Lyrebird Hill (33 page)

‘What about him?’ Mum wanted to know.

‘He’s gone.’ Jamie eyed me from under her lashes. ‘They sent him back to Newcastle.’

I stopped scrubbing. ‘He’s not gone. I saw him at school on Friday.’

‘For your information,’ Jamie announced loftily, ‘he was a thief. He got caught stealing, and Mrs Drake sent him back to the boys’ home. Good riddance, I say. He was weird.’

‘Stealing?’ Mum said. ‘That’s a shame. The teachers always speak so highly of the boy, I must say I’m surprised.’ She looked at me and frowned. ‘Well, if anything good comes out of this, it might be that Ruby’s grades pick up.’

‘His brother’s a jailbird,’ Jamie said, ‘and his dad’s a loony tunes. He’s no better. Everyone at school knows that bad blood runs in his veins.’

Mum frowned. ‘Jamie, that’s not a nice thing to say. It’s not the boy’s fault his family is dysfunctional. I won’t have you speaking like that.’ She turned back to the sink and dithered for a moment, then opened the pantry cupboard. Subject closed.

I felt the blood drain from my head. There must have been a mistake. The Wolf wasn’t a thief. He couldn’t be gone. My heart began to thrash like a rabbit in a trap. I had a picture of my life before the Wolf came along – sitting by myself at lunchtime, getting picked on at school, muttering and fumbling on account of my horrible shyness.

He couldn’t be gone.

Jamie looked at me and smirked, twirling her finger near her ear. ‘Loony,’ she mouthed.

I threw the vegie brush in the sink and ran to the door. Stuff them, I thought, rubbing my eyes with gritty fingers as I raced along the path to where I’d left my bike. Stuff them both . . . they could scrub the blasted carrots themselves.

‘I knew the very minute I saw you.’

Pete and I were sitting on an embankment beside the river, lounging on a tartan picnic rug. Old Boy and Bardo were dashing about in the water below us, chasing sticks that Pete periodically threw down to them.

I toyed with one of the sticks, picking at a sliver of loose bark.

‘Not the
very
minute,’ I said a little shyly. ‘Come on, how long did it really take?’

‘Really? Let’s see . . . it took all of, oh, shall we say – a nanosecond?’

‘No!’

‘You haven’t changed
that
much.’

I grimaced. ‘Still the geeky twelve-year-old, eh?’

Pete snorted. ‘Roo, you were anything but geeky. A bit of a tomboy, maybe. And a temper like a cut snake.’

‘So Mum always claimed.’

His smile fell away. ‘I have to confess, I was smitten.’

I gave him a shove. ‘Get out of it.’

‘Hey, it’s true.’

I shook my head in mock disbelief, but inwardly I was chuffed. The Wolf . . . smitten with
me
?

‘You don’t believe me,’ he said with a laugh. ‘But I can prove it.’

My gaze drifted down to his mouth. Oh yes, I wanted him to prove it. Right now, the sooner the better. Because all of a
sudden I needed proof, craved it like a drink on a parched day, longed for it the way a moth longs for the moon.

Which was wrong, very wrong. I’d given up on love, remember? Anyway, what did I really know about Pete – that we’d been friends as kids for six months while he’d been fostered on a neighbouring farm; and that he’d been sent back to the boys’ home by his foster mother for stealing? Not the strongest foundations upon which to build a romance.

But then the Wolf was smiling at me from the face of a grown man, and it was such a friendly face, with intelligent blue eyes and a gaze that somehow turned the straw of my failings into gold, and lips that quirked at the corners in that cheeky way that made me want to lean forward, press my mouth to his, and lose myself in the forbidden pleasure that awaited me there.

Wicked thoughts. Fiendish. I had to stop thinking them.

But as I sat on the velvety green grass beside the river with Pete, tickled by shadows as the casuarinas swayed overhead in the warm breeze, I could feel the draw of my desire. And despite the cautioning voice in my head, I wanted to abandon myself, maybe even go a little wild. So, when Pete got to his feet and reached for my hand, and hauled me up beside him, it took me a moment to register what he’d just said.

‘You’re going to prove that you were once smitten with me?’ I asked incredulously.

‘You bet.’ He waggled his eyebrows mysteriously. ‘Follow me.’

High along the rocky slopes of the Spine, formed by the junction of neighbouring boulders, was a crevice. It didn’t look like much, just another shady gap between big flaky rocks. But as Pete kneeled on the ground before it and reached his hand into the cool darkness, it brought back a flash.

Granite wears away like an onion
, the Wolf had once told me.
Hundreds of years of frost and fire, sunlight and rain cause the surface
to expand and contract. The constant stress causes the top layers to flake away, which is why it’s called—

‘Onionskin weathering,’ I remarked to no one in particular.

Pete looked over his shoulder and studied me a moment, then winked. ‘That old memory of yours is sharpening up. It must be all the fresh air.’

Ridiculous, how an offhand comment and a wink had the power to make me glow. But as I stood in the shadows of the tall trees, basking in the warmth that radiated off the clustered boulders, I
did
glow.

Pete dragged a long rectangular steel box from the crevice, and grappled with the lid. ‘Remember this?’

I nodded. The Wolf and I had been learning about time capsules at school, and had decided to make one of our own. Granny H had given us an old army ammunitions box in which she’d once stored broad beans. The box was rat-proof, waterproof, and – though Granny H had said not to quote her on this – fire-proof. She’d also donated a TV guide, a crocheted beanie and a paper bag of homemade shortbread – only the shortbread hadn’t survived long enough to make it into our capsule.

‘Open it.’

Wedging the ammo tin between his feet, Pete gripped the front handle with both hands and pulled. Finally, on the third try, the lid squealed open.

Inside was a tiny rocket ship the Wolf had built out of tin and wood and coloured glass – far too good to bury, I remembered arguing, but in it went anyway, along with a photo of the puppy the Wolf had had as a kid, and a packet of Smarties. My contribution had been a book. Not just any old book, but one I’d made myself with leftover paper from one of Mum’s art projects. Mum had showed me how to stitch the spine and glue the binding boards, and on the cover I had painted a picture: Granny H’s face as the sun, and her hair poking out around her like rays. She was beaming down on two small sunflowers,
which were supposed to be the Wolf and me, but really were just blobs with eyes. My book was full of the stories Granny H had told us – all the crazy fairytales that grew out of shape and turned into something else entirely.

Right at the bottom, we found another book.

‘Here,’ Pete said, passing it to me. ‘Proof.’

‘I don’t remember this going in.’

‘I snuck back later and added it. I wanted to give you something to remember me by.’

‘But it was meant to be a time capsule. We were supposed to wait fifty years before we opened it.’

‘Yeah, well, we’ve just shot that plan to hell. Still, eighteen years isn’t a bad effort.’ He gestured at the book I held. ‘Aren’t you going to look inside?’

I turned the little book over in my hands. The cover was leather, and looked really old. A loop sewn into the edge of the back cover held a slim pencil. All its pages were blank. Except one.

When I opened the flyleaf, a soft brown feather wafted out.

‘Esmeralda,’ I marvelled, picking it up and beaming at Pete. ‘I was gutted when Mum gave her the chop. I don’t think I ever really forgave her.’

‘You were pretty upset.’

‘You held my hand.’

‘There you go. More proof.’

I blinked quickly and looked back at the book, turning to the first page. Written in the Wolf’s careful handwriting – smudged with a grubby fingerprint – were two short sentences that made me feel hot and cold, happy and sad all at once.

I’ll never forget you, my lovely Kangaroo.

Your friend always, the Wolf.

‘You called me your “lovely kangaroo”?’ I pointed out. ‘That’s your idea of declaring eternal love?’

Pete frowned at the wobbly inscription. ‘Hmm. I’m sure I remember filling the page with soppy devotion. At least, it felt pretty momentous when I wrote it. I definitely remember spending hours mulling over what I was going to write, what words best captured the depth of my feeling.’ He grinned. ‘Hey, stop laughing. “Lovely” is a pretty passionate word for a twelve-year-old!’

As we joked and bantered I couldn’t help stealing secret glances. Pete had brought me here to unearth a fragment of our past – a time capsule that had waited in the dark for nearly two decades for our return. His inscription touched me, but more than that I felt a surge of warmth that he had remembered.

‘Why are the pages blank?’

‘For your stories.’

‘What stories?’

‘The ones you were always writing down on scraps of paper, or the backs of envelopes, or inside the covers of your exercise books.’

I shook my head. ‘I never wrote stories.’

He picked up the book I’d handmade with Granny H’s face on the cover, and flipped through it.

‘Yeah, you did.’

‘But they weren’t
my
stories. Granny made them up, I just copied them down.’

He started packing our various treasures back into the ammo box, but kept the little leather-bound book out. Tucking the feather back in the flyleaf, he handed it to me.

‘Well, now you’ve got another blank book to fill with someone else’s stories. And maybe, occasionally, you’ll turn to that first page and remember the boy who was once smitten with you.’

I took the book and smiled into his eyes, intending only to offer my silent thanks; instead, I found myself lingering in
his gaze, melting into that clear, impossible blue. I tried to pull back, but there was something there I needed to see. A recognition, maybe. An acknowledgement that these first warm threads of feeling were real.

‘Why did you vanish out of my life?’ I asked quietly. ‘After they sent you back to the home. Why didn’t we stay in touch?’

He considered me, his head tilted, his smile at half-mast. ‘I guess I went a little off the rails, after that.’

My own smile was shaky. ‘Join the club.’

Pete wedged the ammo tin back in the crevice, making sure it was hidden under a sprinkling of leaves and twigs. Then he stood up and took my hand and led me over to the edge of the stone outcrop. We gazed across the rolling hills and valleys. Stretching in all directions was a sea of treetops, interrupted here and there by islands of bare stone. Closing my eyes, I leaned against Pete’s warm shoulder and tilted my face to the sun. The insides of my eyelids turned blood-red and I could see tiny arteries. In a nearby stringybark, a butcherbird sang its fluty song.

Once, I had shown the Wolf my dog scar. And he, in return for the favour, had shown me his. He was kind even back then, I realised; even as a twelve-year-old foster kid from Newcastle. He had told me about crocodiles and snakes, and shown me the marks they had made; but now, in hindsight, I understood.

He’d been a gentle boy – with a wild streak, but what boy didn’t? And yet someone had, judging by the scars on his legs and abdomen and arms, hurt him badly as a child. Was that why he now hid himself away in the bush with his dogs, living as far from other humans – Esther excluded – as possible?

I floated for a while, trying not to think about the world that lay beyond Lyrebird Hill – not my little cottage on the coast, not my bookshop, not even Earle who was probably starting to
wonder where I was. Most of all, I tried not to think about Rob; whether he missed me, or whether he was finding comfort in the arms of a woman who wore a doll-sized black bra. He seemed suddenly far away, both in distance and in my thoughts.

Which suited me just fine.

Pete unlinked his fingers from mine, and we turned and walked back along the trail, leaving behind us the crevice, and the time capsule hidden in its darkness. Maybe only fifteen minutes – half an hour, at most – had gone by since we’d arrived at the Spine, but it felt as though years had whizzed past.