Pobby and Dingan (2 page)

3

When I woke up the next day, Mum told me how Dad had been in prison overnight but he was being released and sent home until there was a trial or something which would prove that Dad hadn’t been ratting Old Sid’s claim. Mum was pretty frantic with worry, though, and she said Dad would have to keep a low profile in the Ridge and stay at home a while, until the whole thing had blown over and he’d got his respect back amongst all the miners and stuff. Ratting, you see, is the same thing as murder in Lightning Ridge—only a bit worse.

We waited for him to come home and played a game of chess to help pass the time and calm each other down. I got Mum in checkmate after fifteen moves. No one can beat me at chess, and I reckon one day I’ll be a bloody grandmaster or something. Either that or a secret agent like James Blond. But I have to admit that this time Mum wasn’t concentrating too well and so she made it pretty easy for my bishops and knights to do the business. The problem was that Mum kept gazing out of the window with a dazed look about her, and I was pretty sure she wasn’t just thinking about Dad but she was also pommie-sick again and thinking about Granny Pom and the other pommie friends she left behind her in England all those years ago.

Anyway, when Dad eventually came home late that afternoon he gave us all a hug and said that the prison was okay and a bit like a motel except that the beds were hard and the bars weren’t the kind that served beer. He said not to worry, because he was going to sort out this whole mess good and proper. But he didn’t know quite how. And Mum told him he’d better not try and sort out anything but just keep his head down and keep out of trouble until the trial and all that shit. And then my dad asked me if Pobby and Dingan had come back yet. I shook my head. “Kellyanne thinks they are maybe-dead,” I said.

“She’s still very upset,” said my mum. “She’s been sulking all day. You shouldn’t have been so careless, Rex, you really shouldn’t.”

“I shouldn’t have done a lot of things,” said my dad, letting out a long sigh. But he was pleased to be back. And he was glad I think of all the attention we were giving him. I even went and got him a stubby of V.B. from the fridge and then I sat there asking him more things about prison. And after that we talked about opal all day, until it got dark and until there was suddenly this godawful shriek and Mum came rushing in from near the front door saying, “Oh, my Lord! God! Help! Get water! Get water fast!” She ran into the kitchen and started filling up a bucket from the sink.

We rushed out front and what hit me first was a smokey smell like the smell of a cigar. And then, when I peered out into the dark, I could see grey figures twisting up into the sky quite awesomely. Dancing. But my dad whispered: “Jesus! They’ve set our fence on fire!” And then I twigged that those figures were swirls of smoke, and some of the stakes were actually flaming at the tops. The light from the flame danced against the walls of our little house and showed up enormous dark lines like zebra stripes. They were letters sprayed on with an aerosol can or something, and they said:

BURN THE RATTERS

Mum threw her bucket of water over the fence post while I ran in to fill up some more and Dad just stood gaping at the words on the wall beside the living-room window. He was there when I came back, still staring, his hand on the back of his neck, not saying a word. And then he disappeared around the back of our house for paint. When the flames were out I went into Kellyanne’s room and told her what had happened. But she just hid under her blanket and said nothing.

4

About this time Kellyanne started getting really sick. I can’t explain it and neither could anybody else. She just lay in bed saying that she was very tired and worried because Pobby and Dingan hadn’t come back, and that she couldn’t be sure if they were dead or not. They might still be wandering around over the opal fields all lost and frightened, and there were wild pigs out there and snakes and all kinds. It made her want to puke just to think about it. Well, Pobby and Dingan had got us into enough shit as it was, thank you very much, and I felt angry with them. Pretty goddamn angry for spoiling our family name. And I thought Kellyanne was faking at first, pretending to be ill like she pretended to have friends. But then I heard her puking in the dunny. She
was
sick. She really was.

She wouldn’t eat anything. Mum called Jack the Quack and he came and sat on Kellyanne’s bed and did some stethoscope stuff. He told my mum that Kellyanne was suffering from a nervous illness or depression, and that she had a fever. He tried to persuade her to eat a little of something. But she wouldn’t. He told Kellyanne that if she kept this up he would have to take her to hospital and force-feed her through some disgusting pipes. I told Jack about everything that had happened with Pobby and Dingan but he just smiled and frowned and smiled again and used the words “syndrome” and “clinical” and “psychological” a lot. Well, I didn’t know what those words meant but they sounded like pretty useless kinds of words to me.

Before Jack the Quack left he hung around talking to Dad about his new jackhammer. He told him that he’d heard about the scuffle out at the claim and that he was behind Dad all the way—and didn’t believe a word of the rumours that were spreading around Lightning Ridge like a bushfire. But there was something funny about how Jack the Quack was behaving. Sort of nervousish. And when he said Kellyanne would be better off in hospital, I reckoned he said that because he didn’t trust my folks to look after her. Plus, when Mum asked him to stay for dinner he made some excuse about having to go line-dancing and scuttled away like a goanna.

My dad started to look pale too. He said, “No bastard’s taking my princess to no stupid hospital,” over and over again. “We Williamsons can look after each other just fine. We don’t need no charity or help from nobody!” Late at night he would pace up and down, shaking his head, saying: “You’re right, Mum. This is all my fault. Maybe we should never have come out to the Ridge in the first place. She’s a sensitive kid. Too precious for this place. She gets bullied at school, don’t she?” That was my dad. He started to get all emotional, and cracked open tinny after tinny of V.B. And then he cried. It was like the beer was going in his mouth and coming out of his eyes.

Well, Mum and Dad didn’t dare tell Kellyanne to stop this once and for all or explain to her straight that Pobby and Dingan were only in her imagination and that she’d better switch the bloody thing off. They’d done it once before, you see, and Kellyanne went a little bit crazy and started screaming so hard the whole town thought they was being air-raided by nuclear missiles from France. They knew better than to tell my sis that she was being stupid. Kellyanne didn’t handle that kind of criticism stuff too well.

So now Kellyanne just lay in bed. She slept or just lay whimpering. That’s all that she did. She got so thin that it didn’t look like there was any kind of body under the sheet.

Well, all this started to rattle my mind, and every day I would wriggle through the car door and clamber up on to my bunk and sit thinking. I figured this was the end of the world, because we were all going crazy. Pobby and Dingan were messing up my family and they weren’t even here. And they also weren’t even anywhere. And although I thought my sister was nuts, I didn’t like to see her like this and hear her chucking up in the dunny. And I wanted my dad to cheer up and go off to his mining again, and I wanted my mother to stop worrying and being homesick, and I wanted the Williamson family name to gleam and sparkle and be all right.

And I knew flaming well that the answers to all these problems lay with Pobby and Dingan themselves.

And then I figured out something else. I didn’t like to admit it, but it seemed to me the only way to make Kellyanne better would be to find Pobby and Dingan. But how do you go looking for imaginary friends? I stayed awake all the bastard-night trying to get my head around the problem. I reckoned that the first thing would be to have as many people as possible looking for them, or pretending to look, so that at least Kellyanne knew that people cared, that they believed in her imaginary friends and wanted to help out. See, I’d remembered that Kellyanne was always most happy when people asked questions about Pobby and Dingan. Usually that made a smile crawl over her face. And it seemed to me if a hell of a lot of people was asking questions about them then she would get better fast. I also knew darn well that there was quite a few people in the Ridge who loved Kellyanne to bits even though they were a little unsure about the rest of us Williamsons, and there were some who almost believed in Pobby and Dingan or who were real nice and understanding about it. And I had it in the back of my mind that if those people believed in imaginary friends and all that shit, or if they knew how real those friends were for Kellyanne, then they’d believe that my dad really had been looking for them out at the mine and not ratting Old Sid’s claim.

The two problems seemed to go together somehow.

So this is what I did. The next day I went around town calling in at the shops and telling people why Kellyanne was sick. I went to The Wild Dingo, and even to The Digger’s Rest, where the toughest miners drink. I said, “Howdy, I’m Ashmol Williamson, and I’ve come to tell you my dad’s no ratter and my sister’s sick cos she’s lost her imaginary friends.” Well, there was a silence and then one of those miners came up to me, grabbed my collar and held me up by it, so that my feet came off the ground. He pulled me so close I could smell his stinking breath and said: “Listen here, kid. You go back and tell your daddy, if he ever shows his face in here again
he’s
gonna be the
imaginary one.
Understand? Imaginary! Geddit? Dead!” Well, I was just about to shit myself when a bunch of other miners came over and said to the bloke, “Put the kid down, mate. Rex Williamson is a friend of mine and those kids of his are good kids.” Well, this bastard threw me on the floor and said, “You wanna watch who your friends are!” to the men, and then walked out. The group of miners picked me up, brushed me down and asked if I was okay. I told them yes, but I was a little bit worried about my sister Kellyanne, because she was really sick and might get taken away to hospital, and how I was gonna try and lick clean my dad’s name until it shone red on black.

I had a busy day, all rightee. I went to the Bowling Club to tell the pokie players and also to the Wallangalla Motel, where there was some line-dancing practice going on. You should of seen me. I tried to go up to people on the dance floor and get them to stop dancing and listen, but they were too busy doing their moves to the music and I kept getting caught up between people’s arms. In the end I just walked up to the bloke with the tape decks and grabbed the microphone and shouted: “Ladies and gents! Sorry to interrupt your dancing, but my name’s Ashmol Williamson, and my sister is sick and we need to help her find her imaginary friends tomorrow!” There was this nasty high-pitched screech from the microphone, like it didn’t exactly enjoy what I’d said, and then everyone, about fifty people in all, stopped dancing and turned around and looked at me all at once. There was a silence and then I heard people mutter my dad’s name and whisper the word “ratter” to each other, and some of them frowned at me, and I knew all of a sudden what it feels like to be a mosquito. Well, I coughed into the microphone and explained in a shaky voice about my sister and Pobby and Dingan and how my dad got into trouble on Old Sid’s claim. And I told them how Pobby and Dingan had liked nothing better than line-dancing, and that unless we found them they might never be able to do it ever again. And then I suddenly ran out of things to say and felt a bit weird with all those lines of people looking at me, so I just put down the microphone and ran out and got back on my Chopper and pedalled off wobbly-legged.

I went almost everybloodywhere. I went to the Automobile Graveyard and spoke to Ronnie, who recognized me from the time he gave me the cool door off the Dodge. I went out to the camps at Old Chum and Vertical Bill’s and the Two Mile. And some people whispered to each other about Dad and some didn’t. And some folks thought I was nuts. And some were nuts themselves anyway so it didn’t make no difference. I even went out and told the tourists out at the Big Opal. They patted me on the head and smiled and whispered to each other in funny languages. One big American man filmed me with his video camera and told me to say something cute into it so he could show his friends back home. But when it came to the crunch I couldn’t say anything and I didn’t feel too much like smiling. So I showed him my James Blond 007 impression, where I turn sharp and fire a gun like on the video that my friend Brent’s parents gave him after they struck opal out at the Three Mile. And I told this tourist how when I grew up I might have a James Blond gun and everything. But then I realized I was wasting time and Kellyanne was sick, and my dad was being called a ratter, and these tourists wouldn’t really give a shit, but.

I went out to the town hall, where some of the black kids were practising a traditional Korobo-something dance with their teacher in funny outfits and didgeridoos and drums. I stood there for a while and watched them and had a good laugh at how dumb they looked. And then one of them started running straight at me with a spear and told me he was going to shove it up my ass unless I dooried right off out of the hall. But the teacher stopped him and honked on her didgeridoo and told him to shut up and get back to doing his hunting dance. But before they started the dance I managed to squeeze in a few words about how sick Kellyanne was, and I also asked them if maybe they could do a dance to conjure up Pobby and Dingan some time tomorrow. And the teacher said that they would certainly think about it if they had time, and then she started going off on one about how her ancestors believed opals were dangerous and stuffed full of evil spirits, and how maybe my family was paying the price for worshipping it and drilling horrible holes in the beautiful aboriginal land.

Well, I’d had enough of hearing this goddamned hooey, as my dad called it, and so I shot off and cycled out on the dirt roads around about a couple of hundred more camps on my rusty old Chopper bike telling people about Kellyanne and how she was ill because of losing her imaginary friends. It was a hot day, and hard work, and so I made sure I was tanked up with Mello Yello to stop my mouth getting dry from all that explaining I was doing. When I told people what had happened to my sis, some of them looked at me like I was a total fruit loop. But a lot of them already knew about Pobby and Dingan, because they had kids who went to the same school as Kellyanne, out at Walgett, and they had seen her talking to them on the old school bus. One older girl out at the caravan park came up to me and said: “Are you Kellyanne Williamson’s brother? My mum says you Williamsons are stupid people and your dad’s a drunk ratter and so you better go away or I’ll punch you the way I punched your sister that time at the Bore Baths.” I gave her the finger and pedalled off fast cos she was too big for me. But she called after me: “The only friends you Williamsons have are imaginary ones! Just you remember that, Ashmol Williamson!”

But some people were real nice about it. On one of the camps a woman gave me a Mello Yello and a cake and asked me how my mum was doing at the supermarket. She said: “The sooner they get your pretty little sister to hospital the better.” I answered: “Yup. But it’s more complicated than that, Mrs. Wallace. See, Kellyanne’s sick-with-worry sick; she ain’t hospital-sick sick.” I also met this kid who knew as much about Pobby and Dingan as I did. He said he didn’t like Kellyanne too much but he thought Pobby and Dingan were all right. He said he had a much better imaginary friend than Kellyanne. It was a giant green ninja platypus called Eric. He didn’t talk to it, but.

One twinkly and crazy old-timer with a parrot took me into the bust-up old tram where he lived and told me he had heard Kellyanne talking to Pobby and Dingan once when she was at the town goat races. She had been standing with three lollies on Morilla Street. This old miner said he believed that Pobby and Dingan really existed and he would look out for them as carefully as he could when he was walking around town. He would also check in at Steve’s Kebabs to see if they’d stopped by for a feed, and he would write a poem called “Come Home, My Transparent Ones!” and hand it around his bush-poet mates. This old codger didn’t seem to understand that I just wanted him to pretend to be looking for Pobby and Dingan. But there you go.

I stayed out till dark explaining to all these Lightning Ridge families how they had to make a big show of looking for Pobby and Dingan so that Kellyanne could see that people really cared about them. And I did some explaining about what had happened to my dad and what a mix-up there had been. And how Pobby and Dingan weren’t real but Kellyanne thought they were and that’s what counts, and how my dad wasn’t a ratter but people thought he was and that’s what counts too. Some of the people were real nice about it and gave me some bags of Twisties, and I went around munching them and putting up signs I had made saying:

LOST! HELP!

KELLYANNE WILLIAMSON’S FRIENDS POBBY AND

DINGAN. DESCRIPTION: IMAGINARY. QUIET.

REWARD IF FOUND

And I put on the address of our house and tacked the notices up on telephone poles and walls and machinery and shit. When I cycled home I watched people looking at the notices, and I saw that some of them had been graffitied-over with the word “Ratter,” but I also noticed that a lot of them hadn’t been. Well, that was a good sign. And a lot of folks were smiling and laughing. I went to bed that night pretty full of myself for having had a go at least at clearing my family name and standing up for everybody. And I hadn’t got beaten up or anything, either—which was cool.