Riggs Crossing (9 page)

A tiny burning twinge hits the back of my neck. I forgot to put sunblock there. You can get skin cancer forty years from now if you get sunburnt as a kid. I read that in a pamphlet at the Community Centre. I find a gift shop, but I don’t want to pay for sunblock when we get it for free at the Refuge. I need a hat. The only one that fits me and that I have enough money for is lime green, with the zoo logo and glow-in-the-dark tiger eyes on the front, and flaps hanging from the back brim to protect your neck. Okay, it’s dorky, but since everyone else here is a dork, I don’t reckon that’s a problem. I pay for it and ask the cashier to cut the tags off.

I’m too hot and tired to pay attention to the signs marking out the trails. I’m just trudging along hoping to see something that will make this trip worthwhile. Then I come to a place where you can see the harbour, and the city across the water. Ferries make their way steadily toward the Quay, or away from it. Sailboats skate in lazy, aimless arcs. The office buildings probably aren’t as tall as the ones in LA, but I bet people like Clarissa Hobbs work in them. I can’t see far enough to where the Refuge is, but I can see Woolloomooloo, and kind of guess where Kings Cross is, where I got sick on that pizza.
My Sydney, my Sydney, my Sydney . . .

‘I caaan’t!’ The whine jolts me out of the only happy moment I’ve had all day. I blink and look down. Beneath the trail I’m on, there’s an observation point and a telescope. Mrs Rowles is trying to get Karen to look through it. Karen is wriggling her arms and stomping her feet in a stupid little tantrum dance. Shane is looking inside a plastic gift shop bag, staring at whatever he bought. Like he won’t have time enough to do that once he gets back to the Refuge.

‘Karen, CLOSE one eye and LOOK through the other!’ Mrs Rowles is trying to be patient. I turn and hurry along the trail until I’m sure they can’t see me. I should have been more discreet. Why didn’t it occur to me that I might run into Karen and Shane and Mrs Rowles? I guess I thought the zoo was big enough so that wouldn’t happen.

I sit down on a rock in the shade and try to work out what I’m going to do. Mrs Rowles drove here with Shane and Karen. That means they’ll be leaving by the top entrance, not by the ferry. I look at my Casio watch. 4:30. The zoo closes in half an hour, so Mrs Rowles will be getting the two junior dickheads out of here soon, unless she decides to feed them to the lions.

I manage to stay at the zoo an hour past closing time by answering ‘yes’ every time a zoo employee asks me if I’m going to the concert. Yeah, right. The people going to the concert are all fiftyish, smartly dressed, and carrying camp chairs, blankets and expensive-looking wicker hampers that probably have bottles of champagne and real glasses in them. The zoo is somehow more interesting after it’s shut. I watch a couple of sea lions lolling around in the water and blowing out blasts of rotten fish breath. I find an aviary full of pretty parrots. Finally one of the employees sees me twice, twigs to what I’m up to, and escorts me to the ferry. Fortunately, it’s twenty minutes before the next boat comes, so I can look at the harbour.

I’m on the ferry and halfway across the harbour before I realise that I can’t possibly get back to the Refuge in time.

As soon as the ferry pulls into Circular Quay, I find a payphone to call the Refuge, but it’s broken. So I walk another two blocks and find another phone that’s broken, too. I walk back to the bus stop, and the first two buses that are supposed to be there never show up. Then I get on a bus that goes down University Road instead of Enmore Road, so I have to get off and walk back to Newtown Station to catch the correct bus.

Everyone’s already at the dinner table by the time I run through the front door, half an hour past curfew. I start gabbling that I know I’m late and I’m sorry and the bus didn’t come when it was supposed to and none of the phones worked. Karen and Shane stare. Cinnamon smirks, figuring that Mrs Rowles will say I can’t watch TV or assign extra chores or report me to Lyyssa.

Mrs Rowles is spooning out casserole onto plates and passing them around. She looks at me calmly. ‘I’m sure there’s a good reason why you were late. I won’t need to mention it to Lyyssa unless you make a habit of breaking curfew. Now go wash your hands and join us for dinner.’

Cinnamon’s mouth falls open and she clenches her knife like she wants to stab someone with it. ‘You let that little bitch get away with everything!’

Mrs Rowles pauses, the serving spoon dripping sauce and melted cheddar back into the casserole dish.

‘We saw you at the zoo,’ Shane says.

‘How much did that hat cost?’ Karen asks. I feel that stupid green hat burning a hole through my backpack, sending a flashing beacon like a lighthouse.

Cinnamon’s face changes from angry to delighted. ‘You didn’t have anything better to do than follow those losers around?’ she squeals, then claps her hand over her mouth. ‘And you spent your own pocket money, too!’ she screams. ‘Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!’

Mrs Rowles waits until Cinnamon has stopped laughing, then puts the serving spoon into the dish. ‘A
bitch
, Cinnamon, is a woman who is intentionally malicious toward others and takes pleasure in their misfortune. Someone like Bindi. Maybe even a bit like you.’

Cinnamon’s face scrunches and she looks at her plate. Oh, dear. Mrs Rowles has
damaged Cinnamon’s self-esteem.

‘Len, I asked you to go wash your hands.’ Mrs Rowles spoons some casserole onto a plate and sets it at my place at the table.

After dinner, I’m helping Mrs Rowles with the dishes, taking extra care to make sure everything’s clean. Music drifts down the stairs from Cinnamon’s room; TV noises come from the lounge room where Karen and Shane have parked themselves. Mrs Rowles and I work without speaking. Mrs Rowles isn’t the sort of person you have to talk to.

‘Well,’ she finally says, ‘how much
did
that hat cost you?’

My shoulders tense and my cheeks feel hot. ‘Ten dollars,’ I mumble.

‘Wipe down the counters, would you? I’ll be right back.’

Mrs Rowles leaves the room and goes into Lyyssa’s office. I hear a filing cabinet open and shut. Mrs Rowles comes back with two twenty-dollar notes and hands them to me. ‘There was forty dollars set aside for each kid who wanted to go to the zoo. You didn’t have to spend your pocket money.’

‘Thank you,’ I say, stuffing the money into my back pocket. I’m starting to feel better. The day isn’t a complete write-off now. Still, it’ll be a long time before I wear that stupid hat again.

‘It’s not easy when you’ve got no one to talk to,’ Mrs Rowles says after a while, wiping a dish. ‘I grew up on a property near Broken Hill. My mother died when I was a baby. I was the youngest of six, and the only girl.’ Mrs Rowles sets the dried dish on the counter and picks up another wet one from the draining rack. ‘There were some romance novels that belonged to my mother. I read every single one of them. Stories about beautiful young English girls who lived in castles and married dukes and earls.’

Cade and Riana. But without the disgusting bits about having your virginity forced.

‘I used to dream about what it would be like to sleep on satin sheets, and wear silk gowns, and dance minuets, and have a tiny waist, porcelain complexion, long, flaxen hair and slender, delicate fingers.’ Mrs Rowles laughs quietly. ‘My hands were always rough and red from washing dishes and doing laundry by hand. My waist wasn’t tiny, even as a girl. And my
complexion
was sunburnt and freckled.’

Mrs Rowles stacks the dish on top of the first one, and starts drying a third. ‘I met Mr Rowles when I was sixteen. He sold farm equipment to people like my father. We didn’t have a proper wedding, just a little ceremony at the registry office. Nobody danced any minuets.

‘Mr Rowles quit his job and brought me to Sydney. He bought a mixed business with the money he’d saved and we ran it for thirty-odd years. Sometimes we stocked novels like the ones my mother left behind, but I never read them. I didn’t have time.’ One more dish stacked, another picked up.

‘Boys must run in my family. Both my children were boys, and I was thankful for that. Boys don’t care about silk gowns or cry because their hair isn’t flaxen.’ Another dish stacked. ‘Mr Rowles and I fostered over a dozen children after our sons left home. All boys. I told Social Services not to send us any girls. I wouldn’t have known how to raise a girl.’

I rinse out the sponge and put it on the rack to dry.

Mrs Rowles puts the stack of dishes into the cupboard and surveys the kitchen. ‘Thanks for your help this evening, Len. I think this kitchen is about as clean as we can make it.’

Chapter 25

Mrs Rowles says she doesn’t know how to raise girls. She seems to do all right around here, but I guess she’s not really raising us.

Lyyssa doesn’t know jack about raising boys
or
girls.

I’m not sure Daddy knew how to raise me. How do you raise a girl? What if I have a kid someday and I don’t know how to raise it? I think about that until I’m tired and fall asleep.

Daddy is gone for a few days. Holly looks after me. Most ladies have brown or black hair that they make blonde. Holly has yellow hair but she dyes it black. She says ‘Blessed be’ instead of ‘G’day’ or ‘Hello’. All of Holly’s clothes are black. She has a tattoo on her arm called a pentacle. Holly likes our house because it’s at the junction of two rivers. She sings outside at night when there’s a full moon. Sometimes she drives into town while I watch television.

One time when Holly is gone I get hungry and eat some corn chips and sour cream dip, then get a bad stomachache. Holly comes back and sees me crying ’cause my tummy hurts. ‘You dag,’ she says, looking at the sour cream dip container. ‘It’s past the use-by date.’ She puts some coloured stones in a circle around me and says she’s casting a spell but the stomach ache doesn’t go away.

Holly gets mad that I’m still crying and asking for Daddy. She takes a pill from her purse, gets me a glass of water, says, ‘Here, just swallow this.’ Then I get very sleepy, and my stomach still hurts but I don’t care. When I wake up I’m still on the couch, but it’s the next day and Hi-Five is on the TV instead of Seventh Heaven.

I hear a car pull into the driveway and the sound of a car door slamming. Daddy is home. Holly is talking to him out front. I want to run out and see him, but my legs won’t hold me up. I fall into the coffee table and knock over the bowl of corn chips. My hands are shaky but I manage to clean up the mess before Daddy sees it.

‘I got ripped off, that’s what happened,’Daddy says as he comes in the front door.

‘The whole crop?’ Holly says, sounding madder than when her spell didn’t fix my stomachache. ‘You didn’t let them get all of it, did you?’

‘Just shut up and get me a beer, would ya?’

Holly stomps into the kitchen and Daddy drops his leather jacket on the couch. ‘Hey, Poss,’ he says in a tired voice.

‘Blessed be, Daddy.’

The slap hits me across the face and knocks me across the room. ‘Mick!’ Holly gasps, but Daddy punches her in the face before she can say any more. I run to my room and hide in the closet.

‘You taught her to say that, you filthy bitch! You keep your goddamn witchcraft away from my kid!’

Outside, Reggie is barking and pulling at his chain.

Finally the screaming stops and the house is quiet. Holly is gone. I hear Daddy go into his room and fall onto the bed. He groans, like he has a stomach ache. I stay perfectly still and quiet until I hear him start to snore.

If Daddy sees me before tomorrow, he’ll still be mad and everything will be wrong. If he doesn’t see me or hear me until tomorrow, then we can both pretend that he never went away and that Holly was never here and that he never hit me, and everything will be all right.

Chapter 26

I’m sitting at my desk, trying to figure out what answers to write on the quiz that Lyyssa gave me. ‘It’ll be something for us to talk about during our next session,’ Lyyssa said, taking the pages off her printer and handing them to me along with a new biro. ‘I’ll do the quiz, too, and we can compare our answers.’

I can’t blame Lyyssa for trying to get me to talk. She’s supposed to counsel me, but I never want to talk in our sessions. Still, I can’t get the point of these goofy questions.

1.  There’s no school today. I would like to:

2.  My wardrobe is mostly made up of:

A month ago, Lyyssa taught me some self-hypnosis techniques, to see if I could bring back memories of my life before the accident. Of course I didn’t bother trying self-hypnosis, but I told Lyyssa that I had, and that it didn’t work. I told Lyyssa that I still couldn’t remember anything.

The more I remember, the less I want to talk to Lyyssa or anyone else.

I remember a ginger-haired man, white-trash women, a dog, drugs being sold and used and stolen.

I may have had amnesia six months ago, but I don’t anymore. The ginger-haired man was my father, and the white-trash women were his girlfriends. The dog was our pet, but he was also meant to protect us from being robbed or hurt. I remember that my father made drugs and sold drugs but didn’t use drugs himself and didn’t want me to use them, either.

But if I were totally cured of my amnesia, wouldn’t I remember something about my mother? I must have a mother somewhere. And wouldn’t I have some idea of where my father is now?

I can’t concentrate. Sky and Jo are helping a new girl move into the next room and they’ve left the door open. They’re moving furniture and talking.

I take another look at the quiz. It’s a real
Glamour Girl
sort of quiz. There was a copy of the magazine in the dentist’s office last month, which I only picked up because there was nothing else remotely interesting to read. The dentist saw me reading it and thought it was a huge joke to call me
Glamour Girl
all the way through the consultation. I wanted to bite his rubber-gloved finger off.

3.  My ULTIMATE DREAM job would be:

4.  Which celebrity would you want as your best friend?

5.  One beauty product I can’t leave home without is:

6.  My best buds would describe me as:

7.  I would ABSOLUTELY NEVER go to the beach without:

8.  What exercise is best to get a TOTALLY bodacious bod?

I flip my new biro around in my hand. These questions piss me off. Nobody calls their friends ‘best buds’ or refers to their body as ‘bodacious’. I’m reading real, grown-up books from our library and from the University library, and Lyyssa thinks she can trick me into talking with some retarded quiz.

9.  My FAVE piece of jewellery is:

10.  Which male celebrity would you LOVE to go out on a date with?

This pink-tinted putrescence can’t possibly come from anywhere else but
Glamour Girl
. And who reads that trash? Karen.

I look at my watch. Karen and Shane are downstairs watching some stupid TV show about a boy detective and his pet chimpanzee. Cinnamon’s in her room with the door shut, and Lyyssa’s in her office. I walk quietly down the hall, looking into the new girl’s room as I pass. Sky and Jo are moving the bed. The new girl has her back to me. I stop, looking for a moment at her perfect blonde ponytail, skinny arms sticking out of a T-shirt, jeans, and scuffed trainers. She’s putting posters of horses on her wall, very carefully pressing each corner to make the Blu-Tack stick. The posters are kind of tatty-looking, like they’ve been unfolded and folded back up again lots of times. But the horses are all impossibly beautiful. One is a glossy black Arab rearing up on his hind legs. Another is a black and white Gypsy Vanner with huge feathers on his hooves prancing through a meadow.

Something in my chest twists when I look at the horses on the wall. I quickly turn away before anyone sees me, make my way to Karen’s room, open the door, and flick on the light.

Welcome to Obese Dorksville. Pink fake fur rug, pink beanbag chair. Two boxes of Maltesers and a bag of jellies on the night table. Closet full of fat girl clothes. Desk just like mine, except it’s got retard schoolbooks and colouring books scattered all over it, along with a huge plastic bucket full of crayons and coloured pencils. Stupid drawings Blu-Tacked to the wall – Karen’s drawn pictures of a red-haired princess, a red-haired mermaid, and a red-haired ballerina. A poster of LeeLee Nelson wearing ripped hipster jeans with a white leather belt and a bikini top that shows most of her boobs. Dream on, Karen. You couldn’t pull those skinny jeans past your fat ankles.

The copy of
Glamour Girl
is next to the beanbag chair, underneath a dirty plate that Karen’s left in her room.
Pig.
The Refuge has a rule about not leaving dirty things in your room. I pull the magazine out by the edges so I don’t have to touch the dirty plate, but the plate turns over anyway, spilling crumbs onto the carpet. Well, it’s not my fault. The plate wasn’t supposed to be there in the first place.

The cover of the magazine looks pretty much the same as the time I read it in the dentist’s, except this time it’s lime green and aqua instead of purple. There’s a picture of LeeLee Nelson on the cover, wearing a white dress and looking cute, not trashy like she does on the poster. I scan the headlines.
Lila-Rose & LeeLee: How to Tell Them Apart!
Glamour Girl
Guide to Totally Awesome Fashion. Model Comp: Are YOU Our Next Cover Girl??? Special Quiz: What Kind of Glamour Girl Are You?

I flick through the pages until I come to the quiz.

Lyyssa did lift her questions from
Glamour Girl.
It’s a quiz to find out whether you’re an Earth Goddess, Beach Babe or Rock Chick. It’s multiple choice, so you can circle A, B or C for each one, then count up your answers. Which Karen has done.

I leaf through the magazine to find the quiz answers. Karen has circled ‘mostly C’s’ – Karen is a
Rock Chick
! Each
Glamour Girl
type has a paragraph with fashion recommendations, dating advice, and info about celebrity soulmates, but I’m laughing too hard to read it. I let the magazine drop to the floor and run out of the room, flicking off the light before I shut the door. Karen’s too dumb to notice that the magazine and dirty plate aren’t where she left them.

After washing my hands in the bathroom – the cover was sticky with jam or butter or something greasy – I go back to that stupid quiz that Lyyssa plagiarised. Miss Dunn told me about plagiarism when she showed me how to write a report. Plagiarism is when you copy stuff from other people’s books or magazine articles.

1.  There’s no school today. I would like to:
make Karen clean her room, then take her to the hospital to get her stomach stapled.

2.  My wardrobe is mostly made up of:
jeans and T-shirts — duh!

3.  My ULTIMATE DREAM job would be:
lawyer
.

4.  Which celebrity would you want as your best friend?
Celebrities suck.

5.  One beauty product I can’t leave home without is:
bottled water. Beauty comes from hydrated skin.

6.  My best buds would describe me as:
I don’t have any ‘best buds’, dickhead.

7.  I would ABSOLUTELY NEVER go to the beach without:
I don’t go to the beach, dickhead.

8.  What exercise is best to get a TOTALLY bodacious bod?
Tennis, swimming, and yoga improve your cardiovascular fitness, muscular strength, and flexibility. ‘Bodacious’ is a stupid word. So is TOTALLY.

9.  My FAVE piece of jewellery is:
I don’t wear jewellery, dickhead.

10.  Which male celebrity would you LOVE to go out on a date with?
I told you, celebrities suck.

I look at what I wrote. I can’t show this to Lyyssa, and I’ve written it in pen, so I can’t erase it. I crumple it up and throw it in the bin. I’ll tell Lyyssa that I lost it, and make up the answers during our session.

We meet the new girl at dinner. Her name’s Anna, and she’s twelve. She looks like she might be okay. Unfortunately, Karen got to her first and it looks like they’re best buds already.

‘Anna’s got loads of horse posters in her room,’ Karen tells Lyyssa, as if it matters.

‘Oh really? Do you like horses, Anna?’ Lyyssa asks.

‘Yeah,’ says Anna, dropping her eyes to her plate.

‘Anna Montana,’ Cinnamon snipes. She starts to hum the theme song to
Hannah Montana
and does a little dance in her chair, like Miley Cyrus does during the opening sequence. Anna looks up from her plate and stares at Cinnamon, her eyes narrowing a little.

Lyyssa ignores Cinnamon and persists with Anna. ‘Did you ride horses with your foster family?’

It turns out that Anna has never ridden a horse in her life. And her foster family were at Silverwater, which makes Cinnamon start laughing because Silverwater’s a dump and they have a gaol there.

So, it’s a typical new kid arrival day. Someone’s mean to the new kid at dinner and gets sent to the kitchen to clean up for violating the Refuge’s Mutual Respect policy.

Anna only lasts a fortnight. I don’t know where she goes next. Karen cries when she leaves, and puts up a poster in her room of Lila-Rose and LeeLee riding matching white horses.