After the froth and exitement of the wedding came a period of adjustment, flat as flat, with Jacqui left very much to her own devices. At first it didn’t seem too bad; she had always been proud of her independence, how she and Arthur respected each other’s space, and she still had her special friends Emily Hardcastle and Kyle Sweet.
Then Emily, precocious in all things and a year older than Jacqui to begin with, chose now, of all times, to become boy conscious and drifted away into a world of sexual fantasy where Jacqui was not yet ready to follow her. No sooner had that happened than Kyle’s father had a yelling match with Warren Shaughnessy over promises made and never honoured and the next thing they had gone, too, blown away on the wind of Mr Sweet’s fury.
Jacqui rediscovered how it felt to be alone. Frances, bat-blind yet seeing with absolute clarity the hurts of those she cared about, did what she could; but Frances was living in her own house now and wasn’t always there when Jacqui needed her.
Jacqui mooched and thought dark thoughts about stepmothers. Then, one Friday afternoon, Frances came up with a suggestion.
‘Betty and I are going up the mountain tomorrow to get stuff for the stall. I wondered if you’d like to come.’
‘Into the Cloud Forest?’
Frances laughed. ‘Not as far as that. But you might still find it interesting.’
It would be something to do, anyway.
‘I could come, if you want me to.’
Not the most gracious of acceptances, but Frances smiled. ‘That’ll be nice.’
Betty Ngaro lived in the settlement on the other side of the creek. Jacqui had always known it was there but had never gone into the area of shanties and stripped cars where the Aborigines lived. On the other hand she, like everyone else in Goorapilly, had seen some of the men lurching drunkenly about the town; unhappily, there was nothing unfamiliar about that sight, or in the occasional individual lying unconscious by the roadside on the outskirts of town. There were others who worked in the mill or for the council and behaved like everybody else, but it was the drunks who stayed in people’s minds. It wasn’t fair — no one thought all whites were drunks just because Sid Donoghue was — but that was the way things were, and there were those who thought, and said, that the settlement should be cleared out once and for all, before things got out of hand.
‘Whatever that is supposed to mean,’ Frances said acidly.
Jeff Toms drove them out to the foot of the mountain in his old rattletrap. He dropped them at the foot of the track that meandered uphill through a paddock of threadbare grass and into the trees.
‘Sure you won’t come with us?’ Frances asked Jeff through the open window of the ute.
‘Reckon I won’t,’ he said. ‘I’ll pick you up at the usual time, though.’
And chuntered on down the track in a diminishing cloud of blue exhaust smoke.
‘He never comes,’ Frances confided to Jacqui, ‘but I wouldn’t like him to think he wasn’t welcome.’
Jeff Toms was a sad case. Like many others who had gone with the army to Vietnam, the man who came back was different from the one who’d left and people thought Jeff strange. Like the Aborigines, he lived on the edge of the community and there were those who thought, and said, that he too should be cleared out in the great purging that would restore the town of Goorapilly to how it should be.
‘Such nonsense!’ Frances said. ‘As though Goorapilly was ever more than a frontier town! You’d think they would welcome people who were different.’
But they didn’t; as in most places, conformity was valued above all things: most people who lived on the edge of the emptiness were intensely conservative. It was an attitude that provided a barrier behind which to hide from the desert, and themselves.
The women and the child went up the track into the forest. Differences of colour and appearance — above all, the mystery surrounding someone who was different — stood in the way of Jacqui seeing Betty as someone like herself, but the awkwardness didn’t last long. It was amazing how quickly differences disappeared when you came face to face with the other person’s absolute normality.
They had a good time up on the mountain, the two adults digging and poking about for herbs, bits of branch, multicoloured fungi, laughing and yakking to each other, while Jacqui went exploring. More than ever was she conscious of the mountain’s mass rising all round her in its mystery and silence. She didn’t find a yeti but she did see two wallabies who blended so well into the shadows that she didn’t know they were there until they jumped out under her feet. Made her jump, too, while they were about it: almost out of her skin.
They weren’t up the mountain long but it was fun and, when they got back and found Jeff and his ute waiting for them as arranged, the three of them were like old friends together.
They went back to Frances’s house with its vast overgrown garden. The two ladies got on with the job of manufacturing their display pieces for the market. Jacqui offered to give them a hand but really only got in the way. After a while Frances gave her a glass of homemade lemonade and sent her out into the garden to amuse herself.
‘You have a care,’ Betty told her. ‘There could be crocs down in the creek.’
It didn’t seem likely. After months without rain, Roper’s Creek was mostly dry, with isolated pools, greeny-black and hung about by veils of mosquitoes and little stinging flies, set at intervals along a bed of pale sand. All the same, the idea that there might be crocodiles added spice to the afternoon, turning what might otherwise have been ordinary, even boring, into an expedition of infinite possibilities.
Apart from the matter of crocodiles, she was glad to get out of the house. The day was still and full of sun and heat and the air indoors had started to close around her so that she felt she could hardly breathe. It didn’t seem to affect the two women who were as lively as two joeys on the loose, but Jacqui was glad to escape from the grown-up laughter that somehow shut her out, even when it did not intend to do so.
She walked through the overgrown garden, the grass that in places rose higher than her head. All around was stillness and a raucous chorus of unseen insects. Somewhere in the distance a screech of cockatoos gave the world what for. She followed the slope down through the mysterious wonderland of towering grasses towards the trees that lined both banks of the creek.
She was careful to watch the ground in front of her as she walked; there would be snakes down here. Tread on a taipan or king brown and you wouldn’t need to worry about crocodiles. She came out of the grass into a patch of open ground. The creek was right in front of her — dried into a series of stagnant pools, as she had suspected — and she saw a boy watching her from the trees.
For a moment Jacqui was not sure what she was seeing: the figure as brown and motionless as the trees lining the creek banks. Then he moved, a band of sunlight shone yellow across his face and she recognised him at once.
‘John,’ she said. ‘John Munda.’
Betty Ngaro’s nephew. Probably that was why he was here, because his auntie was up at the house.
He came towards her, long-legged as a heron, walking without sound across the ribbon of pale yellow sand, dry now, that during the wet would form the bed of the creek.
‘I never seen you here before.’
‘It’s my aunt’s place,’ she told him. ‘Do you come here often?’
‘My auntie’s up at the house with her.’
‘I know. We’ve been up the mountain.’
‘They’re always doing that,’ he said and grinned. ‘Two aunties together.’
‘Your aunt said there might be crocodiles down here,’ she told him.
‘She’s always fussing.’
Jacqui was conscious of her arms and legs, her white feet inside her shoes, and thought how much nicer it must feel to be black and barefoot, wearing only a raggedy pair of shorts under the sun that shone impartially on the pair of them.
‘I’m going for a hike up the creek,’ John said. ‘You can come if you like.’
She followed him along the creek bed. It was strange to see him moving so silently and effortlessly from patch to patch of shadow as though he, too, were part of the darkness that embraced them now they were beneath the trees. It was cooler here, the mosquitoes not as bad as she had expected, and the brilliant jungle of Frances’s neglected garden cut out any hint of that other world in which she normally lived. She felt she had moved into a remoteness not only of space but of time, so that by moving through the shadows of the dried-up creek she had travelled to the distant past where all things had been different, all things new.
Eventually, after what seemed a long time, John stopped in a clearing where the sunlight, pouring down between the trees, turned the parched grass as yellow as gold.
‘I come here all the time,’ he said. ‘This is my corroboree ground.’
She thought he had done her a great honour by bringing her to such a place.
‘Do they really hold corroborees here?’
‘It’s only pretend. I pretend I’m a great warrior and I dance the deaths of all my enemies.’ And he took two dance-like steps, crouching and scowling most fiercely, before slapping with hollow palms on his bent knees. Then he looked up and uttered a sharp cry, sudden and ferocious:
‘Ah ha! Ah ha!’
Jacqui watched. In another place it might have been embarrassing to see a boy who she thought was probably a year younger than herself going through such a performance but here, amid the stillness, it seemed not only right but mysterious and important.
John straightened. ‘You can do it, too, if you like.’
‘What was that shout you made?’ She tried to imitate what she had heard, but it didn’t come out right at all. ‘Er … rer. Er … rer.’ The sound sagged feebly. Hopeless.
‘That’s my war cry.’ And did it again, his voice sharp and clear, puncturing the stillness of trees and shadows. ‘Ah ha! Ah ha!’
‘Aren’t men and women things supposed to be done separately?’ She didn’t know much about Aboriginal customs but was sure she’d read that somewhere.
‘That’s when it’s done for real,’ John said carelessly. ‘This here’s only pretend, so it’s okay. You can be a warrior, too, if you like,’ he offered generously.
Jacqui was wearing shoes and a T-shirt as well as her shorts. She took the shirt and shoes off. Her white skin shouted at the shadows, the downpouring of golden light. The bare patch of ground on which she was standing felt warm beneath her feet, the dust as thick as cream.
‘You do it like this,’ John said, and demonstrated. Jacqui watched, then tried to copy him. He indeed looked like a small warrior, legs purposeful, feet punishing the hard and dusty ground; Jacqui hopped and scrambled like a panicky chook.
‘I’m hopeless,’ she said sadly.
‘You’ve never done it before.’
It was nice of him to say so.
‘I’d better get back,’ she said. ‘They’ll be wondering where I am.’
‘If you wanner come again …’
‘Yes?’
‘I’m here most Saturdays,’ he said casually, in a voice that said take it or leave it.
She walked back by herself. On the edge of the corroboree ground she turned. John was standing as she had left him, his dark body one with the shadows. Just as he might have stood a million years before, she thought. The silence, the golden pool of sunlight, the poised darkness of trees and boy combined to give her a feeling that she knew would remain with her forever.
She raised her arm to wave to him. For a moment she thought he was not going to acknowledge her, then his body moved into the two or three steps of the warrior’s dance and she heard once again, faintly through the sunlight, the ferocious sound of his battle cry.
‘Ah ha! Ah ha!’
Two weeks later, Frances and Betty once again making their pilgrimage up the mountain into the forest, Jacqui went with them. This time John came too. To start off he was a bit awkward, one boy among three females, but as soon as he and Jacqui went off together it was all right.
For the last two weeks they had seen each other every day at school and she, at least, had observed him with new eyes, yet they had passed each other with shuttered faces, as though each had been made of air. The previous Saturday she had intended going down to the creek to see if he was there but Judy had dragged her off to see some friends who lived fifty kilometres away and by the time they’d got back it had been dark.
Now she and John were together again and everything was all right between them once more. They danced the warriors’ dance, prancing about, stamping the ground and shrieking together until the dance turned by degrees into a pursuit with each chasing the other through the undergrowth while the silent canopy threw a blanket of silence over their clamorous excitement.
‘Did you have a good time?’ Frances asked when they got back.
‘Yes,’ Jacqui said. ‘We did.’
The following week Jacqui talked first Judy, then Frances and finally Betty into allowing the two of them to take a picnic lunch up the mountain together.
‘Don’ you go gettin’ lost, now,’ Betty warned them. ‘Don’t do no stupid things. No fires. Keep away from cliffs …’
‘I want to see you back here by four o’clock,’ Frances said. ‘No later.’
‘They won’t be late,’ Judy said. Betty in particular seemed unconvinced but Judy smiled at both children. ‘They know we won’t let them do it again if they are.’
It was a nice way of warning them but a warning it was, nonetheless.
‘We don’t have a watch,’ Jacqui objected.
‘That’s easily fixed.’ And Judy lent them her own, not the smart gold one Arthur had given her when they got married but the cheap Japanese digital she wore to school during the week.
Judy ran them to the beginning of the path and they set out together, across the paddock and into the trees.
They went up and up. No fooling around now; no warriors’ dances, real or pretend; no squealing pursuits through the undergrowth. They had made up their minds. They were going up into the Cloud Forest.
They never got there. It was further than they’d expected. Harder going, too. The slope was steep and it was difficult to make their way through the jumble of boulders and trees, the mosses, ferns and tumbling streams. There were no paths and, if they were following in the footsteps of the boy who had climbed this way over a century before, there was no way of knowing it. John’s ancestors had probably explored all over this land but of them, too, there was no trace. Jacqui and John might have been the first people ever to have pushed their way through the forest to the upper slopes of the mountain.
As they climbed higher, the vegetation began to change from the tropical growth of the lower slopes to a world of ferns and dampness. They saw birds; once they heard what might have been the thump, thump of fleeing kangaroos, but the thick ground cover made it impossible to be sure.
They reached the top of a cliff that fell vertically into swimming depths of green and blue haze, with the treetops little more than a blur of heat and silence far below them. There were streams and cascades, silvery in the green light, and the noise of the falling water enhanced rather than diminished the brooding silence that lay over all.
By the middle of the afternoon they had eaten the food they had brought with them and drunk the Coke. Jacqui wasn’t particularly hungry and thirst was never going to be a problem with streams flowing everywhere between the rocks, but time was against them.
For the hundredth time, she checked Judy’s watch. ‘We’ll never make it to the top. Not and get back by four o’clock.’
‘So what if we are late?’ said John.
‘They’ll skin us alive, that’s why.’
More important than that, she knew that Judy would keep her word: be seriously late and this expedition would be their last. She no longer resented Judy or told herself she hated her but there was no messing with her; four o’clock she’d said and four o’clock she’d meant.
‘We’d better go back.’
Black looks from John but Jacqui went anyway, with him grumbling behind.
‘Just like a girl …’
It made her mad. ‘You be quiet, John Munda! I’ve had a good time. I want to do it again. Maybe, now we know the way, we’ll be able to get higher next time, even to the top, maybe. But if we muck up now, there won’t be a next time. Okay?’
‘Okay.’
But sulkily, as though time and female logic were twin burdens that no man should be expected to carry.
Halfway down the mountain, John pointed off to their left. ‘There’s a cave …’
Jacqui had had about enough of him by now and would not look. ‘You’ve really made up your mind you want us to be late, haven’t you?’
And pushed on, deaf to his protests.
They only just made it. They were halfway across the paddock when they saw the plume of dust trailing behind Judy’s bright red car, as lively and cheerful as herself, as it came up the track towards the pick-up point.
‘Good!’ Jacqui said.
While John was more sulky than ever. ‘There was a cave,’ he said. ‘It wouldn’t have killed us to have a look at it.’
‘I didn’t see it.’
‘I called out but you wouldn’t stop.’
‘We can look for it next time.’
‘Always supposing we can find it.’
‘A tracker like you? Of course we’ll find it.’
John was not so easily talked round. ‘I’ve half a mind to go back there, see what I can find by myself.’
Jacqui knew he wanted her to get mad at him for saying he’d do such a thing without her but she wasn’t going to give him that satisfaction. ‘Go ahead. If that’s what you want to do.’
Cross faces all round as they climbed into the car but Judy, wise in the ways of kids, said nothing.
‘Talk about miracles!’ Betty said when they got back to Frances’s house. ‘You managed not to fall off a cliff, then.’
‘Of course we didn’t.’
Jacqui could be lofty, when she chose. There was a time when she wouldn’t have dared say such a thing with Frances within earshot, but her aunt was a lot softer these days, maybe because she no longer had Jacqui to put up with every day of the week. She’d forgotten about Judy, though.
‘You be careful, young lady.’
While John, fidgeting and wishing he was far away from this house full of women, was no help at all.
‘Did you see the yeti?’ Frances asked them.
‘We may have heard it,’ Jacqui hoped.
‘There was a cave,’ John said. ‘Maybe it was hiding in there.’
‘We’re going to look at it next time,’ Jacqui told them, and him.
‘A cave?’ Betty was having none of that. ‘You keep away from caves, you hear? Start poking around in the dark, next thing you’re lost, never find your way out. That what you want, is it? Fall down some hole in the ground, never see neither of you no more?’
‘We’ll take a torch,’ Jacqui said.
‘I think you should leave caves well alone,’ Judy said with the decided air of a grown-up who had made up her mind. There were times when Judy, bright and lively though she was, came across as older than Frances. Older than old, sometimes.
Jacqui said nothing, which she had discovered worked pretty well, mostly.
‘You hear me?’
‘I hear you.’
But she hadn’t promised, had she? And provided Judy didn’t push it, she wouldn’t, which meant they were free to do what they liked. Perhaps John was right and there had been a yeti inside the cave. It made her sorry there hadn’t been enough time to check out whatever John had seen, but Judy would have nailed them, sure enough, if they’d kept her waiting. This way they were still in with a chance for later. Provided no one made her promise anything.
‘John and me are going outside,’ she said.
‘Not for long,’ Judy said. ‘We’ll be going home soon.’
‘Watch out for snakes,’ Frances said.
But they went anyway. With any luck, the grown-ups would have forgotten all about caves by the time they came back.
‘Snakes aren’t going to trouble me,’ John said.
‘How come?’
‘The snake is my totem. That’s what my name means. Munda means snake.’
Jacqui thought it was very grand to be called snake. She practised a few variations to herself.
Jacqueline Taipan … Jacqueline Tiger …
Somehow it didn’t sound the same.
‘What would my totem be?’ she asked him.
John had not forgiven her for refusing to look at the cave. ‘You can’t have a totem. You’re white.’
It didn’t seem fair.
‘Maybe we should call you pussy cat,’ said John. ‘Jack Pussy Cat.’
She didn’t think much of that. All the same … ‘Cats can kill snakes.’
‘Not this one.’ He grinned at her, pleased to have found a way of annoying her. ‘Jack Pussy Cat! Jack Pussy Cat!’
And took off through the grass, voice raised mockingly, while she chased furiously after him.
They had intended to go up the mountain again the following weekend but it rained first thing. By the time the clouds had cleared it was too late so they went to the beach instead.
‘Look …’
They sank lower in the grass and watched the rhythmic movements of the two naked white figures that lay entwined on the edge of the sand.
Jacqui wanted to ask what they were doing but thought she knew or at least ought to know, so kept quiet and watched while the figures wriggled and tumbled and thrust, and eventually lay still.
John laughed.
‘Sshh!’
Too late. Hot and angry looks and a frenzied grabbing for clothes.
‘Let’s get out of here!’ Jacqui hissed.
Away they went, belting across the dunes, laughing at the release from tension now that they were spying no longer.
There was a house further along the beach. It was set back from the sand, with a big stone wall all round it. It was a grand house, modern, with windows that scowled at the sunlight.
‘I wonder who lives there,’ said John.
‘That’s Harley Woodcock’s place. Frances’s stepson.’
‘I don’t know him.’
‘You haven’t missed a thing,’ Jacqui told him. ‘Harley the pig, that’s what I heard Judy call him once, when she was talking to Arthur. Said he was giving Frances a hard time.’
‘What about?’
‘Dunno. But I don’t reckon she likes him much either.’
‘How do you know what Judy called him?’
‘Little jugs have big ears. That’s what Arthur says.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘It means I listen to what grown-ups are saying.’ She was not in the least ashamed of it; it was the only way, if you wanted to find out what was going on in the grown-up world; they would never tell you, otherwise.
‘If Frances is your auntie, why don’t you stay with her?’
‘Because I stay with Arthur and Judy.’
‘But if she’s your auntie …’
Jacqui didn’t understand what he meant. ‘Frances is my mother’s sister. Arthur is her brother. That’s why they had me here to live with them, after my parents died.’ She looked at him, puzzled. ‘Like Betty’s your aunt, too. The sister of your father or your mother. Isn’t she?’
‘More like a sort of cousin, I suppose you’d say.’
‘Why call her auntie, then?’
‘Because she brings me up.’
‘But why —’
‘It’s the way we do things.’
From his tone of voice Jacqui understood that John was not going to talk about it any more. There were blackfella ways and whitefella ways and nothing to be said about either of them.
It seemed a funny way of doing things, to have an aunt who wasn’t to bring you up instead of your parents, but she didn’t want to fight John about it. Instead she thought of something else to keep them occupied.
‘I’ll tell you what we’ll do,’ she said.
She thought it would be fun to carry out a raid on Harley Woodcock’s surly-looking house.
‘Not a real raid, of course. Just a pretend one.’
Like the dances that had been real and also pretend, they would be redskins raiding the fort the cavalry had built in the Indian territory.
‘If he’s as horrible as you say …’
‘That’s why we’re doing it.’
There would have been no point making the raid if the house had been empty or Harley a kindly man. It had to be scary enough to be exciting or it wasn’t worth doing at all.
They made their way to the entrance: big, wrought-iron gates standing open. They spied through them and saw a long driveway leading to the house. A silver Porsche stood outside the front door.
‘He’s at home, all right.’
There were a number of trees and shrubs inside the grounds. They were too close to the sea to grow really well, but they were big enough to give them the cover they needed for their raid.
‘What’ll we do when we’re inside the gates?’ John asked.
‘We’ll case the joint.’ She’d read the phrase somewhere.
‘And then?’
‘We’ll run up to the house, slap the wall by the front door and then get the hell out of it.’
That was another phrase she’d read; Arthur might favour the classics but Jacqui, with the rest of the school to help her, was more broad-minded.
‘Quick!’
Through the gates they went, sprinting for cover under the nearest bank of shrubs.
‘Pow!’ Jacqui was kneeling up, peering between the branches. ‘Pow!’
‘What?’
‘That sentry. Didn’t you see him? I got him with my bow and arrow.’ She spun round. ‘Pow!’
Another one bit the dust.
Dead sentries apart, it seemed that no one in the fort had spotted them. They left the first line of defence and moved on to the next, scooting quickly across the open ground to plunge onto their fronts beneath a cluster of wattle trees that trailed their pointed leaves limply in the salt wind.
‘How do we get away?’ John asked.
‘We run out the gate, spring on our pintail horses and ride off.’
‘Pintail?’
‘It’s a type of horse.’ She spoke confidently but was unsure whether she’d got the name right.
‘It’s a duck.’
‘It’s a horse!’
Something else not to be discussed.
‘I can’t ride, anyway.’
‘Neither can I.’
Lucky they were only pretend horses, in that case.
Another dash. They lay panting beneath some mixed shrubs that included …
‘Ouch!’
‘Sshh!’
… roses.
It was a bit too close to the house to shoot any more sentries. Jacqui lay still, working out how far it was to the front door.
‘I’ll go this side,’ she said. ‘You go that. We’ll both slap the wall and then …’
Get the hell out of it.
‘Your side’s nearer than mine.’
‘It’s not!’
‘Course it is! Much nearer!’
‘Then you go this side and I’ll go that. If you’re chicken about it.’
‘I’m not chicken!’
They leapt up and ran and, through confusion as to who was doing what, collided with each other and fell sprawling on the patch of open gravel immediately outside the front door. As though on cue, the door was flung open.
Steps crunched; a voice spoke, as harsh as the driveway.
‘What the hell do you kids think you’re doing?’
Harley. Jacqui risked a glance to confirm who it was, then looked away at once. Her knees were stinging with gravel burn. Never mind that; she’d got them into this, now she must get them out again. Words formed in the air before her.
‘We were coming to ask if there were any jobs you would like us to do for you. Tidy the garden, maybe. Wash some dishes …’
Anything, even dishes, so long as it kept them safe from this man whose teeth — twice as many as a normal man, surely? — became more pointed and threatening as he drew back the lips over his gums.
‘You want to help, why are you sprawling all over my garden?’
‘We tripped.’
It was the truth, but her answer did not seem to please him. ‘You think you can come in here and raise merry hell on my property? I’ve been watching you. Oh yes. Digging around in the bushes …’
‘We weren’t,’ she said.
He stepped forward, hand raised. She cringed, then he lowered his hand again.
‘You’d like me to do that, wouldn’t you? Give you an excuse to tell the police I’d assaulted you? Well, tough luck, mate. I won’t touch you. Now, clear off out of it, you hear me? Come back and I’ll have a word with the police myself. There are laws against trespass, you know.’
He stood over them while they dusted themselves down. Jacqui saw that John’s knees were bleeding too. Harley frogmarched them to the gate.
‘Scat!’
Jacqui had hoped he hadn’t recognised her but his next words dashed any hopes of that.
‘Tell my stepmother I said she should keep you under better control.’
They ran without further argument. When they looked back from the edge of the dunes, Harley had gone back into the house. They heard the dull thud as he slammed the door behind him.
‘I’ll come back tonight,’ John said. ‘Burn his stinking place down. Him inside it, any luck.’
‘I’ll help you,’ she told him.
Who would have thought four scraped knees would cause such a fuss?
‘What have you been up to?’
‘Playing.’
‘Did you ever see such kids?’ Betty demanded, although whether of Frances, the house or the air, no one could be sure.
There was antiseptic and a cloth to dab it on with, and the treatment hurt more than Harley’s gravel. Frances fiddled around with a pair of tweezers and that was the worst thing of all. Not only because of how it stung.
‘Gravel?’ She held a fragment up to the light so her feeble eyes could inspect it more clearly. ‘Where have you been to pick up gravel in your knees? The nearest place I can think of that’s got a gravel drive …’ She stopped and looked at them both. ‘You didn’t. Tell me you didn’t.’
‘It was a cavalry fort,’ Jacqui explained. ‘We were Indians and —’
Frances was not interested in Indians or cavalry forts. ‘Did he catch you?’
Jacqui, too, inspected her knees. ‘Yes.’
‘Where were you?’
‘In the drive, that was all. We didn’t do anything. I mean,’ she said righteously, ‘we didn’t break into the house or anything.’
Although the thought had crossed her mind.
‘What did he say to you?’
‘He told us to get out. Said there was a law against trespass.’
‘He said scat,’ John said.
‘He also said …’ And Jacqui stopped.
‘What?’ Frances’s voice was ominous; now was not the time to play games with her.
‘He said you should keep us under better control.’
‘Cheek of the man,’ Betty said.
‘It’s his property,’ Frances pointed out.
‘In the drive? What harm they doing?’
‘Even so …’
‘Even so nothing! That letter he sent you … I’m surprised he’s the nerve to open his mouth.’
‘This town is full of weird people,’ Jacqui said.
Frances smiled. ‘That’s a very sweeping statement. Who do we know who’s weird?’
‘Well, there’s Harley …’
‘Harley ain’t weird,’ Betty said. ‘He’s bad.’
‘There is no call to say such a thing,’ Frances told her.
‘Never trust a grabber, that’s what I say.’
‘He’s done nothing to you.’
‘Because I got nothing he wants. If I had, it’d be a different story. You need to keep your eye on that man,’ Betty said. ‘This is his house, remember. He’s already written to remind you. Why should he do that, ’less he’s planning to turn up one of these days and put you out in the street?’
‘What nonsense you talk!’ Frances said crossly.
‘Isn’t this your own house?’ Jacqui was interested by what Betty had said.
‘My husband left the house to Harley. But Harley agreed that I could stay here as long as I liked. He told me so himself.’ If it’s any business of yours, her tone said, crosser than ever.
‘That was then,’ Betty said. ‘You told me yourself: he give you nuthin in writing.’
‘Stuff and nonsense!’ Frances said, clattering plates in the sink.
Jacqui thought that Frances’s snip-snap way of speaking, so unlike her usual self, might be because she feared that Betty was right.
‘Where would you go if he chucked you out?’
‘That is a hypothetical question.’ She saw Jacqui’s expression. ‘Hypothetical means it won’t happen. And chuck is not a word ladies use.’
Jacqui thought of pointing out that she was a child, not a lady, but in view of Frances’s mood decided she’d better not.
‘Why can’t ladies use it?’
‘Because it’s slang.’
‘Darn right,’ Betty said.
‘You were telling us,’ Frances said, ‘about all the weird people, as you call them, in Goorapilly. You have so far mentioned my stepson. Who else did you have in mind?’
Jacqui hadn’t expected to be taken up on what she had thought the most harmless of remarks. She thought as hard as she could.
‘Jeff Toms,’ she said. Surely no one could argue about that?
‘You think Jeff Toms is weird, do you?’ asked Frances in a dangerous voice.
Uh oh. ‘Everybody says he’s around the bend,’ she said defensively.
‘And who is everybody?’
‘Brett Shaughnessy was saying only the other day that Jeff Toms should be in the loony bin.’
‘And since when do we take any notice of what Brett Shaughnessy says?’
It was obviously Jacqui’s day for sticking her foot in her mouth. She decided it would be safer if she kept her mouth shut, so she did.
‘I want you to listen to me carefully,’ Frances said. Her voice was sharp no longer but serious, with a note in it that might be pain. ‘Jeff Toms is my friend. He is not a lunatic, whatever Brett Shaughnessy says. He went to Vietnam to fight in a war that our government said we should be fighting. That war ended up by hurting him, as it did many others.’
‘Was he wounded?’
‘In a sense he was. Not his body, but his mind.’
‘How?’
‘In a way he never came back, not completely. He left something of himself over there.’
‘How could he do that?’
‘I don’t know. But that’s what happened. To Jeff and lots more like him. But he’s not round the bend, or weird, and I will not have you saying so. Do you hear me?’
The idea of leaving bits of yourself around the place seemed pretty weird to Jacqui, but she knew better than to say so.
‘Yeah, right.’
‘And that is also no way to speak.’ Frances really had her battle gear on today. ‘Yeah, right: what kind of English is that? Yes, Frances, would be the right way to answer me, if you feel the need to say anything.’
Yeah, right. Jacqui decided she’d skip off home, while she could.
A few days later she turned up again, unannounced, hoping to find Frances in a better mood, but her aunt was out. She never locked her door and Jacqui could have gone inside if she’d wanted, but without Frances she knew it wouldn’t feel right. Instead she fooled around in the garden for a bit, chasing dragons that leapt at her out of the house-high grass, hunting the enemy soldiers who fired volleys of arrows at her through the secret, singing air. When she was fed up with playing by herself, she mooched down to the beach where she and John Munda had seen the two naked strangers on the sand.
She still wasn’t sure what she had seen. There was so much to learn. Too much.
Thinking about it made her feel more alone than ever. Her parents had abandoned her when she was four years old. Okay, maybe they hadn’t meant to, but that’s what had happened. Arthur and Frances had said they’d look after her; now Arthur was married and Frances had gone away. She’d been friends with Kyle and Emily but Kyle had gone, too, and Emily had drifted away into her own, very different, life. John Munda pitched up only when he felt like it. Judy had said she hoped they’d be friends, but Judy was a grown-up. It was hopeless.
She quite enjoyed the feeling of being let down by all the people she knew. Poor me …
She had walked some way along the beach when she saw two figures sitting side by side on the sand. At first she thought they might be the same couple she’d seen before. Sent on a do-or-die mission to fetch help for the starving fort, she stalked them, wriggling stealthily between the lines of enemy warriors, until she came out on top of the dune behind the seated figures and saw that they were not the strangers at all but Frances and Jeff Toms. They were sitting together and looking at the sea.
She watched them for a long time. They didn’t move or speak but sat with their faces to the tranquil water and the waves that seemed barely to break along the level beach on this day without wind.
Perhaps they were lonely, too, Jacqui thought, and this was the way they were company for each other. It was odd to think of grown-ups, who knew so much, needing the company of other people. She thought that she was a bit like Jeff Toms herself. She, too, had left bits and pieces with the people who’d been part of her life and now were not, or not as they’d been before: her parents, Kyle and Emily, even Arthur and Frances. Maybe that was what growing up was, a process of leaving people behind you. Yet the memories you had of those people also became part of you. If you left parts of yourself with people you no longer knew or saw, you also got something back: the person you had become because of knowing them.
It was too complicated. She wasn’t sure she had worked it out properly in her mind, but thought that maybe that was what Frances had meant. Perhaps everyone was weird, or nobody was. As for Harley Woodcock …
Betty had called him bad. She remembered the way he’d behaved to John and herself at his house. All right, they’d had no business to be there, but they hadn’t been doing any harm. She thought that Betty was right.