Chapters

Bornfree

‘Deslie’s on the roof,’ said a figure at the doorway, silhouetted against the night.

Billy and some of the kids, watching a video in the classroom, had heard nothing. Deslie was on the roof. Why? They couldn’t hear him still.

And then it was like in a video itself when Billy went out with a torch and climbed up and shone it onto Deslie. He lay flat on his back, his eyes showing the high black sky and its stars. The torch a yellow comet rocketing forwards, taking up the sky.

They helped him down gently. He was not like a person, more like the outside part only and hollowed out. He bumped against the wall and he resonated slightly, like a drum.

He is killing his insides with that petrol, sniffing it.

There are some things to tell about Deslie, because he is a different one. He is not from here. He comes from Beagle Bay, and we call him Bornfree. He got that name when he was a little one, because he just ran wild and no one looked for him.

He nearly never went to school. His mother and his father, they drank all the time and they just left him, let him go. His mother killed someone one time, in a fight, with a bottle. She went wild, and broke, and they took her away, to Fremantle or somewhere.

Deslie grew, and filled himself with the bush. Like the other kids say, like Sylvester said to Billy, ‘He a proper well-trained blackfella that one.’ He catches fish like the best men here, and many times he goes out fishing or hunting on his own. He dances. Our other kids are too lazy.

Billy liked to hear Deslie talk about when he was a little boy. The teachers, or other bosses, would try to get Deslie to school, but he would run away from them. He saw them coming; he inside in the shadows, looking at them through a doorway or window, they pale and shimmering in the bright sunlight as if over-exposed and their colour gone. Their hands jerking, heads turning toward him as he moved. He’s off. Gone! Whoosh! Thunder in his ears.

Sometimes he’d flee on a horse, little bloke like a flea on a horse, eh? Bareback, no saddle, nothing; bare legs gripping, bare feet flapping, fingers in that old horse’s mane. They might shout at him, but after a time they didn’t really want to get him.

Lots of times he met up with the old people in the bush and helped them. He liked that.

But then his cousin brought him here to live with him and his family. People worried about him, he was sniffing petrol, going too wild all round. He went to school all the time here, because they made him. But he was not clever at school. Couldn’t read or write, not even his own name, but he was clever enough to trick the other kids, and teachers, too, most of the time.

Like when the class played Hang the Man, that spelling game. Deslie, he copied a word from a book and showed it to Billy. Billy sat at the back of the class when they played this game. Someone might guess a letter and Deslie would just look around the class like he was teasing. When he glanced past Billy, Billy would nod either yes or no, and hold up his fingers to indicate whether the letter was the first, second, third, or whatever. Deslie then checked the word, and copied the letter onto the board in big letters.

At church, when they put the words to hymns up on the wall, Deslie looked at the words as he sang, just like he was reading them for the first time.

He was a funny boy, that Deslie. Make you laugh. Make you cranky too. He fought with the other kids a lot, and sometimes he was a bit sneaky. But they teased him because he was not from their country, because his parents didn’t want him, because he was dumb at school.

Deslie remembered one good thing about his school at Beagle Bay. He did go to school every now and then, and each time it was more awkward for the teachers to know what to do with him. So one time they gave him a book with a cassette tape. The book was not much good to him, except for some little pictures in it, but he listened to the tape. He remembered it. Billy was surprised when Deslie talked to him about it, and he asked Billy to read it to everyone in the class.

Deslie and Billy went fishing down in the gorge. They were walking back, Deslie carrying a barramundi almost as big as himself. See? Told you he was a good fisherman. Billy had caught nothing.

The fish was heavy and they took turns carrying it as they picked their way over the red rocks, gleaming from countless polishings by sand and wet season rapids. Really, they needed a canoe or a raft. And Deslie said yes. This is like ... I could be Huck, and you Tom, he said. Billy wondered about that.

And Billy did read Tom Sawyer to the class; he skipped bits when his listeners started to wilt at the onslaught of verbosity, just bits here and there.