Burning Eddy

Scot Gardner
lives near Yinnar, a little town in eastern Victoria, with his wife and three dryads. He works with young people who don’t like school, and expectant fathers. He plays didjeridu, grows vegies and loves Dreamtime stories and pyrotechnics.
Burning Eddy
is his third novel.

Also by Scot Gardner

One Dead Seagull
White Ute Dreaming

SCOT GARDNER

Visit Scot’s website at
www.scotgardner.com
,
or email him at [email protected].

First published 2003 in Pan by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited
St Martins Tower, 31 Market Street, Sydney

Copyright © Karijan Enterprises 2003

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior
permission in writing from the publisher.

National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Gardner, Scot.
Burning Eddy.

ISBN 0 330 36401 4.

1. Boys – Victoria – Fiction. I. Title.

A823.4

Typeset in 11.5/15 pt Aldus Roman by Midland Typesetters
Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group
Internal artwork by Shaun Gardner

The characters and events in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real
persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

These electronic editions published in 2003 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd
1 Market Street, Sydney 2000

Copyright © Karijan Enterprises 2003

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.

This ebook may not include illustrations and/or photographs that may have been in the print edition.

Gardner, Scot.

Burning Eddy.

Adobe eReader format 978-1-74197-182-8
ePub format 978-1-74262-542-3
Mobipocket format 978-1-74197-584-0
Online format 978-1-74197-785-1

Macmillan Digital Australia
www.macmillandigital.com.au

Visit
www.panmacmillan.com.au
to read more about all our books and to buy both print and ebooks online. You will also find features, author interviews and news of any author events.

For Dinny

We are not islands. This book holds spirit and stories from the following . . .

Pauleigh Gardiner, John Nieuwenhuizen, Peter Van Berkel, Shane Cloak, Robyn Gardner, Dinny Slot, Jay and Ag Curry, Liam Gardner, Pam Reynolds, Peter Counsel, Shaun Gardner, Jen, Belle and Bryce, Tony, Janine and Amanda Hanning, Susie Zent, Peter Adams, Vaughan Reimers, Tara Harle and the plants and animals that give meaning to this pantheistic life.

I fell in love with spiders quite young and quite by accident. I was in grade three at Watson Grace Primary School in Sydney’s west. Grey shorts, white socks and runners that were never allowed inside. They lived on the sill outside the kitchen window otherwise they stunk my room out, so Mum said. And a sky-blue T-shirt that Mum had ornamented with my name across the front in sunflower-yellow fabric paint. She’s got a photo of me wearing it somewhere; no doubt she’ll get it out for my twenty-first birthday.

We lived right opposite the school and somehow I always managed to be the last one across the oval to assembly. My sister was five minutes early and I was five minutes late. Every day.

I remember hearing the music start — the same
Rocking Rex track every morning, ‘Let’s Get Moving’. I heard it so many times I can still remember the words:

The sun is up and there’s
Brekky in my tum.
It’s time to get moving,
Time to have some fun.

Get moving, get moving,
Let’s move it right along.
Get moving, get moving,
Come on, sing along!

I can’t believe someone actually recorded that rubbish. Kat was telling me about an interview with Rocking Rex that she’d heard on the radio. She said Rocking Rex was a multimillionaire. There’s no justice in the world.

I remember at the end of the song, the bell would chime and Mr Cummings would ask people to shush. He’d say people’s names. Mostly Frank Schott’s name. ‘Frank. In line please.’ ‘Frank Schott, hands to yourself please.’ ‘Mr Schott! Go and wait for me in my office. Now!’

Frank was a handy distraction. He’d slink up the steps and push through the door behind Mr Cummings. Everyone watched him. They never saw me scurrying across the oval. They never heard my lunchbox — with two sultana sandwiches in it — thumping up and down in the pack on my back.

One morning I had a grass seed in my left shoe, on the tip of my big toe, but I was running too late to stop and get it out. I started limping. Step plod, step plod, step plod. It didn’t help. I slipped my bag off my back and crouched down behind one of the telephone poles that marked the edge of the oval. I quickly kicked my runner off. No seed. I tapped the heel of my runner on the ground and to my absolute horror, a spider fell out. Not just any spider; a big, hairy, grey huntsman spider that — to me as a third grader — looked bigger than a dinner plate. It was groggy, probably doped up on sock gas, but it was still alive.

I squealed. I stood up and squealed again. The squeal went on forever and when I ran out of air I just kept squealing but no sound came out. Mrs Davies was walking up the embankment towards me, footfall after heavy footfall. She wouldn’t run for anyone or anything. I turned, still screaming, with tears pouring from my eyes, and bolted for home. Step-plod, step-plod, step-plod.

‘Daniel, wait! What’s the matter?’ Mrs Davies panted.

Then she squealed. I didn’t look back. Step-plod, step-plod, step-plod.

Mum was finishing the breakfast dishes and saw me from the kitchen window. She slammed open the flywire door and scooped me into her arms.

‘What is it, Daniel? What happened?’

‘I . . . got . . . BLAAAAAH!’ I wailed, and held my toe.

She ripped my sock off but couldn’t see any bones poking out. No blood. ‘Where? Where does it hurt? What happened?’

‘I . . . got . . . BLAAAAAH!’

She carried me inside and sat me on the couch. Five minutes later, my wailing had faded to a sob. Mum still couldn’t understand me. She looked at my toe.

‘Mrs Fairbrother?’ said someone at the front door.

‘Yes? Hello.’

‘Oh, you’re here. Thank goodness. Is Daniel okay?’ It was Mrs Davies, puffing and hacking.

‘I don’t know. What happened?’

The teacher came in, her face red and spotted with perspiration, the corners of her mouth white with spittle. She was carrying my bag and had my runner pinched between two fingers. ‘I think Dan had a spider in his shoe. Big grey spider.’

Mum grabbed my chin with both hands and put her face close to mine, her eyes wide with panic. ‘My lord. Were you bitten by a spider?’

I sobbed and nodded.

She looked at my toe again and could at last see marks —a constellation of puncture wounds. She phoned Poisons Information while Mrs Davies sat on the couch beside me. The couch creaked and the springs popped and twanged under the load.

‘Are you okay, Daniel?’ she asked with her hand on my shoulder.

I nodded and at exactly the same time the couch springs broke and Mrs Davies’ bottom thudded to the floorboards. She shrieked and flapped like a walrus but she couldn’t get up. I stood up and tried to help her. She was stuck.

My body started shaking from the ribs out. When the laugh eventually made it to my mouth, Mrs Davies
frowned and struggled even harder, levering herself up on the armrest. The armrest splintered and she crunched heavily back onto the floor. The boards under my feet shook and I squealed with laughter until I had to sit down.

Poor Mrs Davies. I should have controlled myself — like Mum said later — but the truth is I wasn’t really laughing at her. Well I was, but the reason I couldn’t stop was because I had brushed with the meanest, ugliest, most fearsome creature in my neighborhood and survived. It had bitten me heaps of times and not only had I survived, it hadn’t even hurt. A bee sting hurts more.

We shifted after that. Dad came home from work one night and instead of having tea, we started packing. We moved to another state, from the city to the bush — to Bellan in eastern Victoria. I moved to Henning Primary and met my best mate of all time, Chris Gemmel. Shifting was the best thing Dad had ever done for me, except maybe giving me the
Illustrated Guide to Australian Birds
for my eleventh birthday. I don’t think Katrina felt the same way about it. She was in grade six at the time and she had so many friends — boyfriends even — and she was always out playing with them in the street until dark. She left them all behind when we shifted. Not many kids around after dark here. Not many kids around at all. Kat just sort of curled up. Stayed inside and listened to music.

We live on the Bellan road, which is forty-nine ks long. It weaves through the mountains like a serpent and crosses Ammets Creek twice. I don’t go down the creek much
anymore. The water and slippery rocks freak me out. We live in the third house. There are only three houses on the Bellan road. There were more in the olden days but bushfires, plantations and blackberries have swallowed them.

There are plenty of spiders here — three species of huntsman live on our place. Spiders are my friends. Instead of feeding my fear, being bitten on the toe gave me respect for them. Instead of squashing them, I began to watch them. Have them crawl on me. Keep them as pets. I found a book in the school library about American Indians and there was a cool section about the symbolic meaning of animals. I believe in that sort of stuff. Different animals mean different things. It didn’t say that spiders were horrible and should be killed on sight. It said that the spider is the grandmother weaver; always patient and watchful, responsible for the construction and maintenance of the web of life. It said that we are frightened of spiders because they can bite us and cause paralysis. Understanding and respecting spiders would give us the courage not to be paralysed in frightening situations. Spider medicine.

Mum’s spider medicine was to spray them with hair spray. When the hair spray set, the spider’s hairy legs couldn’t move. They’d eventually die from starvation. Totally sick. I gave Mum such a hard time about it that she eventually grew to respect my love of spiders. The man at Poisons Information had told her that there are very few Australian spiders that can cause more than discomfort. If it wasn’t a notorious funnel-web — heavyset, black and shiny — or a white-tail or a redback, then she had little to worry about. Keep an eye on him, he said.

She progressed from spraying them with hair spray to a special sort of shout. ‘Danyellllll!’

A shout I could recognise from one hundred metres away. A special sort of restrained terror in her voice let me know that there was a spider to be rescued.

Bellan is where my life really began. Mine began, and life as Katrina knew it ended.