Free Pobby and Dingan by Ben Rice

turned up and I helped carry them up to the grave. And old Humph came along in his hat to tell me he was putting a plaque for Pobby and Dingan up in his Moozeum. Well, I was looking forward to telling Kellyanne this when she arrived from the hospital with Dad. That would put a massive smile on her face, for sure. And she would never be sick again.
    And then all that was left to do was to wait for people to start arriving. I had some butterflies in my stomach, but. You see, I’d been round the whole of Lightning Ridge posting Humph’s invitations into everybody’s mailboxes. And I was sort of nervous to see how many came and how many tore up the invitations and still called us Williamsons a bunch of frigging lunatics. And I was also nervous because of the reports about Kellyanne and how she was getting worse by the day even though they’d managed to pump some food into her at the hospital. So it seemed pretty much like it was now or never.
    I got so afraid that people wouldn’t turn up and that I might have to imagine myself a whole crowd that I got really impatient, and an hour before the funeral was due to start I got on my bike again and went pedalling around Lightning Ridge to see if people were getting ready. The place was a sort of deathly quiet. I sat on the step outside The Digger’s Rest for half an hour, trembling and half wanting to go for a piss.
    Eventually a few people started stepping out of houses and shops coughing, or pulling back curtains and doors. And then suddenly, as the sun got hotter in the sky, old buggers, young buggers, men and women and dogs started appearing on the street and walking out towards the cemetery. A couple of them saw me and waved. I got on my Chopper fast and cycled around the back way, standing up on the pedals to get a good view of the crowd walking along in silence between the gum trees and houses. And I noticed that everyone had like made an effort and changed out of their mining clothes into their best boardies and singlets.
    I got back to the cemetery ahead of the people and I saw them all coming up the road past the balding little golf course like a massive great wave. I stood on Bob the Swede’s gravestone and saw that actually there were many more than I’d expected. Thousands of people all coming out towards us. More even than you saw at the goat races, more even than I’d ever seen in my whole life except on the football on TV. And for a moment I was worried that there was something else going on that they were all going to, and that they were going to walk straight past the cemetery gates or something and head out of town.
    But I shouldn’t have worried, because pretty soon the little cemetery was full of living people, and everyone closed in around the grave and the coffins which had Pobby and Dingan inside. And some sat on the scorched grass, and some wandered around looking at some of the other graves. And no one was saying nothing except a few words to each other. But most just gave me a nod and gazed out over the land or fanned themselves down. And Mum and me had made some lemonade and cookies earlier, and so we passed some cups around and began pouring, so that people had something to graze on. But although I was relieved to see all these people turn up at the cemetery for the funeral of Pobby and Dingan, the most important ones hadn’t arrived. And that was Kellyanne and Dad.
    Kellyanne and Dad. Dad and Kellyanne. They still hadn’t come back from the hospital. It was way past time for the funeral to start and people were starting to do a bit of muttering and all that. And I suppose some of them were starting to doubt if there was going to be a funeral at all. And perhaps some folks were beginning to look at each other and at me and my mum and starting to ask each other what the hell they were doing attending the funeral of two figments of a girl’s imagination, especially when that little girl wasn’t even there. And I remember picking out Judge