True Country Page 14

Liz grabbed her by the arm. ‘Out! Get out this minute!’

  The two girls ran before her, and Beatrice walked by her side. Liz wanted Beatrice to struggle so that she could restrain her, use some sort of force. ‘I’ll be seeing Uncle Moses about this, you’ll see. You can’t just go into people’s houses like this you know!’

  ‘We always do, with our houses.’

  ‘Other kids in here too, Miss.’

  ‘What? What other kids? In here?’

  ‘Yes, Miss. All ’em. Beatrice first. We just followed her, Miss.’

  Beatrice smiled up at Liz. She still had not spoken. Liz shook her. She remained silent. Her smile stayed.

  ‘They took stuff, Miss. Your clothes, Miss.’

  ‘You tell all them kids to get that stuff back. Go! I’m seeing Uncle Moses and anything missing will come from your parents’ pays. You three, Beatrice, Isobel, Rosenda, make sure you tell the others.’

  Isobel and Rosenda ran off. Beatrice jogged behind them, then ran to catch them up and tried to push them over. Liz felt like crying. She went into their bedroom. Clothing was strewn across the room and the drawers and wardrobe doors were open. Her make-up had been used, the bedclothes were rumpled. She got out a pen and paper and began making a list of what was missing.

  Liz and Billy went over to the office to report what had happened. Some of the small children on the basketball court were running around, laughing, with Billy and Liz’s underwear pulled over their heads.

  Moses was surprised at what had happened. ‘It’s no good. These parents are not looking after their kids. Some people are too soft with them too.’ He looked at them a moment longer than necessary, and asked if they knew the kids. They told him. They told him what was missing. They gave him the list.

  Gerrard was not surprised. ‘Little sods. This used to happen all the time when I was in Warburton. What are you going to do?’

  When they were walking home they saw Beatrice walking toward them. She had on one of Liz’s jackets. She was beaming. They stopped her. She smiled at them. Liz grabbed her arm and started taking the jacket off her. Beatrice made no protest.

  ‘Beatrice, what are you doing? You can’t do this.’

  Liz released her grip on the child, and Beatrice simply continued walking.

  ‘Bye Miss.’ It was already a surprise to hear her speak.

  Stella was at their gate with her daughter, Beatrice, at about sunset that day. She gripped the girl’s arm severely.

  ‘This girl in your house today?’ Stella shook Beatrice like a doll. ‘She using your things? I’m sorry, I don’t know why...’ Stella was upset. She shook that girl again. ‘Say sorry.’ Beatrice mumbled something. Her face all puffy from crying. ‘Now I show you, I’ll whip her here. You’ll see.’ Beatrice cried out to her mother for pity, and Billy and Liz watched as Stella began hitting Beatrice across the buttocks with a stick taken from a tree. Beatrice’s cries tore at them all and made Stella more angry, more confused.

  Liz muttered, ‘Stop, oh...’ and said, ‘Stella, thanks for your concern. We don’t know why, we don’t understand. Beatrice is such a good girl, usually. One of the best.’ She said this for Beatrice, believing it.

  Stella still clutched Beatrice’s arm. ‘I wanted to show that my kids don’t get away with, don’t break into teachers’ houses, don’t steal things. They make me wild. This one, she givin’ trouble all the time now.’ She hauled Beatrice roughly away, the child sobbing and stumbling to keep up with her mother.

  ‘Bye Stella.’ Billy and Liz looked at one another, turned for their door, went inside.

  Aliens

  Children: elbows splayed, tongues protruding, heads close to desktops; their calloused bare toes gripping the desk rails, their weeping boils forgotten for the moment. The children at their schoolwork.

  Beatrice slid out of her seat. She walked behind Cyril and punched him on the back of the head. Liz’s searching gaze swung up as Cyril yelped. Her eyes settled on Beatrice, and warned of trouble.

  Beatrice, on a sea of her own, drifted toward Liz, drawn by that stare, and halted, abruptly, at the edge of the teacher’s desk.

  The small girl rocked gently on her feet as she suffered a reprimand. Suffered? She tilted her head from side to side as if listening to an internal clock tick-tocking. Her eyes were wide and unblinking, a small smile touched her lips. She did not respond to Liz’s questions. She seemed like in a dream.

  ‘You can’t go around just hitting people like that! Not in my class you don’t!’ Liz spoke sternly, growing angrier at the child’s indifference. The last sentence was a shout.

  A shout that jerked Beatrice’s head back stiffly. Her cheeks sucked in, and released with an expulsion of air. A glob of spittle sailed proudly through the air toward Liz, and landed on the desk before her startled face.

  Beatrice pirouetted to face the class, all of whom sat dropjawed and goggle-eyed at the spectacle. Beatrice, tiny sweet Beatrice, raised her right fist in triumph.

  ‘Yaah!’ she screamed, laughed, and the children giggled their embarrassment.

  At first people thought, Raphael! It must be him. He maybe bashed Beatrice for stealing into Billy and Liz’s house. But after a time they knew the truth. There really was something wrong with Beatrice.

  At school she listened to no one, see, and would simply get up and walk out of the room, or hit the other children, or throw things. Whatever came into her head. You cross her and she scream, spit, bite, kick, punch. And Billy or Alex would come running to carry her away in a bear hug.

  Yes, the teachers spoke to Moses, the chairman, and to her parents. They didn’t know what.

  Beatrice stole things from the store. Everyone looking at her. She fought with the other children, and adults even.

  In the store Beatrice attacked Francis. She grabbed his spectacles and threw them away, giggling. He clumsily struck out at her, and she felt the blow and came at him with her limbs spinning like a cartoon fighter in a cloud of dust and swearing.

  She walked into him, a kicking, punching, screaming, swearing devil, and poor Franny; sixteen years old, a big boy, he broke before her madness. He rushed for the door sending cans of food and shopping tumbling into his path, jostling and pushing at people to get past. Beatrice ran after him. Everybody was laughing, ‘Aiee! Wild one! Look! Look at that devil girl.’

  But they stopped. They had to. They had to grab her. Franny fallen over, and Beatrice standing over him kicking and throwing cans of food and stuff at him, screaming screamingscreaming screaming.

  Milton grabbed her, he gathered her up in his arms and carried her off, still struggling and shrieking, to Raphael.

  He might have belted her then. We heard her screaming, and Raphael, and Stella. Gloria too. He always bash his women, maybe his daughter.

  No one knew what to do.

  She was crazy.

  She got crazier. Sometimes she just sat down, for a long time, rocking herself, or crying, or with her face vacant and responding to no one. There was no one home there.

  The doctor flew in. Lights flashed down long tunnels at her. Her chest was tapped. She giggled at pale fingers and tongues of cold metal.

  They took her to Wyndham for tests, and Stella went with her. She was pregnant again. Crazy Beatrice and her swollen mother flew in a little plane to Wyndham and Raphael stayed behind.

  Samson arranged to bring in some beer and flagons on the plane that came for them. So, for a couple of days while crazy Beatrice sat wide-eyed with nurses, crispsheets, antiseptic fumes curling around her, we also had crazy people around us here, shouting and fighting one another and haunted by their own alcoholic ghosts.

  But at Wyndham they didn’t know. They could find no bruises or breaks to support the idea—the hospital people said things at coffee and biscuits—that she’d been treated bad by her parents or relations. Bashed, or worse. They poked her with their dry pink fingers, but found no evidence of sexual abuse.

  The doctors thought it might be meni
ngitis from the water. We drink it straight from the river.

  Beatrice and her swelling mother went to Darwin Hospital for tests. Beatrice was mostly quiet now, sitting rocking rocking, and humming, her eyes unblinking.

  Her mother sat with her, swelling all the time. Stella’s ankles were all soft and spongy, and in the mornings she vomited. Beatrice didn’t seem to recognise her.

  Stella wasn’t happy. Her daughter being like that. And she was lonely, and perhaps she or her new baby might catch the craziness from Beatrice.

  But then, everyone here seemed mad. They gave her and Beatrice a room of their own. Stella sat in a corner, she pushed herself into a corner by the window and looked out through the gaps in the venetian blinds, down on the car park below. Both Stella and Beatrice wore ill-fitting hospital gowns. Sometimes they just stared at one another. Like standing in front of one of them funny mirrors, thought Stella.

  Pale people spoke to them, but didn’t listen, or couldn’t understand. Stella heard their stabbing heels and laughter ricocheting down corridors, fading away, returning louder from another direction.

  Sometimes it got so that they had to strap Beatrice down on her bed, she was so wild and violent. The first time this happened Stella stood shocked, for a moment. Then she attacked the attendants, her thick voice, usually so soft, tensing up into shrieks and curses. They had to grab her. White soapy scented people ran at her and pulled her away with their soft hands, but the bones so hard beneath the flesh.

  So was she going crazy too?

  They explained things to her. She didn’t want to stay. The air was bad, there was the food and the cold hard toilets. The humming silence, the echoes, the crisp sheets and stainless steel.

  But she had to stay with her daughter. Even if she went crazy with her, or locked the door and swelled herself up enough to fill the room and crush the both of them. Three of them.

  She rang Raphael. He’d have to come and rescue them, or help somehow.

  A Journey

  The high school mob went to Darwin. After two days on the rough track the bus rolled onto the bitumen rattling like a money box, and with lengths of rope and towing cable holding up the fuel tank.

  On the first night that they camped Fatima, Liz and the girls went down to a creek to wash the hot dusty day from them. They waded in. Liz threw off her clothes and immersed herself in the flow, the bubbles tickling along her belly and the rocks smooth and cool on her flanks. Her pale skin glowed in this landscape and light. Some of the girls joined her, bodies glistening in the fading sun, small flecks of foam fleeing from them in the darkening water, their voices teasing Fatima who squatted in her wet clothes, frowning. But she had to laugh too, couldn’t help herself it seemed.

  They came back to the fire, the colours of the tents draining away with the light, and they were like a tribe approaching the flames.

  In the tents that night. ‘Just like us, the same, but red hair there, too.’

  ‘Hey Raphael, Raphael!’ Deslie called out. And there was Raphael, in a taxi, in the middle of Darwin, just like that. They ran over to the taxi as it waited at the traffic lights, and Raphael told them he was going to the hospital to see Stella and Beatrice, and they told him where they were staying. Then, green light, traffic moving, he was swept away just as if he was in the river at home.

  ‘No door handle,’ said keen-eyed Deslie, puzzled, as they walked toward the glass front of the hospital reception.

  ‘Automatic door.’ Sylvester read it.

  ‘Aiee! Like videos, you know. You stand, it opens for you, eh Sir?’ said Franny, peering at Billy with his head thrown back and those thick glasses of his balancing on his nose.

  Young Jimmy and Deslie ran to the door, and stopped hesitantly before it. The door yawned, they leapt through.

  A nurse led them into the elevator. They all crammed in together quietly enough but, squeezed together, the screams of ‘Oh, my guts!’ as the elevator rocketed them upwards, and the giggles, vibrated through them all as one mass.

  They followed the nurse’s stiff white dress and rapid pattering shoes through narrow sharp corridors and among hard glossy surfaces.

  There was a small room. There, huddled in a dark corner and away from the dim window, was a figure. There, in a creased nightgown was Stella. Her face opened like a surprise, they saw something like fear, and she burst into tears. She held the older girls, and she held Fatima, and she wept, laughing. Smiling once, twice at Billy and Liz through blinking eyelids and tears.

  They ate on the lawn by the car park, far below the shrinking room, and breathed properly once more. They moved in close together, and touching now and then, watched the people walking to and from the reception area; watched for anyone who hesitated before the automatic door.

  Beatrice hugged her knees. She let no one in. ‘She’s better, she knows you.’ The girl rocked herself gently, her blank face occasionally manifesting a glorious smile, a smile so powerful that it would animate everyone for a time.

  ‘I ... I dunno if...’

  It was getting too much for Stella. The hospital wanted her to remain, for the child’s sake. And she was able to control Beatrice when she went wild, better than anyone else anyway.

  Like we said, they had to strap her down, tie her up, stab her with big needles, fill her with drugs. Maybe that helped make her like she was now.

  Stella needed a break. Raphael had come but he’d gone again. He was like a child himself and no help.

  They took her with them for the couple of days they were in Darwin, driving around in their grubby bus, with the kids ogling the shiny cars, and racing one another to be first to shout ‘My car’ and thus gain imaginary possession of it. And fighting about this. She was with them when they surreptitiously grabbed at the fish the tourists fed at Doctor’s Gully, teased the caged crocodiles at the crocodile farm and stroked the stuffed one in the museum. They went roller skating one evening but only Deslie, Billy and Liz got onto skates. The others were too shy. Too many gardiya. And the girls they saw smoking in the toilets, why they thought they were too good. There were some in there, half-castes, they thought they was film stars themselves.

  The hostel where they stayed had a swimming pool. Most of the other residents, mostly young international backpackers, lay around it, working on their suntans. Billy and Liz commented on two of the schoolgirls, Stacie and Rita, talking to a young Swedish girl in the pool. The three of them breast deep in water against the side of the pool, in intimate conversation, and Rita, quite unselfconsciously, stroking the girl’s blonde hair as she spoke to her.

  The school kids took over the pool. They played chasey in and around it. Leaping in and out like amphibians, noisily, innocent of pretension. Only once was there trouble. Some young European men, perhaps German, began playing a casual game of water volleyball across the heads of the black teenagers. One aimed at Deslie’s head, and guffawed as he bounced the ball from it. Deslie smiled sheepishly, and made apologetic words as he swam away. The Germans laughed more, and another pretended to take aim. Maybe tears of confusion came to Deslie’s eyes.

  Then hot-headed Liz’s voice cut through the braying, and she stormed over and snatched the ball from the young man. The dark youths gathered around their teacher as she marched off to give the ball to the receptionist.

  Fatima spent time at the hospital with Stella, but she didn’t like it. They didn’t like you chewing tobacco. There was nothing to do, except wonder at Beatrice, and talk—enough to frighten one another—about why she was like she was.

  It was a comfort to look down at the car park. The coloured cars silently going in and out, patiently waiting for their drivers, the little people fast-stepping about.

  The doctors didn’t know what was wrong with Beatrice. They were sending her to Perth now, for tests, and for other doctors to look at and poke.

  Raphael arrived at the hostel on their last night there. His voice echoed in the dimly lit and late night corridor, ‘Jimmy, Jimmy, you here?’ A
hoarse, slurred whisper. Everyone had gone to bed. Billy recognised the voice and went out into the corridor. Raphael was drunk and his breath was tainted with stale beer, cigarettes, and vomit.

  ‘Hey Billy, sorry. I come see my little cousin-brother, Jimmy, eh? He here, Sir?’ His voice wheedled a little.

  They spoke softly together. Raphael seemed a happy, quiet drunk here in Darwin. He faced the stairwell. Behind his back one of the bedroom doors opened. The head of one of the older girls appeared around the corner of it. Her eyes were wide, to see as much and as quickly as possible. Her glance met Billy’s gaze. She raised her eyebrows in a query, grinned. Her head withdrew. The door closed softly.

  ‘But, they’re asleep, mate. You’ve had a few drinks, eh? You might go silly. Kids, you know. They might get stupid.’

  Raphael put his arm around Billy. They were walking down the stairs. ‘It’s good to see you, you know. I miss my home, you know. You?’

  There was someone waiting for them downstairs. Looking furtive, and trapped, Bruno waited for them in the shadows by a public telephone. ‘Hey.’ He swaggered over to them. A couple of the young men from the swimming pool stared and smirked.

  ‘Hey, you got ten bucks for me? Pay you back, true god.’

  They went down the street and had a beer. Bruno put his arm around Billy. ‘I respect you, Sir, you know, I respect you.’ He was tapping his own chest. He was hitting his chest, hard. ‘I respect you, true.’

  Raphael pushed him away. ‘Leave him you, let him be.’ He put his back to Bruno and faced Billy. Bruno pushed his way back in.

  ‘We had a fight, Raphael and me. See?’ He pointed to his swollen lip. ‘Raphael, he hit me. He put me down. Boom. On me bum.’ He laughed.

  ‘He’s drunk, don’t worry,’ said Raphael, slurring his words, and pushing Bruno away again. The barman was keeping an eye on them.

  ‘Hey, you got ten bucks, for me?’ said Raphael. ‘Don’t give him nothin’.’ One of Raphael’s front teeth was missing.

  Billy didn’t want to give them money, because, because ... He gave them an equal amount each, and couldn’t but feel patronising, and condescending, whatever he did. He felt shame for them.