Faris felt like a wind was buffeting his brain. He’d read about convicts on the internet, when he’d looked up the history of Australia. ‘But convicts were two hundred years ago!’ He stared. ‘How old are you?’ White skin, he thought, that had felt no sun for months.
Billy lifted his chin. ‘Fifteen.’
‘He’s been fifteen for more than a hundred years. Two hundred maybe.’ Susannah’s voice was calm and clear. Though Faris could still hear the echo of pain. ‘I’m ten. I don’t know how long I’ve been ten. But it’s been a long time. Eighty years maybe. A terrible long time.’
‘Not terrible at all! A good time,’ insisted Billy. ‘What’s the likes of me to go back to, eh? Dying in the dark? I got seven years to serve even if I reach Botany Bay. You know what that’s like at Botany Bay?’
Faris shook his head.
‘Cove on the ship could read. He’d read a newspaper back home. Said as how convicts in Australia get chained together, have to make roads with pickaxes, up in the mountains till they’re blue with cold, till they drop with the hunger and die in their chains. If you speaks out or tries to run, you get the lash. Coves die under the whip out there. Seven years of that, an’ only if I’m lucky,’ Billy made the word a sneer, ‘enough to live. You know what I got here?’
‘Billy lives on a farm in his Australia,’ said Susannah. ‘There are horses and sheep —’
‘An’ they’re all mine. Big fires in every room. An’ roast beef every day,’ said Billy. ‘Grilled kidneys and kippers for breakfast, an’ all the toast I want, and mutton chops for dinner and roast beef for my supper, unless I want a goose or pork pie.’
Faris remembered the meat, the heavy loaves of bread Billy had brought down to the beach, the stone jugs of apple juice. Every time he wanted to think this was impossible another piece of the jigsaw fitted in.
‘And puddings and pies, I’m never hungry, not for nothin’, never! And no work neither. Just playing like this, every day, on the beach.’ Billy looked a challenge at Susannah. ‘It’s a good life.’
‘But not a real one,’ said Susannah quietly.
Faris felt his heart empty. ‘We’re dead then?’
‘No, o’ course not!’ said Billy, just as Susannah cried, ‘No!’
‘I was drowning. You had the fever. Billy was going to have his throat cut —’
‘How can we be dead?’ said Susannah sharply. ‘This isn’t heaven.’
‘Then what is it?’
‘A refuge,’ she said quietly. ‘It took me years to find the answer. I sat on the sand hill. I prayed, day after day. And one day the answer came. We are the children who refused to die. Instead of dying we have come here to build up the strength to go back to what we have to face, the strength to live. The strength to go back to our lives and to survive.’
She looked at Faris, then at Billy. ‘I knew something else then too. I knew it was my job to help us remember. I knew I had to stay here to help each one of us go back.’
Billy snorted. ‘Why does there have to be a reason? We’re here. That’s all that matters. Don’t you listen to her, Far Eyes. You stay here and you forget.’
Forget? How could he forget now?
Faris shut his eyes. ‘My grandmother,’ he whispered. ‘I left her there. Abandoned her. But I didn’t mean to leave her. I didn’t mean to be a coward.’ He opened his eyes.
‘See?’ said Billy. ‘Remembering hurts.’
‘You’re not a coward,’ said Susannah fiercely. She gave Billy a sharp look too. ‘And neither are you.’
‘What are we then?’ demanded Faris.
‘Brave.’
Faris remembered how he had cried on the boat, how the sea had drunk his tears. ‘I’m not brave.’
‘True bravery doesn’t know how brave it is. I think our beach is where only the very brave come, children who have been travelling to Australia, from many times, from many places. Who’ve faced things impossible to face. Who come here till they can go on living.’
‘And then what happens?’ Faris whispered.
‘You go back.’
Billy folded his arms in challenge. ‘Or if they’ve got the sense, stay here.’
Faris looked across the beach, almost unable to bear its beauty. Leave? Go back to the wave? To Jadda, he told himself. ‘How can I get back?’ he demanded of Susannah. Then he knew.
He looked along the beach, at the tumbled rocks. ‘The doorway.’ That strange doorway that had called him on his second day at the beach; the door he had so carefully avoided ever since.
Susannah nodded. ‘When anyone goes through that doorway, they vanish. They go back to where they came from.’
Faris stared at her. It was impossible. But everything that had happened in the last few days — even the last few years — had been impossible too.
‘Has anyone ever come back?’
‘No. None have returned.’
‘Then how do you know where they go to? Or when?’ It would be bad — impossibly bad — to go through that doorway and face the wave. It would be worse to go through and find a calm flat sea, weeks or even months after the bodies and debris had floated away.
‘Because Mudurra says so. He says the door leads back to our old lives. Our real lives.’
‘How does he know?’
Billy looked at him in a way Faris would once have found threatening. ‘Mudurra knows this beach like you know your hand. Don’t you go thinkin’ that ’cause Mudurra’s a darkie he’s less’n you nor me.’
Susannah laid her small hand on Billy’s white arm. Despite all his time on the beach, the convict had not reddened or darkened in the sun.
Somewhere, sometime, Billy Higgs was still in a dark hold on a convict ship.
‘Hush with you,’ said Susannah to Billy. ‘Mudurra has been here longer than any of us,’ she continued to Faris. ‘We never quite believed when he said the doorway could take us back. Then Ah Goon went through it. We’d been talking, Ah Goon and me. Suddenly he remembered what had happened to him, just like you did today. He said he was going through the doorway, to try to go back to his ship. Ah Goon had been on a ship exploring Australia, a Chinese one, long before even Billy got here.’
That didn’t make sense. ‘The English were the first here,’ declared Faris. ‘They found the Aboriginal people here.’
Billy snickered. ‘You were there, were you? You know just what happened?’
‘The internet says so.’
‘An’ who’s the internet then, that he knows it all?’
‘The internet is —’ Faris stopped. How did you explain the internet to a fifteen-year-old from 1827? Machines talking to machines across the world? He’d think it was impossible.
As impossible as a beach and an imagined Australia where you vanished from danger … but could go back.
‘Ah Goon were here afore me, and Pedro, Jan and Henri too. They was all on ships. Pedro and Henri, they had the scurvy real bad. Their teeth was fallin’ out. Jan was going to be speared by some blacks. Spears even bigger’n Mudurra’s, he reckoned. Ah Goon was washed overboard, in a storm.’
‘When Ah Goon stepped back through the door, we saw where he was going.’ Susannah’s voice was quiet with remembered horror. ‘We saw the waves, saw the side of the giant black ship. Ebony, Ah Goon said it was, the blackest wood in all the world.’
‘Saw him saved? Or saw him die?’
‘Ah Goon lived,’ declared Susannah. ‘He had to live.’
‘Except you don’t know that at all,’ said Billy flatly. ‘Why do you think Mudurra’s never gone back, eh? Who knows what really happened when Ah Goon went through the door? Maybe the poor cove drowned, or a shark ate him. Pedro, Henri and Jan went through the door after Ah Goon went. Maybe they all died too, or worse. Susannah thinks we should all be heading through that door, back to what we escaped from. But I say nuts to that. I say we’re better off here, where life is good.’
‘Where you’ll always be fifteen,’ challenged Susannah. ‘
Where nothing changes. All we have is what we remember, the Australia that we dreamed of.’
‘And ain’t that good enough? Better’n good? What if you got Ah Goon, Jan an’ the others to walk through that doorway, just to find their deaths on the other side? What of that, eh?’
‘They may have died,’ said Susannah softly. ‘But I don’t think so. Death is easy for people like us, the easiest thing in our whole lives. But to survive — that’s harder. I think that’s why we’re here. To find the strength, the courage to survive.’
‘You think,’ snorted Billy. ‘But you don’t know.’
‘How many have come here?’ asked Faris. ‘How many have left?’
Billy glanced at Susannah. ‘Show him yer book.’
Susannah reached into her apron. She handed Faris the leather-covered notebook. He opened it, looking at the painfully neat writing. It was the list he’d seen before. But this time he really looked at it. ‘There are dozens of names here,’ he whispered.
Billy nodded. ‘There were five already here when I came: Mudurra, Ah Goon, Pedro, Jan, Henri then me. Mudurra says Ah Goon came next after him. Ah Goon had some adventures, I can tell you. Did you know there’s places where they wrap up women’s feet to make them small?’
He didn’t wait for Faris to answer. ‘Never did find out where Pedro come from. Don’t think he knew neither. The sailors on the ship he were on just grabbed him from the docks when he were sellin’ fish, an’ he couldn’t speak their lingo. All he had to eat was ship’s biscuit, crumbly with weevils, an’ salt fish, so much salt his lips blistered. Then his legs swelled up, and his teeth started to fall out. He went to sleep one night an’ woke up here.’
‘Who came after you?’
‘Big Johnny came after me, then Bridget. She were Irish, starving.’ Billy shook his head. ‘She were starved when she got on the ship, and starved on the way here too. Never saw no one so thin, not even David. Then Gow Lee, he were after gold, goin’ to send money back to his family till his ship were wrecked; and then Wolfgang — they came only a few days apart, but Wolfgang’s family were farmers, not after gold. Two ships but the same storm wrecked them both, I reckon.’
Billy glanced at Susannah. They argue about everything, but there’s friendship too, thought Faris wonderingly. He remembered Billy throwing gentle balls to Nikko, and how Susannah had immediately called Billy when she saw that Faris was starting to remember. How had he never seen the friendship between them before? Both of them doing their best for the others, even if they disagreed about what ‘the best’ was.
‘Mudurra, Pedro and the others were just muckin’ about on the beach till I got here. It was me got them playin’ the game,’ Billy was saying, with a touch of pride. ‘The game is fun. It brings us together too. All of us from different times and different places. Don’t none of that matter when you play the game. Then Susannah got here.’
He shook his head. ‘Soon as she remembered where she came from, she started making us remember too. Naggin’ at us. “Go back,”’ he imitated in a mockery of Susannah’s accent. ‘An’ one by one they all went through the door. All me friends, gone to who knows where?’
‘To their real lives,’ said Susannah fiercely. ‘This place gives us the strength to live.’
‘For what? Months with the rats and the darkness, then seven years with a ball an’ chain around me leg?’ Billy shrugged. ‘Well, maybe Pedro and Jan and Henri had more to go back for than me, if they managed to get to where they was goin’, an’ managed to live. But me? If I get to Botany Bay, I’m naught but convict scum. I’m someone here, king of the beach, boss of my farm. An’ here I’m stayin’.’
Faris looked down at the players. ‘What about the others?’
‘Jamila will go back,’ said Susannah. ‘Soon, I think.’
‘She’ll stay here if she knows what’s good for her! Every one of us is better off here,’ said Billy. ‘But that don’t stop Susannah naggin’ us to go back. Now she’ll be trying to get you to go through that dashed door too.’
‘Faris …’ began Susannah.
Suddenly Faris felt the same anger as Billy. How dare this small girl ask him about things that hurt, force him to remember? How dare she expect him to go back, to leave the beach and its sunlight, Jadda and the big clean house with its books and computer?
‘Then why don’t you go through the door yourself?’ he demanded.
‘Because if I go, there’ll be no one to remind you all of what you’ve left behind.’ She gazed down at the small group, still playing ball on the sand. ‘When I got here, they’d all forgotten there could be anything but this beach and the homes they go to at night.’
She met Faris’s eyes. He shifted uncomfortably, still unused to a girl’s direct gaze. ‘But they’re dream homes, just like this is a dream beach. And one day everyone here needs to go back to what’s real, no matter how hard it is.’
‘You believe that?’
‘I do.’
‘An’ I don’t,’ said Billy. He glared across the sand at the doorway, as if he wished the next tide would wash it away. But it looked too secure for that, jammed between its rocks. ‘All of us here now, we’ve decided to stay here. An’ you will too, if you’ve got sense. An’ you’ll keep my rules, down on the beach. No questions, no memories. An’ if you go to someone else’s home, you don’t ask no questions about the past there neither. No questions, no tryin’ to make us remember. Never.’
‘Except on the sand hill,’ said Susannah.
Billy shrugged, as if the scrubby sand hill could never compete with the beach of golden sand. ‘So, are you staying?’
Faris thought of the black wave, of Jadda waiting for him back in the house, the bright fresh house that seemed so real. And maybe tomorrow he would try the new computer. Maybe tomorrow his father would be back from the hospital …
What had he to return to, except terror and almost certain death?
‘I’ll stay,’ he said. But his eyes still shifted to the rough timber doorframe among the rocks.
CHAPTER 9
The computer stared at him when he woke the next morning, its gleaming flat screen just like the advertisements he had seen. He remembered where he had seen a computer like this now — in the in-flight magazine when they had flown to Indonesia. He had longed to try one.
Now he could. All he had to do was turn it on.
Nothing changes here. He heard Susannah’s words again. He had never turned on this model computer. He never would, not if he stayed here.
Now he knew why his father was always at the hospital. For he had no father, not one he knew. The man who had been taken, the man who would have swallowed his scream as the police wrenched his arm, he knew that man was gone.
He still had a father, somewhere. But that man had gone through years of prison, torture, if even a fraction of the rumours were true. The man in Australia was Faris’s father, but not the one he knew.
There was no father for him here.
But there was Jadda. He got up, dressed, in jeans again but a different-coloured T-shirt, went out to find the buffet breakfast, the one on the holiday websites for the place called Uluru and for the Great Barrier Reef. Those are from my memories, he thought. This is my version of Australia. No wonder the food had little taste. He had seen it in photos of Australian resorts on the internet: he had never actually tasted it. Only imagined. Only dreamed.
But he had known Jadda. Did know her. He hugged her especially hard this morning, heard her laugh as she hugged back, smelled her hand cream.
If this is memory and imagination, he thought, as he sat down to drink the tall glass of pineapple juice, topped with an umbrella and a cherry, then it’s good. Just like Billy said.
But it was different now. He knew it. He couldn’t let it go.
He looked around the room. There would never be a surprise in this room, never something new to find.
He looked up to find Jadda watching him. ‘Go to the beach,’ she said softly. ‘G
o and be with your friends.’
It was what Jadda would have said. It was what he knew he needed too.
He hugged her hard again, swiftly. Even if she was from his memory, she was still the Jadda he loved, who loved him too.
He jogged along the quiet street. No children played in the gardens. No women walked the footpath with shopping baskets. No one drove the shiny cars.
Why hadn’t he seen it before?
Because I didn’t want to, he thought. Because I needed quiet and safety.
He climbed the sand hill. Down on the beach Billy, Susannah, Mudurra and Juhi tossed the ball to each other. Billy hadn’t mentioned Juhi, he realised. She must have come with Mudurra. But then Juhi was only a girl. He trudged down the sand. Billy looked up at him and gave a grin of relief.
‘Hey, good to see you, matey. Come on down.’
He’s glad I haven’t gone through the doorway, thought Faris. He’s glad I’m still here, and safe. Billy wasn’t the bully he had at first thought. He was a protector, just like Susannah.
One by one the others wandered down the sand hill and joined in the game. Faris looked at them curiously. It was as though until now they had just been playmates, part of the game. Now he suddenly wanted to know their stories and who they were.
Susannah brought down a mutton-and-potato stew for lunch. It wasn’t spiced like Jamila’s, but it was fatty and comforting. Did your mother make the stew? thought Faris, as he ran up the beach and took the giant pot from her. Or did it just appear, like my giant buffet breakfast is always on the table when I come out from the bathroom?
Where had Jamila come from? What was her dream Australia like? Were her bright scarves and dresses from her past, or were they the clothes she had longed for?
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