His Illegal Self

19

She lay on the mudflats between nightmares and the ropy unknown day. A magpie sang. In November, the creepy Rabbitoh had told her, the magpies pecked your head and made blood pour down your face. Some country she’d been sent to.

Dial, the boy said.

She was sleeping in a nest of pillows and musty rugs beneath a ceiling of worrisome water-stained wood. She did not want to wake and deal with what she’d done. It was too hot already.

Dial.

Her skin was itchy, her hair still dirty. She had slept with her head wedged into the tight dark angle where the ceiling met the loft.

Dial!

He needed too damn much too often. She hid her face in her hands, playing peekaboo but also hiding from his breath. She must buy him a damned toothbrush.

Dial, when can we leave?

She opened her arms to him and he buried himself in the warm cave beside her neck. Whatever had happened to him you could feel he had been loved. No matter what a cow his grandma was she had cuddled him and kissed him. He had told Dial the names of the puddings Grandma had cooked: queen, sticky toffee, pineapple upside down, unbelievably Victorian.

When can we leave, he said now, but she could not deal with that. She could feel his immense fragility but what could she do? This place might be their only hope. It was in the middle of the outback, as she understood it, with no phone and no mail delivery. They were off the grid. How else could she use the money to make them safe.

No matter what happens, Dial, can we? Leave?

She looked at his small determined face, his frown, the searching intelligence in those gray eyes.

He’s worried, she said, mocking Adam, not so much to change the subject, as to begin leading the boy toward the matter that he really must address. They were not going to start drifting.

He has to confer with someone, she said, and rolled her eyes.

Can we stay in a motel? Can we?

The dope is worried the pigs will grab him for having U.S. dollars.

Finally, she saw him understand. It made his body rigid. You’re trying to buy it!

Baby, you said you wanted to stop going places.

He jerked away from her. She hardly saw him go, but heard him on the ladder, half falling, landing heavily. As she rose from her blankets the flies rose too and she felt one crawl along her bare arm. She slapped herself.

Che? I’m trying to look after you. She pulled on some underpants so she could decently descend the ladder. The rungs were thin. They hurt her feet.

All I have is U.S. dollars. I don’t have a lot of choices.

He did not answer.

She said, It’s useless to them, you heard that. We’re rich, but the money’s worth nothing.

She took his hand. He snatched it back. Come on, she said. She was pleading with him, really, to understand what had happened to her life.

Come on, she said, show me all the stuff you found yesterday.

He kept his hand to himself but he led her out into the long wet grass and took an obvious sulky pleasure showing her to the so-called bathroom, a rusty four-gallon can inside a square wooden box.

Come on, she said. The place itself is sort of pretty. Let’s look in the other hut.

And it would have been pretty, in photographs, the varied greens, the log-clad huts with their low sagging verandas. Inside the second hut they found shirts and trousers hanging from four-inch nails. A netted bed faced two windows. Between the windows was a door which opened onto a low dark veranda where bats hung like broken rags.

It’s a real jungle, she said. It looked poisonous to her.

There’s another hut down there, she said. Do you want to check it ount?

You said ount, he said.

No I didn’t. She laughed but she hated people doing that to her, pointing out the moments when Boston surfaced. He had done this to her at Australian customs, the little WASP, announcing she was saying mayan instead of mine. Well, he would have more foreign stuff than that to deal with.

This was going to be his home, not just the acres, or the two huts, but this small third hut down in the darkness of the rain forest, creepier than the others, with nothing in it but an empty pickle jar.

Outside, on the stoop, someone had carved a face into a block of stone. It was not exactly sinister, but it suggested superstition, witchcraft and some very lonely lost life reduced to a hidden corner of the earth.

What does conferring mean? The boy pushed the stone over so its face was hidden.

He’s chickenshit.

You should not use curse words, you know.

He was hugely upset. She was hugely upset herself but she was the adult and could not show it.

What’s the matter, baby?

You shouldn’t curse.

Shut up, she thought. She brought him out of the forest, emerging just below the deck of one big leaky shaky hut, beside a bush with shiny leaves and bright red berries which she said was coffee. She wasn’t even sure that this was true.

Go on, she said, peel one. You’ll see.

Inside the red skin was a white, moist seed, slippery and somehow wrong. The boy was peeling a second bean when she heard an engine and saw the dirty blue-oil smoke, then the car itself. When the motor was turned off it continued knocking and coughing. She was expecting Adam, not Trevor. Now both of them walked through the grass toward them, Trevor staring at the boy a little too intently for her taste.

Hello boy, he said, shirtless, oily, hipless in the sun.

Hello Trevor.

She saw how the boy lifted his chin, allowing himself to be silently interrogated.

She said, Fancy seeing you here.

Trevor chewed his smile in the corner of his mouth. Well, someone has to change your money.

Of course, she thought.

The boy also understood. His howl came out of nowhere, like something teased and taunted in a cage. He charged at Trevor like a mad thing. He punched him in his hard hairless stomach and between the legs.

Che! she screamed at him, but Trevor had lifted him up and away and he was still hitting and scratching in the air.

When he was still, Trevor put him back on the ground and the boy looked hatefully at Dial, waiting for her to do something. When he understood she would do nothing, he slashed at the coffee bush and tore a handful of leaves and then he ran through the long dewy grass, leaping with fright at something on the way, continuing through the dense tangle of lantana which would doubtless rip his skin.

I’m sorry, she said to Trevor, but she was frightened now, of everything she’d done. I better go and talk to him, she said.

No, said Trevor, he’ll be fine. You have to talk to me.

And she obeyed. She walked with them up the traitor’s path, thinking of the boy, knowing exactly where he was, what he felt, inside the empty shed with the pickle bottle, curled up on the filthy floor, growing cooler, slowly more ashamed.