Friday Brown (3 page)

I pulled the photograph out of my backpack.
Prof. Green, Uni, 1994
was scrawled on the back in Vivienne’s handwriting. The man clutched a book to his chest, the word
Henry
just visible between his fingers. These were my only clues. He could have been nobody important, but it was his smallness, his dancer-grace that made me think there was more to him. Over time, Vivienne had discarded or lost the few old photos she’d had. Some were left behind; some were burned in fits of despair. But she kept that one.

I showed the old man the photo with its furred creases and he saw a resemblance, even though there was none. I said I was going to finish school and then go to university. That my father loved and missed me very much but my mother wouldn’t let me see him.

Not much of it was truth.

He clucked his tongue and I heard the pop and suck of false teeth. ‘I’ll drop you at the station,’ he said, and reached across my legs with his scaly arm.

I couldn’t help it, I shrank back.

He looked at me with pity and flipped open the glove box. A jumble of stuff fell out but he left it on the floor. He fumbled about and dropped a plastic-wrapped square onto my lap. A sandwich. Corned beef and pickle and something limp and green.

I hadn’t cried for forty-two days. Not since the nurse had unhooked Vivienne, the day they took the last of her away and a half-empty saline bag dripped onto the floor. I hadn’t cried since that night when I slept in her T-shirt so I could smell her, but all that was left was the scorching scent of bleach and Betadine.

But that sandwich did it. The crusts were off and the cling wrap had hospital corners. I blubbered the whole way.

The old man dropped me right out the front of the train station. He watched me as I walked into the station and didn’t pull away until I waved.

It seemed the city had no curfew. I expected everything to be dead that early in the morning but there were people everywhere. Not just night-people. A woman pushing a covered pram shoved past me. Three guys with sullen faces squatted, smoking, by the doors. One flicked his butt at my feet and waggled his tongue. I looked away. Tall buildings leaned in and squeezed the air out; the dark there was more sinister than any dark I’d ever felt, even with a million pinpricks of light from windows and doorways. Give me the absolute dark of the outback
at midnight, where you can sense what’s coming. The city felt alien and unsafe.

I found a bench inside the station and curled up on my side with my backpack for a pillow. A rain moth the size of a sparrow crawled out of a drain and headed towards the light, antennae twitching. I watched it for a while. I closed my eyes and when I opened them again, it was gone. My eyelids were so heavy. Trains came and went as sleep dragged me under.

I dozed. I cupped my hands over my ears to shut out the commotion, but most of the white noise was inside my head. Something fluttered near my ear and I slapped it away. I felt the dry brush of wings against my neck, but my hand closed over air. I grabbed again and felt something warm. Skin.

I snapped upright and my neck was cricked, my hip sore and stiff.

A boy was crouched next to me, stone-still, his hand outstretched. Part feral-child, part old man. Clear blue eyes and matted hair like silvery fairy floss.

‘Hey, what are you doing?’ I croaked.

He scuttled sideways like a sand crab. He could have been twelve or forty and he was strange-looking, otherworldly. Then he smiled and I saw that he was younger than I was because he didn’t quite fit into his teeth.

‘What are you smiling at? I haven’t got anything. Look.’ I wrenched open my pack and pawed through my things. ‘See, nothing. I haven’t got anything for you!’ I yelled. ‘Go away.’

He sidled closer and whipped out a packet of cigarettes. He shook one out and it fell to the ground. Nonchalantly, he picked it up and jammed it between his lips. He sat next to me with his back against the wall and smoked the whole thing without using his hands.

‘What do you want?’ I asked.

He shrugged.

I pretended to be busy rummaging through my bag. Early commuters were lining up along the platform. A train whooshed in and out. The platform was left nearly empty.

Still he sat there. He pulled his hoodie over his face, folded his arms, crossed his ankles. Appeared to fall asleep.

I could smell bacon or something greasy and good. I needed food. My stomach whined and the boy shifted. I jammed my backpack on, hoisted my swag and thought about what to do next.

Without thinking, I fished out a twenty-dollar note.

Everything happened at once.

The boy, not sleeping, darted in front of me, quick as a rat. I yanked my hand away and spun around. He was fast and fluid like a practised thief, except that he was past me and the twenty was still in my hand.

‘Hah,’ I gloated.

He was gone, empty-handed.

He bolted for the platform and I could see what had got him moving. The young mother, turned away from her baby in its pram, holding her phone up to the light.
The pram, rolling away, down towards the track. A pink fist waving. A woollen sock dangling from a tiny foot.

I went after him but my legs were stiff, my boots heavy. The boy got there as the pram tipped over the edge. He hesitated for a moment, then leaped onto the track.

‘Your baby!’ I screamed at the woman.

She was registering the vanished pram, the coming train, the gurgling screams from below. Her comprehension was slow and painful. The train screeched and slowed, but not enough, not in time.

I reached the edge of the platform and looked over the edge. The pram came back up, as if plucked by the hand of God. I grabbed the handle and heaved the pram onto the platform.

The mother snatched the baby up and crushed it to her chest. It was red-faced and screaming, but whole. Alive. The train lurched two, three times, hissed and stopped.

People came from everywhere. A security guard questioned the mother.

‘He’s still down there!’ I yelled at him.

‘Who?’ he asked.

‘The boy. The one who saved the baby! Move the train!’

The mother turned her white, shocked face to me. ‘I didn’t see a boy. Only you.’ Her voice was calm and she nuzzled her child as if memorising his smell. ‘I saw you pull him up.’

I wanted to slap her.

‘He’s still under it. Move the train!’ I paced along the edge of the platform, shouting, arms raised. Fistfuls of hair. ‘Pleeaaase. Just move the train!’

After some discussion, the driver stepped onto the platform. He pointed at me. ‘I saw her pull it up. That’s it. There’s nobody down there.’

I paced some more.

The guard looked at me with suspicion. After long minutes, the driver moved the train.

I stared down at the rails. Nothing. No blood or pieces. No proof of a wild boy with silver hair. I wasn’t convinced until the guard jumped down onto the track and looked under the carriage. Still nothing.

I collapsed onto the bench and tried to breathe. Half the crowd was calling me a hero, the other half was saying I must be crazy, on drugs. A guy held his mobile phone in front of my face and took my picture.

The mother was escorted to an office, still clutching her baby close. The guard asked me to stay to answer some questions for a report.

‘It’s a miracle,’ said a batty old woman in pyjama bottoms. Her eyes were murky with age, but she was the only person who looked me in the eye.

I stared after the mother and baby. A group of people huddled around them, trying to touch the miracle baby.

This was not my miracle, it was theirs. I just witnessed it. Moments like that, I thought maybe there was a God, a fickle puppet-master who decided it was time to remind
us that life isn’t just an echo of the Big Bang—that we’re here, with beating hearts.

The guy with the mobile phone snapped another picture. I jerked my hand up to cover my face and the phone clattered to the ground.

‘Hey!’ he yelled.

The crowd turned to stare.

I grabbed my things, sprinted out of the train station and onto the street. A taxi driver swerved and swore. Pale fingers of morning light poked between the buildings, and the bacon smell made my stomach groan.

Life is full of wrong turns and dead ends and pathways that peter out. They all count, even the wrong turns; they all add more to who you become. Nobody wants to be a one-way street. There are signposts if you cared to look, Vivienne always said. Something will always tell you which way to go. It could be a wet finger held up to the breeze, a scrap of paper caught underfoot, a too-bright star that calls you west.

I thought maybe I’d missed it.

I spun around. I looked up. It could be as simple as a feeling, or a sound. It could be something that would reveal itself in its own time and I’d just have to wait.

Or it could be a boy nobody saw.

CHAPTER THREE

The boy found me.

I was sitting in a café down a crooked street. I’d eaten a full breakfast special and ordered another. I was slurping a bottomless coffee and waiting for my order, except the food had gone down and I was full. Around me the city was awake and crawling. Buildings rose into low cloud and when I looked up, I felt dizzy. Too many people in too little space. All I wanted was to escape the crush, feel dust between my toes and taste clean air.

The boy slid into the chair opposite. He grabbed a packet of sugar and poured it into his mouth. He stuck out his tongue and tried to look at it, cross-eyed, as the crystals dissolved.

‘How?’ I asked him.

He tapped his nose with a grimy finger. He grinned
and mimicked a magician’s flourish with spread hands.
Where did he go?
Wonder-eyed, he looked around. Dusted off his hands, gave a seated bow and leaned back with his ankles crossed.

‘You saved that baby,’ I said. ‘I thought you were dead.’

He shook his head.

I wondered if he was deaf. But he didn’t speak at all, didn’t look at my lips when I spoke, didn’t even open his mouth except to pour more sugar in. He seemed to mime everything, like a scruffy, life-sized Pierrot. When the plate came, he flashed a wistful look at it. Turned away. Even feigned disinterest was pure performance.

‘You have it. I’m full,’ I told him.

He nodded graciously like he was doing me a favour, discarded the fork and folded the food into rolls. He fed them in like his tongue was a conveyor belt, stuffed it all in, no chewing.

I watched him the whole time.

Some days, when we were on the road, Vivienne and I would go for days without real food. One season, when we were picking fruit, I ate nothing but oranges and mandarins for a week. Another time it was tinned tuna and toast with sugared tomatoes for dessert. I remembered hunger like that, the kind that gnawed at my gut and woke me when I was sleeping.

‘What’s your name?’

He pressed his hand to his throat, pinched there, and a sigh escaped. He waggled his Adam’s apple. A faint
sound came away, but I got what he said by the shape of his mouth.

Silence.

‘That figures,’ I told him.

He pointed at me. You?

‘Lili. Liliane. But mostly I get called Friday. Why can’t you speak?’

He brushed the question away like it was stupid, or he didn’t want to talk about it, or maybe the story was just too long and too painful to tell. He pulled out a twenty-dollar note and slipped it under the pepper shaker.

‘No,’ I told him. ‘I’ve got it.’ I gave him my twenty.

He took it for a moment, then handed it back, shaking his head. His expression was regretful, but he insisted, shoving it at me and letting it go.

I grabbed the note and went to take it up to the counter.

He snatched it back and stuffed it in my front pocket. He stabbed his note with his finger. The impact folded back one corner and I could see it was blank underneath.

‘Is that a fake?’ I said, too loudly.

He put his finger to his lips and grabbed my elbow. Steered me upright and moved to leave.

‘We can’t. What if we get caught?’

Come on,
he mouthed.
Now.

We walked away casually and broke into a sprint when we reached the corner. He was laughing or wheezing, I didn’t know which. I followed him to a park in the middle of the city that was more like a few acres
of lawn where they had forgotten to put a building. A bronze statue of a horse and rider reared into the sky and a fountain dribbled pale, green water.

Silence wedged himself between the horse’s rear hooves and opened a battered leather wallet. He flipped through the compartments and turned up nothing. He tipped it upside down and shook it.

I sat next to him. ‘You can have this.’ I held out my twenty. ‘Do you need to get home? Where do you live?’

He grinned and held his arms out wide to encompass the whole city.

‘Seriously. Everyone has a home, don’t they?’ Except me.

He took the twenty, made a nick in one side of it with his tooth, and tore it neatly into two unequal pieces. My eyes bulged and he smiled, tapped his nose again. He put the smaller piece into his pocket and crooked his finger.
Come.

Silence sauntered into a bank like he was a secret millionaire. We waited in the queue until we were called up by a weary-looking woman who eyeballed Silence with affection and suspicion.

‘Another mute?’ she said and held out her hand.

‘That’s not very nice,’ I told her.

Silence handed over the larger piece of his torn note and the woman gave him a slick new one, snapping it between her fingers. Silence kissed her ringed hand and she blew him one back.

‘I don’t even want to know what kind of racket you
have going, mister,’ she said and winked. ‘Mutes. Mutilated notes,’ she said to me. ‘We exchange them if you have more than a half.’

I turned red.

‘So, what do you do with the smaller piece?’ I asked Silence when we were outside.

Using hand movements, he showed that he stuck two smaller pieces together.

‘Does that always work?’

He cocked his head and shrugged.
Sometimes.
He pulled out his phone and texted one-handed while the other rubbed his forelock fringe into a matted mess. A minute later he received a reply that made him bounce on the balls of his feet.