Heat and Light (13 page)

The Falls

The Villa mob were back from the city and back in their old place near the creek bed and everyone thought we should have a cook-up that night. Mum was making salad with her boomerang arm Dad had given her. Grace and I were on the couch waiting for Dad to come home. I looked at Grace’s bright pink lipstick. Her eyes were like sizzling jewels brought to life. She was wearing a bold singlet and denim cut-offs shorter than our neighbour’s two-year-old’s. I saw under her hand on the other side of the couch she had her oversized New York T-shirt ready to change into, as if half-accepting defeat.

Dad walked in but didn’t say anything. He didn’t look at us and when Mum came over to greet him he backed into the bedroom and shut the door. Grace gave me a look and flipped open her hand mirror, checking her makeup. Mum had left the salad bowl next to me and I looked at the contents – the tomatoes red with energy, the onions peppering my eyes. It was about as beautiful as my mother. I was surprised to see her curled to the window, her back to us, watching the red dust tides.

We waited for Dad to come out of the bedroom. I didn’t know what he was doing in there, or how long he’d be. I thought he’d just need to take a piss and put on his favourite T-shirt that we got him for his birthday. Mum warned me not to go in but I went up and put my ear to the door. It was the only door in the house and it always held a fascination. I thought I could hear the hum of radio, though our radio had been broken for a year or more, that’s what Dad had said, unplugging it and putting it under the bed for safe keeping. I rested my head on the ground and nudged my eye under the door. The bed was tucked up neat. Was my father under the sheets, wrapped up? I smelt cigarette smoke and peppermints – the strong kind he got from the petrol station.

I felt my hand crushed, and saw Grace standing on me. I yelped and quickly got up, calling her half-formed names.

‘I’m not
stupid
,’ she hissed in my face and gripped my arm. I pinched her and then the door opened and we withdrew from each other.

My dad had shaved his beard and moustache – it was the first time we’d ever seen him clean-shaven. He was wearing olive-green cargo shorts and a button-up shirt I had never seen him actually wear but recognised from the wedding photos of him and Mum.

He said nothing about Grace’s outfit, maybe to discourage a comment about his own appearance, and as usual I was the one picked on. He put a hand on my forehead, almost covering my eyes and said, ‘You mind your manners, tonight. Especially with them old people.’

I shunned a smart response, feeling my tongue seethe.

My mother came to our side and Grace flashed me a snide look that was better than nothing from her. Even when Grace mangled my hair it was better than being ignored.

‘We ready?’ my mother asked.

My father nodded and went outside to inspect the car. We had packed it this morning – after the cook-up we’d leave as a big mob for the falls, stay there until Sunday and then head home in time for the kids to go back to school. Our car was packed up like a real blackfella’s car, dirty mattresses flapping out of the window, unregistered plates, red dirt and rust on the bonnet. All someone needed to do was give it a paint job proper way – dots and that.

My mother was watching my father checking the water level under the bonnet.

‘He’d be too hot in that shirt, eh?’ she asked us, to make sure she wasn’t the only one seeing what she was seeing. Grace made a vague noise of agreement. Of course he’d be hot, it was January, school holidays. The time of year where we spent our days with our eyes on the clouds, hoping they’d live up to their promise. Mum went back in the bedroom and emerged ten minutes later, holding a grey T-shirt but frowning as if she couldn’t find the one we all knew as his favourite. ‘I’ll bring this,’ she said, folding it up into a small square and slipping it in her bag, the one the women had weaved for her. I picked up the salad bowl and carried it out to the car.

Grace and I walked to the Villa place. When we got there the place was really full with mobs of people. I saw the kids my age first, sitting by the Esky with the fizzy drinks. The kids Grace’s age were listening to music from one guy’s big red headphones, and I maybe had heard the song before; maybe Grace had let me listen to it on one of those nights Mum and Dad were out and she’d let me sit on her bed and tell me the story of Grandmaster Flash, how he got his name, he was an electrician.

I saw the old ones look at us, and I was shy. Mum grabbed me by the hand and said, ‘Give Aunty Elaine a kiss and Aunty over here. Go and show them who you are.’

When the women kissed me I felt like I’d been turned into a boab tree, their skin was deep and I felt myself shrivel up. I didn’t like talking about myself. Sometimes they’d want to know whether Mum had taught me how to make quandong jam or how I was going at school and sometimes they’d forgotten my name and thought I had a brother but they were interested in me all the same. They touched my hair and gave me hugs that crushed my ribs. After I had been there for long enough they switched into language, my ears would skip over and I looked down at the dirt.

The adults were playing Country and Western, though I could hear some beats in the corner. Grace was there with a group. I went over, beside two of the Villa kids, Joanne and Dec.

‘Hi,’ Dec said to me, smoothing his long hair back behind his ears. I didn’t know how his hair was so straight. He was looking at Grace and Grace was looking at him in a way that was predictable for me.

‘So how come you’re back?’ I said. Grace gave me a sharp look like a slap.

Joanne said, ‘Dec went to lock-up.’

‘Yeah,’ Grace said. I could hear her heart hammering out of her singlet top next to me.

‘Cars.’ Dec half-smiled. ‘And a few bottle-os and that. Now we’re back here.’

They got to talking about songs they liked, Dec was talking about Dr Dre. Grace signalled at me to leave.

‘I know that stuff too,’ I protested.

‘Shit, man,’ Grace said. ‘She’s only ten years old.’ And they all laughed.

‘Go on,’ she said, drumming her fingers, pointing them in my ears and in the direction of the younger kids.

I knew Grace wouldn’t tell anyone, but she’d been training me up. She was serious about touch football. We’d take it out the back and when I had the ball she’d sing out, ‘Go on, run at me, see if you get past me.’ And I’d run some, the footy heavy, almost slipping off my chest and I’d try to be quick and dodge her but somehow I’d charge right into her and she’d hit me like she was a concrete block and I’d go straight to the ground, remembering to still hold the footy and she’d scream at me and press my ear into the inside of my arm. There wasn’t much point in telling her there was no tackles in touch. She said to me, ‘They’re not letting me play footy. But next year, I’ll be in with the boys. I’m better than them.’ She easily wrestled the ball out of my grip, her nails needles, grazing my face as she got up. She kicked the ball so close to my skull I felt my head blow. It could be difficult to get back to my feet, still finding it hard to breathe, but I would watch her kick and chase the ball without a care – as if she’d run across all three deserts, no problem.

Food was the best thing about gatherings, I reckoned. I walked to the food table, keeping a lookout for Dad. I got in trouble for eating too much at these things. He said I ate
more than my share
. I had to
wait for the Elders
and it
wasn’t my place
.

The barbecue smell brought warmth to my cheeks. There was no sign of Dad with the other men. Mum’s vibrant salad wilted next to the corn chips, rice crackers, dip, sausages, sticky chicken sticks. I eyed off the food. Dad and Grace usually hit me before the food did. But they weren’t there to stop me and I stood for a little while at the table, feeling like the fifteen-kilos-overweight ten-year-old I was. I picked up a kebab and took a bite, the satay sauce running down my lips and onto my shirt, an old one of Grace’s. Caught, I put down my paper plate and the rest of the chicken stick. The party and people went on without me. I saw my mother side by side with the other women. They were encouraging her to dance to the music and it didn’t take much until she was moving her bare feet on the dirt with them, a smile slinging to her face. I felt it as she looked over at me and I felt like running to her and kissing her hands and she was mouthing some words to the song I didn’t know but understood as ‘I’ll look after you’. I forgot about Dad and Grace and the shame job. I piled up my plate and went to sit down.

My dad didn’t seem to be minding his manners. He was normally so tight with the mob. It was a shock to see him sitting by himself on a deck chair drinking a can of beer. He’d come into the feed aggressively friendly as if he’d wanted to put people off from mentioning his cleanly shaven profile. Like those teenagers who come home from the city with edgy haircuts and eyebrow piercings, looking at you like, ‘I dare you to mention it, kid’. My father had slipped, like the time he rolled his ankle at the Bungle Bungles and he went down like a lizard in a hole.

‘How’s the salad?’ Mum said. She’d come over to fix my hair, sprung up with the endless ruffling.

‘Great, Mum.’

‘Good. Make sure you get ’em greens into you, girl.’

I missed my dad’s loud voice in the mix. His stories of roo-hunting and tourists in trouble. I wanted him to laugh. Before I was born, and a few years after, when Grace and I were too young to remember, Dad worked as a diver and they lived in Broome. When they moved here, he got a job at the council, working different jobs. I don’t know as much about him as I do about Mum. Grace reckons he can’t read but we should never tell him we know. Grace says he’s not too nice but we don’t choose our fathers.

That night a lot of mob talked to me but mainly I circled through the stations of Dad and Mum and Grace. By the time it was 9 p.m. and the sun had set, Dad’s shirt was soaked at the sides from the armpit and at the neck. Mum looked worried about Dad but she didn’t go over there, no one did, because he had found an old newspaper and held it close to his face.

‘Mad sounds,’ Grace was saying, her head bumped up tight against Dec’s, the red headphones tying them together.

I wanted to stay awake for the ghost stories but I didn’t make it.

Mum or someone must have carried me to a sleeping bag and I came to this conclusion jolted upright by Grace sneaking in beside me, a lo-light torch strapped to her wrist. Before we lay down, Grace’s head by my feet because she said I gave her nits, she pointed the torch in my eyes and said, ‘He’s so into me.’

‘What does it feel like?’ I asked. I slipped a sock off my foot, and the cool air caught the pool of sweat between my toes.

She didn’t pinch me for speaking to her. She just lay back and I could see her teeth and her eyes and she began to hum. This track I knew, ‘It’s Like That’. She stopped to say, ‘Phew! That reeks, man. Put your socks back on, you idiot.’

We woke up at dawn, the kids shaking the bugs out of the sleeping bags onto each other, the grown-ups looking worse than last night. We ate cold sausages and onion for breakfast and there was leftover cream cake, too, if we remembered our toothbrush. We went to the cars. There were hugs and kisses to make your back hurt even though it was only a two-hour drive to the falls. Mum and Dad and Grace and I squeezed our butts into our car, the seats already burning with a day that had started without us. Dad seemed okay now and Mum had brought coffee for him and her in a thermos. Grace asked if she could have some and Dad said yes. He took his shirt off and hung it in the window to keep the sun out of our eyes.

The Wheel

If you drive out past the one-pump service station on the edge of town, where the new dirt reaches the old dirt, out where there’s nothing but fresh countrymen’s land, that’s when you see the wheel. In the pale echoic distance, a thin impending structure that fascinated us as kids. Don’t ask me how long it’s been there. All I know is you’d be hard pressed to find anyone from here that doesn’t remember it.

Small community, and my sister told me what she thought I needed to know about it. The best time to nick lip gloss from the shop – after a dust storm, when the woman’s still cleaning her glasses. Where to take a boy if you like him. Sometimes she pointed things out and didn’t say anything, like the glimpse of deckchairs under thickset trees behind the post office.

My sister and I used to count the kilometres and calculate how far we’d get if we ran away. I grew up knowing the distances: 250 ks from the ocean; 400 ks from the nearest major town, Broome; 2500 ks from Perth; 1500 ks from Darwin. We wondered how far we’d get before someone would notice and people would start looking. Soon the word would spread, jump from town to town, and we’d be the black girls everyone’d be talking about. How much chocolate would we need? I used to ask Grace. Could I be the one to choose?

This was on the afternoons when Mum wouldn’t talk, and Dad would be out the back, in the shed, and we would hear him shouting, hitting things.

The first time I saw it happen I was in the kitchen, filling in my spelling sheets for class at the table. Mum came in from outside. Dad had been spending a lot of time in that shed. She didn’t look at me as she turned on the tap, filling the sink for the dishes. We heard him, and I didn’t quite believe it. It sounded like something happening from another family. Wood against metal. Man against the world. I was shocked but my mother didn’t seem shocked.

My mother started crying. She put a hand on her temple, bowed her head and started sobbing. To comfort my mother wasn’t a natural instinct. I’m not sure if she had a shield around her or if I was too young to contemplate that she might need me for something. So instead of going to her and holding her I moved to leave.

‘Stay. Keep doing your homework,’ she said in a thin voice. Her elbows were shaking but she still scrubbed the plates.

One day Grace came at my mother with the Broome phone book open to mental health services. This was a few weeks after he had stopped working.

‘Your father won’t go,’ Mum said.

‘Yeah, but we can get Uncle over there—’

‘No. This is between us. It is a family matter.’

‘When did they stop being family?’

My mother shook her head. I realised she never really let anyone in, not enough.

That year there was a new girl in town and when Grace and I went to meet her Grace said, ‘What, did your parents leave you in the bath too long?’ She was so small she came up to Grace’s hips.

She wore ribbons in her white-blond hair and had glasses with a gold and purple butterfly on them. Her name was Stephanie Grey. She looked too young for the age we knew her to be, she was in my class, composite grade six and seven. Her ideas came from encyclopaedias. She owned a complete set – I saw them in her room when I went over there.

‘We’re from Melbourne,’ she told us.

‘Solid,’ Grace said. ‘That’s a long way. Crossed a few countries to get ’ere. You’d be hot soon, eh.’

‘I am already,’ Stephanie said.

Grace had started a hip-hop crew who hung out at the skate bowl on a Friday night. They were responsible for the town’s graffiti tags, and the blaring music after nine.

She had quite a following of younger girls – they all looked up to her, what else was there to do – and Stephanie was one of them. I felt sorry for her. Things could’ve been different for her, if she hadn’t been blinded by Grace.

When Stephanie saw Grace dance in assembly, she stood up and clapped her hands, made a big scene and that, and we all stared at her. We were the casual breed. Serial underperformers and undertalkers, jeered at by teachers who thought of us as no-hopers, destined to be dole bludgers and, if we were lucky, tradies or kitchenhands. We didn’t like outspokenness, hand raising, blowtorching.

Stephanie thought Grace was the deadliest. She followed her home after school whenever she could, and that’s how she became my friend.

My sister and I lay down in the bed we shared.

‘Why can you feel your heart in your arm?’ I asked.

‘It’s your pulse,’ she said, pushing me off her.

‘Why is it in your arm?’

‘If you ask me one more question I’ll give ya an arm like Mum’s got.’

‘That’s not nice,’ I said.

I caught a glimpse of regret flash across her face before she pushed her palm into my nose and put her headphones on. Dad had been onto Mum again, like he did when we were little. I don’t remember but Grace does. Abruptly, she grabbed me in a headlock. Her hands lodged through my hair, breaking knots.

‘Geez. You look like no one owns you. Your hair’s a fucking nest. When was the last time you washed it? Or ran a fucking comb through it?’

‘I don’t have a brush. Mum was going to get me one.’

She sighed – it was painful for her to say, ‘Use mine.’ She got it out of her studded toiletry bag. ‘Rinse it after, though. Wash it good, otherwise I’ll kill you.’

Mum wasn’t home much. She had found the deckchairs at the back of the post office. Where they’d got the grog in. Secret grog business. She’d come home, at eight or nine at night, when dinner had been forgotten. With a scent I didn’t know yet, but Grace said, ‘You reek of fucking gin, Mum.’

Grace and Mum were always fighting. ‘You’re a disgrace,’ Grace said. ‘You’re embarrassing. It’s about time you looked after us.’

It just wasn’t in her power. She couldn’t be a great provider on twenty dollars a week. She had given up. About once a fortnight Mum came home with supplies, but we would eat the good shit in a day. I learnt to pinch food. I helped myself to a lot from the school tuckshops, from friends’ places, from the footy club.

The smell of Mum’s alcohol became a comfort to me – the way it reached to my fingertips and my hair.

That next January I started bleeding and like usual Mum and Grace weren’t home. I began to notice the distances between us: 200 ks between Grace and Mum, 100 between me and Mum, 3000 between Dad and Mum. I gasped as I sat upright on the toilet, hugged my arms around my chest, sat there for an hour but there was no one to come.

I tapped on the shed door. ‘Dad. I know you’re sick, eh, but I need help and you’re the only one who’s home.’

He opened the door and his expression changed when he looked at me. This was the first time I’d seen him properly for months, more than the moving figure between hallways, limping in the yard. He was skinnier. He was going bald. His chest hair was uneven.

‘Second drawer in the bathroom. You’ll find it there.’

I came back with tweezers, cotton balls, kids medicines. Nothing for a girl on the verge of womanhood.

This time he didn’t open the door the whole way. ‘Go to one of your friends. Tell her mum you got the monthlies.’

I walked to Stephanie’s house. Her mother was helpful, in an artificial way, as if she was being careful for me not to get attached. Their bathroom was spotless and dry, looked like no one shit in there. I cleaned myself up and went out into the living room. Stephanie’s parents didn’t want me hanging around, and I didn’t want to stay either. Stephanie put a book in my palm. She said it was for Grace.

I got home. Mum wasn’t there. The fridge was empty. Dad was swearing loudly outside, above the droll beat of the insects. Grace was on the bed, angry. ‘I can’t take this anymore,’ she said. She scratched the scars on her knees she got from breakdancing.

‘Let’s run away, like we said.’

She nodded. ‘Yeah, alright, little sis. I said if it ever got this bad, we’d go.’

She got up and pulled her jeans out of the cupboard. Stashed in the back pockets was all the money she owned, fifty-four dollars, fifty-five cents. She took out a ten-dollar note and gave it to me. She took another ten and said, ‘I’m going to the shops, get a few things. And I gotta see a friend.’

‘Don’t tell anyone, Grace.’

‘I won’t, stupid. Stay here and get ready.’

Hours later it was dark and our place still held the same number of occupants, no one had come home. Around midnight I walked myself to the skate bowl. There was Grace, sitting on the top of the ramp, kissing a boy. She had betrayed our plans; she was not coming. So that’s how I ended up with Stephanie.

In the morning I was knocking hard at the Greys’ front door. They were the only family that kept it all locked up.

‘You’re here again,’ her parents said warily.

I pulled Stephanie into her bedroom, sealed the door closed with her stack of encyclopaedias, and told her the plan. She’d overheard Grace and me talk about it a few times when we were all together. She knew the plan better than I did, like the plot of her favourite
Famous Five
novel. It wasn’t easy convincing her to come, and I almost felt bad. But her parents wanted to move back to Melbourne already; it hadn’t worked out for them here, they’d said. And Stephanie wanted a story to take back there.

Our packs were light at first. I squeezed next to the Greys’ fridge, inspected the contents, chose the orange-flavoured poppers Stephanie had in her lunchbox, crackers and cheese packs, Up&Go. When I walked out of town for the first time and out of the shade, I can tell you that I felt weightless. Stephanie didn’t even need to be there. We headed east, deciding to follow the road for a bit. It was still school holidays and it would be a while until anyone noticed we had left.

We were in good spirits early on; I showed Stephanie a desert gecko curled still on a rock and she pointed out a collection of bike tracks someone had left. We must’ve looked silly starting off, a chubby black girl and a skinny white girl with backpacks walking along a few metres from the road. We only saw one car. We saw it approaching for a while, and we kept our heads down but it didn’t stop. After that we walked a little more quickly, and there was a bit more grass up ahead. I walked through it. It was the last grass we saw.

Flat country here, eh. I knew it, couldn’t help thinking if we walked far enough in this direction, we’d see the wheel. The wheel is where every kid wants to get to. We don’t know how it got there, an abandoned ferris wheel erected in the middle of the desert. I knew if we made it to the wheel we would have done alright.

I quickly grew tired in the backs of my legs. The ground was tougher than I thought it would be. We had to look where we were walking. Stephanie was okay, being a talker. I got her to tell me about Melbourne. She told me a story about an African boy she once met on the bus. He didn’t know where he was going so he had already been on seven bus routes that day. Stephanie explained that there are a lot of different buses in Melbourne. Like hundreds. All with different numbers and routes. The boy thought he would eventually get to where he wanted by chance. But in his hop-on, hop-off approach, every bus he took was taking him further from his intended destination. I wanted to know whether he got there, but Stephanie shook her head.

It was hotter than I’d imagined walking endlessly in the sun. ‘Mum and Dad don’t like me going outside.’ Stephanie’s face was smudged pink. Freckles sprang up on her arms like frogs at wet season.

I ripped a part of my backpack to make a hat for her. I laughed when she put it on. It kept falling off until she got the hang of walking in a careful way, her palms outward and her legs close together.

We made each other silly, inventing games to chase away the boredom. In between, when there were silences (they were inevitable, even with Stephanie who could chat about anything); I swore at Grace under my breath. She could get stuffed.

In the late afternoon we came to a small rock formation, barely taller than Stephanie, and after asking permission aloud I got up and stood on it, trying to see the wheel. There was a thick smudged dot beneath the cloud but it had no definition. Darkness fielded the sky.

We spent our first night cold. We had run out of food. I craved a bag of chips from the store. Stephanie was tired. I had got us settled between the rocks, using the backpacks as softeners. Stephanie breathed consistently from her nose. I couldn’t get to sleep for a while. I felt my skin blend and burn with the familiarity of the rocky hill.

In the morning we trekked through the desert, and we got a few hours in before our bodies remembered they were wanting. We tossed around the aluminium water bottle like pass-the-parcel, until there was nothing but a metallic wink at the bottom. My cheap-arse shoes were cuffed at the sole already. I felt faint, but I was sure I didn’t look half as bad as Stephanie, her face was a hollow glowing red.

‘How come Grace didn’t come?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know. We’re better off without her.’

She scrunched up her eyes in her glasses. ‘Grace would have known what to do.’

I picked up a rock and raised it at her and she blinked and I knew this was not what I wanted to do, not how I wanted to act. I saw Grace, sitting on the ramp, talking to the boys, flicking back her dyed red hair, rapping, ‘I don’t fight with my fists, I fight with my words.’ I thought of her secret tattoo. I saw it when she changed her shirt before bed. I didn’t see it every night because she’d call me a pervert. A black hand, on the cave of her lower back.

I sighed. ‘I wish Grace could have come, too. But she’s not here.’ I thought of what my mother said often. ‘And we’re going to have to do without.’

With the rock in my hand I went searching for food and water, Stephanie behind me. There had to be something still with me, my father’s words, the years we camped with the other kids and mob from all over.

I hadn’t talked for hours and when I opened my mouth my lips peeled off each other and throbbed. ‘I came from here. I need to know how to survive.’ I didn’t expect or want Stephanie to hear me, but she was right behind me.

‘I know how to survive in Melbourne. Catching trams and wearing four layers in August.’ She giggled, and she laughed a little too long for me to think she was dehydrated.