‘Reckon you could take me for a look around today?’ Tomas asks me. ‘Just to get some inspiration?’
‘Yeah, okay,’ I say. ‘Abby’s having a party tonight. I’ll take you for some inspiration there.’
I start to think maybe it would be good to take Tomas exploring or something – maybe just a walk in the bush. I know it would take me out of my head, get my mind off Tesha. And besides, maybe spending some more time with him, just the two of us, wouldn’t be so bad.
‘Is Tesha going to Abby’s party?’ Mum asks.
‘Dunno. We broke up the other day.’
‘What? Why? What did you do?’
‘Nothing, Mum.’ I share a look with Tomas as I take a seat beside him with my bowl of cereal.
‘Tell me you weren’t sleeping around behind her back,’ Mum insists.
‘I wasn’t. It’s just done, that’s all.’ I dig into the cereal, but I can still feel her eyes on me.
‘Are you okay?’ she asks, with a softer tone. I just nod.
A relief comes over me, because now that I’ve told Mum as well as Jarny and Kalyn, I don’t have to talk about it anymore. I know Tesha will be at the party, though. She’s always there.
The kids all plant themselves in front of the telly and watch a DVD of The Simpsons. I get dressed into a fresh singlet and shorts. Tomas is out of clean clothes, so I lend him my white singlet, which hangs loose over his body, and a clean pair of football shorts. We both walk out of the house barefoot. The road burns as we step onto it, so we walk on the grass.
‘Where’re we going?’ Tomas asks.
‘Just for a bushwalk.’
We walk along the main street of the Mish, past the community centre and toilet block. Uncle Graham is outside doing his gardening. His wife, Aunty Becky, was the gardener, but since she died he’s been working at it like crazy. It looks almost like the kind of garden you’d find at Buckingham Palace. He gives me a wave as we walk by. Next door, Aunty Lois and Uncle Roger are having their morning coffees and cigarettes on their front verandah.
‘How’s it goin’, Jackson?’ Aunty Lois asks.
‘Good, Aunt,’ I say.
‘Tell your mum to drop in later for a cuppa.’
‘I will.’
Some kids are playing on the lawn of the next yard. Their little high-pitched voices annoy me, so much so that I almost don’t notice that Tomas is trailing behind me. I slow my pace so he can keep up, though I hate walking unnaturally slowly.
We reach the pathway I had in mind and step onto the dirt, into the bush. The trees get taller as we walk on, and there’s more space between each one. The ground is covered in fallen leaves, and wooden signs are drilled into the occasional tree, all the writing too deteriorated to read.
We arrive at the top of a set of stairs cut into the mountainside, which descend into heavy forest. The bushy trees below leave no room for sight of the ground. All we can see when we look down is green. I begin to climb down the stairs and Tomas follows.
‘How does he get his powers?’ I ask, mostly because the silence between us is annoying the hell out of me.
‘What?’
‘Your superhero. How does he get his powers?’
‘I’m still figuring that one out. I was thinking when the coppers kill him, they throw his body into a polluted lake, and the waste in the water grows into his body, then he uses his powers to escape. Something like that.’
‘That’s cool,’ I say.
‘Yeah, I thought so.’
The stairs get so steep that we have to use our hands as well as our feet to climb down them. We pass the treetops and travel to the darkness covering all the bush underneath. The moisture is thick in the air.
I reach the bottom of the stairs before Tomas. It’s about a two-metre drop from the last step to the earth. I watch as he readies himself and jumps. The ground is spongy beneath my feet. It feels wet and soft. Water is running somewhere in the distance. Everything is much colder underneath the cover of the tall, towering trees.
‘Be careful, snakes round here,’ I say as I trot ahead.
‘Great.’
We travel deeper into the forest until we reach a small creek. It’s mostly dried up, but a small stream of water from up the mountain still races through the rocks. I cup a handful and splash it onto my face and hair. Tomas does the same. The small droplets of water seem to stay whole on his hair, twinkling. He shakes his head and sprays me like a dog that’s just been hosed down.
‘Come,’ I say. ‘Let’s follow the water.’
We climb down a gully, still following the creek-water. The ground appears broken, with cracks in the dirt. I descend the broken land before Tomas, wondering what he thinks when he gazes at it. It looks like there was some sort of mudslide, or earth-avalanche, as Mum calls them, as one large chunk of land has just been ripped from the earth. The water still trickles down the rough ground.
I stop walking and wave Tomas over without looking at him. When he reaches me, I point to the ground. There is an impression on the dirt and sand. I examine it and he hunches down with me for a closer look. To Tomas, it might just look like a set of horse’s hooves have kicked the ground, or a large rock resting there was moved.
‘Do you believe in Doolagahs?’ I ask.
‘Doolagahs?’
‘Yeah, like Yowie’s, y’know?’
‘Oh, right. Like the Hairy Man?’ His tone has dulled, and he sighs. ‘You don’t believe that stuff, do you?’
‘I dunno. Maybe,’ I say. ‘When I was little, we were camping down the coast. All my family down that way believe in Doolagahs. The whole family was there: Aunties, Uncles, cousins, Nan and Pop. They used to tell us stories from when they were younger, camping with the elders and that, about Doolagahs. We thought they were just trying to scare us. We were all little arseholes. We laughed at ’em, called ’em silly old fellas.’
Tomas takes his eyes back to the marking on the ground. He hunches down and feels it with his fingertips.
‘All the cousins, we used to sleep together in my uncle’s old caravan,’ I continue. ‘He pulled everything out of it, so it was just the floor and we put some mattresses down and all slept there. We were all little, so we fit.
‘One night, it was really hot and a few of us couldn’t sleep. There was probably three or four of us still awake. We always left the back door open a bit, with a net hanging down to keep the mozzies out. There was a nice breeze coming through, and all the Uncles and Aunties were asleep in their tents. Then my cousin Erin sat up and pointed at the window. The windows were big, and they were jammed, so you couldn’t open them. Erin was real quiet. She wasn’t even breathing. The rest of us looked, and the glass was fogged up, like someone was breathing on it.’
Tomas gazes back to me, and all other sounds of the bush drown away. It’s just us, standing there.
‘It was so dark, so we couldn’t see anything. I remember we heard scratching on the caravan wall from the outside, like a possum or something trying to claw its way in. One of my other cousins pointed at the door – that’s when we realised it was still open a little bit. We all just stayed dead quiet until the scratching stopped. Then, bang!’
I make sure to scream the word bang, and Tomas gasps the most electrifying gasp. His eyes widen and his body jolts and it’s the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.
‘The Doolagah smashed into the caravan,’ I continue, ‘and it nearly got pushed onto its side. It was shaking like crazy. The Doolagah just kept banging. We were falling all over each other. Everyone woke up and we all started screaming. Then the banging stopped. We told the aunts and uncles what happened, woke them all up in the middle of the night, and we left camp the next day. Never went back.’
‘Right,’ Tomas giggles. I giggle too. I guess it does sound pretty silly. ‘It was probably your Uncle trying to scare ya.’
‘Maybe. There’re so many stories about ’em, though. It’s hard to believe so many different stories would all be bullshit.’<
br />
‘Riiiiight . . .’ Tomas says.
I start laughing – it’s bursting out of me. In the laughter, I get a brilliant idea.
‘Maybe instead of a villain, you could have a monster in your story,’ I say. ‘A Doolagah would be a pretty good monster for ya.’
‘Could be,’ Tomas chuckles. He pulls out his sketchbook and turns to a page headed Villain ideas, where he writes Doolagah. I can’t help but study his hands as he writes. He’s bitten his fingernails short, and his grip is strong on the pencil.
‘You wanna come to the party tonight?’ I ask. I’m almost wishing for him to say yes.
‘Yeah, all right,’ he says. He closes his book and I lead him along a trail through the bush. The shrubbery is heavy and pokes out over the pathway, so we need to weave to dodge the cuts and jabs. A kookaburra laughs above us, probably to another kookaburra who’s staying silent.
‘Holy shit,’ Tomas says.
He points through the bushes. There are three kangaroos just standing there, still, staring at us. I step closer, land on some crunchy broken leaves, and they hop away with speed.
‘I’ve never seen them so close,’ Tomas says.
We keep walking and come to a post, with a faded picture of an echidna on its top as well as some writing too worn to read anymore.
‘The mob at the Land Council used to do cultural bush-walks for tourists and school and shit,’ I say. ‘This was one of the tours they’d do – bring them out here, and people who weren’t black would learn all about our culture, and about how our people used to hunt, what plants we used to make medicine, those sorts of things. My favourite one growing up was the walk up the mountain. They’d take you right up the top, and you can see everything from up there.’
‘They don’t do it no more?’
‘Nah. Not anymore. Now there’s just the men’s group and the women’s group. The health workers come to the community centre sometimes, but that’s pretty much all we got now.’
We continue along the trail and head uphill. The bush grows denser still, and we have to duck and weave past branches. The pathway hasn’t been properly maintained in years.
‘Why did they stop doing the tours?’ Tomas asks.
‘I don’t know, really. I guess it had to do with money.’
Tomas screams at the top of his lungs and jumps past me. It scares the shit out of me. He loses his footing and I have to try to catch him.
‘What’s wrong?’ I ask. Tomas wriggles free from my grip and crawls for a moment on the ground before he leaps forward along the trail.
‘Fucking spider,’ he says. I study the branches, and there is a big fucking redback spider at the centre of a web, fixed just above my head over the pathway.
‘Don’t worry, it’s not on you,’ I giggle, as Tomas shakes his shirt and dances like an idiot. I grip his elbow to calm him down. ‘Chill out.’
He stops and stares at my hand for a moment, becoming still. His arm is warm and sweaty under my fingers. It’s a strong arm. His muscle is all firm, maybe from lifting weights in juvie, maybe from jerking off. I wonder if he’s jerked off in my room when I wasn’t there, or while I was sleeping . . .
I let go, because I’ve been holding him too long. I walk past him and continue along the pathway.
‘I fucking hate spiders,’ Tomas says, puffing behind me.
I feel all awkward now, though. I feel like I might have looked at him differently for that moment I held his arm. I think he might have seen how I looked at him.
‘You know, I got bitten by a funnel-web once,’ Tomas says. ‘I had to go to hospital and all. They said I could’ve died from the venom.’
‘I’m glad you didn’t,’ I say.
I think the moment has passed now, thank fuck. Tomas has forgotten all about it. Maybe I’m overthinking the whole thing. Nothing happened. Nothing at all. Maybe he was so worried about the spider that he didn’t notice any look I gave him. Maybe he didn’t even notice I touched him at all.
8
We arrive back at the Mish and head home. The kids are running around the backyard shooting each other with their nerf guns and water pistols, the noise of it echoing into the kitchen where Mum and Aunty Pam sip bourbon at the table, listening to Charley Pride.
I walk to the fridge and take out the leg of ham left over from Christmas. Tomas takes a seat opposite Aunty Pam as I get a knife from the drawer and begin slicing. I take the half-empty loaf of bread resting on the kitchen bench and throw it to Tomas.
‘Take some,’ I say, placing the ham on the table. He grabs two thick slices of ham and makes a sandwich. I do the same.
‘Reckon you can handle a Mish party?’ I ask, turning to him with a cheeky grin.
‘Well, I’ve been to my fair share of parties,’ Tomas says.
‘You better behave yourself,’ Aunty Pam says. ‘Don’t go doin’ anything stupid, yeah?’
Tomas just nods. Mum gives me the evil eye as I pour myself and Tomas a glass of bourbon each from her bottle.
‘He’ll be right with me,’ I say to Aunty Pam.
She turns to see him taking a sip from his glass and rolls her eyes. ‘If he gets in trouble again, it’s on you, Jackson Barley.’
‘Grog’s not my problem,’ Tomas says. ‘No need to worry.’ He takes another sip and screws up his face, like he’s just sucked on a lemon.
I understand when I taste it, because the bourbon churns my stomach.
‘Get any inspiration today, Tomas?’ Aunty Pam asks.
‘Yeah. Got some ideas.’
Me and Tomas force ourselves through our glasses. I take a six-pack of beer from the fridge and we head to my room. Tomas drinks a beer while I draw a Doolagah in his sketchbook. It’s tall and looks like a grizzly bear wearing a fur coat. Its eyes are just black spirals. I draw the hair bushy and long on its head, like flaccid spikes that flail about.
‘So, the hero lives on the Mish,’ Tomas says, as he writes onto a sheet of paper. ‘He’s just a normal teenager. He has a girlfriend and mates and cousins and whatever. Then one day, a few kids go missing in the bush.’
He sounds so intense. I can almost hear his brain speeding as he speaks.
‘He goes and looks for the kids, but the cops tell him not to interfere. So, they arrest him and cut his throat.’
‘Do the cops really have to cut his throat? Or kill him at all?’ I chuckle.
‘Hey, I’m just being realistic,’ he giggles back.
‘Yeah, but not all cops are racist killers.’
Tomas sighs. ‘Fine, maybe they don’t kill him. But then how does he get into the polluted lake and get his powers?’
He takes another sip of his beer while I sketch some detail into the Doolagah’s feet.
‘Maybe he always had his powers,’ I say, ‘and just didn’t realise until the time came to use them.’
Tomas sits forward. His eyes beam to me. ‘Right, okay. That’s good. Maybe he finds bones of the children at the Doolagah’s den. Wait, do Doolagahs live in dens?’
‘Sure, I dunno,’ I chuckle.
‘Then he fights one and realises he has superhuman strength. And that he can fly!’
I laugh at his excitement. I finish off the Doolagah and hand him the sketchbook.
‘Dear god,’ he says. ‘It’s beautiful.’
‘Is it scary enough?’
‘Fuck yeah.’
My phone vibrates on my bed – a text from Tesha. She asks if I’m coming to Abby’s party. I tell her I am. She doesn’t respond, not that I want her to. I finish off my beer and start another.
‘Should we save some for the party?’ Tomas asks.
‘Yeah. There’ll be more there, though. We always share.’
I get dressed into my maroon shirt and black jeans. Tomas changes into a shirt and shorts. We put on our shoes and head back downstairs. The kids are all watching a movie. They’re all quiet and don’t even notice us as we walk out the front door. I realise I’m tipsy as I land on the steppingstone
s and aim for the front gate, with Tomas just behind my shoulder.
The road is dark, and the sky is a dark blue. It’s just about night-time now and so much cooler outside. A wind whistles through the main street of the Mish. The cuffs of my pants stop just above my ankles, leaving them bare to feel the breeze.
We walk downhill towards Abby’s house, and Tomas follows me onto the dirt driveway. It sounds like a big night ahead.
‘Are you even drunk?’ Tomas asks.
‘A little bit.’
‘I can’t tell. You don’t seem drunk.’
I just smile and continue to the rusty broken gate. The party house is bright. There’s a large bonfire in the backyard with a group of people standing around it, smoking cigarettes and drinking. A few of the oldies are sitting around the fire as well. The old men have long grey beards and the women have messy grey hair. They look a lot older than they are.
I spot Kalyn by the fire. He’s talking to a girl, who I realise is Tesha. I stand there for a moment, with my hands resting on the gate. I wonder if I should just turn around.
‘You right?’ Tomas asks.
I push the gate open and we walk into the backyard. I greet all the guys with handshakes and the girls with kisses on the cheek, except for Tesha. We just exchange a hey and she walks away. Owen offers me a wave.
‘Glad you came,’ Kalyn says.
‘You remember Tomas?’
He looks to Tomas and nods. ‘How’s it going?’
‘All good,’ Tomas replies. It annoys me because that’s a thing I say: all good.
Tesha has made her way to some girls I don’t know who’ve set up a dancefloor on the dirt under the speaker, which rests on the windowsill.
I tap Tomas on the elbow and start for the back door of the house. The music is deafening as we walk onto the back verandah. Inside, Jarny is dancing with a bunch of girls in the living room. I don’t know any of them. They must be visiting.
‘Jackson! Come dance!’ Jarny shouts over the music.
Fuck it. Usually I wouldn’t, but fuck it. Now I’m dancing with Jarny and the girls, and I hope Tesha walks in and sees me there.
The Boy from the Mish Page 6
