Sometimes, when everyone annoyed me, I’d go to my bedroom and sit on Jonny’s bed. He was fifteen when the accident happened. That was when everything kind of stopped. Well, not stopped exactly. It was a bit like when the ute got three flat tyres, or the time when the bank phoned, or something else went wrong. Whenever that happened, we all kept out of the way until Mum and Dad had sorted it. We kind of made ourselves invisible, so we were no trouble to them. With most stuff that would last a few hours, or maybe a day if it was something real serious, like when the generator broke. Only with Jonny’s accident, I guess they couldn’t fix it, so we’d been invisible for a while.
That’s why I liked to keep our room exactly as Jonny’d liked it to be – how he’d left it. No one was allowed to touch his stuff. No one. Mum tried once. She came into our bedroom a few weeks before we found out Sissy was pregnant. She came in to see if I had any laundry, and as she picked up a few things off the floor, she said she reckoned it would be a good idea to start thinking about sorting Jonny’s things out. I dunno what she meant by that. There wasn’t anything to sort out; his stuff stayed where it was, how he liked it. When I explained that to her, she put down the things she’d picked up and said she didn’t mean we should throw anything away, but just change the sheets and tidy a bit. I stood up and shouted, ‘No way,’ at her. Mum turned to look at me for a moment, then held up her hands and left the room. I guess she knew I was right.
Jonny’s accident happened about six months before we found out about Sissy and the baby. Her getting pregnant meant everyone seemed to forget about Jonny, like he’d never been here, or something. Like it gave them an excuse not to think about him any more. So they didn’t miss him, I guess. Everything then was about her and that baby. I couldn’t stand it. I didn’t want Jonny to be invisible. There was a photo of him on top of the piano and I liked to touch it, every day if I could. I think I started doing it to remember what he looked like. I dunno, really, it just made me feel better. Like keeping all his things just how he had them. If I looked at them, I always put them back. I never mixed them up with my stuff. That would have been wrong, like stealing.
A few days after we found out about Sissy, I sneaked into the kitchen, hoping to grab some bickies without Mum catching me. I was stopped in my tracks, though, because she was in there on the phone. She was busy yabbering on to Aunty Ve in Alice Springs. I knew it was her because she was the only person who ever phoned. I hung around wondering if I might be able to sneak into the pantry without Mum noticing. That’s when she told Aunty Veronica that Sissy was three months gone, so it must have happened some time around Christmas.
I was getting down on the floor and thinking about crawling into the pantry, so she wouldn’t see me. Then Mum said, ‘I dunno, love, we can’t think it would be either Elliot or Lloyd – I mean really? They’re decent fellas – Elliot especially.’ I guess Aunty Ve didn’t know Elliot and Lloyd very well, cos there’s no way they could have been rooting with Sissy. No way. They’re loads older than her for a start. Then Mum got mad with Aunty Ve, so I stopped where I was on my belly on the floor and listened. Mum never got mad with Aunty Ve. She said something like, ‘Over my dead body – we couldn’t, we just couldn’t! After everything else we’ve all been through with Jonny. I can’t believe you’d suggest that – and the same goes for having the baby adopted.’ I didn’t think having the baby adopted was such a bad idea: I mean it was already causing everyone a whole heap of stress, and it hadn’t even been born. I reckoned that was the best idea anyone had had for ages, but I guess Aunty Ve must have apologised for whatever she’d said because Mum calmed down then and said she was sorry for losing her rag. Her voice went kind of quiet when she said she didn’t know how we were going to manage after the baby came. She reckoned she was going to see about reducing her hours at work.
I stopped listening then for a bit – I was still trying to work out how to slip along the floor into the pantry where the bickies were without Mum seeing me. I was thinking about just making a dash for it, when Mum said the worst bit. She said Sissy couldn’t have chosen a worse time to have a baby. ‘We’ve got the muster happening the same month it’s due,’ she said.
The muster is the best part of running a cattle station. It’s when we round up all the cattle and decide which will go for slaughter and which will stay on the station for another year. It only happens once a year and this one was going to be my last before I went away to boarding school in Alice. I didn’t want Sissy and her baby ruining it. I couldn’t help it, I was so mad, I forgot all about the bickies and jumped up and shouted at Mum. I yelled that it wasn’t fair – Sissy and that baby were ruining everything. I shouted that I hated Sissy and her dumb baby. Mum shook her head at me, and asked Aunty Ve to hold on a minute. She put her hand over the phone as she told me to stop being such a baby and to go to my room, before turning her back to me and carrying on talking to Aunty Ve. I heard her say, ‘Oh nothing – just Danny having a fit about nothing, as usual.’ That made me madder than anything. I stormed off to my room, slammed the door and ripped some pages out of Jonny’s cattle book. I dunno why. I was sorry afterwards, so I stuck them back in. No one noticed.
Sissy couldn’t go back to boarding school in Alice Springs, so she had to go to the school room on the station with Emily and me instead. That’s where we learn maths and writing and stuff. The school room is an old shed Dad tidied up when Jonny and Sissy were little. It’s pretty basic – wooden with a metal roof, so if it rains it gets so noisy you can’t hear the lesson any more. Not that it had rained for a while – not really. When the rains really came the rivers filled up and kind of flooded a bit – but that hadn’t happened for ages. We hadn’t had enough rain to wet the ground, really – not for a couple of years. We’d had one little shower, but Dad reckoned he could spit and do a better job.
Anyway, we went to the school room every morning at seven o’clock until around lunch time when it was too hot to concentrate any more. We only went to the school room until we were thirteen though. That’s why after Christmas I was going to go to the boarding school Jonny and Sissy used to go to. I guess that’s why Sissy was so unhappy about being in the school room again. She must have felt kind of stupid sitting with us, even though she had her own schoolwork to do. Every day, when we walked over there from the house, she had a face like someone had slapped her. I didn’t speak to her, but Emily did – always about the baby and what she was going to call it. They were both so dumb.
Bobbie had been our govvie for more than a year. She helped us learn stuff using this radio programme called School of the Air. It is for kids like us who live at places like Timber Creek, too far away from a normal school. Timber Creek Station is two-hundred miles west of Alice Springs in the middle of the Tanami Desert in the Northern Territory. The nearest towns are Warlawurru thirty miles south of the station and Marlu Hill, twenty-five miles north. They’re towns for Blackfellas though. Mum works in the office at the health clinic at Marlu Hill, so she drives over there each day, and even though there is a school there, it’s just for the Blackfellas’ kids. Sometimes we call them gins, as in Abori-GIN-al.
Bobbie was twenty-two and came from a farm in Victoria. She lived in one of the old outbuildings on the station. Dad had turned half of it into a bedroom for her and she had her own shower and everything. We weren’t allowed in there. It was out of bounds. Bobbie reckoned she needed some space and privacy. I dunno what for. In the afternoons all she did in there was read or watch TV. In the mornings she was with us in the school room.
We had a few people working for us at Timber Creek. It was sixteen-hundred square miles of desert and we had several thousand cattle, so Dad couldn’t run it all by himself. That’s why we had Elliot and Lloyd. Elliot had been with us the longest and he was real nice, kind of quiet, but a real hard worker. He knew what he was doing. I know Dad liked him a lot, reckoned he was real reliable. Elliot came from just up the road near Tennant Creek. His folks had a station out that way, but he was the youngest of four brothers, and there wasn’t enough work for them all. Their station was a bit smaller than ours and because he was the youngest, and his older brothers were already working there, it was up to him to find a job somewhere else. I once said to him I reckoned that wasn’t fair: it wasn’t his fault he was the youngest. I said they should have pulled straws or tossed a coin or something. But he just smiled and shrugged. That was Elliot for you – he would never make a fuss.
Lloyd was different, he was real big and strong, which made him handy, but Dad reckoned you had to watch him because he wasn’t too bright and he had a quick temper. He was newer to Timber Creek. He arrived not long before Jonny’s accident and was a Top Ender – that meant his parents lived somewhere up near Darwin. Our neighbours, the Crofts, who have a station fifty miles east of ours, had heard from a friend of a friend that Lloyd was looking for work and suggested Dad took him on. At the time Dad wasn’t sure about it. He didn’t like old Dick Croft sticking his beak into our affairs. Dad reckoned we were doing OK, but Mum said she reckoned Dad was working too hard and it would be good for Elliot to have a mate on the station. She reckoned it was lonely for Elliot. Dad agreed and said he didn’t want to lose Elliot, he reckoned he was worth his weight in gold. So Dad thought about it a bit, and after he met Lloyd, I guess he reckoned he’d be handy to have around. And then after Jonny’s accident, we were kind of a man down, so I reckon Dad was real glad he’d taken Lloyd on.
The Crofts had been my family’s friends and neighbours for years and years. They ran a cattle station called Gold River, which was on the eastern side of our land. Emily once asked Dick why his granddad had called it that. He hesitated for a while and said, ‘Well, I guess my granddad was an optimist.’ Later Emily said, ‘Danny, what does an optimist do?’
All the rivers near us had been dry for so long because of the drought, they were all a kind of gold colour like the rest of the desert. Maybe there’d been a drought back then too.
My great-granddad bought Timber Creek Station after the last owner, Arthur Simpson, died in 1930. Ever since then, Dad said, there’d been Dawsons and Crofts working side-by-side to make a living off the desert. Before my granddad, Alex Dawson, died, he’d been good mates with Dick Croft. Dick was real nice, but he’d got lanky now, like someone had dressed a dead tree. He rattled, as though a pea had got stuck in his breath, and when he talked he wheezed like I did if I ran around the yards chasing a steer – only Dick didn’t have an inhaler to make it stop. I once asked Dick’s son, Greg, what was up with his dad; he just said: ‘Too many smokes.’
Greg smoked. He was a real hoot. Once he told us this joke: What’s the difference between a gin and a dog shit? One eventually turns white and loses its smell. We all died. After Jonny’s funeral, Greg gave me a hat. It was real smart: leather. He said it was time I started dressing like a proper stockman. He’d picked it up in Alice when he’d met with his mates. They’d had a wild time. There’d been a fight and one of his mates had been banged up.
Aunty Veronica, my mum’s sister, once said it was time Greg found himself a good woman. I dunno what for. Greg ran Gold River cattle station with his sister Mary’s husband, Ron. Dick was too old and crook to work much. He had a girlfriend called Penny who looked after him. He met her in a roadhouse. She was younger than Dick and had real yellow hair. Mum said it came out of a bottle. I dunno where Dick’s old wife Mavis was. No one really talked about her. Mum said Mavis ran off with some fella from Katherine when Greg and Mary were kids. That meant Dick had to run the station and look after them all by himself. Gold River was bigger than Timber Creek too. I guess Dick was real glad when he met Penny – it meant he didn’t have to do everything himself any more. When I said that to Dad, he nodded and said he reckoned Penny would put the smile back on any fella’s face.
Greg’s sister, Mary, didn’t say much, but Mum reckoned she was real nice. And everyone liked her husband Ron. When they got married, the Crofts had a big barbecue. There was loads of food and a band. We all stayed up real late. Even Emily.
The Crofts had been great after what happened with Jonny and everything, but they had their own cattle station to run and we couldn’t rely on them to help us all the time. I heard Mum saying to Dad how she was worried about how we were going to cope. She was talking about the future and how things were going to be different with the baby coming and no Jonny. I guess everyone had been waiting for Jonny to finish school and start work on the station. He was going to be Dad’s right-hand man. I felt sore about that – I knew I was younger and with me going to school in Alice, it meant I wouldn’t be around as much, but I still knew a lot about running the station. Part of me wanted to scream at them so they remembered I was there, and the other part of me wanted to never speak to them ever again. But then Mum said something that made me feel even worse. She said she needed an extra pair of hands to look after the house and the young ones. She never called Jonny or Sissy young when they were thirteen. She told Dad she needed a house girl and he said OK.