Dust

by Christine Bongers

  I’d clip jewels onto my ears, fingering gold hoops and dangling beaded hooks with painful longing, until Mrs Leddes, hearing the car pull up outside, would gently pry them from my fingers, unclip, unhook and unclasp and clink clink clink them back into the jar.

  Mum laughed when I said Mrs Leddes was a gypsy. But I knew what she was. And she proved it. By leaving. Like gypsies do.

  I remember staring with Mum at the dead square where her caravan had squatted; the stinkweed still clustered where the wheels had been planted.

  She’s gone. Mrs Leddes is gone.

  She might come back. One day.

  But she never came back with her caravan and her jar with the beautiful things inside.

  The darkness reshaped itself into the familiar shadows of my shuttered room. My eyes seemed so limited, focusing on the here and the now, able to make out only the dimmest of shapes, dark against darker, a slit of light under the door. Useless eyes. Boring. The colour of the Dee River: not green, not brown, but something in between.

  Cow dung, Punk would say.

  Like Aileen’s, a voice whispered, but I pushed it away.

  We were the exception that proved the rule: the opposites that didn’t attract. I was done with her. It was over.

  The blackness flickered and the sound of the TV cut in.

  Someone else couldn’t sleep.

  The jingle that had been playing on the radio and RTQ7 for weeks now drifted in like a good omen, a reassuring sign of better times ahead.

  It’s time for freedom

  It’s time for moving, It’s time to begin,

  Yes, it’s time …

  I closed my eyes on Little Pattie’s voice soaring above the chorus.

  It’s time for children,

  It’s time to show them, Time to look ahead,

  Yes, it’s time.

  Aileen Kapernicky reared up from the shadows, standing over me in a dream. Her feral grin put my teeth on edge.

  ‘You gotta problem, Kapernicky?’

  Her eyes locked on mine as she prowled back and forth, arching her back, stretching and flexing, like she was warming up for some major event. Grinning like a gargoyle the whole time.

  ‘Something funny?’

  ‘Yeah.’ She squatted in front of me, a worn skirt hanging in the shadows between her legs. ‘Remember telling me I needed a bra?’

  ‘Yeah, well you did. So what?’

  ‘Yeah, well, you don’t. And you have got one. So, that’s pretty funny, don’t you reckon?’

  She reared up from her haunches and strode back into the shadows, shoulders shaking. The noise coming from her made me shiver.

  It was the first time I’d heard Aileen Kapernicky laugh.

  chapter 19

  ‘Men and Women of Australia …’

  The black eyebrows and white hair were an arresting combination, but it was the voice that held me. Like he used a set of scales to weigh each phrase before putting it down precisely where he wanted it.

  Punk waltzed in picking his teeth. ‘What’s he talk so slow for? Does he think we’re a bit thick or something?’

  Mum and Dad had sat up the night before and watched the results come through. It had dominated the radio all day, yet here they were glued to the ABC News as though they were hearing it for the first time. Our new Prime Minister. The first Labor win in all the years that Dad had lived in this country.

  Mum’s eyes stayed riveted to the TV as she answered Punk’s question. ‘His mum was deaf. He spoke like that so she could understand him.’ She sniffed at the grudging mark in his favour.

  Dad was still filthy from the paddock, leaning forward on his brown vinyl chair, forearms resting on his open knees. ‘Flaming politicians. They’re all as bad as each other. Should turn the bloody thing off.’

  But he didn’t.

  He slumped back onto the chair and stayed there until Blair Edmonds finished his crisp summary of the day.

  ‘There’s a change coming. I can feel it.’

  Dad paused on the top step, daring the defiant sky to prove him wrong. Hands on his hips, work shirt hanging over his Stubbies shorts, his dark curly head tilted up and around as he scanned the painfully blue skies.

  He pulled his towelling hat onto his head and stomped off. He’d given up complaining about us watching the flaming cricket during the heat of the day. Just left us to it. Swigged down a salt tablet and headed off on his own, into a heat so dry it sucked the sweat from his pores.

  There’d flaming want to be a change coming.

  Much more of this and we’d all turn into sultanas. Our inner juices sucked up by the transpiration cycle in a valiant attempt by nature to pull together enough moisture to form a cloud so that it could rain.

  Never does, of course.

  The transpiration cycle has been struggling since they started clearing the Brigalow in the fifties and sixties. Not enough trees to produce rain. Not enough people to produce spit. If you counted every single person in a hundred-mile radius, bet you wouldn’t reach ten thousand, tops.

  Ten thousand people.

  Ten billion flies.

  Terrible, cruel skies. Wild with stars at night, impossibly blue by day. Puffed up with show-pony clouds that pranced about, failing to deliver on their promise. Month after month. Year after year.

  Then one day, when you’ve totally given up hope, right smack bang in the middle of the heat and the flies, the impossible happens.

  And everything changes.

  ‘I’m going for the record!’

  Big Hairs ran full-pelt through the pounding rain. Thundering along fringes of long-dead grass before leaping onto the mudflats and barefoot-skiing across the open space between the sheds. We scooted after him, skidding, sliding, slipping and skittering in the hammering hammering rain.

  ‘GET OUTTA THE WAY!’

  He launched himself onto a glassy stretch of mud, but his weight was too far forward. His toes dug in, throwing him off balance. Arms windmilling, he landed, full-length, facedown in the mud.

  He surfaced like a monster from the deep, rain sheeting off him, teeth and eyes a shocking white behind a muddy mask, a long snot yo-yoing from one nostril.

  He snipped it off with a thumb and forefinger and watched it waggle back and forth. The evil grin made him look just like Punk.

  ‘RUN!’

  The rain kept falling, heavy and steady, as if after bottling up its tears for so long, the sky just couldn’t stop crying. Weeping for the years of drought, for the sorry jutting hipbones of the cattle, for the failed crops, for the tight-lipped nods at the bank manager in church.

  The thunder rolled in great shuddering sobs and the wide flat bowl of the Callide Valley began to fill.

  In the eternal flatness of our lives, we discovered secret dips and peaks that were invisible until suddenly revealed by the rising waters.

  The dry gullies filled first, then the lagoon where Susan Coulsen’s uncle drowned in 1948 when his horse stomped on him during the last big flood.

  Cattle moped in miserable wet clumps on any elevated land they could find.

  The perennially dry floodways with their mysterious marker posts finally made sense, as water measuring three foot and more deep cut off sections of the road.

  Dad threw off his raincoat and dripping hat and slammed the never-used front door against the watery onslaught.

  ‘The Callide’s lapping the bridge between us and town. The Harrises from the pub have already sent their kids down to Brisbane before they get cut off.’

  I’d barely spared a thought for Hayley since the drought had broken. Dad’s next words banished her completely from my mind.

  ‘If this rain keeps going, the Callide Dam will overflow and turn the whole place into a swimming pool.’

  The only pool we’d ever had was a canvas tray stretched over a steel frame, five foot by five foot by a foot deep.

  Dad watched with interest as I blessed myself at the kitchen bench. ‘What’s that for?’
/>   ‘I’m praying for rain. We could do with a pool.’

  By dinnertime, the afternoon’s gentle patter had accelerated once more into a driving beat. Gusts of wind hosed rain across the windows.

  We pressed our noses against the cold glass, gasped and ran for the door, flinging ourselves into the grey, watery night.

  Our world was water, water everywhere. Falling, falling, pooling around our ankles.

  Silently, like a thief, the flood had crept up on us, stealing our land, our paddocks, the path to our back door, our bottom step. The Big and Little Sheds, the fuel tank, and our house floated on the surface of an infinite lake.

  Rain sheeted off us as we stared, transfixed, at our world transformed.

  The top step creaked. Mum stood in the shelter of Dad’s arm as he held open the screen door, his voice echoing over the downpour.

  ‘The dam’s overflowed. The Callide Creek has broken its banks and it’s spreading out over the countryside.’

  Mum looked down at the water covering our bottom step: only four more steps and it would be in the house.

  Dad shrugged. ‘It’s spreading over a big area – it’ll take a helluva lot more rain before it comes inside.’

  She turned on the little boys, splashing and wading on the cricket pitch. ‘You lot, play where I can see you! No gallivanting off into the dark, or you’ll all be back inside!’

  Big Hairs, Punk and I paddled out to join them. The single bulb above our back door cast a safe haven of light in the great dark waterfall surrounding us.

  Blair Edmonds nearly started a riot during the seven o’clock news.

  Big Hairs was ‘Bank’ and was trying for a quick killing in Pontoon while the news distracted Mum and Dad.

  Mum was always on about not taking advantage of people younger, weaker, less fortunate.

  We kept telling her that it was the only way Lick and Fatlump would learn to stop flipping on seventeen when twenty-one was the name of the game. But she’d just confiscate our piles of pennies and redistribute them among the little boys’ jam jars. So we bit our tongues and continued to exploit each other ruthlessly whenever her back was turned.

  ‘In further developments today, Jambin, population eleven, has been cut off by flood waters –’

  ‘Eleven! Who’s he kidding? There’s more than eleven people in Jambin!’

  ‘Yeah! There’s the Harrises at the pub, and the Blincos and the Rodinskis next door –’

  ‘And the Coopers at the shop – they’ve got three kids.’

  ‘And what about the Lapkes? No, their son’s gone jackarooing out west.’

  ‘And there’s the other three railway houses –’

  ‘I think two are empty … but Mrs Bowen lives in the end one.’

  ‘And what about the Kapernickys?’ Punk was stretching it a bit now. Their place was half a mile up the road from the shop.

  ‘The Kapernickys don’t count. They live on a farm. Not in town.’ I did a quick tally. ‘Hey, they didn’t count the kids. That’s not fair. Kids are part of the population too.’

  Punk pointed an accusing finger at the black and white television set.

  ‘Yeah, Blair, get your facts straight. There’s sixteen people in Jambin, not eleven.’

  Big Hairs lifted a corner of the card in front of him. ‘We playing cards or what? Come on, place your bets. Quick game’s a good game.’

  The sad eyes of the Queen of Spades stared out at me and I bet the five-penny limit.

  The ABC’s carelessness with the truth still prodded at me.

  Were they ignoring Hayley Harris and her brother Sean just because they’d gone to Brisbane? What about Alison, David and Cameron Cooper? Didn’t they know about them?

  And what if they did know? What if they ignored them on purpose because they thought that kids didn’t count?

  Blair Edmond’s black-rimmed glasses hid his thoughts and I wondered what sort of a world newsreaders lived in, where kids didn’t count.

  ‘Twenty-one.’

  Wart’s eyes were dark and serious in the soft planes of his face.

  ‘There’s twenty-one people in Jambin, Sis. The Kapernickys do count.’

  He placed his cards carefully on the floor. ‘Sit.’

  He’d flipped and drawn a nine. He couldn’t flip on less than twelve. And he hadn’t busted. So he had twenty-one. The name of the game. He was sitting all right.

  Janeen Kapernicky’s eyes stared out of my Queen of Spades. A pathetic six sidled up to her apologetically.

  Bank would have to bust for me to get my money back on this hand.

  I pressed my cards facedown on the lino and avoided Wart’s eyes. ‘Sit.’

  He was right. I was as bad as Blair Edmonds.

  I shouldn’t have said that the Kapernickys don’t count.

  chapter 20

  The day shone, a defiant blue after the downpour.

  Our endless lake had disappeared, drained into lower lands further afield from the Callide Creek. In its place, a liquid network of lagoons and melon holes swirled through a rich dark mire, softening green with tender shoots of new life.

  The six of us waded up a drowned section of bitumen, keeping to the slightly raised backbone dotted along the centre of the road. We wanted to survey our splendid isolation from the only high point for miles around: the overhead railway bridge that took Central Queensland’s coal to Port of Gladstone.

  Mum said she could see us from the kitchen window, capering like mad things against a backdrop of brilliant day. Told Dad to go get us before a triple-header mowed us down.

  He came on the tractor – our little Massey Ferguson – and hauled me up behind him. The boys had trotted off as soon as he’d mentioned pancakes, leaving us to tour like generals surveying a battlefield after the troops had gone home.

  Machinery and equipment tilted drunkenly in oddly exposed locations or squatted in bogs up to their axles. Fences that weren’t washed away flew flags of matted weed along their top wire, evidence of the water’s peak. Dad stomped on the brake and yanked the tractor out of gear.

  ‘Wish I’d brought the camera so I could make a photo.’

  The ABC called it a national disaster, but for some reason Dad looked like he’d won the Casket.

  ‘See that?’ His Craven A pointed at a fence line, buried to the top strand of barbed wire in newly deposited silt. ‘There’s a bumper crop in that for us.’

  He took a last drag and flicked his butt, sizzling, into a ditch.

  ‘The Kapernickys won’t be too happy though. That’s their topsoil all over our paddocks. See if we can’t make better use of it than they have.’

  He shoved the tractor back into gear and lurched off in search of firmer ground.

  I had to yell over the clattering throb of the tractor.

  ‘What do you mean? About the Kapernickys?’

  He shot me an odd sideways look and patted his pocket, slowing to a crawl while he steered with his knees and lit up. He sucked the smoke deep into his chest.

  ‘People are funny. Give them something for nothing and they just don’t appreciate it.’

  He flicked at the ash with his thumb. ‘Better off making them work for it.’

  The little tractor staggered as it hit the built-up gravel laneway that led to our house.

  ‘Hang on to your hat!’

  He opened up the throttle. The Massey Ferguson bellowed and roared, whisking away thoughts of the Kapernickys in the rain-freshened wind.

  ‘Mum said don’t even think about swimming in Greycliffe Creek.’

  Wart could be such a grandma sometimes.

  ‘She said we could all drown in two shakes of a lamb’s tail in that current.’

  ‘You’re right.’ Punk ripped off his shirt. ‘Who wants to see me drown?’

  My hand flew up to shield my eyes. ‘Jeez, check out Mr Puniverse.’

  ‘You lot coming in, or what?’ Big Hairs was already thigh-deep on top of the culvert, bracing himself against the cara
mel current.

  Punk waded in, shouting back over his shoulder. ‘Come on, Sis, what are you? A girl or something?’

  Together they pushed deeper into the swollen belly of the creek, their wild cackling irresistible. I ran in after them, Wart’s disapproving cries lost in the rising roar of the flood.

  ‘You idiots!’

  Wart exploded out of the trees round a bend where the creek broadened and slowed, the little boys streaming after him. ‘Didn’t you see that snake?’

  Punk and Big Hairs were already halfway up the bank. I clambered out in sudden haste.

  ‘Snake! What snake?’

  ‘This great whopping black snake was caught in the current right behind you! I was yelling my head off! Didn’t you hear me?’

  ‘Is that what you were going on about?’ Hairs was still grinning from the wild ride.

  Punk blew his nose onto the ground and came up smiling.

  Wart looked from one to the other.

  ‘So. You reckon I could have a go?’

  A tangle with a floating tree trunk finally took the edge off the fun.

  ‘I’m out of here before I kill myself.’

  ‘Sook.’ Punk was sunning his fluorescent body on the bank.

  ‘My foot’s killing me. Look –’

  We stared with interest at the short stick impaled at an angle, a good quarter-inch into the top of my foot.

  ‘Jeez! What’s that?’

  Big Hairs scrambled about in the swirling shallows, grabbing at something caught up behind him. He hauled up a spluttering Lick and tossed him onto the bank.

  I patted him on the back while he spat and coughed. ‘You all right?’

  He hacked again and nodded.

  ‘Good, ’cos Mum’ll kill us if we let you drown.’

  He spat and bent down to inspect my foot.

  ‘What’s the lumpy bit where the stick goes in?’

  ‘I think it’s the meat that used to be where the stick is now.’

  I held my breath and slid it out. The lumpy bit stayed where it was and the hole filled with blood.