Sydney Bridge Upside Down

by David Ballantyne

  So that was what I was thinking while I followed Dibs and Cal across the rocks. I was thinking Caroline was the most beautiful girl in the world and I didn’t care how often she pointed to my dingdong—and there was nothing wrong with this.

  ‘It’s funny on Saturdays,’ I said, not realising Dibs was so near.

  ‘Eh?’ he said. ‘What’s funny?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said, thinking how close I had been to saying that Saturdays were funny because Dad was home and we couldn’t run around after breakfast. Then I said: ‘It’s funny you kids thinking you’ll find crayfish. You won’t find any here.’

  ‘I know,’ Dibs said. ‘I’m only filling in time. Then I’m going for a swim with Caroline.’

  ‘How do you know she wants to go for a swim?’ I said. ‘She didn’t say she was going for a swim.’

  ‘She’s wearing her togs, isn’t she?’ he said.

  ‘How do you know?’ I said, grabbing his arm.

  ‘I saw them,’ he said. ‘It’s the way she sits, boy.’

  I held his arm, wondering if I should tip him off the rock, if I should give him his swim a bit sooner than he expected. Then I decided he hadn’t said anything cheeky, and I let him go.

  ‘You shouldn’t be looking,’ I told him.

  He laughed. ‘Who’s talking!’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I made my voice fierce.

  ‘I’ve seen you looking,’ he said. ‘I bet she has too.’

  ‘I bet I haven’t looked any more than you,’ I said.

  ‘You get more chances than me,’ he said. ‘Anyhow, she’ll be changing her way of sitting after this. You see.’

  ‘Why?’ I said. I reached for him, but he dodged me and jumped to the next rock.

  ‘Because Mum’s noticed, and I bet that’s what she’s telling her about now,’ Dibs said. ‘Mum notices that kind of thing, she’s always telling my sisters not to show their bloomers. And another thing—she reckons Caroline wears too much lipstick. I heard her saying that the other day.’

  ‘Your mother better watch out,’ I said, jumping to his rock. ‘My father won’t like it if she’s a stickybeak.’

  He was on the next rock before I could grab him. ‘She only gives friendly advice,’ he said. ‘That’s the way women talk. They’re allowed to.’

  Well, he had sisters and I hadn’t, and I guessed he knew what he was talking about, he had seen more naked girls than I ever had, he knew more about them than I did, though I was catching up. It might be best if I made no fuss; I had enough to take care of, what with the danger of Cal or Susan Prosser saying something to cause trouble.

  I looked towards the clearing and saw that Mrs Kelly had moved close to Caroline. Yes, she was very likely talking to her. I hoped she didn’t make Caroline unhappy.

  Dibs was moving on across the rocks. He glanced back at me several times.

  I wouldn’t chase him. I wouldn’t stay on the rocks, either. Cal had gone nearer the shore and would not be in trouble even if he did fall into the sea, so I could move to the beach. I would keep an eye on the clearing, and if I saw Caroline waving or jumping I would know she wanted help. She might even yell out to me. I would race to the clearing if she did.

  ‘Harry!’ shouted Cal.

  I looked back from the beach. He was waving with one hand and pointing to a rock with the other. He had evidently found something, maybe a sea-chest full of silver coins.

  He was too far away. I waved to him, pointed to the dunes and walked towards them. I would sit up there and look at the clearing, and blow Cal and his treasure.

  I heard him calling some more, to Dibs now. I knew Dibs would go to him.

  I paused half-way up a dune. Everything looked peaceful in the clearing.

  It was the same when I looked from the top of the dune. Mrs Kelly and Caroline seemed calm.

  I sat in the sand, glanced towards the works, then downward. And there was Susan Prosser. She was in the hollow on the other side of the dune, only about ten yards away, and she was looking up at me. She was wearing a pink frock; on the sand beside her were three books.

  Seeing her there gave me a fright. I wanted, the moment after I saw her, to dive back to the beach. I might have done so if she had not been looking at me.

  I grinned as I walked towards her. ‘Doing some studying?’ I asked. ‘You must be keen—studying on Saturday.’

  ‘I’m not really studying,’ she said, looking at me suspiciously. ‘I’m really sunbathing.’

  I squatted on the sand, decided against saying it was a good idea to wear togs for sunbathing. Better to be friendly. I said: ‘You could have come to our picnic. We’ve been here for hours.’

  ‘I knew about the picnic,’ she said. ‘Mrs Kelly invited me.’

  ‘You should have come,’ I said. ‘We’ve been having fun.’

  ‘Naturally,’ she said. That had a nasty sound.

  ‘Naturally what?’ I said.

  ‘You’re always having fun,’ she said.

  ‘It’s the holidays, isn’t it?’ I said.

  ‘You don’t save your fun for the holidays,’ she said.

  ‘Better than studying and being gloomy all the time,’ I said, knowing I would soon be very angry if I didn’t hold myself back. ‘Why didn’t you come to the picnic?’

  ‘Because I had other things to do,’ she said. Now she did not seem suspicious, she sounded sort of superior, as if she believed she was better than a kid who always wanted fun.

  ‘What’s clever about going for walks at night?’ I asked. The question popped out, I hadn’t realised I was going to ask it.

  She gave me her famous mean look. Then she said very quietly: ‘Have you been spying on me, Harry Baird?’

  I was shocked. ‘Me spying! Gosh, I’m not the one who—’ I stopped just in time. I was nearly going to say she was the one who did the spying. That would certainly have made her think there was something worth spying on. In fact, I might have said too much already. She seemed to be waiting for me to go on, to give myself away.

  ‘What did you say?’ she asked presently.

  ‘Actually, I haven’t seen you going for walks at night,’ I said, feeling all right again. ‘I only heard about it from another kid. Doesn’t worry me if you go for night walks.’

  ‘I can guess who told you,’ she said. ‘If he didn’t have such nasty habits, he wouldn’t notice when somebody goes for a private stroll in the evening.’

  I didn’t know what she meant by that, but I certainly would not ask her to explain, it was bound to make either her or me angry. ‘Suppose these walks help to clear your head,’ I said. ‘After you’ve been studying so hard.’ I said this very pleasantly, I made it seem that I envied her for being clever enough to study until her head got cloudy.

  She looked rather surprised. ‘Yes, it helps,’ she said slowly.

  ‘By the way,’ I said, ‘have you heard any more about Mr Dalloway?’

  ‘I have no idea what his plans are,’ she said.

  ‘You still reckon he’s not coming back?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s not what I reckon,’ she said. ‘It’s what I understand to be true.’

  ‘And he won’t be here next term?’

  ‘So I understand.’

  ‘Why won’t he?’

  ‘I haven’t the faintest idea,’ she said. ‘I imagine it’s because he prefers the city.’

  ‘I wonder why?’ I said, acting stupid so that she could go on thinking she was clever.

  ‘Why what?’

  ‘Why he would prefer the city.’

  ‘You know who to ask about that,’ she said. ‘ I don’t know the city.’

  I guessed she meant Caroline. I said: ‘I’ll ask her.’

  ‘How often do you write to her?’ she asked. When I stared, she added: ‘Your mother. Do you ever write to her?’

  ‘Oh, her!’ I said. ‘She doesn’t expect me to write. Dad tells her the news.’

  ‘All of it?’ Though she spoke nicely, I knew she
wanted to worry me. ‘I’d be surprised if your father told her all the news.’ She paused, but I thought it best to say nothing. ‘I used to talk to your mother a good deal,’ she said. ‘I think she might like to hear from me. If she’s staying long in the city. Do you know how much longer she’ll be there?’

  ‘No,’ I said. Then I thought how terrible it would be if Susan Prosser wrote tell-tale letters to my mother. ‘Dad says she’ll be back any day,’ I said. ‘He says she might be back by—oh, by the end of the week maybe.’

  ‘You don’t sound very positive,’ she said. ‘I think I’ll write her a letter.’

  ‘Don’t do that,’ I said.

  ‘Harry, you look frightened,’ she said. She laughed.

  I was annoyed at myself for letting her see. ‘Heck, I don’t care if you write to her,’ I said. ‘I don’t care if you tell her about Cal and me playing at the works when she told us not to. I don’t care if you tell her we’re not weeding the garden like we should. I don’t care.’

  ‘I hadn’t intended mentioning those things,’ she said. ‘I did think of mentioning your cousin. Would that be all right, Harry?’ Now she was pretending to be sweet, or half-pretending, wanting me to understand that she could make trouble for me.

  ‘You haven’t even met Caroline,’ I said. ‘What can you tell my mother about her?’

  ‘I can put two and two together,’ she said.

  ‘Why don’t you like Caroline?’ I asked. ‘How can you be jealous of somebody you haven’t even met?’

  ‘I’m not jealous,’ Susan Prosser said, reaching for her books, standing.

  ‘You are,’ I said, putting out my hand. I thought I should pull her back, make her tell me why she was jealous of Caroline. But she dodged my hand.

  ‘I can see her, I can hear her,’ she said. ‘I know what she’s like. She’s insincere. She’s the insincerest person I’ve ever seen or heard.’

  This amazed me so much that I shoved my hands over my ears and fell back on the sand. I closed my eyes and kicked my legs in the air. ‘Yee-ow!’ I shouted.

  When I looked up, Susan Prosser was off the beach and going through a fence gap. She turned towards the track across the paddocks beside the works. She was walking very quickly.

  I ran after her. Near the fence I jumped because of a sudden terrible pain in the heel of my right foot. Watching Susan Prosser, I had not noticed the piece of barbed wire in the grass, I had stood on one of the barbs. I flopped on the grass and looked at the puncture. There was a blob of blood on it, my foot was throbbing. The barb had been rusty, I might be poisoned.

  I hobbled back to the dune, and I said angry things about Susan Prosser to myself on the way. Going up the dune, I tried to keep the heel out of the sand; every time I did lower it, I left blood spots in the sand. As the poison spread, I thought, the foot would get stiffer and stiffer. Already it seemed stiff.

  I hobbled along the beach and across the railway line towards the clearing. Back on the dune, I had thought how I would ask Caroline to bandage my foot. Then, on the beach, I saw that the Reo had returned and that Dad and Mr Kelly were in the clearing, and I guessed it didn’t matter whether it was Caroline or Mrs Kelly who did the bandaging, Mrs Kelly would probably do it better anyway, it was not something you could expect Caroline to do well. I could not see Caroline from the beach, but supposed she was hidden behind Dad and Mr Kelly. I could not see Cal or Dibs or any of the other kids.

  Although I said ‘Ouch ouch’ several times when I was near enough to the clearing to be heard, Caroline did not run to see what was wrong, as I had hoped she might. In fact, Caroline was not there. The only ones there were Dad and Mr and Mrs Kelly. This was a shock. I forgot my foot and looked in every direction. Caroline was nowhere in sight.

  ‘What’s the fuss?’ Dad asked.

  So I had to show my heel, and Mrs Kelly agreed that such an injury might cause complications if it wasn’t attended to; she bandaged it.

  I felt dizzy about then, maybe because of the sun. Mrs Kelly, who said I had gone so pale my freckles were sticking out like currants, made me lie in the shade. And I still did not know where Caroline and the others had gone.

  I felt gloomy, mad at myself, sick of everything. Everything was in a mess.

  What might happen now was that everything would turn black for me. Off and on, maybe twice a year, I had black times; these had gone on for as long as I could remember. Things would go wrong, I could do nothing or think nothing that seemed right. Nothing seemed fun. At these times I would want to bop everybody I saw, and I wouldn’t care if they bopped me back and went on bopping me until I couldn’t feel a thing or see a thing or think a thing. I would say dirty words over and over to myself, and sometimes I would shout them out loud, provided Dad was not around, it didn’t matter so much if Cal or Dibs heard. At these times, too, nobody believed anything I said, my parents picked on me, my father kept threatening to use the whip if I didn’t stop telling lies, I hated them all, I hated myself, I even thought of jumping off the wharf or from the top of the works. Every black time lasted two or three days, and I reckoned I was lucky to get through it; when everybody else in the world was satisfied with everything it was terrible to be lonely (what did Susan Prosser know!) and furious and guilty and shitshitshitshit. Lying there in the shade on this sunny day, I certainly hoped I was not in for another of the black times.

  Dad and Mr Kelly were drinking beer and listening to Mrs Kelly.

  I had not been listening to Mrs Kelly. Then I heard her say, ‘a terrifying situation for any poor girl to find herself in’ and I began to listen. She was saying: ‘—brought up sensibly, but not of course to know what dangers to expect or how to protect herself. I believe she shared a flat with another girl, but this young lady proved to be not as respectable as she originally seemed, being addicted to wanton pleasures. Indeed, promiscuous. It seems Tilly returned one evening from a Tabernacle social to discover her flat-mate joined to a young man on the lounge rug and was thereupon invited by the young man to await her turn. She locked herself in the bedroom, but was presently tormented by heavy blows upon the door, the visitor threatening loudly, the flat-mate cajoling between-times. Fortunately for Tilly, there was a fire-escape outside the window. But what an ordeal for a girl as strange as she was to city ways! She could have been forgiven if, there and then, she had left the city. No, Tilly had spunk, she didn’t give up easily. She found another place to live—a boarding-house where the landlady was unusually considerate and, indeed, motherly. Or so it at first appeared—’