Friday Brown (5 page)

She waved her hand—a dismissive flick—and Malik pulled her back down onto the mattress. Her dreadlocks coiled over her shoulder.

The tattoo on her back was harsh against her skin. It read:

No
more
tears
now.
I
will
think
upon
revenge.

A wicked-sharp knife was tattooed beneath the script.

‘Mary, Queen of Scots,’ Arden said when she noticed my stare.

‘Are you Scottish?’ I asked.

‘Am I Scottish?’ She looked at Malik and snorted. ‘No.’ Her gaze slid back to me. ‘I am vengeful.’ She laughed hard and pressed her hand against her stomach. ‘You should see your face.’

Silence moved towards the stairs.

I followed him and reached behind to shut the door.

At the same time, Arden ducked beneath the sheet and Malik arched his back, as if he was being drawn upward by an invisible thread.

My hand on the doorknob, I was torn between repulsion and fascination. The moment lasted a few seconds, but it was a drawn-out, painful reminder of Vivienne and the nights her door was closed to me.

‘Leave it open,’ Arden said.

CHAPTER FIVE

We judge others by their appearance: their eyes, their expression, their clothes or hair.

I learned also to judge a person by their shoes.

I could only put it down to the many nights I spent dozing under pool tables in front bars while Vivienne used her considerable intellect to pull beers so she could scrape together enough money for us to live.

My earliest memories were about shoes. Vivienne wouldn’t leave me alone in a motel room and we never stayed in a town long enough to learn who to trust. She’d tuck me under the pool table with a blanket and a packet of chips; I’d doze to the sound of balls ricocheting off the cushion and the clink of pint glasses on teeth. I learned to reset the jukebox when a song played four times in a row and a drunk patron grew maudlin. I watched feet
shuffle around the table: leather boots were working men; scuffed flats meant waitress-on-a-break; when stiletto heels got wobbly they went outside with leather boots; thongs were well-worn drunks who slipped me fruit-cups under the table; bare brown feet with splayed toes were indigenous locals. Sometimes, there would be a stranger in wedge heels or sandals, or black courts you could see your face in, which meant the Jehovahs were doing country service. There wasn’t much I couldn’t figure out without ever seeing a person’s face.

Downstairs, only Darcy was still in the kitchen. She sat cross-legged on a crate, plucking at the laces on her sneakers. They had been white—now they were covered with puff-paint graffiti and black Texta symbols.

‘Are you in or out?’ she asked bluntly.

Silence put his thumb up.

‘In, I guess,’ I said.

‘Oh goody, an induction,’ she said.

‘What happens at an induction?’ I asked. My stomach was doing flip-flops.

Carrie breezed back into the kitchen. ‘You pledge your allegiance and we sacrifice a virgin. Oh, that’d be you, Darce,’ she said wide-eyed.

I couldn’t help it. I laughed. All the emotion that had been boiling and festering since I’d left Grandfather’s house overflowed. I made my first enemy without even trying.

Darcy fired a poisonous look and stormed out.

‘Don’t worry about her. She pulls faces at blind
people. See you guys tonight.’ Carrie heaved a bag over her shoulder and left.

Silence wrote in his notebook.

Do you have a sleeping bag?

‘I have the swag,’ I said.

He nodded and led me to a bedroom with scarred floorboards and a sagging ceiling. There were three mattresses. Two showed signs of occupation: pillows, unzipped sleeping bags and jumbled clothes. A make-up bag, an open book and a one-eyed teddy bear. The spare mattress, leaning up against a wall, was bare and stained.

‘Who sleeps here?’

Carrie and Bree,
he wrote.

‘How many of you are there?’

Eight. Nine with you.

‘Are you all renting?’

He shook his head.
Squatting.

‘How long have you all been here?’

Silence held up six fingers.

‘Six months?’

I tipped the mattress onto the floor and a cloud of dust exploded in our faces.

Silence sneezed. Upstairs a floorboard creaked and he looked up, holding his breath.

Come on.

‘Where are we going?’

Work.

I went to pick up my backpack but Silence gestured
for me to leave it. I stuffed the photo into my jeans pocket and followed.

We left the way we came, through the cellar window. Outside, the sun was warm and the air was still, expectant. We scrambled through the trapdoor fence, into the alleyway. I noted the street name—Jacaranda Lane—and paid attention to landmarks as we made our way back into the city. Individual corner shops and houses gave way to office blocks and furniture stores. Then came the multistorey towers, malls and tramlines.

Breathing felt like inhaling soup.

Silence walked with his head down, shoulders hunched, as if he was heading into a gale-force wind.

So, he picked up strays. I was officially a stray. A street kid. I’d heard about them, read about them. Maybe living on the street was a kind of freedom. Or was it a sentence? It felt like freedom to me then.

We passed under a bridge and walked along a path next to a slow-moving brown river. I kept well away from it. Cyclists whizzed past. I felt lighter without my backpack, or maybe it was more than that. There was a weight gone, a physical burden. It was nice to be
led.

Silence seemed to be looking for something, or someone. He veered off through a brick arch and into a park. Not just any old park—there the trees were massive and ancient. They blocked out the buildings and I could barely see the sky. Beyond the canopy, pieces of blue like a broken puzzle and the sound of bickering birds. It was like finding the Secret Garden in the middle of a desert.

Silence stripped a handful of birch seeds and crushed them in his hand. He threw them up into the sky and they coasted on the breeze like a swarm of insects.

‘Where are we going?’

He pointed to a glasshouse.

‘What’s in there?’

He cupped his hands together and made a movement like a fish.

‘We’re going fishing?’

He snorted and shot off, weaving through trees and shrubs, taking paths that looked like they weren’t often taken.

When I got to the glasshouse, he was already there, sitting on the edge of a circular bricked pond. The water was dark green and murky. Silence bent over and dipped the tip of his nose into the water. I watched him as hundreds of tiny fish swarmed beneath his reflection, nibbling at him. His teeth flashed white, he laughed, his breath dimpled the surface and they darted away.

‘I like it here,’ I said.

He jumped, like he’d forgotten I was there.

Me too.

Then his mind came back from a faraway place. His mouth was tight and he walked out of the glasshouse, his hands deep in his pockets. That resolute walk, like he was late for an appointment.

I ran to catch up. We passed a small lake. Turtles bobbed at the edges and a one-legged heron perched on a rock. There was a kiosk and tables with red and white
striped umbrellas. Thirty or so Japanese tourists vied for a place in the queue, long-lens cameras swinging from their shoulders.

Silence moved into the line.

I waited at one of the tables and pulled out the photo. I stared at the man with his arm around Vivienne’s shoulder. It reminded me that I was there for a reason—to find him. If he wanted to be found. If he didn’t, it would be another dead end and a new beginning for me.

Part of me wanted to go back to the last place I was happy—before Vivienne got sick—a little town up north. A friendly street, a sun-soaked place where nobody stared at my bare feet and tangled hair. I went to the local high school and started Year Twelve, even though technically I hadn’t finished Year Eleven before we left the last town.

Silence was having a conversation with one of the tourists, moving his hands in a language of his own. He pulled his hood away from his hair and mussed the front.

A woman laughed. She touched his hair. She nodded and bowed and said, ‘Yes, yes! You have photo? Yes?’

Silence seemed embarrassed.
No, no.

The woman pointed at him and some of the others smiled and raised their cameras. She put her arm around his shoulder.

I saw how still he was. Lines of concentration on his forehead.

He moved away from her.

No, no,
he waved his hand. Abruptly, Silence left the line.

I knew that look already. That casual swagger. I stood and put the photo back in my pocket.

The Japanese tourist who had found Silence so engaging was at the front of the queue. She was digging in her bag. I knew her hand would come up empty.

Silence kept moving towards me.

I met him halfway.

As he fumbled and tried to shove the purse down the front of his jeans, I grabbed it and hid it behind my back. I moved smoothly into the line.

The woman wailed and spat rapid-fire Japanese. She turned and pointed at Silence.

He was frozen, probably torn between saving himself and waiting for me. That moment of hesitation was his downfall; a tour-bus driver in khaki shorts grabbed him by the shoulder and pinned him there. Silence wriggled and twisted but the driver had him by his hoodie.

‘Is this yours?’ I stooped and pretended to pick up the purse. ‘You must have dropped it.’

The woman put her arm down. She took the purse and bowed, red-faced.

The driver let Silence go.

Silence milked it. He tugged his hoodie back into place and scowled.

‘Sorry, mate,’ the driver said. ‘Lots of purse snatchings lately.’

I stood, incredulous, as the Japanese woman pressed a
ten-dollar note into my palm. She peeled off another and handed it to Silence. He bowed. She bowed back. The two of them looked like a couple of bobbing birds.

I grabbed Silence’s hand and pulled him away. We sat on a flight of cold stone steps overlooking a water fountain.

Silence’s ears were pink and he wouldn’t look at me.

‘That was stupid,’ I said. ‘How many times a day do you do that?’

He held up three fingers, then flicked up a fourth.

‘And is that what you call
work?’

Yes.

‘Is that what the others call
work,
too?’

Some.

‘It’s theft, is what it is. What if you took that poor woman’s passport and she couldn’t go home? What happens if you steal a man’s wallet and his kids can’t eat?’

Silence let his shoulders drop. He looked down at his feet.

‘Aren’t you scared of getting caught?’ My voice was shrill. ‘Why do you do this?’

He shrugged again. He pulled out his notebook and wrote:
I need to make $200 a week.

‘For what? To live?’

To stay.

Silence jerked to his feet and beckoned me to follow. We traipsed along a sawdust pathway between rows of shedding plane trees, through an archway draped with vines, and into a clearing. He pushed his way through
a cluster of bamboo stalks and stooped to prise open a green box that looked like an old water meter. The lid flipped open and he stood there, shamefaced.

There was a graveyard of wallets and purses scattered in the bottom of the pit.

I sucked in my breath, then let it out with a whistle. ‘You’re pretty good at this,’ I said. ‘You’re the Artful friggin’ Dodger, reincarnated.’

Silence frowned. I think he knew it wasn’t meant to be a compliment.

‘If you need money, I’ll give you what I have. You can’t keep doing this. How old are you, anyway?’

He gave me three bunches of fives.

‘You’ll have to find another way to make a living. First this, then you’ll graduate to home invasions and muggings.’

Silence looked mortified. He put the lid back on the box and dusted off his hands.

‘How do we get out of here? I’m hungry.’ I changed the subject because all those lost things made me feel unbearably sad.

Silence took me to a takeaway shop in a dirty street full of bars with blacked-out windows. Sandwich boards advertised happy hours and silhouettes of female bodies promised good times. We ate greasy kebabs on a park bench and watched men come and go through the curtained doorways.

‘Do you know where I can find the university?’ I asked. ‘There’s somebody I need to check out.’

Silence nodded. He pointed to his watch and showed me that it was nearly six. He wiped his chin and stood up.

‘Do we need to go? Back to the house?’ I said. There was a seesawing sensation in my belly.

Induction. The word sounded like it described the process of sucking-dry, like dragging the dregs of a milkshake through a straw. Some words just don’t match their meaning at all.

‘Okay. I’m ready,’ I lied and bit my lip.

You could say one thing, and mean something else.

CHAPTER SIX

Rats. Another thing that gave me the pinprick terrors. We passed through the trapdoor. On both sides, lumpy bodies scurried along the fence line between the houses. The fig tree was alive with dark, writhing shapes and high-pitched squeaks.

Silence picked up an apple core and buzzed it at the fence. A few seconds of stillness, then the rats resumed their dusk raid as if we weren’t even there. My teeth ground and I squeezed his hand as we made our way along the flattened path through the weeds.

Darcy let us in. She stood back and watched me without expression as I lost my balance and landed hard on the concrete floor. When Silence offered his hand she sighed and flounced up the stairs.

‘She hates me,’ I said as I wiped off my backside.

Silence snapped his hand open and shut—
yap yap yap
—which I took to mean that Darcy hated everybody.