The stink of something burning hits me then, so I jump up, and tear down the hill after him. I don’t go thumping on the hut of the nearest old person like he does, though. I carry right on to the sea. I don’t even look for crocs, I jus’ plunge straight in, splashing into the water right up to my knees, and stick my whole head under the water. The burning dies down a bit, but the stinging goes on. I take a breath and stick my head under again. Try to feel at it with my fingers. It’s lumpy. Blistered, I think. Hair comes out in my hands right off my head.
I stand up in the shallows and yell my head off. I don’t wanna be some bald old man!
Marta and my ma come running down the hill with Jag, a whole pile of Rusty Bus kids on their tails, and this is good coz you don’t go standing in the shallows yelling round here unless you wanna get et by a croc.
‘What you done, child?’ Ma asks, which sets me crying.
‘Back in the water,’ Marta says. ‘I think you uncovered a power source!’
I dunno what that means or whether it’s good news or bad news to Marta, but I’m pretty sure it’s bad news to me. They wash me off and get me up out of the water, wrapped in a towel, and Ma works on my hair with the scissors coz she says some has melted into clumps, while kids crowd round and Marta tells me how lucky I am.
‘You’re lucky you missed your face,’ she says. ‘You’re lucky you missed your eyes, or you’d be blind. You’re lucky your ear didn’t melt.’
My ear is real hot so I touch it carefully, trying to make sure it’s a proper round ear shape, but Ma bats my hand away.
Finally Ma finishes and sends Jag to get a mirror to show me. He’s jus’ staring at my scalp when he comes back with it, so I’m guessing it’s bad, but I look anyways.
I got a black blistered wide stripe that runs from my eyebrow right up over my ear. And above that, my hair’s all choppy. In the centre of the burn there’s no hair at all no more. Jus’ a bleeding oozing redness under black lumps of blistered skin. No wonder it stings.
‘Why’s it black like burnt snakeskin?’ I ask.
‘Coz it’s burnt,’ Marta says. ‘The black will drop off and a scar will form.’
‘Yuk!’ I say and push the mirror away.
‘Did you get a good look at it, before it burnt you?’ Marta asks.
I shake my head and frown at her for not being more worried about my head right now.
‘Just draw it as best you can,’ she tells Jag, and he shrugs at me and heads back up the hill to find the cardboard and pencil he dropped, already dragging his toes in the dirt coz he has to go up there alone.
‘I’ll go too,’ I say and wriggle out of my towel.
‘No,’ Ma says. ‘You need dry clothes and a lie-down.’
‘Nah,’ I say. ‘It’s hot enough today to dry me, and my arms and legs work fine!’
Ma rolls her eyes at me, so me and Jag run up the hill and get the cardboard. I watch while he finishes the drawing. My head’s still burning like mad. When Jaguar draws the little circles of poles, above the holes he draws sharp zigzaggy lightning bolts.
I nod. ‘That’s about right,’ I say.
He smiles his most excellent grin at me, which drops away when he sees my head again.
We take the picture we drew back to Marta and then she jus’ has more chores for us. Fetch this here, fetch that there, but then she pulls out an old tube of burn cream and squeezes out globs of white cream and smears it on my burns and wraps them up in stretchy bandages and the stinging starts to calm down.
‘Come back in the morning,’ she says. ‘We’ll sail to the other Ockery Islands and ask if the siblings visited them too, and if they know what this is.’
‘But I wanna go salvaging,’ I say. ‘Or fishing.’
‘No,’ she says. ‘You need a few days off, until your burn heals over. You can come visiting with me.’
