted visitor.

  ‘How did he know it was there? Your friend must have known; why else would he go to the trouble of cutting and polishing such an ordinary stone?’

  ‘He’s been a rock hound a long time. He never knows what he might find; he just knows where to look and what to look for.’

  Mr O’Driscoll’s eyes moved steadily between the two of us.

  ‘My friend has always been interested in what others neglect or overlook. He is fascinated by what is formed by different pressures at different times. He says it is the extremes that create the most marvellous hearts. In rocks and in life.

  ‘I’d like you both to think about that.’ He pulled the blue horse from my hands. ‘You’re intelligent girls. Smart enough to know better than what I’ve seen and heard from you today.’

  Heat seeped up from my neckline as he locked the blue horse back into the cabinet. The mildness of the rebuke stung. I would have preferred the six-of-the-best that he gave Punk, to the shame of disappointing him.

  I moved to follow him as he led Aileen out the door, but he raised a hand and shook his head.

  Apparently I had given him no choice, attacking Aileen like that.

  Apparently, spending Sports Day by myself in the classroom would give me time to contemplate the error of my ways.

  He left me slumped in a chair wondering what nest of spiders I’d find in Aileen Kapernicky if I cracked her open.
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  The decades-old ink stain had transferred to my index finger, circling its base like a dirty bruise. It matched the dark thoughts churning through my mind as I dredged through what I knew about the past. About my dad.

  His stories from the Old Country were of family and food. Potatoes and war. Eggs bartered at shops three miles’ tramp through the snow. A slaughtered pig. Slabs of rosy bacon with fat thick as shaving soap. The stomp of soldiers’ boots calling children to the well, forcing them to drink. Water sloshing painfully in hungry tummies until a stern commandant motioned them back and row after row of troops filed forward to fill their canteens.

  Everything I knew about my dad, he had told me.

  But Aileen Kapernicky knew something else. Something I didn’t.

  The thought gnawed at me along with the psycho smile she’d given me when she left. Like she’d enjoyed our fight. Like she was looking forward to the next round.

  I rubbed at the stain on my hand, not sure if I wanted to get into it with Aileen Kapernicky.

  She wasn’t like other kids. Not even Janeen.

  There was something feral curled up inside her, something you didn’t want to prod with a stick. Something that wasn’t scared of anything. Or anybody. And definitely not scared of me.

  I’d been pushed around enough in my life to recognise warning bells. And there were sirens coming off Kapernicky.

  She wasn’t someone you’d pick to fight. Not if you wanted to survive to start high school.

  On the way home, I sat down the back of the bus, a safe distance from the Kapernickys up the front.

  If Mr O’Driscoll called Mum, I was dead. She’d be furious about the fight. And if she found out about me coming out with shit in front of a teacher … Well, best not to think about where that would end up.

  Not that it was considered a particularly offensive word at our place – more a fact of life than a swear word. After all, we spent our life walking in cow shit, horse shit, dog shit, cat shit, chook shit … even mouse shit from time to time.

  It wasn’t the word so much as the fact that I said it in front of Mr O’Driscoll, someone I wouldn’t normally antagonise in that way. And having broken the taboo, the consequences were far less – scary, I guess – than I would have imagined.

  It was an interesting thought – that actual punishment could be less terrible than anticipated punishment.

  I wondered whether that’s what made people bad to the bone. They knew what the consequences of their actions would be and they just didn’t care.

  Illicit thoughts began floating through my mind. Poisonous daydreams of what I could do to Aileen Kapernicky if I loosened the restraints on my usual behaviour …

  I stood on the edge of a cliff, the solid ground of good intentions falling away at my feet, the lure of flagrant and fearless rule-breaking tempting me into a thrilling free-fall.

  The dizzying temptation of that lawless future made me lean forward into the void and I heard a voice call, ‘Are you jumping off, or not?’

  Mr Blinco, the bus driver, scowled at me. ‘Well, are you?’

  He had the door cranked open, and was itching to go.

  ‘You want to stay on the bus, girlie, that’s fine by me, but your brothers have all jumped off. You going too?’

  The stub of a cigarette hung out of the side of his mouth and jumped around as he spoke.

  I took off after the boys.

  I hated being called ‘girlie’.

  chapter 12

  ‘What are you looking for in that old box?’

  Mum’s armful of ironing and folding had been sorted by owner and location for rapid filing. She looked mildly curious. Nothing more. So maybe O’Dribble hadn’t rung her after all.

  ‘A reason to be here.’

  She stepped over where I sat cross-legged on the cracked lino. ‘In my room?’

  She slotted her smalls into the top drawer of her dresser. Dad’s Y-fronts and singlets went opposite; socks down a drawer; work shorts and shirts below that.

  ‘In this life.’ I shuffled out of the way so she could hang her house dresses in the wardrobe.

  ‘What’s brought that on?’

  There was no way I was going to tell her, but for some reason I showed her the Weet-Bix-card-sized photo in my hand. One of the hundreds that had been packed tightly into the cardboard carton and now spilled out over my lap and onto the floor.

  It was Dad. Taken just before he left Holland. Forever.

  A lanky young version, with a suitcase under one arm, his mother under the other. She wore clogs and an apron-like dress over a black skivvy and stockings. Looking up at him like she couldn’t get enough of the sight.

  But he wasn’t looking at her.

  He was staring, hungry and purposeful, into his future. I could see it in his eyes – he had already left her far behind.

  I had always thought that some strange magnetic force had pulled him away – from her, his home, his country – to a new land, to a new life, half a world away. Now I wondered if he wasn’t pulled … he was pushed.

  ‘He left his mum.’ It sounded plaintive, even to my ears. ‘His whole family. To come out here where he didn’t know a soul. Why would anybody do that?’

  Her eyes wandered to a bluebottle buzzing at the window screen, trying to headbutt its way into the house.

  ‘He was looking for a better life.’ Mum’s eyes stayed fixed on the intruder.

  ‘Why? What was wrong with what he had there?’

  She hesitated. ‘He had no future there. Only a past.’

  My heart sank.

  He was running away from something.

  Aileen Kapernicky was right.

  Mum’s people were Danish on her dad’s side and German on her mum’s. But they’d been here forever, three generations at least, so nobody gave them a second thought.

  It was different for Dad. He had the accent. And the ash on his forehead, the fish on Fridays. Little things that marked him as different in a family like hers and in a school like ours.

  Just about everyone round here was Methodist or Presbyterian or something that didn’t make it a mortal sin to not go to church. They weren’t religious at all. You could see them panic a bit when Dad made the sign of the Cross. Like they didn’t know what he was going to do next. Like he might lunge at them going ‘YAAAAAH!’ just because he was Catholic.

  Mum settled on the bed beside where I sprawled on the floor.

  ‘He did know someone, you know.’ She bent and rescued a pile of photos that had slid off my lap. ‘He didn’t just randomly pick here.’

  She began sorting them, turning each the right way, arranging neat little piles on the chenille bedspread as she spoke.

  ‘His Uncle Martin and Aunty Anne had come out a couple of years earlier with their ten kids. You wouldn’t remember them. They moved down to Victoria when you were still in nappies.’

  I picked up a messy stack and joined her on the bed. She paused at a tiny photo of Dad looking impossibly brown. As if all those cold early years had made him greedy for the sun. So he sucked it up once he got here, let the harsh blinding light fill his pores, turning his skin gold, then bronze and finally mahogany.

  ‘But why did they come here? Uncle Martin and his family?’

  Maybe the whole family was on the run. From the Nazis. No, they were all gone by the 1950s. Something else then. Something bad.

  ‘Australia, I can understand. But the Callide Valley? Did anyone in Holland even know where that was?’

  She shuffled slowly through the welter on the floor.

  ‘They weren’t given a choice. When they got off the boat in Melbourne, they were sent straight to a migrant camp. They were told there was work up here, so that’s where they had to go.’

  She stared up at the fly-spotted Sacred Heart of Jesus hanging on the wall above her bed.

  ‘They had a terrible time of it, you know, when they first arrived. Some farmer out in the Morinish district west of Rocky used them as slave
labour in his dairy. Put the twelve of them up in a shed where the walls didn’t even meet the dirt floor.’

  She sighed and gathered another pile of photos off the floor.

  ‘He sent Dad’s cousin Louie out to dig holes for the new telephone lines going in across Central Queensland. He was a skinny little thing. Couldn’t have been more than fifteen. And they wouldn’t let him have a drink of water until he’d met his quota of holes.’

  She sniffed and riffled through the photos until she found what she was after.

  ‘Look, here he is, with Bill and Uncle Martin, picking peanuts.’

  I stared at the tiny black and white photo. ‘Gawd. He makes Lick look healthy.’

  Welcome to Australia, mate.

  Mum said nothing, just passed me another photo.

  Dad again. The sleeves ripped out of his old work shirt showing brown muscled arms; strong hands folding together tobacco and paper; dark curls falling over his forehead as he grinned up at the camera.

  Our eyes met and Mum stifled a smile.

  No wonder she changed her religion for him.

  She settled into a natter about the old days while I rummaged through the photos for any that might steer her back onto why Dad had to leave Holland.

  Her voice played like a radio in the background, with snippets filtering through … about the Catholic Church, life-lines, Uncle Martin and his tribe.

  I wasn’t that interested. Had other things on my mind. Didn’t know these people anyway. Didn’t much care, to be honest.

  But she kept on talking, like she was putting the story together as she went. From scraps she’d heard from Dad, from his cousins, stuff she remembered, stuff she’d wondered about. Piecing together a story that I hadn’t heard before and pretty soon she had me and I gave up not listening and tuned in properly, sweaty stacks of photos sticking to my hands …

  ‘Funny thing was, Mass was the only thing their old and new lives had in common. It was still in Latin in those days, the same in Alton Downs, Queensland as it was in Uden, Nord Brabant. So those Dutchies clung to it like a lifeline and funnily enough, it saved them in the end.