Dreaming of Amelia Page 5
Shortly after arrival, they’d completely run out of clothes, shoes and food, and they’re running around starving and half-naked.
They’re so cut off from the rest of the world, they don’t even know that the French Revolution is on. (They’re all just, ‘Da dee da, hmm, maybe I’ll holiday in France next year? If only I weren’t so hungry…’)
The locals helped them out, and some ships arrived from home just in time to stop them dropping dead.
Anyhow, they got the convicts working, and started growing grains, greens and potatoes. Got themselves some goats, hogs, poultry, sheep and fruit trees. Threw together a town called Sydney, another smaller place out west (Parramatta), and some farms along a river called the Hawkesbury. (But that kept flooding.)
Next they started a huge farm. They let some super-evil dude run that. He had the convicts work from dawn until they fell down dead on the spot. There was a pit where they threw the corpses every day, and the native dogs gnawed on their bones through the night.
Couple of years later, super-evil dude had ruined that farm — on account of double cropping. So they started a new super-farm out west, towards the Blue Mountains. At a place they called Castle Hill.
That’s it. The History of Australia. It all ends here in Castle Hill.
Now I’ll let Tom take over — tell you how he got to Castle Hill, and why he sees the darkness coming. You might notice that my Irish accent is not exactly great, but you’ve gotta give me points for effort. Thanks.
6.
Tobias George Mazzerati
Student No: 8233555
26 June 1800
Tom Kincaid, 17 years old, and here I am on board a ship. The ship is named the Anne, 384 tonnes, 12 guns, 42 crew plus sundry others.
Just weighing anchor and setting sail as we speak.
Sure and you’ve got to keep your own spirits up, for there’s no one else will do that for you! So here’s my best efforts. It’s a kind of a game:
True it is that they got me for stealing a sheep, but that were the eleventh sheep I’d taken, and they could have got me any time before!
True that my papers say Life — but I hear that if you pay the right person enough you can get your papers changed!
Sure and I’ve not got a farthing to my name, so even if I knew who the right person was, all I could offer is my smile.
But I hear that it’s a winner of a smile! That’s what Maggie says at least.
Och, the thought of Maggie. It’s enough to make my heart billow like sails! But it plunges me anchor-deep too, for I cannot spend another day without her. I cannot.
I’d best try again:
They’ve hardly scratched a corner of the land where we’re headed, and who can tell what might be hidden there? It’s a great unfolding mystery, it’s the future! There could be monstrous creatures as big as the hills! Blue grass, purple trees, and little people! Nobody knows! (There are natives, I suppose, who might know. But they’d be keeping it a secret.)
What else? They’ve stowed rations of biscuit, beef, pork, plum pudding and peas! We’re to get our own beds! I’ll not know what to do with all that space! (At home I share my bed with three brothers.) What’s more, they’ve given us two coarse linen jackets, two pairs of duck trousers, two shirts, two pairs of yarn stockings, two pairs of shoes, and a woollen cap! — all of them the ugliest things you ever saw, and I’d prefer to be stark naked than to wear them.
Ah, well. Perhaps I’ll try that game another day.
30 June 1800
Tonight, below deck, I was chatting with an errand boy from Dublin and a tinker from Galway. A shoemaker and a tobacco twister joined the conversation, and sure, it seemed to be a village square!
There’s a crowd of Rebels aboard this ship, too, and I’m wary of them. They think they’re a class above us common thieves. I must tell them about the ten other sheep and they’ll see I’m uncommon good.
2 July 1800
The first mate, he’s a right hostile fellow. Likes to press the heel of his boot into your foot. A girl who reminds me of Maggie to look at scalded her arm the other day, and that was the first mate’s leering — it frightened her into carelessness.
12 July 1800
I’ve made friends with one of the Rebels! He’s a fellow named Phillip Cunningham, who doesn’t put on the same airs. Maybe because he doesn’t have to; the others respect him like he’s something special. He’s a stonemason from County Kerry; older than me but treats me like he hasn’t noticed that. He’s left a wife and two small children back home. You can see that he knows how to speak his mind, and he’s already made me laugh twice.
29 July 1800
A strange day. There was a fumigation below deck, and some of the Rebels used the distraction to try to take over the ship. Held a sword to the captain’s throat. There was shouting, shoving, gunfire, and it was over.
Phillip knew it was planned, he says, but he hadn’t mentioned it to me — which offends me a little. I thought we were friends. But he wasn’t one of the ringleaders.
The ringleaders were punished. We had to watch that, up on deck.
15 August 1800
Tonight, all convict hands were called on deck, and I saw the stars exploding in the sky. I said, Look, Maggie, that’s your eyes. Such quiet eyes, such a soft, shy voice, but both of them brimming with something, exploding like stars. I don’t even know what she’s brimming with, my Maggie. Dreams maybe, magic, or fairies. (You must always call them ‘good people’, she says.)
That sky made the future bright again.
4 September 1800
The first mate broke one of his fingers today, trying to secure the longboat, which cheered us all a great deal.
1 October 1800
At dusk today, a vessel was sailing at a distance and it had no canvas up, except the foretop sail, and that was all torn to pieces with the wind. The captain steered towards her and the closer we got the clearer it was that no person was alive on board that ship. She was waterlogged. The waves were washing over her, and every time the ship rose with the swell, the water came out her cabin windows.
We sailed on and left her be, a ship full of ghosts.
13 October 1800
Some nights the darkness below deck frightens me. They pull up the ladder so you’re trapped, and there’s a barricade spiked with iron just above our heads, and the fierce smell of men all around me. Men are filthy creatures, and filthier the older they get. Mix their smells with that of foul water, from the bottom of the ship below the pumps, and the rotting wood, and I’ll tell you this, in a darkness such as that, the great unfolding mystery of the future, it doesn’t seem so wondrous to me.
2 November 1800
I think every moment of the last time I saw Maggie. I feel the touch of her fingertips on my cheek.
She talked of finding a leprechaun and taking its silver shilling so she could join me in Sydney Town.
Then she said she’d steal a ribbon or a watch. They’d catch her, she said, and transport her too.
I looked into her eyes and saw she meant it.
‘You’ll not be doing that,’ I said, and ‘Try to stop me,’ says she.
She’s dreamy one moment, tough-as-nails the next, that’s my Maggie.
‘Don’t be doing that,’ I said again.
‘If I don’t get caught,’ she said, ‘at least I’ll have a ribbon or a watch.’
15 December 1800
Dreadful weather the last few days. Seas like mountains and the surf like smoke. Thunder that beats from somewhere deep in your chest; lightning that falls like rain; water that rushes into our quarters and washes us from our beds.
2 January 1801
A child died today, the son of one of the female convicts. A sailmaker prepared a piece of canvas and they folded the little one in it and tossed him to sea.
15 January 1801
A whale swam alongside the ship a good half hour today, and turned on its back as if it wanted us to tickle its belly.
Phillip swears he saw shoals of the merrow (or mermaids, as the English call them) swimming in the wake of the whale, but I didn’t see a single one.
20 February 1801
Och, and so the months have passed and tomorrow we sail into Sydney Cove!
It’s been 240 days all up, which is unexpected long.
And let me tell you, if the smells were savage after just three weeks, you can imagine — no, you cannot — the smells after eight long months.
Twenty men have died on our passage.
Sure and I’ve seen things I never thought to see, and I’ve gathered Maggie into my mind so she could see them too! Flying fish, fog as thick as blankets, porpoises and giant albatrosses!
But that strange day — the day that the Rebels tried to take over the ship — the punishments we had to watch on deck. One man they gave 250 lashes, and the other, a young man named Marcus, dark curls and a deep blush, a lot like a boy I was at school with — him, they executed by firing squad.
I turned to Maggie in my mind when it happened, and then I stopped and turned away. For I couldn’t have her see the likes of that.
21 February 1801
Boatloads rowing up beside us, shouting out greetings and welcome, and calling for friends and news — and my eye catches the glimpse of a skeleton, hanging from a tree on a tiny island in a bay.
Phillip tells me that the island’s name is Pinchgut, and the skeleton belongs to a murderer.
‘They strung him up there as a warning,’ says Phillip, and then he smiles and adds: ‘A warning and a welcome.’
It’s good, I suppose, that I saw that.
For sure and this is supposed to be a gothic tale.
Lydia Jaackson-Oberman
Student No: 8233410
Feet up on the leather couch, translation homework on my knees. The parents enter the room like stage directions.
Mum, from the left.
‘How can you see in this light, Lydia!’ She stops to press her shoulder to the wall switch. ‘Now, isn’t that better?’ My mother has invented electricity!
But I can see better in the dark.
Dad, from the right.
He drops himself onto the couch beside me. I bounce straight up and smack my head against the ceiling. Slip into a coma for a moment, then wake up. Dad doesn’t notice. Flicks through the pages of my German.
Why?
He doesn’t know either.
Drops it to the floor again. Leather creaks and squeals. He sniffs. Picks up a random paper instead. It’s a note from my school. He’s got it in both hands but he’s gazing at the television screen.
‘You always work with the TV on, Lyd?’ Chatting now. He’s curious. What’s it like, this so-called schoolgirl life?
‘Pasta on the stove, Lydia.’ Mum curls herself on the other couch. ‘Help yourself. What’s this rubbish you’re watching, Lyd?’
They have to keep saying my name: we’re a soap-opera family and need to remind the audience who I am.
Dad’s still holding the note from school. Now he looks down.
Can he read?
‘An optional Biology excursion to Longneck Lagoon,’ he announces.
Turns out he can!
‘Looks like it’s not compulsory.’ He narrows his eyes at the note.
Now I’m truly breathless.
How can you be that smart and still be alive?
Dad’s still studying the note. ‘They’re really selling this excursion.’ He gives a wry smile. ‘Focus on your schoolwork this year, eh, Lydia? Give the optional, extracurricular stuff a miss.’
‘Oh, this is that race across the world thing.’ Mum has the remote control.
‘The Great Race,’ Dad agrees. ‘No. That’s not it. The Amazing Race.’
‘It’s strangely compelling,’ muses Mum.
‘Gotta go out,’ I say.
I don’t even take Biology.
At the Caltex, I get myself a new set of parents. They’re normally $45 but my shop-a-docket takes that down to 40. Got myself a bargain! And a Magnum too.
‘Lyd.’
That’s a voice against the back of my neck.
It’s Seb. He’s my ex.
I wait while he pays for his petrol. We walk out the door together; stop by the dark-lit Customer Parking stripes.
‘How’s things?’ he says.
I can’t see his eyes in the shadows. He swipes suddenly, with his foot, at an empty water bottle on the ground. Kicks it fast against the wall. It thwacks and rolls away. He straightens up and faces me again.
‘Fine,’ I say. ‘’Tsup with you?’
It’s like we’re talking in shrugs.
Then I remember my Magnum, tear off the paper and offer him a bite. Now we’re sharing a Magnum so we can share sentences. I ask about his teachers and his major work for Art. He asks about my writing. Used to be, we planned to make books together. He’d do the pictures and I’d do the words.
There’s quiet for a moment and he fills that up: ‘Hey,’ he says, ‘Riley and Amelia are at your school this year?’
‘You know them?’
‘They used to go to Brookfield.’
That’s Seb’s school. The public school down the road from us.
‘No.’ I shake my head at him. ‘They never went to Brookfield.’
‘Oh, yeah,’ he nods, thoughtfully. ‘You’re right. They never did.’
Now I’m half laughing.
‘They never,’ I say again. ‘They couldn’t come from Brookfield.’
He’s still nodding slowly like he’s made a mistake.
‘Em’s got this obsessive thing about them,’ I say. ‘Someone would’ve told her by now if they were just from Brookfield.’
‘Em.’ He grins, thinking of Em. ‘No, but.’ He shakes his head. ‘Riley and Amelia went to my school.’
‘You’re full of it,’ I tell him.
Now we’re both laughing. He touches my arm, remembers, and takes his hand away.
‘They were. But most Brookfielders don’t know them cos they never came to classes.’
‘If that’s true,’ I say, ‘how come you know them?’
‘I don’t,’ he says. ‘But I’ve seen them.’
He saw them early one morning, he says, maybe a year and a half ago. He was on the Brookfield oval, early for soccer training, and he’d kicked the ball behind the equipment shed. He overheard the coach talking with a girl and a guy.
‘They were kind of laughing around with him at first,’ Seb says. ‘They’d just turned up out of the blue, and they were going, “Yeah you do, you do know us, we were here last year.” And the coach is going, “Not ringing any bells,” and they go, “We were on your swimming team — when we first came to Brookfield?” And the coach laughs then switches to his mean voice — the one he uses for fat kids or for kids who throw like girls, the one that used to make me lose it. He goes, “You didn’t actually think I’d forgotten you, did you? Best swimmers the team ever had and you bailed on us before you even got wet. What can I do for you today?”
‘There’s silence then. Sound of grass crunching: Amelia and Riley shifting around. Sound of the shed door creaking: Coach is leaning on it. Then they went ahead and asked for a favour anyway.’
‘What kind of a favour?’
A beat goes by. Seb blinks once.
‘Saw them walking back across the oval a few minutes later,’ he says, like I haven’t asked a question. ‘And then I never saw them again. But I heard the other day they’re at your school now. Amelia still hot?’
The empty water bottle’s on the ground. He sends it back and forth between his feet, but he’s watching my face all the time.
I’ve had enough of drink-bottle soccer.
‘Gotta go,’ I say.
Now we’re separating, walking to our cars. We’re watching each other as we walk. We’ve both got our strange smiles, the smiles that could be mean or could be funny. They could tip either way. It’s like we’re waiting to see
how the other person’s tips.
I’m buckling my seatbelt when I hear his voice again.
He’s standing by the side of my car.
‘Stay away from Riley and Amelia, okay?’ he says.
I wind down the window and grin like he’s joking. But his smile is gone.
‘Seriously, Lyd,’ he says. ‘They’re trouble.’
Emily Melissa-Anne Thompson
Student No: 8233521
Amelia and Riley’s swimming success meant that my strange interest in them finally made sense. It was not childish weirdness! (As I had secretly feared, and as Lyd and Cass had openly suggested.) It was my sixth sense.
I am a very intuitive girl, and I must have sensed that Amelia is the reincarnation of the Inuit sea goddess, Sedna. (I looked that up on the night of the carnival.)
No wonder I was so intrigued! I was in the presence of a goddess! And her boyfriend!
I felt oppressively excited. I went to school the day after the carnival in a bubbling state, sure that everyone else would bubble too.
And there was much exhalation about Riley and Amelia. Their Olympic chances and so forth.
Then. However. Well, it faded away. Within a few days, everyone lost interest.
I found this indescribably odd.
But then I remembered how celebrity works. It’s always: okay, great movie, but where’s the next one? Show us what else you’ve got. And until you do, we’ll forget about you.
From then on, I walked around with this expression on my face:
Well, I was trying to draw a picture, but never mind. It was an expression of admiration for Riley and Amelia, combined with contempt for humanity.
I don’t think Riley and Amelia ever noticed. They didn’t really look at me.
And now, I must confess, that I myself continued to look at them.
Oft.
For my quest to discover who they were had reached epic proportions. It kept me awake at night! It consumed my every Toblerone!
Which is understandable. World champion swimmers join Ashbury in Year 12? I mean, come on.