Dreaming of Amelia (31 page)

He shifts his body to look at me, his eyes a-gleam in the moonlight, and we both laugh hard, to be sure.

Sure, but I tell you, it's the truth. I've grown fond of many sounds here in Castle Hill: the scuffles of creatures, slither of snakes, howling of native dogs. I'm fond of the colours too. There's a deep red-gold in the soil, and in the bark of the trees after rain, and sure if it isn't the colour of my Maggie's hair. There's the pale blue of the mountains in the distance, a little like the colour of her eyes.

The overseers say there's no crossing those mountains, but I hear that there's a paradise hidden just beyond. (Well, it's paradise or China. Depends who you're talking to. Either way it's just over the mountains.)

We talk often, Phillip and I. He could talk the teeth out of a saw on most things, but not a word of his wife and little ones any more — like he's grown afraid to say their names. You can feel them in his stillness now and then though. And sense them in his use of the word,
home
.

And speaking of
home
, there are plans. Not just talk. Not just sketches of ships in the mud — but real plans made by Phillip and other strong, bright men — to rise up against the English and go home.

Last year, two new ships arrived from Ireland — the
Atlas
and the
Hercules
— and it seems that their journeys were a pure hell. So crammed together were they, and only a drop of water a day, so that nearly half were dead before they landed. Most of the survivors so sick it was direct from the harbour to the hospital. Those that could walk — marks of the irons still clear around their ankles and necks — were sent to us here at Castle Hill. That's some angry, thirsty, desperate, wild-eyed men, I tell you, with a grim determination to join us in these plans.

(I hear that the
Atlas
also brought a load of wondrous things — beaver hats, cuckoo clocks, and satin shawls — and I plan to try to find some for Maggie.)

There's more anger, too, for they've lost our indents — that's the papers that record the lengths of our sentences. So we've all got to stay here for life. That's neither here not there for people like me who already had to stay for life, but it's here and there and more besides for people who were sent for seven years.

And everyone's been practising, you know — like rehearsals. On every ship from Ireland here there's been at least one attempted uprising. Not long back, the women convicts ground up glass and hid it in the sailors' flour, hoping it would kill them. (It didn't.) And the Irish here have planned uprisings aplenty, but something has always gone wrong.

Not this one. Not with Phillip in charge. There's secret meetings, secret handshakes, secret code. The plans inch forward at a slow, careful pace, and we'll not make a move until we're certain to succeed.

In the meantime, we're working the land and making the best of things.

On my birthday just the other day, I woke missing Maggie and my mother, but Phillip drank to my health, and drank to my health, and drank to my health once more, and everything was cheerful again.

He ruffled my hair, which I've cut very short — all the Irish have so they call us ‘croppies'. ‘When you see your Maggie,' Phillip said, ‘she'll fall knee over toes in love with you again, such a handsome young man as you've become.'

I liked to hear that. The part about Maggie I mean.

The others joke and tell me she's forgotten me. They're not like that with the older men who've left wives and sweethearts at home. I'm young so they think my heart's for laughing at. Just because Maggie's letters are not so frequent as they were. She's busy, that's all, and her letters, when they come, are just as passionate and sweet.

Speaking of Maggie, would you kindly forget what I said earlier of the pretty girls in Sydney Town? I'm dead ashamed of my thoughts (and my deeds, I confess). There was a madness took me over, is all that I can say. But now I'm older, and wiser, and I see that the girls in Sydney Town, they've got sharp edges. They make me long for Maggie and her softness.

She can be angry, sure, when she wants to be, but she'd never grind up glass to put in flour.

But tonight, as I talk with Phillip in the moonlight, I'm not thinking of errors or sharp edges. There's a mad kind of flutter in my heart, like flags flying high in the wind

Phillip tells me they've ordered him to oversee the building of a grand stone barracks here in Castle Hill.

‘A two-storey barracks,' says Phillip, looking about him in the darkness, measuring air with his eyes, ‘with a fireplace
there' — he gestures with one hand — ‘the sleeping quarters there — and we'll store the grain here.'

Sure, and my heart surges with pride.

Phillip will build his barracks, all the while making his plans. The plans will run smooth, and I'll sail home to Maggie with the gifts of cuckoo clocks and satin shawls.

I laugh aloud, and Phillip says, ‘What?' and I shake my head. I'm laughing at nothing but the smile in my chest, for whichever way I turn towards the future, I cannot see a thing that could go wrong.

 

Riley T Smith
Student No. 8233569

You should know our plan.

I know what you're thinking. Something demonic. It's not, it's just — calculated.

You should know the reason for the plan.

We lived on the streets for a year or two, detention for a year after that.

You can never know what it is to be apart from Amelia. So just imagine this: every day, you want to take her hair, her long, long hair, and wind it tight around your wrist. Tighter, tighter. Knot the ends together. Never let her go again.

Every day you want that like a wrenching in your chest.

That year apart, we wrote to each other. Talked each night as we fell asleep — inside our heads, I mean. What a counsellor there called a psychic connection — I told him he was nuts, but it's the truth. We held each other's souls.

And we looked around and saw that we were different. These kids with their track marks, suicide scars, hepatitis, couldn't finish sentences.

So we made plans. We'd never live on the streets again, never be apart. We knew we should Get An Education like the counsellors said. But then what? Careers would split us down the middle, lock us up in corporate suits.

No. Amelia and I would be free and rich and we'd do it playing music. It's what we love, and it binds our souls even closer.

We're okay at music, nothing special, but we know how to deceive, and we know what you need to succeed.

You need rich people.

That's all it was. Our evil plan.

Convince the counsellors at the detention centre that we wanted to get honest.

Write a scholarship application that would shock them into meeting us.

Convince the committee that they held the power to save our evil souls.

Then, once we were in, pretend to be friends with these rich half-people. Trick them into thinking we were something. Use them, and manipulate them. Their money, their connections — their independent record labels.

Lydia was perfect.

Term 3, her parents were back, so the big parties shut down. They turned intimate instead. That was perfect too.

Blue Danish Café, late afternoon, early in Term 3. The number 15, white on black, propped on a metal stand, centre of our table. Chairs and conversations scraping between tables. I happen to look sideways and there, at the next table, an Ashbury boy named Saxon. I've seen him around. I don't like him. He wears his hair long, in his eyes. He's always tilting his head forward, pausing, then throwing it back. Clears his eyes a moment, like a horse.

Also, he blinks slowly, as if he doesn't care how long his eyes stay closed.

Now I hear him talking to an Ashbury girl.

‘Seriously,' he's saying. ‘There's something simian about you. The disproportionate length of your arms.'

He's saying it with his charming smile. She's trying not to look at her own arms. Trying to pretend she knows what simian means. Hoping that it might be complimentary.

He's saying that she looks like a monkey.

‘You haven't noticed? It's in the structure of your jaw too.'

He's making scientific observations in a fascinated voice. Some people at the table look bored, look out the window. Others say, ‘
Saxon!
' which only makes it worse. The girl is catching on that he's insulting her.

‘I wouldn't worry,' he says now. ‘It's your heritage.'

Then he starts a monkey imitation: Ha ha ha ha heee heee hee, scratching under his arms. Looking at her all the time with a glint to let her know that she's supposed to laugh along.

I've had enough.

I'm getting up, I'm on my feet, my eyes on Saxon when —

Emily, who's at my table, is also standing up. She's finishing a conversation, but she's moving sideways behind the chairs and now she's right behind Saxon. She takes a strand of his long hair and grips it in her fist.

‘Yeah, Saxon, get a haircut,' she says. ‘Chimpanzee.'

And while the others at the table laugh, I notice Em's fist move. Taking the hair with it. Saxon tries to laugh, but his eyes panic. She lets go just as suddenly, looks across the table, says, ‘Oh, Briony,' so that's the girl's name, ‘Oh, Briony,' as if she only just noticed her, ‘I was just telling Lyd and them about how the ghost took your iPod. They're not believing me, so can you come and tell them yourself?'

Briony finds her smile. ‘I never actually said it was the ghost. I just lost it.'

The table laugh at Em, who says, ‘Okay, come and lie for me,' and Briony stands up.

I hadn't known that Em could hear the conversation at the next table. But I did know this: she had not been talking to the others about Briony's lost iPod or the ghost.

Later that night, we're at Lydia's place.

Her parents are inside. Lights in windows.

It's a mild night. So quiet we can hear the dog crossing the terrace. We're fully dressed, on floating armchairs in the outdoor pool. We're separate, reclining, watching stars. There's lantern light around the pool; a turquoise glow inside it.

It's just a small group — Lydia, Emily, Cassie, Toby, Amelia and me. Chocolates are being passed around. They're so good, these chocolates, that you don't need to check the chart to choose the best one. Any one you choose will be the best you ever ate. And the box seems endless.

Sometimes there's talking, sometimes just hands trailing the water.

I won't lie to you. It's nice.

We're talking about time travel, ghosts. They're making fun of Em. Whether ghosts exist.

I say: ‘I think you can miss a person so much it's like a fatal wound. So your mind goes into panic and projects an image of the person onto the air. Gives the person back to you, to fix the wound. That's a ghost.'

There's a moment of quiet in the pool:
Who has Riley missed so much his mind went into panic?

Now is the time to take the next step. I feel Amelia thinking the same thing.

Next step: share a secret. Make them think that we're true friends.

So we tell them. Not much.

Just the fact that we've lived on the streets and in detention.

We stop.

They're thinking. We're waiting. Then something surprising happens.

Cassie says I'm right.

I don't know what she means.

‘About ghosts,' she says.

She's gone back in time. To what I said before, about your mind giving a missing person back.

I think:
She's changing the subject. They don't know what to say about our past, so they're going to pretend that we never said a word
.

Then Cass explains to Amelia and me that her father died a few years ago. She says they were close. Then she says again that I'm right — you can miss someone so bad your mind goes mad.

It's not exactly what I said.

Floating armchairs brush one another, brush the side of the pool.

I realise: she wasn't changing the subject. She was giving something back. We gave her a secret; she gave one of her own.

Then something else surprising.

Em tells Cass she wants to hear one of Cass's new songs.

Cassie's in our music class, but I've never heard her sing. Didn't know she could.

Amelia and I are thinking:
Please don't break into song
.

We're thinking:
Things were going fine here. But please don't make us hear this
.

And then she does. She sings.

And Jesus, she's good. The song is simple, nothing special, but her voice is beyond perfect.

I let my hands trail water, watch the stars.

That night we sleep in Lydia's recreation room. Couches are deeper and softer than any bed I ever slept on.

We end up at the Blue Danish again, for breakfast. Somebody mentions an essay due today. Lydia swears. It's a quiet,
almost indifferent kind of swearing. She says, ‘Has someone got the question?' Takes out her laptop.

And she writes the essay. She talks, drinks her coffee, eats a pecan cookie (those are her favourite), and writes an essay in less than half an hour.

I read over her shoulder.

The question's about ghost stories. I remember some of the lines she wrote.

On either side of the ghost story's path is a dark, uncertain wilderness: the ‘supernatural' (in which ghosts are real) and the human psyche (in which they are imagined, symbolic and possibly even more sinister)
.

Something like that. I don't remember exactly. My point is that she wrote fast and well without thinking. The girl is smart.

I know what
you're
thinking.

You're thinking that I'm falling for them.

You think that's where I'm headed here — the surprising complexity of a lesson in human life. Turns out our new friends are people after all.