For about a week after that, I heard no more about Lightning Ridge, and I started to think, Med, I hope you didn’t kill off that idea, so one night, I got the maps out and said, ‘Hey, what about we mark the route?’ I said, ‘I reckon you take the Golden Highway as far as Dubbo. From there, it’s dual carriageway. You don’t want to be doing it at night. You can pull over at Dubbo, sleep in the car, and then keep going.’
Blue, he said, ‘I dunno, old man, it was just something I was thinking about’ and I said, ‘It’s something you were thinking about precisely because it’s on your mind.’
I folded the maps up that night, but I was careful not to put them back where they were kept, with Pat’s Bible in the hall cupboard. I kept them out on the kitchen table so they’d be there, looking at him, whenever he came in for tea, beckoning him to have another look, but a week or so later when the maps were still there, and not touched, I took a Camel from the pack and opened a beer, and tapped the cap against the kitchen tabletop, which was my way of saying, ‘Take a seat, Blue. We’re gonna talk about this.’
I said, ‘You given any thought to how you gonna get there, Blue?’
He was still wavering. He said, ‘I haven’t even made up my mind to do it, old man’ but I said, ‘You’re mind’s made up. You just need a shove out the door.’
Blue said, ‘It’s not that simple’ and I said, ‘In what way are you not simple?’
He grinned. He said, ‘I got no wheels.’
I said, ‘There’s the Jeep.’ I’d taught him to drive in the Jeep. It was old when I got it and was now older still, and Blue, he said, ‘Old man, that shitbox won’t make it to the end of the street. It’s got weeds comin’ up through the floor’ and I said, ‘It’s served us well for 20 years’ but Blue, he was right.
I said, ‘I reckon we can get enough together to get a ute from Forster Motors’ and that was the right thing to say, because having his own wheels was something that no kid would say no to.
We drove into Forster and I told Blue to sit tight, I’d do the deal, and I did it the way deals were then done. I took Camels from my top pocket and the dealer took his Marlboros from the top drawer and we stood and smoked and talked and smoked a bit more and ground the cigarettes and walked out to look at a Holden ute, and looked it over and opened the bonnet and driver’s door and turned on the engine and closed it up again and went back inside and came back out and shook hands.
I got back in the car with Blue and said, ‘Alright, that one’s yours.’ It had a hundred thousand on the clock. It needed brake pads but the bloke had reckoned we could get them down the wreckers, so we drove around to the wreckers and I went inside and spoke to the bloke there, an old bloke in a tin shed, radio on, and came out with a tool and walked with Blue down the back of the lot and found an identical Holden and prised the pads off, and gave them to Blue to hold and went back into the office and put my hand in my back pocket and pulled out a wallet and handed over some dollar bills.
We fitted the pads at Forster Motors, lying right there on the ground, and took the ute home the same day and parked it near the house. Fat, who would have been nine or ten, she came out and sat in the driver’s seat and tooted the horn.
I said, ‘Quit that, Fat.’ She did it again, and I said, ‘Fat, I said quit that’ and she did it again and bolted.
Following day, I put a rag over the oil cap and removed it and took out the dip stick and wiped it on the rag and saw the thing was nearly empty. I poured the oil and put the dip stick back and took it out again, and this time, it gleamed. I screwed the cap back and wiped my hands on my jeans, and I was thinking, this might be the last time I clean something up for this boy who’d become a man.
I said, ‘I reckon it’ll get you there.’
There was no real conversation about when Blue might actually hit the road but then the day came, and we both knew it. He packed up a few things – a shirt, a pair of boots, plus the ones he was wearing – and I went into the kitchen and took some bread from the bread box, cut some ham sandwiches, put an apple and a banana together, put the whole lot back into the bread bag and plonked it on the kitchen table with the maps.
I said, ‘You got smokes, Blue?’
He said, ‘Yeah, I got smokes.’
I said, ‘You got something to listen to on the road? There won’t be radio all the way.’
He said, ‘Yeah.’
I said, ‘That Cold Chisel bullshit?’
He said, ‘Chisel, Angels, you name it.’
I said, ‘I don’t expect you to phone up every week but once in a while you drop me a line and especially when you strike a vein.’
Blue said, ‘Old man, if you’re thinkin’ I’m gonna be makin’ this family’s fortune you may well be disappointed.’
I said, ‘Well, you never know.’
We had a different dog in those days – not Dog, who’s with me now as I write this, but some other, equally ugly mutt – and it had a feeling, like dogs do, that something was afoot, and it was hanging around the two of us.
I said, ‘You reckon you want to take that dog?’
Blue said, ‘That mutt? No.’
I said, ‘Right then, she’s yours.’
We walked out to the ute together, and I opened the passenger door and helped the dog up. She had a grin on her face like something grand might happen. Blue, on the other hand, was chewing his lip.
Fat came out and stood on the porch and said, ‘You gonna bring me an opal, Blue?’ and Blue said, ‘Biggest one you ever saw, Fat. You’re gonna hang it round your neck and it’s gonna give you neck ache and people are gonna be wondering why you’re always looking down at your shoes.’
Fat said, ‘Yeah right, retard’ and went back in, the flyscreen banging behind her.
I knew that he meant it. First decent stone, he’d send down to Fat.
I said, ‘You better get on your way’ and Blue said, ‘Right’ and I said, ‘Do me a favour and stay in touch with your mother’ but he didn’t respond, just ground his cigarette into the dirt.
I said, ‘Don’t give me cheek about it, Blue. Just write to her.’
He said, ‘Righto’ and got in the car and started the engine and turned on the radio and rolled down the window and said, ‘Right then.’
And I said, ‘Okay’ and Blue pulled out, and there was a bit of dust and that was it, he was gone and so yeah, that was Kat off, and Blue was off, and it was me and Fat, and I’ve got to tell you, I missed the other two, but it was great with Fat. People might think, oh, an old man and a young girl, that’s got to be boring for her, but we weren’t bored, or maybe they think, that’s got to be hard for him, but to be honest with you, the stuff that Pat used to make such a commotion about – getting the kids out of nappies, onto the potty, getting them to give up the dummy – it was nothing really to complain about.
Now, I know you must be thinking, well, this is all very well, but when did things start to go wrong because obviously, things have gone wrong for Fat, and when I look back I can see things, signs I didn’t see then. Fat wasn’t great at school. She struggled with the basics – letters and numbers. There’d be days when she couldn’t get her words out properly. She’d go to say octopus and it would come out hopperpus, or she’d go to say loveheart and it would come out huvlart, but I mean, that’s not really the kind of thing that would stop you in your tracks, is it? The teachers were worried, I do admit that, but I thought, be careful, you might just be comparing her to Kat, who was so bright, and maybe Fat just isn’t that bright. But I must have been a bit worried, because I remember cutting open the Cornflake’s packet and lying it flat and writing the times tables on it, and getting Fat to sing them with me. One way or another, we got her into high school and then, of course, the first parent-teacher night, they told me, ‘Donna-Faye’s really not coping with the schoolwork’ and I thought, right, here we go again. But it wasn’t just that. Fat didn’t know how to make friends either. I really didn’t get that. At home with me, it was hard to
get her to stop talking but the teachers said, no, she doesn’t play with the other children. She was getting fatter, too. I know that’s not unusual now, to be 12 or 13 and fat, but in those days, there was only one fat, strange kid in every school, and Fat was it. Anyway, we muddled on, and then one Saturday night, when Fat was about 14, there was a knock at the door, and I went to open it, and there was a Chinese boy standing there.
My first thought was, is this a delivery? I mean, on some level, I must have known it couldn’t have been a delivery. There was a Chinese place in Forster – the Golden Palace with the red velvet chairs, but they didn’t deliver, not in those days. So this boy wasn’t from the Chinese but my brain was clearly not ready to accept that he might be Fat’s boyfriend, and I just went with the idea that he was delivering food.
I hollered back behind me, ‘Fat, did you order Chinese?’ but she was ahead of me. She was already at the door. She pushed past me and went outside with this boy, and sat out on the kerb with him, fidgeting. She came back in, and I said, ‘What’s all that about, Fat? Who is that Chinese boy?’
She said, ‘He’s not Chinese. He’s New One.’ That’s what I thought she said, ‘He’s New One.’ I said, ‘He’s the new what?’ Maybe she meant, ‘A new Australian?’ but she said, ‘That’s his name, Dad, New One’ and I see now, it was probably Nyugen, because isn’t that what they’re all called? The ones at the Shire are. But at the time, none of it was making any sense at all, and then Fat said, ‘He’s not Chinese. He’s Vietnamese.’
I said, ‘He looks to me like the bloke that takes the orders at the Golden Palace.’
She said, ‘He’s not Chinese!’ and the way she said it, all defensive, it dawned on me – she was interested in this boy. She said, ‘You don’t get it. His family came out on a boat. You don’t know what they went through.’ I thought, I know well enough what my brother went through. Now, don’t get me wrong, Your Honour. I’m not opposed to people coming here from places where there’s strife. It happened when I was at school, the Balts turned up, and the Italians and they were wogs for a while, and then they came good. The Gooks – that’s what we called them, before we knew any better – they were a challenge for some when they first starting arriving but I went along to one of those meetings they had in the Forster Town Hall, around 1978, back when Malcolm Fraser was Prime Minister, and Fraser himself had come out and explained that these Gooks were our Gooks, they’d been fighting on our side and now had to get out or else they’d be killed, and so we were obliged to take them. I got that, and I didn’t mind that. I just didn’t expect to find one standing at the front door, speaking like an Australian.
I said, ‘Fat, don’t tell me this bloke is your boyfriend?’ and that started an argument, our first real argument, with Fat saying, ‘You don’t understand!’ and me saying, ‘I understand perfectly well’ and Fat saying, ‘You’re racist’ and me saying, ‘Fat, I don’t care if he’s black, white or brindle. You’re not old enough for boys’ and Fat saying, ‘It’s not 1950 anymore, Dad’ and me saying, ‘I wasn’t even born until 1950, Fat’ and Fat saying, ‘Things have changed’ and me saying, ‘They haven’t changed that much’ and so on, until Fat went to her room and wouldn’t come out.
Now, I thought I’d won the argument but, of course, those arguments – the ones you have about who your daughter can go out with – they are not winnable. New One didn’t come back to the house but I know that Fat kept up with him, and here’s how I know: One afternoon, not too long after he’d first turned up at the house, Fat came home with three ducks. They must have come from him because who else would have given her ducks? I said, ‘Come off it, Fat, we can’t keep ducks, we’ve got the cat’ but Fat said, ‘They’ll be good for eggs’ and I said, ‘What they’d be good for is fattening up and taking down to the Chinese Palace and getting your friend to sweet and sour them’ and Fat, she said, ‘He’s not Chinese!’ and I said, ‘Well, whatever he is, you can take your ducks straight back where you got them from’ but she wouldn’t have it, and she got so emotional that I gave in.
I said I’d build a pen with wood and wire, but Fat said, ‘No, they’ve got to stay under lamps until they get their real feathers’ and I tried to explain, ‘It’s not normal lamps you need, it’s heat lamps’ but she wouldn’t listen. She put the ducklings in a box near her bedside lamp – she had one of those beds with the wooden bedhead and light built into it. The next day, two of the ducklings were stiff as boards, and Fat was crying and I couldn’t stand to see her crying, so I went up to Forster hardware and got a heat lamp. And to my surprise the duck lost its down and got feathers and started leaping out of the shoebox and shitting on the floor and Fat thought that was marvellous. I said, ‘It’s time we put the duck outside, Fat, and I put a cage together, with wood and chicken wire, and the duck went into there, and what happened? I woke up and Fat was making this strange, gulping noise, and I got out of bed and went into the kitchen, and there was Fat, with red eyes, wet face, pointing towards the duck cage. I went out and there in the cage, there were two feet. That’s all that was left, two orange feet, and one beak.
I thought, ‘Jesus Bloody H. Christ.’ A cat had gone in over the top and torn the duck to pieces. I thought Fat was going to choke she was crying so hard. I admit I didn’t know how to handle it. I said, ‘That idiot, New One, tell him no more ducks around here’ and that made her cry even harder.
Anyway, pretty soon after that, the romance with him, the puppy love or whatever it was, burnt out and, for a while, there were no blokes around, and I thought good. And then Fat started playing netball for the school team. She hadn’t wanted to do it – sports weren’t exactly Fat’s thing – but the other girls wanted her. They had a bad team at Forster. They never won a game. Fat was big. Not many kids her age would get past her on the netball court. She’d always be wider than the girl with the ball. It hadn’t happened to her all that often, that people were interested in her, so she took up netball, and it went pretty well for a while, and then one Saturday afternoon, the year that Fat turned 15, she went to netball, and came home on the bus, all agitated, and I said, ‘What’s so exciting?’ and she said, ‘We won!’ and they never won, so I said, ‘Hey, that’s great, and why don’t we go into Forster, and get some chicken packs to celebrate’ and she thought that was a great idea.
Normally, we would have gone into Ollie’s Trolleys on Main Street, but Fat wanted the buns with gravy and Ollie’s Trolleys didn’t have the buns with gravy, so we went to Red Spot on Harrison Street, instead. We drove home and I was putting the chicken and the peas and the buns and the gravy on the plates and the phone rang and it was for Fat, and it was never for Fat, and I thought, well, they really are excited about this netball thing.
She spoke on the phone for a bit, and then came into the kitchen and said, ‘Dad, I’m going out for a while’ and I said, ‘What about the chicken, Fat?’ and she said, ‘Oh, but there’s some friends from netball getting together and I want to go.’
I was taken aback a bit. Like I say, Fat hadn’t fitted in at school and there weren’t all that many times where she had somewhere to go.
I said, ‘But how will you get home?’ and she said, ‘It’s alright, Dad. My mate’s mum will bring me back.’
I said, ‘What mate is this?’ and she said then what might have been her first ever lie to me. She said, ‘Lana’ and I knew Lana. Lana was the daughter of a family in town. I said, ‘Well, okay’ because, I mean, it was a Saturday night and it was daylight saving, still light outside. I said, ‘Okay, but not too late’ and secretly, I was pleased. My Fat, making a friend.
So Fat went out the front door and I went into the kitchen to put foil over her chicken plate and put it in the oven, and watched while Fat got on the bus – the bus stop wasn’t a hundred metres from the front door – and watched the bus drive off. I had my chicken in front of the TV and watched a bit of Hey Hey and then some other rubbish came on and I thought, Time for me to hit the fart sack. Fat still wasn�
�t home but that was fine. I didn’t want to sit up with the rolling pin. I didn’t want to ruin her night out.
Next morning, I got up, I opened the door to her bedroom, and first thing I noticed was that Fat’s bed hadn’t been slept in. I thought, no, that’s not right. I went and checked the other rooms – Blue’s old room, the sewing room – but no Fat. I went and poked my head around some of the sheds on the property and even wandered down to the dam to see if Fat might be there, but she wasn’t near the dam. Like most families, we used to keep the Rolodex near the phone, and I flipped through it, looking for L for Lana, but there was no Lana, and I was buggered if I could remember Lana’s last name.
I sat on it for a bit, thinking of what to do, and come 9 am, I phoned the cops at Forster, and spoke to the duty officer. He didn’t seem that worried. He said, ‘How old is she now, Med?’ and I said, ‘Fifteen’ and he said, ‘And let me guess, 15 going on 23?’ and I thought that was a bit cheeky, but I laughed along, and the cop said, ‘Well, Med, she’s probably just run off.’
I had my doubts about that but the duty officer said, ‘Mark my words, Med, she’ll be back by teatime.’ I said, ‘You reckon you could do a bit of a search?’ and the duty officer said, ‘I’m on my own here, this being Sunday. Why don’t you go look around the places where she might go, and if nothing’s turned up by teatime, you give me a ring back.’
‘Well, I knew the Shire better than the cops did, anyway. My work was with the Shire, basic maintenance, all around the council parks and gardens, the toilet blocks, the skate bowl, the golf course. I put down the phone and made some rounds. Time to time, I’d come across a neighbour and roll down the window and say, ‘You seen Fat?’ and they’d say, ‘No, mate’ and I’d say, ‘Keep a bit of a lookout, will you?’ and they’d nod and say, ‘Sure thing.’
I Came to Say Goodbye Page 5
