The kids in Rusty Bus all sleep good. Everyone’s tired out from all that crying last night about the red flashing eye outside, so they’re happy it’s now jus’ a glow behind the trees. Everyone cept me. My head burns. And I can’t think how I can get out of sailing from island to island tomorrow, prolly every Ockery Island on the whole inland sea. I wanna be busy salvaging or fishing with Jag. Having fun. Not floating about being good and quiet and polite with Marta.
I think I jus’ get to sleep, too tired for the stinging in my scalp to keep me awake a moment more, and then the sun comes peeping in the bus windows and wakes me up. It falls on the sweet round faces of the littlies and sets them squinting and grizzling awake, ruining that sleeping sweetness. Some of them scramble from the bus to get breakfast. The morning breeze floats in the flung-open door, bringing with it the smell of cooking.
What’s for breakfast is same as always. A fresh chook egg broken into a hot fish stew. If you eat it quick enough the egg white is soft and the yolk is like runny golden sauce, but if you eat it slow, or stir it too much, it turns to little white strings of rubber in your stew. The littlies like rubber strings but I don’t.
Mas and das is coming down to make sure their kids is up and fed and wearing hats and long sleeves, ready to do their chores or have someone to take care of them while they’re out fishing or scavenging for the day.
My ma’s on her way to go fishing, and comes to the Rusty Bus to feel my forehead and remind me what manners is for when I’m out with Marta. I don’t bother saying to her I don’t want to go, she’d shut that down real quick. So I tell her my head hurts.
‘Of course it does, you numbat,’ she says. ‘Pain’s your body’s way of saying don’t do that no more.’
‘Yeah, but I learned my lesson already, so it can stop now.’
Ma shakes her head. ‘For you, my girl, it should prolly hurt you for a whole year to remind you to be safer, but it’ll let up soon.’ She pulls my flax hat up off my back where it’s hanging by its string round my neck, and puts it on my head, easing it down over the bandaged burn. ‘Keep the sun off it,’ she says and blows me a kiss as she leaves. ‘Go gently, child!’
Jaguar’s da, Uncle Sorren, is already loading nets into his boat and yelling for Jag to hurry, so Jag does this thing with his mouth where he makes it real wide like a tawny frogmouth and tips his bowl up and swallows down the soup like it’s a drink and not chunky at all. I watch his throat stretch with each lump gulped down and when he burps at the end I laugh.
‘Your head still smells like a barbecued frog!’ he tells me before he fastens his belt of useful tools around his middle, half of them jus’ bits of rubbish that might be useful but never is, and gallops down towards the boats clanking like a goat.
‘And your burps smell like fish farts!’ I yell.
The boats all head out leaving me behind like I’m a little kid, picking through my fish stew with eggs that have curdled to rubbery strings from all my angry spoon-stirring.
