* * *
After that, he gave up looking for Ava and headed for the cubby he’d hollowed out under the lilly-pilly at the back of the house. Years of pruning had left the bush with a solid outer skin of leaves, tight as the feathers on a chicken. But behind that skin, against the house, Neville had snapped away the dead twigs and made a clear space big enough to sit in or stand up in or even lie down in, if he didn’t mind the bed of dry leaves, which he didn’t. It was one of several secret places in his and the surrounding territories to which Neville retreated when he needed space and privacy for thought.
As it turned out, however, it wasn’t to be private this day, because seated right in the middle, in the best, roomiest part of the cubby, with her back against the house stump and Ava’s head cradled in her lap, was Afsoon Rahimi.
“What a stupid man!” she harrumphed as he crowded in beside. “Why do you listen to him?”
“Mister Shoomba? Why? Whaddya mean?”
“Saying your father will never be the same again! What does such a fat lazy man know of Heroes, or anything?” She gripped a friendly handful of Ava’s ruff and gave it a shake. “Ava and me - we say, if anything has been cooked from the inside out, it is Mister Shoomba’s brain!”
“Well,” said Neville, even though he knew how the topic would provoke her, “He knows about pirates! He says there’re pirates at the boat ramp!”
“Hah! If pirates were at the boat ramp, they’d’ve cut open Mister Shoomba’s gizzard and put his big ears on a hook for fishing!”
Neville had learned the hard way that it was not always wise to repeat ‘Soon’s most colourful language. Though tiny, she was nearly two years older than he - almost eight - and possessed of a deep and ready cynicism about life. “If you want to speak like that,” Mum had said, “go out to the garage and talk to the lizards!”
“If you want to know about pirates,” ‘Soon was now saying, “there is only one way. You must talk to Riff and Raff. Once, they fought a whole shipload of pirates, with their bare hands! When they came to take our Anosh, Riff drowned a hundred of them in the middle of the ocean! And caused the others to sail off in a terror.”
Her brow furrowed and she hugged Ava close, burying her face in the little dog’s ruff.
“So they can’t be here can they, Ava!” she murmured. And to Neville, “Anyhow, why would they come? They have Anosh and many others! What else would they want? No. This Shoomba is a liar-man! And I tell you, Ava, you must poop in his yard every day! I will join you. And Neville will join you also. Even if Terrible Bill catches us and scratches our bums to pieces!”
The Neighbourhood
The neighbourhood which comprised Neville the Less’s domain looked like this.
First, there was Home Country, which was the block on which stood the house in which Neville the Less, Mum, The Quiet Man and Ava lived. It had been bought years ago, when Mum was still Bettina and The Quiet Man was still Neville the More and neither Ava nor Neville the Less had been born.
The house was a ‘Queenslander’ which meant it perched four feet off the ground on wooden stumps, had wide verandas and, in summer with the doors open, could harvest even the slightest breezes, drawing them right through from south to north or east to west. Not through Neville’s room, though, because it was an add-on; a little out-of-the-way almost-secret one in a back corner, behind the pantry - part of the changes that had accompanied the arrival of Neville himself.
Neville didn’t mind the tininess or the seclusion of his room. Being next to the pantry meant he could help himself to lollies and biscuits to store up as snacks for himself and Ava. It also meant he could creep on hands and knees through the kitchen and the sleep-out to see unseen what Mum and Dad were watching on television. Or listen to conversations on the western veranda which, coincidentally, also overlooked the leafy skin of the lilly-pilly cubby. Then there was the thrilling possibility, already well into the serious consideration stage, of secretly coming and going from the house via the little window that scooped in the summer northerlies. And the best - his long-term plan - (though it had definitely been set back by the arrival of the Things) was the trap door which one day, when he’d gotten up the nerve to make it, would grant him the unimaginably satisfying option of simply dropping out of sight like a magician’s rabbit.
‘Out of sight’, of course, meant into ‘Under’ - the space beneath the floor joists where the dark-loving Things had recently taken to gathering in the night. It was a space just high enough, maybe for one more year, for Neville to stand without bumping his head. Whether the Things could also stand there, or whether they had to crouch on all fours with their shaggy backs against the floorboards, was a question too awful to consider.
In its favour, even in the depths of the tropical summer, Under was cool and quiet during the day - a space with packed, bare earth and a dead forest of stumps - fifty remnants of once gigantic trees. It was those stumps on which the house rested and to which it was anchored by thumb-thick bolts of iron. Once during a cyclone, according to Mister Shoomba, the house had lifted right into the air and would have blown away entirely but for one heroically unyielding cyclone bolt.
“House swung on that bolt for half an hour!” he swore, eyes ablaze with the memory. “Stretched ‘er out to twice ‘er length, but she never let go! Durin’ the clean-up your ol’ man wanted to throw that bolt away but I says, give it to me, I says. ‘Cause iron’s got the magic in it, see? ‘N’ ‘at piece’s got more’n its natural share I reckon! Still got it somewhere here, under the house. Show it to you one day ‘f ye like. Crap strewn all over Hell’s Half Acre after that blow, I can tell you!”
During wet-season storms and for days after, Under would stream with water - oodles of water - on which Neville could sail stick boats, sending them curling and swirling around the massive columns of wood. And all year round, in both wet and dry times, since the perimeter of the house was lined with shrubs, Under had been one of the places from which Neville could watch the world’s unfoldings without being seen. What had begun unfolding there after dark in recent times, however, had been enough to bring Neville’s visits there to an abrupt and permanent halt.
The front yard of Home Country looked boringly out onto Station Street, but the back yard into which the wet season rivers drained was the true heart of Home Country. Straight across it, to the west, it was edged by a dense forest of banana palms and the end of Rahimi’s animal house.
In the northwest corner stood the stockade, made of old railway sleepers, where papers were sometimes burned. In the southwest corner stood a dilapidated garage over which hung the mighty branches of an ancient Poinciana. Major branches of that tree hung down low enough for Neville to grasp, creating for him a highway onto the flat roof of the garage and into the Duke of Daisley’s mango tree; the very one from which he’d overheard Mister Shoomba’s ‘criminal waste of hormones’ comment. From various lookouts in that immense old tree, Neville could spy out the doings in Home Country, Shoomba Territory, the Island of Rahimi and even a little of what happened behind the high fences of the Duchy of Daisley.