School has yellow and pink counting sticks. Pink equals the number four, yellow equals five and you put them next to each other to make nine. The sticks leave coloured smudges on my skin and they are magnificent. But the real magnificence is in the corner of the classroom: a box of thick cards in a lidded box. Inked in different colours, each card has a story. Red cards have big baby print and stories that aren’t even stories: the duck went to the pond, the duck got lost, the mother duck came and got the duck. At the back of the box the cards are sparkling silver and golden, the print small, the depth of story dense. For treats at recess I am allowed to sit by the box, taking the cards out and running my finger across the words, tying myself into the story.
Our house is not a house of books, but in the second term of kindergarten Mrs Noble declares me unusually clever in a whispered conversation with my mother and begins sending home small parcels of books. Holding them in my hand, my fingers moving across the shiny pages, my mouth watering; it is better than watching the story time on Play School, when the turning of the pages fills me with an urgent longing.
In the afternoons, I collect the empty bottles of fizzy drink from the police station next to the house and at the back of the cool-room. In his dark uniform with the sergeant’s stripes, my father seems like a different man from the one roaring through the house at night. Bluff and cheerful, his big-man voice calling me Blossom, calling my brother his little mate, as though he did not throw my mother against the wall the night before. At the back of the station, they keep crates of empty soft drink bottles: Fanta, Coke and Cherry Cheer. Sometimes the smell of the sticky sweet drink fills the back room so that my mouth waters, desperate for the liquid sugar, the pure pleasure of bubbles. Instead, we are allowed, my brother and I, to take the empty bottles to the corner shop, trading them in at the rate of five cents for every empty bottle.
We split the money, counting out carefully at the shop counter, making piles of five-cent coins. With his share, my brother buys models of old Spitfires and miniature tubs of enamel paint, then spends hours leaning over them, piecing them together, his hand steady, his gaze unwavering. Me, I take my earnings to the St Vincent de Paul charity shop on the main street. There, I tip the coins onto the counter in exchange for collections of books boxed in old fruit crates, with handwritten labels on the top: Chldrns Assorted. I found the first box by accident—pressing my nose into the rich papery smell, my mouth watering—when I had to wait while one of the sisters looked for a sparkly belt for a fancy-dress party. Sometimes, before I get home, I squat on the footpath, extracting book after book, greedily opening the flyleaf to see what I’ve got. Maisie of the Upper Sixth. The Girl from the Bush. He Loved Her Tenderly. Pansy Goes to School. The Good Twins. There is no sorting system, just a riveting assortment of words, of other places to be.
Everything in my world needs words to give it form; the world can be contained by words, can be measured and bound up. If I can find the right words, the formless terrors that hound me can be shrunk to a proper size. Named by me, therefore smaller than me.
Everything in these boxes is mine, the slightly damp smell of paper and ink filling my bedroom where I open them one by one, ready to disappear. The Good Twins, it turns out, aren’t good at all, but terribly naughty! Children escape from robbers and from explosions and Pansy does indeed go to school, where she learns to be kinder to strangers as well as to herself. The Girl from the Bush is an Australian girl found at a train station in England after her guardian fails to collect her. Taken to the local boarding school, she works hard and learns hard and discovers her mettle and she changes into a rowing, award-winning dynamo. Mettle. I roll the word over my tongue, wondering where I might find mine. England, perhaps. At night, I lie awake in my bunk, planning my escape from all possible worlds, trying to find my mettle.
The Crocodile Book is the best of the charity shop books: a thick, cloth-bound annual, plump with stories and illustrations. Talking animals, runaway children, ballrooms hidden in deep forests, girls escaping shapeshifting demons. I hold the book to my face, breathing in its old pages, and I read again and again the story (clearly the best in the book) about the girl who runs away from a dark house in the woods and builds a castle from the bones of her enemies and she lives there on her own, watching the swans on the lake nearby, needing nothing but the company of the stars and the swans and the moon.
In second class, Debra Wales comes to our school. She has a deep voice that makes her sound smart, and her father is a Methodist minister, broad-backed and with a permanent grin, like a boy. All of them, her whole family, have red hair: both the mother and the father, the older sister, and Debra herself. Hers comes in the form of long red plaits, like Pippi Longstocking, and her house has books along one wall and the kitchen is full of the smell of baking and you can sit at the table while her mother gives you a glass of strawberry Quik and a piece of peppermint or cherry slice that she baked herself and then she will tell you to run along outside and play. It is like being in a book: Milly Molly Mandy, for instance, or The Magic Faraway Tree before the children go to the woods, when Mother is telling them to take care.
Debra Wales’s house does not have a prison or a paddock for horses, nor does it have shouting and hitting. Even so, at lunchtime Debra pretends to be running away from home with me and Sally Waters. More than anything, I want to be friends with Debra Wales; I want to spend weekends at her house and have sleepovers in the holidays. And so I offer her my most precious gift.
I wrap The Crocodile Book in golden cellophane paper, bought from the newsagents with my bottle earnings, and present it to Debra Wales ceremoniously during a morning recess at school. Mrs Scott is on playground duty, her black hair whipping over one eye so that she looks like a monster. Mrs Scott has the shoutiest voice. In first class, we heard her shrieking at her children in second class, and we each whispered our hope that she would die or leave Boolaroo Public School before it was our turn to be in her class. But she did neither and now she is my teacher.
Light reflects off the golden cellophane, and it crinkles like potato crisps, but it is the book inside that makes my mouth water. I hand it to Debra while we stand outside the washroom, under the watchful eye of Mrs Scott, who peers across at her, calling, ‘Is it your birthday, Debra?’
‘No.’
‘Then why the gift?’
Debra looks at me blankly, one shoulder lifting in an indifferent shrug. ‘I don’t know.’ But she takes the book and folds the cellophane into a little square, slipping it into her pocket.
I wait that day and the next for Debra to tell me how much she loves the book. I wait for her to rush to school after reading the story about the castle made from enemy bones. I can barely contain the potential thrill of having someone with whom to discuss the finer points of the castle. But each day Debra arrives at school with her clean white socks up to her knees, and her neat red plaits, and her shiny school port, and she says nothing about the castle or the lake, and she does not invite me to her house for the weekend. After two weeks, I ask her to name her favourite story and she shrugs again, this time with both shoulders, so that her plaits bounce slightly against her plaid collar. She says, ‘Don’t know.’
Breath held, I ask which ones she’s read. And again, she shrugs.
And that shrug is the truth. Debra Wales doesn’t care about that book or those stories. Because the truth is this: if you don’t have a prison in your backyard, you don’t need to find the rules for escape.
Kerouac had a lot to answer for. My finger, pointed towards the highway, for one. Also, my legs aching from the weight of the stupidly large second-hand backpack, my mind fizzing and bubbling with so much unsaid, the hospital a shadow behind me.
Heat throbbed against my feet, ran up my calves and my thighs, turned to liquid. My pack tugged heavily on my back, the trainers suspended from it bouncing every so often against my legs. The bottom section was jammed full of books—including On the Road, of course, but also Steppenwolf, The
Unbearable Lightness of Being and a fat collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s mediocre short stories, The Price Was High. It was indeed. Perhaps this particular idea came first from Kerouac: a finger outstretched, me on the road, a load of lies in my head. But Kerouac’s girls were ciphers, receptacles for the dreams and visions of the wild young men driving and dodging through their big land, knowing the world would shift shape for them, that they would make the world change. For the girls, the world does not shift shape. For the girls, the shape that must shift is their own.
I tried to make myself the right shape. I tried to shift myself, to be the kind of girl who fits, bending myself around the world, squeezing into corners, making myself thinner than I was, trying to be less hungry, less angry. I tried to be the kind of girl Kerouac or one of the other Great Legends might write about. But I was not that girl.
Eight fat books weighed my pack down, all of them with grand stories, one way or another, of escape. All of them with young men striding through the world wielding swords or cars or horses or girls as weapons. I searched for myself in their pages, tried to build my muscle to make myself the hero I could see there. Nonetheless, I stepped out into my own map. The great north, the wild unknown—that would save me. My vision was clear. I would be Kerouac; I would be Joyce and Thomas. Unbound on the road, I would escape, and I would find myself. Or I would be found by someone else.
My sleeping bag had a hole burned in the bottom of it after my encounter with the hairy driver. He’d picked me up just before the New South Wales border. My black lace-ups were already starting to look dust-worn. When I kicked them in the red gravel outside the Moree truck stop cafe, small crimson grains settled into the holes, sifting into my white socks, leaving spots that looked like blood, as though tiny shoe insects had bumbled in, biting in procession.
After Armidale, my first ride had dropped me at the truck stop and given me twenty bucks for some food. I said, ‘It’s fine, don’t.’ That guy had toddler seats in the back of the car and played Classic FM from Brisbane. In a charity shop in Newcastle, I’d found a flick knife, a strangely beautiful thing. Gold, carved, with a small clip. Five dollars. I bought it because it made me feel tough and because, along with the small bottle of amyl nitrate, I thought it might come in handy. I had no idea how to use it. None. But I kept my hand on it all the way to Moree, while the guy with the toddler seat explained the music of Bartok to me and quoted things his toddlers said. At the end of each story of toddler cuteness, he trailed off into a slow chuckle, shaking his head in wonder. I waited for the turn, for the mask to come off, waited for the moment when I would realise his true wickedness, but it did not come. When he dropped me at the truck stop, he told me to be careful, to watch out for myself.
After the toddler-seat man drove off, tooting his horn cheerfully, I tried to order yoghurt in the truck stop and the blonde woman said, ‘We don’t serve health freaks here.’ I bought a bag of peanuts and licked the salt from the foil packet.
Hairy Guy was outside, holding the door of his ute open. My deal with myself was this: whenever I could, I’d get rides from cafes or truck stops. And I’d write down the number plate and tell someone—the waitress in the cafe, a guy in another truck, anyone—where I was going. That, I thought, that would keep me safe. But anyway, nothing I’d done had kept me safe, not the right things or the wrong things. Danger followed me, and perhaps I deserved it. Some girls, when they are hurt, eat an entire town, watching their bodies swell like a fortress. I had done this, eating until I was numb and wide. Some girls, when they are wounded, vomit up the town they ate, and I had done this too, feeling the burning in my throat, hoarse like a scream. Some girls batter their bodies with drugs or, like me, with danger.
But Kerouac and his boys jumped in and out of cars. They stuck their thumbs out on the highway and they were free, and I would be free too. The driver of the ute rested his hand on the upper frame of the cab door—prominent knuckles, neatly trimmed square fingernails. Clean, too. My own nails were already caked with dirt that I couldn’t get rid of, no matter how many times I scraped a bobby pin beneath them. Khaki canvas fluttered across the ute trailer; a swag poked out. There was no dog and no sign of another ride.
Let me be clear here: I had no deadline, no outcome, no one waiting. There was no one to care for me, only myself, and I had never learned the lessons of caring. There was only me and my backpack full of books and my black lace-ups and a desperate need to get away. I’d already disappeared, though, and the more buried I was, the better. The more buried I was, the deeper in the earth, the more chance I had of being new, of making a new me, a new story. That was my plan, as much as I had. I got into the ute and hoped that it would get me further away from where I was.
Hairy Guy had a name—Paul—and he could take me north, as far as Emerald. It was closer to the end of the country, closer to the land’s boundary. And so I went with him. I told him I’d come from Melbourne, where I was studying law—I’d always fancied studying law—and I was taking a break between courses. I knew less about Melbourne than I did about law, but he didn’t ask me about the city. He just said I must be smart if I was going to be a lawyer and was it just for the money, and I said no, I wanted to be a lawyer so that I could help people.
He said, ‘Help crims, you mean? Help them get off?’
I watched the cotton fields flash past outside the window. ‘No. Help the others. Not the crims. Help innocent people.’
‘Victims?’
I shrugged.
He said, ‘How would you know? How would you know who’s the victim and who’s guilty?’
I said, ‘I guess that’s why I’m studying law. To find out.’
‘To find out how to tell who’s lying and who’s telling the truth? Double-crossing people, you mean?’
‘Double-crossing?’
‘When you come down and ask the crim all the questions and then another lawyer asks him again.’
‘Cross-examining?’
‘Yeah. That. Will you do that? Is that what lawyers do?’
My pulse battered at the base of my throat, but I nodded. ‘That’s right.’
We camped overnight somewhere in the desert. We’d gone so far north that the land and sky had already opened up. We ate soft cheese and white bread and he lit a fire and hung an actual billy on it. Yes, I thought. I am far away now. I am on the road and the world will never find me and I will become someone else. What happens will happen whether I will it to or not. I don’t know what I thought I would find. Flames cut across the night, embers sparking. Hairy Guy—Paul—was a shadowy shape on the other side of the flames, his beard looking one second red, the other black. I’d untied my enamel mug, purchased in the army surplus store in Sydney, and poured the billy tea in. It was as thick as the black above me.
We slept by the fire, me in my sleeping bag, him out of his swag, and all night he shuffled closer and closer to me, while I shuffled away from him inch by inch until I woke with the smell of smoke, where the end of my sleeping bag had melted into the embers of the fire.
The next day he dropped me at another truck stop, and held my hand for a minute too long, and then I stepped out of the ute and stood on the highway in the sweltering sun, waiting for my next ride, waiting for something hopeful, waiting for something to change.
There was no yoghurt in any of the truck stops, only burgers and bad coffee and a feeling that I didn’t know this country, my country. The further north I went, the more alien the country and the people became. On the outer boundary of Emerald, I camped on my own beneath a tree by a creek bed and was woken in the morning by a cluster of locals speaking their language. At first, when I woke in my half-burned sleeping bag, the words seemed to be birdsong blending in with the song of the river. I lay there, trying to separate out the sounds, trying to decipher the music, while I blinked myself awake. In the night, the temperature had dropped down low, and I’d layered myself in socks and leggings. When the sun came up, I felt that I was being roasted and
grilled, basted by the melody of the language washing over me. I wriggled out of my sleeping bag and headed down to the creek barefoot to rinse the grain from my face. Sand clumped beneath my toes, and when I set one foot into the water, the sweet cool of it stilled me.
Behind me, the talk escalated into shouts and catcalls, a cacophony that frightened me with its strangeness. Someone was shouting behind me, something urgent in the tone. I knew the sounds of escalating violence, had grown up attuned to the swift changes in mood that might turn to a punch, a hit. This talk lacked that undercurrent, but still my toes trembled a little in the cool dark water. I wanted to feel at home here; I wanted these words, these accents, to feel familiar to me. I wanted to feel a part of it. But I didn’t, and when the hand grabbed at my wrist I jumped, letting out a little shriek.
The woman’s pink nails dug into the skin of my forearm. She said, ‘There’s crocs in there, honey. Just ’cause you can’t see ’em doesn’t mean they’re not there.’ She jerked me back, away from the shoreline, then kept her hand on my wrist, her gaze on the far side of the river. She held her other hand up, instructing me to wait, to listen, to watch. Cicadas burned somewhere deep in the bush, and the swell of heat accompanied the undulating tide of noise: a chirruping, the soft and quiet swirl of water, and, somewhere nearby, the ck-ck-ck of an unfamiliar bird. Sweat pooled under my breasts, the sun making my limbs soft. On the far side of the river, one of the long grey logs twisted suddenly, its jaws clicking open before it slid, rocket-fast, into the water.
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