‘Tell Chrissy it was Mike what loaned you the possums,’ the man says. ‘She can pay me back.’ He winks.
I smile. We’ve found people who are still nice like us. ‘Thank you,’ I say again and shout, ‘Hike! Mush!’ to the dogs, and we set off. I wave to Mike.
‘We can’t go to the house,’ Emery says quietly. ‘It might be a trap.’
‘What?’ I say, coz I’m feeling like we’re in good country now. We’re in a place where people got enough to eat and know Emery’s family.
‘More meat on a dog than a possum,’ Emery says.
‘No!’ I say. But I know he’s right. I know we can’t trust no one. I’m just too tired to go on without help.
‘I know a place we can hide, near Ma’s,’ he says. ‘If we can get there.’
Lights flash around the valley and now I’m scared they’re people organising an ambush, not telling them we’re okay to pass. I’m so terrified now, tears leak down my face, no matter that there’s no water in me to waste, but I head the cart where Emery tells me, and a while later, when it’s almost dark, Emery walks Maroochy and the cart down into a ditch beside an old road, to a pile of enormous concrete tubes and a little trickle of a creek.
‘They dumped these here years ago, to do some drainage under the road or something,’ Emery says. ‘But they never did it.’
I unhook the dogs and shove the cart into a concrete tube. Crouched in the opening of the tube, I cut up the two possums and feed the dogs right away.
Then we lay out the sleeping bag on the cold hard concrete and crawl onto it. One by one, the dogs slink over looking for a warm bit of sleeping bag for themselves, and I snuggle against a furry back to keep myself warm without my hoodie.
A car rumbles by slowly on the road above us, gravel crunching, lights bouncing around the countryside outside the concrete tube, and the dogs growl, them not having heard a car on a road for so long.
At first light, Maroochy wakes me, nudging my face with her damp nose, and Emery is gone from the sleeping bag beside me. I crawl out of the giant concrete pipe, and there he is, standing, staring around, looking like he knows where he is, holding his arm to his body. He looks like the sleep did him some good. Or maybe he’s just excited he’s home.
‘Come on then,’ he says, ‘let’s get to those caves before the sun comes up. Even if Ma’s not there, at least I know my way around, and no one will catch us.’
‘They gotta be okay,’ I say. ‘We’ve come all this way.’
Emery shakes his head. ‘Working real hard for something doesn’t always make it turn out, Bells. Sometimes things just go wrong.’
‘I know that,’ I say. ‘Didn’t you see me knowing that back there, when I was driving the dogs on and on, and shooting at a man, and feeding you a hunk of dead snake?’
‘Yeah,’ Emery says. He reaches over and rubs my head, like Dad always does. ‘You’re walking on your head real good.’
I smile and pack up the cart quick, even though Emery’s standing there saying we’d travel faster just running, but the bumping of the cart is nothing as bad as the bumping of running for his arm and head, plus there’s no way either of us can run as fast as a dog, even a dog towing us on a cart.
We’re off, the sky behind us grey with new light, like smoky glass, getting lighter all the time, chasing us into the darkness that has kept us hidden most of the journey here.
There are even more tufts of wild grass here, brown and yellow like they’re supposed to be, but alive on this old country like they’ve been for a million years, I bet. Alive after the fungus, they’re pushing up through the sprawling weeds.
A small mob of roos bound over a hill ahead of us and the dogs race on with Emery calling, ‘Haw! Rooch! Haw!’ to keep Maroochy’s starving brain and stomach from chasing them down.
‘There’s time enough for roo hunting when we’re all safe,’ Emery says.
I guess the possum last night has helped, coz the dogs mind Emery and we run on.
We dip down between two hills and cross a dry creek bed. All the trees are blackened off here, like a fire came through. Me and Emery hop off and walk. I lift the cart over the lumps of stones, then Emery rides the cart up the hill, while I run along beside, hanging onto the handlebar to steer, coz the dogs are exhausted.
At the top of the hill, I climb back on, and I’m so tired from running up the hill I can hardly lift my knees high enough to get on the step.
Eating a big roast roo sounds like a great idea right now, and I wonder if we can go back for one.
The light catches up to us, so now we can see for ages, and the yellow grass stretches forever from here, like the fungus never made it this far. ‘Murphy’s farm is down there,’ Emery says, pointing. ‘They ran goats for meat. Those things went everywhere. I helped them round up a couple of summers ago.’ He stares at the tin sheds and long brick house when we get closer. ‘I don’t think anyone’s there.’ The sheds and all the fences are blackened.
He looks away and tells Rooch to ‘Haw a bit, haw a bit,’ to turn us away from those empty Murphy farm buildings. I keep working the brakes as the land dips and lifts, and when we’re on top of a small rise, Emery says, ‘Woah!’ and stops the dogs. He stares down at a square, dirty white house with a couple of big sheds next to it. It’s ringed by old cars and bits of rusty tin like a huge wall around it and the road leading to it is just two dirt tracks.
Emery breathes in and lets it go slowly, and he just stares like he doesn’t know what the next move is.
‘Is that your grandparents’ house?’ I ask.
He nods. ‘Ma said there was nothing here for me, but I would’ve been happy working in the caves and growing the mushrooms. That big old white van?’ He points to a tall van, red dirt halfway up its side, in with the cars that make up the wall around the house. ‘Ma used to drive the mushrooms to town in that.’
In the front lawn, there’s a mound and a hunk of tin rammed in one end and writing on the tin. It looks like a grave. I’m not close enough to see the writing. It don’t look like a word long enough to be ‘Christmas’. Emery’s and his face is stone cold shocked. All the life gone from his cheeks. He’s seen it too. Nothing I can say will calm him down about seeing that. To me, it looks like he don’t even want to believe he’s seen it. Tears are filling his eyes though, and we gotta keep moving.
I look all around us, coz up here we stand out. ‘Do you think they’re in there?’
‘I dunno. We should go on to the caves.’ He jumps back on the cart and turns the dogs again away from the house, shouts ‘Mush!’ and ‘Haw!’, like he’s afraid of that old house now and who’s lying in the ground down there.
We race down through tufty brown grass and scrubby little trees, winding between them up onto a flat, and in the distance, above thousands of scrubby bushes, dark green like a lumpy carpet, there’s a bizarre pink bank like the land below it just fell down a bit.
‘Are the caves there? In that bank?’ I ask.
Emery shakes his head. ‘They’re here, underneath us. Water cut caves through this bit of land, leaving it so dry on top it looks worthless, but underneath, it’s damp enough for growing mushrooms. Ba...’ He stops. He swallows. He don’t need to tell me he thinks it’s his grandad lying in the ground down there on the front lawn. ‘Ba bought the house when he was young and foolish, Grandma said, when he found out there was a secret gold mine on the property. He never did find any gold, and water kept seeping in wherever he dug, so Grandma brought logs in and started growing shiitake mushrooms in the mine shafts, and her and Ma picked them and sold them in Swan Hill. Ma said to tell people we were growing them in the sheds, coz the tunnels are probably illegal. You can’t see the old mine until you’re almost falling into it.’
‘Don’t let us fall into it,’ I say.
Emery guides us around the scrubby trees, shouting, ‘Haw!’ and ‘Gee!’ at the dogs, who are just trotting now, and ‘Left!’ and ‘Right!’ at me, before he finally grabs one o
f the handlebars and shoves it around himself.
Anger is working its way through him. I don’t know what’s going on in his head but it’s real bad thoughts about his grandad being dead, I’m guessing.
We wind our way deeper into the scrub and finally it opens out into a clearing with a little concrete creek. The concrete is full of stones, worn and polished shiny sitting set in the concrete, dark where water laps at them.
‘This is some old mining thing,’ Emery says and waves at it. ‘Woah!’ he says and stops the dogs. ‘We’ll shove the cart in there, under the scrub, and get the dogs some water.’ Emery points at a bare patch under a gnarly old scrubby tree, so I unhook the dogs one by one from the gang rope and let them go get a drink from the concrete creek. I drink too. So glad to wash the dust from my throat.
I’m afraid to speak in case I say something that’ll set Emery off. His body is stiff like he’s about to lose it. And why not? He’s waited to come back here for so long and when he finally does, his grandad might be dead.
Emery gets down on his belly and drinks too. He looks up at me, the morning light making his dark irises paler and glassy. ‘This is the place we come to find, Bell.’
I nod but I don’t smile, coz what good is finding a place if the people you love aren’t here no more.
I pick up the rifle. ‘Where’s the mine?’ I ask, but Emery don’t answer. He splashes over the concrete creek and up into a worn path on the other side. There’s an old shed there, with a built-in bench and table, all of it painted patchy green and brown.
‘This shed used to be white,’ Emery said. ‘We kept our buckets here. We’d pick the mushrooms and load them all out to the table, in white buckets.’
‘That’s a good sign, right?’ I ask. ‘That they had time to make sure this was painted and hidden?’
He leads me around the side and down a few steps, the edges lined with planks, to a mine shaft, hidden behind a wall of cut-down scrubby trees, piled up against a hole in the ground. Emery pulls away just one hunk of tree and steps down into the shaft.
It’s like a massive rabbit hole going gradual, not straight down, but square. Giant hunks of wood like railway sleepers line the top of the door and down the sides and all along the tunnel leading in. The dogs are dawdling behind us, sniffing and trying to check things out. I pull the lighter out of my pocket and hand it to Emery in case he needs it.
‘Twelve steps down,’ he says quietly, ‘then it levels out. I’ll go first and see if anyone’s down here.’ He holds out his hand and wiggles his fingers for me to hand him the rifle.
I shake my head and hand him the knife. ‘You can’t shoot with one arm. I’m coming too.’ I don’t tell him I can’t even shoot with two arms.
Emery rolls his eyes. ‘Don’t trip and shoot me in the back,’ he says.
‘Don’t worry,’ I say. ‘I only got a couple of bullets. I won’t waste them on you.’
He sticks out his tongue. Then he touches his finger to his lips and steps down into the shaft. I follow him, and Maroochy is coming down so close behind me, her head is bumping into my butt. The air is cool and musty down here.
In the dark, Emery gets ahead of me. I don’t know how far ahead till he flicks the lighter and lights up a long cave.
‘Nobody here,’ he says. But I’m not looking at him. The walls are lined with racks of weird logs and growing out of those strange stringy logs are hundreds of glorious white mushrooms, long bent stalks with delicate wavy caps. The way they stick out from the wall with their little circle caps all parallel and perfectly white makes me think of a pile of hovering alien space ships. Are these even Earthling food? I pull the cap off one and shove it in my mouth. It’s dry and squeaky on my teeth, but it’s food.
‘These are shiitake,’ Emery says. ‘They’re looking real healthy, so someone’s taking care of them.’
Rooch sniffs at the mushrooms, so does Bear, and the other dogs are coming down behind her. She sniffs at me eating one, like she’s not sure. I pluck another cap off a log and break it up and give it to her. She’s hungry enough to eat anything, but she’s chewing it with her mouth open, lips back, like it’s not a taste she likes.
I grab some more and break them up and pop them in front of Bear and Oyster and Squid, and even Wolf, slinking in the shadows, not wanting to be left alone.
‘Come on, Wolf,’ I say and crumble a mushroom for him. ‘It’s just until we go get you a nice fat roo.’
Squid gets a real taste for them and bites a few mushrooms off the racks on the wall. Chewing and pushing them out again with his tongue and picking them up off the damp cave floor for another go, like he’s not sure he wants them in his mouth or out. He’s such a goose.
Emery yelps and takes his thumb off the hot lighter.
‘What now?’ I ask him in the dark.
‘Grab the sleeping bag. We’ll go on into the other tunnels and wait to see who comes down. Most mushrooms don’t need extra water, but these mushrooms are from damp mountain forests in Asia, and they need a bit of a spray to keep them growing.’
I run out and get the sleeping bag from the cart and head back down. Emery leads us further into the tunnels and along a little channel of water, and finally there’s a light ahead. It’s a crack of light in the rock.
‘This tunnel was made by water seeping into a crack and washing it out over the years,’ he says. Emery squeezes through the crack, the rocks on either side worn smooth like lots of people been squeezing through here. I follow him through, pushing back Roochy’s head, coz she thinks we can both fit at the same time, her not wanting to wait till I’ve dragged the sleeping bag through.
The cave, which is all pale pink and white rock, is lit up good from that jagged crack above, and it opens out wide enough so I can walk with my arms out and drag my fingers either side, and then it widens further, just in one bit and the floor is all pale sand with a hollowed-out side of the wall, almost the shape of our tent.
‘And this is Emery Beach,’ Emery says, and he smiles soft like he’s remembering good times.
‘So you got your own beach?’ I say. ‘How come you never told me about this place?’
Emery shrugs with one shoulder. ‘It’s a secret place.’
It’s real weird to have a beach way down under the ground with just a jagged crack of light above, coz it’s not warm or sunny like a regular beach. It’s cold.
‘Well, it’s not so secret with that shaft of light lighting up the end of the mine tunnel,’ I say.
‘Yeah,’ Emery agrees. ‘It was pretend secret for when I was a kid, same age as you.’
‘Ha!’ I laugh. There’s been no time for me pretending like a kid in the last two weeks.
So we take turns at sitting in the dark of the mushroom mine tunnel with the rifle or sleeping curled up in a sleeping bag on the tent surrounded by dogs, me winding my fingers into Roochy’s fur to feel safe.
Nobody comes down to water the mushrooms, but I play over saying, ‘Hello, Christmas? Is that you?’ in my head a million times.
When the light in the crack above Emery Beach loses its glare, Emery says we need to go get some possums or roos for the dogs, and this idea is full of problems. Emery can’t run, I can’t cut the throat of an animal even to stop it suffering, I can’t even think of it, not unless it’s a snake that looks like it might bite me or the dogs.
If the dogs get wind of something and take off, they’ll be howling up the place letting anyone around know there’s a pack of dogs in the scrub and they might come looking.
‘The dogs just gotta eat mushrooms tonight,’ I say. ‘Until we find out who is around. Hunting is too noisy. You keep them quiet in here and I’ll go back and check out the house.’
‘Ella, no!’ Emery says. ‘I know my way around. I should go.’
I shake my head and hand him the rifle. ‘You can’t run.’
‘There’s other tunnels Ma could be hiding in. She might not even be in the house,’ Emery says. And it’s like he’
s been thinking the worst while we’ve been waiting all day down here.
‘If I don’t see anyone in the house, then we’ll check those out, tomorrow,’ I say.
‘Ella, I need to come with you!’ he says, and he winds his fingers around my arm so hard it hurts.
He really needs to know who is dead down there. And who is alive.
‘I know,’ I say. ‘You need to know. But I need you to keep the dogs quiet. I can do this. I’ll just look and come straight back.’
‘Take Rooch then. She’ll keep you safe.’
I nod, coz I’m worried about getting lost in the dark and Rooch will help me find my way back through all that scrub to Emery.
So it’s me and Rooch alone again. Me walking with my hand tight around Maroochy’s collar, us picking our way down between the trees towards the house.
We sneak up on it until the last scrubby bush before the house. Mike, the guy who gave us the possums, is striding down the road, a rifle slung over one shoulder, a small roo and a few possums over the other. He gets to the old van and he slaps on the door.
‘Chrissy!’ he yells and my heart leaps. She’s in there, everything is okay!
‘Hold on!’ Christmas yells from the house, and then she comes down the steps, the sight of her sending my heart pounding and my eyes to tears. Then she disappears behind the tin and old car fence. The scrape of a sliding van door, and then she’s inside the van with the window in the other door beside Mike slid open.
‘Those boys turn up?’ Mike asks, his voice carries across the early evening air. Roochy growls softly.
‘What boys?’
‘Your boy and another one,’ Mike says. ‘And a pack of dogs.’
‘Emery?’ Christmas asks, and her voice is so full of hope, I almost leap up then and there and yell, ‘It’s us, we’re here! We’re okay!’ But Rooch is growling about Mike, and Rooch knows things.
‘I’d know him anywhere. He was on his way here, should’ve been here by now. I gave them two possums, so you owe me.’
The Dog Runner Page 12
