A Small Free Kiss in the Dark Read online

  ‘Gulliver’s Meadows.’

  ‘That’s not a place!’

  ‘Yes it is. It’s Grandpa’s place. It’s his farm.’

  ‘But what’s the town called?’

  ‘There isn’t a town, just paddocks.’

  ‘There’s gotta be a town. Where’s it near?’

  Max wrinkled his forehead. ‘It’s past a mountain.’ He waved his hand. ‘You know, near the great big railway tunnel. When is Billy coming back?’

  ‘Soon,’ I said and I hoped my answer would come true. I stopped asking Max questions and tried to remember what it was like to be six and to know only the most important things; like having a grandpa who lived near a great big railway tunnel and owned more than ten cows.

  I watched the Friends of the Library loading boxes of books into the van. Then some people came out of the foyer carrying a person between them, one at the head and one at the feet. You couldn’t tell if the person was alive or not. They were loading it into the van when Max turned around to see what I was looking at.

  ‘Is that person dead?’ he asked me.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  They closed the doors of the van and drove off. Not long after, Billy came.

  ‘Did you get banana fritters?’ Max asked.

  ‘No fritters today, but I got some other good things.’ Billy talked quietly and he didn’t let us look in his bag straight away. ‘Let’s go outside and have our lunch,’ he said. ‘I think the sun’s almost shining.’

  Billy had already picked the place. He pointed to a seat that was sheltered from the wind. It was the only spot along the wall where no one could see you from inside the library or from the street. I thought Max would notice, but he didn’t say anything. Maybe he was too hungry.

  Billy undid his bag. He had cans with ring-pull lids. The labels were burnt off them, so it was like a lucky dip. Billy got baked beans and Max and me got fruit salad. We didn’t have spoons so Billy ate his beans off his pocketknife. It took him a long time because the beans kept falling off and he had to be extra careful not to cut his tongue. Max and me drank the juice and then picked the pieces of fruit out of the cans with our fingers. I got two cherries.

  ‘Do you like cherries?’ I asked Max.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  I gave him one to taste, and he nibbled it and nodded so I gave him the other one. Next there was bread and dried sausage. Something hot would have been better, something like Sam’s Kebabs, but I knew Billy would have done his best. I ate the bread and put the sausage in my pocket.

  ‘Eat up, Skip,’ Billy said.

  I told him about the eyebrow woman, who’d been kind to us. ‘I thought she might like a bit of sausage,’ I said.

  ‘Eat it. I can’t feed everyone.’

  As well as the food, Billy got a beanie for Max. It was dark blue with white stripes and a picture of a cat. The Cats were Max’s favourite football team. Last of all Billy gave me a new packet of chalk.

  ‘Don’t let anything stop you, Skip,’ he said.

  I nearly told him about the books then, but I didn’t want Max to know I was a thief.

  Not as many people stayed that night. I heard someone say it was safer outside. But Billy and Max and me got in our bunker. The planes sounded close and Billy didn’t put his torch on. Max sang ‘Incy Wincy Spider’ for a little while. I could feel him doing the actions in the dark. Then he went to sleep. I thought about the cows in Max’s Book of After-school Activities, and about his grandpa who lived on the other side of the mountain at Gulliver’s Meadows, just near the big railway tunnel. I visualised meeting a cow in person, with green grass right up to its kneecaps. That made me think about other things I wanted to see, like stars reflected in rivers and irises growing by sunlit ponds. I was just thinking about how good it would be to have a dog that I could paint on a plate, when Max started screaming.

  He thrashed around under the blanket like he was having a fit. Billy pushed one of the tables over and we dragged him out of the bunker. We talked to him, trying to calm him down. But he wouldn’t shut up and his legs and arms kicked like crazy. People were calling out in the dark, ‘What’s the matter? What’s going on?’

  I threw myself down on top of Max, pinning his arms to his sides and Billy knelt beside him, stroking his hair, talking quietly. Someone else came and sat next to us. I couldn’t see who it was till Billy put his torch on. It was the eyebrow woman. She felt Max’s forehead and pulled back his eyelids.

  ‘He’s dreaming, poor lamb,’ she said. ‘Night Terrors, that’s what it is. He’ll be fine in a minute.’

  At last I felt Max stop fighting, and I moved off him. He opened his eyes and tears rolled down his cheeks.

  ‘When will Mummy come, Skip?’

  I didn’t know if God would listen to the prayers of a thief, and I didn’t know if you could undo prayers once you’d said them, but I tried. I even offered to do a deal with God. I said if Max’s mum came through the door I’d put the books back on the shelves. I didn’t want Max to be like me, always looking and never finding.

  7

  Albert Park

  Most people believe their mother will come for them when she says she will. They don’t think of all the reasons why she mightn’t be able to, especially the reason of war. It isn’t a thing you think will happen to you, especially when you’re six years old. It’s an unlikely event. Max thought about his mother the way other people think about the sun; because it was there yesterday, it would shine again tomorrow.

  ‘She’s gone shopping,’ he told us on the first day. ‘She goes shopping at night after work. I stay here at the library until she comes back, and I don’t go outside. Sometimes she buys me fish fingers for my dinner.’

  On the second day he said, ‘She might come tomorrow.’ And when she didn’t come again, he said, ‘She might come next Tuesday.’

  After a few days, Max and me thought of a plan to find his mum. Max had a photo of her stuck in his book. In the mornings, before people went away to find food, Max and me showed everyone the photo. Max carried the book and I did the talking. ‘This is Max’s mum,’ I’d say. ‘If you see her anywhere, would you please tell her that Max is still waiting in the library?’

  Cecily, the eyebrow lady, thought it was a great idea. We showed the photo every day in case the old people forgot what Mrs Montgomery looked like, and for the new arrivals.

  Most days someone new came. Some of them brought pots and pans and blankets and tiny gas burners like the ones people take camping. They arranged chairs and desks like cubbyhouses. It was always cold. Wind gusted through the holes in the walls and people hacked pieces off the carpet and burnt them to keep warm.

  Max was brave. He only cried at night, and he cried quietly. I wouldn’t have known he did it, except one night I felt his hands wiping the tears off his cheeks. Sometimes I had to think about my overcoat list or do my visualisation technique because it’s a difficult circumstance when you’ve got a small boy crying quietly beside you and you don’t know what to do. I hated the quiet crying even more than the screaming nightmares that he had almost every night.

  I shifted the art books to higher ground when the toilets started flushing backwards. After about a week, the water stopped altogether and the smell got so bad that people started moving out. Some said the smell was coming from the toilets. Others said it was the bodies of the people who’d been killed when the front of the library collapsed. People argued about everything. The Friends of the Library stopped coming, although there were still thousands of books on the shelves.

  ‘We’ve got to find somewhere else soon, Skip,’ Billy said.

  He didn’t have to tell me that. Every morning another building had disappeared from the horizon. They weren’t all bombed; some just crumpled quietly, like a pair of jeans with no legs in them, because there was nothing to hold them up.

  I looked at Max, who was drawing in his book. ‘What are we going to tell Max?’

  Billy shrugged his
shoulders. ‘The truth, he’ll have to get used to it.’

  After that, I never left Max and Billy by themselves for a second. I had to be there when Billy told Max we were leaving. I wanted to hear the words so I’d know if it was just Billy and me going or all three of us. Max didn’t argue when Billy said we’d have to find another place to stay, and he didn’t cry when Billy told him his mother might not come. He just kept on drawing and said, ‘Mummy always came for me before.’

  Billy said we needed another tactic. That’s when I knew we were taking Max along. ‘We’ve got to get his mind off his mother.’

  ‘Why don’t we think of some places we could go?’ I said. ‘Things Max would like to see.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Trains? He loves trains. He’s got heaps of pictures in his book. We could take him to the station for a visit, to get him used to being away from here.’

  Most of the people who were there when we first came to the library had gone. Every day more people left. Sometimes others came, but not many. I finally got the nerve to tell Billy what I’d done, but I let him think I only did it to keep the books safe, like the Friends of the Library. He didn’t say if what I’d done was right or wrong, but he found me a suitcase with wheels to put the books in.

  On the day we planned to take Max to look at the trains I got the books out of their hiding-place and put them in my case. Then I went to say goodbye to Cecily. Even though Billy never said so, I had a feeling we wouldn’t be coming back.

  ‘Come with us, Cecily. We’re like sitting ducks up here,’ I said, repeating the words I’d overheard that morning.

  She laughed softly and shook her head. ‘Don’t worry about me, Skip, where I’m going, nothing can hurt me.’

  I gave her the end of the dried sausage that I’d been saving for emergencies. Her lips curved and her eyes sparkled under her soaring eyebrows and she put her bony arms around me. They felt like wings, and I remembered someone telling me once that you turn into an angel when you die. I wondered if Cecily knew the rules for praying. I wanted to ask her if you could reverse a prayer or if you had to be a good person before God would take any notice. But I couldn’t because there was a lump in my throat, and in my head was a picture of Cecily flying away. I closed my eyes and she whispered something into my hair.

  ‘Remember, Skip,’ she said, ‘that home is where your winter coat is.’

  I didn’t understand right away what she meant. But her words soaked through my skull like warm oil, behind my eyes, down my spine and into the empty space inside me.

  There was one last thing I wanted to do before we left. I went outside and drew a picture of Michaela on a patch of broken footpath. It was the first time I’d drawn anything since the flowers and cross I did for Bradley Clark when I thought he was Billy. I’d never done a portrait. For Michaela’s face I drew a pond. I drew irises for her eyes, and for her lips I did a small pink rosebud lying on its side. Then I went inside and told Billy I was ready.

  But Max wasn’t. He wanted to see the trains but he was afraid his mother might come while he was gone. He screamed and kicked and cried and bit Billy on the hand. I promised him a ride on my suitcase with wheels, but he wouldn’t shut up. Billy and me didn’t know what to do. Then Cecily and the knitting lady came to see what was going on.

  ‘I’ll watch out for your mum,’ Cecily told Max. She closed her eyes and stroked his head and said the words over and over like a magic spell. Max’s muscles relaxed and his face faded from red to pink, like the sun was going down under his skin, and at last he stopped crying. He lay still and the knitting lady, who didn’t like noise and never even talked to us before, leant over and gave him something. It was a pair of striped mittens with button eyes and stitched-on smiles.

  There was a 7-Eleven store on the corner, across the road from the station. We went shopping there before we caught the train, except we didn’t have to pay. There wasn’t much to choose from because the store had been looted, like any others that weren’t flattened or burnt out. You could tell which people were already scared of running out of food. They were the ones who took as much as they could carry, instead of only what they needed. Most of the things we got were in cans with the labels burnt off. We knew sardines because they were in flat tins, and we got muesli bars that were only a bit melted because they were in foil packs.

  We put our shopping in Billy’s backpack, crossed the road and walked downstairs to Platform One. It was dark and cold underground, but there were fires burning and people cooking on them. It was ages since we’d had anything hot to eat, and whatever was cooking smelt delicious. I didn’t know I’d started walking slow until Billy called out. ‘It’s rats,’ he said, then he laughed.

  The subway people had lived underground for a long time, not just since the war came. They lived in tunnels where the trains didn’t go any more. There were old people and young ones and even little children. Some were musicians and others were dancers, jugglers or fire-eaters. I saw the guy with the barbed-wire tattoo, who drew pictures in the mall, and Billy spoke to some of the others as we walked by.

  We decided not to go in a VFT, which stands for Very Fast Train, because we wanted to enjoy the scenery, and everything goes past in a blur when you’re on a VFT. There were people already in some of the carriages. We walked to the locomotive, where the engine-driver sits, and Billy slid his pocketknife in a crack and made the door come open. We let Max drive. I looked out the windows and saw white cows with black spots. When we got to the tunnel, Billy lifted Max up so he could pull the lever that sounded the whistle. We got out at the station near Gulliver’s Meadows. Billy opened all the tins and we found we had yellow peaches set in jelly, dog food, beetroot and some sweet, sticky stuff called condensed milk. I thought about Pablo Picasso’s dog, when we opened the dog food, and wished I could have saved it until I got a dog of my own. We sat in a paddock full of green grass and ate the peaches and the beautiful silver sardines, and dipped our fingers in the condensed milk and licked them, and then I drew some cows on the platform for Max and a sausage dog for me, before we caught the train home again.

  I never had anyone to pretend with before. My dad never pretended. Even though I only did it for Max, our make-believe train ride had been fun. It stopped me wondering about things like weapons of max destruction and where we were going to sleep and why Max’s mother hadn’t come and what would happen to us all next.

  We followed Billy down to the guard’s van. ‘We’ll sleep in here tonight,’ he said.

  Max looked up at him. ‘Aren’t we going to the library?’

  ‘It’s too dark to go back now,’ Billy said.

  Max looked at me and I felt bad. I’d told him we were only coming for a visit, but deep down I’d guessed that this was what Billy would do. I got myself ready for Max to throw another tantrum, but he looked at his mittens for a while and nothing happened. I guessed he was thinking about what Cecily said. I took the books out of my suitcase and Billy and me made a bed in it for Max, and zipped the cover up halfway so he could breathe and keep warm at the same time. I lay down on the bench beside him and Billy sat in a corner with his back against the wall. I closed my eyes and thought about the four storeys of books that we’d left behind, and wondered how many pages that would be and how many paragraphs and sentences and words and letters.

  It was quiet in the guard’s van except for the faraway stutter of machine-gun fire, but after a while something made me think Max was crying. I reached out in the dark and took the handle of my suitcase on wheels and I rocked it backwards and forwards beside me, the way I’d seen mothers do with babies in prams. Then I heard Billy’s harmonica sounding sweet and sad and blue all at the same time, like a train whistle in the night. The music soaked into my skin and bones and I felt myself falling down and down and down into the velvet dark.

  That night I dreamt of Cecily. She was flying around a church steeple. I couldn’t see her face, but I knew it was her because of the coffee tin under
one wing. She was chucking biscuits everywhere and soldiers were firing machine guns at her. I screamed, trying to make her fly away, but she said, ‘I promised Max I’d look out for his mother.’ When the bullets hit her, she didn’t fall down, she exploded into billions of stars.

  Then Billy was there, shaking me, and I knew something had happened.

  ‘Wake up, Skip. It’s morning.’

  I knew it was more than that. Everything was vibrating, the carriage doors rattled and there was a rumbling sound like a huge train was going to smash through the subway wall. We woke Max and shoved the books and blankets in my case, then we all hurried up the stairs to see what was going on. Most people were going the other way, rushing towards the underground. The platform at ground level was almost deserted, except for the subway people, and even they looked like they were getting ready to move on to someplace else.

  ‘Keep off the streets,’ the fire-eater said when he saw us. ‘The place is swarmin’ with tanks.’

  ‘I was there, man, I seen it all,’ someone else said, ‘and I swear to God it wasn’t random bombing, it was pinpoint precision.’

  ‘What was the target?’ asked Billy.

  ‘State Library, man. There ain’t one brick left standin’ on another.’

  Precision is the opposite of random, and random is the same as hit-and-miss. I couldn’t think of a reason why anyone would want to bomb the State Library. Was this my fault? Was this how God had answered my prayer? I held Max’s hand tight and squeezed my eyelids shut.

  ‘If youse are leavin’ town, the safest way is to follow the railway tracks,’ the fire-eater told Billy. ‘There’s roadblocks everywhere and it’ll only get worse.’

  We sat on a red couch in the travellers’ lounge and opened up Max’s book like a travel brochure. Max turned the pages. He pointed to a photograph. ‘That’s Disneyland. We could go there,’ he said.

  ‘It’s a bit far away,’ said Billy.

  ‘What about here, then,’ said Max flipping through the pages. ‘Is this too far?’