Dreaming of Amelia (6 page)

And competitive swimming.

It goes like this: she starts the day not caring, wins the first race, and realises she cares too much. That makes her mad. And terrified she won't win again.

Not just win, either: win in a way that causes frenzy.

The world presses in and that makes it worse. It's the frenzy that she wants but she can't stand it. After every race, she curls tighter.

Swimming carnival at our new private school. Sports teachers asking who her trainer is. Relay teams catching her in victory dances. (They could have waded down the pool, Amelia would still have won it for them.) Yearbook wanting her photograph. She never lets anybody photograph her. She knows she's a ghost and won't show up.

We had to be out late that night, starting 2 am.

The music helped — it helps us both. We're not musicians, we're average, but playing music makes us feel like gods.

But then she's on the dance floor, and Amelia's a newspaper that just got loose.

Pieces of her flying wild.

Flashes of her face, hands in the air, that piece of black string with the tiny white opal that she knots around her wrist.

At three, I find her by an exit door, some huge purple cocktail cold between her hands, a joint between her teeth, a beer held tight beneath her arm.

I'm thinking that I have to get her home.

Some guy is leaving. His hand hits the exit door just above Amelia's shoulder. There's a moment when he realises: push the door, the girl will fall. He stops.

Then he looks sideways. ‘Amelia,' he says. ‘Hey.'

I see his mouth say this. Can't hear his voice over the noise.

Amelia stares back, breathes in through her nose. Her eyes give him a smile, like she likes the look of him.

‘You were amazing today,' says his mouth.

So he was at the swimming carnival. He's someone from our new private school.

I'm staring at his face, his clothes, his body language. He's a big guy. Looks okay.

We hit the exit door together, so I can find a taxi. He helps me look a moment, then he asks me where she lives. Says that's on his way.

I call her from the Goose and Thistle, half an hour later. She answers in her sleep.

The next day she's forgotten it all. I see the guy, point him out. He's running up a flight of stairs.

‘Oh, yeah, him,' she says. ‘I think he's in my History class. Why?'

‘He drove you home last night.'

And she laughs like she doesn't believe me.

That time in the café, she was kicking someone's chair and she didn't even realise she was doing it. She was sideways on her own chair, elbow on the table, sucking on a straw, talking to me, and one foot was doing this slam, slam, slam against the side of the chair at the next table. A middle-aged woman was sitting there. Didn't say a word until a kick so hard that the chair almost tipped to the floor.

 

Tobias George Mazzerati
Student No: 8233555

It's just like with mapquest. You've gotta zoom out sometimes.

Before I can give you Tom Kincaid's story, I'm going to have to give you the History of Australia. Starting from the point when England took it from the locals.

Sorry about that, but here it is.

The History of Australia

Okay. Guy named Captain Cook was taking in the night sky in Tahiti, when he got a text message from back home:

While U R down that way, pls check out the southern oceans for the Great Southern Land? Thx XX

So he packs up, sails around, and runs smack-bang into the right-hand side of the Great Southern Land. (One day to be named Australia.)

He sends a text back:

Just arrived. They've got kangaroos
Soil looks gr8. Let's take it.

He goes to write a cheque for the deposit, but then he remembers: it's 1770! You just take it! Feeling proud, he messages the King:

George III! Word is U R about to lose America? War of Independence to start in 5 yrs?
Sorry to hear it. But good news: have picked up gr8 new property for you: cld keep
prisoners here? Sthrn exposure; gr8 beaches; plenty of flax. Spk soon. Luv Cptn Cook. XXX

That's why, twenty years on (more or less), you've got your English ships crammed full of convicts sailing down this way to get a country under way.

Shortly after arrival, they'd completely run out of clothes, shoes and food, and they're running around starving and half-naked.

They're so cut off from the rest of the world, they don't even know that the French Revolution is on. (They're all just, ‘Da dee da, hmm, maybe I'll holiday in France next year? If only I weren't so hungry…')

The locals helped them out, and some ships arrived from home just in time to stop them dropping dead.

Anyhow, they got the convicts working, and started growing grains, greens and potatoes. Got themselves some goats, hogs, poultry, sheep and fruit trees. Threw together a town called Sydney, another smaller place out west (Parramatta), and some farms along a river called the Hawkesbury. (But that kept flooding.)

Next they started a huge farm. They let some super-evil dude run that. He had the convicts work from dawn until they fell down dead on the spot. There was a pit where they threw the corpses every day, and the native dogs gnawed on their bones through the night.

Couple of years later, super-evil dude had ruined that farm — on account of double cropping. So they started a
new super-farm out west, towards the Blue Mountains. At a place they called Castle Hill.

That's it. The History of Australia. It all ends here in Castle Hill.

Now I'll let Tom take over — tell you how he got to Castle Hill, and why he sees the darkness coming. You might notice that my Irish accent is not exactly great, but you've gotta give me points for effort. Thanks.

Tobias George Mazzerati
Student No: 8233555

26 June 1800

Tom Kincaid, 17 years old, and here I am on board a ship. The ship is named the
Anne
, 384 tonnes, 12 guns, 42 crew plus sundry others.

Just weighing anchor and setting sail as we speak.

Sure and you've got to keep your own spirits up, for there's no one else will do that for you! So here's my best efforts. It's a kind of a game:

True it is that they got me for stealing a sheep, but that were the eleventh sheep I'd taken, and they could have got me any time before!

True that my papers say Life — but I hear that if you pay the right person enough you can get your papers changed!

Sure and I've not got a farthing to my name, so even if I knew who the right person was, all I could offer is my smile.

But I hear that it's a winner of a smile! That's what Maggie says at least.

Och, the thought of Maggie. It's enough to make my heart billow like sails! But it plunges me anchor-deep too, for I cannot spend another day without her. I cannot.

I'd best try again:

They've hardly scratched a corner of the land where we're headed, and who can tell what might be hidden there? It's
a great unfolding mystery, it's the future! There could be monstrous creatures as big as the hills! Blue grass, purple trees, and little people! Nobody knows! (There are natives, I suppose, who might know. But they'd be keeping it a secret.)

What else? They've stowed rations of biscuit, beef, pork, plum pudding and peas! We're to get our own beds! I'll not know what to do with all that space! (At home I share my bed with three brothers.) What's more, they've given us two coarse linen jackets, two pairs of duck trousers, two shirts, two pairs of yarn stockings, two pairs of shoes, and a woollen cap! — all of them the ugliest things you ever saw, and I'd prefer to be stark naked than to wear them.

Ah, well. Perhaps I'll try that game another day.

30 June 1800

Tonight, below deck, I was chatting with an errand boy from Dublin and a tinker from Galway. A shoemaker and a tobacco twister joined the conversation, and sure, it seemed to be a village square!

There's a crowd of Rebels aboard this ship, too, and I'm wary of them. They think they're a class above us common thieves. I must tell them about the ten other sheep and they'll see I'm uncommon good.

2 July 1800

The first mate, he's a right hostile fellow. Likes to press the heel of his boot into your foot. A girl who reminds me of Maggie to look at scalded her arm the other day, and that was the first mate's leering — it frightened her into carelessness.

12 July 1800

I've made friends with one of the Rebels! He's a fellow named
Phillip Cunningham, who doesn't put on the same airs. Maybe because he doesn't have to; the others respect him like he's something special. He's a stonemason from County Kerry; older than me but treats me like he hasn't noticed that. He's left a wife and two small children back home. You can see that he knows how to speak his mind, and he's already made me laugh twice.

29 July 1800

A strange day. There was a fumigation below deck, and some of the Rebels used the distraction to try to take over the ship. Held a sword to the captain's throat. There was shouting, shoving, gunfire, and it was over.

Phillip knew it was planned, he says, but he hadn't mentioned it to me — which offends me a little. I thought we were friends. But he wasn't one of the ringleaders.

The ringleaders were punished. We had to watch that, up on deck.

15 August 1800

Tonight, all convict hands were called on deck, and I saw the stars exploding in the sky. I said,
Look, Maggie, that's your eyes.
Such quiet eyes, such a soft, shy voice, but both of them brimming with something, exploding like stars. I don't even know what she's brimming with, my Maggie. Dreams maybe, magic, or fairies. (You must always call them ‘good people', she says.)

That sky made the future bright again.

4 September 1800

The first mate broke one of his fingers today, trying to secure the longboat, which cheered us all a great deal.

1 October 1800

At dusk today, a vessel was sailing at a distance and it had no canvas up, except the foretop sail, and that was all torn to pieces with the wind. The captain steered towards her and the closer we got the clearer it was that
no person was alive on board that ship.
She was waterlogged. The waves were washing over her, and every time the ship rose with the swell, the water came out her cabin windows.

We sailed on and left her be, a ship full of ghosts.

13 October 1800

Some nights the darkness below deck frightens me. They pull up the ladder so you're trapped, and there's a barricade spiked with iron just above our heads, and the fierce smell of men all around me. Men are filthy creatures, and filthier the older they get. Mix their smells with that of foul water, from the bottom of the ship below the pumps, and the rotting wood, and I'll tell you this, in a darkness such as that, the great unfolding mystery of the future, it doesn't seem so wondrous to me.