Ghost Child (16 page)

She told me, ‘If they left your soul on the railway tracks, Harley, things are gonna be bad, but I reckon they got it.’ She was quite a spiritual bird, Angel, and I totally understood where she was coming from, because I didn’t feel like I’d lost much at all. I felt like I feel after a night on the piss: I was groggy. I couldn’t move that well. But I didn’t think, ‘Oh, my life is over.’

Later on, when I moved from the trauma ward to the rehab, I met blokes who were like Angel said: definitely not all there. I mean, obviously parts of their bodies were missin’, but there was something else missin’, too, like they’d lost – I dunno about the soul – but like they’d lost the plot.

The other thing I understood from the get-go was
there would be women. For a lot of amputees, and also the blokes who end up in wheelchairs, it’s like, who is gonna love a freak like me? But girls love the arm. It’s not grotesque, it’s just kind of missing, and once they see it’s not hideous they come flocking. So when the doctor comes around and says to me, ‘You may have difficulty relating to people, you may find that people find you some kind of object of fascination,’ I’m thinkin’, ‘You’re the one that’s lost the plot, mate, if you think that’s gonna be a problem.’ I’m happy to be an object of fascination. Bring it on.

As for the day-to-day stuff, you do your best. There was pain at the start, fairly constant, and I’d be perspiring, and Mum would say, ‘What’s happening, Harley?’ And I’d say, ‘It’s my arm. It’s aching.’ I’ve heard people say, ‘It’s like pins and needles,’ but excuse me, it’s not like pins and needles, it’s like a red-hot poker going through your bone. I had a few practical problems: how do you do up a button with one arm? How do you put on a shirt? But that’s just practice and also, Mum, she’s good with that kind of stuff. She invented me a few things: a steel hook thing that I call the Ruby Button Threader, and a face washer that I can put over the stump, so I can wash the other armpit.

I had to give up working on roofs, obviously, but I didn’t mind too much. I kept the business, just hired more blokes to work for me, and the money kept coming in. I had to get the ute remodelled, so the gears
were on the steering wheel, and then the rehab people wanted to know, ‘Are you gonna go for the claw, or for the prosthetic?’ I was pretty keen on the claw but I went for the prosthetic. It’s a silicon sleeve with a hand and fingers and, to be honest, I don’t wear it that much. I can’t see the point. It’s bloody heavy, and it’s not like you can use it. The thing just hangs there. I do, however, have some fun with it. When I take it off, it looks like something from the Halloween shop. Me and me mates dug it into the ground at the cemetery once, set it up like it was coming out of the ground near one of the graves, and then we sat around drinking, and watching to see the local teenagers come and scream.

The thing wasn’t cheap and I suppose I should actually wear it as opposed to piss-fart around with it, but it’s not something I can actually hide, the fact that I’ve got one arm. I mean, people are gonna find out eventually, so why not up-front? Besides that, your arm, whether you know it or not, weighs about five kilos, and although it hangs off your shoulder, it’s got its own support. You try hangin’ five kilos of silicon off your shoulder, with no support. It’s not that comfortable.

So that’s the story of my arm. I told Lauren all about it that night in the motel, and the only thing she really said was, ‘Did the lady who looked after you freak out when she found out?’ And I remember thinking, ‘Did who?’ Because those words – ‘The lady who looked
after you’ – didn’t mean all that much to me. I didn’t get that she meant Mum. And that’s when I thought, ‘Yeah, we don’t have the same mum, not any more,’ and how weird is that? I find my sister, and then I find we haven’t got the same mum. Except we do, obviously. And that got me thinking, ‘I better give my mum – I mean, Rubes – a call. I better tell her I’m bringing Lauren.’ So I go to Lauren, ‘Mate, I’m just gonna pop out and get some ciggies.’ And she’s like, ‘Not for me, mate, I’m giving up.’ And I’m like, ‘Righto.’

I collected up my keys and my wallet – I could see she was amused, the way I put my wallet in my mouth to open the door – and I was careful to slip my mobile into my pocket. I started up the ute – it stunk of McDonald’s and cigarettes, two of my favourite smells – and I drove down to where the Caltex was glowing on the freeway. I stopped out the front, flipped open the phone and thought to myself, ‘Come on, Harley. This is no biggie.’ I pressed the keys and the phone lit up. If anybody was gonna answer, it was gonna be Mum, and she did.

I said, ‘Mum, it’s me, and I gotta tell you something and don’t freak out.’

She goes, ‘It’s bad news.’

I go, ‘No.’

She goes, ‘It’s bad news, isn’t it, Harley?’

I go, ‘It’s not, Mum. It’s not bad news, it’s not good news. It’s just news, news.’ And she goes, ‘Just tell me,
Harley,’ so I laid it on her. I said, ‘I’ve got Lauren with me, Mum, and we’re making our way to Exford.’ Then I said, ‘I gotta go. I’ll speak to you tomorrow.’ Maybe she was speechless because she didn’t say much. I closed the phone and sat in the dark cab for a bit.

I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I said I’ve had no more than two or three proper conversations about my birth mum with my proper mum. I always knew my birth mum was in jail. Nobody hid that from me. I remember when I was little, there was a bit of chat about whether Lauren should move from wherever she was living and come and live with us, but it never happened and then, when my birth mum died, I actually saw Lauren, because the social workers said we better have a meeting to talk about it. So we did, and Mum and me, we talked about that, but not much.

Other than that, I can only remember one other time that we talked about my birth mum. It was out on the porch at Exford, and I was sitting with Mum – with Rubes, I mean – and it was about a year or so after I lost the arm, but before I’d moved up to New South Wales. Rubes had simmered a pot of mulled wine, with cloves and cinnamon and orange rind, and we were sitting around the pot-belly on the porch. The frogs were making a regular racket. She was settled into her favourite pozzie on the old Papysan chair, and she had the guitar out, like she does when she’s had a few. Maybe because it was all mellow, she said, ‘Do you
know what I’m thinkin’ about, honey?’ – sometimes, she calls me honey – and I said, ‘No, honey, whatchoo thinkin’ about?’ She goes, ‘I was thinking of the day you came to us, Harley.’

I’m like, ‘Musta been the best day of your life.’

And then she goes, ‘I always knew you’d meet a beautiful girl and get married and raise a tribe of kids.’

I’m like, ‘What choo talkin’ about, Mama?’ Remember that show,
Diff’rent Strokes,
how the little black kid used to say that? That’s what I say to her when she says something totally out of the blue.
What choo talkin’ about, Mama?
Because, frankly, marriage and kids? That was some way off. I had no regular lady friend.

But Mum says, ‘I thought you might go off the rails a bit, when you had the accident – ’ which is one hundred per cent false, by the way, she knew perfectly well I was gonna be fine, and if anything, it was her that practically drove the staff on the ward mad, wobbling in with her walking stick, and the incense sticks and the wholegrain muffins that taste like cardboard, and getting her purple robes caught in the door – ‘but now I can see it. That accident was the best thing that ever happened to you.’

And I was like, ‘Yeah, right on, honey, best thing that ever happened to me, to get hit by a train.’

She said, ‘That’s right.’

She didn’t spell it out any more than that. Look, I
don’t get too philosophical but, obviously, I know what she meant. She meant that I carried the baggage about DeCastella Drive all the way to Exford with me, and I was never allowed to set it down, until I lost the arm. At school, I was always the ‘foster kid’ or else the ‘kid that Ruby Porter took in, and wouldn’t give back’.

After the accident, well, things are different now. Wherever I go these days, I’m the guy with one arm. That’s what people see. It’s not: Harley, the kid from the Porter farm. It’s Harley, the guy with one arm. This might sound wanky and, like I said, I don’t ponder things too deeply, but looking at Lauren, I could see that she still had the baggage. She hadn’t been allowed to put it down.

I reckon Mum would have been a bit freaked out about me picking up Lauren. I suppose she would have been thinking, ‘How did they find each other? Did he go looking for her?’ Which might have got her thinking, ‘Why would he go lookin’ for her?’ In actual fact, I don’t believe I’ve spent so much as one second thinking, ‘I must go lookin’ for my sisters.’ Maybe I had some curiosity about them. Maybe there would have come a day when I did start lookin’ for ’em, but I never had the feelin’ when I was a kid, or even after, that I needed to track them down and ask them what happened, or whatever.

Anyway, I tried to keep the tyres from crunching in the gravel when I got back to the motel, in case Lauren
had gotten off to sleep, but when I got inside I saw that she was just in bed with the sidelight on, pretending to be asleep. I said to her, ‘I’ll bunk down on the floor,’ but she goes, ‘Don’t be stupid.’ And truth be told, there was no room on the floor. There was a double bed and it took up all of the floor space. So I messed around a bit more. There was one of those strips of paper with things you could order for breakfast, and I studied that for a bit. I said to Lauren, ‘What do you want to eat in the morning?’ But she was so sleepy, I don’t think it registered. I went into the bathroom, examined my face in the mirror for a while, expecting her to fall asleep any minute, which would make it easier for me to get into the bed with her, but I could hear her going through the channels with the remote, so I had a shower.

Lauren’s eyes were closed when I came out of the bathroom, but she still wasn’t asleep. I said, ‘Go to sleep.’ I closed the pizza box, put it outside the door, relieved myself in the toilet again, burped and brushed my teeth. I came out and stood, waiting. I had a feeling she was listening to me, through her eyelids.

I said, ‘Hey, if you wake up in the night and see this, don’t get a fright.’

She opened her eyes. I was holding the silicon arm in my good hand. I waved it at her and said, ‘Nighty night!’ She gave me this sleepy smile, and said, ‘Don’t let that thing grope me.’

And then, with one swift movement, I got under
the covers, pulled them right up to my chin. We tussled over the doona for a bit. I turned off the sidelight, and there was complete darkness in the room. I could feel the weight of her on the mattress beside me.

I said, ‘Night,’ and then, ‘Night, sis,’ because I’d never said it before and it felt kinda cool.

She said, ‘Night, Jake.’

I wasn’t Jake, but I let it go.

In the summer of the year I turned seventeen, I slipped out of my unit on the Barrett Caravan Park to meet up with a guy I’d met somewhere on the Barrett Estate. He’d arranged to pick me up from the carpark outside the railway station. I got into the passenger seat. The guy, whoever he was, waited for me to shut the door, did a U-turn, and started toward the Barrett weir. It was close to midnight and the way was lit only by streetlights, still, I saw a rabbit on the road ahead of us. I turned toward the man behind the steering wheel to share my delight, but he’d already seen it, and swerved toward it. I heard the
whump
as it disappeared under the wheels.

‘We got it,’ he said, pleased.

We drove until we came off the bitumen, onto grass and mud, stopping, finally, on swampy land near the
water’s edge. The weir was a popular place for Barrett’s kids to park and have sex, but there weren’t any other cars with fogged up windows that night. The guy killed the engine, turned off the headlights. He lit a cigarette. He didn’t offer me one. ‘So, Lauren,’ he said, between drags. ‘You’re from that place on DeCastella Drive, right?’

I said, ‘Yep.’

He nodded and said, ‘Yeah, right. I thought so.’

He dragged on his cigarette, saying nothing for a minute, then he said, ‘So, you know, like, what happened out there?’

I said, ‘Where?’ and he said, ‘You know, in that house. People reckon there was blood all over the walls.’

I hadn’t heard that before. I knew it wasn’t true, but I said, ‘I don’t really know.’

He nodded, and stubbed out his cigarette.

He shoved the gear stick into first and, with his other hand, used a lever to collapse my seat and lay me flat. He kissed me and soon he had my pants down around my ankles. His pants were around his ankles, too. I thought to myself, ‘So, it’s going to be one of those. He’s not even going to get undressed.’

He had barely managed to get inside me when he came. He eased himself off and found his way back to his own bucket seat, where he sat with bare buttocks against the vinyl, the hair on his thighs thick and curly. My own nakedness, from the waist down, seemed
ridiculous. I crouched over my abdomen, and searched for my jeans on the floor of the car. He popped the glove box, and took out a box of Wet Ones. He wiped over the head of his penis.

‘Want one?’ he said.

‘I’m good,’ I said.

He zipped his pants. I zipped up my own. He put the car into reverse, and soon had us back on the road to the railway station. He parked where he’d picked me up.

‘You good to get home?’ he said.

I said, ‘If it’s okay, I need a cigarette.’ I lit one before he could object. Oh, sure, I could sense that he was done with me, that he wanted me gone, but since I’d started to smoke he lit one of his own. We didn’t speak.

Finally, he said, ‘You right to go?’ And I said, ‘No worries.’ He didn’t move. He was waiting for me to get out of the car. I said, ‘Well, thank you.’ Only now do I think, ‘For what? For not dumping me by the weir when you were done with me, maybe? For having sex with me and making me walk home afterwards, in the dark?’

‘No, thank
you
, mate,’ he said. ‘You’re a good root.’

I walked home and went to bed, and the next day I used the red phone in the motel foyer to call the Department. I told them that my caseworker had gone missing the night before – it wasn’t entirely untrue, since it was the one who often went missing. A man had tried to
break into my room, I said. Nothing frightened the Department more than the idea that one of the kids might get raped, not because of the trauma they might suffer but because the tabloid TV programs might find out about it, and in so doing find out that hundreds of kids were living practically unsupervised in caravan parks and in motels across the state of Victoria.

They said, ‘Stay there and we’ll get somebody to you.’ When they did, I told them flatly, ‘I want to move.’ I knew they wouldn’t refuse me. I was too old for foster care, and although I was technically too young to be turned onto the streets, it was certainly time for me to transition to some kind of semi-independence. So they set me up in a group house, with other kids who were also almost off the books. All I had to do was prove that I could support myself, which wasn’t too difficult. I was still at school but I’d been earning a small income of my own for some time.

I’d taken my first part-time job at fourteen, behind a counter at a lunch place, earning $4.25 an hour. I’d stayed there until I was sixteen, and then, when that place closed down, I got another job in a restaurant, waiting tables after school and at weekends. It was a pretty good job. The boss was Greek. I’d never met a Greek, except for the guy who sold pizzas in Barrett. This guy’s name was Alexander, but everybody on staff called him Pop. He seemed, to me, incredibly old, although looking back now I’d guess he was fifty.

On my first day, he’d said, ‘I’m going to be watching you pretty closely,’ and then he’d taken a lock of my hair, twirled it round his finger, and said, ‘You better keep this up in a net, or something. We don’t want it in the food. I don’t want the Health Department here.’

I twisted my hair into a bun and then a customer came in and took a seat by the window.

Pop said, ‘There you go. Your first customer. What will you do now?’

I said, ‘I’ll go see what that guy wants?’

‘It’s not
that guy
,’ he said. ‘It’s
that gentleman
or
that customer
. I don’t want anybody called guy here.’ And I thought, ‘Oh. So it’s not only the Childless that talk properly.’

Pop gave me a vinyl menu and said, ‘Off you go.’ I gave it to the customer and told him I’d be back to take his order.’

‘Good,’ said Pop, when I came back. ‘Now you give him a minute to decide, and then you go back, and see what he needs.’

I went back and said, ‘What do you want?’ but Pop, who’d been watching, raced over and said, ‘She’s
new
. She means,
What can I get you
?’

The customer was amused.

‘Coffee, Miss New Girl,’ he said. ‘And eggs with toast.’

I wrote it down on the pad I kept in the pocket in front of my apron, my hands shaking as Pop watched
every move. Then he said, ‘You have to ask: How would you like your eggs? What kind of toast? Brown, white? Butter?’

The customer must have been a regular. He said, ‘She’s all right, Pop. Give her time. She’s gorgeous. I’ll have fried eggs, white toast with butter, thank you
miss
.’

It didn’t take long to get into the swing of things, and I must admit that I learnt a lot from Pop. He helped me with my manners: always say please, thank you, you’re welcome, may I, ma’am, sir, miss.

We – us waitresses – wrote the orders on a whiteboard near the kitchen with a black texta that hung on a string. There was a code I had to learn: ‘H+C (T)’ was ‘ham and cheese, toasted’ (a T on its own, no bracket, meant tomato) and if you added a ‘B’ that meant ‘brown bread’ – which was, by the way, something I’d never seen, let alone eaten. We had WR, too, which meant ‘Welsh Rarebit’ – and that, too, seemed posh and exotic.

I worked Friday nights after school and all day on Saturdays. Whenever it wasn’t busy I was allowed to sit at the staff table and have a coffee and a cigarette while I folded the paper napkins. After the lunch rush, I got thirty minutes to eat a sandwich. I used that time to smoke, too.

When I told the Department that I wanted to move into Independent Living, they asked me whether I intended to make the restaurant job full-time. I didn’t.
After about a year, Pop had taken to pushing me against the industrial fridge in the kitchen, and groping at my breasts. I’d had enough of it, and enough of restaurants. The problem was, I had no other skills and had no idea what I could do. Then one day, one of the customers, a girl who was a regular, told me about her job. She was a nurse in a city hospital, and she said they were crying out for aides.

‘You could do it,’ she told me. ‘You don’t even need your HSC.’

I asked her what the job involved and she said, ‘It’s crap. You make beds, empty pans, and chuck out the flowers when people get discharged, but you get holidays and super, which you probably don’t get here.’

It sounded all right. I told the Department I wanted to become a nurse’s aide and, to their credit, they were excited for me. They found out what I had to do – sit a test, basically – and after I’d passed, they arranged a three-month trial for me, at Melbourne’s Royal Hospital. Once I got settled, they moved me to Mernda, a group house with other foster kids who were moving toward Independent Living. Like most of the group houses, it had holes in the walls, the lights were fluorescent and coated in moths, and other kids brought in drugs and ghetto blasters. Nobody mowed the lawn. Nobody emptied the letterbox. Nobody let anybody else get any sleep, regardless of who was working shifts, but still, I was, at last, away from the gossip on the Barrett Estate.

Then, too, for the first time, I was earning what seemed like decent money. I can still remember my first hospital pay. It came in a dark manila envelope, larger than a standard envelope, with stiff notes, never handled, straight from the bank. There was a piece of paper inside. Across the top, it said, ‘North West Health Service’ and underneath, in smaller letters, ‘Name: Lauren Cashman. Employee number: 196875.’

There were other details: taxes paid, union fees deducted, a compulsory contribution to superannuation. There were unexpected additions, too: a laundry allowance, $1.80; and travel allowance, $2.20. Then, in the last column, there was my wage minus tax: $280. It seemed a fortune, and it gave me the feeling that everything would be okay – not immediately, maybe not even soon, but one day, eventually, I’d be on my feet, and everything would be okay.

I guess I’d been at the hospital a few weeks when some of the other aides started talking about having a girls’ night. I found myself feeling keen to go. I had never had too much success being friends with people at school, but things were different at the hospital. There was camaraderie among the aides. We were all so far down the pecking order – below the nurses, below the doctors, below even the administrative staff – that we had to stick together.

‘No one is gonna drive,’ one of the girls said. ‘We’re gonna get a minibus. It’s gonna be ace.’

‘Where will we go?’ I said.

‘You go everywhere!’ she said. ‘They drive you round to all the discos, the clubs. It’s grouse.’

The tearoom was alive with enthusiasm. There would be eight seats on the bus. You could drink all you wanted. It was better to get pre-mixes – UDL cans, they called them – and then you didn’t have to carry two bottles.

‘You’ll come, Lauren?’

I said I would.

Here’s what I didn’t say, ‘This is the first time I’ve been invited to go out with any girls, anywhere.’

I didn’t know what to wear, but one of the other aides said, ‘Go to Sportsgirl. They’ve got great gear,’ so when I knocked off on the Thursday – the day before the bus tour – I went late-night shopping. I told the sales girl, ‘I’ve got to go on this minibus. We’re going around the discos.’

She said, ‘Cool. Everybody’s wearing stirrup pants at the moment, and a big shirt.’

I tried them on. The pants had a strap of material that went under the arch of the foot. The shirt had floppy cuffs, and lace across the bodice.

‘It’s cool,’ the girl said. ‘Get yourself some heels, you’ll be grouse. Cash or Bankcard?’

I didn’t have a Bankcard. I said, ‘Cash,’ and gave her some of the bills that had been folded inside the manila envelope I’d started to use as a purse.

The aides worked late on the Friday. Instead of going home, we got ready in the toilets. One girl, Lisa, said to me, ‘Where’s your make-up?’ I had eyeliner and a small lipstick, a sample that I’d picked up at a foster home. I had an old eye-shadow, with blue chunks, like chalk, falling loose in the case.

Lisa said, ‘You can’t wear that. Here, let me do your eyes. Look up.’

I turned my eyes toward the ceiling, and let her rest her hands upon my face.

‘Up, up!’ she said, flicking my eyelashes with a curled rod of mascara, coating my brows, and blushing my cheeks. I hadn’t worn so much make-up since Barrett High.

‘Mate,’ she said, stepping back. ‘Look at the difference.’

My eyes were watering. I went to rub them, but Lisa said, ‘No! Don’t touch. You’ll smudge it.’ When the pools of water receded I looked in the mirror. The girl looking back at me seemed much older than the one who had been there before.

‘Amazing,’ said Lisa.

I went into a toilet cubicle to get dressed, using my teeth to snip the tags on my new clothes. My new shoes were tight, but the shop assistant had told me they would give, so I stuffed my aide’s uniform in the plastic Sportsgirl bag, toddled out said, ‘What can I do with this?’

‘Just shove it down behind a seat on the minibus,’ said Lisa. ‘Nobody will take it.’

We started drinking on the bus, starting with something called Blackberry Nip, and something else called Brandavino. I sat near a window, with a heavy bus curtain knocking against my cheek. I hadn’t previously been a drinker, but I’d heard the girls talking all week: ‘Make sure you eat something. Make sure you have a glass of milk. It lines the stomach. You won’t chuck up.’ I’d had a glass of milk from the hospital fridge. The alcohol was sickly sweet. I started to feel loose.

On the bus, Lisa told me that some of the guys from the hospital – young cleaners, mostly, who pushed the buckets around and mopped the floors – would meet us at the club.

She said, ‘They’ve probably already had a few,’ and laughed. She looked so pretty and excited.

‘Do you know Rick?’ she said. She was sitting in the seat in front of me, and had turned around so we could talk. I said, ‘Rick?’

‘He’s the tall guy, the real tall one. You must have noticed him.’

I said, ‘Rick? Rick. No, I don’t know any Rick.’

‘You
do
know,’ she insisted. I sensed that she was keen to share something with me. ‘Tall guy, really tall. Dark hair. Wears, like, those trainers with the high tops. Wears ’em all the time.’