Charlotte's Creek

by Therese Creed

‘You’ll start next year?’ Lucy asked.

  ‘Yep.’ Wade nodded, bouncing merrily on his knees on the bed.

  ‘But will you let us hang around sometimes when you’re teaching the others?’ Molly asked, and Wade ceased bouncing in anticipation.

  Suddenly suspicious that the twins were trying to exploit her ignorance and wangle their way into formerly banned activities, Lucy decided not to agree to anything else without first attaching some conditions. ‘I’m sure that’ll be fine sometimes,’ she said carefully. ‘It’ll depend on what we’re doing in class and how quiet you can be.’

  The twins nodded, seeming to think this was fairly reasonable.

  ‘What about bedtime stories?’ asked Molly. ‘Do you do those?’

  ‘They might be a reward for days when you’ve been really good,’ Lucy said.

  ‘Will you let us eat when we’re on the computer?’ Wade asked hopefully.

  ‘Certainly not,’ Lucy replied.

  ‘Oh, that’s good, ’cause the crumbs bugger up the keyboard,’ Molly said solemnly.

  ‘You shouldn’t need food during lessons,’ Lucy stated.

  ‘Righto. Fair enough,’ said Wade. ‘Anyway, Mum said to tell you that your dinner’s getting cold.’

  ‘Oh!’ Lucy exclaimed in alarm. ‘We’d better get going, then!’

  The meal was well under way by the time Lucy and the twins entered the kitchen. It was a long, open, airy room with a large pantry at one end, cluttered benches and cupboards on all sides, an enormous oven and sink, and a row of chest freezers and fridges on the far wall. A television was fixed high on a shelf, in pride of place before the long wooden table at which the rest of the family were seated.

  Lucy hurried towards the table, her cheeks flaring. ‘I’m so sorry!’ she said.

  Mel and the two older children glanced in her direction before turning back to the TV without a word. The twins sat down and began babbling about some sort of grey lady, in what appeared to be a kind of private language. At the far end of the table sat Ted. He appeared more boyish without his hat, his light brown hair tousled, and he looked up briefly from his plate to acknowledge her arrival. The old blue heeler under the table lifted his head from his paws to study her, with slightly more interest.

  Seated next to Ted was a handsome, strongly built, dark-haired man of about forty. He turned away from the TV and examined Lucy with sharp blue eyes for a moment before speaking. ‘If you’re too slow round here you go hungry,’ he grinned. ‘We kept that seat for you.’ He pointed with his laden fork towards a vacant spot between himself and the twins.

  ‘Thanks,’ Lucy said, sitting down in front of a plate holding the biggest steak she’d ever seen.

  ‘Vegies.’ The man gestured towards a huge dish in the middle of the table, half full of an assortment of boiled lumps of potato, pumpkin and carrot, tangled together by a web of watery cabbage.

  Trying not to think of her mother’s delicious vegetable dishes, Lucy looked away from the bland food, and back at the man. ‘I’m Lucy Francis,’ she said quietly, conscious of the others watching TV.

  ‘So I reckoned. Dennis West.’ He held out a work-roughened hand, which she shook.

  Lucy served herself some vegetables and managed to force a small mouthful past the lump in her throat. Her ears were ringing, partially blocking out the prattle of the television. A frantic mantra started up in her brain. It will be okay . . . it will be okay . . . it will be okay . . . But the hot, cluttered kitchen, the blank, uninterested faces of Mel and the older children, and the harsh sound of the television made her feel completely alone and out of place.

  To quell her rising panic, she took a sip of water from the glass in front of her. It was unexpectedly sweet—it must be rainwater, she realised. She’d never before tasted anything so pure. Suddenly, from some unknown source, serenity flowed through her, slowing her breathing and calming her hurrying heart. She glanced around. Her eyes came to rest on Ted. Following his example, she looked down at her meal and began to tackle the edges of the enormous steak.

  Chapter 3

  After a broken sleep, Lucy woke early, nervous about the day ahead. She made herself some tea; then, feeling the need for a second cup, she went to refill the kettle, only to discover that it contained a freshly boiled frog.

  Feeling slightly ill, she began to get dressed, trying to turn a blind eye to the age-old grime between the buckled floorboards, the mould-stained walls, and the festoons of spider webs adorning the ceiling and light globe. She had to toughen up and leave behind the thought of her spotless, lavender-scented Sydney home. A less sheltered existence was what she’d been craving, wasn’t it?

  Still feeling queasy, she made a beeline for the schoolroom at the western end of the family house, which Mel had shown her could be entered from an outside door at the top of a little staircase up onto the veranda. Despite the fact that it was Sunday, Lucy was resolved to spend the day thoroughly organising her new classroom, and hoped that this exercise would put her more at ease. But the state of the schoolroom when she entered did little to improve her spirits. Resignedly she began shuffling through the mountains of jumbled paper and books, miscellaneous unit outlines and paperwork for the ‘home tutor’. All of the correspondence she found from Mrs Teal, the Distance Education teacher, was rather desperate. She discovered countless unfinished or barely started pieces of work in every drawer, on every shelf and lurking under every piece of furniture.

  The four children came in after their lunch to watch, bringing Lucy a corned beef sandwich that Mel had made for her.

  ‘Did you notice you have a heap of frogs living in your toilet in the hut?’ Billie asked. ‘Watch out for them, eh?’

  ‘They don’t bite,’ Wade said reassuringly.

  ‘They can’t, ’cause they don’t have teeth,’ Molly added.

  ‘They got long tongues, but,’ Billie warned, watching Lucy closely, clearly hoping to provoke a reaction.

  ‘They can shoot them out, right across the room to stick up a bug for smoko,’ Wade explained.

  ‘But you don’t even look like a bug, so don’t worry,’ Molly said, patting Lucy’s forearm comfortingly. Then she hissed at Wade, ‘Remember what the Grey Lady said, Wadey! We gotta be nice to this one!’

  ‘Who’s the grey lady?’ Lucy asked, intrigued by this mysterious ally.

  Cooper groaned. ‘Heck, don’t get them started. She’s their imaginary friend.’

  ‘She is not ’maginary!’ Molly bellowed.

  ‘And there’s also the geckoes.’ Billie was still stuck on the household wildlife. ‘They’re even worse than the frogs, ’cause they laugh.’

  ‘I’m sure I can cope with a few frogs and lizards,’ Lucy said with as much confidence as she could muster.

  ‘One of our other guvvies left because of the frogs,’ Cooper observed.

  ‘And the snakes,’ Billie said.

  ‘And the mozzies,’ Wade added.

  ‘The mozzies gave her a caning,’ Cooper said. ‘Fresh blood, eh. She woke up one morning with her eyes puffed shut.’

  ‘She was an English,’ Molly elaborated, ‘and she forgot to turn the fan on full one night.’

  ‘Too soft and white,’ Wade went on. ‘They don’t have no mozzies over where the English come from.’

  ‘She couldn’t take to them,’ Molly said sadly.

  ‘Yeah, but that bird was scared of everything,’ Cooper said dismissively.

  ‘Especially us,’ Billie added with a grin.

  ‘We had a German guvvie once, too,’ Cooper went on. ‘She was real pretty, but not much upstairs. Then a Dutch guvvie, but he couldn’t speak English, and after that a Canadian lady, who reckoned she’d been a teacher once, but she was too old and crippled-up to keep us under control.’

  ‘She said she’d never seen anything like us in all her years,’ Molly added, with a perplexed frown.

  ‘Natalie liked us, but,’ Billie said. ‘Called us rotten names when she got mad. Dad said she
couldn’t teach a monkey to eat bananas. She stayed a year and a bit. She liked the ringers.’ Billie rolled her eyes. ‘A lot!’

  ‘Except for Ted,’ Cooper amended. ‘She hated him ’cause he took no notice of her. Natalie was the longest hanger-on we’ve had.’

  ‘And what country did she come from?’ Lucy asked, a little faintly.

  ‘Victoria,’ Cooper said.

  ‘But worst of all is when Mum tries to teach us,’ Billie said, lowering her voice. ‘No guvvie is worse than that. Jeez, she gets mad at how dense we are!’

  ‘Bloody oath,’ agreed Cooper.

  By the end of her first day in the small dusty schoolroom, Lucy had things in better order. She had familiarised herself with the curriculum and organised the stationery supplies and books. She also had a clearer picture of how challenging the task before her would be. Judging from what she’d seen of their schoolwork, Cooper and Billie were terribly behind for their age and clearly not accustomed to having any sort of standard expected of them. Lucy tried to convince herself that she wasn’t discouraged, and that she was only feeling tired from the long day. After all, she’d taught a class of thirty children in Sydney; surely she could manage these two with ease?

  Not long before dinner, Mel appeared in the schoolroom. She was carrying a huge basket of clean laundry which she banged down onto a table that Lucy had just cleared, and she began to fold it while speaking. Lucy wondered whether Mel was one of those women who liked her washing folded in a particular way. But after watching for a minute or so, she decided that she wasn’t, and began to help.

  ‘Just wanted to get you while there weren’t kids’ ears flapping nearby.’ Mel glanced around at the neat piles of school material, then back at Lucy. Her face was tiredly apologetic as she went on. ‘I suppose you found a bit of a disaster area in here, eh? Reckon you’re up to it?’

  ‘I’ll do my best,’ Lucy said, reaching for a crumpled towel. More than anything she wanted to sink her face into it and cry, but she held Mel’s gaze.

  Mel looked hard at her. ‘Sorry, eh. Things are . . . it’s bloody full on here. All the time. And the twins will be starting too in a year. All that paint and glue again. I can’t face it.’

  Lucy laughed, despite herself.

  ‘I’ve had it with rattling around at eleven pm, looking for egg cartons to make hungry caterpillars for the next day,’ Mel continued. ‘And I have more than enough cooking to do without having to make batches of playdough every second week. Had to get someone in to teach them, even though we can’t afford it. The kids would much rather be outside doing something else, and so would I. And they know it. Doesn’t work at all.’

  ‘I think most people find it hard to teach their own children,’ Lucy agreed. ‘I guess parents aren’t scary enough.’

  A twinkle appeared in Mel’s tired eyes. ‘You reckon you’ll be meaner than me?’

  There was silence for a moment as they continued folding. Then Mel went on. ‘Their other guvvies haven’t been much chop. Really young, most of them, and came here looking for a good time. More interested in partying than teaching. To be fair, I gotta say, my kids are a bit of a handful.’

  There was another pause while the piles of folded garments grew taller. ‘The last girl we had was so desperate—no bloke round here was safe!’

  ‘Natalie?’ asked Lucy.

  ‘Yeah, that’s her.’ Mel paused and raised her eyebrows. ‘Any old ringer—and the chopper pilot, Adam . . . She even did a line for Dennis before she walked out. After that, I decided to go back to teaching the little buggers myself. But they’re older now and it’s a damn headache. The second half of last year nearly killed me.’

  ‘You have so many other things on your plate,’ Lucy observed. ‘It’s no wonder, really.’

  Mel stopped mid-fold and looked at Lucy in surprise. ‘Oh well. You seem to have your head screwed on, anyway.’

  Lucy looked at Mel’s weary face and noticed a sort of surly wisdom that she hadn’t seen there before. Perhaps, she thought, she and Mel might be able to get along after all. So she spoke with quiet determination. ‘I’ll do my best with your children, Mel.’

  Mel shrugged and continued haphazardly folding a shirt. ‘We’ll see. I don’t care how you go about it, so long as the work gets done. And make sure you give them a good flogging if they give you any lip.’

  Lucy, unsure how to respond, wrinkled her forehead anxiously.

  ‘And my kids don’t need to know what you get up to in your spare time—with the fellas and that, righto?’

  Lucy stiffened. ‘I have no intention of—’

  ‘Yeah, that’s what they all say—at first,’ Mel cut in. ‘But this place gets you down after a bit. Too bloody far away from anything. You’re on your own out here.’

  ‘It’s beautiful, though,’ Lucy said. And it was. Unforgiving, probably, but beautiful.

  ‘I used to think so too, a long time back,’ said Mel, her folding becoming even faster and more businesslike. ‘Anyhow, I’d better get back to the cooking. We’re mustering all this week and the ringers are supposed to be arriving here for tea.’ She loaded the folded clothes back into the basket. ‘But no doubt the buggers’ll show up half-cut at two am as usual.’ She picked up the loaded basket and, without another word or glance in Lucy’s direction, left the room.

  At last the sun descended and Lucy’s long day drew to a close. The television relieved her of the obligation of making any conversation at dinner, and Mel’s stormy mood over the ringers’ foretold failure to arrive silenced even the twins. But they grinned at Lucy when Mel wasn’t looking, and even Cooper found an opportunity to give her a sly wink, lifting her spirits slightly.

  However, on her way out of the house after dinner, when she slid her foot into one of her tidy little slip-on shoes, Lucy gasped as her toes encountered something soft and slimy. A muffled giggle and slight movement in the curtained window closest to her confirmed that the frog hadn’t found its own way into her shoe. Picking up the other shoe, she tilted it towards the light and squinted into it. Another frog. Lucy frowned and stepped back into the house. The four children were standing just inside the door.

  Molly was looking at her feet and Wade was chewing his lip guiltily.

  ‘Sorry, Lucy,’ Billie said in a singsong voice.

  ‘You don’t sound sorry,’ Lucy said. ‘You’re just lucky I like frogs.’

  ‘You like them?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Lucy, carefully pulling the unharmed frog out of her shoe.

  ‘Jeez.’ Cooper was impressed. ‘You did that so gentle, he didn’t even piss on ya!’

  ‘Are we busted?’ Billie wanted to know. ‘Are you gonna tell Mum?’

  ‘Why would I bother such a busy lady with something so silly?’ Lucy responded, looking at each of them sternly in turn. ‘Goodnight.’

  Before climbing into bed a short time later, Lucy pulled back the covers and made a thorough search under her pillow. All clear. She sighed. In spite of the confident front she’d put up for the children, their clichéd trick had succeeded in shaking her. She lay down on the hard little mattress and tried to relax her body as the unfamiliar night noises drifted through the unscreened window beside her bed. What surprises were in store for her tomorrow, her first school day at Charlotte’s Creek?

  Somehow she drifted off to sleep, only to be woken just after midnight by the sound of vehicles rattling over the cattle grid. The mustering contractors had clearly arrived. She heard whoops and laughter from the direction of the dongas, then silence fell again until morning.

  Chapter 4

  Shortly after sunrise, Lucy woke to the roar of an engine approaching her cottage. She leapt out of bed and hurried outside in her pyjamas. Mel was at the gate, looking harassed, the ute idling behind her.

  ‘I gotta go and help Den,’ she called to Lucy. ‘Can you head over to the house? The kids’ll make a hell of a mess over breakfast, otherwise. Then they’ll ping off and you won’t find them for school.’
Before Lucy could answer, Mel jumped back into the ute and drove away.

  Lucy rushed to throw on some clothes. The jeans. She would wear them again today, for the third time running, instead of the tailored pants she’d brought for her first teaching day. She’d only ever worn an item of clothing two days running at the most, and that was backpacking in Europe. These jeans were a catalyst.

  Over at the house, Lucy found the kitchen already vacated. Four partly eaten breakfasts had been left on the table and there was a great deal of mess. Looking around, she decided against calling out or demeaning herself by going searching for the kids. Instead she made herself a cup of tea and sat down to wait. Two minutes later the twins emerged from the pantry.

  ‘Don’t you want us?’ Molly wondered.

  ‘It wasn’t our idea to hide,’ Wade explained. ‘We reckon you’re all right.’

  ‘Since the Grey Lady told us you’re a good soul,’ Molly added.

  ‘Oh? That was nice of her,’ Lucy said, wondering how this grey lady could presume to know.

  Cooper appeared next. With his blue eyes and dark hair, and his grim expression as he looked at Lucy, he was like a miniature of his father. ‘We don’t have to do school today, do we? ’Cause I reckon I’ll shoot through now if we do.’

  ‘That’s up to you, I guess.’ Lucy shrugged, trying to appear unconcerned. At the same time, she wondered what she would do if they refused to cooperate.

  ‘Fair dinkum?’ Cooper exclaimed. ‘You mean we don’t have to? But Mum’s paying you good money to teach us!’

  ‘That’s right,’ Lucy agreed. ‘But I can’t do that if you shoot through. I’ll be getting paid for nothing, I suppose.’

  ‘So you’re telling me I have to stay and do school?’ Cooper straightened his arms by his sides and clenched his fists defiantly.

  ‘No, not really.’ Lucy took a sip of her tea. ‘It’s not me that will be upset if you grow up without an education. I already know how to read and write properly. Which is more than I can say for you, judging by what I found in the schoolroom.’