Dust

by Christine Bongers

  ‘Your mate was looking for you, but you never showed –’

  Air burst from my lungs in great shuddering gasps: I hadn’t, had I? Not once. Not ever. I’d chosen the worst this school had to offer, over her, every time.

  So what did that make me?

  I lurched to my feet, stumbling away from the thought, towards F block and class, when I caught myself and faltered. They’d want to know why I was late, where I had been, who I’d been with … I couldn’t face the questions, couldn’t imagine answering them, but couldn’t stay here either.

  I didn’t know what to do, where to go. A gust of wind plucked at a plastic lunch bag left on the stands and spun it in a crazy spiral over my head. I watched, helpless, as the bag opened, surrendered to the full force of the wind and was swept away.

  chapter 28

  I missed the jungle gym. The solid comfort of cool metal applied to burning problems. I missed the connections. The comfort of believing I could make sense of life, that I could work things out just by hanging in there, because a solution would always manage to work its way through the convoluted maze of angles and joints and fall right into place, even when I was hanging upside down with my undies showing.

  Now I had nowhere to hang.

  And no-one to hang with.

  The thought curled me into a crouch on the fuel tank, arms hugging my legs, knees pressed into eye sockets and I hung on tight. Because it was better than thinking about Janeen.

  A thud beside me announced I had company.

  ‘Can see your undies.’

  A second set of dusty feet rubbed up against mine on the fuel tank. I realised that it no longer bothered me. Maybe Punk’s shock therapy really had worked. The thought distracted me and I opened my mouth to tell him, but he got in first.

  ‘When are you going to stop hanging around with that pack of losers at school?’

  Another girl’s shame burned my face. I buried it in my knees, muffling my next words. ‘I’m not hanging round them any more, OK? They’re creeps.’

  ‘Finally, she gets it.’

  ‘Shut up! Just SHUT UP, OK?’

  From the corner of my eye, I could see his filthy feet weren’t going anywhere. Reluctantly, I raised my head.

  ‘OK, Mr Smartarse, you picked them straight off. Told me they were a pack of losers the first time I went down there –’

  ‘Hardly makes me a genius; just makes you thick as custard.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘It means you don’t have to be real smart to figure out if someone’s a loser.’ He rocked me with a shoulder nudge. ‘Jesus Sis, grow a brain. If they treat other people nice, odds are they’re nice. If they treat other people like shit, odds are they’re shits.’

  He pushed himself off the fuel tank. But suddenly I didn’t want him to leave.

  ‘Punk?’

  He stooped and picked up a flat stone from the ground.

  ‘What’ll I do if I don’t go down the stands every break?’

  He flipped the stone in his hand. ‘What you always used to do – read a book, go to the library. Find some friends you actually have something in common with, apart from getting in trouble.’

  He started back towards the house then stopped, another stone catching his eye. He picked it up and studied it for a moment. When he finally spoke, his voice was flat.

  ‘Did you hear about Janeen?’

  He wouldn’t look at me, but his face was bleak. Something shrivelled up, cold and hard, deep in my gut. He knows. Everyone must know.

  I didn’t want to talk about it. But he waited me out, flipping the rocks in his hand, forcing me to fill the silence with something.

  ‘They were talking about it – those creeps – this morning, down the stands.’

  He nodded. ‘She’s not coming back to school, you know.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘The Gorgon told us. Janeen was in our group for lunchtime debating. Something about sterilising foreigners, I think.’

  I’d forgotten that Punk and his mates had been conscripted after kicking a soccer ball through the ranks of the debaters once too often.

  ‘She was supposed to be doing the research. Gorgon reckons she’s withdrawn from school. Won’t be coming back, so now it’s just me and Karl and Greg. An all-boy debating team – what a joke. Got no-one to write our speeches.’

  A crow swooped overhead and Punk spun on his heel, chucking a rock at it.

  ‘Hard to hit, those crows.’ He turned back, scratching his head. ‘You could give us a hand, you know. With the debate.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about sterilising foreigners.’

  ‘What – and we do?’ He waited long enough to make his point. ‘The Gorgon reckons there’s stuff in the library. TIME magazine. Shit like that. You might as well. Give you something to do in your lunch break.’

  Now that I wasn’t going down the stands anymore.

  ‘We’d come too. Give you a hand.’

  That almost made me laugh. ‘That’s pretty generous.’

  He nodded. ‘Least we can do.’ Waited a beat. ‘So, it’s a deal?’

  Liquid heat pressed behind my eyes. Punk knew I couldn’t fill those lunch breaks on my own. He was offering me an alternative. A way out. Something trembled in my chest. I waited till it stilled and I could trust my voice.

  ‘Yeah, why not? Deal.’

  That night I dreamt of Janeen. Alone, on the other side of the lagoon.

  The boys were giving the waterlilies a clobbering: yowling and chucking each other off the raft; bomb-diving the lily pads.

  I squatted at the water’s edge, gouging at a rock embedded in the bank. The sun was low, directly behind where she loomed like a shadow puppet against a blinding backdrop.

  I couldn’t tell if she was looking at us or not. But she must have known we were there. We could see her, but she was just part of the landscape, like the scraggly fig she stood under. We ignored them both. Left them standing there. Alone.

  The bank gave way and the rock leapt into my hands. Janeen straightened and tilted her head. The late afternoon sun glinted off one cheek as the stone trembled and cracked. A flash of blue thundered out of the heart of stone, lighting up her face, illuminating her tears. For the first time I could see her. Really see her.

  But it was too late.

  I had woken up and she was gone.

  Punk was outside filling up the Moke when I stumbled out to catch him before he went down the paddock.

  ‘We should go check out the Kapernickys. See if Janeen’s OK.’

  Punk narrowed his eyes. ‘And if she’s not? What are you going to do?’

  ‘I don’t know. But we should at least try.’

  He triggered in one last squirt – didn’t take much to fill up the Moke – and hung up the nozzle as though it offended him.

  ‘Shit, I don’t know, Punk. We gotta do something. She’s not going to school anymore. She’s stuck out there with that creepy Morrie and her psycho sister. Someone should make sure she’s OK.’

  He blew out a long considering breath, twisted the fuel cap back on and wiped his hands on the arse of his KingGees.

  ‘OK, get some clothes on. We’ll tell Mum and head off.’

  ‘No.’ Mum slammed the porridge saucepan into the sink.

  ‘But, we just wanted –’

  ‘I don’t want you going near the Kapernickys, do you hear me?’

  Punk looked as baffled as I did. ‘What’s the problem? Why can’t we just call in and –’

  ‘BECAUSE I SAY SO! Now eat your porridge before it gets cold.’

  I opened my mouth to argue, but Dad got in first.

  ‘There’s no point going over there – no-one there anyway.’

  Mum glared at him through her glasses, but he just shook his head.

  ‘They’re going to hear about it anyway, Ev. Might as well be from us.’

  ‘Hear about what?’

  Dad pushed his plate away.


  ‘They’re gone. Lila and the girls. Took off not long after the police came and took Morrie and his old man away.’

  ‘The police? Jesus! What’d they do?’

  Mum and Dad exchanged a bleak look. Dad cleared his throat and patted the pockets of his work shirt, looking for a fag. Mum’s lips tightened. She wouldn’t look at us and was giving the porridge saucepan a brutal scrub.

  ‘Mum?’

  Her lips, clamped white, stayed that way, even when she opened them to speak.

  ‘They’ve been … interfering … with those girls.’

  The words dropped like a stone into my heart, forcing up memories that rippled out across my mind.

  Freckle-faced smiles on two little girls. Judith and Susan. The Mackay sisters. Gone. Taken by a stranger. A monster. From the bus stop on their way to school. Mum’s cry echoing a constant refrain ever since … Wait! Wait for your brothers!

  News headlines shrieking and screaming long after they were found. Dead, with their clothes neatly folded nearby. The police had never stopped looking. Were looking still.

  Mum’s stricken face, her strangled whisper: They’d been interfered with … A dangerous stranger … a monster … a main road, a bus stop like ours … wait for your brothers … just wait…

  The ripples spread out, numbing my chest … Janeen in the library, discussing Jane Eyre. They were cruel people … she had no-one to look after her … that’s how they could get away with it …

  And Dad’s voice murmuring disembodied words that filtered into my mind like fumes …

  ‘The older girl ran off after the Jambin dance. Police found her wandering round the dam in the middle of the night, in a terrible state.

  ‘Didn’t want to go home, but they took her anyway … She’s not sixteen, they didn’t know what else to do …

  ‘Fred Cooper reckons you could hear it at the Jambin shop. An almighty barney, screaming and yelling. Terrible thing.

  ‘The younger one, Aileen, flew into Morrie, blamed him for everything. Damn near took his eyes out.

  ‘Then it all came out – what’s been going on …

  ‘She’s pregnant, you know, the older one … they carted Morrie and old Alf straight off to jail – they can rot there for all anyone cares … pleading guilty, they say, spare everyone a trial …

  ‘Lila shot through with the girls soon as she heard. No-one knows where they’ve gone … they’re just …

  ‘…gone …’

  For a long time, the only sound was the sigh of Dad’s cigarette smoke funnelling up to the ceiling. Mum had stopped taking it out on the saucepan and was staring at her hands.

  My mind wasn’t working, thoughts shearing off and disappearing. Nothing made sense. My eyes found Punk and clung to him, anchoring on to something real, something known.

  He shoved away from the table.

  ‘IT SHOULDN’T HAVE HAPPENED! WHY DIDN’T SOMEBODY DO SOMETHING!’

  ‘We didn’t know.’ Mum’s voice was thin and tired. ‘Nobody knew. That’s how they got away with it.’

  From somewhere outside, the distant sound of the little boys laughing trickled in. It lapped at the dry stone wall surrounding my heart, but I felt nothing. Nothing at all.

  chapter 29

  An invisible barrier descended at school, quarantining me from Glenda and the rest of my class.

  Classes passed like stimulus-response experiments: prod a nerve and I jumped; ask a question and I answered; tell me to study and I processed great gulps of information as a substitute for feeling, for thinking.

  Anything to fill the emptiness that yawned at me, rising without warning and threatening to drown me in a great flooding sense of opportunities missed, of understanding come too late.

  The stands were history, so tainted that I avoided them and F Block altogether.

  During breaks I hid out in the biggest room in the school, wandering down aisles of weighty references, boxed periodicals, bruised but resilient hardbacks and plastic-coated paperbacks.

  I’d choose a book at random and sink into it, alone but for the ever-silent Miss Pat, enmeshed in her endless servicing of the catalogue.

  Alone but for a half-finished packet of Craven A pressing like a dirty secret into the centre of my chest.

  Sometimes I’d slip out, find a lonely cubicle and punish myself with the bitter weed – tendrils twisting and coiling at random, tracing the mad thoughtlessness of being and doing.

  I’d brood while it burned, unnoticed, down to my fingers, then I’d drop it, sizzling, into the bowl, for a pointless flush. It lingered like an accusation: no clean exit, not here, not now. Instead, just pointless, punishing thoughts and deeds, pressing hard edges into the soft flesh surrounding my heart.

  ‘Aren’t you a bit young for birth control?’

  Susan Johnston with a ‘t’ leaned over my shoulder. ‘If your Mum’s anything like mine, she’ll have a hissy fit if she finds out this is what you do in the library.’

  She smelt like apples. I leaned the surly stench of my last illicit fag away from her, twisting in my chair as if to make room for one more.

  ‘It’s not for me; it’s for my brother –’

  ‘He needs a vasectomy? In Eighth Grade?’

  I smiled despite myself. ‘He’s doing a lunchtime debate on compulsory sterilisation in over-populated countries. I’m giving him a hand.’

  She made a show of scanning the empty tables. ‘And he would be –’

  ‘Playing soccer with his mates.’

  ‘Enough said. Got brothers myself.’ She plonked herself down in a cheerful clatter at the table beside me. ‘Positive or negative?’

  By the end of the week, the team for the negative had mustered its arguments against what Susan had dubbed ‘the Nazi solution’.

  She’d written a fiery indictment of Hitler’s sterilisation programs centring on the mentally ill and handicapped, arguing that the poor and the powerless would be victimised by any compulsory program.

  With world population now creeping up to four billion, I’d gone for a soft-sell ‘education solution’ that Punk was dead keen on: Just send all the Chinese and Indians to work as teachers; that’d put ’em off having kids big-time.

  My argument was more based on the declining birth rates in highly educated societies, but we all agreed Punk’s idea would make a good punchline at the end.

  ‘Hi guys, what are you up to?’

  Glenda slid into the chair beside me.

  I tried to match her cool. ‘Not much. Just reading.’

  Susan was such a blusher. She just couldn’t help herself. Ever since we found the good bits, she’d been pink from the chest up.

  ‘It’s The Blue Lagoon – I brought it in from home. You have to read it; it’s a classic. Sex and everything. Here …’ She passed it over to Glenda. ‘Don’t worry about the beginning – they’re just kids then. When they grow up – that’s when it gets good.’

  Glenda nodded politely and started flipping the pages. When she spoke, her voice was studiously casual; it was hard to believe we hadn’t spoken in so long.

  ‘You know, the other day, down the stands –’

  Her words dragged me to the lip of an elephant pit that my mind skirted daily, threatening the fragile cover of dirt and leaves I’d kicked over the memory.

  A spike of adrenalin flushed heat up from my chest. I couldn’t, wouldn’t go there – not again. I pulled back from the edge, retreating to safety, into silence.

  Her hand gripped my wrist, forcing me to face her.

  ‘You were right. I shouldn’t have said what I said.’ She released my wrist. ‘Anyone can get into trouble. You don’t need to go out the dam with half a dozen guys. Jesus. Just ask my sister.’

  Her face looked naked in the light: she’d dropped the kohl mask from her eyes, the knowing tone from her voice.

  We faced each other like novice chess players, hesitating over the next move. Then Susan’s voice lobbed in from left field, startling us
both.

  ‘We’re thinking of trying out for the junior debating team, but we need a second speaker. You interested?’

  Glenda blinked at Susan as though seeing her for the first time; pursing her lips as she processed this patently absurd suggestion. Susan ignored my frown and waited wide-eyed for Glenda’s response.

  ‘Sure. Why not? I’ll be the beauty. You two can be the brains.’ The hope in Glenda’s eyes took any sting out of the words. ‘It’ll give me something to do now that nobody’s going down the stands anymore. Nobody important anyway.’

  The clamp in my chest began to loosen. ‘You realise this will probably get you a reputation – for being boring as bat shit?’

  She shrugged. ‘Not much risk of that if I stick close to you two. Just start me off easy.’

  She noticed The Blue Lagoon was still in her hand. ‘This doesn’t look too hard.’ She flicked the first few pages.

  ‘Now, where did you say the good bits were?’

  The golden buttery smell of pikelets hit me as soon as I opened the door.

  Punk and Hairs barrelled past me into the lemony freshness of the kitchen. Mum must have had one of her cleaning frenzies: the benches gleamed and a king-sized roast was just starting to sweat in the oven.

  I loaded four pikelets with jam and headed for my room.

  Backing through the door with Susan’s cassette player and Glenda’s tapes cradled against my chest, I sensed something out of place, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

  I shrugged it off, my mouth thick with pikelets. Whatever it was, it could wait. Slade Alive! and Alice Cooper’s new School’s Out album were ready to rock.

  The feeling that I was missing something important continued to pester me through the afternoon and evening. After dinner, I thought I’d nailed it.

  ‘Are they new curtains?’

  Mum’s eyes refused to loosen their grip on her nightly episode of Bellbird. ‘I washed and ironed them this morning. Came up a treat, didn’t they?’