Kipp The Kid (2 page)

“Pigeons,” Kipp’s grumps had told him often enough,
“not much good for anything, except for eating.” Kipp had never
tried eating them, though if he was hungry enough he was sure he
would give anything a go.

The campsite was exactly as he had left it a few days
before. Exactly, that is, except for some tin cans thrown about and
all the logs moved. There were tracks leading up to the logs, like
they had been dragged by something or someone.

Someone, Kipp realized as he stared down at the big
boot marks in the dust. Hardly anyone came down to the mines
anymore. Even the tourists stopped coming ages ago. Occasionally,
Kipp saw visitors, a few rat bags now and again, mostly from out of
town, but they rarely invaded his camp site cause it was always so
hard to get to and so well hidden.

He could have camped anywhere in the mines and been
safe, but Kipp preferred one of the shallower dug-outs because it
offered shelter from wind and rain and there was always water
there. Not very tasty water, but good enough to drink if you didn’t
have anything else.

There was an artificial crevice tucked neatly away in
the corner of the dug-out. It was cool and mostly dry there and the
fire bounced off the vertical walls of solid rock and made the
whole space nice and cozy. It was a good spot, his spot. The fact
that someone else had found it annoyed him. He felt protective of
it, like he was an explorer who had discovered it first. He’d even
named it Kipp’s Chasm and had scrawled the name into a rock, as if
doing so made it his.

Someone else had written something now too, but it
was graffiti and Kipp couldn’t read it at all. He got a big sharp
rock and scratched away at it until all he saw were scratches. Nip
sat patiently panting by the stack of wood Kipp had collected on
his way into the Chasm. He gave a quick bark and then cocked his
head sideways. His little floppy ears dangled like old brown socks
in need of mending. His big brown eyes watched everything Kipp was
doing.

As soon as he had scratched off all the graffiti,
Kipp got the fire going and sat on a flat stone he had placed there
a long time ago, back when he was barely old enough to lift it,
back when grumps used to come down with him. Nip sat next to him as
Kipp rubbed his hands together.

“It’s gonna be a cold one tonight Nip. A bit nippy
I’d reckon.” Then he chuckled to himself. Nip barked a reply as if
agreeing with him and then he wandered over to the backpack and
started sniffing. “Oh, right, you want something to eat huh? No
surprises there I suppose.”

Kipp opened up a can of spam and tipped it onto a tin
plate and gave it to Nip who gulped it down without even tasting
it. It was probably just as well, because Spam is one of those
things people make, but nobody actually likes, yet everyone seems
to have a spare can or two in their pantry.

He watched Nip finish licking the plate and then
dived into the bag and pulled out a packet of chips. He opened it
and started munching away. Then he made up some cordial and drank a
couple of cups full.

Above him, the stars were already bright in the
narrow section of sky between each wall of the chasm. Aside from
naming the Chasm, Kipp had also taken to naming the constellations.
He knew they already had names, but he wanted to name them himself,
as if he were the only one who had ever seen them. Big Kipper, he
called one of them he thought was shaped like a boy, Little Nipper
he called another shaped like a dog and there was another one that
sort of resembled a girl with a dress on. He absentmindedly named
it Jane, seeing how she was the only girl he actually knew well
enough to deserve having stars named after her.

As he sat there thinking about Jane, but trying hard
not to, there was a cracking noise coming from the other side of
the dug-out. At first Kipp thought it was a Kangaroo, or wild dog.
Nip started barking and took off to the opening of the chasm where
he stood, yapping away like he had seen a fox or rabbit.

Kipp followed him and peered into the dark. He had
his torch with him, but he wanted to see if he could hear anything
first.

“Shush Nip.” He commanded and Nip stopped barking.
Instead, he was growling under his breath, letting out a
half-hearted “wrrrroof”, not quite qualifying as a bark, but close
enough.

Kipp was about to give up looking when a figure
appeared out of the shadows and into the moonlight. Kipp had
expected it to be an animal, or maybe an owl. But he had not
expected it to be a girl and certainly not someone he knew.

“Jane? What the heck?”

Jane wandered sheepishly over to him, casually
swinging her arms from side to side. Kipp was gob smacked. At first
he didn’t know what to say, so, being a girl as she was, Jane did
all the talking.

“So this is your secret haunt?”

“Well, it was a secret, but not any more, I guess,”
he stammered, rolling his eyes.

“You needn’t look so worried. I won’t tell.” Kipp
breathed a sigh of relief, but he soon had reason to worry again.
“That is, unless you don’t let me stay.”

“Stay? Ummm, not a good idea. Too cold. Yes it’s very
cold, isn’t it Nip?”

“Woof!”

“Besides. You’re a girl and I have rules,” he said,
wondering if she even felt the cold in her nighty and dressing
gown.

“Well, I see you have a fire.” She wasted no time in
making herself at home and sat down on his rock. Kipp rolled his
eyes and Nip cocked his head and barked. She had found the rest of
his chips too and was already chomping them down.

Kipp was not really all that good with girls. It
wasn’t that he wasn’t interested enough to talk to them, more that
they didn’t talk to him, unless it was to tease or run a hand over
his head to see if his hair really was as wiry as everyone said.
But Jane, for all her flaws, the biggest being she was a girl, was
the best of a bad bunch. She was two grades lower than him and
still in primary school. He’d seen her around at school and had
unsuccessfully pretended not to know her. He had observed she
didn’t have many friends and had, deep down, secretly, felt sorry
for her.

If he had thought about it more, he would have
decided she was not the worst person to join him at his camp. She
was certainly better than his cousin Jack, who thankfully only
visited rarely and she was better than the Skinner sisters a couple
of properties up the road from where he lived. They used to walk
their Dobermans past his gran and grumps house every afternoon in
summer and during holidays, stopping to call out to him from the
gate. They were twins and the loudest, screechiest, most annoying
creatures on the planet. Even his pet cocky Sam was not a patch on
them for the noise they made.

“Kipp? K-I-P-P?” They would call out to him, but he
hid inside until they gave up or their dogs got restless. Nip would
run out to the gate, stopping half way, barking bravely. But the
stupid black things would bark back and he would run back to the
porch and half hide under the deck.

But Jane, she was quiet, at least for a girl. He
didn’t really know a heck of a lot about her, even though they had
been neighbors for as long as he could remember. But two things he
did know. She spent a lot of time inside and she had flaming red
hair that flowed low over her back, almost to the hips.

He’d spied her more times than he would admit, in her
back yard, playing with her toys or in the cubby house, or with her
cats. He had rarely seen visitors come to the house and had only
known her to have one friend over, another girl her age, but he
didn’t know for certain if she was related or just a friend. She
certainly hadn’t come from their school.

And here she was, standing, rubbing
her hands fiercely over the fire. Such a delicate and slender
little thing. She looks like she would snap in a sharp breeze. Kipp
had never compared girls to girls, but now that he had time to
observe, he subconsciously graded her according to the scale of
Kipp. Everything was graded that way, his grandparents love for
him, his absent father’s…absence, his love for his dog Nip. His
gran and grumps scored a reasonable six out of ten. His father, who
he had not seen since he was four, got a half a point, just for
being his dad, but that’s it. His mum, if she were still here,
would have scored a nine. Nip was a certain ten and Jane? She fell
neatly at a very respectable seven. If he had been honest with
himself he would have scored her higher, but he was too embarrassed
to admit it even to himself.

Chapter 3: The kipper way

Jane had not brought anything with her, except a
hastily packed bag of not very warm looking clothes, some snacks
and her toothbrush. She had no bedding and apart from his swag,
Kipp only had a coat he always brought in case the weather turned
nasty. If it had been the middle of winter and not late spring, he
would have to have marched her straight back home. As it was she
had begged him to let her stay even on pain of freezing to
death.

So she stayed. Kipp did his best to keep her warm and
comfortable. If he had been a gentlemen, or even knew what one was,
he would have offered her his swag and rolled up next to the fire
in his coat. But he didn’t. He felt that if he made it too
comfortable for her, she would want to come back again. It was a
fine line he was treading, way up on the tightrope of relationships
and the rope was wobbling like jelly.

Kipp reasoned that he had already made too many
concessions. To make up for it, he gave her some canned soup, which
she scoffed down like a poor child in a Charles Dickens novel. When
she was finished, Kipp made up some hot chocolate and the two of
them sipped quietly away, sharing the rock as a seat, which only
had just enough room for the two of them. Kipp’s bum got sore from
sitting nearly on the sharp edge, because he didn’t want his bum to
come into contact with hers. Jane, on the other hand, seemed not at
all fussed about it and actually leant in a little, every time Kipp
adjusted his position to move. But despite his discomfort, he
wasn’t about to give up his rock, even for a girl he only barely
tolerated, let alone liked.

Kipp never dreamed. At least, not dreams he
remembered. Only once had a dream been so real that he woke up
expecting to see his Mum standing there and was genuinely surprised
when she wasn’t. But on this cool night something inside him had
stirred and he had a dream so vivid, so strange and so real that
the vision of it stayed with him long into the next week.

He’d been down to the mines, as he always had. It was
a warm night and there were bugs everywhere. The campsite was just
as he had left it the last time he was there. But there was an
eeriness, an unease that seemed to penetrate the place. The stars
shone down brightly, sparkling like heaven’s jewelry in the black
box of space. Even the fire he made took on a ghostly glow and cast
strange beams of light out into the mist that had somehow rolled in
from above the chasm. Odd, he had thought, wrong time of year for
fog.

But just as Kipp was wondering about the strange
mist, a voice suddenly cried out in the dark and a white figure
appeared at the end of the chasm. It called out his name and the
sound echoed off the stone walls, making it sound much louder than
it would normally. Then, the strange figure, who he did not
recognize, held out both arms and let out a howl.

Kipp woke to his dog Nip howling at the Moon, whose
crest had only just started to appear above the chasm. It did not
occur to Kipp straight away that Nip had rarely howled, not at the
Moon, not at thunder, not at anything except when the Rooster
crowed early on some mornings.

It took Kipp some time to adjust to the still cool
air of the night. He checked his watch. It was not even three. He
looked over at Jane who had somehow managed to fall asleep, curled
up uncomfortably in his coat. Her feet poked out one end, her white
socks dirty from the red dust. The fire was almost out, only the
smallest glow of embers to warm the air. He decided to stoke it and
throw some more sticks on. He watched as the sticks slowly
smoldered until the fire finally flickered back to life.

He sat there for a long time, watching the fire and
wondering about the dream. He tried to picture the figure, too
large to be a girl and too small to be his mother. But it was
definitely female. It wore a long white gown, old looking and
frayed. She had dark hair, that much Kipp remembered. But he dared
not look across the chasm into the dark cleft, lest something
sinister appear.

Jane stretched out to reveal a screwed up face poking
out from in front of the nape of Kipp’s jacket, squinting in the
morning light. Her hair was all over her face. A cheeky eye gazed
at him.

“Is it morning?” she asked matter-of-factly.

Typical
, thought Kipp.
Always stating the
obvious
. In his experience, girls always did that. His mother
had done it. His gran did it often. “Get some clothes on. It’s
freezing,” she would say, as if Kipp couldn’t feel cold until the
magic of her words made it cold.

He would tease her sometimes about it. “Gee, is that
soup?” and “Wow, you have blue hair.” But his gran seemed to not
get the joke. “Well of course it’s soup,” she would answer, a
rebuking tone in her voice. The same tone she always used when
calling out to grumps. “Stan, you have to get the chickens in.
Stan, come in off the porch before you catch pneumonia. Stan, the
neighbor’s goats are loose again.” Then she would grumble to
herself because he hadn’t heard her.