The Promise Seed Read online

Page 3


  Can you keep a secret? he whispered.

  I said I could, of course. Secrets were valuable currency in the Home, and you did whatever you could to get a hold of them, whether you could keep them or not. So Big Johnno leant in even closer to me, his eyes shining brightly. I could see the reflection of the flames in those black circles.

  They talk to me, he said.

  Who? I said.

  The fire creatures. They talk to me.

  What do they say? I asked him.

  They tell me stories. And they tell me to wait.

  Wait for what?

  They tell me to wait for their signal. And when the time is right, I’ll join them.

  Well, as you can imagine, I steered clear of Big Johnno after that little chinwag. I didn’t fancy being around him when those fire creatures decided the time was right, you know what I mean? And sure enough, not a month or two after that, some boys came running out from the direction of the upstairs toilets, calling Fire! Fire! I was in my room reading, and by the time I got to the door to see what all the commotion was about, there were great billowing clouds of smoke coming from the bathroom. Big Johnno had finally done it. He’d nicked some matches from the kitchen and collected a week’s worth of loo paper and set the whole lot alight. The worst thing was, he’d piled it up on top of one of the toilets and then locked himself in the cubicle. Apparently he just stood there, with his back against the door, watching it burn. By the time Mr McCready had found a ladder and bucketed water over the top of the cubicle, and Mr Harris the maintenance man had found a screwdriver to undo the lock, poor Big Johnno was semi-conscious from inhaling all that smoke. He suffered serious burns to his face and hands too, which didn’t help his general appearance, even after they healed. The scarring made him look like one of those blackened stumps that you see standing after a bush fire.

  He never stopped listening to those fire creatures though. Even after all that, every winter night when Mr McCready laid the kindling in the fireplace, and those first tiny licks of flame began to flicker, Big Johnno was always the first to bags the closest chair, and always the last to go up to bed.

  Then there was the time that little skinny kid disappeared. That was sad, but still, when you’re with a whole lot of boys living in a place like the Home, anything out of the ordinary is an adventure, sad or not. I don’t recall his name. He was only seven or eight, with ears that stuck out from either side of his head like two handles. I must’ve been thirteen, ’cause it was a year or so before I left. A whole lot of us were playing hide and seek in the grounds. It was the beginning of spring and one of those beautiful warm days that arrives out of the nowhere of winter. We’d been cooped up inside due to the cold, and so when the day dawned sunny and bright we were all champing at the bit to run around in the fresh air. So we had this game of hide and seek going on, and Mr McCready must’ve been in a good mood that day, ’cause he’d said we could go anywhere at all within the boundary, even in the back orchard and out along the side amongst all the pine trees. I was real pleased about that ’cause my favourite place to hide was up in one of the pine trees, a big one with sturdy branches the right distance apart for climbing. Me and some other boys had even lugged an old wooden pallet up there, our attempt at a tree house. Anyway, so I was busy hiding up in my pine tree, and all the other boys were in their various hidey-holes, and the game was going on fine, except that after a few rounds we realised that no-one had found the little skinny kid. Quite a few people had been It, and I guess there were so many boys playing that we didn’t notice before then that he hadn’t been found. But it wasn’t until Mr McCready called the end of the game and we all trooped back up to the grey building that we realised he wasn’t being a good hider, he was actually missing. We were all sent out again to find him. We must’ve searched for two hours or more.

  My roommate Derek was the one that finally located him. Stupid kid had levered the cover off a disused well right up in the back corner of the property. He must’ve climbed in and braced himself against the inner walls while he dragged the cover partially closed over the top of him. I don’t know how long it would’ve been before the poor bugger realised he couldn’t hold his own weight up like that, balanced against the sides of the well, but eventually he must’ve dropped like a stone, right to the bottom. It was a long way down too.

  There was a big inquiry after that, into the Home and everything that went on there. Like I said, I left the following year, but the Home itself was closed down soon afterwards. I guess that even though they were happy to put all of us boys there and practically forget about us, they weren’t too happy to be losing kids down wells.

  That kid next door, the one who was scaring my chooks and hiding near my woodshed, reminds me of that skinny kid who fell down the well. He’s got that same air about him, beaten down and bedraggled, but determined too, like he’s the permanent runner-up in the dogfight of life. To tell you the truth, I hadn’t taken much notice of him before today, other than when he’s making a racket running a stick along my fence. Think it’s only him and his mum, and she’s a sorry creature; always a man or three hanging around like they’re after a bitch on heat. Not nice types either. Driving motorcycles and drinking and cursing and carrying on. The pair of them moved in two or three months ago but you’d think it was yesterday – there’re still stacks of half-empty cardboard boxes scattered all over the porch, and an old fridge that never made it past the bottom front stair.

  He gave me quite a start today, hiding there. I was all ready to yell at the little blighter for disturbing my chooks – they won’t lay, you know, if they’re frightened like that. But that bloke with the filthy mouth got my dander up, and to tell you the truth, I kinda felt sorry for the kid. There was something in his eyes that stirred a memory inside me. For a moment, I was him, I was that boy hiding by the woodshed, and I figured that whatever he was hiding from, it had to be worse than an old man with arthritic fingers and a few frightened chooks.

  6

  The air was charged with that peculiar smell of electricity before a storm. A wind had started up from nowhere, whipping the uppermost branches of the trees and tunnelling through the side of the yard, sweeping plastic bags and discarded rubbish before it. In its wake, the bushes shivered. The gusts plucked a few late-flowering jasmine from their stems and tossed them into whirling white eddies. A subtle green shaded the afternoon light, washing out the colour of the sky. Everything was trembling in anticipation.

  And then it began. At first, a few fat raindrops thudding to the ground. Then the clouds cracked open with a clap of thunder and the water fell like a solid mass, drenching the boy as he hurried across the road and in through the squeaking gate. He couldn’t even hear it above the noise of the downpour.

  Up the stairs, two at a time, and then he was under the cover of the verandah, shaking the rain from his hair like a wet dog. He wiped his nose against his shoulder and went inside the empty house.

  His bedroom was at the back of the building. It had a sloped ceiling; his mum had told him she thought it probably used to be the kitchen, before it was renovated in the seventies. Once she’d told him that, the room’s eccentricities seemed to make more sense. There were several circles of darkened wood on the pine floor, which the boy imagined were caused by a stove. At one point, though, the cooker would almost certainly have been in the tiny alcove that jutted out into the side yard, now fitted with a crossbar and home to his few clothes. Only one of the wardrobe doors remained.

  The walls of the room were painted a soft shade of blue, and he loved to lie on his bed, half-close his eyes, and lose himself in the soothing colour. A previous tenant had painted a white cloud on the wall near the window. Usually it floated, light and fluffy, between the blue of the wall and the blue of the sky outside. Today, however, it seemed benign against the thunderheads storming across the vista of the window, the silver-streaked sheets of water plummeting into the ground. />
  The boy kicked off his dripping runners. Taking aim, he threw one towards the cardboard box on the other side of the room. It missed, but he tried again with the other shoe and this time it dropped agreeably into the box.

  Yes! he shouted, and punched the air.

  He rummaged under his bed and pulled out a battered shoebox. Sitting cross-legged on the bed, he took out the contents and placed them in a semi-circle. There were four marbles he had won off the fat kid. Three pieces of crystal quartz he had dug out of the dirt in their previous house. He fanned out his collection of Pokémon cards and counted them carefully. There were nine doubles; maybe he should try to swap them after school tomorrow.

  He fingered a small gold ring. It had belonged to a stuck-up girl a year above him, who was always bragging about her big pool and her overseas holidays. He had stolen it when she’d left it on a communal basin the day they’d all done the tree planting. Probably didn’t want to get it dirty. He wasn’t sure if it was real gold, but it was pretty. He had planned to give it to his mum, but that was about five months ago now and here it was, still sitting in his box under his bed. The moment of his imagination, some special moment that culminated in giving her the ring, hadn’t eventuated. Not yet anyway.

  There were bush-turkey feathers and unusual rocks and a spent bullet; there were half-a-dozen wishbones and a pointy stick he particularly liked and a magnet; there was a miniature model train engine given to him by one of his mum’s boyfriends and a birthday invitation he had received two years ago from a boy in his class. He had a Batman torch and an I participated in Sports Day ribbon and a matchbox containing his collection of dead bugs. And there was a note in his mum’s spidery handwriting – Gone to the pub for bingo. Leftovers in fridge. Love Mum xx. He’d kept it ’cause of the Love Mum and the xx. He examined his treasures as if they were holy things. He squared the cards into alignment, rubbed a piece of quartz on his sleeve until it shone and then rearranged the bits and pieces into their appointed spaces in the box. Finally, he drew from his pocket a golden cocoon he’d nicked from his teacher’s silkworm display. One end was splayed open where the moth had emerged. He peered through the hole. The inside – that dim place of mysterious transformation – contrasted sharply with the fine strands of shimmering gold surrounding it. He placed the cocoon gently inside the box, closed the lid and slid it back under his bed, his ritual complete.

  He retrieved the latest John Marsden book borrowed from the school library and settled back on his pillows. The rain sluiced down his window and drummed a hollow rhythm on the tin roof.

  7

  It was the autumn of ’52 when I left the Home. Not exactly voluntarily, I have to say. But once you reached fourteen, Mr McCready didn’t like you hanging around the little kids anymore. He particularly didn’t like me hanging around the little kids, even when I was one myself. And, as I said, there were a few dramas going on, what with the inquiry into the death of the kid down the well, so they were starting to move on a few more boys than usual.

  I’ll always remember the day of my departure. Unlike most of the state, autumn meant something on the Darling Downs. The whole area was surrounded by the most beautiful gradient of colours – bright reds through to pale pinks, a range of yellows from golden to pumpkin orange to amber to soft lemon, chestnut browns, caramel browns, chocolate browns, with even a few plum purples and the occasional stubborn green thrown in. It was a sight to behold. There was a slight wind that day too, and those leaves still clinging to the trees shivered like they were waving goodbye. Every so often the breeze would pick up and release a shower of colour. I wasn’t going to miss the grey building, but I was real sorry to be leaving behind the trees and flowers and bits of nature I had learnt to love.

  A few of the older boys were allowed to come out to the bus to see me off. My old roommates, James and Derek, were already long gone by then, being older than me. Someone told me James ended up in juvenile gaol for stabbing some girl with a penknife, but that could have been hearsay. Anyway, there were one or two kids who’d been there almost as long as me, and they came out to say goodbye and good luck and all. Though I’m not sure any of us knew what we needed good luck for, or where we would be going to get it. Still, it was nice that they bothered.

  I was off to the unsettling prospect of a normal high school. I had no idea what that might mean – how these new kids would be more normal than me, or normal in a different way. I needn’t have worried. The two years I spent boarding at the Christian Path Academy in Ipswich were so normal as to be dull to the point of monotony. The school was populated with adolescent boys from good Christian families and run by an evangelical group that offered several scholarships each year to wayward boys who – the church elders felt – might have just enough salvageable soul to drag them back onto the Path. I was seen as a good candidate.

  Mostly my past didn’t matter. They knew where I’d come from.

  But every so often the rumours would circulate. I’d catch a trio of boys whispering, or find some hurtful words scrawled across my locker. Once, not long after I arrived, I returned to my classroom after the bell and found my maths teacher and the new science teacher engaged in a furtive discussion. As soon as I entered the room, they clammed up. I remember the new teacher stared at me, open-mouthed. I saw a flicker of fear and curiosity cross his face.

  Gradually, though, the rumours petered out, and once I’d left school altogether, they stopped following me around like a bad smell. I could look a bloke in the eye without him flinching. I no longer felt like I was being watched. People’s memories are short, and thank God for that. Living on your own as an old fella’s bad enough without giving folk any extra ammunition to hurl at you. Every time I consider opening my mouth to tell those kids in the street to pipe down, or that boy next door to stop making such a racket, I remember those days when people had heard the rumours, the apprehension flitting across their stony faces, and I think better of it and shut my mouth. No point courting disaster, inviting nosiness when indifference serves me just as well.

  But back at the secondary school, the gossip still had legs and the speculators still had plenty to speculate about. Those two years were not the most comforting of my life. The day boys had families to go home to each night, and although there were quite a few boarders from distant properties, most of them went home for the holidays or even sometimes for weekends. There were only a few of us that lived permanently at the school, which had been named as our legal guardian for the term of our enrolment. There were a couple of orphans, and one kid whose parents were both in gaol, and two more – like me – who refused to speak about their families at all. At first I gravitated towards these boys in the mistaken belief that they would be kindred souls, seeking the gruff rough-housing camaraderie I had shared with the kids at the Home. But other than the fact that we all received welfare bursaries, there didn’t seem to be any other ties binding us, and I soon realised I was more comfortable with the regular boarders or, more often than not, with my own company.

  The religious angle was something new to me and for a while I threw myself into reading the Bible, listening to all the stories, learning the hymns and trying to work out how to get my prayers heard.

  I prayed a lot for my sister. And I prayed for my own flawed soul.

  But despite all the hype, the energy I saw devoted around me to the Path didn’t seem to materialise into any actual results, and I became a tad dismayed and bored with the whole process.

  The boarders were nice enough. One boy, Tom, invited me to his parents’ property a few times. And eventually the school relented and said I could go. It was the Easter break. Tom and I took a train and then a bus to get to the little township near where he lived, and then we had to wait on the side of the road until his dad came along in this filthy banged-up ute with a hyperactive border collie straining at the leash in the back. Boy, was that dog pleased to see Tom. I thought he was going to lick him to d
eath. Tom’s dad told Bluey (that was the dog’s name) to get back in the tray so we could drive to the house, but Tom pleaded with him to let him sit on our laps in the front, and so he did. Tom’s dad pretended not to like it, but I saw him smiling when he thought Tom wasn’t watching.

  Tom’s family consisted of his dad, his mum, his big sister Therese, who was living in the house with her husband, her belly full of their baby, and Tom’s ten-year-old sister. I never did find out her real name but everyone called her Bump. Their house was this huge, rambling farmhouse with about seventeen rooms. They even had a music room with an upright piano. Not that they were rich or anything, or not so as they boasted about it. I got the impression the whole family worked pretty hard, and even Tom and me were expected to chip in with the chores.

  That week was the best out of all my time at Christian Path, and probably one of the best times of my life. I suppose that’s sad, seeing as I was only fifteen or so and I’ve lived so much more of life since then, but there you go. It was the first time since I’d left that cold house of my memory, with Mum’s wailing filling the air, that I’d stayed in a real home with an actual family. Tom’s parents genuinely seemed to like each other, which I have to say was somewhat surprising for me. Most evenings they’d switch on the radio and dance around the living room, pretending they were at a ball. Then Therese’s husband might get up and say to Tom’s mum, May I have the pleasure? and his mum would blush and say Of course, kind sir, and Therese would erupt in a fit of giggles. Everyone adored Bump, and Bump adored Tom. She followed us around the whole week, wanting to do whatever we were doing. Eventually Tom would get jack of it and tell her to go play with her dolls (which annoyed her ’cause she hated dolls and told him so), but most of the time he put up with her good-naturedly, and let her tag along. We took her swimming in the dam, where she was like a fish back in its natural habitat. She put me to shame.