Pat catches my eyes on him and brushes something invisible from his pants.
‘You remember everything?’
Suddenly I’m afraid. Have I packed all the knowledge?
‘’Cause we’re not comin’ back,’ he says with a big fat full stop.
‘But I don’t know all the galaxies or what disease emphysema is.’
Pat rolls his eyes.
I’ve got it wrong again. People don’t always use words to say what they think. Sometimes it can be a long unblinking stare from the other side of Parker Street one Tuesday arvo that burns like a branding iron. ‘Go back’ is what those eyes mark on your shadow so you’re always in the wrong place no matter where you are. Right now I’m using that eye-talk with Pat. He hasn’t said anything about the boat so I don’t know if he thinks he’s coming too. I give him this cowboy glare that says ‘Sorry mate it’s not on the cards. Not even the four of spades. This is a family trip and you and me are not that.’
I know the boat will be made out of metal. Or wood. I just don’t know where it is yet. But I will feel it in my waters as Margie says about the rain that mostly always never comes. She’s eighty-nine and has lived in Beyen forever. This town is the beginning, middle and end of the whole world for her. Margie’s life map is very small but mine is just about to start. A single crack in the dry earth travelling east from the middle of nowhere to the wide, open sea.
Sometimes I find my way into memories that aren’t mine. Saturday just gone I walked past a lady picking up pork ribs from Gary the butcher, and suddenly I’m at her kitchen table watching as she plays gin rummy with the girls, cackling like galahs when Theodora says that Ian sleepwalked into the kitchen and peed into the geranium pot by the window but, gee, hasn’t it flowered well since then. I’m only there for a few seconds before I get sucked back out, but I know a lot of people in this town and the secret things they do. I didn’t ask for that kind of knowing and sometimes I wish I could shut it off, especially when I see things I don’t want to. Like Mr Kelly’s grandson who lives in Adelaide but comes here for the holidays. I passed him one day sitting on the front porch. Looked into his eyes and watched as he drowned a cat in a bucket of water behind Mr Kelly’s back shed. It was all gone in a flash and when I looked back at him sitting on the porch, he held up a kitten for me to see. Cuddled it close to his chest and smiled.
I had a kitty once, called Ashtray. He’d cuddle close to me as well, purr loud as a lawnmower. Did Mr Kelly’s grandson know that too? People like him are why you keep your eyes to yourself. When I told Mum about the things I saw, I thought she’d say, ‘It’s only a hop, skip and a jump from heaven to hell for telling a lie.’ But she whispered that life was full of things we could not understand. That it must be hard to suddenly see a glimpse of what makes people tick, for better or worse.
I won’t be taking any of those memories with me if I can help it. Got no room for drowned cats or potplant pee.
Brown foam bulges out from under the wrecked car-seat cover and I think the whole world is second-hand. What does new smell and look like? How do you feel if you’re pretty? The engine chokes on its own smoke and splutters into action. We pull out and follow the sun as it rises. No one but us, like we called ahead and booked out the whole damn road. If we were bandits on the run, we’d have special names like Fury and the Tadpole. Or Buster and the Choc Drop. But in this bomb-of-a-ute, held together with rust and rubber bands, it’s just me and Pat and the only thing chasing us is a tornado of dust. It spurts out from the tyres and hits the back window like a hazy brown blanket.
You’d think it just being the two of us we’d have a cracker of a conversation going but Pat’s sold all his words for a big slice of silence. Clenches the wheel so hard it looks like his knuckles are gonna pop through the skin. And when someone has angry hands you don’t talk. But I know we’re thinking the same thing—that it’s my fault she’s not here. True enough, I’ve never been very good at keeping people around and now I’m basically an orphan. Although Pat’s grumpy like Daddy Warbucks (without the bucks) it’s really not at all like Annie.
Pat’s not my dad. He’s Mum’s boyfriend. Was. Now everything is past and I’m not sure what he is to me. Or vice versa.
Dad’s the one who made me black. A darkness so deep down you cannot take it out or scrape it off.
Besides I’m fourteen and by now it’s probably seeped into my bone marrow. Even though Mum had the safe kind of skin, I only got it on my palms and the soles of my feet. Not much good there. Maybe none of that matters anymore because this is the end of the beginning.
We’re coming up to the Red River Hotel. Might as well have been Pat’s second home. I bet he’s scared that the magic will happen without him. But just because you believe in something, doesn’t make it true. Mum said he was stupid to fill a metal box with a gas bill or a week’s worth of shopping. Pat goes there a lot because he can’t sleep and the lights are so bright that night is always day. They all know his name, the tap beer he likes and the pokie where he has to sit. One time he got into a fight because Les was at his machine, so Pat tipped Les’s cup on the floor and everyone scrambled to pick up the coins like they were piñata lollies.
But the Red River’s also where Mum used to work. She was only supposed to stay for a year, making her way around Australia one pub at a time. Mum was like some kind of exotic bird with her French accent. They used to joke about lining the floor of the bar with mattresses on account of all the fellas falling head over heels. Including my dad. And, even though there are black people in Paris, maybe he was kind of exotic to Mum too. At first they got on lovely because Dad wanted to make a go of it for real. But there was a complicated knot in Dad’s head, and when it got too twisted, things got bad. Snap, bang, heart’s in your mouth pounding like a racehorse. A hand whips across Mum’s face and she holds her cheek, red with slap burn. Dad slams the door so hard the whole house shakes.
Dad gave me my skin. It’s not really his fault though ’cause he got the blackness from his dad. That’s called a legacy, which is usually a good thing like having a five-octave singing voice or being double-jointed. I can only click my knuckles when it gets real cold. Mum kept saying my skin was special, that it brought people and places together. ‘Who and where?’ I used to ask, but she’d just look out the window at something that wasn’t there. Mum didn’t want to scare me but I already knew.
My grandad William Freeman is a bottom-of-the-well kind of black. Darkly deep and deeply dark, a no-way-out kind of black that cracks the pavement wide open and swallows you whole. That kind of legacy’s no good. Neither is my surname. I don’t know why I got stuck with Freeman because I don’t feel free at all, having this blackness weigh me down. Even though my skin is one shade lighter than my dad’s and two shades lighter than William Freeman’s, it’s still dark enough to bring me trouble. Back gate banging in the wind. Black like a wolf running through the night panting with hunger. It might tear down the door with its sharp nails and turn into a ball of smoke, which I’d accidentally breathe in. Have that wolf hibernate in my chest and make me do bad things. When I told Mum about the smoky wolf she took me to a lady doctor to have a chat about it all, but she just sat there and made me play with emotion-face cards. Like I was a baby or something. The blackness always made me feel wrong. Sometimes we’d go for a walk and people would look at me and then glance at Mum. Like we didn’t fit together. Once, a fat boy with a yellow front tooth rode past on a bike and called me Sambo. It sounded like a pretty word but Mum chased after him. Couldn’t hear what she said but that boy turned around and stared me down for the longest time. He saw the wolf and the wolf saw him.