The Stars at Oktober Bend Read online

  since no one would take what i wrote, i pinned it in places where people might stop and read. railway waiting rooms, fish-and-chip shops, church noticeboards and bus shelters. squeezed them between and under and beside lawn-mowing cards, lost and found notices and babysitting ads. sometimes i pasted speech bubbles on the paper lips of poster models. gave them words so they’d never be like me.

  ‘in any language a scream is a scream and a smile is a smile.’

  i even invented a word to describe the things i wrote. called them alicisms. i liked that word. it was mine.

  in quiet corners, i pinned questions.

  is love or flying the quickest way between two hearts?

  is love or flying the most dangerous?

  is love the only cause of forsaking?

  i left spaces for answers and pencils tied to string and did not wonder if my odd questions were signs of shedding twelveness. the only responses were rude ones. until manny came.

  6 ALICE

  house of silence

  once-upon-a-time we had a grandfather who lived with us and a telephone that did not work. joey said the phone company disconnected it because we didn’t pay the bills. but that didn’t stop gram shouting into the receiver when she got the debt collector’s letters. she did it to fool us, joey said.

  i don’t remember gram shouting. that was before. i only remember after, when gram, joey, bear and me were all who were left. when gram was easier to say than grandma glorious. when i wrote lists instead of sentences and sounded like a tuba with a sock stuffed in its throat. when gram looked old and tired like other people’s grandmothers.

  after was when the landlord sent us an eviction letter. said the council wanted to demolish the house. told us we had to get out. out of our home. out of our place in the world.

  ‘where will we go? what will happen to us if we don’t?’ i asked gram. ‘will they put us in jail, like papa?’

  ‘don’t be stupid,’ she snapped. ‘we’re not going anywhere. we pay our rent, we got a right to be here.’ from then on she burnt council letters and letters from our landlord in the stove. without even opening them. like that was going to save us.

  joey was more practical. he cleaned old charlie’s gun. oiled its two blue barrels. kept it ship-shape. and in spring when the rains came and the river rose, it was joey who dragged the boat out from under the house. tied it to a verandah post. safe as we could be. all of us. papa in the slammer. letters in the stove, gun under the house, boat on the verandah, companion constant, and secret at the angel’s feet.

  the secret appeared one morning in the earliness of my homecoming. body weak, stitching raw, thoughts unruly. but still i spied. spied it resting on the blue petals of a cloth daisy. thought i had found a little soul upon my sheet. pure as light, it was. clear and glistening. shapeless as a cloud. i cut around the flower. snip-snipped, careful as i could. hid it in a matchbox. the red-haired lady kept her heart-shaped lips closed. wouldn’t tell. but i told joey. bothered him with questions he couldn’t answer. bothered him to bury it. to his why i answered, ‘in case it is the beginning or the ending of something precious.’

  perhaps to please me, perhaps to end my botherings, dearest brother, gentle joey scratched a hole near the angel’s stony feet. lay the matchbox there, covered it with sweet black soil and tufts of tender moss, he said. patted it down, snug and safe. a secret between him and me. a dear departed soul to keep teddy company. to this day i do not really know what was in the matchbox. perhaps it was filled with longing or with fear. or maybe with nothing at all.

  for weeks afterwards, i wanted to ask joey to dig it up again. to make sure it was still there. scared it was or wasn’t. scared it was part of my madness. only a dream. scared there might be loose ends after all. one thread pulled and i might come undone. so i said nothing.

  months later, when a thread of fear fizzed like a lit wick, i wrote an antidote to fright in my book of flying.

  we strange birds are safe

  in our rust-chewed nest perched

  on deep-driven bridge

  piles on the mudflats of oktober

  bend.

  i was not the only one who left words unsaid. ours was a house of many silences. most of them left by the people who’d gone away: our father, sunny; and then april, our mother, who took her cello with her. papa charlie would have stayed, but they took him. made him go. he had no say in it. silence swelled with time. grew thick and heavy. not only because we couldn’t hear the voices of our missing ones, but because sadness, hurt and anger made it too hard for us to talk about them. gram most of all. she ignored joey’s questions like she ignored the demolition letters. and pretended she couldn’t understand my slow, thick speech. days joey went to school, there was another silence. i learned to fill it by writing poems that nobody read. and questions no one answered.

  7 ALICE

  kith and kin

  they don’t let you receive phone calls when you’re in jail. not even from kith and kin. but you can make them if the people you want to talk to have a phone that works. the only way we could talk to papa was to visit him. he didn’t answer letters.

  ‘how will we get there?’ joey said.

  ‘train,’ answered gram.

  ‘do you think you can make it up to the station?’

  ‘i’ll just have to, won’t i.’

  ‘we’ll have to leave early then. leave plenty of time so’s you can have a rest on the way.’

  ‘i’ve done it plenty of times before.’

  ‘before your lungs were stuffed.’

  i wished joey would shut up. gram had never let us go with her before. she might change her mind if he didn’t be quiet. but she ignored him.

  ‘we’ll go on sunday. children are allowed on sundays,’ gram said. she made me promise to take my tablets. ‘and if you don’t feel too good, tell joey and he can take you outside.’

  the security people checked us to see if we had any contraband. all we had were explorer socks with extra-padded soles, licorice allsorts, a fishing magazine and a poem. i wanted to show papa how i could write now. wanted to give him a clue that the doctors might have got it wrong. i could not bring my lures to show him. we had to hand old charlie’s gifts over to security even though they were not contraband. they promised us they would pass them on to papa after we left. they let me sign my name on the poem so he would know i wrote it.

  there were other people in the visitors’ room when we got there. men wearing green tracksuits talking to their families. then they brought old charlie in. papa in a green tracksuit. i never saw him in a tracksuit before. never ever. least i don’t think so. whenever i thought of him he was wearing a flannelette shirt and khaki overalls. on visiting sunday he looked shrunken down into his clothes. like a turtle with its head pulled halfway into its shell. he smiled when he saw us. didn’t talk much. just kept smiling and nodding his head. biting his lip. trying not to cry. i had my pills inside me. chemicals hurtling round inside my veins. i did not cry. i held papa’s hand and my electrics hummed smooth as summer honey through the wires in my brain. kith and kin we were. love made us strong. joey put coins into a machine and got us potato crisps and soft drink. i ate the crisps and listened to the others. did not say many things. did not want my voice to remind papa about what happened. about the reason he could not come home with us.

  it was a long way from home to the jail where papa was. three hours to get there and three hours back. that is a long time for someone whose breathing apparatus is buggered. every time i asked gram when we could go again, she’d say, ‘when my chest is better.’

  when i asked joey if he and i could go by ourselves, he said,

  ‘you’ve got to be eighteen to go without an accompanying adult. that’s the rules,’ he said. ‘we go with gram or not at all.’

  gram’s bad chest meant that arrangements had to be made. she signed her name on a pile of green and white slips so joey could get her pension money out of the bank. joey and me talked
about next of kin and what happens when you haven’t got any who are not locked up. kin is family. kith and kin is friends and family. kindred is likeness. joey didn’t count april as kin. didn’t count our mother as anything. he never knew our daddy, sunny, and i couldn’t remember much about him either. our daddy who is dead. our father who art in heaven. some things we tried not to

  think about like

  what number gram was up to

  and we shut our ears to her

  strangled breath.

  joey said so long as he turned eighteen before anything happened to gram, we’d be okay.

  if something happened before

  no one need know

  except us he said and

  the small hill of green and white was

  like a key

  to gram’s money.

  joey never asked anyone

  to the house or

  talked about gram,

  old charlie or me.

  joey, bear and me were kith and kin, kindred. we were everything to each other. that was before joey met tilda. before manny came. tilda and manny were complications.

  not even jack faulkner came to the house. gram wouldn’t allow it. the less that people knew about nightingale business the better, she said. joey and me knew it wasn’t just the fly business she meant; it was personal stuff like

  tar in her lungs,

  eviction letters

  old charlie behind bars

  and me

  not going to school.

  meeting faulkner at the community centre was another one of gram’s arrangements. made while she had breath enough to make them. faulkner lived in the city. came once a month on a thursday. after the country women’s association meeting was over. gram volunteered to mop the floor. they gave her a key and she laid my trout flies on the kitchen table and let jack in the back door. when her emphysema got worse i took over the mopping. joey did the business. faulkner made out he was sorry for our gram.

  ‘must be tough trying to raise two kids on the pension while her old man’s in the slammer,’ he said. he offered cash for my flies like he was doing us a favour. named a price. stuck out his right hand. hairy, gold-ringed pinky. but joey wouldn’t shake.

  ‘they’re worth more than that and you know it!’

  so faulkner said he’d pay more for flies made from rare feathers.

  ‘it’s damn good money for a retarded girl with no prospects,’ he told joey. he never looked at me.

  8 ALICE

  on birthday number fifteen

  i took things into my own hands. took the dictionary down from its place between the tea-leaves and the sugar. did some research into acquired brain injury and wrote my findings on the pages of the book of flying.

  acquire v. gain possession of.

  gain v. 1 obtain, esp. something desirable. 3 achieve 7 reach (a desired place).

  possess v. 1 have or own. 2 occupy or dominate the mind of (she’s possessed of the devil).

  be possessed of own, have.

  desire n. 1 a feeling that one would get pleasure or satisfaction by obtaining or possessing something.

  doctors say my brain has acquired, gained possession of, obtained or got, an injury. this much might or might not be true. the rest is incorrect. here are the facts:

  • having a brain that does not work properly is not desirable. is not an achievement.

  • i do not feel any pleasure or satisfaction in having a brain that does not work the way it should.

  • there’s no devil in there. just me and my thoughts hammering away at the walls. trying to break free.

  dot point facts are

  easy found, hard

  to form

  saywords come

  slow and slurred

  sound stupid

  but heartwords fly

  from my pen

  the research part was easy. all i did was copy what someone else had written. non-fiction. stating my opinion took hours. finding the right words. arranging them on the page. when my work was done i wished there was someone i could show it to. someone who would read it and tell me it didn’t look like a girl with crazy wiring had written it.

  9 Manny

  Runaway

  I am the running boy. The one who loves Alice. I am called Manny James.

  The first time I saw Alice it was late at night and she was sitting on the roof of her house. You do not forget a thing like that.

  The moon was big and bright that night and I was out running. Running is what I do when I cannot sleep. When I got to the footbridge over Charlotte’s Pass, I stopped to catch my breath. The air was hot and still and I could hear a train in the distance. I looked down at the trees and bushes that grew between the railway and the river and that is where I saw a very strange thing.

  It was a house on stilts I saw. I ran that way often, but I swear I never saw that house before. Way up high near the tree tops it was. Like it was floating there.

  You must be dreaming, Manny James. Even in this land, houses do not float in the trees. That is what I was thinking when a light came on in a window, high up near the roof of that house. The window opened and a person stepped out onto a small balcony. It was a girl. Her hair was very long. Down to her waist it was. That is how I knew that person was a girl. She climbed onto the railing, and my heart was beating fast and loud. Almost as loud as the train. Not fast because I had been running, fast because that long-haired girl started crawling up the steep roof and because the ground was a long way down. But I did not shout at her. I did not call out, be careful, girl! I could not. My tongue was dry, like the leather tongue of a shoe and my chest was tight with air that could not escape. The train got closer and louder and I watched that girl climb higher.

  When she safely reached the top, the air went quickly out of me and I was very glad. But then she stood up and again I was afraid. This time I thought that girl was going to jump. I know what it is like to have no hope. I have been that way.

  ‘No! Don’t do it. Don’t!’ I screamed at the top of my voice, but the train was much louder than me and that girl did not move. She looked like a carving on an old fashioned ship, sailing through the stars. That is what she looked like. The seconds ticked slowly, slowly. Then she threw her hands up, that girl did, and tiny fragments came drifting down all around her. In the place where I came from there is no snow, but I have seen it in the movies. That is what the falling pieces looked like. I did not know it then, but that girl was Alice and that is the picture of her that I keep in my head. That girl on the roof making snow fall in summer. It is a thing I will never forget. The train passed slowly between us. Its trucks carried grain, not people, and it did not stop at Bridgewater Station. At the far end of the platform the train began to move faster, and by the time it disappeared the roof of the house on Oktober Bend was empty.

  10 MANNY

  The First Poem

  I found the first poem that night. It was very quiet, as if the train had taken all the sound in the world away with it. I raced across the shunting yards, past the empty goods sheds and the broken carriages all covered in graffiti. I did not know why I was running so fast. The train had gone, and the girl, and I could not find a way to get down to that house in the trees but still I kept running. I ran through the subway and up the steps to platform one, then I sat down on a wooden bench and wiped the sweat off my face and chest with my singlet. I looked at the medallion hanging around my neck. It was a gift from kind Louisa James. She said it was a charm.

  ‘A charm is like good luck, Manny,’ she said. ‘It will keep you safe.’ That is what she told me. It was a shock when she said that. I did not think there were things to be kept safe from in Australia. No one had told me what happened to the girl called Alice. I wore the charm every day but only to please Louisa James. You do not need a golden charm around your neck to bring luck. Luck brought me to Bull and Louisa James, and they gave me a home in the house of many windows. They gave me many other things also, but nothing or
nobody can keep you safe all the time. Not a charm, not a person, not luck. Not anything. That is a fact.

  When I had stopped thinking about luck, I stood up to leave and put my foot on the seat to tighten the laces on the running shoes that Bull and Louisa James had given to me. That is when I saw the poster that was on the noticeboard behind the seat. It had a picture of a pretty lady on it. She was drinking Coca-Cola and someone had written ‘Read My Lips’ beside her mouth, which was open just enough to let the Coca-Cola in. Then I noticed that pretty lady also had something pinned to her hand. It was a piece of paper folded to look like a small fan. The pleats were tied with thread to stop them coming undone. I took the pin out of the lady’s hand, unwound the thread and straightened the paper and then I saw that the fan was made from an emptied packet of flower seeds.

  ‘Yates Blue Velvet pansies,’ I read, ‘shades of indigo, violet and midnight.’ I had never heard of pansies. Flowers do not grow well where landmines are buried. I studied the picture on the packet and those flowers reminded me of the faces that I saw in my dreams. They had big frightened eyes and no mouths. I dropped the paper on the seat and picked up my singlet. I needed to run again. That was the feeling I had inside me when I thought of the faces. But, before I ran, I saw that there was handwriting on the back of the flower packet. That is what stopped me from running.

  desire

  my desire is

  to be

  understood

  my soul is filled

  with songbirds

  but when I open myself to

  set them free

  they shit

  on my lips.

  anon

  It was a night for big surprises. First that girl making snow on the roof and then that small poem on the number one railway platform. I read that poem many times and many times it made me sad. Sad for Anon, who had songs that no one understood, and sad because I had no songs left inside me. I did not know if I had a soul, but if I did, I was sure there was nothing there worth letting out.