Change the Locks

  Contents

  Cover

  Blurb

  Logo

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  About The Author

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Also By Simon French

  I don’t know where we came from.

  Several times when it had seemed important to know, I had tried asking, but mum never really answered.

  Steven is curious about his past. When he hears a stranger’s name, odd memories come back to him. A large house. Being left on the side of the road. But does he really want to remember everything?

  An unforgettable novel from multi-award-winning author Simon French.

  CHAPTER 1

  Like clockwork, I kept waking.

  There was a noise next to me that made me blink my eyes open for moments at a time and stare into the blackness. I knew what it was.

  Whenever the baby’s breathing got out of time or the sheets in the cot next to my bed rustled too much, it woke me. Most times, I could dart out of bed and reach into the cot and pat his back until he calmed; rearrange his quilt before the restless breathing became a squealy cry. I knew that if I didn’t move myself quickly enough, there’d be a sudden glare of hallway lights and lots of trouble.

  I held my breath and waited. The sheets rustled again.

  Don’t cry.

  I got out of bed, feet on the cold bare floor, feeling around with my toes and trying to remember which floorboards creaked and whether there was anything to trip over. Suddenly, I could feel a tiny jumpsuited foot against my leg and realised he had caught his leg between the rungs of the cot. Slowly, carefully, I reached down, eased the tiny foot back into the cot and lifted him back into the centre of the mattress. He whimpered a bit and it gave me goose bumps and a tight stomach.

  “Don’t cry,” I whispered, covering him with the quilt and half expecting angry voices at any moment.

  Then I remembered. Five weeks now of no angry voices or trouble of any kind, five weeks of no Darryl in the house. Five weeks, three days.

  I stared into the dark. Stupid, I told myself, you forgot.

  I was wide awake then, and knew what was real and what wasn’t. The baby quietened and slept. I let myself smile, just a bit, and back in my own bed, gazed at the black outlines of the cot. The last thing I remembered thinking was how the bars of the cot looked like a prison window as I fell into the heaviness of sleep again. Almost.

  Somewhere outside the house was the quiet click of a car door and a soft, slow crunching of gravel. Softer and softer it became until suddenly there was a cough of an engine. A car. Ours.

  I was out of my bed again, stumbling into the hallway, clunking my shoulder against the doorpost, bare feet smacking on the floorboards until I reached the front door and managed to open it.

  Down at the bottom of the paddock, near the gate, was the car’s bobbing shape and, out on the roadway, the dim lights of another car.

  The lounge room light was switched on behind me and my mum strode to the doorway, ready to be angry about being woken.

  “What d’you think you’re …” she began to say, but looked out into the darkness and saw what I saw.

  In the near distance, two sets of headlights came on and two cars drove loudly away towards town.

  “The car,” I said, my voice strangled with surprise, “he’s stolen our car.”

  CHAPTER 2

  I was asleep again.

  There was blackness and a relaxation where I heard or felt nothing for a long time, no sounds or movement or things that frightened me. Then the daylight began to wash over me again in a hissing of voices.

  “Steven.”

  “Woo-oo, Steven.”

  And got louder.

  “Miss, Steven Matovic’s asleep again.”

  Which was when my eyes blinked open. There was my desk, scratched initials and texta marks coming into focus, leagues club ruler, ballpoint pen with the end chewed into plastic furriness and my maths book open to a page of work not finished. My forehead was resting on my hand and I eased my face up and tried to pretend nothing unusual had happened. Especially to me.

  There was the front of the room, a chalkboard covered in Mrs Cale’s neat writing, and the whole class of kids leaning around on their chairs, smirking and staring at me.

  Where was my teacher? On the chair beside me Patrick was trying not to grin, but his eyes were dancing between me and whoever was standing behind me.

  “Awake, Steven?” Mrs Cale asked, her voice close to my ear. She had carved wooden combs holding back long hair as dark as mine. Her eyes never seemed to blink. “Are you with us again?” she added and her voice wasn’t cranky, although her face frowned a bit.

  “Sure, Miss,” I answered, but yawned at the same time.

  She strode back out to the front of the room then, and the kids let their attention follow her away from me. She had a large envelope in her hand which I hadn’t seen before. I squeezed my eyes tightly shut, then opened them wide. When that didn’t work completely, I stretched myself backwards without letting the chair tip too far.

  “Should’ve brought your pyjamas,” Patrick mumbled. It made me grin and I gave him a friendly punch for his trouble.

  “How long was I asleep?” I whispered back.

  He looked at his watch. “Ten minutes, I reckon.”

  “Felt like forever.” And I still felt tired. A semitrailer rumbled and rattled along the stretch of highway outside our school. It was heading west, towards the slopes of pine tree forests and on to the distant flat country I’d never seen.

  Mrs Cale was talking.

  Our art work and projects were stuck along the classroom walls and the battery in the clock above the chalkboard had gone flat. A quarter to seven it read, and had done for weeks now. Mrs Cale still had that envelope in her hand, but I still couldn’t figure out what she was talking about.

  “Oh, come on!” she said in a loud voice, because whatever she’d asked hadn’t been answered. “These kids live three hundred kilometres away! No one in this class has ever been to where they live! You wouldn’t know them from a bar of soap … what are you going to tell them? What are you going to ask them?”

  Kids wriggled on their chairs and began putting hands up.

  “About our favourite TV show.”

  “Tell them what our school’s like.”

  “Horrible!”

  “Ask them what their school’s like.”

  “What sport they like playing.”

  “Who their friends are.”

  “Who our friends are.”

  Maybe it wasn’t quite what she wanted, because Mrs Cale rolled her eyes and looked a bit fed up. Then she spotted me yawning again.

  “Come on, Steven, what’s your suggestion?”

  And the reply I fought for and finally got out was, “Ask them what their school’s like,” which I felt sorry about straightaway, because there was a chorus of groans. Redmond Hall swung around on his seat and said, “Go back to sleep, Matovic.”

  “Great,” I mumbled and looked down at my scratchy desk, wishing that it was home time, that I was on the bus as it climbed the rise towards our valley, away from town and further away from school.

  Penfriend. I tumbled the word around in my head for a moment. How could you be a friend to someone you didn’t already know?

  This was the latest of Mrs Cale’s schemes. In Term One we had been the school gardeners, planting trees and flowers in the few places around the school that weren
’t covered by concrete. Mrs Cale had asked for donations of plants at school assemblies. “Six C are hoping to make this school a more pleasant place to be,” she’d told the lines of primary kids, “instead of a place that looks like a factory yard.”

  And I was sure I’d seen Mr Robinson, the headmaster, arch his eyebrows up at that one.

  At the beginning of Term Two, she’d asked us if we all knew the correct way to set out a letter.

  A few kids went “Huh?” and when Cassie Morton said, “It’s easier just to phone someone up, Miss,” with a laugh in her voice, most of the other kids agreed.

  We wrote letters that term.

  We wrote to the local newspaper about the traffic noise and we wrote to the local council about building proper places to ride skateboards and pushbikes. We wrote a protest letter to the Prime Minister when two more of the local coalmines closed down, and we did our best to tell him what it was like in a country town where lots of people were unemployed.

  And now in Term Three it was penfriends. A teacher friend of Mrs Cale’s taught another Year Six class in a place I’d never heard of.

  “You might find these kids’ lives are quite different to yours,” she told us, “but it’s going to be up to you to find out how and why they’re different. On the other hand – you might have lots in common.”

  I jumped.

  “Steven!” Patrick was hissing softly, and I realised I’d been nearly asleep again. When I blinked and looked at him, his hand was up, and at that moment, an envelope fluttered onto his desk. Mrs Cale was beside us and the big envelope she’d been holding was now folded flat and empty, wedged under her arm. In her hand was one more envelope.

  “Lucky last, Steven,” she said and handed it to me. The room was full of the racket of kids tearing open envelopes and reading letters from strangers in another Year Six class.

  “Less noise, thanks!” Mrs Cale said loudly, but our class hardly ever did things quietly so it didn’t make much difference. She turned back to me. “Your eyes,” she said, sweeping hair from my forehead with one hand, “your eyes, Steven, are bloodshot. Are you feeling okay?”

  “Yes, Miss.”

  She knew about the night before. Half the school must have known by now. Having a car stolen from a supermarket car park was something you could read about any day of the week, even in our town. But having a car taken from your own yard was something else.

  Darryl need a getaway car or something? Redmond Hall had said before school, and I’d felt like hitting him.

  “Sure?” Mrs Cale asked again.

  I sighed. “Yes, Miss.”

  “Hmm,” she said. A few kids were getting curious and turning around. I was getting a bit cranky and feeling too old for this kind of concern, so I said nothing more and pretended to look interested in the envelope I’d just been handed.

  She left me alone, then. “When you’ve read your letters,” she said to the class, “jot down some ideas in your workbooks. Start a rough copy.”

  In my homework book, I’d already done a rough copy, but not what Mrs Cale had in mind. It was scrawly, angry writing in blue ballpoint.

  This is what you stole. I’d underlined it three times.

  Our car, and Mum can’t afford another one.

  Dylan’s baby seat.

  The car sound system you got Mum for her birthday.

  Six of our best CDs.

  The small change in the glove box.

  My sleeping-bag, the blankets and the spare pillow.

  The little wind chimes on the rear-view mirror, they were Mum’s, and special.

  My school library book, I’ll have to pay for a new one.

  Dylan’s favourite rattle.

  Give us back our car. You rat. I hate you.

  Patrick was reading his letter. “This kid’s called Alex,” he muttered. “Open yours up, Steve.”

  I eased the envelope open with the point of my pen and pulled the letter out. It was written on fancy coloured paper.

  Dear penpal,

  Hi, my name’s Elise Turnbull and I’m eleven. Our teacher is Miss Carroll and she’s a friend of your teacher. Our school has only one class per grade so it’s not a big place, which is kind of good. There’s three people in my family – my mum, my little brother Paul (pest) and me. Actually my brother isn’t that much of a pest but some of the boys in my class are real pests. How about the ones in yours? My mum breeds horses and I’ve been learning to ride since I was seven. My horse is called Ariel, he’s three. Do you have any pets? I hope you write back soon.

  From your penpal

  Elise Turnbull.

  I put my hand up and waved it impatiently until Mrs Cale noticed.

  She’d finished glaring at Redmond Hall about something and looked at me with a loud sigh. “Yes, Steven?”

  “Miss, this letter’s from a girl.”

  There was a bit of giggling and groaning. “And?” Mrs Cale replied.

  I let my hand thump back onto the desk. “I didn’t want to have to write to a girl, Miss.”

  “Does it really make a difference, Steven?”

  “Yeah,” mumbled Patrick, “she might be, you know, worth writing to.” And he jiggled his eyebrows up and down.

  “Thanks a lot,” I mumbled back. “I guess not, Miss,” I replied aloud.

  “Bad luck, sucker,” Redmond Hall turned around and said. I gave him the answer he deserved and then his hand was up in the air. “Miss, Miss, Steven Matovic stuck his rude finger up at me.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Patrick told me when all the fuss had died down, “jeez, you’re grouchy today.”

  “Well, wouldn’t you be if someone knocked your mum’s car off?”

  “Maybe it is being used as a getaway car,” he suggested, whispering so that Mrs Cale wouldn’t notice. “Bank job or something?”

  “So we get it back full of bullet holes. Terrific.”

  “Would Darryl have taken it?”

  “Sure,” I replied, “it had to be him.”

  I opened my penpal’s letter again, even though I didn’t really want to, and read it slowly from start to finish.

  From your penpal, Elise Turnbull.

  And everything ground to a halt.

  Elise. I knew that name.

  “Elise, huh?” Patrick said, leaning across and stickybeaking.

  “Elise,” I said aloud, “it sounds … familiar.”

  “Is there a kid here at school called that?”

  I shook my head.

  “Maybe you heard it in a movie of something. Or a song.”

  I shook my head again. “No, it’s someone I met … once. She had the same name.”

  Patrick watched me doubtfully for a moment. “Couldn’t be the same person, but.”

  “Could be.”

  “It’d be the coincidence of the century, Steven.”

  “I guess so,” I finally admitted. For a long time I gazed at my schoolbook and said nothing. But I thought and thought.

  Elise.

  There was a face and voice for that name I couldn’t find. There was somewhere it belonged as well, but I couldn’t picture the place or time. And I spent the rest of the afternoon waiting for it to make sense.

  The buses pulled up at the gate after school.

  Patrick and I climbed onto the bus that would take us home to the valley.

  “Ferals!” the town kids yelled, laughing from the footpaths.

  “Town rats!” the bus kids yelled back through tinted windows.

  We sat on seats near the back, as far away from the driver as possible. And surrounded by noisy kids and the smells of sweaty sneakers, uneaten school lunches and farts, we talked about school and cracked jokes like we usually did. The tatty edge-of-town houses slipped by outside and the bus gasped between gears as we began to climb over the range.

  When we ran out of things to say, I felt tired all over again. So I closed my eyes, not to sleep, but to block out some of the racket around me and do some thinking. It was ten, ma
ybe fifteen minutes, because I missed the gum forest and the little pocket of palms and ferns near the hairpin bend, the bush trail to Handley’s Waterfall and the rocky outcrop beside the road where people had carved their initials into the boulder face.

  Suddenly, Patrick was tapping my shoulder. “Steven, Steven,” he said in a big rush, “we’re nearly at your place. The police are there.”

  “What?” I looked through the bus window. There was a patrol car next to our house and a cramp in my stomach.

  The high-school kids behind us were going mental.

  “Ee-aw-ee-aw!”

  “Busted, Matovic!”

  “Tell them where the money’s hidden, Steven!”

  “What are you looking so worried about?” Patrick wanted to know. “They’re probably asking your mum about the car.”

  “I know that.”

  “Well?”

  As the bus coasted towards my stop, everything came into focus. There was no one I could see outside the house. “It’s just …”

  “Maybe they’ve found the car.”

  “Yeah, burnt out, I bet.” I stared down at the floor and added, “I hate the police.”

  “Why?”

  “I dunno. I just … hate them being at my house. Inside my house.” The bus slowed to stop and I grabbed my schoolbag, fumbled down the aisle.

  Behind me, Patrick said in a hopeful voice, “I’ll ride over later, if you want,” but I didn’t get time to answer. I was out of the bus and onto the gravelly roadside without even thinking and stood shaking and watching as the bus pulled away along Bulldog Road.

  “Ee-aw-ee-aw!” came a high-school voice through a window. In the dust on the rear engine hatch was “wash me!” in big finger-written letters.

  I realised I hadn’t even said goodbye to Patrick.

  CHAPTER 3

  I wished I was still on the bus, so I could get off at Patrick’s stop instead – walk up his driveway and onto his verandah, into his house.

  He would go home to chocolate milk and his mother’s cake. He would play on his computer and not come over to my place today.

  If we lived in town like we once had, I could have doubled back to the safety of the shops, but here there was nothing but open paddocks and a view of the farms around.