Dreaming of Amelia (52 page)

Oh, I cannot stop the weeping.

Your loving Constance

I could have loved you, Kendall. You could have loved me. If you'd only stopped and looked.

It was preposterous, really, how much you and Sandra laughed.

You and I could have laughed but more moderately. We could have read books. And so forth.

My heart won't stop its mad, mad beating!

What have I just seen?

Shall you guess? No! You will never.

I saw
Riley
kissing
Lydia
! In the conference room — in your own bedroom. Oh, Kendall, who knew you would ever betray Sandra in that way!

She must know! It will hurt you, of course, when she leaves you, but you will quickly recover and I will help you on that path.

I will be there, for you to weep onto my shoulder.

How can I let Sandra know?

Amelia, I mean, of course. How can I let Amelia know that you have betrayed her with Lydia?

Riley, I mean, of course.

I will put it on that girl's blog. Yes.

And then, soon, you will be mine. My darling.

Term 4

Dear Kendall,

Well, the HSC has commenced, and it is just as we suspected.

Very wearing.

But more to the point, the committee has been making inquiries — and again, it is just as we suspected! Amelia and Riley are truly evil. They are not merely thieves, they are savages. They beat a man near to his death at the time they stole from the petrol station.

Chris Botherit got the information from a sports teacher at Brookfield.

It is rather satisfying, you know, to have been so right.

Now at last we can be rid of Amelia-and-Riley and move on with our lives.

Your loving Constance

Good news. It's all falling apart. They will be stripped of their scholarships! They've made quite a mess of things, the silly ninnies. They have to defend themselves — but they won't be able to. I'll watch from up here. I'll bring popcorn. Shall you join me? Yes. Do.

Kendall,

Have you guessed?

I was there — the night that Sandra fell. I was watching.

I could have warned you, you know.

You were turned away from her, looking through your records, choosing a new one to play. She was on the window ledge and had fallen asleep.

I saw her — I saw her beginning to slip.

I could have called down, you know — warned you.

But then you would have known that I was there. How you would have laughed at me, the pair of you. You would not have been angry. You were not that sort. You were so jolly. Oh, you would have laughed, and laughed, and laughed.

So, I stayed quiet, quiet as a mouse, and when you did turn back, it was too late — she was already falling.

Yours forevermore,

Constance

Toby at his mum's place

Brisbane

Sunday 18 January

Mr Roberto Garcia

c/o Ashbury High

Castle Hill

Dear Roberto,

You recall I once asked you if my dad was a black hole?

And it turned out to be a stupid question cos you made it into a homework assignment that ripped the heart out of my last year?

Nah. Just kidding. You didn't rip the heart out of my last year, I did that myself — you
gave
it a heart, if I'm going to be honest (and sentimental), when you gave me Tom.

Plus, I didn't spend much time researching black holes, if you want the truth. I Googled them for 20 minutes. And I kinda liked them. Not as much as I liked Tom, but you know. Black holes. What's not to love?

Anyhow, that's all an aside.

I'm chillin' with my mum in Brisbane here — back in a coupla weeks to start that Certificate in Music Industry (Technical Production) I told you about — and you know I'm going to produce Amelia and Riley's first album one day? — make myself a fortune and spend my life doing woodwork and kicking your arse at pool.

Mum's chasing a blowfly around the room right this moment, so she's not chillin' I guess, but, you know. She was. Her kid, Polly, is having an afternoon nap, and Mum's got these banana-chair lounges that flip right back, and we've been sitting in those, drinking ginger beer, looking through the windows at her overgrown, overgreen backyard.

There goes Mum now — she just jumped over my legs, flapping a tea towel, trying to direct that blowfly out the open window.

What was I saying?

Yeah, I wanted to tell you that he's not any more.

My dad, I mean. A black hole.

Or anyway, seems to me he's got his head out of the hole, and he's taking some good, deep breaths of a sky full of stars.

I spoke to him on the phone this morning, and he's cleaning out the house. He had that excited, proud voice of someone who has never even picked up a duster, explaining exactly how you wash a window to avoid streaks. And turns out he's throwing away Mum's stuff. He was thinking of shipping it to her but he couldn't be bothered. He actually said those words. Then he sounded guilty and asked if that was wrong, and I said, no sir, it is exactly right.

He wanted to know about the giant wooden M, though. M for Megan. M for Mum. I made it for her to hang her keys on when I was ten. She left it behind when she left. Dad said he didn't want to throw
that
away, as it's pure genius. He still can't figure out how I got the angles so right.

And something came to me right then.

What the f—was I thinking, planning to give my cabinet to Mum?

That's what I was planning. I told you that, didn't I? My prize-winning major work, which I am sorry to show off here, but I think it's almost as beautiful as I intended it to
be — I was going to give it to Mum. I thought she deserved it cos she didn't get me. I mean, cos I didn't come with her to Brisbane when she left.

She left behind her giant M, she's not getting my cabinet.

Anyhow, there's Dad talking about how black the water was in the bucket after he cleaned the skirting boards. He was so excited about the colour of that water. He also told me that the other parent rep from the committee is coming over for dinner tonight and asked which of his pastas he should make.

‘You think Patricia would like my
boscaiola
?' he said — and I thought, damn me, he's remembered her name.

Anyway, I've decided Dad can have the cabinet.

Funny to be writing this now while Mum's in the room. She's given up on the blowfly. She's back on her banana chair, reading a novel. Right beside me.

Look. It's not complicated. She's nice, my mum, but she shouldn't have left the wooden M behind.

While I'm here I might even tell her that, and she'll say something like, ‘But I left it there
because
it was so wonderful — you and Dad deserved it more than me.' Something like that, is what she'll say. She always does that. Twists things around so I feel bad for her again, and want to make her feel better.

But not this time. Whatever she says, I'll say, ‘You bet, but you shouldn't have left it.'

Just chillin' here, and it's not so bad. I've still got her, she made some mistakes, but here she is beside me and she loves me. Whereas other people's mums are not so great. I'm thinking here of what I've heard lately about Amelia and Riley's mothers.

Anyhow, speaking of mothers, that brings me to the real
reason I'm writing to you. I couldn't wait until I got back.

Just before I came here, I went to the Mitchell Library and looked up the originals of Tom's letters home.

Not just the photocopies that you gave me. Suddenly wanted to see his actual handwriting.

And there was one more letter.

I'm not kidding.

The last letter in
my
collection was the one that Tom's friend wrote — the guy Tom was hiding out with in the bush for all those years. He made it back and he wrote to Tom's mother to tell her that Tom did not.

But in the collection at the library? That's not the last letter at all.

There's another one, written two years later. I've enclosed it.

I guess I must have lost it, or it never got copied, but there's something keeps waking me at night — and it's this. Maybe it was never there at all.

Anyhow, whatever the explanation — sure, and isn't it the strangest tale you ever heard?

Love,

Toby

My Dear and Beloved Mam,

I've learned today that, two years back, you'd a letter from my dear but restless friend, James, telling you that I was dead!

You may now be pleased to hear that I am not.

But for a little scratch in my throat, sure, my health is grand altogether.

I'll tell you the story of what has befallen me, and sure, if it isn't the strangest and most wondrous tale you ever heard.

Now, James, as I think you know, was my companion in the bush, and didn't we have a rough time of it, year after
year, foraging for what we could. And many's the cold night we'd lie under the stars, and didn't I long to be safe by the fireside in your own home?

So, and there came a time when there'd been drought for upwards of three years, and nothing to eat but the skin of our own knuckles, and we bethought ourselves that we'd best take our chances with the soldiers back here or be dead within the week.

So it was that we found our way back one hot afternoon, just as a furious storm was coming on, and there were the old stone barracks. So weary was I that I fell to the ground, and I knew in my heart that I was done for.

‘James,' I whispers, ‘go on without me, but tell my poor mam that I loved her.' Or somesuch, as I wish I hadn't now, for it seems that James set to work at once, soon as he'd had a good meal, and wrote you that I was dead.

Then he promptly sets out to make his fortune up north, being as he always was, a restless fellow. He's back again today, and wasn't he surprised to see me alive? He gave me a copy of the letter he sent to you (he kept it about him all this time, as a record of our time in the bush), and so it is that I learned that you took me to be dead.

But ah, never mind, back to my story.

What happened next is a wonder to me, and it will be to you as well.

There I lay on the dirt while the rain pummelled my face, and the thunder roared out the world's despair. Or so it seemed to me, anyways, at the time. The spirit seemed to ebb right out of me, I could feel it leave via my fingertips, when a voice spoke soft in my ear.

Ah, says I to myself, that's an angel with the voice of my Maggie.

Then the angel grabbed a hold of the ear and twisted hard,
which I thought to myself, now that's not the way of an angel. I found my voice to ask it to stop, when the angel slapped me hard across the face!

Sure, and if it wasn't my Maggie.

I opened my eyes and there she is kneeling beside me, ready to slap me again.

It'd been years since I'd seen her but there she was, more beautiful than ever I remembered, bedraggled by rain which beat on her head, and rushed down her eyelids, and dripped from her chin as she leaned over me, that fury in her eyes!

She saw that my eyes were open and she gave me a mighty severe look and, ‘I thought you were dead,' says she, and then the fury flew from her, and it was my soft, sweet Maggie again.

My Maggie in my arms, and me in hers.

I could hardly speak, what with the wonder and with being half-dead from starvation.

She dragged me into shelter, gets me dry and warm by the fire, and feeds me, bathes me, brings me food, and sure if it wasn't a week before I believed that I was not dead and in heaven.

Then one day I came to my senses, and there was Maggie, her tongue pressed in the side of her cheek the way she does, and I knew that it was not a dream, and the tears came, my heart up in my throat ready to choke me.

But I looked around and saw, so far from being in heaven were we, that in fact we were in a sort of hell. The long and short of it was, we were in a lunatic asylum.

The barracks, you see, Phillip's barracks, had been made into a place for those of feeble minds, and them that had lost their wits. It had fallen into the worst sort of disrepair, with maggoty food, and damp everywhere, vermin of every
description, bedclothes black with mould, and clothes patched together out of nothing but thin air.

But still and all, we were in heaven, because we were together.

And here is where Maggie told her story to me.

How she tried to carry out her plan, but couldn't bring herself to steal. In the end, she joined up with the Rebels, thinking she'd change the world and then bring me home. But they arrested her and shipped her here, so the result was the same.

Then, when she got here, and I was nowhere to be seen, and the men of the colony were sniffing around her like dogs, she'd a notion to pretend the passage here had sent her mad.

So she ended up here in the asylum.

It's years she waited, hoping I'd return, reading and rereading the letters I'd sent her — she always kept them close, says she, to give her courage. But all the time, says she, her courage was fraying at the edges. If it was not for a strange new friend she met, a girl who used to sit in the garden by her side, with a curious manner of speech and dress, she might have given up that much sooner. Even with her friend though, in those last few hot, dry weeks — weeks of oppressive, wearing weather — she found that her heart had worn right through. She'd given up on hope, you see. No way home, and it seemed that I wasn't coming for her after all. And I suppose if you spend your days with lunatics, it might be like to get your spirits down.

The long and short of it is, the day that I was crawling my way back to the colony was the very day that our Maggie decided she wanted to find her own way home.

She'd run from the asylum, and thought she would take her own life.

Sure, and you'll recall that Maggie has a dreamy way about her, but she swears that the story you're about to hear is true.