‘Good friends,’ said Tully.
‘Did you have a class together this year?’
‘Science,’ said Tully. ‘We met in science.’
‘And?’ Griffin prompted.
So she told him. How she’d walked into her first science class and the only seat left was the one next to Nate. How Nate had seemed annoyed and hadn’t even looked at her when she’d mumbled, ‘Is this seat taken?’ then introduced herself. How she couldn’t seem to get a handle on what the teacher was talking about and how Nate leaned over his work, covering it so she couldn’t get an idea about what to do. How she had tripped over her seat when they were in stage three of their experiment and had knocked the Bunsen burner rubber hose from the wall. How the naked flame had tipped towards the leaking gas from the valve in the bench and how that had exploded into a fire-jet.
‘I heard you did that on purpose,’ said Griffin.
‘I wish,’ said Tully.
She didn’t tell Griffin about Nate’s reaction. First, the look of surprise. Then a roll of the eyes as he leaned in and turned the gas off.
‘What was your name again?’ he’d asked.
‘Tully,’ she’d said. ‘Tully McCain.’
He held out a hand and she shook it in a daze.
‘Nice to meet you, Tully McCain,’ he’d said. ‘Please remind me to get a new lab partner for science.’
But she hadn’t and he didn’t mention it again and they’d been friends ever since.
‘Do I turn left here?’ Griffin asked, removing his hand again to change down gears.
Tully nodded.
‘Straight home?’ he asked.
‘More or less,’ she said.
32
Tully’s Story
I finally talked Griffin into driving back home and talking to you guys. I hate that I had to wait until he decided it was time to come back. I can’t wait until I get my licence. Can’t wait until I just get in my car and go whenever I want. I was always waiting for Mum. She was always late picking me up from school. At some schools they’d have after-school care and I could go there, but sometimes Mum said it cost too much so I’d be left standing at the pick-up post waiting for her. Some teachers wouldn’t leave me there alone and I’d have to go back inside while they called Mum to come and pick me up. Other teachers believed me when I said that she’d be there any minute, and they’d leave me to wait outside alone.
And then there were the times when Mum decided just to pack up and go. Sometimes I’d recognise the signs. She’d get jumpy at loud noises. She’d peer through the curtains like she was spying on someone. Other times she’d be happy in the morning then crabby by night. One day she picked me up from school and we just kept driving for a hundred kays or so until she got tired and we slept in the car. Some days she’d totally forget to pick me up from school and I’d have to find my own way home. The forgetting to pick me up happened a lot when we lived at Coolidge Street.
In my memory tin is a scrap of wallpaper no bigger than a postage stamp. It has a tiny rosebud on it. I loved that wallpaper. When we moved into the house on Coolidge Street, I chose the smallest bedroom because of that tiny rosebud wallpaper. I loved that wallpaper so much that one night I tore some of it from the wall near my bed. I’d only meant to tear the smallest bit off, but when I pulled it I was left with a large ribbon of wallpaper curling in my hand. Then I tore a small piece from that and I shoved it into my tin so that I would never forget the beautiful rosebud pattern. And then I went to sleep.
The next day I had an excursion for school. I remember it because we went to the zoo, and even though I was happy to go, I was a little sad that I didn’t get to see it with Mum and Roo, my favourite one of Mum’s boyfriends. He was the only one that had ever tried to keep in touch with me, but Mum wouldn’t let me contact him. So I tried not to think about Roo and just had a great day. Mrs Beilhartz, my teacher, even bought me an ice cream from the kiosk.
I should have known. It was my fault. I should have seen the signs, but I’d been so worked up about going to the zoo. Mum must have had one of her headaches, must have had it for days, but I’d missed it. She didn’t pick me up from school. Our neighbour, a nice lady called Theresa, offered to drive me home. Her daughter, Steph, was in my class but I never spoke to her. Steph sat in the front of the car and I sat in the back and pretended I was in a limousine. When they stopped outside my house, I waved them a thank you and ran up to the front door steps and grabbed for the key from under the mat. But it wasn’t there.
I should have known.
I banged on the door and yelled out. ‘Mum! Mum, I’m home.’
I checked again, but the key wasn’t there. I could hear someone walking around inside muttering. I heard something heavy being pushed across the floorboards, getting closer and closer and then a thump against the door. Then I heard someone panting through the keyhole.
‘Mum?’ I said.
I rattled the door.
‘Let me in,’ I said.
‘Stupid,’ she shrieked through the keyhole.
The word clutched at my throat and threatened to choke me.
‘Mum?’
‘Did you think I wouldn’t find out? How am I going to fix that wall? We won’t get our bond money back. You stupid girl.’
‘Let me in. Let me in, Mum,’ I whispered.
‘You’re staying out there until I’m ready,’ she said.
I heard her shuffle away from the door, and up the hallway. Then a door slammed.
It was cold that night. I stayed on the doorstep, in case she changed her mind. I took my plastic raincoat out of my bag and used it as a blanket and in the morning it was wet with dew. When I woke the door was wide open and a lounge chair sat crooked to one side of the hall. I crept into Mum’s room and looked down at her sprawled out on top of her doona.
Her fringe covered one eye and I pushed it back gently so I could see her face. Her mascara had made a black river down one side of her face. She was dribbling on her pillow in her sleep. I grabbed her coat from the end of the bed and draped it over her to keep her warm.
‘Sorry, Mum,’ I whispered.
Then I got myself some breakfast.
The house on Coolidge Street had high ceilings and heavy doors with tarnished brass handles. It smelled of old and secret things and I used to wonder who had lived there, long ago when it was first built. Some of the rooms in the house still had the owner’s furniture and the doors to these rooms were locked to keep us renters out. A long strip of lino ran the length of the hallway and curled up at the edges. One day, a week after Mum had locked me out, I was trying to look under one of the locked doors and found a silver coin under the lino edge in the hallway. I showed Mum at dinner that night. She took it and held it up to the kitchen light and said, ‘It’s a sixpence. Old money.’
She handed it back to me.
‘Give it here.’ That was the first night I met Craig. I had come home from school that day to find him nailing down the edge of the laminex in the kitchen. At first I thought he was a handyman, but he turned around when I came in and said, ‘You must be Tully.’
His jeans were low-slung, the kind that sit low on the hips because the wearer has a pot belly. He wore large wraparound sunglasses that took up half his face and I wondered why he was wearing them inside. When he held out his hand to introduce himself he smelled of stale cigarettes and old sweat.
That night Craig sat at the head of the table, a splash of gravy from Mum’s famous meatloaf perched on his moustache. Meatloaf, Christmas turkey and takeaway—her three recipes.
‘Give it here,’ he repeated.
I shook my head. I didn’t want to give my old money to this stranger. He smiled at me, reached into his pocket, and pulled out a shiny coin.
‘I’ll swap you,’ he said.
I shook my head again and turned my left hand into a fist that cocooned my special money.
‘Don’t be silly, Tully,’ said Mum.
She had her co
bra smile on. Her eyes bored into mine and they narrowed even while her smile became wider. I watched her take a sip of her coloured drink which she’d poured into a fancy wine glass. Usually she just drank it straight from the bottle.
‘That’s okay, Sandy’ said Craig. ‘She doesn’t have to.’
I could see that he was trying to be nice to me, but I couldn’t stop looking at the gravy on his moustache and the bit of meat from the meatloaf stuck between his front teeth. He grabbed me and slapped his coin into my palm. When he let go there was a white mark where all the blood had been pushed away from the skin on my wrist.
‘No, thank you.’ I tried to be polite, but it didn’t help.
‘Don’t be bloody rude, Tully,’ said Mum.
‘I don’t want it—’
‘Go to your room,’ she said. ‘And leave that bloody wallpaper alone.’
When I got to my room I hurled the fifty cent piece across the room. I put the sixpence under my pillow, crawled into bed and pulled off another curl of wallpaper with a satisfying riiiip.
33
Fitzroy Police Station: 25 December, 4.02a.m.
‘So you left Amanda’s house and came straight back?’ asked Constable Tognetti.
‘Not straight back,’ said Tully. ‘I paid someone else a visit first.’
34
Christmas Eve
They’d been talking for about an hour, Tully guessed, when she saw the Welcome to Stawell sign on her left.
‘Better slow down,’ she said, stretching her legs. ‘Hey, turn here. I want to show you something.’
Griffin followed Tully’s directions for several kays until they stopped outside a rusted farm gate.
‘What’s this?’ he asked.
‘This is Mick’s farm,’ said Tully. ‘I used to live here with Mum and Craig when I was little.’
‘What a hole,’ said Griffin.
‘That’s what I thought when I first came,’ said Tully.
She peered up the driveway, which had more potholes and dips than she remembered. The house was about a kay up the driveway, partly shielded by a line of greybox gum trees.
‘The gate’s open,’ she said. ‘Can you drive in? Please?’
‘What if someone’s home?’ said Griffin.
‘We’ll just say we’re lost,’ said Tully.
As they drove up the driveway, the house came into view. It was a weatherboard and sat on brick pillars that cleared the ground, high enough for the cattle dogs to go under in search of shade.
Near the house was a woodshed—a corrugated iron lean-to that was divided into three sections. Iron horseshoes hung from the rafters in upturned smiles, leaking their good luck over the hessian bags that lay stiff with age on the ground. Lacy cobwebs covered the dark corners in delicate patterns.
‘No one here,’ said Tully.
Griffin stopped the car and Tully jumped out and pushed back the house gate. On the back door porch some swallows had made a nest above the door and had left a trail of white droppings down the back door screen and on the step. The gas bottles stood staunchly near the back door, the same as Tully remembered, but the bin was missing. She tried the back door handle. She was not surprised to find it locked.
On her way back to the car she noticed the rain gauge but didn’t bother to check it. It was obvious there had been no rain for some time. Everything was crisp at the edges. The grass around the house crunched underfoot and some fruit trees near the woodshed were dead. Only the eucalypts looked unchanged, their grey bark peeled back to reveal the creamy trunk inside.
Back out on the road they drove along the property line and Tully pointed out her favourite yabby dam, now dry, her favourite climbing tree and the rusted-out hulk of Mick’s old Chevy truck. Tully noticed the fenceline sagged in some places and in one section lay flat against the ground.
‘Do they live here anymore?’ asked Griffin.
Tully shook her head and pointed him in a new direction. ‘This used to be a gold mining town,’ she said. ‘That’s why Mick’s grandfather or great-grandfather—whatever—moved here. Mick used to tell me about it. That’s how they got enough money to buy the farm.’
‘Hard to believe anyone would want to live this far out of the city,’ said Griffin. ‘Where are we going?’
‘To the cemetery,’ said Tully.
Guinness World Book of Records
Longest Fingernails Attempt
Length of Longest Nail
13/3, 20mm long
5/4, 15mm long
6/4, 7mm long
7/6, 32mm long
12/7, 12mm long
35
Tully’s Story
On our way back to the city we passed through Stawell and I asked Griffin to stop at the local cemetery so I could, like, pay my respects to a friend there. Griffin wasn’t in any hurry to get home, so he didn’t mind stopping. I guess we should have tried ringing someone then—to let them know we were okay and what was going on—but we didn’t think of it.
Mum and I moved to just outside Stawell when she met Craig. Craig’s dad, Mick, had a farm. He had a few animals—some sheep and a few goats—but was mainly into crops. He grew canola, which was a waving sea of bright yellow when it was ready to be harvested. It was so bright in the sun you had to wear sunglasses to look at it. We lived on the farm with Craig and Mick. Mick was what Bamps would call a ‘good bloke’. Craig was supposed to be taking over the farm so that Mick could retire, but you could tell Mick was in charge. Mick wore the same clothes every day, even on Sundays.
Mum hated the tank water—she said it frizzed her hair more than normal—but I liked the space of the farm. The unending horizon of it. I could stand up the top of the driveway and spin around 360 degrees and the horizon remained the same. No hills. No neighbours. Just flat and dry. At the end of the day I would watch the sun dip low in the sky. Mick said if you listened hard enough you could hear the sun touch the dirt on its way down to someone else’s new day. I think I heard that sound maybe once or twice. I wondered if that person knew they were looking at my sun.
We were happy there, for a while. Mum got a job at the local pub and I got to go to a school that had a huge outdoor space for lunchtime and recess play. I was worried about Mum working at the pub but she never came home with dentist breath and she didn’t seem to get her headaches like she used to.
Everyone called Mick Mick, even Craig, but I didn’t call him anything because Craig had only introduced him to me as ‘this is my dad’. Whenever Mick wanted my attention he’d nod his head in my direction or call out ‘girl’. At first I was scared of his grumpy ways and the way one side of his face never moved. He could speak perfectly fine and when he smiled, which was hardly ever, it was a nice kind of a lopsided grin. Eventually we got into a routine. Dinner had to be finished before seven so Mick could watch the news on the ABC. Craig used to have a shower before dinner then off to the pub after the dishes.
Sometimes Mick would help me with my home reading. His thick pointer finger would move along the words that danced on the page before me. If I got the word wrong he would keep his finger on the word until I had another go.
‘Break it up,’ he’d say.
So I’d try to break the word up into smaller pieces until he gave me a hint or just straight out told me the word.
Mick had a room that he called his office, which was really just a room with a bookcase and a table and a filing cabinet and a picture of him as a young guy with a young woman in a wedding dress. I figured it must have been his wife but I never asked about her and he never told me. Mick had some old books which didn’t have many pictures in so I didn’t really like them that much, although there was one book, Famous People in History, which he would go through with me. He also had a book with a green leather cover and gold for the title, which said The Greenedges Book of Famous Quotes. He would tell me one famous quote a day and if I liked it I would write it down and try to remember it. Sometimes we would look at the Guinness Book of World
Records that he’d pull down from the top shelf of the bookcase. It was filled with wonderful pictures and stories of people doing incredible things. My favourite world record was the man with the longest fingernails. I wanted to grow my own fingernails so I could set a new record, but I kept forgetting and bit them instead.
At the weekends Mick would take me to the footy to watch the local boys slog it out and I could get a pie from the canteen. If it was too cold we would sit in the car with the radio blaring and turn the fan on when the windows got too foggy. Craig still played—he was one of the stars of the team—and Mum would sometimes come to watch and cheer him on. It was hard for her to get out of bed early because she worked on Friday nights and she had a shift on Saturday night as well. When she came, I would sit on the wire boundary fence and she would hold onto me so I wouldn’t fall, and happiness would settle in my stomach like a drink of hot chocolate.
Some Sundays, Mick would take me yabbying. We’d open up a tin of cat food and shove it down into the toe end of a nylon stocking or sock. I never asked him where the stocking came from, though I know it wasn’t Mum’s because she didn’t wear stockings. Then we’d tie the stocking or sock into the bottom of a net Mick called ‘the Opera House’ which was a cool net that the yabbies could crawl into but not get out of again. Mick would let me sit on the tractor seat next to him and we’d drive out to the yabby dam and throw the net as far out into the middle of the dam as we could get it. You could tell where we’d thrown it because Mick tied a large orange float to the net that bobbed along the top of the water. A couple of hours later we’d go back with a long pole with a hook at the end and pull the net in.
Some days there would be nothing but weed, but other days the basket would be filled with grey-green yabbies, clacking their claws like they were tapping out morse code or something. Then Mick and I would have a fight. I would always want to let the yabbies go and he would always want to cook them. He couldn’t understand why I would want to go yabbying if I didn’t want to end up eating them. I could never understand how he could put them in a boiling pot of water that turned their beautiful grey-green colour to red. At least he’d always put the ones with eggs back into the dam.
Hostage Page 9
