by Tony Birch
‘There’s something in the air. I don’t want the wood getting wet if it rains. It’ll go all out of shape and bend like fuck when it dries out. Won’t be able to make a thing from it and we’ll have to burn the lot.’
He was as calm as ever. Nothing Gwen had said seemed to have upset him. When we’d finished with the wood he made us a cup of tea and we sat on the back step. I heard a rumble of thunder and looked up. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky.
‘Where do you reckon it’s coming from?’ I asked.
‘Could be hundreds of miles away. Sound travels a long way at night. When I was a kid I stayed with one of my aunties one time, in the country. She had a farmhouse, a bit like this place, but in better nick. They had chooks, and goats, a couple of cows. Late at night you could hear the train off in the distance, thump-thumping along, even though it was miles off. Miles and miles.’
A flash of lightning cut across the sky, with more thunder before it went quiet again. Too quiet.
‘Jon, do you reckon it’s gonna rain?’
‘There’s a storm coming, but not yet. This one might pass us by. It’s hard to tell.’
He surprised me by grabbing hold of my arm and tugging at it until I looked him in the face.
‘Will you be ready for it, Jesse? When the storm comes? You remember what I’ve told you. Sometimes you can stay out of trouble and other times you have to step up.’
He stood up without saying another word and walked back into the house.
Later on I lay in bed and thought about what he’d said as I listened to the thunder. When I got up in the night to pee, I saw he was asleep on the couch. The next morning he was nowhere to be found. His denim jacket, which always hung on a nail inside the back door, was gone. I walked out the front, down to the gate and searched for him. I saw nothing but empty road. When I walked back onto the veranda I spotted a piece of paper rolled around the handlebar of our homemade cart.
It was a note from him.
He wrote that he was was sorry he had to leave in a hurry, but he had to go to the city for some work, ‘or my parole office will fuck me up.’ The note ended on a p.s. – ‘Don’t forget to get stuck into a Can-Tam now and then, if you can remember the recipe!’
I tore the note into pieces, went into the backyard and locked myself in the shed and cried. I stayed in there a long time, until I heard Rachel calling my name. I didn’t answer but I heard her footsteps at the shed door and then saw her eye blocking the light in the keyhole.
‘I knew you’d be in there,’ she whispered through the door. ‘Please come out, Jesse. Or let me in. I want to be with you. She’s going to be crazy at you. And then she’ll be crazy at me too.’
When I went back into the house Gwen was at the table with a glass of water in one hand and some tablets in the other. She smiled at me like everything was fine.
‘Why’d you let him go?’ I yelled, my fists clenched by my side.
She swallowed the tablets, took a drink from the glass and put a hand to her head. ‘Give me a break, Jesse. Can’t you see I’ve got a hangover? Jesus Christ. He’s just a fella. One fucken fella. Plenty more than him. And better. Stop sooking and get over it. If it’d been up to him we’d be sitting around like a pair of old-age pensioners waiting to cark it. I’m not ready for that. I’ve got life in me. Life.’
I’d never had a dad and couldn’t have cared less about one until Jon came along. I wasn’t sure if he was what dads were supposed to be like, and maybe I was wrong, because I’d met some pretty mean ones who’d spent the night with Gwen rather than be home looking after their own kids. But I did know I’d been happy when Jon was around. And I didn’t want him to leave Rachel and me.
She was just as upset as I was. I found out how much she missed him when we were at the table the night after he left. Gwen was smoking a cigarette and doing her nails. Rachel got up, scouted the house a couple of times and came back into the room. She put her hand on Gwen’s arm. ‘Where’s Jon gone to? When will he be back?’
‘Won’t be,’ Gwen mumbled, and she took a long drag on her cigarette.
‘Why not?’
When Gwen didn’t answer, Rachel pulled at her dressing gown and asked again where he’d gone. Gwen was getting angry. I tried signalling to Rachel to stop with her questions, but she kept on going and grabbed at the dressing gown one time too many.
Gwen jumped up from the table and pushed her in the chest, sending her flying across the room. Rachel slammed into the cabinet against the wall and fell. Cups and plates crashed around her and a dirty plate of leftover casserole, the last meal Jon had made for us, landed in her lap.
‘I said he’s gone,’ Gwen yelled. ‘He got sick of you two nagging bastards and fucked off out of here.’
‘That’s not true,’ Rachel screamed right back at her. ‘You were fighting with him. I heard you. He’s gone from you. Not us. And I’m going to go from you. With Jesse. My brother. He will take care of me.’
Gwen bent down and stuck a fist under Rachel’s chin. ‘Your brother? Take a good look at him.’
She pointed a finger at me.
‘He’s only your half-brother. Get it? Half. And his old man was a boong. You get that too, little sister? A drunken no-hoper who left me for dead with a new baby to look after. And your hero brother here, he’ll grow up just like him. So don’t be thinking he’ll look after you when the shit hits the fan. He can’t even look after himself, so don’t get your hopes up.’
Gwen slammed the fist into her own chest and started crying. ‘I’m your mother. Don’t you ever forget it. I take care of you. No one else. And if you play up I can get rid of you anytime. One call to welfare and you’re off. Both of you. Don’t fucken push it.’
She staggered out of the kitchen and slammed the bedroom door behind her.
That night was the first time I’d thought about running away and knew I could really do it. I could easily go and never see Gwen again. But it would mean leaving Rachel behind.
I left her on the floor with the mess, crying to herself, and went out to the yard. I heard the shower turn on in the bathroom and then more door slamming, and a few minutes later, the whine of the rusting front gate. I walked around the side of the house to the front yard. I could smell perfume. I looked around for Gwen but couldn’t see her anywhere.
I sat on the veranda step trying to work out how I might escape for good. Rachel came to the door and looked at me through the flywire.
‘Is it true, Jesse?’ she cried. ‘That we’re only half brother and sister?’
I’d always been good at making up a story, on the spot, to get me out of trouble. But I couldn’t think of one right then, a lie for Rachel when she needed it most.
‘Yeah, it’s true. We’re half brother and sister. So what? I thought you knew anyway. It’s no big deal. We’ve got the good half,’ I laughed.
She opened the door and came out. Her eyes were red where she’d been rubbing the tears away. She stared at me as hard as she could and stuck her hands under her armpits. I noticed she’d put on a clean dress. It was on back-to-front and inside-out.
‘It’s not funny, Jesse,’ she screamed, stamping her foot on the wooden boards. ‘I don’t want us to be half. We have to be whole. Jenny Lee, the girl with the red hair and the freckles and the plaits from school, she told me that if you have half brothers or sisters and your mum and dad split up, you get separated. Forever. She has a little sister she hasn’t seen for ages because her mum and dad had a divorce. It’s because they’re half, she says.’
‘That’s not true. Kids always go with their mum when there’s a split. Anyway, we haven’t got a dad between us, so there’s no divorce to get. I don’t know Jenny Lee, but I’d bet she’s bullshitting, teasing you like that.’
‘Don’t you swear, Jesse. I don’t want you to.’
‘Okay. I won’t. But only if you stop stamping your feet and screaming your head off. You’re worse than Gwen sometimes.’
She stamped her foot again. ‘No, I’m not.’
‘Then don’t act like her.’
She sat next to me. ‘What’s a boong?’
‘A boong?’
‘Yeah. Gwen said your dad was a dirty boong.’
‘It’s an Abo. An Aborigine.’
‘Your dad was an Aborigine? Like out in the bush?’
‘Don’t really know. When I was little, smaller than you, I was always asking Gwen who my dad was, all the time. If she was in a shit mood she’d tell me he was a ‘no-good Abo’. Or sometimes, a Wog. Or a Gypo. All sorts of things. And when she was in a good mood she’d tell me he was a musician, a guitar player, someone famous from a rock band she’d met at a pub she was working at. She couldn’t name him, she said, because of the scandal it would make. I dunno which story was true. Maybe none of them.’
She frowned. ‘What’s a Gypo?’
‘Maybe like a gypsy. Or an Egyptian. Not sure.’
‘Is that why your skin is browner than mine is? And your hair is curly and mine is straight? Cause of what your dad is?’
‘I suppose so. But I don’t care. You’re my sister. All I got.’
‘I want to know who my daddy is.’
‘Well, you’ll have to ask her. I dunno. I swear.’
‘I did ask her, one time, but she got angry with me too. Tell me, Jesse.’
‘I really don’t know, I can’t tell you anything. That’s the truth, I swear.’
She made fists and banged them against the top of her legs until they turned as red as her face. I grabbed hold of her again and tried to stop her.
‘Don’t do that. You’ll hurt yourself.’
‘I want to. I hate Gwen. I hate her.’
‘I hate her too. But you don’t see me belting myself up. Stop it.’
She might have hated Gwen, sometimes, but it didn’t stop Rachel fretting for her whenever she left us alone for too long. No matter how bad she treated Rachel, all Gwen had to do was put out her arms, pout her lips and ask for a hug. Rachel would run to her without thinking twice.
She wouldn’t stop her screaming. I had to do something to shut her up. When I tried dragging her into the house she pulled against me.
‘Do you want us to be whole or not?’ I asked.
‘Whole?’
‘Do you want to be my full sister? Me your full brother?’
She dropped her head. ‘Course.’
‘Good. Shut up then and come with me.’
I marched her into the house and told her to sit at the table while I went through the cupboard drawers, looking for a knife. Because we moved around so much we didn’t keep stuff of our own. Just a few cups and plates, a couple of pots and knives and forks. Jon had said it was a miracle he could cook at all with the stuff we had.
I couldn’t find a sharp knife in the kitchen, so I took Gwen’s razor from the bathroom and smashed it under a leg of a chair by jumping on the seat. Bits of plastic flew across the kitchen floor and the blade came away in one piece.
With the razor in one hand I held my thumb over the sink and sliced across the top of it. I cut myself deeper than I should have and it hurt like hell. I watched the blood as it ran down the inside of my thumb, across my palm and down my arm. Spots of blood, big as raindrops, splashed onto the lino floor. Rachel was holding onto her chair as tight as she could.
‘Come on. Now it’s your turn.’
She looked down at the spots of blood. ‘Nope. It’s not my turn, cause I’m not doing it. You’re like Gwen. You’re being crazy, Jesse.’
‘No I’m not. We’re gonna be whole. You said that’s what you wanted.’
She shook her head and wouldn’t move. I showed her the bloodied blade, which was maybe a bad idea.
‘Come on, I said. I’m losing all my own blood here while I’m waiting. Do you want to be whole or not? You’re the one who was crying over what Gwen said, not me. I don’t even care. Now, come on,’ I said, a little more quietly.
She got slowly to her feet, but refused to come closer to the sink. She couldn’t take her eyes off my bloodied thumb.
‘I don’t want to.’
‘Rachel. I promise, if we do this we can never be separated, by anyone.’
‘But Gwen said she can tell the welfare people.’
‘Don’t listen to her. If she called welfare she’d be the one in big trouble. They’d probably lock her up. And she knows it. She won’t be calling anyone. Now, give me your thumb.’
‘I have to go to the toilet first.’
‘No. The toilet can wait until we’ve done this.’
‘Will it hurt?’ She pointed at my thumb. ‘I bet it hurt you?’
My thumb was throbbing with pain.
‘No, it doesn’t hurt if you do it quick. I can’t feel anything. Now come here.’
She took a step towards me and held out her hand. She squeezed her eyes closed, opened them again and looked at the blade. Her hand was shaking as I took it in mine.
‘Look away, Rachel. Over at the TV.’
She looked at the telly, through the kitchen door and on the other side of the lounge.
‘It’s off.’
‘Well, pretend it’s on. Or look out the window. Now.’
I wrapped my hand around her wrist, held on as tight as I could and nicked the tip of her thumb with the blade. She didn’t cry at all. She let out a yelp like a puppy that had had its tail trod on. I pressed my thumb to hers and we watched as our blood ran together.
‘How does it work?’ she asked. ‘If only half our blood is the same how does this make us whole?’
‘It works like a ritual. An American Indian ritual. I saw it on TV.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It’s a powerful spell and it can’t be broken. Not by anyone.’
‘A spell,’ she repeated a couple of times.
‘Yep. And we have the same blood in our bodies now.’
‘Didn’t we always have our blood together? Some of it?’
‘Yeah. But not like this. Not in the ritual. That’s where the magic comes from.’
She drew her thumb away, looked at her cut and then at mine.
‘Your cut is bigger,’ she said, as she turned her thumb to mine. A lid of skin moved up and down on the top of my thumb as she pressed against it.
‘Your blood colour is darker too. What’s that mean?’
‘Nothing. When you mix them together they’re the same. Half and half make one. That’s all that matters.’
‘It’s sticky,’ she said, laughing. ‘Our thumbs are stuck together.’
She jammed her thumb in her mouth and sucked hard. I couldn’t make out what she said next.
‘Take your thumb out of your gob.’
She had smudges of blood across both cheeks.
‘I’m your magic sister,’ she said, smiling.
TWO
I really missed Jon. Rachel didn’t talk about him much at all, but she was as miserable as I was. She moped around the farmhouse with her head down and didn’t know what to do with herself. Getting her to go to school was hard. She lost the friends she’d made on account of Jon, and was off on her own again.
If Gwen was disappointed that Jon had gone, it didn’t show. She was drinking more but that was no surprise. She always hit it harder after a break-up. A couple of weeks after he left the police turned up at the gate with a warrant for his arrest. After they’d had a good snoop around to see if he was hiding somewhere in the house, one of the coppers slapped a card down on the kitchen table and told Gwen it would be ‘in her best interest’ to get in touch with them if Jon showed up.
‘We have a series of violent robberies that we need to question him over. Your boyfriend held a weapon to a young lady’s throat. These kids are not safe with him around. He’s a bad man.’
‘You don’t have to tell me,’ Gwen agreed. ‘And he’s not my boyfriend. Shouldn’t have let him near the kids in the first place. I feel sick just thinking about it.’
Gwen’s boss, Larry, started stopping off for a drink when he dropped her home after work. His car would roar off in the middle of the night, sometimes later, when he stayed until the sun was up.
I woke one Sunday morning to the sounds of shouting and swearing outside my window. I got out of bed and lifted the blind. A woman was standing on the gravel pathway wearing skin-tight jeans, white boots and a black top that had sparkles on the front. She was waving her arms around and screaming at Larry. He was barefoot and smoking a cigar, wearing only a shiny pair of black suit pants with the fly undone. He had a gut like a pregnant lady.
Larry’s car, a hotted up red ute with chromed wheels, was parked in the driveway. I picked up the words ‘Gwen’ and ‘slut’ in the one sentence before the woman picked up a handful of gravel and threw it against the side of the house. She kicked some more gravel at Larry, rushed at him and thumped him so hard in the chest he fell backwards, onto his arse. She stood over him, spat in his face then marched off to a small yellow car parked out the front. She screeched off down the road, one arm out of the window, giving him the rude finger.
For a moment Larry lay on his back looking up at the morning sky, scratched his belly and took a puff of his cigar. He stood up, dusted himself down and walked back to the house. I closed the blind and listened to the muffled talk between him and Gwen, and then a few minutes later I heard him drive off too.
Gwen lay low in her room all that morning and left for work at the usual time in the afternoon, without a word to Rachel or me. We were surprised to see her back within a couple of hours, fuming. She said as soon as she walked into The Road Train, Larry sacked her ‘on-the-fucken-spot, with no pay’.
She took a bowl of noodles into her room and slammed the door behind her. I made some toast and vegemite for us then put Rachel to bed and told her stories until she fell asleep. I was asleep myself later that night when our door crashed open and Gwen came into the room and shook me awake.
