The Lost Child

  THE LOST CHILD

  Suzanne McCourt grew up on the wild southern coast of South Australia and now lives in Melbourne. The Lost Child is her first novel.

  The

  Lost Child

  Suzanne McCourt

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  Copyright © Suzanne McCourt 2014

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published by The Text Publishing Company, 2014

  Cover design by Imogen Stubbs

  Cover artwork © copyright Jeremy Miranda

  Page design by WH Chong

  Typeset by J&M Typesetting

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Author: McCourt, Suzanne, author.

  Title: The lost child / by Suzanne McCourt.

  ISBN: 9781922147783 (paperback)

  ISBN: 9781922148773 (ebook)

  Subjects: Families—South Australia—Identity (psychology)—Fiction.

  Dewey Number: A823.4

  For my mother and sons

  PART ONE

  1

  On the mantelpiece, Mum is a bride with a mermaid tail and a frothy veil, her hands hidden behind big flowers. There are two bridesmaids with more flowers: the one with the grumpy face is Mum’s sister. Dad is standing next to Mum but it doesn’t look like him.

  ‘Who’s this?’ I ask when I climb up to get a closer look.

  ‘Your father. Who do you think?’

  ‘It’s not his face.’

  ‘They got the airbrushing wrong.’

  ‘What’s airbrushing?’

  ‘Improving the photo.’

  Dad’s improved face is dolly-smooth with lipstick lips like Mum and her maids. The dimple in his chin looks like a spider hole. You could pick a whole nest of spiders out of that hole. He doesn’t look happy with his improved lips and his spider hole. He looks like a stranger to himself in a black suit and bow tie, gloves like cocky feathers in his hand.

  In the other photo, Dad is a boy with his own lips and chin. He is standing next to a chair, stiff and straight as a fence post, wearing a jacket, short leg pants and socks pulled up to his knees. He looks as if he thinks it’s silly being dressed up in a suit with slicked-down hair, holding on to a chair instead of sitting on it. He looks as if he wants to be outside, being a boy instead of a little man.

  Next to him is a photo of Big Red winning the Muswell Cup. This is before Big Red fell at Reedy Creek and broke his leg and Dad had to shoot him to put him out of his misery. In the photo Big Red nuzzles Dad’s ear as if he wants to eat it, as if he loves Dad as much as Dad loves him, and Dad holds up a silver cup, grinning fit to burst. In his other hand, he holds a folded whip.

  It’s his whip from the kitchen dresser, his whipping-whip!

  ‘What sort of hat did she have?’ says Mum.

  Dunc throws his bag on the chair and unbuttons his shirt. His face is shiny hot and he smells of summer grass. ‘I dunno. Yellow.’

  ‘What about her dress?’

  ‘We had to sit on the oval for ages and when the plane flew over we had to wave. The Queen was in a car and you couldn’t see anything, except everyone waving. It was dumb.’

  ‘What about the Duke?’

  Dunc makes us wait while he drinks a full glass of water. ‘Why didn’t you go yourself? The whole school went on the train and half the mothers too. You could’ve taken Sylvie. Mrs Winkie took Lizzie.’

  ‘I’m not Mrs Winkie.’

  I know this and Dunc does too. Mrs Winkie has grey hair, three chins and a strawberry birthmark on her neck shaped like a beetle. Mum has reddy-brown hair, one chin and a mole called a beauty spot near her mouth. Marilyn Monroe has two beauty spots.

  Dunc unbuckles his bag and gives us presents from Coles in the Mount. ‘I hope you didn’t waste your money,’ says Mum, sucking on her ciggie.

  Mum’s present is a cup with the Queen’s head, and a saucer with a gold crown underneath. She says Dunc shouldn’t have. Dunc has a new pocketknife with a gold crown on a red case, and blades and hooks and things that he snaps out and back under my nose. My present is a locket with a Queen’s crown on top, when I really wanted a skull ring like his. I wish I had money to waste from trapping rabbits like Dunc, instead of sixpence inside a pig that I can’t get out.

  Dunc presses my locket until the top pops up. Inside is a hole covered with a cellophane heart. ‘This is where you put the photo.’

  ‘What photo?’

  ‘Your boyfriend’s, of course.’

  ‘I don’t have a boyfriend.’

  ‘Or a lock of hair,’ says Mum.

  My hair has dead ends from the Toni Home Perm that Mum gave me when she permed hers. Mine didn’t take properly, which is why it is straight with frizzed ends. Dad says I’d be better off bald.

  In the bedroom off the kitchen, where Mum sleeps in the big bed under the window and I sleep in the bed against the wall, Dunc clips the chain around my neck.

  ‘Don’t lose it,’ he says, making slitty eyes at me in the mirror as if he can’t decide whether he is pleased with my locket or not. I move my head in the mirror light and make the gold glint. I wonder if there is time before tea to take my heart up the street to show Lizzie. She has a gold bangle, and her own bedroom. Her mother is Mrs Winkie with the beetle birthmark. Mrs Winkie also has a gold tooth.

  When I turn from the mirror, Dunc is on my bed, bouncing my dolls all over the place. ‘Don’t,’ I say as I rescue Ted, but now Marilyn is bouncing on her head and Blue Rag Doll’s arms and legs are twisted and I am full of scorching air and angry words. I squash everything inside my mouth and rescue Marilyn and ask myself why Dunc is always being nice then turning mean and tricking me. Then his new Phantom comic slides out from under my pillow. This is not meant to happen.

  Dunc bounces to a stop. ‘What’s this? Didn’t I tell you to leave my comics alone? Didn’t I?’ He rolls the Phantom into a tube and flicks my head—flick—arms—flick—ears—flick. ‘Anyway’—flick—‘you’re not even five’—flick—flick—‘you don’t go to school’—flick—flick—‘and you can’t even read’—flick—flick—flick.

  ‘I can read pictures.’ I climb onto my bed and back into the corner against the wall. ‘Mum!’ I yell, holding Ted over my head to shelter me from his hits. ‘Mum! Dunc’s messing up my bed.’

  Still she doesn’t come. Dunc stops hitting and I peep through Ted’s legs. ‘Anyway,’ he says, ‘this was my bed before it was yours.’ He pokes out his tongue so close to my nose that I can see his dangly tonsils thing. ‘I slept here for five years before you were born, and Dad slept here too, not in the spare room. You didn’t know that, did you?’

  His breath smells of licorice and mint leaves. He must have bought them at Coles and eaten the lot.

  ‘Dad used to sing me to sleep every night.’ He whispers with a licorice hiss as if it is a dirty secret. ‘He never sings to you. Does he?’

  He picks up Marilyn and holds her in front of my face. ‘You don’t even know she married Joe DiMaggio. You don’t even know who he is!’

  When I don’t answer, he whispers: ‘You don’t even know how babies are made.’ I know about the stork but he doesn’t wait for me to speak. ‘A boy puts his red ho
t poker in your black hole of Calcutta.’

  Suddenly he is gone, sliding across the floor on his socks, and my breath dropping out of me.

  In the kitchen, I hear Mum say: ‘What did you get your father?’

  ‘A beer mug with a crown in a coronation box.’

  ‘He’ll like that,’ she says.

  He does. I am fed and in bed when he comes home from Hannigan’s. I am keeping quiet and being good like Mum says I should. From my bed, I can see the stove and mantelpiece, half the table, two chairs, the bubble-glass dresser, the door to the laundry porch. When Dad comes in, I can see him but he never sees me.

  ‘What’d I do to deserve this?’ he says, messing Dunc’s hair and play-punching him. ‘It’s a beaut. Better baptise it right away.’

  ‘Haven’t you had enough?’ says Mum.

  Dad pours beer into his new mug. When he sits at the table, Fluff hops onto his lap. I send Fluff magic messages. You are my kitten. Jump down and come to me. But Fluff rolls on his back and puts his legs in the air and Dad tickles his tummy like Faye Daley’s dad tickles her.

  I put my head under the blanket. I am a wombat in a hole full of hurt and hot air. A bird is squeaking and beating inside my chest. When I burst out, the hurt is a slimy toad and Dad has finished his tickling.

  ‘Come on, Dunc,’ he says, tossing Fluff onto the floor, ‘better see what’s happening with the weather.’

  I take a running leap onto Mum’s bed so the bogeyman underneath won’t reach out and grab me. When I lift the curtain, the night is still summer-hot with no breeze; there is a smell of dry mud from the lagoon and waves boom on the beach behind the dunes.

  On the back step, I can hear Dad telling Dunc that a ring around the moon means rain in two days. The moon is low over Shorty Manne’s shaggy pines, with no ring anywhere. Dad says a star close by means wind will blow up next day. There are star spots everywhere, pale and white, with a bright one not far from the moon. But how close is close by?

  ‘Should be an okay day. Worse luck.’

  ‘You don’t like fishing, do you, Dad?’

  ‘It’s a mug’s game.’

  Mum’s voice: ‘Duncan, you’ve got school tomorrow.’

  A beer bottle clinks. ‘With horses you can tame ’em. But the sea’s ya master. You’re nothing out there.’

  ‘Can we get another horse, Dad?’

  ‘No point, mate. Racing’s a mug’s game.’

  Then Dad begins singing, softly, hardly more than a hum, his honey-brown voice sliding in through my window like a warm breeze. ‘In the cool, cool, cool of the evening…tell ’em I’ll be there—’

  Mum again: ‘Come on, Duncan, bedtime.’

  ‘Stay where you are,’ says Dad and then he tells Dunc a story about a monster he saw out past Ten Mile Rocks. A flash beneath the wave’s curl. Something lurking. ‘Could’ve been an old, sleepy hair seal swimming on the edge of the deep. But when the seagulls fly up, flapping and squawking, you can bet there’s something big about. And probably pretty darn mean.’

  ‘Duncan! Bed.’

  ‘Was it a monster, Dad?’

  ‘Could’ve been. Augie reckons he saw a tentacle curl outta the water big enough to wrap around the whole boat. Could’ve been a squid that grows up to fifty foot and weighs a couple of ton. I says to Augie, we’re getting out of here. And we did. Faster than a cut snake.’

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t tell him things like that,’ says Mum at the back door. ‘You’ll give him nightmares.’

  ‘You’re the only nightmare around here.’

  There is a drop of silence. Then Dad laughs. And after another drop, Dunc laughs too. Their laughs cackle high into the sky and now there is a laughing ring around the moon, which means rain in two days. But that laughter booms in my head like the surf behind the dunes and I curl in my bed against the wall and wonder if I smashed open my pig, could I buy Dad a present for sixpence?

  Water is up to my shins and hidden things—periwinkles, crabs and maybe stinger fish—wriggle beneath my feet. ‘Dunc!’ I yell. ‘I want to go home.’

  Dunc jumps off the reef with a silly scream. Pardie and Ken scream on their tractor tube. Gulls scream for sandwich crusts.

  ‘Du-u-u-u-u-u-nc!’ I scream.

  Suddenly there is a hole in the reef and water over my head. I choke and grab at weeds and kick and scream and swallow sea and try to swim and sink with water in my mouth and ears and suddenly no sound of anything.

  Then Dunc is there, yanking me out with strong arms, thumping me on the back.

  ‘Shit,’ he says as I cough and choke. ‘Didn’t I tell you to stay on the beach? Didn’t I?’ Thump, cough, thump. ‘Shit,’ as he leads me ashore and sits me in the shelter of the old boat that lies on its side in the sand. ‘Shit,’ as he wraps his towel over my shoulders with kind, clumsy hands. But when Pardie and Kenny come to gawk: ‘Now stay here, like I told ya. And don’t tell Mum.’

  When they leave I watch the jetty dancing on criss-crossed legs all the way to the end. The cold has climbed up my nose, even my hair shivers. I try to find Dad’s boat in the middle of the others, but although the Henrietta is the biggest in the fleet, there are too many boats. The sun warms the top of my head but my teeth still rattle in fright and my fingers are witchetty grubs, wrinkled and white. Then, as I dig in the warm sand, right there under my hand is buried treasure, paper money with the new Queen’s head on it.

  I run to the change sheds. Two big girls are smoking in the dunnies but I dress with my back to them and don’t let them see my money. I leave my bathers and towel in the old boat with Dunc’s towel, then I run along the sea wall, past Denver Boland’s big white house, past the rotunda and the harbourmaster’s house, over the road to Mrs Cronk’s shop.

  Mrs Cronk looks like a fox with bushy, red hair. Her eyes behind her glasses are bigger than her mouth. Her shop is opposite the playground, near the roundabout with the big pine. Once she told us to stay off the slippery slide if we couldn’t use it properly, that we’d break our necks going down backwards. Faye Daley gave her the rude sign and Mrs Cronk called out that she’d wallop the living daylights out of us if she had more time. Her shop smells of mothballs. The holiday people who stay in the rooms above smell the same. So do the cottons and wool and knitting needles, the hats and beach towels.

  My friend Lizzie is at the counter with her big sister, Mary, who is home from boarding school in the Mount for the weekend. ‘A pound!’ says Mary when I show her my money. ‘Finders keepers. What are you going to buy?’

  ‘A present. A present for my Dad.’

  Mrs Cronk looks at me with her magnified eyes as if she recognises me from the park. Then she says she has just the thing; it is a piece of round glass with the Queen’s head inside. She says it is a paperweight to put on your papers. I can’t think why Dad would want the Queen sitting on his paper because when he’s finished with it, Mum tears out the crossword and screws up the pages to start the fire. Mrs Cronk says one day it will be a collector’s piece. Mary and Lizzie don’t say anything and when I look up, they are at the shop window.

  ‘The circus,’ says Mary, grabbing Lizzie’s hand, turning to me. ‘Want to come?’ Then she sees my pound on the counter and Mrs Cronk’s fox fingers scratching towards it. Mary gets it first. ‘Don’t lose it,’ she hisses as we push through the door. ‘You give it away when you buy something.’ She pulls Lizzie and me past the petrol bowser.

  All the way from Stickynet Bridge to the harbourmaster’s house, people are running off the beach to watch the circus crawl into town. Dunc is propped on his bike across the road when he should be looking after me and not letting me out of his sight for one minute. I want to show him my pound but he is blocked from my view by a car with fins bigger than the white pointer Dad caught off West End. Then vans with curtained windows and trucks with high sides covered in painted lions and clowns with fat lips and sad eyes. Then an elephant on a tray truck with chains on his feet and one angry eye that looks right into
mine. And a camel with a long waving neck and yellow teeth, but no real lions or tigers or monkeys or bears.

  Mary says they are inside the cages with boards on the side and we have to get to the oval to see them unloaded. She says there are jobs and free tickets but we have to hurry.

  ‘Come on!’ she says as the last truck turns at the roundabout pine. Pardie, Dunc and Kenny are already tailing the trucks and vans on their bikes. She says we’ll take a short cut and yanks Lizzie and me across the street, through the park and under the pines near the fish factory. At the goods shed, with its wide-open doors and black hole under the floor that sometimes hides tramps and once a dead dog, she pulls us onto the railway track. ‘Hurry!’ she says, showing us how to jump from sleeper to sleeper.

  I don’t like this two-handed closeness. I try to get free but I am tied to Mary like an extra-long arm. I am afraid the train will come and we’ll be squashed flat but when I look back there are only two rail tracks running into the scrub and a huge blue sky above.

  When we get to the spot behind the oval where the circus sets up, Dunc and the others are already there. ‘Damn, shit, damn,’ says Mary, going straight to the man in the cowboy hat. He says she is too late, that he has all the help he needs. Mary says she worked for him last year, doesn’t he remember? He says for God’s sake he travels all over Australia, does she think he remembers every kid he meets?

  ‘I’m not every kid. You said I was the best girl worker you’d ever had. You put your hand up my jumper and told me I had the juiciest apples you’d ever seen. Remember?’

  Lizzie and I look at Mary’s apples. So does the man. ‘Creep,’ she says, pulling us away from him.

  Lizzie and I pretend we can’t see angry tears on Mary’s freckles. We follow her past the monkey’s cage without stopping; Mary says she hates their red bottoms. Behind the vans, the circus people are stringing up clotheslines and unpacking pots. A lady with yellow hair says: ‘Clear off out of here.’

  ‘Make me,’ says Mary, and we run, cheeking and giggling, towards the clearing where the big tent is spread on the ground with circus men banging in pegs and Dunc lumping a hay bale towards the animal cages. Then a loud shriek and a fur ball leaps onto a van before running along the top and swinging onto a cable connected to a trailer.