by Tony Birch
Tony Birch is the author of Shadowboxing (Scribe, 2006) and the short story collection Father’s Day (Hunter, 2009). He lives in Melbourne where he teaches in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne.
Also by Tony Birch
Shadowboxing
Father’s Day
Reversing the Negative: A Portrait of Aboriginal Victoria
For Brian and Debbie –
with all my love,
for taking my hand.
‘Then the boy, me and the boy
we walked for miles through stormy weather
hand in hand, we roamed the land
and held the gleaming heart together.’
Kate Rusby, ‘The Bitter Boy’
A policewoman came into the room carrying a tray of food. Two cheese burgers, some fries and a Coke. She put the tray on the wooden table. The top was scratched with initials and messages – FUK THE COPS. I kept one eye on her and the other on a TV sitting inside a padlocked cage in the corner. She was pretty, the policewoman; blond hair and big brown eyes. She looked like she could be a pop singer, if it wasn’t for the uniform.
I was busting for a piss so I asked if it was okay to go. She shrugged. As soon as we walked out the door she grabbed hold of a belt-loop in the back of my jeans and stuck a couple of fingers through it. We walked along a narrow corridor. The offices on each side were crowded with police, some of them in plain-clothes, others in uniform. She followed me into the toilet, stood behind me and held onto me as I unzipped my fly. I could feel her warm breath on my neck and I was so embarrassed I couldn’t piss. I asked her if she would let go of me for a bit. She laughed. ‘You got stage-fright? I’ll help you.’ She let go of the belt-loop, reached across to the sink and turned on the tap. ‘Try now.’
When I’d finished she told me I couldn’t wash my hands. I’d have to wait until after I’d been interviewed. I took a look at my face in the mirror over the sink. It had a crack down the middle, splitting my face in two. My hair was plastered to my face. One eye was swollen shut and scabby. She leaned forward, put a hand on my shoulder and spoke into my ear, real quiet. I could feel her tits pressing against my back. I watched her face in the mirror. ‘Jesse, if you help us out here, tell us what went on back there at the house, I’ll make sure you get a hot shower, some clean clothes and something decent to eat. No takeaway shit. What about it?’ She sounded so friendly I was about to ask her where Rachel was, and if she was okay. But I didn’t. If I opened my mouth once, I might keep on talking and get myself in more trouble. Jon Dempsey had taught me that. ‘Once you start humming a tune, you can’t help but sing the whole song.’
We walked back along the corridor. The policewoman left me in the room with the cold food and TV for company. I tried to remember the last time I’d eaten but I was too tired to think. I had an ache in the guts and a hammer in my head. I grabbed one of the burgers, tore it apart with my teeth and washed it down with the Coke. I’d knocked off both burgers and most of the fries when my guts started aching even more. My head was spinning and I thought I was going to be sick. I looked around the room but couldn’t see anything I could spew into. I wondered if I was being watched. I couldn’t see any cameras, so I guessed not.
Pretty soon the dizziness went away. I took off my wet smelly runners, lay down on the floor, and stuck the shoes behind my head for a cushion. The TV was turned to the home shopping channel. A woman in a sparkly dress was selling gold and silver jewellery. I tried to guess the price each time she held up a piece. I wasn’t even close.
I heard the door open and looked up. It was the skinny detective I’d seen earlier that night. The policewoman was standing behind him. He had a folder under one arm and was carrying a clear plastic bag. He yelled at me to get to my feet and sit back at the table. He pulled a chair over to the table, sat across from me and threw the bag down. I could see the gun inside. I shifted my eyes to some of the names scratched into the tabletop and pretended I could see a J and an R carved in the wood. Jesse and Rachel.
‘Jesse and Rachel Were Here.’
ONE
We’d always been on the move, shifting from one place to another, usually because she’d done the dirty on someone, or she was chasing some fella she’d fallen for. And when Gwen fell for a bloke, she had to have him. I didn’t mind so much when it was just the two of us. All I had to concentrate on was staying out of her way and the trouble she brought home. But when Rachel came along everything changed. I was only a kid, just five years old. But from the moment I saw her, wrapped in a blanket in the hospital, I knew I’d be the one that would have to take care of her.
We were heading for Melbourne from up north, when Gwen said we’d have to stop because she was going to have the baby soon. ‘The place has a set of traffic lights,’ she noticed when we stopped outside a pub in the town we were passing through. ‘So it has to have some sort of hospital.’
She rented a room upstairs at the pub. It was hot and stuffy and smelled of something terrible that I couldn’t make out. She ordered us toasted cheese sandwiches from the bar, picked up a couple of beers and sat on the bed and waited. The pains went away in the night and she slept in until around lunchtime the next day. We shared a ham sandwich in a shop next to the pub and went for a walk around the town looking for the hospital, but couldn’t find it. ‘Gwen, maybe we should stop and ask someone for directions?’ She ignored me and kept on walking. We followed the sounds of kids yelling and music playing, and turned a corner to see a brightly coloured tent in a paddock, with flashing lights and rides. It was a carnival.
I stood and watched kids crashing into each other in dodgem cars while Gwen counted our money. We had just enough for lunch. We were sitting at a table in the food tent eating hotdogs when I saw that her hands and ankles were swollen. She held up a hand and said the same had happened when I was about to be born and when she went into labour another time, a couple of years back.
‘You remember that, don’t you, Jesse? The last time I got pregnant?’
She smiled when she said it. Didn’t bother her at all.
‘No, I don’t remember,’ I said.
But I did. I remembered lots of stuff I never spoke to Gwen about. She’d lost that baby. I’d watched her belly get fatter and was excited about getting a baby brother or sister because I didn’t want it to be just Gwen and me, any more. The day she was supposed to have the baby she left me on my own and went to hospital in a taxi, holding her belly like it was about to collapse on her. When she came back the next afternoon she had a flat tummy and no baby. She wouldn’t talk to me and just lay down on the bed and went to sleep. She tossed and turned in the night, moaned in her sleep, and woke us both up. I sat up in bed and asked her where our new baby was. She looked at me as if she didn’t understand what I was talking about.
‘There’s no baby, Jesse.’
‘Why not? You said we were going to have one.’
‘I’ve got a shocker of a headache. Leave me be.’
She got out of bed, went through her bag until she found some tablets, threw a couple in her mouth, and stuck her tongue under the tap in the sink across the room. She came back to bed, rolled onto her side and faced the wall. I was upset and pulled the bed sheet off her.
‘Where’s the baby?’
She pulled the sheet back.
‘Jesus Christ, Jesse. You ask too many questions. The baby couldn’t breathe when it came out. It was born blue. That’s what they call it. It died, Jesse. The baby’s gone.’
‘Blue? What’s that mean?’
‘No more, Jesse. Get back to sleep.’
She pressed her body into the wall and left me with no shee
t.
I wanted to cry, but knew if I did she’d probably give me a whack, so I squeezed my eyes shut to stop the tears from coming out.
One night, months later, I had a dream about the blue baby. It was night and the sky was full of stars. The baby was a boy and he was floating above my bed. He had a jumpsuit on and looked like an astronaut. When I reached up and tried to touch him he drifted away. I was sure he’d been real, even after I woke up with a fright. I jumped off the couch and ran to the window, hoping to see him. Outside, the sky was dark. There were no stars and no baby.
When Gwen told me she was pregnant again I worried that she would have another blue baby and it would float away too and meet up with the other baby. But when it came it wasn’t blue. It was a girl. And it was Rachel.
Gwen felt the pains when we were standing in line at the supermarket after we left the carnival. She was wearing maternity pants with elastic in the front. They made it easier to knock stuff off. She’d just shoved a smoked ham down her front when she buckled over with pain. It went away pretty quick but she got another one a few minutes later. I ran to the lady on the checkout. She told me where the hospital was and we walked there, as fast as we could. On the way Gwen handed me the ham and a packet of cheese and some dry biscuits and told me to hang onto them.
At the hospital she was put in a chair and wheeled away and I was sent to an office to wait for somebody. I’d only just sat down when there was a knock at the door and a woman came in. She had frizzy hair and wore a dress with big flowers all over it. She didn’t look like a nurse or doctor. She looked down at what I was holding in my arms.
‘Where did you get the food?’
‘We paid for it, at the supermarket.’
I don’t reckon she believed me but she didn’t seem to care. She picked up a jar from the table and unscrewed the lid.
‘Would you like a lolly?’
I took one, my favourite, a sherbet bomb. She read from a blue slip of paper in her hand.
‘Gwen Flynn. She’s your mother?’
I bit into the sherbet bomb. It exploded in my mouth.
‘Yep. My mum.’
‘And you are?’
‘Jesse.’
‘Tell me, Jesse, how did you end up here, in our town?’
I took a deep breath and then told her the story Gwen had been drilling into me since I could talk. She called it the ‘Nosy Parker’ story. I told the woman we’d left our hometown across the river and were on our way to Melbourne to stay with our relations because my grandmother was sick and ‘probably about to die’.
‘Gwen . . . my mum started to get pains in her guts so we had to stop here.’
She looked a bit sad and offered me another lolly. She even took one herself. The truth was we had no place to live, on this side of the river or the other. And my nan had died years before I was born. I only knew her from a couple of photographs.
The woman stood up, came around my side of the table and put an arm on my shoulder. She told me she was sorry that my grandmother was ‘gravely ill’. Then she went back to her side of the desk and signed the bottom of a ticket. I had to hang it round my neck in a plastic wallet. It let me eat anything I wanted.
I caught a lift upstairs and followed the smell of hot food, to a cafeteria where a lady behind the counter helped me pick out a meal, finished off with a bowl of chocolate ice cream. She piled the ice cream so high it spilt over the side of the bowl. After I’d eaten I sat and watched TV until a nurse came for me. She had good news. I had a baby sister.
The baby was wrapped up tight in a pink blanket with just her face poking out. She had bumps and bruises over her eyes and looked like she’d been belted or dropped on her head. I touched the side of her face with a fingertip. Her skin was softer than anything I’d felt.
‘Gwen, what’s wrong with her face? Did somebody hurt her?’
‘Nothing’s wrong, Jesse. Most babies look like that when they come out. Don’t get yourself worked up about it.’
I didn’t trust anything Gwen said. Once, when she was having an argument with my pop he’d called her a ‘born liar.’ It sounded strange because I didn’t see how a person could be born a liar. But as I got older I thought that if anyone could have, it would be Gwen.
I walked around the ward and looked at the other babies in their cribs. A couple of them looked perfect, like the babies I’d seen on the covers of magazines, with fat faces, big round eyes and red cheeks. Others though, like Gwen said, had faces more like a beaten-up boxer than a baby. I came back to the bed and touched the baby’s cheek again.
‘Have you picked a name for her?’
‘Yep. I’m calling her Rachel. Do you like it? It’s from the Bible.’
I couldn’t see how Gwen knew any names from the Bible. I’d seen a few Bibles before, lying around the hotel rooms we’d stayed in, but I’d never seen Gwen reading one.
The day after Rachel was born Gwen got an infection and had to stay in the hospital. There was no one to look after me while she was sick. The social worker tried finding me a foster place but couldn’t get one, so, in the end, they let me stay at the hospital. I spent most of my time in the TV room watching the soap operas and quiz shows with some of the new mums breastfeeding their babies and a row of old women who’d fallen over and hurt themselves and had their hips replaced.
The women were friendly and gave me chocolates and lollies. I made them cups of tea in the kitchen next to the TV room because some of them couldn’t walk so good. I enjoyed myself so much I’d have been happy to stay there. But after a week, we were on our way again. Gwen picked up a second-hand baby seat at the Salvation Army down the street and we headed straight for Melbourne with baby Rachel in the back. A friend of hers, called Midnight Mary, had a place over the office at a tyre yard. We’d stayed with Mary a few times before, but we never lasted long because she and Gwen would end up fighting over money, or men.
Mary grew marijuana plants for a living, under special lights, in a spare room. She said we could stay with her, rent-free, if Gwen kept an eye on the plants and checked the timers on the lights when Mary was out dealing. There wasn’t much for me to do but watch the baby or go downstairs to the workshop and listen in on the tyre fitters talking about drinking and girls. Across the street, there was a block of flats with heaps of kids, so I sometimes wandered over there. A police car would pull into the flats most days. Gwen told me to stay away from the kids, unless I wanted trouble.
She also said I’d be going to school for as long as we were there.
‘If the police get a look at you, they’ll get suspicious and call the welfare. Or worse. Take you in.’
‘School? But I don’t want to.’
‘You bet, sport. School. I need you off the streets while I’m helping out here.’
So I went to school for the first time. We had our own desks and had to sit in the same seat every day and weren’t allowed to move around. After a week I told Gwen I wasn’t going back. She snorted and said, ‘No fucken way. I can’t be taking off with this baby. This is our home now, Jesse. For a while, at least.’
It was hard to believe what she’d said. We’d never had a home and I didn’t reckon we’d last with Mary. And we didn’t. We took off when Rachel was about four months old. Gwen went to bed swearing and yelling at me for no reason and woke up the next morning and told me we were leaving. She waited until Mary had taken off for the morning, packed up our stuff and we left.
‘What about school?’ I asked, as we were driving out of the tyre yard.
She wound down the car window and sniffed the air. ‘Don’t worry about school. You’re no Einstein. You won’t be missed.’
I skipped a lot of school after my first taste, moving around with Gwen and Rachel. We spent as much time on the road as we did staying put. She was either running away from someone or
chasing a crazy idea she’d picked up from the horoscopes she read in old magazines or her tarot cards. She’d always mucked around with the cards. She’d even made a bit of money telling people their future when we were broke. The luck in our life, which was mostly bad, she put down to the fall of the cards. Just about everything that happened to her was the result of being dealt a ‘bad hand’.
‘I can only work with the cards I got,’ she’d say whenever we took a knock.
If we did stop in the one spot long enough for me to go to school, I was always a mile behind the other kids. I got teased a lot and ended up in fights. I didn’t read well and couldn’t add up much more than what I could count on the fingers on both hands. But I could tell a good story. I’d learned that from watching TV.
Whenever Gwen got a job she did nights. The only babysitter I’d ever had while she was out working or partying was the TV. I did the best I could looking after Rachel, but sometimes she’d start bawling and wouldn’t stop until I propped her in front of the telly. It did the job, and shut her up straightaway. One time when the power went off for half the day during a heatwave, she sat in a beanbag and stared at the blank screen like the world had come to the end.
Until she was around five Rachel was happy to watch the shows I picked out. But once she’d worked out her own favourites we had to take it in turns. I liked cop shows and gangster movies. She went for anything about families, especially if they got through hard times and ended up happy-ever-after. Her stories were all the same and I liked spoiling the ending by giving it away.
We missed out on a lot of stuff that other kids got. Birthdays. Family parties. Food, sometimes. But we never missed out on TV, even when Gwen was flat broke. She once told me that in the old days, when she first started working behind the bar in pubs, you could buy a stolen TV for about a quarter of the real price, and brand new in the box.
These days, you can pick up a TV for nothing, off the side of the road. When someone buys a new model, a flat-screen, they end up putting the old set out with the rubbish. The last telly we had, before the three of us took to the road for the last time, I found sitting at a bus stop. I was walking by, after school, when I spotted it. It looked lonely, like it couldn’t wait to be taken home, plugged in and sat in front of.
