After our visit to Mr Driver, we walked together to Mrs Abrahams’s shop for our lollies, and then we took our sweets and sandwiches into the vacant block across the road from our house. It was full of ancient olive trees. Dad said it had been part of a large commercial grove before we moved to Rostrevor. The big grey trees weren’t looked after by anyone anymore, so there were branches at different heights, which made them great for climbing. There were ten kids there when we arrived, and for a while we all stayed together playing. Caleb, Ruthy and I climbed our favourite tree as high as we could to eat our lunch. My jam sandwiches fell out of the paper onto the ground, but I climbed down to fetch them, dusted them off, picked out a few twigs and a bug of some kind that had been trapped by the separated jammy bread, and ate them anyway. The two Phillips boys yelled out, ‘Gross!’ but I didn’t care.
I had a fight with Ruthy who stormed away with Caleb in tow, after I called him a flat-nosed rude. It was a Wilson rule that we weren’t allowed to swear, so we had made up our own cussing, and flat-nosed rude was right up there with the best of the real obscenities. Caleb deserved it. I had finished all my lollies and asked him nicely for one of his. When he refused, I asked him again in my very friendly voice and also reminded him that in the Bible there was a story that said if someone asked you for a shirt, you should give him your coat, or something like that, and so he was lucky he only had to give me one set of lolly teeth and not the whole bag. He said he was pretty sure that wasn’t a rule. He twisted the top of his white paper bag tight, as though that was the end of the matter, and put his sweets in the waistband of his shorts. So I pinched him. He told me I would be in ‘tremenjous’ trouble with Mum. I started laughing and called out to the other children that Caleb couldn’t say tremendous. Ruthy said that just because I was too lazy to learn new words didn’t mean Caleb couldn’t, and she put her arms around his shoulders and led him away
Those who saw a chance to be closer friends with Ruthy, which seemed to be everyone’s goal, followed her and Caleb to a clearing amongst the trees on the other side of the block. Only Teddy Edwards stayed with me.
Teddy Edwards was just a straight-up strange boy. He asked me to marry him most Saturdays. I explained to him over and over that I would never get married unless it was to a Knight of the Round Table, and there weren’t that many of them in Australia as far as I could tell. Teddy persisted. I didn’t understand why he kept choosing me, because I wasn’t particularly nice to him, although I did make up roles for him in my plays, whereas the others often left him out of games and activities because he was a bit weird and quite smelly.
After a while of huffy silent treatment from me, even Teddy gave up and joined the other kids. I hung around in the tree for a bit longer, pretending I didn’t care that everyone always liked Ruthy better, and talking loudly to a person I made up so the others would think I had a new friend, but eventually I dropped to the ground, softened by old olives and leaf litter, and decided to visit Mrs Johnson and Sixpence.
I wanted a dog more than anything in the world. And not a dog I had to share with Ruthy and Caleb, but a dog that loved me alone and belonged to me and slept on my bed and walked with me to school and then waited for me to come home. I would call her Raspberry, because that was a good name for a dog, whereas Fido and Rusty and Max had no imagination to them. But we were not allowed to have any pets. Mum said it was because of Caleb’s asthma, but I think it was because she didn’t like any kind of dirt, and if you have dogs, well, you have dirt too.
I pleaded and promised and prayed and protested but nothing made any difference. Mum was firm. No dog. If I couldn’t have a dog, my next greatest wish was for a guinea pig, but Mum said they were really just rats with long hair and cowlicks, and there was no way she was having a rat in her home. I tried to explain I was pretty sure I would be a vet when I grew up, and I needed animals to practise caring for, but Mum said there was no way I’d get to vet school with my school marks, and I was more likely to be a mum than a vet, if anyone would have me, which she said she doubted if I kept scratching the sores on my head.
Mrs Johnson lived across the road from us and four houses down. I liked her for lots of reasons, but the main one related to the animals she kept in her backyard, and in particular a guinea pig called Sixpence.
Mum didn’t like Mrs Johnson or her family. We lived in a street where all the houses had been built at the same time by the government and all looked like each other. People changed the colour of the paintwork or the cement steps leading up to the front door, or the plants they put in the garden beds, but that’s about all. Our mum was very houseproud and had a reputation for being a bit of a style queen around the neighbourhood. She always looked tiptop herself before she left the house, although we saw the other side of her of course.
She didn’t much care what happened in our backyard – she said backyards were for men and front yards were for women – so she threw her heart and soul into making sure we had what she called ‘street appeal’. She repainted the cement steps dark grey each spring, once the worst of winter was over, and swept them clean every day. She said she held no truck with people who let the paint on their steps blister and flake. Caleb asked Ruthy what a truck had to do with the steps, but even Ruthy just shrugged.
Most of our neighbours had low front fences made of crisscrossed wire. Some people grew ivy over the fence, although if you didn’t keep it clipped it grew too heavy and often made the fence line dip towards the pavement. Others left it wiry and you could see the plants they put in their garden beds. Mum grew roses along our wire fence line. She loved her roses and clipped them and sprayed them and picked bugs off them so she could have flowers to put in a vase come the summer. She grew seasonal flowers beneath them, only in white to show off the colour of the roses. She mowed the little square of grass between the wire fence and the front of the house with an old push mower because Dad wasn’t home enough to do it for her. She had a large terracotta pot on the doorstep that she kept filled with whatever was flowering at the time. She refused to have stone gnomes or fairies or plastic anythings because she said they were common. And she hated, hated, hated Mrs Johnson’s front garden.
Mrs Johnson had removed her fence altogether, which everyone in the street agreed was a strange thing to do. She’d filled the whole front yard with native plants, except for the crushed gravel driveway where Mr Johnson parked his Holden station wagon. Her front yard was almost like a forest and disguised much of the house from the street. She’d made a crooked sort of path from the pavement to her front door, so you couldn’t see the door until you had gone around a couple of little bends. She had taught me the names of many of the trees and shrubs; my favourites were the little bells on the correa and the flowers like tiny bunches of purple grapes on the hardenbergia. She believed we should all plant things that grew naturally in the area we lived in. Mum said the only good gardens were the English ones, that Australian plants were ugly and attracted wildlife, and that Mrs Johnson had no style.
Mrs Johnson’s back garden was a wonderland. It was full of windy paths where you had to turn and twist to find surprises around bends. She had built little grottos you would come across suddenly, with stone fairies or gnomes or cement animals in little frozen scenes from plays she called tableaux. These were regularly changed so that every visit offered fresh discoveries. She had a rabbit hutch, and a huge guinea-pig enclosure that used to be an enormous aviary so you could actually walk inside it. In her shed, she kept mice of several colours in a special mouse house so their little hearts wouldn’t die from the cold, and blue tongue lizards that had been attacked by cats and needed to be looked after because they couldn’t slither away quickly anymore. She had a magpie that wasn’t in a cage but had a sore wing and used to stay near her back door to talk to her. She fed it mincemeat and scraps of toast. It tried to talk to her in return, and sometimes you would swear they really were having a good old chat. For a while she had a sick baby kangaroo that lived in a sack tied to the back of her chair in her kitchen, and that she had to feed with a bottle every four hours, even in the night-time.
Mrs Johnson also unfortunately had two girls and a husband called Athol. I say unfortunately because I didn’t like them nearly as much, and they tended to need her attention, even when I badly needed to talk to her about something important. I particularly didn’t like Mr Johnson, who was a big man with tiny eyes and fleshy red lips that rested on a bushy beard. He had bad breath, and often leaned right into my face and sort of grinned at me, but in a way that didn’t seem that friendly. Ruthy said it was more of a leer than a smile, which felt right to me when she explained what leering meant.
Mum called the Johnsons tree-huggers and hippies. I didn’t know what that meant, but hugging a tree seemed like a rather nice thing to do, and Mrs Johnson was a seriously interesting person. She knew so many things. She was a very unusual adult because she spent a lot of time playing with us, or setting up interesting activities for us, and looked carefully at all the things we made. I often bossed her children, and any of the other local kids visiting, into participating in a play I would make up, and she would sit on an old metal seat Mr Johnson found in the tip and watch the play all the way through and then clap when we finished. She would then tell me what she had liked about the story, and often encouraged me to write the words down, which I wasn’t that keen to do because I was better at just directing the kids to say what I needed at the time.
But best of all, she let me help with looking after the animals. I loved, loved, loved sitting in the guinea-pig enclosure with her, and one day she let me name one of the latest litter. She taught me that the Latin name for guinea pig was Cavia porcellus, and that Mum was right in a way when she called them rats because they are not pigs but rodents, although I decided not to tell Mum about that. Apparently they used to be worshipped by people in a place called Peru, and some people believed they could cure diseases. She also mentioned that there were people in the world who ate them, but I think it would have been better if she hadn’t shared that bit with me.
At first I wanted to name a little black and white one, but she gave that to her oldest girl River. I resented this because River didn’t care that much for animals, and I knew she wouldn’t spend time with the cute black and whitey, which she called Smudge. I was a bit jealous of that name though, because I had to admit it was quite good, and generally speaking I am the one who is excellent at making up names for things. Mrs Johnson’s other daughter, Sunshine, was just three and didn’t care too much about which guinea pig she named, so Mrs Johnson let me have the second choice. I pointed to a dear little baby that was mainly white but with coffee-coloured polka dots. I named her Sixpence, and I instantly loved her very much. When Mrs Johnson wasn’t too busy, she let me sit on her metal chair in the enclosure, and I nursed Sixpence and stroked her and fed her greens.
One day, Mrs Johnson had said about the most wonderful thing I had ever heard. She told me that if my mum and dad gave permission, I could have Sixpence as my very own as soon as my dad made a safe enclosure in our garden. I was so excited I ran straight home and nearly knocked Mum over when I hurtled into the kitchen with the news. Her answer was a very firm no.
After she’d smacked me for nagging, she stormed over to Mrs Johnson and told her off for offering me Sixpence without speaking to her first. I heard her tell Dad that Mrs Johnson was determined to put a rift between me and my mum, but Dad said he thought she was just being kind. This infuriated Mum, who yelled at him that he always took everyone else’s side and never hers, and it started one of their bad arguments, where she threatened to go back to Grandma. She stomped out of the house, which happened quite a bit when they had a fight. She would march away and say she was never coming back, and we would huddle together on my bed and I would comfort the little ones.
After a while, depending on how cross Dad was, he would sigh and look for his keys and go driving to find her. She always agreed to get in the car and return home, but sometimes they wouldn’t speak to each other for a day or more. After this particular fight, I was banned from visiting Mrs Johnson for two weeks, which felt like a lifetime, and also unfair because I was just reporting the offer. I picked the sores in my head often during that time. Mum said this was to make her angry, but it wasn’t. Like I said, I don’t always know I’m doing it.
Dad came and sat on my bed one night, which was always special because he didn’t do it much. He said that I had to understand a guinea pig might make Caleb sick, and he was sure I wouldn’t want that, but that if I really pulled my socks up in the Sunday school exams and at school, and didn’t cause Mum too much grief or pick my head, he would think about making me a hutch for Sixpence over the Christmas school holidays. I shrieked with happiness and gave him loads and loads of baby kisses all over this face, but he pushed me back into the bed and reminded me of all the things that would have to happen first, and that he was making no promises. He suggested that I only talked to him about the guinea pig, because Mum would worry about Caleb. I understood, and I agreed.
When he left the room, Ruthy, who shared the room with me, sat up and spoke into my happy darkness.
‘It won’t happen, Dorcas. There’s no way you will behave until Sunday this week, never mind until Christmas. And there’s no way Mum will agree to having an animal in the garden. And if she did, there’s no way Caleb wouldn’t have another asthma attack if he touched it. He gets sick every time he plays with animals. Dad was just being kind so you will stop picking your head.’
I jumped out of bed and dragged her out of hers over to the stain in the carpet we called ‘the wee patch’. The big brown stain on the carpet was there when we moved to Fisher Street, and Ruthy was the one who imagined that three dirty boys had lived in the room before us and had urinated a little bit each into the centre of the room every night like puppies marking their territory. Caleb and I believed her story instantly and always jumped over the stain. The thought of touching it even in our shoes would cause terror. I pushed Ruthy over and rubbed her cheek into the patch. She let out a long piercing scream that resulted in Mum racing in to see what had happened.
‘She pushed me into the wee patch,’ hollered Ruthy.
‘But Mum, it was fair enough because …’ And then I realised I couldn’t justify myself because I had promised Dad not to tell Mum about the plan to bring Sixpence home.
‘I don’t care why you did it, you dreadful child. I am sick to death of having to come into this room after I’ve put you to bed because of your nonsense.’ She pulled back the covers of my bed and smacked me hard twice on the legs. I flinched but didn’t say a word. ‘No chocolate for you on Friday night, my girl,’ she said, and slammed the door shut behind her as she left.
‘Well, that’s not going to help you get Sixpence, is it?’ said Ruthy. ‘See what I mean, Dorcas? There’s just no way.’ She said it in a kindly explaining voice, not a mean hurting voice, but it made me furious anyway. I wished I had a sister who took my side. My friend Venita at school had an older sister who always looked out for her, and I dreamt about having one who would always be kind to me and help me with projects and somehow stop Mum from getting so cross with me. But Ruthy said she had to call it as she saw it, which was what my Aunty Maisie used to say, particularly if she was being critical. Any time Ruthy quoted the dreaded Aunty Maisie, it made me doubly mad, so I crept over and pretended to smother her with my pillow.
I remained angry with Ruthy, so it wasn’t surprising we had another fight that Saturday morning, and that she took Caleb away to play with the others. She didn’t understand that I needed a pet. It didn’t seem fair because she loved her notebooks and got to have them, and Caleb loved bugs and got kits where you could catch them and kill them and stick pins in them to put them on a board, but I didn’t get to have a dog or even a Cavia porcellus.
Caleb got the bug and science kits he wanted because of the light-of-Mum’s-life situation, and because he suffered badly with asthma and was often pretty sick but wasn’t allergic to bugs. It’s not fun when you can’t breathe, and it’s not much fun watching your brother struggle for breath either. But Mum was pretty sure he was allergic to lots of things and was always fussing about what he might eat or play with and whether it would give him an attack.
So now that I had rushed out of the olive grove in a temper, Mrs Johnson’s was the obvious place to go. She didn’t answer when I knocked on the front door but I was pretty sure she was home because I saw Mr Johnson’s car in the drive. I squeezed down the side path, walking sideways because of how thick the grevilleas had grown, and called out at the back door. Again no one answered, and I decided to let myself into Sixpence’s pen for a visit.
There were two wire doors. The first one let you into a space just big enough for a grown-up to stand in. We called this the safe room. You had to make sure the first door was closed before you opened the next one, to make sure none of the furry family could escape. Mrs Johnson trusted me to go into the pen alone sometimes, because she knew I loved every one of them and wouldn’t allow them to sneak out. I carefully let myself in, sat on the metal chair and stroked Sixpence, and told her about the other children taking sides with Ruthy. I’m pretty sure she understood. She snuggled right under my cardigan. I cried a little bit, which I didn’t like to do, but it didn’t matter that Sixpence saw me crying because she was my true friend.
It was because I was bending over Sixpence and telling her things that I didn’t hear Mr Johnson creep into the pen. And he must have been creeping, because normally the door was quite squeaky when you opened it. He stood behind me and called out, ‘Boo!’ and frightened me half to death. I screamed and accidentally jumped about a bit, causing Sixpence to leap from my lap and scamper into the little shelter with all the others.
‘What are you doing here, Dorcas? Does your mother know you are over here with the reprobates and morally bankrupt?’
‘Sorry, Mr Johnson. I don’t think Mum has said anything about how much money you’ve got. Mrs Johnson said it’s okay to visit Sixpence, given she is sort of my pet anyway. Where is she?’ I asked.
‘She’s taken the girls to her mother’s,’ he said. ‘Come on inside, Dorcas, and I’ll make us a cup of tea. There’s something I want to show you.’
‘Aw. No thanks, Mr Johnson. That’s okay. I don’t really like tea and I should be getting home. I have to study for the Sunday school exam anyway. Thanks very much though,’ I said, remembering my manners.
‘Rubbish. Everyone likes tea. Obviously your perfect mother doesn’t know how to make it. I said I want to show you something, Dorcas, so in you come. Now.’
I hesitated. The ‘now’ was said in that way grown-ups use when there’s to be no debate. Still, I hesitated, although I wasn’t sure why.
‘If you want to visit that guinea pig again any time soon, in you come now,’ he said.
He opened the inside door and held it open for me. I worried a furry baby would escape into the little halfway room and then maybe get out, so I reluctantly followed him. I called out to Sixpence once we were in the safe room and gave her a wave. She looked up. I’m pretty sure she understood. We would have a conversation about Mr Johnson next time I visited, and I suspected we’d reach the same conclusions about him. I trudged behind the man with hands as big as a Sunday roast.
It was dark inside. All of our houses were pretty dark. Dad said this was because they faced east–west, but the Johnsons’ place was darker than most because of all the trees crowding round the doors and windows. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I just stood by the door, tapping on the lintel, wondering what Mr Johnson wanted to show me. He put the kettle on the gas ring, and I tried again to tell him I would be late home for study, but he just waved away my worry with two swipes of his meaty fist, and then pointed to a chair at the end of the green formica table. I sat down. I could see a bit of the metal edging on the tabletop was coming loose, and pulled at it to see what would happen. He told me to stop fidgeting.
He left the room. I seriously considered making a run for it, but I was worried I wouldn’t be allowed to see Sixpence again, so I stayed put. There was spilled sugar on the tabletop, so I drew some circles in it while I waited. After an hour that was probably a minute, he returned with a magazine in his hand. He sat on the chair next to me. I could smell him – a combination of sweat, tinned tuna, car oil and the breath of someone who was a stranger to a toothbrush.
He opened the magazine to a page about halfway through and pushed the page under my nose. I was so surprised when I looked at it I made a little ‘O’ noise, which made him laugh. On the page was a very naked lady. I don’t think I’d seen a grown-up naked person before so it was a bit of a shock. I quickly turned away, but he grabbed my face in his huge paw and made me turn back to it.
‘What do you think of that?’ he said.
‘I’m not sure Jesus would want me to look at that, Mr Johnson, so it’s probably best if I just close my eyes.’
‘Not if you want to see your little furry friend again, it isn’t,’ he said.
I opened my eyes but did a sort of squint so I couldn’t really see much.
‘Why do you want me to look at this, Mr Johnson?’ I asked.
‘Because you’ll look like that soon,’ he said. ‘Let’s just say it’s part of your education. You’ll have hooters that size, I reckon, given your mum’s stack. Not like my Janet. She may as well be a boy.’ He snorted in a dismissive way. It made me feel even sorrier for Mrs Johnson.
‘In fact, while you’re here, Dorcas, let’s see how those baby hooters of yours are going.’
The whistle on the stove started to scream that it was time to take it off. He stood up and reached over to the hot plates. At that very moment Mrs Johnson walked into the kitchen, back from taking her girls to stay with their grandma overnight. She stepped towards the kitchen table and saw the picture lying open near the empty mug. She turned to Mr Johnson and said in a scary sort of whisper: ‘What have you done this time?’
I made a dive for the back door and ran home as fast as I could. I ran down to the tree house and climbed my favourite branch. I knew I should be in the kitchen ready to study, but I couldn’t go inside yet.
I tried to think happily of nursing Sixpence, but every time I thought of her, I saw Mr Johnson’s red face and set of big yellow teeth, and so I had to stop and think of my friend Maynard’s dog Rastus, which helped a bit. I heard Mum calling my name after a while, and decided I’d better go in.
‘What a nice surprise,’ said Mum, in a voice that didn’t match the words. ‘You’re late.’ She was standing with her hands on her hips, looking at me with her head turned to the right, favouring her left eye, which was not a good sign.
‘Sorry, Mum,’ I said. Ruthy and Caleb were smiling at me in a not-very-nice way.
‘Did you call your brother a bad name?’ she asked.
‘Don’t remember doing that, Mum,’ I said. ‘What was the bad name I called him?’ I spoke innocently, knowing the others would never disclose a single word from our swearing vocabulary.
‘They wouldn’t tell me, but it had better not be a swear word, my girl,’ she warned. She leaned over and peered into my face, as though she would be able to see a lie in my eye.
‘Nope. I can promise you I never cussed,’ I said confidently, because of course this was true.
‘Well, I should hope not. Now get your books out and open to your revision chapter.’
I went into my room and took out my Sunday school busy bag from under my bed. It was blue with big spots on it; Aunty Maisie had made it for my last birthday. I decided to put one of Ruthy’s dolls, Milly Molly Mandy, right into the middle of the wee patch. Mum called out for me to hurry up. I sat at the table and sighed as I opened my book, which made Mum crabby again.
I had four questions to review: Who is the chief cornerstone in the temple God is building today? What had David done as a boy that helped him to be a good king? When David became king in Jerusalem, what did he want to do for God? and What sort of man was Nehemiah?
I had no idea about the answers to any of those questions. I thought of answering the one about Nehemiah and making up a picture of him. I thought he might be tall, good-looking and obedient if he was an important character, but then a lot of stories were about people who had been bad and then come good in some way, so I thought that might be too risky.
So I decided I’d have a stab at David as a boy. I started to write down all the things I could do that would make Mum and Dad happy, and hoped I’d ‘cornered the market’, as my Aunty Maisie used to say all the time.
I took a long time to sharpen my pencil, until I could tell Mum’s patience was running out again. With a nice point ready to go, and my tongue sticking out in its thinking hard and writing position, I made a start.
David did a lot of things to make him a good king when he grew up. What you do when you are a kid shows a lot about what you will be like when you are grown up. My mum is always telling me I am limiting my choices because I don’t do as I’m told, and I’m pretty sure David knew about this from his own dad when he was small. So to be a good king he did all the family washing on Saturdays, never argued with his brothers and sisters, which I think would have been hard because he might have been Catholic and they have quite a big number of children. And he did very well in Ye Olde Worldy Union Exams ever year.
I was actually pretty pleased with myself about this answer. It made me forget about Mr Johnson for a minute, but then I saw him in my thinking and my guts went all squirmy again. Mum finished helping Caleb colour in the story of Joseph and the coat of many colours. I would quite like to have helped with that because I enjoy colouring in and I am very good at it. She then checked Ruthy’s work and told her it was outstanding. I was actually looking forward to her reading mine, because I thought I might have nailed it.
When Mum read my work, her face changed colour to a bright red that clashed with her auburn hair. She grabbed me by the ear and dragged me outside. She smacked me on the backside and pushed me into the laundry and told me to stay there until my dad came home. She turned the key and took it out of the lock from the outside, so I was trapped. I sat on the stool in the corner, worried about what Dad would say. I also hoped Ruthy wouldn’t write about this in her notebook for Daniel to read. I think he would be particularly sad if I’d made a mistake that concerned the Bible.
After a while Caleb came out and spoke to me through the hole under the handle of the wooden door.
‘Are you or-right, Dorcas?’ he whispered.
‘Yeah. It’s really good in here. Better than being out there. There’s a kitten and a little green and white bird here to play with. It’s the best really.’
‘Aw. No there isn’t, Dorcas … is there?’ he asked, and I saw his eye through the hole in the door, trying to check out the animal story. ‘Anyway, I’m sorry you got into trouble. Ruthy read your answer and she said it was quite well-written for you. Here’s an orange snake you can have. I’m sorry it’s an orange one but I ate all the others.’
I watched the long springy lolly as he fed it through the hole. ‘Thanks, Caleb,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t seem to have a head though.’
‘Yeah. Sorry about that. I did eat the head, but I left the rest for you. Will you be or-right? If they leave you out here all night, Ruthy and I will bring you a candle and pillow and rug so you don’t die of frostbite.’
‘That’s nice, Caleb, but how will you get all that through that hole?’ I asked, interested.
‘Good question.’ He went quiet as he thought of a strategy. ‘I might go in next door and ask Mr Driver about that.’
‘Better not, Caleb. I think Mum might put you in here with me if she finds out you told Mr Driver.’
‘Aw. No she won’t, Dorcas. You know where I am on the string. Besides, Mum doesn’t like me going into the laundry because she says the cold and damp is bad for my chest.’ He went quiet again for a moment. ‘I wouldn’t worry anyway, Dorcas, I think Mum is getting over it now.’
Then we heard a scream like a banshee. I think that is actually the right word to describe it, because my teacher Miss Thompson said a banshee is a female spirit who cries out to warn that someone’s going to die, and given it was Ruthy screaming, I was pretty sure I was going to be the one to die.
‘Muuuuuum. Dorcas put Milly Molly Mandy into the wee patch. She’s ruined for life. Muuuuuum.’
I hoped Caleb would work out a way to get supplies through the hole in the door, because now I knew I’d need them.