Red (4 page)

‘Oh, all right then, take it.'

She passed them each a plate of beans in a rich tomato sauce.

‘You are such a liar,' said Red as they moved across the grass.

‘Gets us fed,' he grinned.

• • • • •

When they had finished, Red said, ‘Is your mum really dead?'

Peri nodded.

‘And your dad?'

‘He's alive.'

‘Why don't you live with him, then?'

‘ 'Cos I don't.'

‘But at least you've got a dad …'

‘I don't want to talk about it.'

‘But …'

‘I said I don't want to talk about it.'

CHAPTER THREE

THEY WERE ALMOST BACK AT THE PALACE. PERI STOPPED,
his hand on Red's shoulder. Ahead of them on the roof of the car was a boy with something in his hand.

‘Who's that?' said Red.

‘You don't want to know,' said Peri. ‘Stay here.' He bent down, picked up a stone and moved on ahead of her.

The boy on the car raised a metal bar.
Smash
, he whacked it through the front windscreen.
Smash
, the side window went.

‘Quit it!' Peri hurled the stone at the boy, who ducked and screamed and swung the bar above his head. Peri was running now, leaping over the rocks and the rubble towards the palace.

‘Ya gunna make me?' yelled the boy. ‘This is my place now. Get ' im.'

Peri stopped. Four boys were leaning against the last bit of wall next to the upturned water buckets. They each picked up bits of brick. A chunk of mortar whizzed past Peri's ear, another struck his shoulder.

Peri stepped back and waved to Red. She turned and ran.

She heard the boy on the car screaming and she glanced back over her shoulder. He leapt to the bonnet and then the ground. Metal bar held high, he charged at Peri.

For a moment Peri held his ground, then, with five boys bearing down on him, he turned and ran after Red. She was running as fast as she could, gasping for breath, grabbing air into her mouth. There were footsteps pounding behind her and she hoped they were Peri's. This time she dared not look. Her chest hurt and she stumbled and almost fell as her feet slipped in the mud.

‘Keep going, Red,' yelled Peri.

On and on she ran, down streets with the bitumen torn up and broken, through a caryard full of vehicles tossed on their sides like a pod of beached whales, till she reached a children's playground.

She looked back over her shoulder. Peri was almost level with her. No one was following them. She stopped, clasping her chest and puffing. She dropped onto a swing, the only structure still standing. ‘Who
was
that?'

Peri shook his head and bent over, his chest heaving. After a moment he straightened up. ‘I don't know his name. He thinks he's king around here. I had a fight with him yesterday, but he didn't have his mates then.'

‘So that's where your bruises came from.'

He nodded.

‘It's not fair. That was your place.'

Peri shrugged. ‘You get used to it. Nothing lasts.

You have to move on.'

She pushed her feet against the damp grass till the swing rocked gently back and forward. ‘So what do we do now? Where are we going to sleep?'

Peri didn't answer for a few minutes. He just stood there till his breathing became normal.

‘Maybe we should go back to the Centre,' said Red. ‘At least there we can get food and there might be room in a tent or something.'

Peri shook his head. ‘I know a better place. Follow me.'

She slid off the swing reluctantly and fell into step beside him. The two of them walked in silence for about ten minutes. They were moving further away from the sea and the shells of buildings, past rows of houses. Some fences were gone, windows and doors were smashed and in one case a whole side wall had collapsed. That left the inside of the house like the cut-away of an ants' nest: a glance showed a girl's bedroom with a purple cover half over the bed, a desk piled high with books and papers, a red-and-white sundress on the floor with sandals and other shoes, mugs, CD covers and magazines. Red wondered did she too have a room like this? Peri urged her on.

People stood on the road or in their yards, talking in small groups, pointing out the parts of their damaged homes. One man had two suitcases stuffed as if ready to go on summer holidays. He held a laptop and folders to his chest like a barrier against the world. It was eerily quiet.

Red and Peri reached the open green of an oval covered in shredded branches and leaves, paper, timber and sheets of roofing iron. Peri kept walking but something made Red stop. Had she been here before? Was this place familiar? She felt she was digging through rubble to find memories.

‘Come on,' called Peri. They were at the entrance to a primary school. Blue-and-white police tape wound its way around the whole site. A huge sign lay broken and twisted on the cracked cement path. Doors and windows were gone, mud and sand was washed a metre high against the walls and the corner of the whole block had sunk into spongy ground.

Peri ducked under the tape. ‘Our next home,' he said. ‘This one's big enough to be a real palace.'

Red followed him, picking her way across the broken path, stepping over tree branches and collapsed fence posts. ‘Was this your school?'

He shook his head. ‘No way. I don't come from round here. Look, we can get in there.' He pointed to a doorway that led into a block on the far side of a quadrangle. Inside, a hall doubled as a gym. Stage curtains were half ripped from the ceiling and toppled equipment, goalposts and floor-mats had been washed hard up against a far wall. Red and Peri were standing ankle-deep in muddy sand and there was an overwhelming smell of rot and mould.

‘I'm not sleeping in here,' Red screwed up her nose. ‘There must be somewhere else we can go, upstairs, a classroom or a library or something.'

They went back outside. The sun had disappeared behind one of the buildings and shadows now crept across the quadrangle. They crossed the yard to the canteen where a bright red sign,
Healthy body =
healthy mind
,
lay buckled in the doorway. A wide cement stairwell led to the top floor. Inside, banks of computers lined the walls and rows of freestanding shelves were filled with books. On the wall behind the librarian's desk was a poster about opening hours and fines and next to that a series of huge photographs. Hundreds of students, all in navy-blue uniforms, their faces shining in the sunlight, smiled up at the camera. Behind them stood rows of teachers with arms folded.

Red walked between the shelves. Nonfiction: 994– 999 Australian History:
Convicts in Australia, The Life
of Bennelong, Too Many Captain Cooks
. 780–789 Music, 641–649 Cooking, 620–629 Transport. At least I can still read. Under the far window was a cluster of beanbags. She pushed herself down into one, squirming and enjoying the feeling of the tiny beads massaging her tired body. She had to think. Think about who she was. Who she belonged to. Jay Martin. James Martin. Maybe John Martin or Joseph Martin. Who was he? How could she find out?

Peri flopped into a bag alongside her. ‘Not a bad place,' he said. ‘We could hole up here for ages.'

‘We can't eat books.'

‘There's probably tinned and packet stuff in the canteen, but. And there could be drinks and lollies. I'll go down and have a look.'

‘It might all be wrecked.'

‘Might not.' He got up then and headed for the door. ‘You want to come with me?'

She shook her head.

Whenever Peri wasn't with her, her mind was a big, empty space. She tried to fill it up with faces: people she'd seen in the past twenty-four hours, images of the missing from the giant boards of photographs at the Centre. The weeping, screaming child. The woman he was with looked like his mother but had he lost his dad? Had she, Red? Someone was her mum, her dad. She pressed her eyes tightly together. I'm going crazy. Do something. She stood up and wandered back through the rows of books. Nonfiction. Reference dictionaries, puzzles, word games. She crossed into a different section. Novels. Thick fantasy paperbacks with gold lettering and dark dragon figures leaping off the spines. Then she was at a smaller shelf, low down so she had to kneel to see the slim, square volumes facing outwards. Picture books. She picked out a thicker book and sat down on the floor.

Grimm's Fairy Tales
. The cover had a pale image of a woman in a long mauve gown leaning towards a knight in steel-grey armour. Red put the book on her lap and let it fall open. ‘Hansel and Gretel
.'
Once upon a time there were two children, Hansel and Gretel. She stopped reading. She knew this. She closed her eyes. This is the story of the children left by themselves in the forest. The wicked stepmother. The woodcutter father. The house made of lollies. The wicked witch who wants to eat Hansel but Gretel pushes her into the oven. Red rocked backwards and forwards. How do I know this? Have I read it before or has someone read this to me? Has someone told it to me? Who?

Another book caught her eye. A slim volume, it had no rich colours, no huge bright letters or bold illustration. The cover was plain and simple: white background and a black line drawing of a girl. Short, untidy hair, T-shirt. It was roughly done in charcoal or crayon and the face, the huge dark eyes were staring straight at the viewer. Red felt she was looking at herself.

She was about to open it when she heard a noise at the door. Peri came into the room, his arms bursting with cans, packets of pasta and bottles of juice.

Red quickly pushed the book under the shelf, ignoring the pain in her fingers as they scraped the hard cover.

Chocolate bars poked from Peri's pocket. ‘Look at all this. We won't starve.' He dumped everything on the librarian's desk. ‘And I've even found this.' He held up a tin-opener.

Red came over to him and looked at the tins. ‘Tomatoes, tuna, baked beans. You're right, we won't starve. You're a good thief.' She took a chocolate bar and pulled off the wrapper.

‘Years of practice.'

‘Is that how you survive? I mean, where
have
you been living? And where were you when the cyclone came?'

Peri pushed himself up onto the desk. ‘I was living in this big old warehouse, a couple of kilometres away. There were other kids there too. Sometimes when it was real hot we slept down on the beach. The roof got blown off right at the start of the winds. Then the rain came in. We headed out then. I slept in a church the night when the waves came.' He pointed to the beanbags. ‘Not as good as this, though.'

Red shook her head. Sleeping in a church. Had she ever done that? Could she have? She pushed the question from her mind. Here she was, about to sleep in a school.

Peri busied himself sorting the packets and tins into separate piles. ‘What have you been doing?'

Red shrugged. ‘Not much. Reading a bit. It's weird, I don't know who I am but when this book opened at “Hansel and Gretel” I knew it. I remembered it from somewhere.'

‘Hansel and Gretel?'

‘You know, the one where the kids are left out in the forest by the father and the wicked stepmother.'

‘Hmm.'

‘What?'

‘Nothing.'

‘And then they find the witch's house made of gingerbread and lollies.'

Peri waved a bag of jellybeans in the air. ‘Like us, eh? Only we haven't got the witch, at least not with us at the moment.' He tore open the bag and dropped a couple of the lollies into his mouth.

‘Sometimes I feel a bit like I'm in a story that someone's made up and they're moving me around and maybe they're going to let me find out who I am and who that Jay or James Martin is. I wish I knew how it would end.'

Peri slid off the desk. He stood for a moment in front of the photos.

‘Red. Have you had a look at these?' He was peering intently at one of the large images of the whole school, running his finger backwards and forwards along the rows of faces.

‘No. Why?'

‘There's a girl here in the second row and I reckon it might be you.'

CHAPTER FOUR

‘THAT IS YOU,' PERI POINTED TO A GIRL IN THE BACK
row, sitting next to the one holding the sign.
Year Five
.

Red stared at the photograph. Was that really her? Head tilted back, a huge grin on her face. Someone must have said something funny. Just ordinarylooking. Ginger hair cut short, same height as all the others, same blue shirt with the white logo of a tree on her chest.

‘Two years ago,' said Peri. ‘Let's check the others.'

She was there again in the photo for the year before. This time she had a fringe straggling into her eyes and a ponytail over her left shoulder.

‘That's you all right,' said Peri. ‘What about last year? Year Six.'

Nothing. They ran their fingers along the faces. The same grins and clusters of friends. This time a boy held the sign. Red felt the pushing and the shoving, the desperate feeling of wanting to be with a best friend, there in the photo, the photographer cracking a joke, urging them to ‘Say cheese' but the kids saying ‘Sex', preserved like an experiment. Forever.

Only she wasn't there.

‘Maybe you were sick,' said Peri, ‘or jigging school. That's why I'm not in school photos.'

Red shook her head. Without thinking she said, ‘I wasn't there because I wasn't at this school any more.' Where had that come from? Where had she been?

‘How come?' said Peri.

‘I don't know. That just came out of my mouth.' Red closed her eyes and rolled her head back. ‘I don't know anything any more.'

They munched chocolate and jellybeans in silence for a while. Then Peri said, ‘If you were at this school you must be in their records somewhere.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Well, everyone has a number and a record that has on it who they are and who their parents are, where they live and what they've done at school and everything.'