Dreaming of Amelia (13 page)

He's referring to my History project.

And when he says Tom, he means Tom Kincaid.

Irish guy. He was 17 years old when he stole a sheep and they shipped him out to Australia. Wrote letters home to his girlfriend Maggie and his mum, and now I've got copies of
those letters. I'm going through them slowly now, filling in the details. Using, you know, History.

‘Well,' I say, ‘it's 1802, and he's right here in Castle Hill with his buddy Phillip.'

‘Ah, Phillip Cunningham.' Roberto grins, like he's remembering the wild times he and Phil have had. ‘And what's going down at Castle Hill?'

‘There's around 300 men. They're clearing the land for wheat and living in your basic bark huts.'

Roberto takes a deep, contented breath, like he's breathing in my facts. He's totally into History, that guy.

‘And Tom is happy?' he says.

‘Roberto,' I say, carefully. ‘He's a convict.'

‘Yes. He is. And you think he's not happy because of this?'

Not a stupid man so he must want something else.

‘He's happy sometimes,' I try, ‘because he talks about his friend Phillip and the other guys, and like on St Patrick's Day they all got trashed. And he likes seeing how the farm's, you know, shaping up.'

Roberto gets an intense expression.

‘But then again,' I say, ‘he could be telling these happy stories to Maggie so she doesn't worry. He could be keeping his darkest thoughts out of his letters.'

Roberto makes a horse-snorting noise. I think he means it's a good point.

‘He talks about how much he's missing Maggie,' I say, ‘and he tells her it's too hot, and the colours are reds and golds but he wants the
green, green grass
of home.'

‘The colours, ah. And what else do you think he might miss about home, our Tom?'

I have a think about that.

I say, ‘Well, he'd be missing his mum. He'd be missing having her around to say goodnight each night.'

Roberto's face gets a penetrating look, and I get a spooky feeling that he thinks I'm talking about my
own
mother.

I now have two things to say.

So, let me clear this up right now. Everything I say — you can take it at face value. Thanks.

The fact is, my mum moved away three years ago and I've just about forgotten how it was, having her around to say goodnight. Also, to the best of my recollection, she didn't say ‘goodnight'. She said, ‘Sleep well' or ‘Sweet dreams' or ‘Can you shut the computer down before you go to bed?' or ‘Turn that down a
tiny
bit, would you? That's better, thanks', or ‘See you in the morning' etc (I could go on). Never just a plain ‘goodnight'.

So, you know:
touché
(is what you say to me)(I think).

And when Mum moved away she asked if I wanted to come. But I chose to stay with Dad. So, if anyone's got a right to a broken heart here, it's my mum.

Back to Roberto's office, with his eyes incorrectly in my head.

To get them out of there, I point to the blacked-in circle on my paper and say, ‘Do you reckon that my dad's a black hole?'

Roberto can be surprising.

‘Tobias,' he says. ‘What's a black hole?'

‘A black hole,' I go, ‘it's, you know, in space — one of those big black holes . . .'

Roberto's still looking.

‘Yes,' he says. ‘What is it?'

‘It's, you know, if someone's a black hole it means they're in a really
black
mood, I mean, they're a real downer.'

‘That's what it means?' he says.

Turns out, I don't know for sure. I just assumed that.

‘Okay,' I go. ‘You got me. What's a black hole?'

Roberto gives his shrug and says, ‘You got me too.'

Then he sends me away to research black holes.

Oh yeah, and the history of Ireland.

WEEK 3

Third week of term I did the research.

Both are straightforward.

Black Holes

A black hole is a something that happens when you get so much stuff crammed together into one small place that the place can't handle it any more so the place goes ballistic and turns into total, mad darkness.

History of Ireland

See definition of black holes.

Sometimes I wonder why I don't do better at school.

Thursday night of Week 3, Roberto's playing pool with my dad when I get home. Dad looks at his watch, and looks at Roberto, and they both raise eyebrows at each other. Then Dad chalks his pool cue and shoots.

It's not that late, just after one.

I tell them about black holes and the history of Ireland. I mean, I tell them the above.

They both laugh but Dad's drunk, and I see something in Roberto's eye, maybe disappointment when I give my history of Ireland. Just a flicker and I think, yeah, he's right. That was just: reductive, witty, ha ha, aren't I clever, calling Ireland a black hole?

That's what I see in the flicker in Roberto's eye.

Or maybe it's just that Dad's cleaning up the table as I speak.

Whatever, I decide to tell them the real History of Ireland.

As I see it:

History of Ireland

Okay, so you've got your basic green and misty country with stone walls, sheep and fairy folk. There's something kind of weird and tilted about it. The fairy folk are real, for a start, not imaginary. That's my understanding. Anyway, England goes: now
that
country looks pretty, we might take it! (That was their way in those days.) So they took it. But, like I said, something tilted there, and so it slipped right out of England's hands. England went, huh, how did that happen? They took it back, it slipped again, they took it back, it slipped. And so on. Each time England held on tighter and Ireland tilted more.

Now, when I say that England held on tighter, I mean they tried various things, such as making it the
law
that Ireland was theirs; taking away the land from the locals; shipping in English people to own the land instead; massacres; asking nicely if they could have the country please. And so on.

I mean, they gave it their best shot.

So, in the end, they won! They got Ireland! (More or less.)

Meanwhile, in Ireland there were a lot of unhappy people. Cos they didn't own their country. And they're all, like, poor, cold, hungry, you know, depressed. Like 20 people, no blankets, crammed together in a leaky mud hut. While the English owners lived in mansions and ate scones with jam and cream. And if the Irish people said, ‘Can I have a crumb from your scone?', the owner had them whipped and put a cap of burning pitch onto their head. More or less.

The Irish people didn't get on that well with each other either. The non-Catholics hated the Catholics, was the main issue, as I see it. You can't blame them for that. If I understand correctly, Catholics do not believe in contraception. So, you know, sex is not relaxing.

Anyhow, it was against the law for Catholics to own land, go to school, vote, join the army or own a horse worth more than five pounds. Which was harsh.

In the end, the Irish people tried an uprising. Shot some English people, burned down their houses, and then the English people were super pissed so
they
shot Irish people, tortured them, burned them, hanged them, and so on. And everything went to hell.

So, like I said, a lot of stuff, a lot of issues, crammed together into one small place and the place goes ballistic and turns into total, mad darkness.

And, in conclusion, that's the history of Ireland.

‘That's my boy,' says Dad. He leans over, sinks the eight ball, winning once again.

‘More things probably happened though,' I say. ‘I stopped researching at 1799 when Tom came to Australia. I think things happened after that.'

‘Things might have happened after that,' Roberto agrees, teeing up to start another game.

We played pool until four in the morning.

I remember a couple of things.

One was that Roberto talked Dad into a blind date with a woman he knows.

The other was I won the last five games. The booze always catches up with the old guys in the end.

WEEK 4

Athletics carnival this week.

Everyone waiting to see Amelia and Riley's new superpowers.

Word on the street was, they were going to (a) throw javelins to China, (b) run as fast as cheetahs, or (c) blitz the egg-and-spoon.

They didn't even show.

Coupla buddies of mine, Liz Clarry and Cassie Aganovic, cleaned up.

I was proud.

Other emotions I had this week included the opposite of pride.

I'm referring, in particular, to the Wednesday, the day that the Year 12 report cards were issued.

Closing the curtains on that day, and moving on.

On Thursday the emotion was terror.

A tertiary information day was held in the assembly hall: presentations, booths, flyers, what-have-you.

The future stood in our assembly hall and let me know it wasn't mine. So. You know. Terrifying.

Anyway, Friday morning I felt what you might call intrigued.

Is intrigue an emotion? Why not.

Because everything was linked. (In my mind anyhow.)

Let me take you through it.

Well, for a start, I was half-asleep.

I should maybe have mentioned earlier that Term 2 was a party term. A girl in my year whose parents were away held parties on random nights at her mad mansion home. The parties were wild.

So Friday morning I was half-asleep.

I had a free period and was doing some reading for my History project, and I came across a reference to an Irish prison called the Black Hole.

Spooky, right? Me and my new interest in black holes, and one shows up in my history research.

But it also made me realise that my definition might have missed something. See below.

Black Holes

Stuff crammed together into one small, mad, ballistic darkness,
and be very, very careful of this darkness because if you go inside you NEVER GET OUT
.

Cos a black hole is a prison.

In actual fact, those black holes in space were not even
named
black holes at first. I think they were called frozen stars. But then this guy suggested we name them black holes, thinking of a famous event called the Black Hole of Calcutta, which was when 146 people got locked up overnight in a small, crowded prison and the next day only 23 were left.

So, I guess black holes started out as hellish prisons.

Anyway, I'm thinking about this issue, and I'm thinking there's more links because you've got these poor Irish peasants all
crammed
together into their little leaking hovels with no
windows and no chimneys, like poverty is their prison. They're going mad and they can't escape so their houses are black holes. And then you've got people trying to escape by, you know, stealing sheep (like my Tom), or becoming supercool rebels (like my Phillip). But they all got thrown into prison, so that's more black holes. Some got tossed from the prisons onto ships that were headed to Australia.

Such as the ship called the
Anne
. Crowds of murderers, druglords, poor folk who stole to get their dinner, and superhip rebels who had some way-cool secret handshakes — crowds of them — all crammed together in the deep, dark, dirty holds of ships. An iron grate dragged over their heads.

That's more black holes, see?

Not surprisingly, the last thought I had that morning, as I fell asleep at the table in the library, was about my dad. I was thinking: is he a black hole? I mean, is he a prison? Did Mum mean she couldn't escape?

But she did escape. Ran away to Brisbane with a guy she met at work, and now they've got a two-year-old named Polly. And Mum's so happy she can't stop showing me photographs of Polly on her mobile, which is fair enough. The kid's cute: at least, her nose is cute. It's just like mine.

So maybe Mum meant that Dad's a black hole
now
. That he turned
in
to total-mad-dark prison-black-holeness
after
she left? (Which means it was kind of unfair — Mum, the one who made him a black hole, calling him on it like that.) And does that mean
I'm
the one who can't escape? Because I'm living with the black hole, my dad? Does Mum mean I should run away like she did, run to the sunlight up in Brisbane?

But then I'd miss my friends. Not to mention Dad. I mean, Mum's okay cos she's got the new guy and the Polly, but Dad's got nobody but me.

So, anyway. That morning intrigued me right into my dreams. It was like there were links from Tom Kincaid to black holes to Irish peasants to the ships to Australia to black holes again to my dad and then to me. I felt like I could reach out and shake hands with Tom. Ride a black hole back in time.

But like I said, I was hungover.

WEEK 5

I found out something else about black holes this week.

Black Holes

When you get trapped in a black hole you change. There's this superpowerful gravity dragging you in, and whatever part of you is closest to the black hole gets dragged in faster than the rest of you, so basically you arrive stretched out of shape. You never get back to normal. And this is called
spaghettification
.