Second Childhood

  Bob ruffled Mark’s hair.

  ‘Show ‘em what you’re made of, champ,’ he said.

  As Bob went back into the lounge room he thought of Mark onstage at the high school prize-giving in a couple of months and suddenly the mortgage interest rate increase that Joy was in the middle of telling him about didn’t seem so bad after all.

  Mark looked at the encyclopaedia on the table in front of him. Then he opened it. He didn’t flick through it this time, he turned the pages purposefully until he came to the word he was looking for.

  Reincarnation.

  When Mark saw Annie’s house, he almost turned round and went home again.

  It was two storeys, white, with a white wrought-iron balcony. The front garden was full of giant ferns. An old-fashioned brass lamp over the gate gleamed in the morning sun. The street number was brass too. Or gold.

  Mark took a deep breath, pushed the gate open, went up to the front door and knocked loudly with the brass or gold knocker.

  He waited, wondering what he’d say if Mrs Upton opened the door. Small talk about sailing would be best. He’d tell her about the time Daryl fell out of the pedal-o boat and ripped his –

  The door opened. It was Annie. She looked surprised, then suspicious.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she said.

  ‘I want to talk to you,’ said Mark. ‘About reincarnation.’

  Annie scowled. She stepped past him, turned on a hose and sprayed it into the ferns.

  ‘Okay Wainwright, okay Abrozetti,’ she shouted, ‘come out and have your laugh and then rack off.’

  ‘It’s just me,’ said Mark. ‘I just want to ask you a couple of things.’

  Annie looked at him for a long time, still spraying the ferns. Then she turned the hose off.

  Mark couldn’t take his eyes off Annie’s walls.

  They were covered with Phar Lap stuff. Posters, old photos, drawings, articles cut out of magazines, photocopies of newspaper stories.

  Would anyone else except Phar Lap, he thought, go to this much trouble?

  He realised she’d finished telling him how reincarnation was a big part of several major and important religions in the world. It was time for the biggie.

  ‘If I was someone else before I was born,’ he said, ‘how come I can’t remember anything about it?’

  ‘Can you remember being born?’ she asked.

  Mark tried. He couldn’t.

  ‘So it stands to reason,’ she said, ‘you can’t remember stuff that happened before that.’

  Mark felt a shiver run down his back.

  Time for the other biggie.

  ‘How did you find out who you were?’ he asked.

  ‘It just sort of came to me. Phar Lap was incredibly popular, right, the whole country loved him, so it stands to reason.’

  ‘What does?’ said Mark.

  Mrs Upton’s voice floated up from downstairs.

  ‘Annie, Dad and I are going sailing. Your pasta’s in the microwave.’

  Mark heard the front door slam.

  Annie fiddled with the carpet for a bit.

  ‘I’m having this life to stop me getting bigheaded,’ she said quietly. ‘That’s why my olds don’t give a stuff about me.’

  Mark waited to see if she wanted to say any more about that.

  She didn’t seem to.

  ‘How did it just sort of come to you?’ he asked.

  Annie grinned at him. ‘You want to find out who you are, don’t you?’

  Mark felt his face getting hot. ‘No . . . I’m just sort of . . . you know . . . interested.’

  He could see she didn’t believe him.

  ‘You’ve really got to want to know,’ said Annie. ‘I really wanted to know. Then it just sort of came to me.’

  ‘How?’

  Annie took something from her bookshelf and held it out. It was a video movie. Phar Lap.

  ‘While I was watching this.’

  6

  The video shop manager stared as the pile of videos on legs tottered towards him down the aisle.

  He’d seen kids stock up for the weekend plenty of times before, but never with this many.

  Interesting selection of titles too.

  Gandhi, Amadeus, Burke and Wills, Greystoke The Legend of Tarzan, Lawrence of Arabia, Frankenstein, Patton, Jimi Hendrix, Lenny, Ned Kelly, Golda, Isadora, W. C. Fields and Me, Lassie.

  Mark’s face peered over the top of the pile.

  ‘I’ll take these, thanks,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll need some proof of who you are,’ said the manager.

  ‘I’ll let you know when I’ve watched them,’ said Mark.

  Thirty-six hours later Mark had watched them.

  He rolled away from the television, looked at the video boxes and tapes scattered around him on the floor, and groaned.

  Fourteen movies and the only thing that had come to him was a headache.

  During Tarzan he’d felt the back of his neck prickling and for a moment he’d thought it was a sign until he realised he was lying on an old biscuit.

  Mark groaned again.

  He saw Daryl standing in the doorway staring at him.

  ‘Nothing?’ said Daryl, eyes wide with disbelief. ‘Fourteen movies and not a single tit?’

  Mark sighed.

  Bob appeared in the doorway behind Daryl. He looked at all the video boxes and frowned.

  ‘You’re sure all this is for the project?’ he said.

  ‘Yes, Dad,’ said Mark wearily.

  He sighed again.

  Now Daryl was winking at him.

  Later that evening Mark had an idea.

  He rummaged around until he found the old photo album, then studied his baby photos closely.

  No good.

  The only person he looked a tiny bit like was Elton John, and Elton John wasn’t even dead yet.

  Mark went into the kitchen.

  ‘Mum,’ he said, ‘when I was a baby, did I remind you of anyone?’

  Joy thought for a bit, then smiled fondly at Mark.

  ‘Porky Pig.’

  The playground was full of kids tearing about and shouting and pushing and not behaving one bit like recycled adults.

  Must be all the sugar we eat, thought Mark.

  Then he saw Annie walking towards the main building. He ran over to her.

  ‘It didn’t work,’ he said breathlessly. ‘I watched heaps of movies and nothing happened.’

  She didn’t even stop walking, just glared at him.

  ‘You and your mates can drop dead,’ she said, and walked twice as fast.

  Mark walked with her, not knowing what to say.

  Hope I don’t turn out to be a horse, he thought, I’d hate to be that temperamental.

  Then he heard Pino and Rufus behind them, giggling.

  ‘Seriously but,’ Pino called out to Annie, ‘do you sleep standing up?’

  Annie turned, glared at them, then at Mark again.

  Mark decided it was time he had a talk with Pino about reincarnation and manners. He sprinted over, jumped on Pino’s back and they both crashed to the ground.

  The school library was full of kids pretending to be Famous People In History. Some with more success than others.

  As Mr Cruickshank strolled among the bowed heads and moving pens, he was pleased to see that most folders had at least half a page of project in them already.

  Most, but not all.

  Mr Cruickshank frowned as he stood over Rufus Wainwright, who was sucking his pen, deep in thought.

  ‘Dear Mum,’ Rufus had written, ‘Guess what? I’m Batman.’ Batman was crossed out. So were the other names that followed it. Steve Waugh. Indiana Jones. God.

  Mr Cruickshank moved along to Pino Abrozetti, who had written even less. ‘To Whom It May Concern’ was the sum total of his efforts so far, if you didn’t count the intergalactic motorbike he’d drawn on his pencil case.

  And here was Mark Smalley, who hadn’t written a thing, staring into spac
e.

  Mr Cruickshank thought about having words with Smalley. Then he remembered the article he’d read in the holidays about how some kids were hopeless students because of their genes. He moved on to the next table.

  ‘Thought he’d never go,’ Mark whispered to the others, sliding the book out from under his folder.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Rufus, looking at the book.

  Mark showed him the cover: Reincarnation Revealed – Discover Your Past Lives.

  Mark had already decided it was the best book he’d ever read, worth every cent of the $3.95 he’d paid in the second-hand bookshop. It also had the information he needed now that Upton wasn’t talking to him.

  ‘Reincarnation’s a con,’ whispered Rufus. ‘I saw it on telly. You andUptonhavebeenconned.’

  ‘Do you believe everything you see on telly?’ whispered Mark.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Rufus. ‘Except the news.’

  Pino leant over and looked at the page Mark was reading. He saw the word Mark had underlined.

  ‘What’s a seance?’ he whispered.

  ‘It’s getting in touch with dead people,’ whispered Mark, ‘to find out who you were before.’

  ‘Yuk,’ said Pino.

  He said it quite loudly, so they all pretended to write for a while in case Mr Cruickshank had heard.

  ‘If you’ve lived before,’ whispered Pino after a bit, ‘how come you’re not all green and mouldy?’

  ‘’Cause you get a new body each life, dummo,’ whispered Mark.

  ‘Gee,’ muttered Pino, ‘I wonder if I could come back as Deidre Armitage in 5B?’

  Mark saw Mr Cruickshank looking at them and they all scribbled stuff on their pencil cases for a couple of minutes.

  Then Rufus whispered to Mark. ‘Why are you doing this?’

  ‘I want to find out if I’m a somebody,’ said Mark quietly.

  Rufus and Pino thought about this for a moment.

  ‘Course you’re not a somebody,’ whispered Rufus. ‘You’re a kid.’

  ‘But what if we’ve all been somebodies in a past life,’ said Mark. ‘Don’t you want to find out if you’ve done great deeds? Won great victories? Travelled great journeys?’

  Rufus and Pino shook their heads.

  ‘I might have caught something,’ said Pino.

  ‘Don’t you want to get top marks in the project?’ asked Mark.

  Rufus and Pino thought about this.

  ‘What’s reincarnation got to do with the project?’ asked Rufus.

  ‘Look how much Upton’s written,’ said Mark.

  They all leaned back to the table behind them and had a peek at Annie’s folder.

  ‘Dear Mum and Dad,’ her first page began, ‘you know me as Annie, but I am actually Phar Lap . . .’

  She was already halfway through her second page.

  Rufus and Pino’s eyes widened.

  ‘Smalley, Wainwright, Abrozetti,’ hissed Mr Cruickshank across the library, ‘do your own work.’

  They hunched over their pencil cases and scribbled frantically for five minutes.

  Then Rufus leaned over to Mark.

  ‘This seance,’ he whispered, ‘when are you doing it?’

  ‘Tonight,’ said Mark.

  7

  Mark finished the reincarnation book under the bed covers by torchlight. Then he read the seance chapter again, just to make sure he’d got all the details right.

  When he’d done that he looked at his watch.

  Seven past midnight.

  Time to go.

  He got dressed as quietly as he could. The batteries were going in the torch and in the dull light the footballers on his wall seemed to be watching him with strange expressions on their faces.

  They probably know, thought Mark, that after tonight I’ll be swapping them for someone else.

  Mark decided to do the difficult bit first.

  He crept into Daryl’s room. Daryl was asleep with his feet hanging off the side of the bed and his head on a Lego spaceship.

  Fortunately it wasn’t Daryl’s Lego that Mark had come for, it was his Scrabble.

  Mark found it on the floor in the corner, picked the box up carefully so it wouldn’t rattle, and crept out of the room.

  He went into the kitchen and stuffed a drinking glass into his pocket, then tiptoed into the lounge to get the encyclopaedia.

  As he was piling up the eight volumes, one slipped and fell to the floor with a thud.

  Mark held his breath, listening for sounds of stirring in his parents’ room.

  All he could hear was the occasional car on the overpass.

  It was only after he’d piled up the encyclopaedia, put the Scrabble box on top, picked them all up and turned to leave that he saw Daryl standing in the doorway watching him.

  The street next to the cemetery was empty except for Mark, Pino, several parked cars and Daryl.

  ‘I reckon the whole idea’s childish,’ said Daryl, clutching the Scrabble box to his chest and nervously eyeing the dark bits of street between the street lights.

  Pino shifted his four volumes of encyclopaedia to his other arm and gave Mark a look.

  Mark wasn’t sure if the look meant ‘why did you bring him?’, ‘Why did you bring such a heavy encyclopaedia?’ or ‘When’s Rufus getting here?’

  ‘Why did you bring him?’ hissed Pino.

  ‘I had to,’ whispered Mark, ‘it’s his Scrabble.’

  ‘Stupid and childish,’ said Daryl. ‘Reincarnation’s what they have in those dumb horror movies.’

  A dark shape loomed out of the shadows next to him.

  ‘Arghhhh!’ said Daryl.

  ‘Sorry I’m late,’ said Rufus, ‘Mum’s new boyfriend went for a swim at the beach today and he kept getting up with gastric.’

  ‘What’s the plan?’ asked Pino.

  ‘Simple,’ said Mark, ‘we just go into the cemetery and have a seance.’

  ‘Does the book say it’s got to be in a cemetery?’ asked Rufus. He was looking nervously at the shadows now.

  ‘Not exactly,’ said Mark, ‘I just thought it’d be a good place to make contact with the departed.’

  ‘What about a phone box?’ said Daryl.

  Mark ignored him.

  As they went down the street towards the cemetery gates, Mark found himself glancing into the shadows and wondering if the cemetery was such a good idea after all.

  And when they got to the gates and found they were padlocked, nobody suggested climbing over.

  Which was just as well because half a minute later headlights beamed through the dark onto the gates.

  They all ducked down behind the bushes just in time, and watched a security car cruise slowly past.

  ‘We’ll have to find somewhere else,’ said Mark.

  ‘Don’t be dumb,’ said Pino, ‘where else can you have a seance at this time of night?’

  ‘It’s very bright in here,’ said Rufus.

  ‘Of course it’s bright,’ said Mark. ‘It’s a laundromat. Laundromats are always bright. It’s so you can see if your washing’s clean.’

  Mark found a bit of cardboard from a washing powder box and tore it in half. He wrote ‘yes’ on one bit and ‘no’ on the other and put them down on the lid of a washing machine. He placed the drinking glass between them, upside down.

  ‘Great place for making contact with the departed,’ said Daryl sarcastically.

  Mark found himself wondering how much younger brothers shrank if you washed them on the hot cycle.

  ‘As a matter of fact it’s an excellent place for making contact with the departed,’ said Mark. ‘When a person dies they usually leave a bit of dirty washing behind. Stands to reason their spirits’ll be down here making sure the relatives don’t forget to put the fabric softener in.’

  Mark put one fingertip onto the upturned glass.

  ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘let’s start.’

  The others all gathered round and put one finger each onto the glass.

&n
bsp; ‘This is crazy,’ said Pino.

  ‘Concentrate,’ said Mark, ‘and no pushing.’

  He decided to do Pino first in the hope of cutting down on the whinging. Mark raised his voice, taking on a tone he hoped was right for talking to fussy spirits.

  ‘Has Pino Abrozetti lived before?’

  ‘Can’t we do me first?’ asked Rufus. ‘Mum always gets up for a pee at two o’clock.’

  ‘Shhhh,’ said Pino.

  ‘Has Pino Abrozetti had a past life?’ intoned Mark.

  Suddenly the washing machine burst into life and started to vibrate.

  Slowly the glass slid over to ‘yes’.

  ‘It’s working,’ shouted Pino.

  Incredible, thought Mark. None of us started that machine, and there’s nobody else here.

  He grabbed the Scrabble box, pulled open the door of a spin dryer and tipped the plastic letters in. Then he closed the door, put a dollar in the slot and watched the letters clatter about inside.

  ‘Oh great,’ said Daryl. ‘That’s very good for them.’

  Mark pulled open the door and all the letters fell to the bottom of the dryer.

  ‘Choose your letters,’ said Mark.

  Pino closed his eyes and grabbed a handful of letters. He put them on a washing machine lid and they all excitedly turned them over.

  ‘Now,’ said Mark. ‘A name.’

  They all slid the letters around, searching for a name.

  ‘Zirp,’ said Pino.

  ‘Trud,’ said Rufus.

  ‘Silt,’ said Daryl.

  There was a long pause while they all studied the letters again.

  ‘Wait,’ said Mark, ‘I’ve got it.’

  Excitedly he rearranged the letters.

  ‘Aurelitus!’ cried Mark. ‘He was an emperor of Rome, I’m sure of it!’

  He grabbed the A-to-D volume of the encyclopaedia.

  ‘An emperor,’ said Pino, gazing majestically at the distant washing powder dispenser.

  ‘Cruickshank’ll have to call you Your Serene Highness,’ said Rufus.

  Mark found the page and ran his finger down the column. ‘Aurelitus . . . Aurelitus.’

  There it was!

  ‘Aurelitus,’ read Mark out loud, ‘a toxic fungus mainly found on the droppings of ruminants.’

  They looked at each other, then at the encyclopaedia, then at each other again.