The Eye of the Sheep (27 page)

Liam rubbed the dirt from his eyes and mouth. ‘It’ll be you next,’ he said to her. ‘And it’ll be your head, not your fingers.’

Deirdre turned and ran up to the house.

Liam picked up my hand and inspected my fingers. Flames jumped from under the nails. ‘Kung-fu, man, aren’t you, Flick?’ he said, then he dropped my hand, pulled down his trousers and weed against the fence.

Anne White took me to the hospital with Deirdre while Jake took Liam to the football field to train him into consequences.

Emergency was underneath the other parts of the hospital. Children came and went, some with bruises under their eyes, some with trails of snot from their noses, some screaming. Deirdre played with Melanie, near the toy box. She sang to friends only she could see, her voice as soft as a butterfly. I sat and took in breaths. I could see the air; it had a vapour and travelled in currents around the room. Anne White read magazines and watched a television up in the corner too high to change the channels.

After a long time of waiting a doctor called John looked at my crushed fingers. He put them in a machine to take pictures of the bones. The bones are hollow. You could play music through them.

‘He doesn’t seem to be in too much pain,’ said the doctor.

‘But he should be in pain,’ Anne White said. ‘Shouldn’t he? Something’s not right if he can’t feel this.’

John cleaned my fingers and said, ‘We’ll put them in plaster; only one is broken and it’s a small break. You’re lucky, Jim.’

While a nurse wrapped my fingers in wet white sheet I looked down through the floor of Emergency and saw the cemetery where all the children that didn’t get fixed in the hospital lived. They were talking to each other.
Everything is on its own
, they said
.

On the way home Anne White turned to me from the front seat.

‘Are you okay, Jim?’ she said. ‘I’m sorry about Liam. He is a good boy, really, and I have to give him a chance. But I can see I’d better keep a closer eye on him – especially around you.’

‘What about around me?’ Deirdre asked, leaning forward from the back.

‘You do a good enough job of taking care of yourself,’ said Anne White, looking at Deirdre in the rear view mirror.

Deirdre slumped back against the seat, crinkling her nose.

‘Jim, please let me know if you are alright,’ Anne White said.

I was only Anne White’s foster, like Deirdre and Liam. We were all pretending. What was alright? My organs were pumping. I wasn’t in the cemetery. Was that what Anne White and John and Jan Watts and Uncle Rodney were all making sure didn’t happen? Was that what Emergency was for? To stop it? Why?

Liam slept in another room that night. ‘Just to give Jim a breather,’ Anne White said.

‘I’ll miss you, Matchbox Boy,’ Liam said, pulling his pyjamas from the shelf. ‘Who will unzip you in the morning?’

It was the first time I would be alone in the room for the night.

‘Sleep well, Jim,’ Anne White said from the doorway. ‘I hope
your fingers don’t feel too bad.’ She was a painting wet at the edges, her pale colours dripping out of the frame.

When she left I closed the door and sat down on the bed. Liam’s bunk hung over me. I closed my eyes, holding myself very still. In the floating world the dust was the same colour as the yellow stripe of the bee. The rest was black. If I held my breath, refusing any oxygen or hydrogen, I could see the dust shining.

‘No, Liam, don’t! Don’t touch her!’

I opened my eyes when I heard Deirdre scream. The room was so light it made me blink. I looked at a poster stuck to the wall beside Liam’s bunk. A man on a motorbike with one big leg on the dirt, the other on the pedal, looked down at me. The man held his helmet under his arm ready to put on his head as soon as he started his engine. The poster had white creases across it, and the edges were curled, as if it had been stuck to a lot of walls. Underneath the poster was a small photograph of Liam standing beside a man in a wheelchair with his arm around him. Liam’s head was the same height as his dad’s head. The dad had been brought down by the wheelchair.

I went to the cupboard and pulled out the red suitcase. I opened the lid, touching the silky material inside. The suitcase’s stomach was empty and hungry after all the years of waiting in the cupboard for a change. I slid my fingers into the thin pockets under the lid, touching the cool edges. There was a smaller pocket, inside the big pocket, that I hadn’t found before. I slid my hand in, feeling slowly from one end to the other. I touched something hard and stiff, like cardboard. I pulled out a photograph.

There was my mother and father when they were young, before my mother had her miracles. She was wearing a long dress with frills around the sleeves. Her feet were bare and one
of them was lifted. My father was holding her from the side. There were trees on the edges and grass underneath. The wind blew my mother’s hair up around her face. She was smiling as she tried to hold her hair back from her mouth and her eyes with her hand. Behind Mum and Dad was the cliff, and beyond that, the ocean. Mum used to read with her chair beside the cliff while Dad climbed down it and fished. He never forgot she was there, it didn’t matter how much the fish pulled and jumped. You could see Mum’s hand coming shyly round my dad’s other side. The photograph was faded from the darkness of time in the hidden pocket of the suitcase.

After a long time of looking at the picture I saw a line that ran from my mother’s fingers, curled up to my father’s hair, and twisted and knotted through the locks. Then it seemed to end. My skin prickled as I searched; I felt myself grow hot. Then at last I saw the line coming down from my dad’s hair, over his shoulder and joining up to my mum’s waist. My heart pounded. I wanted to be slipping and sliding up and down that line as if it was a ride at Luna Park and I was miniature and could fit, sliding from one to the other, mother to father, father to mother, forever.

Downstairs a door slammed, and I heard Deirdre and Liam shouting.

I turned the photograph over.

Point Paradise Caravan Park, Point Paradise
Gavin and Paula

It was my mother’s writing; I knew the round ups and the leaning downs, the i’s with hardly a dot, and the thin u’s. It was as if
I was looking at a code from another country so far away you couldn’t find it on the atlas.

That night I didn’t zip myself into the suitcase. There wouldn’t be room for all the feelings coming from my pores. I needed space; I had
glad
, I had
want
, I had
maybe
, I had
Mum and Dad.

I turned off the light and climbed into the bottom bunk holding the picture by the edges. I didn’t want my fingers to contaminate it. I tried to hold exactly one millimetre, balancing it between my bandaged hand and my unbandaged one. But what if I fell asleep and the photograph was squashed beneath my bulk? What if it slipped through a crack and no matter how much I searched, or Anne White searched, or Jake searched, or the police, or the army, the picture would be lost forever, never to be found, always missing without an answer? I got out of bed and turned on the light. I balanced the picture on the table beneath the photograph of Liam’s dad.

I kept my eyes glued. I was the night guard of the photograph. My fingers throbbed a forward pulse beneath the stiff bandage.

In the morning Liam stood beside the bed looking down at me. He was wearing his pyjamas; row after row of brown anchors leading down to his ankles and a sea of carpet. ‘You look small in that bed, Flick,’ he said. ‘But in the suitcase you look big.’ He picked up the top of my blankets, and waved them up and down. ‘I’m emptying your fart bag,’ he grinned. ‘Did you like having the room to yourself?’

I shivered, my eyes on the photograph behind him.

He turned around. ‘Who’s that?’ He leaned in close to the
picture. ‘The man looks like you.’ He picked up the photograph. ‘Is that your dad?’ He swung around to me. ‘Is it?’

I got out of the bed and held out my hand.

Liam looked back at the photograph. ‘Is that your mother? Come on, Flick. Talk, will you? Is that your mother?’ Liam sat down on the chair still holding the picture. ‘If it’s not your mum, your old man’s a root rat. My old man’s a root rat even though he’s in the chair. The ladies still like it. They climb up on the bars and hang off them with a drink and a smoke and they lift up their skirts so my dad can see the edge of their underpants. The skirts get stuck on the hooks he nails into the armrests before the ladies get there. They come around from the hospital. The hooks are to protect him from his enemies but they’re good for hooking the ladies’ skirts too. Ha ha!’ he laughed. ‘Is your old man a root rat?’

My arm ached from holding it out as I waited for Liam to give my photograph back. I tried to grab it but Liam held it high.

‘She’s nice, your mum. Lucky my dad never met her, or he would have rooted her. Then we’d be brothers. Liam and Jimmy, partners in crime.’ He turned the photograph over and looked at the words. ‘We’d be in the headlines.
Gun Crimes Across the Nation
. We’d be famous.’ He touched my mum’s writing. ‘What does it say?’ he asked me. ‘Do you know?’

I stepped towards him.

‘Is he still alive, your dad? I know your mum’s dead – Anne told us. But what about him?’ He smoothed his fingers over my dad then at last he gave me back the photograph.

I looked at it again and the picture led me straight to the cliff where I could watch them together, Mum and Dad.

‘Let’s see if Fanny Bite will give you chips for breakfast, Flick,’ he said to me, leaving the room.

I put the photograph back against the wall under Liam’s dad and followed him out the door.

As I walked downstairs I could feel the floor beneath my feet and the railing in my hand and the air entering my tubes, as if I had never felt them before. I breathed in deep and the oxygen charged my engine, turning the lights green for go.

Jake, Liam, Deirdre and Anne White were already sitting at the table. I went to my chair and joined them. I ate toast. It was dry at first but I added more butter, then I took a sip of milk to wash it down.

Anne White nudged Jake. He smiled at Anne White. ‘You’re a miracle worker, Anne.’

‘Can I write on your bandage?’ Deirdre asked. She picked up my arm and lay it on the table, then she got a texta from her pocket and wrote,
Deirdre your sister was here.

‘Do you think you’re his sister, Deirdre?’ said Liam.

Jake looked up from his bacon.

‘Of course I’m his sister,’ said Deirdre. ‘And you’re his brother, Liam. Didn’t you know that?’

‘Okay, Deirdre, just leave it there,’ said Jake.

‘Okay, Dad,’ Liam said, putting egg onto his fork. Jake frowned.

After breakfast Liam said, ‘Deirdre, come up to our room.’

‘What for?’ she asked.

‘Because I said so.’

‘That’s not a reason.’

Liam looked at me. ‘Because Flick wants you to.’

‘Do you, Jimmy?’ Deirdre asked me.

Something was forming in the core. My sensors were
awakening; the wind in the photograph had set my cells in motion. I nodded my head.

‘You do!’ she said. She put her small arms around my neck and held tight. She smelled of sugar. When she let go she took my hand and pulled me along the row of bedrooms until we came to mine and Liam’s. She led us in and she looked at Liam and said, ‘Well, what?’

Liam took the photograph from the desk and showed Deirdre. ‘They’re his mum and dad. His mum’s dead . . .’

‘Liam.’ She shook her head and frowned at him.

‘What?’

‘You shouldn’t say that.’

‘Why not?’

‘You’ll make Jimmy sad.’

‘But his dad’s not dead. Just his mum.’

‘Dads don’t count.’

‘Yes they do. They count more. Just because you don’t have one.’

‘I do have one and he’s not in a wheelchair.’

‘Bullshit, Deirdre. You don’t have a dad.’

She snorted air out of her nostrils, then turned to me. ‘What did you want me to come up here for, Jimmy?’

‘Have a look at this.’ Liam turned the picture around and gave it to Deirdre. ‘Read what it says.’

‘Point Paradise Caravan Park, Point Paradise,’ Deirdre read out. ‘Gavin and Paula.’ She turned the photograph back around. ‘Is that your mum?’ she asked me.

‘Yep,’ said Liam. ‘And the man is his dad. You can tell. Flick looks almost exactly the same as him.’

‘Your mum was pretty, Jimmy.’

‘Yeah, but she’s dead,’ said Liam. ‘It’s his dad that’s alive.’

‘But his dad doesn’t want him or he wouldn’t be here. So his dad may as well be dead,’ said Deirdre.

‘But it’s his
dad
.’ Liam turned to me. ‘I’ve left every foster home to get back to my dad. I hitch or catch a train or a bus. But I don’t get my hopes up. Jan Watts says not to.
You’re old enough now to lower your expectations, Liam.
I lower them lower and lower but I never lower my expectations enough because when I get there Dad says,
Bugger off, you little bastard.
When I’m eighteen I’ll go and live with him. I can cook for both of us. I’ll keep his fridge full of tinnies and we’ll get a dog and I’ll train it to pull Dad’s chair round the house so Dad can use his hands for smoking and changing the channel.’

‘I like dogs,’ said Deirdre. ‘Maybe I’ll come and visit.’

‘Maybe I won’t invite you.’

‘Maybe you’ll still be in jail.’ Deirdre stuck her tongue out at Liam and gave the photograph back to me.

‘Do you want to find your dad?’ Liam asked me.

‘Do you, Jimmy?’ said Deirdre.

My dad was missing. It was one thing I knew. I didn’t know the other things I should have known; I never did know them. But I knew my dad was missing.

‘Do you, Flick? Just nod, that’s all you have to do.’ Liam came close to my face and spoke very slowly. ‘Juuusssstttt noood, thaaatttt’s all youuu haaaavveee tooo do. Do you want to find your dad?’

‘He can understand you, Liam. He just doesn’t want to talk.’

‘Flick,’ said Liam suddenly, ‘if you can understand me, then answer me. It’s not a hard question. You have a dad. Here he is in the photo. If you want to see him, then nod for a yes.’