Anna ran towards them as Charlie dragged Claudy down to the ground by her hair and shoved her hard, then ran off into the trees. Claudy curled on the ground at Anna’s feet, weeping, her hands pressed on either side of her head.
Anna knelt. ‘Claudy.’
The girl looked up at Anna, a line of blood on her cheek. Macky put his thin brown arms around his sister and she burst into fresh sobs.
‘I didn’t do anything,’ she said. Macky whispered something into her hair.
Anna hurried after Charlie, who sat on a fallen tree fifty metres away.
‘What happened?’ said Anna as she approached.
‘It was my turn.’ Charlie’s voice was hard and she breathed shakily.
‘You hurt her.’ Anna tried to dampen the anger in her voice. ‘You really hurt her. What were you thinking?’
From the corner of her eye, she saw Macky help Claudy up and walk her towards the creek. Anna should go and comfort them, apologise. She was meant to be the adult.
Charlie exploded. ‘Fuck off!’
Anna felt a rush of fury to her head. She shouted, ‘Don’t you dare talk to me like that! Don’t talk to me like that and don’t ever hurt Claudy again. She’s not going to want to play with you now.’
Charlie glared back at her, her face red. ‘It was my turn.’
‘But you don’t hit, Charlie! You just don’t!’
She was overreacting. Stop, Anna. She lowered her voice but it was still sharp. ‘You never hurt someone.’
Charlie said, very softly, ‘Fuck off.’
Anna spun around and walked away from the girl. She wanted to scream, How dare you? How dare you, after all I’ve done for you?!
She heard a small noise behind her and turned to see Charlie weeping. Anna sighed and crossed to sit beside her. She put her arm around the girl but Charlie shuffled out of reach. Anna didn’t know if she should try to comfort her or leave her alone. She had absolutely no idea what a girl like this needed. And there was no one to ask. She shouldn’t have yelled. She was barely better than Gabby and Harlan.
Over at the creek, Claudy was involved in some game with the others, but Anna sensed a cold shoulder from them. Charlie had unreasonably wounded one of their own. After a few minutes, they drifted downstream, out of sight. Anna could barely hear their voices over the burble of the water.
Anna shouldn’t be surprised that Charlie would be so savage with Claudy. Someone had likely done the same thing to Charlie before. Would she always carry the neglect and violence in her? If it was impossible to scrub away altogether, was it also too late to be layered over with good experiences? What a fantasy to think that a bit of time away from the violence would heal years of trauma.
Anna knew she was out of her depth. All she could do was love Charlie and help her feel safe. For now.
‘I’m sorry for shouting, Charlie.’
The girl gave a small shrug. Anna retrieved a towel from near the fire and draped it around Charlie’s shoulders. Anna wondered if Charlie was also listening to the kids going further away.
‘Let’s go back to the fire,’ she said. Charlie walked behind her and sat on the log that Macky had used at lunchtime.
Anna added a couple of sticks to the fire. ‘Do you want some of Beatie’s lemon cake?’
Charlie nodded. Anna cut her a slice; the cake was moist and flecked with poppyseeds.
The tea had been stewing away in the billy and would be bitter but Anna needed caffeine.
‘I’m just going to get the milk from the creek,’ she said. She retrieved the small jar of milk wedged between two roots, and glanced downstream. The big pool was empty. The kids were gone. They’d left a few of pieces of crumpled clothing on the sandy bank.
Back at the fire, Charlie sat with the towel around her shoulders, eating another slice of cake.
‘Would you like a game of noughts and crosses?’ Anna asked. They played it at the cottage in the evenings. Charlie shrugged, but picked up a stick and drew a grid in the sand, and shoved the last of the cake into her mouth.
They played game after game in silence. The sun slanted through the trees, turning the light hazy. Anna felt another wave of remorse for shouting at the girl. In the moment, standing over Charlie, she’d felt so righteous in her anger, so justified in yelling. The imbalance in any adult–child relationship was impossible to ignore. As a child, Anna had been powerless to question her father’s refusal to talk about her mother. She was in no position to challenge him. He was all she had. Anna was all Charlie had.
It was time to head back up the hill but Anna waited a bit longer, hoping the kids would return.
Finally, she tipped the dregs of her tea onto the sand.
‘Let’s go.’
Charlie used her foot to rub out their last game of noughts and crosses while Anna knelt by the fire and spread out the coals. She filled the billy with creek water and stood for a moment, watching the water sliding over the rocks, the silent eddies in the big pool. In the waning light, the smoky haze over the waterhole looked especially ghostly.
She poured the billy of water over the fire, releasing clouds of steam.
‘Alright. Let’s go home and make some dinner.’
Charlie stood up and said, ‘It’s not home.’
Chapter Thirty
On Christmas Day they went to Pat and Sabine’s for lunch. Pat gave Charlie two more wooden dolls and she dressed them in the tiny clothes Anna had sewn by candlelight. They played quoits on the lawn, and Anna drank Sabine’s beer and carved the roast chicken. She tried not to think of her dad and aunty and cousins who’d all be sitting around the long table on Lorraine’s back porch. She knew Dave was going to his ex-wife’s house for lunch. She wondered if he’d thought of Anna on Christmas Day, or had she already drifted to the back of his mind? She’d been gone half as long as they’d been together.
They played quoits, with Sabine keeping score from her chair in the shade. She drank iced water and every so often put her hand on her belly and said that she was convinced the baby would come early.
Pat hadn’t mentioned Beatie knowing, so either she hadn’t told him yet or he’d decided to ride it out. He agreed to lend Anna money for a laptop and said he knew someone who sold second-hand Apple Macintoshes. Anna had begun to imagine living there long term. It would be a strange life but better than the alternative: leaving Charlie at the mercy of a system that had failed to protect her.
Just as they were leaving Pat’s, the phone rang. It was Anna’s dad. He was ringing from Lorraine’s – Anna could hear her family’s chatter in the background – and only spoke for a minute. ‘Happy Christmas, darling. I love you.’
•
They continued spending every day down at the creek. The kids had appeared the day after the hair-pulling incident as if nothing had happened. Macky finished the li-lo launch pad and for a few weeks, the kids rode the rapids every day, timing themselves with an old stopwatch. Ralph the dog started turning up every few mornings and hanging around, lolling by the creek and letting the kids scratch her belly. Then the dog would just disappear, suddenly trotting off, ears pricked, as if she’d heard Michael calling her.
When the rains came in February, and the creek breached its banks, Anna stopped the kids going in. They stood under the trees and watched the water surging around the boulders. Then the rain set in. ‘It’s the wet!’ grinned Macky.
Anna and Charlie stayed at the cottage, reading books, playing with the dolls and waiting for the rain to stop. Beatie’s kids visited every few days and brought Monopoly with them. Anna spent the evenings planning the portfolio she’d put together once she got the laptop.
•
The first sunny morning, Anna sat Charlie on the front doorstep and slowly detangled her hair. Anna used her fingers, extricating a few fine hairs at a time from each spectacular knot. She discovered that every knot had formed itself around a fragment of leaf or fluff. She passed the tiny mementos to Charlie, who lined them up on the door sill be
side her.
The last knot was impossible to untangle. Anna would ask Beatie for some conditioner. She’d taken to going over to Beatie’s a couple of afternoons a week and having a glass of wine with Beatie and Will on the verandah while the kids played. Anna had dropped the idea of finding a home in another valley. She couldn’t take Charlie away from the kids, who had become so central to her world. Charlie talked about them all the time, recounting their games in blow-by-blow detail. Quite often, Anna and Charlie had an early dinner at Beatie’s, then wandered home through the forest twilight.
Anna sometimes had the feeling that she’d stepped into a parallel universe, a life she might have had if she and Pat had stuck it out.
She finished combing Charlie’s hair and gathered it into a stubby topknot. ‘Shall we go down to the creek now?
Charlie shook her head. Her voice was quiet. ‘I want to lie down.’
She lay on the mattress, her cheeks flushed and forehead hot under Anna’s hand.
‘How are you feeling?’
‘Yucky. Do you think Ralph might come?’
‘I don’t know. That would be nice, wouldn’t it? Here, drink some water.’
Charlie slept on her side, knees drawn up, while Anna washed the dishes and swept the floor. Sleep was the best cure, she figured. She felt Charlie’s forehead again. She was hotter.
‘Here, sit up and drink some more.’ She fanned Charlie with a book.
Charlie took a sleepy sip and fell back onto the pillow. She slept for another couple of hours and Anna wondered if she should wake her. She had no idea how to look after a sick child. They could get sicker faster, surely, since their bodies were small?
She kept fanning Charlie with the book and hummed a lullaby her aunt used to sing. But she couldn’t remember the whole tune, so she hummed the same refrain over and over, the book making a rhythmic, shushing noise.
Did her mother take care of her when she was sick? By shutting down her longing for her mother, might she also have shut down memories? But how could Anna have kept going if she’d let herself feel how much she missed her, how much she wanted her there every day? It would have paralysed her.
Charlie spoke much less of her mother now. Did Charlie sense that Anna preferred her not to talk about Gabby? Just as Anna had known to not talk about her mother?
Late in the afternoon, Charlie moaned and rolled over. Anna helped her sit up.
‘Have another drink, Charlie.’
The sheets were warm and damp with sweat. Anna shifted her to the dry side of the bed and unpegged clean sheets from the clothesline. She came back in to find Charlie vomiting over the side of the mattress. She wiped the girl’s mouth with a washer and covered the vomit with a towel. Charlie flopped back onto the pillow. Anna felt her forehead. So hot.
Anna crushed up half a Panadol and put it in Charlie’s mouth. ‘Drink it down.’
The little girl’s eyes opened wide as she swallowed. A minute later she vomited.
Anna wiped up the vomit. Don’t panic. Don’t panic.
What if Charlie was really sick? They were in the middle of bloody nowhere with no phone. Was it something Anna had done? Or not done? Creek water. Papaya. Something. It was all very well to pretend to be Charlie’s mother when the girl was healthy. A real mother wouldn’t let a child get sick like this.
Charlie lay back and started shuffling her legs about. ‘I’m cold,’ she said and shivered. Anna pulled the sheet and cotton blanket up.
‘Anna. Anna. It hurts.’ Charlie clutched at the blanket.
‘I’m here. What hurts, sweetie?’
‘My head. Owww. Owww.’
She rolled over to retch onto the pillow, her whole body shivering.
•
Anna carried Charlie down the hill. It was dusk and sections of the path were so dark she could hardly see her way. She had to rest every few minutes, and sink down onto the path, the girl in her arms. Charlie retched over Anna’s shoulder, the warm liquid running down Anna’s back.
‘It’s alright, sweetie. We’ll be at Pat’s soon.’
•
She climbed the verandah steps and Pat opened the door. ‘Here, on the couch,’ he said. ‘What is it?’ His hair was wet and he wore a sarong and t-shirt.
‘She’s vomiting and has a fever. I don’t know what to do.’ Anna lowered her onto the couch.
Charlie retched again, that terrible sound, and Anna caught the strand of yellow bile in her cupped hands.
‘How long’s she been vomiting?’ Pat laid a towel under Charlie’s head as Anna soaped her hands at the sink.
‘Half an hour. She’s had a fever since this morning.’
Charlie curled up and moaned.
‘Why don’t I call Beatie?’ said Pat.
Sabine called from the bedroom, ‘Phone Jo.’ She appeared in the doorway in her dressing gown.
‘No!’ said Anna. Not Jo. Then she’d know they were still there.
‘She’s a nurse,’ said Pat.
‘Okay.’
Pat disappeared into the bedroom to get the phone. Anna wet a tea-towel and wiped Charlie’s face. The girl’s skin was pasty and her mouth slack. Sabine sat at the end of the couch and stroked Charlie’s foot.
•
Jo pulled up half an hour later, a black bag in her hand. She knelt on floor beside the couch and laid a hand on Charlie’s forehead.
‘How long has she had the fever?’ She pulled an electronic thermometer from her bag.
‘Since about nine this morning. And she’s got a headache.’
‘Hi Charlie, I’m Jo. Where does your head hurt?’
Charlie didn’t open her eyes, and flopped her hand at her forehead.
‘I’m just going to take your temperature.’ Jo held the thermometer in Charlie’s ear until it beeped. Jo glanced at it and pinched the skin on the back of Charlie’s hand.
Charlie retched and Jo used the towel to wipe drool from the girl’s chin.
‘Here.’ Anna took the soiled towel and gave Jo a new one from the pile Pat had given her.
Charlie looked up at Anna, unblinking.
‘Anna,’ she whispered.
Anna stroked her forehead. Her skin was so hot and dry. ‘I’m here, I’m right here.’
Jo rolled the girl to look at her back and said, ‘When did she last do a wee?’
‘Umm . . . just before nine this morning, I guess.’
Jo sat back on her heels and ran a hand down her face. ‘Well, if it were me . . . if Charlie were my child,’ she looked meaningfully at Anna, ‘I’d be taking her to the hospital.’
‘Really?’ The hospital.
They’d be discovered. Anna looked over to Pat, who leant against the kitchen bench. He gave a small frown and glanced at Sabine.
Jo slid the thermometer back into her bag and zipped it up.
‘She’s got a fever of nearly forty. She’s dehydrated. She’s vomiting. She has a headache.’ Jo shrugged. ‘You can watch and wait, but if it’s something like meningococcal, and her symptoms do tick some meningococcal boxes, you do not want to wait around. I’d be on my way to hospital now.’
Anna’s mouth was dry. She knew how it worked at a hospital. You had to give ID, a Medicare card. Was it possible Jo was saying this so they’d come to the attention of the authorities?
‘My head hurts,’ Charlie sobbed and covered her eyes.
Anna looked at Pat. ‘Let’s go.’
He nodded, and Anna bent and gathered up Charlie. The girl felt so light and so hot.
Meningococcal. What if Anna had left it too long?
•
It was dark outside. Anna climbed into the front seat of the ute and settled Charlie on her lap. Pat walked to the ute, locked in intense conversation with Sabine.
She grabbed his arm. ‘But of course they will think you are a part of it, Pat! You really could be in trouble.’
He laid his hand over hers. ‘Hey, I’m just driving them down there. You heard Jo, Charlie needs to be i
n hospital. Everything will be fine. I’ll call you.’
Sabine turned back to the house, her voice strangled. ‘I can’t believe you are doing this, Pat.’
Let’s go, let’s go, Anna wanted to scream.
‘I’ll call you.’ Pat climbed in and shut his door.
He drove slowly, steering carefully through the potholes, easing his way around the corners. Anna felt another surge of fear that she had left it too late. The idea of Charlie dying in her arms made her guts turn to water.
‘Can you go faster?’
Pat glanced at her, his face serious in the green light from the dashboard. ‘Not much.’
Finally they reached the sealed road and he accelerated. She held Charlie tight through the bends to stop her flopping from side to side. Anna was not sure if she was asleep or unconscious.
On the outskirts of town, Pat asked, ‘How’s she going?’
‘I don’t know.’ As they passed streetlights she got a better look at Charlie’s face. Her eyes were closed and lips slightly parted. ‘How far’s the hospital?’
‘One or two minutes away.’
They were caught behind a few cars, people coming home late from work or heading out for the evening.
‘If they want her Medicare card,’ said Anna, ‘I’ll say I’ve left my handbag at home and I’ll give them the name and birthday of a child I know in Sydney.’ Emily’s daughter, Chloe.
‘Is that wise? Why not an invented name?’
‘Oh. Do you think that’s better?’ The headlights lit up the blue sign saying Hospital and he turned right.
Pat said, ‘I don’t think you should come in, Anna. I’ll take her. The two of you together would be really recognisable.’
Charlie gripped Anna tightly. She was awake after all.
‘No,’ she moaned. ‘I want Anna.’
Anna swallowed. ‘It’s better if he takes you in, Charlie. I’ll be right here in the car, waiting for you.’ Could he pass himself off as her father? Charlie might give it away.
‘Noooo, I want you. Please, please.’ Charlie burrowed her head into Anna’s stomach. ‘Please. Please.’
There was no way Anna could sit in the car while Charlie was inside that building. If they were caught, Anna needed to be with her.
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