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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780702265983 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Queensland Press |
| Publication date: | 06/10/2024 |
| Series: | First Nations Classics |
| Edition description: | Third edition |
| Pages: | 300 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.00(w) x 7.75(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Blood
By Tony Birch
University of Queensland Press
Copyright © 2011 Tony BirchAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7022-4760-6
CHAPTER 1
We'd always been on the move, shifting from one place to another, usually because she'd done the dirty on someone, or she was chasing some fella she'd fallen for. And when Gwen fell for a bloke, she had to have him. I didn't mind so much when it was just the two of us. All I had to concentrate on was staying out of her way and the trouble she brought home. But when Rachel came along everything changed. I was only a kid, just five years old. But from the moment I saw her, wrapped in a blanket in the hospital, I knew I'd be the one that would have to take care of her.
We were heading for Melbourne from up north, when Gwen said we'd have to stop because she was going to have the baby soon. 'The place has a set of traffic lights,' she noticed when we stopped outside a pub in the town we were passing through. 'So it has to have some sort of hospital.'
She rented a room upstairs at the pub. It was hot and stuffy and smelled of something terrible that I couldn't make out. She ordered us toasted cheese sandwiches from the bar, picked up a couple of beers and sat on the bed and waited. The pains went away in the night and she slept in until around lunchtime the next day. We shared a ham sandwich in a shop next to the pub and went for a walk around the town looking for the hospital, but couldn't find it. 'Gwen, maybe we should stop and ask someone for directions?' She ignored me and kept on walking. We followed the sounds of kids yelling and music playing, and turned a corner to see a brightly coloured tent in a paddock, with flashing lights and rides. It was a carnival.
I stood and watched kids crashing into each other in dodgem cars while Gwen counted our money. We had just enough for lunch. We were sitting at a table in the food tent eating hotdogs when I saw that her hands and ankles were swollen. She held up a hand and said the same had happened when I was about to be born and when she went into labour another time, a couple of years back.
'You remember that, don't you, Jesse? The last time I got pregnant?'
She smiled when she said it. Didn't bother her at all.
'No, I don't remember,' I said.
But I did. I remembered lots of stuff I never spoke to Gwen about. She'd lost that baby. I'd watched her belly get fatter and was excited about getting a baby brother or sister because I didn't want it to be just Gwen and me, any more. The day she was supposed to have the baby she left me on my own and went to hospital in a taxi, holding her belly like it was about to collapse on her. When she came back the next afternoon she had a flat tummy and no baby. She wouldn't talk to me and just lay down on the bed and went to sleep. She tossed and turned in the night, moaned in her sleep, and woke us both up. I sat up in bed and asked her where our new baby was. She looked at me as if she didn't understand what I was talking about.
'There's no baby, Jesse.'
'Why not? You said we were going to have one.'
'I've got a shocker of a headache. Leave me be.'
She got out of bed, went through her bag until she found some tablets, threw a couple in her mouth, and stuck her tongue under the tap in the sink across the room. She came back to bed, rolled onto her side and faced the wall. I was upset and pulled the bed sheet off her.
'Where's the baby?'
She pulled the sheet back.
'Jesus Christ, Jesse. You ask too many questions. The baby couldn't breathe when it came out. It was born blue. That's what they call it. It died, Jesse. The baby's gone.'
'Blue? What's that mean?'
'No more, Jesse. Get back to sleep.'
She pressed her body into the wall and left me with no sheet.
I wanted to cry, but knew if I did she'd probably give me a whack, so I squeezed my eyes shut to stop the tears from coming out.
One night, months later, I had a dream about the blue baby. It was night and the sky was full of stars. The baby was a boy and he was floating above my bed. He had a jumpsuit on and looked like an astronaut. When I reached up and tried to touch him he drifted away. I was sure he'd been real, even after I woke up with a fright. I jumped off the couch and ran to the window, hoping to see him. Outside, the sky was dark. There were no stars and no baby.
When Gwen told me she was pregnant again I worried that she would have another blue baby and it would float away too and meet up with the other baby. But when it came it wasn't blue. It was a girl. And it was Rachel.
Gwen felt the pains when we were standing in line at the supermarket after we left the carnival. She was wearing maternity pants with elastic in the front. They made it easier to knock stuff off. She'd just shoved a smoked ham down her front when she buckled over with pain. It went away pretty quick but she got another one a few minutes later. I ran to the lady on the checkout. She told me where the hospital was and we walked there, as fast as we could. On the way Gwen handed me the ham and a packet of cheese and some dry biscuits and told me to hang onto them.
At the hospital she was put in a chair and wheeled away and I was sent to an office to wait for somebody. I'd only just sat down when there was a knock at the door and a woman came in. She had frizzy hair and wore a dress with big flowers all over it. She didn't look like a nurse or doctor. She looked down at what I was holding in my arms.
'Where did you get the food?'
'We paid for it, at the supermarket.'
I don't reckon she believed me but she didn't seem to care. She picked up a jar from the table and unscrewed the lid.
'Would you like a lolly?'
I took one, my favourite, a sherbet bomb. She read from a blue slip of paper in her hand.
'Gwen Flynn. She's your mother?'
I bit into the sherbet bomb. It exploded in my mouth.
'Yep. My mum.'
'And you are?'
'Jesse.'
'Tell me, Jesse, how did you end up here, in our town?'
I took a deep breath and then told her the story Gwen had been drilling into me since I could talk. She called it the 'Nosy Parker' story. I told the woman we'd left our hometown across the river and were on our way to Melbourne to stay with our relations because my grandmother was sick and 'probably about to die'.
'Gwen ... my mum started to get pains in her guts so we had to stop here.'
She looked a bit sad and offered me another lolly. She even took one herself. The truth was we had no place to live, on this side of the river or the other. And my nan had died years before I was born. I only knew her from a couple of photographs.
The woman stood up, came around my side of the table and put an arm on my shoulder. She told me she was sorry that my grandmother was 'gravely ill'. Then she went back to her side of the desk and signed the bottom of a ticket. I had to hang it round my neck in a plastic wallet. It let me eat anything I wanted.
I caught a lift upstairs and followed the smell of hot food, to a cafeteria where a lady behind the counter helped me pick out a meal, finished off with a bowl of chocolate ice cream. She piled the ice cream so high it spilt over the side of the bowl. After I'd eaten I sat and watched TV until a nurse came for me. She had good news. I had a baby sister.
The baby was wrapped up tight in a pink blanket with just her face poking out. She had bumps and bruises over her eyes and looked like she'd been belted or dropped on her head. I touched the side of her face with a fingertip. Her skin was softer than anything I'd felt.
'Gwen, what's wrong with her face? Did somebody hurt her?'
'Nothing's wrong, Jesse. Most babies look like that when they come out. Don't get yourself worked up about it.'
I didn't trust anything Gwen said. Once, when she was having an argument with my pop he'd called her a 'born liar.' It sounded strange because I didn't see how a person could be born a liar. But as I got older I thought that if anyone could have, it would be Gwen.
I walked around the ward and looked at the other babies in their cribs. A couple of them looked perfect, like the babies I'd seen on the covers of magazines, with fat faces, big round eyes and red cheeks. Others though, like Gwen said, had faces more like a beaten-up boxer than a baby. I came back to the bed and touched the baby's cheek again.
'Have you picked a name for her?'
'Yep. I'm calling her Rachel. Do you like it? It's from the Bible.'
I couldn't see how Gwen knew any names from the Bible. I'd seen a few Bibles before, lying around the hotel rooms we'd stayed in, but I'd never seen Gwen reading one.
The day after Rachel was born Gwen got an infection and had to stay in the hospital. There was no one to look after me while she was sick. The social worker tried finding me a foster place but couldn't get one, so, in the end, they let me stay at the hospital. I spent most of my time in the TV room watching the soap operas and quiz shows with some of the new mums breastfeeding their babies and a row of old women who'd fallen over and hurt themselves and had their hips replaced.
The women were friendly and gave me chocolates and lollies. I made them cups of tea in the kitchen next to the TV room because some of them couldn't walk so good. I enjoyed myself so much I'd have been happy to stay there. But after a week, we were on our way again. Gwen picked up a second-hand baby seat at the Salvation Army down the street and we headed straight for Melbourne with baby Rachel in the back. A friend of hers, called Midnight Mary, had a place over the office at a tyre yard. We'd stayed with Mary a few times before, but we never lasted long because she and Gwen would end up fighting over money, or men.
Mary grew marijuana plants for a living, under special lights, in a spare room. She said we could stay with her, rent-free, if Gwen kept an eye on the plants and checked the timers on the lights when Mary was out dealing. There wasn't much for me to do but watch the baby or go downstairs to the workshop and listen in on the tyre fitters talking about drinking and girls. Across the street, there was a block of flats with heaps of kids, so I sometimes wandered over there. A police car would pull into the flats most days. Gwen told me to stay away from the kids, unless I wanted trouble.
She also said I'd be going to school for as long as we were there.
'If the police get a look at you, they'll get suspicious and call the welfare. Or worse. Take you in.'
'School? But I don't want to.'
'You bet, sport. School. I need you off the streets while I'm helping out here.'
So I went to school for the first time. We had our own desks and had to sit in the same seat every day and weren't allowed to move around. After a week I told Gwen I wasn't going back. She snorted and said, 'No fucken way. I can't be taking off with this baby. This is our home now, Jesse. For a while, at least.'
It was hard to believe what she'd said. We'd never had a home and I didn't reckon we'd last with Mary. And we didn't. We took off when Rachel was about four months old. Gwen went to bed swearing and yelling at me for no reason and woke up the next morning and told me we were leaving. She waited until Mary had taken off for the morning, packed up our stuff and we left.
'What about school?' I asked, as we were driving out of the tyre yard.
She wound down the car window and sniffed the air. 'Don't worry about school. You're no Einstein. You won't be missed.'
I skipped a lot of school after my first taste, moving around with Gwen and Rachel. We spent as much time on the road as we did staying put. She was either running away from someone or chasing a crazy idea she'd picked up from the horoscopes she read in old magazines or her tarot cards. She'd always mucked around with the cards. She'd even made a bit of money telling people their future when we were broke. The luck in our life, which was mostly bad, she put down to the fall of the cards. Just about everything that happened to her was the result of being dealt a 'bad hand'.
'I can only work with the cards I got,' she'd say whenever we took a knock.
If we did stop in the one spot long enough for me to go to school, I was always a mile behind the other kids. I got teased a lot and ended up in fights. I didn't read well and couldn't add up much more than what I could count on the fingers on both hands. But I could tell a good story. I'd learned that from watching TV.
Whenever Gwen got a job she did nights. The only babysitter I'd ever had while she was out working or partying was the TV. I did the best I could looking after Rachel, but sometimes she'd start bawling and wouldn't stop until I propped her in front of the telly. It did the job, and shut her up straightaway. One time when the power went off for half the day during a heatwave, she sat in a beanbag and stared at the blank screen like the world had come to the end.
Until she was around five Rachel was happy to watch the shows I picked out. But once she'd worked out her own favourites we had to take it in turns. I liked cop shows and gangster movies. She went for anything about families, especially if they got through hard times and ended up happy-ever-after. Her stories were all the same and I liked spoiling the ending by giving it away.
We missed out on a lot of stuff that other kids got. Birthdays. Family parties. Food, sometimes. But we never missed out on TV, even when Gwen was flat broke. She once told me that in the old days, when she first started working behind the bar in pubs, you could buy a stolen TV for about a quarter of the real price, and brand new in the box.
These days, you can pick up a TV for nothing, off the side of the road. When someone buys a new model, a flat-screen, they end up putting the old set out with the rubbish. The last telly we had, before the three of us took to the road for the last time, I found sitting at a bus stop. I was walking by, after school, when I spotted it. It looked lonely, like it couldn't wait to be taken home, plugged in and sat in front of.
It was big and heavy and I could hardly get my arms around it. I wrestled it like a bear down the road, back to where we were living, a rundown farmhouse out behind the airport. We were just off the old highway that runs in a straight line all the way from Melbourne to Sydney. A freeway had gone in further up from us and our road took only a few trucks. It would have been a quiet place to live except that the planes from the airport went straight over the house about a hundred times a day and rattled the windows. It was peaceful at night, and quiet, except when a storm rolled in from the west and it sounded like another plane coming over, as the wind tried to tear the tiles off the roof.
Gwen had a job dancing at a beer barn along the highway called 'The Road Train'. It was stuck between a used car yard and takeaway food place. A neon sign out the front advertised 'Topless Asian Hostesses'.
When I got up of a morning and went into the kitchen the smell of cigarettes and booze would be hanging around. It was also in Gwen's hair and her clothes and on her skin. The men at the beer barn left that smell on her. I felt bad that maybe she was dancing topless too. I couldn't stop thinking about it, so in the end I asked if she was taking her clothes off.
'Of course I'm not.'
'I bet you are.'
'I told you, I'm not.'
'I don't believe you. I saw that sign out the front.'
She ended the argument by slamming her fist down on the table and screaming in my face, 'Do I look fucken Asian?'
She never got out of bed before lunchtime and left for work in the afternoon. She'd sold our car for bond and rent and had to walk to the bus stop where I'd found the TV. Her boss, Larry, dropped her back at the front gate early in the morning. Whenever she was away Rachel and me were left at the farmhouse on our own. I didn't mind her being away, except when the storms came, and the old house got thrown around like a boat. If the wind moaning through the house didn't keep us awake, wild dogs howling off in the darkness did.
As soon as she heard the first cry of a dog Rachel would jump down from her bunk and slip under the blankets next to me as quietly as she could. She knew that if she didn't make a nuisance of herself, the better chance she had of staying. I was usually awake anyway. I would never have told her so, but I was just as frightened as Rachel, and felt safer myself with her warm body pressed against mine.
Gwen carried a red plastic wallet everywhere she went, in her handbag, filled with photographs of herself, taken when she was younger, when she first started dancing. She flipped through the wallet every chance she got just to be sure she'd once been beautiful. One time I heard her talking on the phone, telling whoever was on the other end that she was too old and ugly for the game. She'd been knocked around and it showed on her face. She was worn out.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Blood by Tony Birch. Copyright © 2011 Tony Birch. Excerpted by permission of University of Queensland Press.
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