‘Follow me, Mr Wiggins,’ I called, not loudly enough to cause an echo.
‘Where are you?’ he called, and there was a small echo.
‘Just up the stairs,’ I said. ‘We have to go to the second floor. That’s where Caroline is, Mr Wiggins.’
I went on up to the second floor and waited for him.
Now I go to our cave the next afternoon. I was there with Cal and Dibs and Bruce Norman. We were smoking cigarettes.
Although I had told Dibs I’d hurt my leg during my usual early-morning run, he kept looking at the bandage as though something about it puzzled him. I wished the damned leg wasn’t bandaged; the cut and the bruise wouldn’t be as noticeable as the bandage was. At any rate, I was glad I’d got up early, before Cal was awake, and had the usual run; it might have seemed odd, later if not now, if I hadn’t.
‘Are you feeling dizzy, Bruce?’ I asked. He had not taken a puff for some minutes.
‘Not at all,’ he said.
‘Usually need three to make you dizzy,’ I said. ‘Depends on the leaves.’ I squinted through the murkiness, trying to see Cal. ‘Cal once got dizzy on one of them. Didn’t you, Cal?’
‘I’m going outside,’ Cal said, crawling from the darkness at the back of the cave. ‘Too choky in here.’
I jerked my injured leg out of the way to let him pass.
‘It is rather suffocating,’ Bruce said. ‘I’m not really fond of smoking. Half a cigarette seems to satisfy me.’ He, too, crawled from the cave.
‘All the more for us to smoke, eh?’ I said to Dibs. I was not enjoying the cigarette, but I didn’t want to leave the cave, it seemed a safe place.
‘Think I’ll only have one today,’ Dibs said.
‘Don’t you want to be dizzy?’ I asked.
‘Not today,’ he said. There he was, looking at my bandage again.
‘What’s the matter?’ I said.
‘Eh?’ he said.
‘Why do you keep looking at my leg?’
‘Nothing, Harry. Nothing.’
‘I told you how it happened, boy. I fell over. But it’s not serious. It was Dad’s mad idea to put this bandage on. I’ll take it off tonight, you bet.’
‘Good idea, Harry.’
I’d better get him thinking about something else. ‘This is our chance,’ I said. ‘Now those kids are out of the way we can have a look at the pistol.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘Think I’ll get some fresh air, Harry. See you outside.’
I put up my hand to stop him, but the stiff leg slowed me, and he crawled from the cave. He seemed in a hurry, I thought. Now why should he be in such a hurry?
I crawled to the end of the cave and took the rocks from the hollow where the pistol had been hidden. There was no pistol under the rocks.
Well, I’m not surprised, I thought. I wasn’t even angry. I should be angry and puzzled. I should rush out and force those kids to tell me what they had done with the pistol.
But I couldn’t be bothered. I did not want to leave the cave.
I lit another cigarette and thought about the pistol. Why had Dibs and Cal taken it? Did it mean they had got some ammo and were planning to fire the pistol without letting me know? Maybe they had already got some ammo, maybe they had already fired the pistol—
No, I still did not care. They could keep it. Let them shoot off their toes. It would serve them right.
I wondered what would happen if I stayed in the cave all day. What say I refused to leave the cave when they came to get me? I could block the entrance with bricks from the fireplace. Nobody could get through. They would have to let me stay in here until I was ready to leave. I might never be ready to leave. I might stay in here until I suffocated, until I died. They would be sorry then. They would be sad. Caroline would be the saddest of all because nobody else in the world liked me as much as she did, nobody else anywhere thought I was sweet, which was another way of thinking I was all right. Maybe it wouldn’t be fair to make Caroline so sad, especially when I had done so much to make her happy. Maybe it would be better if I put off staying in the cave. I could save it up for another time.
I finished the cigarette. That was the third. But I still did not feel dizzy.
‘Harry?’
The stiffness spread from my leg to the rest of my body when I heard the voice. Then I saw that it was Dibs looking into the cave.
‘Are you all right, Harry?’ he asked.
‘Sure,’ I said, crawling towards him. ‘I just had another cigarette. Thought I’d see if I could get dizzy. It didn’t work, though. Those fags aren’t as good as the last lot you made, boy.’
‘We were talking about you, Harry,’ Dibs said when I was out into the sunshine. ‘We wondered if you’d conked it. Like, with all that smoke in there.’
They were sitting on the grass, Cal and Dibs and Bruce. They were looking at me. Was there something special about the way they were looking at me?
‘One of these days we’ll have to put in some air-holes,’ I said, sitting on the grass not far from Dibs, looking at the opposite hill, the one above the works, as I spoke. ‘By the way,’ I said, still not looking at them, ‘what did you kids do with the pistol?’
‘Pistol?’ asked Bruce.
‘I don’t think you know about it, Bruce,’ I said. ‘But Dibs does. And so does Cal.’ I looked at Dibs. ‘What happened to it?’
‘You mean you didn’t take it?’ Dibs asked. He glanced at Cal. Then he told me: ‘We thought you’d taken it and hidden it somewhere else, Harry. Hey, who did take it then?’
‘Search me,’ Cal said, staring at me as if he still thought I’d taken it.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ I asked Dibs. ‘How long’s it been gone.’
‘It was there a couple of weeks ago,’ Dibs said. ‘Then I checked a week ago and it had gone. And I didn’t tell you because I thought you knew. Honestly, Harry, I thought you’d hidden it somewhere else.’
‘I’d like to know who took it,’ I said. ‘That was supposed to be a secret hiding-place.’ I believed Dibs and Cal, they were not pretending, I could always tell when they were pretending.
‘Was it a real pistol?’ asked Bruce. ‘Could it shoot?’
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘But you better not tell anybody. We might get into trouble. If you hear of anybody having a pistol, though, you can tell me. It will probably be our pistol.’
We seemed to be friendlier after that. It was as if the mysterious disappearance of the pistol had turned Dibs and Cal against me. Now they knew that I was as puzzled as they were; they believed me.
‘Anyway,’ I said to Dibs, ‘did you ever ask Buster about the ammo?’
‘Yes, I did,’ said Dibs. ‘He only laughed. He said he’d be a nut to give ammo to kids.’
I frowned. ‘So Buster knows about the pistol. I wonder if he took it? Do you think he’d take it, Dibs?’
‘No,’ said Dibs. ‘Buster wouldn’t take it.’
‘That’s what I reckon,’ I said. ‘But I don’t know who else would, either.’
We thought about it, but couldn’t find an answer.
Then Bruce said he was going home, and Dibs and Cal got up to follow him, and I knew I would have to go with them, I couldn’t stay out of the way any longer.
I did not hurry, though. I hobbled, as if my leg were too stiff for me to hurry.
Somehow I guessed what would happen when Bruce reached the turn in the track and saw the works and the houses. He would stop and stare.
And that was what he did, sure enough.
But it was Dibs who called back: ‘Hurry up, Harry! Something’s going on at the works! Looks like everybody’s there!’
I stopped. Then I took a deep breath and hobbled on.
13
AGAIN I am walking in the moonlight along the road that takes you from the railway line, from Sydney Bridge Upside Down’s turnaround spot, to the river and over the river and on across the countryside, up hills and around bends and through gulli
es, all the way to Bonnie Brae, and further still if you are escaping, if you are trying to get as far as you can from the edge of the world. The soles of my feet are tough, they make crunchy sounds in the metal. I listen to these sounds, then I stop and try to hear other sounds. I can hear the sea. I can hear the swamp frogs. I can hear trees stirring in the little breeze on the hill above me. I look up at the hill and I see the shapes of the trees as they tremble and now I see another shape up there and this one is still and doesn’t move at all while I watch, and when I look away and take two steps in the metal I hear Mrs Knowles’ cat miaowing from the first house, so I look back at the shape on the hill and it is the same as before, it is Sydney Bridge Upside Down waiting there (You can say this as well, dear Caroline. You can say that my first teacher, Miss Piggy-face, threw black-balls at me. She was in an awful temper. She said I had made muddy marks on the floor. She said I had crumbled chalk. She said I had scribbled on the desk-top. She said I had hidden Susan Prosser’s rubber. She said I had picked my nose and stuck the snot on Jimmy Ling’s shiny schoolbag. She said I had stolen Billy Vigars’ ruler and busted it. She said I had made a rude noise with my mouth when she was writing words on the board and a rude noise and a smell with my bum when she was writing sums on the board. She said I had thumped Dibs Kelly on his ringworm scab when he wasn’t looking. She said I had thrown my sandwich crusts at the girls at playtime and grabbed other boys’ sandwiches at lunchtime. She said I had stolen one of the apples other children, the good children, had brought her. She said I hadn’t cleaned my teeth or fingernails and hadn’t combed my hair and hadn’t washed my ankles or knees or elbows or neck. She said my shirt was always hanging out. She said I tugged out other boys’ shirts and undid the girls’ hairbows. She said I pinched the girls and punched the boys when we were leaving the classroom. She said I had taken the cork from the red-ink bottle on her desk and used it to stamp a trail across her pretty Niagara Falls calendar. She said I wasted all the paper in the dunny at the end of the playground. She said I was always putting up my hand to leave the room when I couldn’t possibly be in any discomfort. She said I chewed the ends of my pencils to shreds. She said I spat. She said I was a little monster. She said she didn’t believe I really was only six, she said most kids didn’t behave like monsters until they were older, like in Standard Three or Four. You are driving me to distraction, she said. That’s why I threw the lollies at you, she said. She threw another one. That’s the last, she said. Now listen all you other children, now you know why there won’t be any black-balls for prizes at the end of the week, she said. Blame Harry Baird, she said. Blame Harry Baird) waiting up there on the hill for me, the way Sam Phelps waits on the road outside our house, staring at our front door, staring at the curtains while I stare back at him, waiting for me to go up the side-path to the front so that he can stare at me and watch me staring back at him, not speaking, not moving, just staring. I can escape by going down the yard and across the swamp to the river-bank, but I keep thinking of him waiting back there on the road, and it is no fun for me to go to the river-bank now, it is no fun to be with anybody. Now there is the horse too. Sam Phelps watches me in the day, his horse watches me in the night. Or is Sam Phelps along there now? Is that his shape by the roadside, near the spot where Mr Wiggins used to park his van? He knows I am away from the house, he is waiting for me to get back. He knows I sometimes go to the cave to be sure of not being spoken to or seen, and that is why Sydney Bridge Upside Down is waiting up there, it’s to stop me from getting to the cave. If I run hard along the road I can be past him before he realises what I’m doing, I can be down the side-path and into the house before he can trap me with his stare. But when I try to run I cannot lift my feet, I am planted in the metal, it’s like there are enormous weights on my feet and splints or bars keeping my legs stiff and straight, as if I’m a statue and forced to stay as still as Sam Phelps and the horse. I hear Mrs Knowles’ cat miaowing again. I hear the swamp frogs. I hear the waves breaking against the wharf piles and across the rocks, I hear the surf swishing and sighing along the beach. I want the moon to go so that I won’t see the shapes waiting for me. I look up at the sky and I see clouds among the stars, and the clouds are moving towards the moon, and I know that when they reach the moon I can go quickly back along the road, I can get away from Sam Phelps. I wait. If I go back I can run behind the works and get across the paddocks and then cut through the swamp to home, and Sam Phelps won’t know where I am, he won’t know that I am lying in bed beside Cal, awake but safe. I wait. The clouds reach the moon. Now I try to lift my feet, and it is all right, I can walk away in the dark. Does he hear the metal crunching? I won’t look back, I won’t stop. Should I start running? It may be too soon to run. They could still catch me if they wanted to. I can run as soon as I’m past the works and in the darkness of the paddocks, too far away to be seen. Now that I am so near the works, though, I remember what happened there and my right leg seems to stiffen at the memory. The memory of how I fell as I ran down the stairs, tripping as a groan echoed in the works. Now the clouds have moved past the moon, and I am near enough to the works to see the moonlight patch by the door, near enough to hear the groans of dying animals. I drop to the grass and I look up at the hill, and I am certain the shape is moving, it is moving very slowly towards the track (Say as well, dear Caroline, that I learned to whistle after Miss Piggy-face had gone. Say that Mr Dalloway, the new teacher, found me one rainy day in the coat-room and wanted to know what I was doing, why was I being so furtive? I said I was sniffing the coats, sir. How improbable, he said. You’ll have to think of a better excuse than that, Baird. I was, though. School had many smells, and the smell of damp coats and sou’westers and gumboots was one that I liked sniffing. It was the same when Mr Dalloway caught me looking into Jimmy Ling’s schoolbag. Why was I interfering with another boy’s property? I was only sniffing the lunch smell, I told him. I liked sniffing the smell of all sorts of sandwiches and guessing what the other kids had brought today, if they were tomato sandwiches or banana or jam or golden syrup or cheese. But Mr Dalloway did not believe me. You can’t tell me you’re in Ling’s bag for the sake of the smell, he said. I’ve been warned about you, my lad. Well, I knew who had warned him, but I could see he was not nearly as angry as Miss Piggy-face would have been if she’d caught me there, I could see he almost believed me or, if he didn’t, was not the sort of teacher to make a big fuss about it. So I didn’t duck when he walked towards me, as I would have if he’d been Miss Piggy-face; I simply put Jimmy Ling’s bag back under the desk and looked straight at Mr Dalloway as though I had done no harm. He kept me in after school to write I must not pry in other children’s bags a hundred times, but it was not as bad as the things Miss Piggy-face used to do to me, like throwing black-balls and shouting. Another time, when I was in a higher class, Mr Dalloway said I could be milk monitor, he said responsibility might bring out a bit of whatever good there was in me; he did not make a fuss when he discovered I’d told the smaller kids the day’s ration was two bottles instead of the usual one so that there was not enough milk for the older kids; he made no fuss, but I was never milk monitor again. I rather liked Mr Dalloway then. His punishments were never very tough and there came a term when they stopped altogether. This, funnily enough, was after he had met my mother to complain about something nasty I’d done—it must have been the time I set fire to the school wood-heap. He met my mother and after that I could get away with anything. Mr Dalloway didn’t seem to care what I did, all he said was that he hoped I wouldn’t do again whatever it was that I had done. Which was probably pretty smart of him, because eventually I got sick of bopping other kids and all that, there wasn’t much fun in it if there was no risk in it. I was no longer the worst-behaved kid at school. I was not the best-behaved, either; but I did stop caring when other kids thought of interesting ways of misbehaving, like chalking rude words on the blackboard when Mr Dalloway was out of the room. Sometimes I wondered what my mother had told him ab
out me) and I begin crawling through the grass towards the furnace-house where there are shadows, pausing every few inches to look along the road and up the hill. I cannot see Sam Phelps. I cannot see Sydney Bridge Upside Down. But I know they are there. The furnace-house is a good hiding-place. If I drop through the hole in the top, nobody can get at me. But I’ll be seen on the top, because there is moonlight on the top; they’ll know where I have gone, even if they won’t be able to get at me. And Sam Phelps will stand guard outside the furnace-house, and Sydney Bridge Upside Down will be with him. I’ll be trapped in there, worse than when I’m trapped in the bedroom at home, and it won’t be any good yelling; when you’re in the furnace-house you can’t be heard. When I yell at home, deep in the night, Cal wakes up, then wakes me, and he tells me to stop having nightmares, he says it happens every night and he can’t sleep properly because I yell so much. He tells Dad about me and Dad says it’s not surprising I have nightmares, it has been an upsetting time in the bay lately, what with another accident at the works and the Bonnie Brae policeman asking questions and people giving themselves headaches trying to think why Chick Wiggins should go into the works, it will be a good thing when they pull down the rest of the ruins, which isn’t far off now, as soon as they find the men for the job down will come the ruins, and though the bay won’t seem the same when that happens it must be done, all these accidents are giving the district a bad name. I tell Dad my nightmares are not about the works; at least, the only one I remember, I say, was about Mr Norman the teacher, about the homework I should have done and Mr Norman’s anger when he found I hadn’t done it. Even so, said Dad, it had been a disturbing time and I might be affected in ways I was not myself aware of, deep-down ways that only showed themselves in nightmares. According to Mr Kelly, he said, even a grown-up like Mrs Kelly had the shivers when she thought of poor Chick Wiggins falling to his death, a man cut off in his prime, a good butcher even if his flirty ways did gave him a bad reputation. If Mrs Kelly, who was used to people dying, could be troubled by Mr Wiggins’ death, it was no wonder youngsters were upset. I remember Dad’s words as I hide by the furnace-house. Is Sam Phelps troubled by Mr Wiggins’ death? Who else might be troubled by his death? Not Caroline, at any rate. Caroline never talks about Mr Wiggins, I am sure she has completely forgotten him. The one she talks about now, the one she looks forward to being with, is Buster Kelly. And this, I am sure, is partly because I am seldom at home; when I am not at school I am up in the cave or alone by the river, alone on the beach, alone in the trees near the swamp. Should I run for the swamp now? When I peep from behind the furnace-house I cannot see Sam Phelps or Sydney Bridge Upside Down, but this doesn’t mean they are not there somewhere, waiting for me. It’s safest to crawl on through the grass until I reach the trees, then I can race along the river-bank to where the swamp begins, I can cross the swamp and be home. First, though, I must get from the works yard to the paddock, quickly and without being seen. I can imagine Sam Phelps along there on the road, staring, waiting, or doing now what his horse is doing—coming to find me. They are moving towards me out there in the dark, Sam Phelps from the road, Sydney Bridge Upside Down from the hill. If I wait they’ll have time to find me; if I run I can be in the paddock and crawling through the grass before they see me. I must run. I run from the furnace-house and throw myself into the paddock, and I lie still, I listen. The swamp frogs are louder, the sea is louder. Away from the shelter of the works, the breeze is stronger and I can hear the grass moving. There are many more clouds among the stars, and I watch them rolling towards the moon and I am sure that this time the moon will be hidden longer, I’ll have a good chance to get right across the paddock to the trees. So I wait for the clouds to help me. I wait. Can I hear hooves? Can I hear boots crunching on metal? If he is coming for me, who will wait back outside the house? Mrs Kelly maybe. She watches me too. Not in the same way as Sam Phelps, not with those long and knowing stares. Mrs Kelly just gives me quick and sharp looks whenever I go by. She says Hello, but she does not seem ready to chat to me, as she used to long ago. And of course she never gives me a piecey, she prefers Bruce Norman to me, he gets bread and plum jam now. I don’t care. Mrs Kelly needn’t think I care about her plum jam, I can get by without it, without her too. I can get by without anybody. Would anybody help me now, for instance? Nobody would help me. I lie here in the grass, listening to the hooves and the boots, and nobody will help me (Put this down as well, dear Caroline. Say that Dad was wrong when he said I didn’t really remember that pongy voyage in the Emma Cranwell. Say it was more than hearing him tell of it in later years that made me remember it. I remembered every bit of it myself, every moment on the leaning deck in the black night on the wild seas. I remembered him throwing away my pyjamas, I remembered the pong that surrounded us as he led me back to the cabin, I remembered how he washed me and how the water splashed. I remembered, even though I was sick and weak and scared, what he said as he washed me. He said: ‘Why didn’t she come? Why does she do it?’ He was talking to something out in the awful night, and his voice was as angry as the waves that crashed on the port-hole. I remembered his words, but I did not speak to him about them ever. When we were home again, just Dad and me, I would pretend that the night he threw away my pyjamas had been a kind of jolly adventure and that I did not mind looking back upon it and grinning with him when he said how my mother would be annoyed because I had lost my new pyjamas. It was good with him and me at home on our own; I liked following him around and helping him, he let me do some hammering and showed me how to use the big saw, and he let me scatter seeds. I did not care if she or Cal never came home, and I wished he would feel the same. I knew he didn’t, because there were nights when he put his elbows on the table and put his hands round his cheeks, and stared at nothing and did not speak for several minutes. I knew he was thinking of her at these times, I knew he was worried. Then he would cheer up and we would go along to see Mr and Mrs Kelly, and he and Mr Kelly would have some beer and I’d be allowed to play with Dibs until we got too noisy and Dibs was sent off to bed, then I sat in a corner and listened to the grown-ups and pretended I was too interested in the Kelly kids’ fairytale books and comics to hear what was being said. What they said was usually about how people were behaving to one another; it was amazing, seeing there were so few people in this part of the world, how much could be said about them. Men were always in trouble with their wives about something or other, wives always had something to be unhappy about, husbands were always good fellows in some ways, not in others, somebody was always courting somebody else, somebody was always going to have a baby, somebody was always to blame for a certain road not being graded, somebody was always to blame for the district not getting a fair deal—I preferred the gossipy bits about people and the things they did to one another, and it did not matter when Mrs Kelly began putting in things like ‘you-know’ and ‘what-you-may-call-it’ into her stories, I could guess, or thought I could, what she was trying to hide. I noticed too that the men used words like bloody and damn after they had been drinking a while, and one night I even heard Dad use the word bitch, and neither Mr Kelly nor Mrs Kelly seemed to mind, Mrs Kelly talked so softly to Dad after it that I couldn’t hear what she said, and when I was in bed later I said bitch bitch bitch to myself until I fell asleep) and nobody will care what the scar-faced old man and the hollow-backed old horse do to me when they reach me. The hooves can trample on me and the boots can kick me, nobody knows, nobody cares. I must not wait in the grass. I must run for the trees. I stand, alone in the paddock, and I do not look back. I put my head down and I run for the trees. The swamp frogs are much noisier now, I hear them as I stand panting behind a tree, they drown out other noises, I can no longer hear the hooves and the boots. I might be safe here, there are trees all the way to the riverbank. If only there were a short-cut through the swamp from here—I look at the rushes, remembering. I was not far from here when I threw the present in. I could only hope it would sink or float away out of sight
. I have never been back to check. What if somebody sees it floating there and fishes it out? What will he find? Flowers? A fur-coat? A hat? An ornament? Or a joke present—like a leg of mutton? I cannot guess what Mr Wiggins thought Caroline would want from him. He would know it had better be something special, because he must know that Caroline did not like him and only something special could make her change her mind. I should have looked, only there wasn’t time, I did not waste a moment after running down the stairs, falling, running on. I must stroll past the swamp during the day, glance in and make sure the present is out of sight. If Sam Phelps will let me. If he doesn’t keep watching me. Where is he now? Where is his horse? The swamp frogs are quieter, maybe because the moon is still hidden. I hear a soft thud-thud, like the sound hooves might make on grass. I peep from behind the tree, look towards the works. I see nothing moving, unless that is something by the furnace-house, that could be something. Only the usual works shadows? I cannot tell. The breeze is much stronger, though. I look at the clouds and many of them are dark, and I can see hardly any stars. If I wait too long in the trees there will be a storm, I will be caught in it. I move on. I go from tree to tree, not looking back, keeping close to every tree-trunk. Now the wind is making more noise than the swamp frogs, it is making the leaves above me rustle, it is making the branches creak. I run faster, much faster than when I’d played Robin Hood games in here with the other kids, yet seeming to take much longer to reach the river-bank, the trees will never end, they go on and on ahead of me, I’ll never reach the river-bank (Now you can say this, dear Caroline. You can start another page and say that one day after school my mother called Cal and me down from the passion-fruit shed and said she wanted us to go across to the store. She stood on the back porch to tell me this, and she handed me some money and told me what to get, and when I asked Cal as we went up the sidepath why he had stayed behind the tank-stand while our mother was talking he said it was because Mr Dalloway was in the kitchen and was probably telling her about him not being able to do his sums today. I said she didn’t seem to be upset when she was telling me what to get at the store, in fact she had the pink cheeks she usually got when she was pleased with something somebody told her or when she was excited. Cal said he hoped I was right, he said he could think of no other reason why Mr Dalloway should call. I said I couldn’t either, it wouldn’t be because of me since I had been doing all right at school lately, I was going through one of my good no-bopping times and was being spoken to politely by Mrs Kelly and other grown-ups. Cal and I talked about school, how it was not so bad some days and damned terrible other days, and Cal said today was one of the days when he would rather be playing at the beach than learning stupid sums, and I said we could go to the beach and have a swim as soon as we had got the things from the store— What things? I couldn’t remember what she had told me to get. I asked Cal what she’d said, but he said he hadn’t heard. He tried naming a few things, like butter and eggs and jam and sugar but I still could not remember. I said it was no use, I would have to go back and ask her. Luckily, we had only reached the river crossing when I realised I had forgotten, it would have been terrible if I got to the store and then found I didn’t know what to ask for. Cal said he would wait for me. I said I’d run home and run back, it wouldn’t take long. But it took a bit longer than I expected it to. This was because the back door was locked when I got home, which was pretty unusual; I had to wait for my mother to open it. I had to knock several times before she opened it. ‘What are you doing back here?’ she asked, and her face was angry and red. She kept the door nearly shut, but I saw she was wearing her dressinggown, and that was pretty unusual for this time of the day. I said I had forgotten what she had asked me to get from the store. ‘Oh, three pounds of flour and two packets of cigarettes, never mind the other things,’ she said. Then she must have guessed that I had seen her dressing-gown and her bare feet, because she said: ‘I’m having a shower while you kids are away. There’s no privacy with you two running in and out. Anyway, three pounds of flour and two packets of cigarettes. Will you remember now?’ I said I would, and she closed the door. No need for her to be so crabby, I thought as I ran back down the road. No need for her to have a shower so late; if we got in her way so much, she should have her shower earlier. I told Cal this and he agreed that she shouldn’t have been crabby. If she was having a shower, he said, Mr Dalloway must have gone. Must have, I said. Then I thought it was funny I hadn’t seen him on the road when I went back. I decided he must have popped along to see Mrs Kelly about Dibs; Dibs had been having trouble with his spelling lately. And I thought no more about my mother taking so long to open the door. I forgot all about it—until a few months later) the storm will break before I reach the river, it is as if I am running in the same spot all the time, yet I pass different trees and I am brushed by different branches. I must rest. I fall against a tree, grab the trunk to stop myself from flopping to the ground. When the noise of my panting stops at last I hear the sound of hooves back through the trees, and I do not wait to hear the other sound, I run on, the wind wilder than ever, the trees bending towards me, branches swiping me. Until suddenly I am at the river-bank. I can hear the river, I can see it rushing blackly by. Somewhere in the hills it must already be raining heavily, must have been raining a long time; I am sure there are logs speeding by in the river, maybe bodies as well. I hear thunder and look at the sky, and I know I will never see the moon again, the storm is beginning. I turn as the rain hits my face. I shout into the trees: ‘Go home! Go to your shack!’ They won’t hear me, I can’t hear my own words. I run on along the river-bank, and the wind is behind me now and I am going so fast I think I will fall at any second, or be blown into the river and swept out to sea with the logs. The thunder has stopped, the rain is heavy, mud spurts into my eyes. I stop to rub my sleeve in my eyes, and I hear sharp cracking sounds from back in the trees, and at first I think it is a pistol going off, then I realise it is the noise of twigs being snapped by heavy boots. The hooves are back there too. Soon the man and the horse will burst from the trees and chase me along the river-bank. But I will be safe if I get to the plank-bridge across the swamp. No horse can follow me there, and I can pull up a plank behind me so that the man will not be able to follow, either. It seems such a long way to the plank-bridge, though. And I can scarcely see where I’m going. I must just guess whereabouts in the rain and the dark the bridge begins. I try to stop to turn, my feet can’t grip the ground, I skid, I slide in the mud. The bridge must begin around here some place, it can’t be far away, it’s in the rushes here somewhere, it must be somewhere near. I slide from the river-bank slope towards the swamp’s edge, and I splash through the water and my feet sink into the mud as I splash on. Then I see the bridge, I see the first plank. The plank seems to be floating, soon it will be beneath the water. The water seems to be rising too swiftly. I’ll never get to the plank in time (And say this, dear Caroline. Please say that I saw my mother kissing Mr Dalloway) and they can’t be far behind now, I won’t look, I won’t listen, I must keep staring at the plank, if I stare hard enough it will stay in place, it won’t float away through the angry angry wildly-waving rushes (Say I saw her, dear Caroline. Say I saw her kissing him. Say I saw them from the tank-stand. I saw them through the kitchen window. He had his hands on both sides of her head, his fingers in her hair, and he was kissing her. I saw them through the window. I was on the tank-stand. They were kissing in our kitchen. I couldn’t watch. I jumped from the tank-stand and ran out to the road) and as soon as I put my foot on the plank I lose my balance and I fall, I seem to spin several times before I sink into the swamp, I am in blackness, then my head is out of the water, I am reaching for the plank, dragging myself out of the slime and the awful-tasting water. I stand on the plank. I move very slowly. I stop. I move again. My foot slides but I do not fall. I stand still. I tell myself I will not fall. I am too strong to fall again. I can get across the plank-bridge without falling. They cannot possibly catch me now (Say this
as well, dear Caroline. Say that one day when I was on the back porch I heard them giggling and talking in the kitchen. They didn’t know I was on the porch because I was sitting below the window-sill, taking a splinter from my heel, concentrating on getting it out and not realising for a few moments that my mother had a visitor. I crept away, but not before I heard a word that puzzled me. I asked Dad about this word a few days later when I was helping him in the garden. It seemed all right to ask him then, he was very friendly to me that morning and I was pleased to be helping him, it was one of the days, one of the great days, when I enjoyed being with my father, just him and me, like the times when she was away with Cal, leaving me with Dad, happy times. I saw him put down the hoe, then rest on his crutch while he wiped some sweat from his forehead. I smiled at him, said I would take off my shirt soon, the sun sure was hot. He said I had better take care, I burned easily and sun-blisters were no fun. I said I would not leave my shirt off too long, long enough probably to get a few more freckles. He said he had freckled easily too when he was a youngster, he said he had huge freckles on his back that he’d got when he was only four or five. This, I thought, was my chance to ask about the word. Had he, I asked, ever been called Spotty when he was a kid? He laughed. No, he said, he had been called Freckles a few times, but he’d not had enough freckles to keep that nickname for long; many of his freckles, he said, had faded. He said I could expect the same to happen to most of my freckles; as it was, he said, I did not have nearly as many as young Dibs Kelly. Good, I said. Had he, I asked slowly, ever been nicknamed Hoppy? He frowned. He wanted to know why I had asked that. I said I had read a story about an air ace in one of the Kelly kids’ comics, and this ace had lost a leg in a crash-landing, and a nasty character in the story had called him Hoppy and this had made the ace feel unhappy, but his friends came to his rescue and gave the nasty character a good hiding, they said he should be ashamed of himself for calling such a brave man Hoppy. I could have gone on like this a while longer, but I saw Dad nod, obviously agreeing with what the ace’s friends had done, so I guessed I could leave it to him to answer. He said he had been called various things in his time, but he could not remember being called Hoppy. Of course, he said, some nicknames were friendly and some weren’t, much depended on the way they were used, on how the person using a nickname felt about the person he was talking to. Hoppy, as I had probably guessed from reading the air-ace story, was not a friendly nickname, he said. None of his own friends had ever called him Hoppy, he said. They knew that he, like the air ace, would be unhappy if they did. On the other hand, he said, a man could not help making a few enemies during his life, and it was quite possible, though he had not heard of it, that one of his own enemies had referred to him as Hoppy, it was an obvious enough thing to call a one-legged man. He bent down for the hoe. I said I would never call a one-legged man Hoppy, it would be cruel. Good lad, he said. He went on hoeing. So now I knew what it meant when my mother used that word, when she said: ‘I promised to make Hoppy and the kids some scones for tonight. Better let me go now, Pet.’ It meant she was my father’s enemy) unless I slip and fall into the swamp, Sam Phelps could catch me then, he could find me lying in the swamp and pick me up and take me to the river-bank and throw me into the river and let me be washed out to sea. Has he reached the beginning of the bridge yet? He might already be at the first plank, Sydney Bridge Upside Down watching while he comes after me. The wind cuts, the rain stings, the water streams down my body, my dingdong frozen. I steady myself, push the hair from my eyes, move on. I must be half-way across the swamp. The water is still rising, but if I can keep my balance I’ll be safe. Anyway, the frogs are silent and I can no longer hear the hooves and the boots. I’ll soon be across. I know this because I have reached the open part where Kingsley, our wonderful Muscovy, used to do his tricks. I don’t want to see Kingsley. I don’t want to remember him. Kingsley is dead. I didn’t mean to kill him. I meant to scare him, but I did not mean to kill him. I miscalculated. I landed on him instead of beside him. Whatever Susan Prosser said, I did not mean to do it. Poor dead Kingsley, poor dead Susan Prosser—I scream at the swamp, I scream, I scream. Sam Phelps screams back. He screams that he is on his way, he is coming for me, he is right behind me, he will lift me on to his horse and carry me off to the sea. You will never escape, he screams. You will never catch me, I scream back. I am too strong for you, I scream. I begin to run, guessing where the plank is, where the next plank is, certain I will keep running even if I miss the planks, I am too strong to fall (And if there’s room, dear Caroline, you can say this too. You can say that when she comes home I’ll tell her what I know, what I’ve seen, what I’ve done. Ha ha! See how she likes that) too strong to care when I leave the last plank and go up to my knees in the swamp, too strong to be stopped now. I reach the bank. Now it is only a short climb to the passion-fruit shed and our backyard. Just grab the vine by the track and clamber up. The vine breaks. I fall. I crawl back to the slope, begin clambering, slide to the bottom. I look across the swamp. Only the rising water, the bending rushes, only the rain, the wind. All I have to do is get to the top, I have done it many times every day, it is not even a hill, it is only a slope. I run at it and grab the higher part of the vine as I slip. The vine holds. It is as if the slope has become a steep cliff, but I hold on. I move inch by inch. The vine breaks, but I do not fall. My fingers dig deep into the mud, I force them to drag me higher. I am at the top. I stand by the passion-fruit shed and look across the swamp. The wind is lighter, the rushes are straighter. The rain stops. Nobody is out in the swamp. Now I can hear the frogs again. I look at the sky and see the clouds moving from the moon. There is moonlight on our garden when I walk by it to the wash-house. I take off my clothes in the wash-house and turn on the tap in the tub. I climb into the tub and wash off the mud. I wipe myself with grubby clothes from the heap in the corner. I run naked into the house. I get into bed beside Cal. He does not move. I lie there. I think I am asleep. Then I hear Cal whimpering. He is crying in his sleep, his body is trembling, he is whispering something in a little-boy voice. He is whispering, ‘Mummy, Mummy.’
Sydney Bridge Upside Down Page 19
