Have You Seen Ally Queen? (17 page)

‘Yeah, well, Mum’s nowhere to be seen these days, so why would she care?’

Did I really say that? Dad looks deflated. He hardly needs reminding.
God.

I stare at the floor, my face burning. ‘Sorry,’ I mumble. ‘That was ... Sorry.’

He sighs, closes his eyes. ‘Ally, I can’t make things any better than they are right now. Things are bad, that’s true. Your mum’s sick, she’s not at home, you’re getting a hard time at school. It’s all pretty awful for everyone. I can’t make it better. We just have to get through it.’

I don’t think I’ve ever heard him say that before, that he can’t fix something. That’s what he does,
normally. We complain about things being
badlydesigned
and he tries to fix them. There’s a problem? Dad sorts it out. Or one of us wants something and he sees if he can make it, get it or do it.
Dad, when arewe gunna go fishing again? Dad, the gate’s busted. Dad, there’s a huntsman spider in the corner of my room.

I can feel the tears coming, the kind you don’t expect and have no hope of stopping. I’m crying because I should have been helping him with all this and I haven’t been. I’ve just been thinking about what’s happening back in Perth and what new tortures I can inflict on Jerry.

He comes over to the sofa and puts his arm around me. ‘It’s all right, you know. Whatever happens, we’ll be okay.’

And suddenly I can see all the possibilities of what could happen and I know that as far as I’m concerned, some of those possibilities are
not
okay. Me ending up sleeping on a beach in Perth, Mum ending up in a mental hospital, Dad ending up on his own and cooking jasmine risotto every night—none of that is okay. Me staying here, me hitching up to Perth, me helping Dad, me not helping Dad—it all starts to fly around my head, and for once I really wish I was Jerry’s age again. I wish I was too young to understand any of it and that
I could just be left out of this stuff altogether.

‘Right now, I just don’t want you swimming out that far on your own, and definitely not with the craypot.’

‘But I’m a good swimmer.’

He nods. ‘Yes, Ally, but you don’t know enough about the water down here to be going so far out on your own.’

‘But what about the craypot?’

‘We’ll go back in the dinghy,’ he says, ‘in a couple of hours. And we’ll take the rods, chuck a line in at the same time.’

I try not to look excited. What a cool way to spend the afternoon! But the seal,
shite.
It might be scared off by the motor. And I don’t want to show it off to anyone else—that’s more what it is. It’s nice to have something of your own. I like that. So I won’t tell them. I just won’t say anything. If I see the seal, I won’t say anything. That’s cool.

I nod to myself.

‘Sound okay, Your Majesty?’

He knows it’s cool.

Something comes back into my mind like a bad memory. Not the whole thing, just enough so I get that nervous feeling in my belly.

‘Dad?’

‘Mmm?’

‘How did the kids at school find out about Mum?’

He shakes his head. ‘I don’t know. It’s awful, isn’t it? That’s one of the things about living in a small place. It’s harder to keep things private.’

That’s the first time I’ve ever heard him say something negative about this joint. It makes me feel so much better about all the things that I hate about being here. And how weird is this: hearing him say that makes me want to
defend
the place—for him, so he
doesn’t
hate it, so he can be positive about it like he’s always been. So I hear myself saying, ‘Yeah, but Dad, here you can go fishing whenever you want, and you don’t have to fight with millions of kids for a good spot on a crappy jetty. You can go right out into the ocean or down to the Cut or wherever.’

He looks up at me and smiles with his whole face. I want to burst out into something, just seeing him grinning like that.

We’re just coming back in to shore. My hair’s stiff and thick—my own personal saltbush. My skin feels like it’s had a sun injection, and I reckon I might have been a mermaid for years.

We caught herring, blowies and two tailor roaming the seas away from their school. Jerry’s getting his knots sussed, so he can fix his own lines now instead of having to wait for Dad or me to do it. Sometimes he just needs reminding about left-over-right-right-over-left with reef knots, but he’s getting it.

When we went out with Rel’s folks, I pretended I didn’t know too much about the prawn nets and stuff. I know that’s dumb, I
know
it’s a modern world and everything, but fishing is still not something chicks are meant to be good at, is it? Swivels and sinkers and gangs and blobs—it’s blokes’ stuff. Put it this way: Rex Hunt is not, and never will be, Ruth Hunt. If you know what I mean. The day a chick runs that show is the
day I’ll admit to being pretty damn good with a fishing rod. And Mum would
spew
if she heard me say that. So would Ms Carey, probably. Maybe it’ll be different when I’m older, but right now, no way. I mean, there is no
way
it would be cool for me to be better at fishing than Rel. And anyway, I’m probably not better than him. And anyway, who
cares
who’s better than who?

When we went back to get the craypot, the seal was gone, and I was glad. I’ll go out there again sometime, maybe without the pot, but I’ll go back, whatever Dad says. I know the reef now, and that’s most of it—knowing the conditions. It’s not so far out, and you can sit on the shelf and rest when you get there, so it’s not like you have to tread water for ages or anything. So long as I’ve got a wettie on, and booties, I’ll be right.

The craypot had a little cray in it, well undersize. There was no way we could have taken it, so we opened the cage and it crawled out after Dad prodded it in the bum.

Jerry loved going out in the boat. It seems like ages since we last went out. It was back in Perth, come to think of it. Dad told us a couple of his funniest stories about the guys he used to work with, and I didn’t feel too gigantic on the tinny. (Vertically large, I mean. I got called a stick-insect once at school. Nice.) Chucked
myself overboard a couple of times, too. The water was gorgeous and deep.

It’s been almost like old times, except that Mum isn’t going to be waiting for us with the milk pan on the stove and the big tin of Milo ready when we get home.

I’m down on the beach on Sunday arvo, walking south. There’s a spit I’m heading to where the sand smooths out like it does in holiday brochures and where seabirds hang out and swoop the water for fish. It’s Mum’s favourite place for collecting dead stuff for the bathroom, and I thought I might find something cute (not dead) to chuck into a letter I’m writing to her. I’m looking for a piece of driftwood, a small bit. The wood is bleached by salt until it’s almost white, and worn and smoothed by water as though it’s been sanded back with the finest sandpaper. Mum keeps driftwood sticks in a mug like most people keep pens, standing up and spiralling outwards on the desk where she writes letters.

Mum says she likes having the driftwood on her desk because it reminds her of how the coast should be, so it gets her really angry when she’s writing letters to the council and to the local parliament guy. She prefers to be feeling seriously outraged when she writes them;
she reckons they come out much better that way. She’s had a few printed in the paper, and they’re pretty full-on. Mum
slams
those guys, accuses them of all sorts of things, and quotes from council documents and everything. I’m not sure if it’s embarrassing or actually pretty cool.

I twirl in my fingers the piece of driftwood I’ve found. It’s a perfect addition to her collection.

There’s no one around, so I sit down on the sand and scope out the beach. The dunes scale up behind me. In front of me are some classic peelers curling over the outer reef. It’s too far out to surf there, and that reef is
evil,
which is why everyone surfs the beach break near the car park. But Dad likes the bigger, slower waves out the front of our joint. He’s taken the mal out a few times and it’s just hilarious—I mean, he’s all right! He’s slow and not very cool, doesn’t do any bottom turns or 360s or anything, but he can surf. It makes me think of daggy sixties surf bands, like the Beach Boys. You can see Dad’s bald spot and everything, unless he’s wearing a Gath hat, which is even worse. Then he just looks like a spaz. We give him shit, sit on the verandah and shout out stuff like you would at the footy. Once he got torpedoed off and it took
ages
for him to pop
back up. Mum was freaking. I saw her face turn down the colour till she was almost grey. It was a bit scary, but we knew he’d be all right. He always is. When he did emerge, he was pretty disorientated but he waved straight away so we knew everything was cool. Mum shook her head and went inside; she couldn’t handle it.

There’s a small thud in the sand behind me. It’s a small, soft sound, like a boondie landing from one of the dunes above—like maybe someone
threw
a boondie. I don’t turn around for a bit, ‘cos someone’s taking the piss, I know they are. In all the time I’ve been here, I’ve never heard a sound like that that wasn’t man-made. Oops, get with the times, girl: human-made.
Person-made?
They both sound shite.

I turn around, trying not to feel like too much of a geek. There’s something red in the sand. I look both ways along the beach and up at the dunes and I still can’t see anyone. As I get closer, it looks more and more like a ribbon, or part of a leg-rope, until I see that it’s not a leg-rope at all; it’s a Killer Python with a red head that’s poking up off the sand. I burst out laughing. I laugh right at that Killer Python; it’s just so stupid! I pick it up—soft and squashy, which means it’s fresh. Yum. I brush the sand off it. Where
is
he?

‘I’m gunna eat this unless you reveal yourself now, O Snake Fiend.’

As soon as I’ve said it, I realise how it might sound and wish desperately that I could dig a burrow into that dune and hide for the next century.
Oh, Ally. Youreally do have a disorder of the mouth, don’t you?

There’s a rustling, and a yellow python flings out of the saltbush.

I manage to suppress a pig-snort. It hurts, like it used to in maths when Shel would pass me those funny notes and Mrs Crawley would look at us for a long, dark time before going back to the whiteboard and drawing up more meaningless squiggles.

A green-and-blue python lands just to my right.

I nod like Mr Farran does when his experiments actually work and he pretends to be figuring out what the results mean. ‘Mmmm-hmmmm,’ I nod. ‘So, here it is, finally, after all my years of research: the rare python-producing bush.’

I hear another rustling and then
some
one booms out, ‘Oh yes, my child, and this bush shall produce pythons from now on until ... until
eternity.’

Wow.
Cool. ‘Give me twenty, then,’ I say.

Well, there’s total silence for at least a
minute,
so I generously offer, ‘Ten will do.’

A paper bag with
one
python comes right at me, and the God of the Python Bush shouts angrily, ‘There may be times of drought!’

Rel emerges, looking around innocently like he’s amazed to see me here.

I grin. I swing a python in the air. ‘Even though I value these more than life itself, I am prepared to share them.’

‘You’re
prepared to share them! Don’t forget whose pythons they are,’ he says sternly.

‘The God of the Very Rare Python Bush gave them to me!’

Rel looks at me like I’ve got rocks in my head. ‘You
are
a freak, Queenie,’ he says, and plops down on the sand, mumbling. ‘God of the Rare Python Bush.
Rii-iight.’

He sighs like he’s sick of something.

‘What’s up?’ I say.

‘Nothin’.’

I pass him a python. The sun’s beaming down on us like it’s coming via a magnifying glass, and there’s hardly any wind this arvo. It’s
hot.
‘Whaddya do this weekend?’

‘Not much. Had a surf yesterday; that was all right. Chucked a line in last night but there was nothing
happening. Pretty crap, really.’

I nod. This is a depressed Rel. Or a preoccupied Rel. I’ve never seen him like this before. I don’t know what to say, so I stick with nothing.