Sydney Bridge Upside Down (7 page)

‘Would they hear me if I shouted?’ she asked, running to the dead tree near the edge.

‘Sure,’ I said, wishing they wouldn’t.

‘Yoohoo!’ she shouted. But it was not a very loud shout. Even though he was just below us, Sam Phelps did not look up.

I saw that Caroline had one hand on the tree. ‘Be careful of that tree,’ I said. ‘It might fall if you touch it. You could slip over the edge.’

‘You know what Harry did to me—’ Dibs began.

I turned to him, my fist to my nose. ‘We have good fun up here,’ I said loudly. ‘So far no accidents.’ I took my fist from my nose as I turned back to Caroline. ‘What say we go home and have lunch? Or do you want to look at the view some more?’

‘Oh, I think that will do for the time being, thank you, Harry,’ she said.

I led the way along the track. I made sure I led them away from the start of the other track, the one that went down to the clearing beside the railway line; I did not want Caroline to suggest that we visit the wharf. When I got to the last rise and had first look at the houses, though, I saw something that made me change my plans. I saw Mr Wiggins’ white van outside our house. I turned before the others could see.

‘I remember,’ I told Caroline. ‘You were asking about the other way. You know, the quick way to the railway line. Yes, we could go down it and maybe visit the wharf.’

‘What about your lunch?’ she said.

‘It’s early,’ I said. ‘We’ve got time to visit the wharf. Eh, Dibs?’

‘I don’t care,’ Dibs said. ‘I got nothing else to do.’

‘Come on then,’ I said. And I led them to the other track, then down it to the clearing.

Caroline sat on the grass in the shade as soon as we were there. ‘It’s a lovely spot,’ she said.

‘We used to have picnics here,’ I told her.

‘I’ve never been on a picnic,’ she said.

‘Never!’ I cried. ‘Never in your whole life?’ I wasn’t really amazed, of course; I just wanted to stop her thinking of lunch and heading home, the longer we talked in the clearing the more chance Mr Wiggins would be gone when we got home.

Caroline laughed. ‘Never, never, never!’

‘What do you know?’ I said to Dibs.

‘What do you know?’ he said back.

We wasted some more time in the clearing, talking of
picnics and what we liked best about them. Because of the way she sat, I had to keep trying not to look at Caroline; she sat with her knees up and the light was much better here than in the cave. It would have been good, I guessed, if I’d been the only one looking; Dibs being there too made it different. I was a bit relieved when Caroline got up and strolled towards the railway line. She must be wondering about Sam Phelps and Sydney Bridge Upside Down. Well, I wouldn’t mind her being with them—not as much as I would mind her being with Mr Wiggins. So I decided we could now go to the wharf.

I pointed out that one way to reach the wharf was to go across the rocks and along the timbers under the wharf as far as the funny steps. The other way, I said, was to walk along the track beside the line.

‘What say we have a race?’ I said to Caroline. ‘You go along the railway track, Dibs and I go across the rocks.’

‘That sounds like fun,’ she said.

Dibs and I did not move very fast because he agreed with me that it would be polite to let Caroline win.

‘She’s a good sport, eh?’ he said as we went across the rocks. ‘Likes having fun, eh?’

‘I bet Cal will wish he hadn’t missed this fun,’ I said. ‘Wonder where he got to. Hope that kid doesn’t fall in the river. I’ll get the blame if he does. Dad will chase me with his whip.’

‘I wouldn’t like to be chased with a whip,’ Dibs said.

‘It doesn’t happen often,’ I said, sorry now that I had used Dad to stop Dibs from thinking about Caroline. Dad was all right, he’d understand that it would be Cal’s
own fault if he was washed out to sea.

By the time we were at the top of the steps, Caroline was chatting to Sam Phelps and stroking the horse’s hollow. Sam Phelps looked hard at Dibs and me, but didn’t tell us to beat it. We praised Sydney Bridge Upside Down and agreed with Caroline that only a very strong-hearted horse could keep it up the way he did.

In fact, the horse was what Sam Phelps and Caroline chatted about for the next fifteen minutes. I was disappointed, I thought they’d chat about other things.

Maybe they saved the other things for when we were heading back along the line, Caroline up front beside Sam Phelps, Dibs and me inside the wagon.

All the way along, I kept hoping Mr Wiggins had gone.

Sure enough, when we reached the road I saw that his van was no longer outside our house. I was so pleased I began to whistle.

I stopped whistling when I reached our front gate. Because I saw Susan Prosser staring at me from her veranda. It was the meanest stare I’d ever seen.

T
HERE WERE
several reasons why the picnic Mrs Kelly held in Caroline’s honour was different from the picnics my mother used to hold. One reason was that my mother was not at Mrs Kelly’s picnic. Another reason was that Caroline was not at my mother’s picnics. I thought of more reasons while Sam Phelps was drinking Mrs Kelly’s lime juice in the clearing, but those two were enough to be getting on with. What started me thinking of differences was the memory of something that happened at one of my mother’s picnics. I remembered we were sitting in the clearing, the Kelly family and us, when Sam Phelps and Sydney Bridge Upside Down appeared, and Mrs Kelly called to Sam Phelps that he was welcome to a drink, and Sam Phelps came across from the line and had the drink, and he drank from a cup that had been lying on the picnic rug, and it turned out this was one of my mother’s cups because as soon as Sam Phelps went on down the line my mother threw the cup into the bushes and blackberry and
said, ‘We can’t let anybody else use it now. Not after that dirty old man’s been drinking from it.’ This had surprised me. Mrs Kelly had seemed surprised too; she had looked towards the spot where the cup had landed, then at my mother, but she had not spoken. Now, at this picnic years later, she did nothing special with the cup Sam Phelps had drunk from; she put it in the basket with the other cups. Mrs Kelly, of course, was different from my mother. I did not think, for instance, that my mother would have held a picnic in Caroline’s honour. And I bet Caroline wouldn’t have much fun at all on her holiday if my mother was around, my mother had a way of frowning that could spoil everything. It’s a good job she’s missing this picnic, I thought.

We had been at the clearing since mid-morning, Mrs Kelly saying a picnic was best if you made a proper day of it. Since it was a Saturday, Mr Kelly was home with his Reo, and he drove us all down as far as the beach just across the line from the clearing. He and Dad stayed with us for an hour, then they discovered they were short of beer; they drove off in the Reo and said they would be back later. I didn’t mind how long they took, they had spent most of the time talking about ancient visits to the city, glancing at Caroline to make sure she was listening. It was odd how even Mr Kelly tried to impress Caroline; you’d think he would realise she was too young to care what happened when he was last in the city. He was probably fooled by her smile; she should frown, I thought, when old fellows like Dad and Mr Kelly tried to impress her.

I had been afraid the small Kelly kids would spoil the
picnic with their shouting and fighting. But they were all right. Mostly they played in the bush, or over on the rocks and the beach. I did not have to take any more notice of them than I usually did.

‘Why don’t you boys run off and play?’ Mrs Kelly asked after we had finished the meat pies, sandwiches and fruitcake. She was looking at me as if she thought I was stopping Dibs and Cal from playing.

‘I’m having a swim as soon as my food goes down,’ I told her. ‘It’s dangerous to swim after a big meal.’

‘You’ll come to no harm after a meal that size,’ Mrs Kelly said. She was trying to get rid of me, sure enough.

‘Best not to take risks,’ I said. I knew that sooner or later Caroline would be going for a swim. She had her swimming costume on under her dress; I knew this because I had seen her putting it on.

‘Off you go, Dibs,’ said Mrs Kelly, probably thinking I would follow Dibs. ‘It’s not like you to linger after a meal.’

‘What an old bitch!’ Dibs whispered to me.

‘Dibs!’ shouted Mrs Kelly, very purple.

‘Come on, boy,’ I said to Dibs. ‘We don’t want to spoil the picnic.’ I looked at Caroline. ‘Coming with us?’

‘Never mind her,’ said Mrs Kelly. ‘Caroline and I are going to have a chat. You boys run off and play.’

I couldn’t be sure if Caroline’s smile was for Mrs Kelly or for me. Anyway, I thought, she’ll soon get sick of Mrs Kelly, she’ll soon want to swim.

‘I’ll come back for my togs,’ I told Mrs Kelly.

She shook her head at me. I guessed she was rather
crabby with all the work she had done for the picnic; my mother, at any rate, got crabby if she had been doing much work, like making a big supply of ginger beer, not that her last lot had been big enough to keep us going all through the holidays, we were now down to five bottles.

‘Let’s look for crayfish,’ said Cal, who seemed glad to be away from the clearing. ‘The kids said they saw some out on the rocks.’

‘I bet they didn’t,’ I said, not wanting to get too far from the clearing.

‘No harm in looking,’ Cal said. ‘Come on, Dibs.’

They ran off across the rocks, so I followed them. But I was not thinking of crayfish; I was thinking of Caroline.

I was thinking of our time at the beach the day before. It had been exciting, but also strange. I mean, when I looked back I knew which moment I would always remember, but there were other moments that were important for me nowadays, right now in Calliope Bay, even if they did not move into the for ever part of my memory like the main moment. One of these other moments was when Dibs told Caroline and me (Cal was over on the dunes) about his discovery that Susan Prosser was in the habit of going for night walks. He knew it was a habit, he said, because he had checked for three nights, and every night she had walked along the road towards the beach soon after eight o’clock. She stayed away about half an hour, he said. What did we think of this for a habit? I was late in telling him what I thought because I had only just noticed a curly hair sticking out from beneath Caroline’s white swimming costume. Of course, I should not have been surprised to
see it, since I knew she had a lot of curly black hair on that part of her body, but it seemed different seeing the one hair and I would have gone on staring at it if I hadn’t heard Dibs telling, somewhere in the distance, about Susan Prosser’s new habit. Caroline, anyway, was first to answer him. ‘That’s the girl who studies so much, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘So she says,’ Dibs said. ‘Well, I imagine she goes for walks to clear her head,’ Caroline said. She looked at me, asked: ‘Do you think that’s the reason, Harry?’ I said it might be, though it was pretty strange for Susan to go out alone at night, seeing how she usually hurried along in daytime, as if scared of being spoken to. You would think a person who was scared in daytime, I said, would be even more scared in the dark. ‘She’s not scared, she thinks she’s clever,’ Dibs said. Clever people, I said, could be scared as easily as those who weren’t clever. Caroline agreed with me. ‘Perhaps,’ she said, ‘the reason is that Susan is shy. After all, she hasn’t talked to me yet. I saw her looking over the fence one day and she turned her head when I smiled at her. She must be lonely.’ ‘That’s what my mother says about Mrs Prosser,’ Dibs said. ‘We never see Mrs Prosser,’ I said. I reflected. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘only when we catch her looking from her bathroom window.’ We all reflected then; nobody spoke for some minutes. During the silence I looked out to sea; I forced myself not to look at Caroline or at any part of her. Susan Prosser worried me, I reflected. I could not be sure, for instance, how much she knew about our running game. I didn’t think she would be cheeky enough to sneak into our yard and maybe peep through a window while I was chasing Caroline, or Caroline was chasing me, but I took
no chances, I pulled down all the blinds and made sure the back door was shut before we began running. Would the lowered blinds make Susan Prosser even more suspicious? You could not be sure with a girl like that. I had found her looking over the fence several times, and we had talked for a while, both pretending to be friendly, and I had not liked the way she looked at me, there was nothing more scary than a person who pretended to be friendly but could not keep the meanness out of her eyes. I knew she guessed we were having fun in our place, and I could imagine what she would be like if she knew Caroline and I ran around with nothing on (Cal had a way now of keeping on his pyjamas and watching); if Susan knew what our fun was really like, she would be so angry she would be bound to tell Dad. I could scare Cal into not telling Dad, but it would be harder to get Susan to stay quiet. I shouldn’t worry; Susan would never find out. To keep things easier for her, I made sure I ran quietly, and I told Caroline to go on tip-toes too. I noticed that Caroline did not get so tired now, the last couple of mornings she had not gone back to bed after the run, she had a shower while I did the dishes, Cal wiping for me. Caroline had swept the house two or three times, but she was not very good at sweeping; she had cooked the dinner two or three times, but the stove had given her trouble and Dad had told her not to bother, he said he did not want her to be a housekeeper, he said he was used to getting the evening meal and would continue getting it, he said he didn’t mind at all. Anyway, lying there on the beach yesterday, I had reflected so much about Susan Prosser that I hadn’t noticed Dibs running across to Cal on the dunes.
He’d probably said he was going, but I hadn’t heard. The first I realised that Caroline and I were on our own was when she kissed me, one of her small kisses but pretty good even so. I fell back on the hot sand, and this was when the for ever moment arrived. Before I could sit up or twist away, Caroline laughed, pointed to my swimming shorts and said, ‘Harry’s naughty dingdong,’ and I certainly knew what she meant because on her first morning of playing the running game she had said Cal and I had ‘sweet little dingdongs’, and what had happened to mine then was what had happened to it there on the beach. Well, I did what I usually did when this happened—I thought of the river on a cold day. It worked again, though I had noticed that my cock, which was what I called it, had been harder to fool lately. I told Caroline I would see what Dibs and Cal were doing over there on the dunes, and I heard her laughing as I shot off across the sand. I hadn’t minded her talking like that, it was only that I got embarrassed and was shooting off across the sand without thinking. If I had given myself time to think I’d probably have stayed there near her and chatted to her about it, I might even have told her about the escaping curly hair. Still, it was better for me to go to the dunes, I guessed; much as I liked what Caroline said, it did make me feel trembly, as if I was doing wrong.

So that was what I was thinking while I followed Dibs and Cal across the rocks. I was thinking Caroline was the most beautiful girl in the world and I didn’t care how often she pointed to my dingdong—and there was nothing wrong with this.

‘It’s funny on Saturdays,’ I said, not realising Dibs was so near.

‘Eh?’ he said. ‘What’s funny?’

‘Nothing,’ I said, thinking how close I had been to saying that Saturdays were funny because Dad was home and we couldn’t run around after breakfast. Then I said: ‘It’s funny you kids thinking you’ll find crayfish. You won’t find any here.’

‘I know,’ Dibs said. ‘I’m only filling in time. Then I’m going for a swim with Caroline.’

‘How do you know she wants to go for a swim?’ I said. ‘She didn’t say she was going for a swim.’

‘She’s wearing her togs, isn’t she?’ he said.

‘How do you know?’ I said, grabbing his arm.

‘I saw them,’ he said. ‘It’s the way she sits, boy.’

I held his arm, wondering if I should tip him off the rock, if I should give him his swim a bit sooner than he expected. Then I decided he hadn’t said anything cheeky, and I let him go.

‘You shouldn’t be looking,’ I told him.

He laughed. ‘Who’s talking!’

‘What do you mean?’ I made my voice fierce.

‘I’ve seen you looking,’ he said. ‘I bet she has too.’

‘I bet I haven’t looked any more than you,’ I said.

‘You get more chances than me,’ he said. ‘Anyhow, she’ll be changing her way of sitting after this. You see.’

‘Why?’ I said. I reached for him, but he dodged me and jumped to the next rock.

‘Because Mum’s noticed, and I bet that’s what she’s telling her about now,’ Dibs said. ‘Mum notices that kind
of thing, she’s always telling my sisters not to show their bloomers. And another thing—she reckons Caroline wears too much lipstick. I heard her saying that the other day.’

‘Your mother better watch out,’ I said, jumping to his rock. ‘My father won’t like it if she’s a stickybeak.’

He was on the next rock before I could grab him. ‘She only gives friendly advice,’ he said. ‘That’s the way women talk. They’re allowed to.’

Well, he had sisters and I hadn’t, and I guessed he knew what he was talking about, he had seen more naked girls than I ever had, he knew more about them than I did, though I was catching up. It might be best if I made no fuss; I had enough to take care of, what with the danger of Cal or Susan Prosser saying something to cause trouble.

I looked towards the clearing and saw that Mrs Kelly had moved close to Caroline. Yes, she was very likely talking to her. I hoped she didn’t make Caroline unhappy.

Dibs was moving on across the rocks. He glanced back at me several times.

I wouldn’t chase him. I wouldn’t stay on the rocks, either. Cal had gone nearer the shore and would not be in trouble even if he did fall into the sea, so I could move to the beach. I would keep an eye on the clearing, and if I saw Caroline waving or jumping I would know she wanted help. She might even yell out to me. I would race to the clearing if she did.

‘Harry!’ shouted Cal.

I looked back from the beach. He was waving with one hand and pointing to a rock with the other.
He had evidently found something, maybe a sea-chest full of silver coins.

He was too far away. I waved to him, pointed to the dunes and walked towards them. I would sit up there and look at the clearing, and blow Cal and his treasure.

I heard him calling some more, to Dibs now. I knew Dibs would go to him.

I paused half-way up a dune. Everything looked peaceful in the clearing.

It was the same when I looked from the top of the dune. Mrs Kelly and Caroline seemed calm.

I sat in the sand, glanced towards the works, then downward. And there was Susan Prosser. She was in the hollow on the other side of the dune, only about ten yards away, and she was looking up at me. She was wearing a pink frock; on the sand beside her were three books.