Eustace

  ‘Borrowed it from Tammy’s mum,’ he informed me, with a half-smile. ‘We have to give it back, though.’

  ‘Thanks, Peter.’ I plucked it from his grip. ‘You really think ahead.’

  He couldn’t help looking smug when I said that. It occurred to me that he was quite a smart and well-organised kind of guy, despite his weird jokes and sci-fi obsessions. Then suddenly Michelle said: ‘What is it? Mr Boyer?’, and I jerked my head around.

  Richard had wandered down the gully a little way. He was standing very still, one finger pressed against his mouth, frowning at the gadget cradled in his hand. A puff of wind ruffled his curls.

  As I watched, he raised his chin and began to peer around, very slowly and intently. I couldn’t see his eyes too well, but from the way his head was thrust forward I was willing to bet that they were narrowed in concentration.

  ‘What is it?’ Michelle repeated, without getting an answer from Richard. It was Delora who spoke instead.

  ‘I have to say that I don’t like this,’ she declared hoarsely. She had wrapped her arms around her fluffy, lime-green chest. Her smouldering cigarette stub was still tucked between the index and middle fingers of her right hand. Standing in the entrance to the smaller gully, teetering on her high heels, her shoulders hunched and her knees turned in, she looked very, very uncomfortable.

  ‘Rickie?’ she said, raising her rough-edged voice. ‘Sweetie? We’re not wanted here.’

  ‘Mmm?’ He turned his head slightly, his gaze still fixed on the electromagnetic field detector. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I said we’re not wanted here. Let’s go, eh?’

  ‘Yes, hang on. In a minute.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Michelle spoke before I could. She was staring at Delora with round, anxious eyes. ‘What’s wrong? Why are we not wanted?’

  ‘I don’t know, sweetie,’ Delora replied. She dropped her cigarette butt onto the dirt and ground it out with the toe of her boot. I sensed, rather than saw, Peter wince beside me.

  ‘This is an historical site,’ he pointed out, stooping to retrieve the smouldering piece of litter. ‘You shouldn’t be throwing away cigarette butts.’ But Delora didn’t seem to hear him. She was glancing around nervously.

  ‘Delora?’ I said, in a loud voice. ‘What’s the matter, are you feeling something?’

  ‘Only that we’re not wanted.’ She had started to jig up and down, as if she was cold. ‘Rickie, we’re not welcome. Sweetie? Let’s not hang around.’

  ‘Quick,’ said Peter. He was shaking Michelle’s arm. ‘Come on. Let’s bury it here.’

  ‘What? Oh. Right.’ Michelle removed her bracelet from her wrist. ‘Who’s going to dig the hole?’

  ‘I will,’ said Peter, then hesitated. ‘Unless you want to?’ he asked, offering me the spoon.

  I shook my head.

  ‘Hurry up,’ Michelle urged. ‘It’s half past eight, already.’

  Peter dropped down onto his haunches, and began to dig. He scraped away at the gravel, then at the finer dirt underneath it. Within seconds, he’d hollowed out a little pit, into which Michelle dropped her bracelet and Peter the cigarette butt. They both covered the pit with handfuls of dirt, which Peter started to pat down firmly.

  From further down the gully, Richard remarked: ‘This is interesting.’

  ‘What?’ said Delora.

  ‘I was getting a reading of eight, and it just surged up into the region of eleven or twelve, and now it’s back down to seven. What do you make of that?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Delora croaked. ‘Something nasty. Come on.’

  ‘Hey,’ Peter exclaimed, ‘this dirt feels . . .’

  What happened next seemed to happen so quickly that I still don’t know who screamed first. It might have been Michelle, as she lurched forward. It might have been Peter when he jumped up, as if he’d been burned. Or it might have been Delora, who grabbed my shoulder and nearly pulled it out of its socket.

  ‘Richard!’ she screeched.

  ‘Who pushed me?’ squealed Michelle. ‘Someone pushed me!’

  ‘Get out!’ Delora yelled. ‘Go on, go, go! Richard! GO!’

  We went. We were in a total panic, stumbling and running and stumbling again. It was Delora who had frightened us. She kept nudging me from behind, urging us forward. Peter was panting: ‘Something grabbed my hand – my hand got stuck!’ Richard was pounding along behind us. ‘Hey!’ he called. ‘Hey, wait! What is it? What?’

  At last Delora slowed. She collapsed against the wall of the gully that lay under the big arch, wheezing and coughing and red in the face. Staggering up to her, Richard exclaimed, ‘What’s wrong? Del? What is it?’

  ‘Oh, dear,’ she hacked. ‘Oh – oh, dear.’

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes . . . yes . . .’ More coughing.

  ‘Who pushed me?’ Michelle had stopped too. There were tears in her eyes. ‘Did anyone here push me? Someone pushed me!’

  ‘And something grabbed my hand,’ Peter added, in a taut, shaken voice. ‘I was patting down the dirt and my hand got stuck. Just for a second. I really had to yank it . . .’

  ‘What on earth was that all about?’ Richard wanted to know. ‘Delora? Why did you scream?’

  ‘Because . . . because …’ She coughed, and took a deep breath, straightening up. ‘Because we weren’t wanted.’

  ‘By whom?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Abel Harrow?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She shook her head, still gasping. ‘God, those cigarettes. They’re going to be the death of me. Oh! That was nasty.’

  ‘What was?’ Richard still sounded confused. ‘Did you see something?’

  ‘No, no. Didn’t have to.’ Cough, cough. ‘Plain as day. Weren’t wanted. Horrible energy.’ Delora flapped her hands. ‘Mustn’t go back.’

  ‘Did anyone else see anything?’

  ‘Someone pushed me,’ said Michelle, for at least the third time. ‘I nearly fell over.’

  ‘Are you sure you didn’t just miss your footing?’ Richard queried. ‘I mean, when you heard Delora scream?’ But Michelle stuck her bottom lip out.

  ‘Someone pushed me,’ she insisted.

  ‘What about you, Allie? Did you see anything?’

  I shook my head. There was a long silence. At last Peter said, in a small voice, ‘Can you feel anything now, Delora?’

  ‘No, no. We’re fine here.’

  ‘Then let’s go,’ Michelle squeaked. ‘Come on.’

  ‘Yes, you go to the car,’ Richard agreed. ‘I won’t be a minute, I’ll just duck back and check my readings – it probably wasn’t anything, but I should run a test scan –’

  ‘NO!’ we all cried.

  ‘But –’

  ‘Sweetie,’ said Delora, taking his arm, ‘we’ve done what we came to do. You’re not going back there.’

  ‘But –’

  ‘Rickie – angel – trust me. It won’t do you any good.’

  So we all returned to Richard’s car. On the way, I found myself beside Peter, trailing behind the rest of them. (Michelle had taken the lead.) At first we didn’t talk. After a while, though, he touched my elbow and said: ‘Are you all right?’

  I blinked at him.

  ‘Yeah. Why?’

  ‘You haven’t said much.’

  ‘Neither have you.’

  ‘So you didn’t . . . I mean . . .’ He hesitated. ‘Are you sure you didn’t see anything?’

  ‘Yes. I’m sure.’ Why on earth would I lie? ‘What about you?’ I asked. ‘Are you sure something grabbed your hand?’

  ‘Yes.’ He scratched his neck. ‘Maybe.’ A sigh. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You don’t know?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Everything happened at once. Michelle nearly fell on me …’ He gave a helpless, hopeless little laugh. ‘It was weird, though, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Very.’

  He lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘Is Delora for real?’


  ‘I think so.’ After a moment’s thought, I added: ‘Which isn’t to say she can’t be a bit odd, sometimes.’

  Peter fell silent. We walked on for a bit. I studied him out of the corner of my eye, noting how he was gnawing his lip and knitting his brows. At last I couldn’t help myself. I really wanted to find out.

  ‘Sorry you came?’ I inquired, and his head jerked up.

  ‘Hell, no!’ he exclaimed. And he meant it.

  Which was flattering, in a funny kind of way.

  CHAPTER # eleven

  We were all pretty shaken up. For a while, even Delora was silent. Richard wouldn’t let her smoke in the car, so she sat flicking her lighter on, off, on, off until we reached the fossicking area, downstream from Golden Gully. Then she jumped out, lit up and began to inhale as if her life depended on it.

  ‘Well,’ said Richard, who remained sitting behind the wheel. ‘That was very odd.’ He peered around. ‘Is this the right place?’

  ‘It must be,’ Peter replied. ‘That’s our bus.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘They must have gone down that path,’ Peter added. ‘We can ask Steve, I suppose.’

  ‘Steve?’

  ‘He’s the bus driver.’

  But we didn’t have to ask Steve. Because when we got out of the car, and joined Delora, we could hear the distant sound of kids’ voices. Somewhere down the path, through the bush, the remaining members of the Year Six excursion were being noisy, as usual.

  ‘I’ll just take them down,’ Delora announced, as if we were babies. She was talking to Richard. ‘Rickie? I’ll just make sure they’re all right.’

  ‘You don’t have to,’ I objected.

  ‘No, no, I will. Best to be on the safe side.’ Delora shivered, suddenly, and sucked in a lungful of smoke. ‘You shouldn’t be wandering around this place by yourself.’

  She was so obviously disturbed that it made us all uneasy. When I asked her if she and Richard would be visiting the museum, she stared at me as if I had a third nostril.

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The museum,’ I repeated. ‘You know. To check out the ghost of Granny Evans.’ Slithering down a dusty slope in front of her, I had to grab at tree-trunks for support. ‘Didn’t Mum tell you? I thought she told you about Granny Evans.’

  ‘Oh – uh – yeah. I think so.’ She didn’t sound too sure. ‘We’ll see. Maybe. Look – there’s your mum. Hi, Jude! How are you, sweetie?’

  I’ll spare you all the details of our gold-panning session, which was supervised by a bloke called Mac. I suppose it was okay, though there was hardly any water in the creek to pan with, and Mac kept looking at his watch as if he had somewhere better to be. No one found any gold, of course – perhaps because no one’s heart was really in it. We were all tired, wrung-out and (in the case of our bus driver) hung-over. By ten o’clock everyone had had enough, so we piled back into the bus and returned to the camp site, where we packed up our gear. Then we had lunch. When Mum asked me how our trip to Golden Gully had turned out, I replied that I wasn’t sure. Something had happened, but I didn’t know exactly what it was.

  ‘You mean you saw something?’ Mum inquired.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You got some readings?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Are you all right, Allie?’ She looked at me closely. ‘What happened?’

  ‘I don’t know. Honestly. I really don’t know.’

  And I didn’t want to explain myself further, because there were so many things to do and so many people around. Michelle and Peter and I didn’t have a spare moment to discuss the Golden Gully business until we were back on the bus, where it turned out that we couldn’t talk in case we were overheard. So we just sat there, eating our crisps and drinking our soft drinks, staring out the window, reflecting on our Golden Gully experience, until we stopped in Mudgee to pick up Mrs Patel.

  Everyone was very surprised to see Jesse Gerangelos climb onto the bus behind her. I think we all got quite a shock when we spotted his slouching figure. I don’t know what we’d expected, exactly – perhaps that he’d been whisked off into another world of police stations and hospital waiting rooms and school principal’s offices, never to be seen again. In a funny sort of way he’d become almost unreal, as if he was part of an ancient legend. That’s why it was a little odd to see him in the flesh.

  He looked different, somehow. His hair was still black and wavy, and his eyelashes were still thick and glossy, and he still had those great teeth and those big eyes and all the other things that made him so good-looking. But the light had gone out of his face. He didn’t look mischievous any more – just weary and distracted and glum.

  He found himself an empty seat down the back, and threw himself into it without saying a word to anyone. Malcolm Morling settled in beside him. Amy asked: ‘Are you okay, Jesse?’

  A grunt was his only response. Up front, Mrs Patel began to converse with Mum as the bus pulled onto the road. The roar of the engine was so loud that I couldn’t hear what they were saying.

  ‘Did you talk to the cops?’ Malcolm inquired, nudging Jesse in the ribs. He received a forceful shove in return.

  ‘Piss off,’ Jesse muttered, and Malcolm looked surprised.

  ‘What’s up with you?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Where’s Tony?’ Angus wanted to know.

  ‘In hospital,’ Jesse replied.

  ‘Is he all right?’

  ‘Why ask me?’

  ‘Haven’t you seen him?’ said Peter, and Jesse turned on Peter like a cornered snake.

  ‘No, I haven’t!’ he snapped – only he used a certain ‘F’ word, as well. Peter rolled his eyes. The rest of us (except Malcolm) exchanged surreptitious glances, then looked away and left Jesse to wallow in his big, black sulk. Only Malcolm didn’t take the hint. He kept asking questions, to which Jesse gave short, gruff answers until a particularly stupid query about handcuffs finally drove him to request, in menacing tones, that Malcolm either shut up or get lost.

  Malcolm shut up.

  From then on, everyone talked and ate and played games and tried to ignore Jesse, who sat emitting the sort of dark, unhappy vibes that make you uncomfortable. It was as if we were all parked near a pile of rotten garbage, which smelled bad but which couldn’t be moved. I think I was more unnerved than anybody. The others just didn’t understand his mood, and didn’t like it. They hadn’t been there at the top of the mineshaft, listening to him wail and plead. They hadn’t heard the fear in his voice.

  I had. I knew that he was shaken up, and I also knew why. The trouble was, I didn’t want to remember any of it. So I tried to forget that he was on the bus, though it wasn’t easy. Before, I had found it hard to ignore him because he was like a magnet to me – I couldn’t help looking at his face. Now he was just a big, bad reminder of something nasty. I couldn’t entirely forget him, any more than I could forget the dentist’s appointment written up on Mum’s calendar.

  Isn’t it odd, the way your feelings change? For a while Jesse dazzled me; he seemed to sparkle like a diamond. The next moment, his magical glow had faded. Did it really happen? Did the Abel Harrow business change him, do you think? Or did it change me? Did I stop liking Jesse because he had lost his special shine, or did he lose his special shine because I had stopped liking him?

  I’m still not sure. On the one hand, Jesse’s unusual black mood lasted for several days after our return from Hill End, despite the fact that Tony wasn’t in danger. (He had a broken leg and fractured ribs, but was back at school within a month – or was it six weeks? Anyway, whatever it was, he hadn’t suffered any permanent damage.) On the other hand, Jesse’s miserable period was followed by a reckless one, during which he spread vegemite on the seats of the boys’ toilets, smoked cigarettes within sight of the library windows, and did all kinds of disgusting things with chewing gum. In other words, he returned to normal, much to the disappointment of Mrs Patel – who’s still teaching our clas
s, by the way, so she can’t have got into too much trouble for losing a couple of students. What’s more, Jesse didn’t stop being friends with Malcolm or Tony. You might have expected that he’d learned his lesson about them, but he hadn’t; he was still putting up with their dumb questions and their pointless jokes and their big mouths. To look at them together now, you’d think that the mineshaft episode had never happened.

  Except that Jesse seems to be as keen to avoid me as I am to avoid him. Maybe I remind him of Hill End in a way that Tony doesn’t. Tony didn’t hear him, you see. Tony didn’t hear the terror in his voice.

  So that’s the situation. I don’t like Jesse any more. And speaking of not liking a person any more, I’m sorry to say that Mum was right about Richard and Delora. They’ve split up. It happened not long after their Hill End trip; I just hope that the trip didn’t have anything to do with it. I’d feel bad if it did, even though I wasn’t the one who encouraged them to go. It was Mum’s idea that they should stay in that awful house, without a fridge or electric lights or an indoor toilet. Maybe they argued about it afterwards. I wouldn’t be surprised, especially since the whole visit was a total waste of time and effort. I mean, with Eustace turning out to be a hoax, and everything. You might argue that Abel Harrow made up for Eustace, but I don’t think Richard or Delora are really convinced about Abel. Delora said afterwards that she often gets a strong sense of not being wanted in places like Aboriginal sacred sites and wildlife sanctuaries – it’s not unusual, apparently. Richard said that the anomaly he picked up on his electromagnetic field detector was ‘inconclusive’. Peter can’t remember if he got frightened before or after Delora screamed. Only Michelle continues to insist that she was pushed, though Richard seems to believe that she might have tripped over her own feet when Delora panicked.

  I know what I think. I think that Abel Harrow has been haunting Golden Gully. He must be a ghost, because the police haven’t found him yet. Samantha says that they searched the gully and its surroundings three or four times, after Jesse and Tony fell down that mineshaft, without success. There wasn’t a trace of Abel: no tent, no hut, no footprints, no nothing – only a burnt-out camp-fire that could have been lit by anyone. According to Samantha, the police are now keeping an ‘eye open’ for Abel. Hill End’s inhabitants have been told to report his whereabouts if he’s ever spotted, even though most of them seem to think that he’s disappeared into the hills for a while – maybe wandered off to another, more remote, fossicking area around Sofala, or something.