Blood

by Tony Birch

  ‘No. I just want to take care of my sister and get her home.’

  He offered his hand. ‘Well, that’s a good thing to do.’

  We shook hands. ‘How old are you, Jesse?’

  ‘Thirteen. Be fourteen in a couple of weeks.’

  ‘Well, you’d have to be the oldest thirteen-year-old on the planet. Your sister’s in good hands. If you’re ever back this way, look us up. You’d be welcome to stay.’

  Rachel came out of the house carrying a large piece of cake in each hand and a cloth bag full of apples dangling from her wrist. She handed me a piece of cake.

  ‘It’s banana.’

  When she said goodbye to Sharon, Rachel put her arms around her waist, squeezed tight and held on for as long as she could.

  We ate two apples each as we walked along the road to the channel. We passed more roadkill, a bird, some rabbits, and maybe a wild dog, although I didn’t look too close to see what it was.

  ‘Hey, Jesse. What did you think of those people?’

  ‘They were okay. He was a real help, that Pete.’

  ‘She was nice too. And pretty. She smelled like soap.’

  Rachel patted her braids. ‘Do you like my hair?’

  I didn’t think much of it but told her she looked pretty anyway.

  ‘Jesse, do you think there’s a lot of people like Pete and Sharon? Nice people?’

  I hadn’t met a lot of nice people over the years. They weren’t the kind of people that Gwen hung out with.

  ‘Not too many like them, I don’t think.’

  In the channel a stream of water moved slowly in a straight line for as far as I could see. Weeds grew out of cracks in the concrete and the bottom was slimy and smelled bad. Walking along the bottom we couldn’t see the land above us, which meant that nobody could see us either.

  ‘We’ll have to move fast, Rache. I don’t want to be left out here in the dark. You can’t get tired and slow us down. We’ll rest when we get to Pop’s.’

  We walked for a long time without seeming to get anywhere. The sun was low on our backs. We only stopped when we needed a drink of water or felt like another apple. I could see a bridge crossing the channel up ahead. It was a long way off and gave me something to aim for. I felt better when it got a little bigger. When we reached it we shared the last mouthfuls of our last bottle of water. I should have asked Pete for a refill. I could smell shit and mud. I looked up at the underside of the wooden slats on the bridge. Bits of grass, dried mud and shit were caught in the cracks.

  ‘Must be a cattle bridge. Or for sheep.’

  Rachel rested against the concrete wall, held the bottle above her head and caught the last drops of water. She looked exhausted. So was I but I didn’t reckon it would help letting on.

  ‘We can’t stop, Rache. If you give up now we’ll never get back. Remember to be strong. Like Scout, in the movie.’

  ‘I’m not stopping. I’m doing the same as you’re doing. Having a drink of water. I can make it just as good as you. And I don’t need to be like Scout. I’m just me. Rachel. And I can walk as far as you can.’

  She didn’t look like she could take another step. I hoped like hell I was wrong.

  I slipped the pack off, dug out the last two apples and handed her one. I was sweaty and hot. I took off my t-shirt and tucked it into the front of my jeans. As I was putting the pack back on, Rachel tapped me on the shoulder.

  ‘Those scars you have there, did you really get them from cigarette burns?’

  ‘Of course I did. You know the story.’

  ‘And you got them when you were in the foster home that time?’

  ‘Who cares? It doesn’t matter now.’

  ‘I care. What if we go to Pop’s house and he can’t look after us? Last time he said he might not be able to keep us for good. If Gwen doesn’t come back, then we’ll be put in homes. Like you were that time.’

  She touched the scar. ‘I don’t want that happening to me. Getting burnt. I’ll run away first. It’s scary, Jesse. And it’s sad. When you were telling Jon the story that time, I wanted to cry.’

  ‘But you’d heard it plenty of times before. I thought you liked hearing it.’

  ‘I know. But it was more real when I heard you telling somebody else.’

  We’d only walked on for another few minutes before I stopped again.

  ‘I want to tell you something, Rachel. It didn’t happen in the foster home. These burns. Well, I mean, it did. But the woman who ran the home, Claire, there was nothing wrong with her. She was nice. Just like those people back there we just met. She didn’t do it.’

  ‘You’re just saying that to make me feel better, in case we get put away.’

  ‘No, I’m not. The story’s not true.’

  ‘Why would you make up a scary story like that?’

  I felt ashamed for lying to Rachel and for causing trouble for the lady who’d taken all those kids into her home. I sat down, hugged my knees and put my head down. Rachel sat next to me and wrapped her arms around my leg.

  ‘Who did it then? Somebody must have hurt you.’

  ‘I did it myself. I put the burns there.’

  ‘You did? Why would you hurt yourself like that?’

  I looked down at the water flowing under my feet. I could see tadpoles swimming and a grasshopper hitching a ride on a leaf. I pushed her arms away and got to my feet.

  ‘Let’s go. We have to beat the sun and get to the end before dark.’

  ‘Why’d you do that to yourself, Jesse? I wanna know.’

  ‘Now? Do you have to know now?’

  ‘Right now.’

  ‘Then we’ll go?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Because of you. I didn’t know where you were, and I got frightened.’

  ‘For me? You hurt yourself for me?’

  ‘No. For both of us.’

  She touched the scar again. ‘I’m sorry you had to do that.’

  ‘Well, don’t you be.’

  ‘One day, I’ll pay you back, Jesse. If you get in trouble, I’ll pay you back.’

  ‘You won’t have to. Nothing bad is gonna happen to me, or you, again. We’ve got this money. It’ll get us out of trouble.’

  I noticed a flame in the distance, low in the sky above the channel. It glowed red and licked the sky around it. Rachel also spotted the flame.

  ‘Is that a fire?’

  ‘Pete said the channel ended where the oil refineries begin. It must be a fire from one of their chimneys.’

  ‘How far away do you think it is?’

  It still looked a long way off.

  ‘Oh, I don’t think it’s too far.’

  ‘You’re lying to me, to make me feel better.’

  I smiled as I thought that she’d finally worked me out.

  We began passing graffiti tags scrawled on the channel walls. Pretty soon both sides were covered in them. Some of the drawings were as beautiful as paintings. Different colours, shapes and swirls. There were messages too, like ‘Hoppers Hoods Are Fucked Up’.

  Rubbish had been dumped and washed along the channel, mostly bits of scrap wood and sheets of tin. We passed a shopping trolley, lying on its side. It was packed tight with soft drink cans, bottles, plastic bags, and leaves and twigs.

  Rachel pointed. ‘That looks like a fish net, sort of.’

  ‘Yeah, a net for picking up all the shit people don’t want.’

  A car wreck sat in the middle of the channel up ahead of us. Its wheels were missing, the windows were smashed in, and it was covered in more graffiti. Rachel had fallen behind. When I called her she ran after me and tapped me on the shoulder.

  ‘See those boys?’ She pointed.

  Three teenage boys, maybe a little old
er that me, were walking along the edge of the channel, tracking us. They were wearing the same uniform: long hair, checked flannelette shirts and big shorts. They had skateboards tucked under their arms.

  ‘How long have they been following us?’

  ‘I don’t know. For a little bit.’

  ‘You could have told me.’

  The boys ran along the top of the channel, single file, until they were ahead of us. The lead boy, who had long dark hair almost to his waist, leaped into the air, hitched the skateboard under his black gym shoes and dropped onto the wall. The other boys followed. They skated through the stream in the bottom of the channel and rode the wall back to the top.

  They stayed ahead of us, skating from side to side, until we’d reached another bridge. The boys hung over the rail and waited for us to pass underneath. When we came out the other side they ran on again and zigzagged across the stream on their boards. They looked like water skiers as they passed through the stream.

  They turned to face us. Two of the boys sat on their skateboards and the other one, the boy with the longest hair, walked forward with his skateboard under his arm. I had about fifty dollars in my pocket, nineteen hundred in my underpants and thousands in my backpack. I didn’t want any trouble from them. But they didn’t look too tough and didn’t scare me at all.

  ‘Where you walking from?’ the boy asked, in a high-pitched voice.

  ‘It’s a girl, I think,’ Rachel whispered.

  I looked closer. It was a girl. They weren’t big, but I could see that she had breasts under her shirt.

  ‘That way.’ I pointed back upstream.

  ‘There’s not much out there. And where you going?’

  I pointed to the flaming chimney in the sky. ‘We’re heading for that. We have to catch the train to the city. Is it far?’

  ‘Not as far as you’ve come.’

  She reached into her pocket and pulled out a packet of cigarettes. ‘You want a smoke?’

  ‘Na. We gotta go.’

  She spotted Rachel wiping her dry mouth. She called out to one of the other skaters: ‘Sonny, get up here with the water.’

  She hopped on her skateboard, pushed it gently forward and glided over to Rachel.

  ‘You look thirsty. Sonny, my brother, he’s the water carrier.’

  Sonny pulled up on his skateboard and lifted his flannelette shirt. He was wearing a belt, made of a bicycle tube and the feet of old pantyhose. The belt held four bottles of water. The girl took one of the bottles and gave it to Rachel.

  Rachel ripped off the bottle top and took a long drink. I reckoned she should have sniffed it first, in case they’d pissed in it, or something. The girl nodded to me.

  ‘Good luck getting home.’

  She jumped on her board and skated off in the direction we’d come from. Rachel passed me the water.

  ‘She liked you.’

  ‘You always say that stuff, Rache. She hardly said a word to me.’

  ‘She was looking. I saw her. Girls have a good look before they talk. That’s what they do.’

  ‘How would you know? You’re just a kid.’

  ‘I just do.’

  A little further on the channel broke to the left. We turned a corner and found ourselves in a wide concrete bowl. The water had completely drained from the bottom. The eyes of a pair of stormwater drains, big enough to walk in, stared back at us. It was almost dark and we’d reached the end. We climbed a concrete ramp to the world above, and found row after row of steel chimneys with flaming heads, shining fat metal tanks and towers decorated in fairy lights.

  ‘Wow. Look at this, Jesse. Where are we?’ Rachel was gushing. It was as if we’d finally made it to Disneyland.

  ‘The refineries, I suppose.’

  We headed along a road with high razor-wire fences and oil refineries on each side. I wasn’t sure we were heading the right way until I heard the railway bells, saw the boom gates come down and a train pass by up ahead.

  Rachel stopped to get a stone out of her shoe. When she sat down in the gutter to put it back on, I could see that she didn’t want to move.

  ‘It’s not far now, Rache. If you’re finding it hard, that’s okay. You can say so. I’m finding it hard too. If you need to, I’ll piggyback you the rest of the way.’

  She tied her lace and stood up. ‘I don’t need a piggyback. I’m gonna get there on my own.’

  The train station was deserted. We had plenty of money to buy tickets but the machine was broken. It looked like it had been hit with a sledgehammer. I ran my finger down the timetable. The trains ran every forty minutes.

  ‘How long will it be?’ Rachel asked.

  ‘There’s no clock here. All I can tell you is that it should be here in less than forty minutes.’

  Rachel sat down, lay back and ate the last bit of her apple. It was saying something, but I’d never seen her looking so filthy. Her arms and legs were black with dirt. There was more dirt, mixed with my blood, on her singlet, and her face was smeared with food scraps.

  I walked from one end of the platform to the other as we waited for the train to come. I stood on the end of the platform and looked back at the oil refineries. The sun was about to sink. It was blood red, as if it was on fire too. The flames from the chimneys in front of the sun looked like the candles on a giant birthday cake.

  I could hear a train coming. The bells rang out again and the boom gates came down. I walked back to Rachel.

  ‘This is it. We’re nearly there.’

  We fell asleep on the train and missed our stop at Flinders Street. The train whistle woke me and we jumped off at Southern Cross just before the train headed back to where we had come from. I found the ticket window and told the attendant that we had to get to Epping.

  ‘Not tonight, you won’t be. The last train on the Epping line has just left. You’ll have to wait until the morning.’ He pulled the blind down and stuck a ‘CLOSED’ sign in the window.

  I slid down the wall and collapsed on the ground. I didn’t know what to do next. All I wanted was sleep. I thought Rachel would burst into tears, hearing that we’d missed our train, but she had something else on her mind.

  ‘Jesse, can you see that hamburger place over there, on the corner, we should go in there and eat. Come on. Get up, please. I bet you’re hungry. I am.’

  We ordered everything we thought we might want from the menu: hamburgers, chips, thickshakes, soft drinks and apple turnovers. We carried our trays to a booth in the corner, and sat and ate as people came and went. Most of them were drunks. They took their food outside and stood on the footpath smoking and drinking beer. Rachel burped real loud and wiped her mouth with a napkin.

  ‘I didn’t know I could eat three hamburgers until now. Do you think it might be a world record for a girl, Jesse? You’re the tor champion and I’m the girls’ hamburger champion.’

  ‘Wouldn’t bet on it. Have you seen some of them fat kids on TV, in America? I reckon some of them could eat ten hamburgers – with the lot. Maybe more. I saw a show once about a whole family of fat people, the mum and dad and three kids. And their dog, which was so fat it couldn’t walk and had to shit where it lay. The boy in the family, he had two fat sisters who were twins. He was so fat himself he couldn’t find any clothes that would fit him without splitting down the middle, so he went round in this dressing gown that belonged to his fat dad. He couldn’t hardly tie it up in the front.’

  Rachel drained the last of her soft drink. ‘Was he allowed to go to school with just the dressing gown on?’

  ‘Nup, he wasn’t. Because he couldn’t do it up properly his dick kept hanging out and frightening the girls, it was so fat.’

  She caught me smiling. ‘Is this one of the stories you make up?’

  ‘Could be.’

  Rachel as
ked if we could have one more go at the tarot cards.

  ‘No, we can’t. Look at the trouble they got us into climbing the silo. Nearly got us killed.’

  ‘But we got out didn’t we? And we didn’t get caught. What about if we didn’t climb up the tower, Jesse? Ray and Limbo would have seen us on the road and caught us. That card gave us luck. I want to do one more. For our future.’

  I hadn’t thought about it that way. She was right, sort of. The card had saved us.

  ‘Okay. Last one. But then, we’re giving the cards away for good.’

  She took the pack out of her pocket and handed it to me.

  ‘You shuffle and I’ll pick.’

  I shuffled the cards and fanned them. She picked one and held it out for both of us to see. It was ‘Strength’ and had a picture of a girl with flowers in her hair walking with a lion.

  ‘Who is it, Jesse?’

  ‘It’s a girl. It must be you.’

  She looked into the girl’s face.

  ‘Wow.’

  I could hardly believe how bad I looked when I saw myself in the mirror in the toilets. My face was black and swollen and the cut over my eye had bits of gravel in it. I washed up in the sink and wet my hair. I didn’t look much better when I’d finished. I shifted the roll of hundreds from my underpants to my pocket and walked outside. Rachel had gone to the toilet too, but hadn’t bothered trying to clean herself up at all. Comfort was dripping wet, though.

  ‘I stuck him under the tap and cleaned him,’ she explained. ‘I’m waiting till I get to Pop’s to have a bath. Can you put him in the backpack? I’m tired of carrying him.’

  ‘He stinks.’

  ‘And so do you, Jesse.’

  We walked outside and saw a sign pointing to a taxi rank across the street. It was empty. I asked a man in a railway uniform where we could catch one.

  He looked at me, then at Rachel. I think he was wondering where our parents might be.

  ‘A taxi? Well, this time of night your best bet is outside the casino.’

  We headed down the hill, in the direction he’d pointed. I took the roll of money out of my underpants and stuck it in my pocket. We crossed the street at the bottom of the hill and stopped on a bridge that crossed the river. Our side of the river was dark and quiet. The other side was lined with tall buildings, all lit up, and lots of people and noise. It had to be the casino. Loud music was playing and people were clapping and cheering. A couple of taxis went by, and I stood on the road and waved to them. They didn’t stop. One had people in it, but the other one was empty.