Free The Lost Child by Suzanne McCourt Page A

Time to yourself at last.’
    They all look at me. Grandpa Ted’s piggy eyes, Mum’s sad, proud brown ones, Grandma Bess’s blanked-out buttons. I turn to the window where the spotty curtain is blowing in the breeze, puffing in and out like the window’s heartbeat. I look into the blue sky and past the speckled clouds to the misty part behind. I look all the way back to Burley Point where I belong.
    Soon we are gone. Mum pulls me down the path. She says good riddance to bad rubbish. She says why did she think there’d be any help here? There never had been, never would be, and so much for family. She says she was stupid to come, she’s got her pride and she’s finished biding her time.

7
    My father has gone. He has taken his brown skin and flashing eyes, his laughs and shouts and silences. He has taken his beer-man smell, his fishy stink, his whiskers in the basin. Now I sleep with Mum in her bed against the window wall. Dad’s smell is in the curtains and the laundry trough, in the lounge room chair; it is in my head.
    My father has gone to live with That Trollop Layle Lewis. Mum sent him away because he said he was going to Queensland by himself but she found out he went with that Layle Lewis. She couldn’t speak to him, she said to Mrs Winkie in our kitchen, couldn’t find the words. She said she told him in a letter that she wrote out many times, crossing out words, starting again.
    When Mrs Winkie tried to stroke Mum’s hand, she pulled away and said: ‘Can you believe it? Everyone knowing…and how many times…’
    She looked at me playing on the floor and cried choking, silent sobs that she tried to swallow and, although she turned from me, I could see her shoulders heaving. I could hear mouse squeaks coming from her mouth. I could feel the empty part of her where my father used to be; it was in me too. Mrs Winkie put her big wide arms around my mother; they looked like the elephant and mouse in my storybook but without the trunk and tails.
    My father is building a house on the other side of the lagoon where he will live with that Layle Lewis. Already the house has bones. Already he has planted a palm tree that he brought back from his holiday in Queensland. I swing on our gate and wonder, if Mum hadn’t given him the letter, would we have the palm tree in our garden? And if we did, where would we have planted it because there’s not much room with the pines along the fence and the kurrajong in the corner, and Mum’s veggies taking up most of the slope next to the gravel drive. Perhaps she wouldn’t have wanted a palm tree in the garden.
    Our car bangs to a stop outside the post office. It is the new blue Austin that Dad bought for us before he went to live with that Layle Lewis. Dunc says if he was old enough he could drive it better than Mum. When I climb off the floor, white flowers are pressed against the windscreen, a fence post on the bonnet, blood on Mum’s nose. ‘You all right?’ she says.
    Mrs Bloomers is at Mum’s window. ‘What happened, Nella?’ Before Mum can tell her, she pulls me out and prods and pokes and looks into my eyes and then does the same to Mum.
    Mrs Bloomers is really Mrs Bloom, Mum’s friend from the soldier-settler farm. Before she married, she was a nurse at Muswell Hospital. Sometimes she thinks she still is. Mum says it’s a shame she doesn’t live closer. Mrs Winkie says Beryl Bloom has tickets on herself.
    â€˜Sylvie’s fine,’ says Mrs Bloomers, wiping blood off Mum’s nose with her hankie. ‘What happened, Nella?’ she asks again.
    Mum doesn’t seem to know. They walk around the car and Mrs Bloomers tells Mum she doesn’t think there’s much harm done and to reverse it out from under the tree. Then they try to prop the rail back on the post but it falls down and Mrs Bloomers laughs and says: ‘The council’s got more money than