Hare's Fur

by Trevor Shearston

  ‘Russell, Kayla. She rung me, yeah? That neighbour’s kid knew Em.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve just come back from there. Those people are safe, they could have gone on staying here.’

  ‘Not your call, ay, Jade’s. You done heaps, so thanks. Not your fault.’

  ‘What about food again, Kayla? They took a bit, but not enough.’

  ‘Not your worry. They ain’t in the same place you found em, so don’t go lookin.’

  ‘Have you traced your mum’s cousin?’

  Down the line came a heavy silence.

  ‘The reason I’m asking, are they going to be down there a further two weeks!’

  ‘I don’t fuckin need this. Like I said, not your worry.’

  ‘No, Kayla, listen, what I’m getting at, I have a car, you and I could go down to Sydney and you can talk face to face to the people you’ve been ringing.’

  ‘You done enough. Thanks. Bye.’

  He stood holding the beeping handpiece. ‘Fuck!’ He turned and pulled out a chair, hit the end-call button and laid the handpiece on the table. He would never see them again. He’d not even got to say goodbye. Surely, though, she would ring once they were in Marrickville or wherever. The note, brief as it was, implied that she knew it was nothing he’d done. It was just freakish bad luck. But he’d lost them.

  What, though, if she couldn’t find the woman — Kayla couldn’t? ‘Mother’s cousin’ was barely, he’d have thought, a legal relative. And they’d been born in Katoomba, their sister was here, whatever friends they had were here, they went to school here. Both Kayla and Jade believed, even hoped — from the way they spoke — that their mother would get a gaol sentence. He didn’t think Jade would approach her father, she’d called him a prick. Anyway, the young ones weren’t his. But she was a minor — by law even if in no other way. They’d have to be fostered, all three. He was in Katoomba, he had the means, he had the room, they appeared to like and trust him. Was he eligible? He screeched back the chair and scurried along the hallway to his study.

  The Fostering NSW site informed him that he was. The requisites were Australian citizen, in good health, able to obtain Working with Children and National Police clearance. From their Ten Myths of Fostering he learned that a foster parent could be single, childless, and, most importantly — for him — any age over twenty-five. Of prime importance to the assessors were whether his health, his energy, and his maturity were ‘up to it’. They had proven to be for the best part of a week. Why not for a year? Longer if needed, depending on how long their mother got. Jade would probably want nothing to do with her, but he assumed the littlies would have to be returned to her when she was out and back in Katoomba. But for dealing she might get years! And even when she was out they might actually get a choice, whatever their ages. And choose him.

  He would, he read, be offered training, 24/7 access to a caseworker, peer support. He didn’t need their tax-free allowance. He clicked on the list of agencies and typed in his postcode. Half were, from the names, religiously affiliated. He clicked on the first that wasn’t. Creating Links was based in Bankstown but had a branch in Faulconbridge. He went methodically through the list. Only one other was close to being local, in Penrith. He returned to Creating Links and bookmarked it.

  He was too excited to eat. He made coffee, drank it pacing. He needed badly to talk to Jade. Why oh why had he not thought to get her number? And a surname! Hers, at least. ‘Well, you weren’t anticipating she’d just … take off !’ He didn’t have a number for Kayla either. He stopped pacing. Her boyfriend — what was his name? Greg! He’d been picked up at the ‘Y’. They crashed at the old YMCA, Jade had said. There was no guarantee they’d returned to doing so. But it was the only place he had. He lifted the phone and snatched the book out from under it. There was no longer a YMCA listed for Katoomba. Near the high school, had been her only other clue. He got his keys and the torch from the drawer and went out to the garage.

  The directory was too recent. He would have to drive circuits. Even if signage had been removed, an abandoned hostel would be recognisable. And he’d need to be there early. He put the directory back in the glove box.

  The first thing he saw when he opened the back door was the chicken thighs. They’d been sitting out on the cutting board for an hour. ‘You’re getting stupid, my man.’ He’d have to sharpen up if ever it came to an interview. He put the thighs back in the fridge. They’d left him enough bread for a toasted cheese sandwich. He ate it standing at the window seats and looking down at the unfinished game, noting as he had each time they’d played that no white piece was placed exactly in the centre of its square.

  In bed he watched the boy on their second morning in the house. He was standing, entranced, at the kitchen window. Thirty metres from the steps was the big male wallaby that was here most mornings, with the black stripe down its spine. It was cropping a patch, then moving languidly on its haunches to the next. Hadn’t he seen them down at the creek? Russell asked him. Jade answered. ‘Nah, we just heard em.’ The boy asked could they go outside. ‘We can try. But it’ll probably hop away.’ He still wanted to, took Russell’s hand when they started towards the door.

  On the landing, inspiration struck him. He whispered to the boy that he would stay out of sight, but the boy should bend over and hop down the steps. He was the same size, the wallaby might think he was a wallaby too. It would stand up, but he should do slow hops and see how close he could get. He had no idea if what he’d said would work, but it did. The boy got to five metres from the animal before it took three sidling hops and halted, ears flicking, to study again this sort-of wallaby. He couldn’t get so close a second time, but the wallaby didn’t panic, simply hopped to maintain its distance. When the boy’s thighs tired he straightened, and the wallaby spun and bounded past the kiln shed and into the tea-tree. The boy watched it go, then turned to find him, his face alight.

  He’d watched wallabies with Michael when Michael was the boy’s age. Now, lying in bed, he asked himself why, back then, he’d lacked the imagination to tell his son to do the same thing?

  The steel sign was pocked by rocks and rusted, but still legible. He drove slowly along the fence line. The complex of single-storey huts occupied the centre of an area of four or five house blocks. Bush left in the corners had recolonised much of the grounds, eave-high wattles and gum saplings growing in the corridors between the huts. He wondered who owned the land, and why it hadn’t been turned into units. Holes big enough for a person had been torn in the chainwire fence in three places and well-used pads ran to the openings. He drove back and parked at the widest. The huts had the look of barracks. Every panel in the fibro walls facing the road had been smashed, the louvre windows were louvreless. It wasn’t a place he’d have chosen for a winter squat. Anyone camped inside would probably have noted the suspiciously slow-moving car. So did he really need to go in? The place had a brooding, even hostile, feel. ‘Yes,’ he muttered, ‘you do.’

  He locked the car and looked along the row of houses opposite. No one was blatantly watching him. But if the police did raids he was probably being observed from behind curtains. He wouldn’t have made much of a spy, he should have parked a street away. As if to make a belated claim on guile he turned towards the huts and bent to peer from under his brows across the roof of the car at the same time as he would seem to be looking inside it. Again, no fleeting face at a window. He walked round the car to the opening ripped in the fence — the ‘how’ interesting him now that he was close enough to see what force had been exerted — then stepped over the ankle-height strand of twisted wire too strong to break and, keeping his eyes on the windows even though believing the scrutiny futile, walked towards the small roofed landing at the end of the nearest hut.

  There were four wooden steps. A heavy chain and padbolt hung useless, the timber of the door splintered where he guessed the lock had been removed and the chain run through its hole.
He bent and peered through the gap into a pale yellow corridor with doorways each side, then pushed the door, wincing in expectation of a loud rusty creaking. It swung open with a squeak no louder than a wren’s.

  The internal walls, too, had been smashed. He picked his way along the corridor, trying to step on patches of bare board, but the shards of fibro lying so thickly it was impossible to be silent. Some rooms still contained an iron bedframe with a sprung-wire base or a steel locker battered open, but most were empty, apart from the fibro and glass littering their floors, and in one, bringing him to a halt, a blue bicycle so mangled it looked like an artwork. At the end of the corridor a doorway with hinges but no door opened into a large bare room with bolted double doors and in the left-hand wall a serving hatch. The walls and even the ceiling were a riot of spray-canned graffiti. It was a try-out space, he thought, for walls he’d seen in town.

  He turned to his left, and recoiled. Staring unseeing over his head was Che, the iconic image, in black beret and star. He’d been given a haloing of chrome yellow. Beneath in red cursive was sprayed, It is not necessary to wait until all conditions for making revolution exist; the insurrection can create them. Russell’s spontaneous response was a guffaw — revolutionaries in Katoomba! — followed by embarrassment. A thinker, a fellow reader at least, had squatted here. He looked quickly again round the room, but it was the only political statement, the rest were the usual geometric tags.

  The hatch and the room’s size said it was a communal dining hall. Which it still was, it seemed. Around a half-sheet of corrugated iron with the remains of a recent fire were stomped beer and Coke cans, barbecue-chicken bags, cracker boxes and bread wrappers, tins with the labels burned off. The smell of curdled milk drifted up from a carton near his feet. There was nothing, though, to sleep on, no dead mattresses or the chunks of raw foam he’d seen down at the overhang. He had a black texta in the glove box. The walls were too busy, but there was space on the floor. A message there would even be more visible. Kayla. Ring me please. Russell. No. She’d be angry at being what she’d perceive as stalked.

  He nodded to Che, then picked his way back along the corridor to the open door and out onto the landing, pulling the door to by the chain, the hinges giving their wren’s squeak. He was almost at the rip in the fence when he was hit between the shoulderblades by the sensation of being watched. It was too strong to ignore. He went through the pretence of spotting a lace undone, crouching to retie it, the while surreptitiously scanning windows from the corner of his eye. Too long crouched would give away that he knew. He stood and walked to the rip. The sensation didn’t abate, persisting to the car, and shifting to the back of his head as he drove away.

  He rang and got Hugh. He told him his visitors had left and asked if he wanted to come over tonight, or would he prefer to wait till Thursday, keep things in sync.

  ‘No fear, I’ll be over! Only be watching crap on the box. So where’d they go?’

  ‘Tell you tonight. Love to Del.’

  He went to the workshop and lit the heater and while it caught cleared the table of the tools and the boy’s unfinished bowl and unused coils and took the marble slab out to the tankstand. Then he turned the feet of the blossom jars he’d thrown a century ago — how it felt.

  The jars couldn’t have been left, but when he’d carried the last to the racks he closed down the heater and fetched his leather-faced gloves from the annexe and wheeled the barrow over to the wood stacks. Which was where Helen found him. She apologised for not having come over sooner, the hardware had called her in for someone off with flu. He was loading splits from the oldest row of radiata. He knocked a test pair together, flipped them into the barrow, the habit so engrained it was no longer conscious, but she stopped speaking.

  ‘What does that do?’

  ‘What? Oh — the ring. For dryness.’ He suddenly remembered — Lucy! — took off his gloves. ‘How is she?’

  ‘She’s fine. I was more concerned about you. Have you heard anything?’

  ‘Their older sister rang to thank me, and to tell me my services were no longer needed.’

  ‘They’re back hiding, then.’

  ‘I gather so, yes.’ He didn’t say how he’d gathered, that he’d found their prints at the lookout.

  ‘Well, at least she thanked you. Which is something, considering the risk you ran.’

  He watched her face. She wasn’t embroidering. ‘With whom?’

  ‘DoCS. Or whatever they call themselves now. They can prosecute you. For hindering an operation. Even more likely where they’ve called in the police.’

  ‘I didn’t realise they could go as far as laying charges. But I suppose … being a government body.’ He gave a tight laugh, looked down at the scarred and sap-stained gloves. ‘Not that knowing would have changed anything.’ He slapped the gloves against his hand as a punctuation. ‘I forgot to ask the other day — how’s the work going?’

  ‘You mean yesterday.’

  ‘Yes. Sorry.’

  ‘That’s all right, a bit’s happened. It’s going well — I’ve finished another one and halfway through a new one. Should have enough by the deadline to give me a choice.’

  ‘Always a good plan.’

  ‘Yes.’ She took a step back, nodded towards the barrow. ‘I didn’t come over to hold you up, I just wanted to know if you’d heard anything. The other thing — sorry — but Lucy’s worried now about Emma. Where’s she sleeping, does she have enough to eat, et cetera. I know, the same questions you’d be asking yourself.’

  ‘They took food from here. Tell her that.’

  ‘Okay, good, I will. She also said to tell you she’s very tough to play at soccer. Emma is.’

  A laugh forced itself out. ‘I don’t doubt it, just playing her at chess. She’s pure will, that one.’

  He barrowed and stacked ten loads at the firemouth. It was enough to dull thought, work off his restlessness. He crossed the grass to the laundry and pocketed the brush and cloth.

  It was a shorter time than usual between visits, but the jars were powdered as thickly as ever. He cleaned Michael’s first, then hers, walked to the edge and whipped the cloth clean, then folded it around the brush and pushed the bundle into his pocket. He moved the white pebble marking his spot and sat, rested his left hand on the lid of her jar.

  ‘You’d have liked them. Not just the boy, all of them. They’re not tame.’ He stroked a finger down the jar to feel the fissures in the guan. ‘Helen tells me I could have faced charges. Still could, I suppose. But they’d have to be caught first. Anyway, I’d reckon they’re pretty good liars.’ The ledge faced south, sunless even in summer. He felt in his pocket for the hanky and pinched the bead of snot from the tip of his nose. ‘This surprised me — but even at our age we were eligible to foster them. All you have to be is healthy. And not a crim. Which we might have managed to establish.’ A shiver bit his neck, ran down his spine. ‘That wasn’t you, it’s getting cold.’ He pinched his nostrils again and stood. ‘Only thing, they’d have moored us here. But anyway, they’re looking for a so-far elusive cousin of their mother’s. Just have to hope she isn’t cut from the same cloth.’ He leaned and kissed her lid. ‘Better make a move, I’ve got Hugh coming.’ He picked up the white pebble, set it back in its place, his place.

  Hugh arrived at seven with a bottle of the organic red from Orange he and Delys drank by the carton. He plonked it on the table and dived a hand into the pocket of his lumber-jacket, pulled out test rings threaded on his index finger, and slid them clinking softly onto the table beside the bottle. ‘Check these. Taken a page out of your book. That’s a slip from a clay I spotted in the sewer trench they’re digging for the neighbour’s extension. She salts, mate!’ He singled out and lifted to the light one of the rings, ‘Look at this!’, held it out to Russell to take. The salt had drawn from the slip a rich rust with gold spangling, the texture a fine-pored orange
peel. Russell placed the ring back on the table and examined the others. They were good, but the first was the star.

  ‘I hope you marked where you took it from.’

  Hugh laughed. ‘Better — snuck in and dug a bagful. They’ll notice their trench’s got a belly, but they’ll be scratching their heads for the why!’ He spun and headed for the shelf with the wine glasses.

  ‘Don’t get too cocky, you’ve hardly outdone yourself, your neighbour’s backyard.’

  Hugh laughed again, too thrilled with his find to be chastened. He broke the seal, poured their glasses, handed one to Russell. He took a sip and sobered. ‘You were a bit cryptic on the phone, old son. I said to Del, something’s happened.’

  He told him what the ‘something’ was.

  Hugh was silent for a few seconds. ‘I can’t say I know Helen, but she didn’t strike me as the dobbing type. So where were you?’

  ‘Like I said — the workshop. They’d been there with me. I went over the house an hour or so after Helen left, and they were gone. Wrote me a note, thanks and goodbye.’

  ‘Hah. Trusting little souls.’

  ‘Me, I think they were starting to.’ He picked up the bottle by its neck, ushered Hugh towards the bay window. ‘You’d have liked the younger girl — Emma. She spotted the board the first night, wanted to know what it was. A day and she was into it, playing a full game. She fell in love with the travel set, even took it to bed.’

  ‘You’re lucky she didn’t knock it off.’

  He kept to himself that he’d had the same thought.

  Geoffrey rang. He was writing the ad to go into Art Almanac. He was, he hoped, still able to list Russell?

  ‘They’re made. I’ll be firing in a month.’