Change the Locks Read online

  I turned the corridor corner and sat down on the stairs. All through the old building were kids’ voices echoing quietly from classrooms. I looked closely at the stamp on the envelope, the postmark, my name and the school address written in a kid’s neat handwriting. On the back was “E Turnbull” and not a school address, but a home one: Exeter Stud, Mt Eveleigh via Braidwood. Elise.

  It was an adult’s voice in my head saying it now.

  Who?

  Wind the window down, Elise.

  When I opened the envelope, I caught sight of a photograph, but made myself read the letter first.

  Dear Steven,

  I was kind of disappointed not to have a girl to write to, but I guess I’ll get used to the idea. I was away sick, so that’s why the reply is late. Your family is the same size as my family! There’s one thing I didn’t say last time. Me and my brother are adopted, and that feels really special. What does your mum do for a living? My best friend is Tara Locke, she’s about as talkative as your friend Patrick. The picture is one of me and Paul. Can you send one back of you? We’re doing a local history project to send to your class. Are you sending one to us?

  From your penpal

  Elise Turnbull.

  Open the door for him, Elise. Help him up.

  And in my mind, I could see the window of a car and a child’s face that stared down at mine. She had hair that was blond, almost white, against a suntanned face.

  That was Elise, and somehow I had met her a long time ago.

  So after reading the letter, I shouldn’t have been surprised to see the Elise that smiled back at me. She was adopted, maybe from another country, because both she and her brother had caramel dark skin and even darker eyes. The Elise in the photo had shiny dark hair that touched the collar of her jumper, and she was leaning against the railing of a paddock fence. There were horses in the distance. So she wasn’t someone I’d met before, this Elise. I stood up and climbed the stairs to my classroom. When I got back, I handed the letter and photo to Mrs Cale to pin to the back wall along with all the others.

  But the voices in my head nagged at me still.

  Help him up, Elise. Lock the door. Make sure his seatbelt’s done up.

  And in someone else’s car I had been driven away.

  CHAPTER 6

  Where had that road been?

  It was bush and trees, mountains, potholes in the bitumen. When most of the panic had left me, I’d started walking in the direction our car had gone. My sneakers crunched on the gravel, flies buzzed around my face and ears.

  I’ve had enough! Get out!

  The breeze had blown at my face and swallowed the sound of the car coming up behind me. Its noise frightened me all over again; a big four-wheel drive that crackled and whined to a stop. There were faces behind the tinted window glass, two children with fair hair and an adult at the wheel whose face I couldn’t see clearly.

  Wind the window down, Elise.

  And the glass slid down into the door and I saw three faces clearly. A surprised adult’s voice said, Are you okay? and the blonde children stared and stared.

  From somewhere else came a voice crackling over a megaphone and a rush of shouts like an army charge.

  And my eyes blinked awake and there was the baby’s cot beside me, daylight outside fighting the fog to shine through the bedroom window. The cot was empty.

  I fumbled around next to the bed for my socks, and slipped them on under the covers. Then, wrapping the topmost blanket around me like a cocoon, I stood up and inched my way across to Mum’s room. Of course that’s where Dylan had gone, woken sometime during the night and comforted back to sleep, not by me for once, but Mum. I didn’t quite believe it at first.

  She was a mountain range shape under the doona and Dylan was almost lost beside her. Only the fuzzy top of his head was showing, and I thought they were both still asleep.

  “Yes?” croaked Mum’s too-early-to-get-out-of-bed voice.

  “Nothing,” I said quietly. “I didn’t know where Dylan was.”

  “He woke during the night. I didn’t want him waking you as well.”

  “Oh.”

  I was more surprised than I sounded, and stood there next to the bed watching her eyes blink open at me and then close once more. It was still a bit strange to come into the room and not find Darryl snoring, not to have the smells of cigarettes, oil and sweat all around. Everything in here was Mum again – perfume, incense and half a cup of cold coffee on the floor next to the bed.

  “Do you want a coffee or a tea or something?” I asked.

  “Sure,” she mumbled from under the blanket, “that’d be nice. There’s a cup in here … somewhere.”

  I did my cocoon walk to the kitchen in my blanket and came back the same way. It was a cold morning and the house was like the inside of a fridge.

  There was a coffee for Mum and one for me, too.

  “Bring the telly in,” she said, slowly sitting up, “music video clips should be on.”

  So the portable TV came in as well and sat on a chair at the end of the bed. Dylan was still asleep, so Mum eased him across a bit and made room for me under the doona. The music on the TV played softly and we sat in silence with our coffee. It was like our Saturday mornings used to be, a long time ago.

  When Dylan finally woke, he looked surprised as well. He kept turning his head to look at me and then Mum, and at last he smiled and made happy wordless sounds.

  “You funny kid,” Mum told him.

  I stared at yesterday’s black eye make-up and the crimson streaks in her black hair, her face completely changed as she smiled at Dylan. For weeks and weeks, he had been Darryl’s baby, not Dylan, a package she bundled from the cot to the stroller and back again.

  “You hear that?” she said to him again, “you’re a funny kid.” She reached across and tickled me under one armpit. “Like your brother.”

  “Like your mother,” I told Dylan, trying to make the most of it.

  I lay down again on the spare pillow and pulled the doona up over my head. The noise of the TV and Dylan’s babbling seemed to quieten as I closed my eyes and fell into a kind of sleep.

  Elise.

  Where had that road been?

  It was like knowing my times table backwards and not being able to answer an easy question. I had already tried our only three photo albums for clues, but found nothing. There were pictures of Mum at parties, a few of my school photos, some that Katrina and Mum had taken of each other. One album was nearly all Darryl; photos of him and his biker mates, lots of neat looking bikes and guys with denim jackets and big beards drinking beer and hanging on tight to their girlfriends. Before all of this was a gap – nothing of me before I’d started at the school in town. Except for one.

  I was new out of hospital and Mum was holding me. I was all rugged up and only my face showed, baby eyes staring blankly. Even though Mum’s two friends were in their school uniforms and she wasn’t, she still looked no older than they did. Just a kid herself, really.

  “I had to leave school because of you,” she’d once told me in a grateful voice. “I named you after one of my teachers.”

  “Was he a good teacher?” It had seemed an important thing to ask.

  “He was the only good teacher at my school.”

  “Was he my dad?” That seemed important to know as well.

  Mum had laughed really loudly. “No way. Your dad was a guy I was going with for a while.” Then she added, “Don’t know why I liked him so much, really.”

  “Wasn’t he very nice, or something?”

  “No,” she said with a shrug, and didn’t seem very interested, “he was okay. In a weird kind of way.”

  I tried the photo albums again.

  “Where did we used to live?” I asked her one afternoon.

  “My mum’s place when you were born. Then the city. Then here.”

  “But there’s no photos. Not of the city. Why’d we leave there?”

  There was silence for a
moment. “We just did, that’s all.” Her voice was different when she said that.

  “I remember …” I began, but then stopped.

  “You don’t remember. You were too little.”

  “When we moved …” I was trying to get an idea of some sort to put itself into words, “… and the car broke down. We were on our way here. I had to go and get help.”

  Mum looked at me for what seemed like ages. “Nothing like that happened. What are you talking about?”

  “Well, what did happen?”

  “Nothing. Give it a rest, Steven. I’m tired of questions.”

  But the pictures and the words in my head were still the same.

  Wind the window down, Elise. Help him up. Lock the door. Make sure his seatbelt’s done up. Are you okay? What’s your name? Where’s your mum?

  But today she had smiled at me. She was talking to Dylan, she was normal. She was busy emptying the house of every last trace of Darryl.

  “Rubbish everywhere,” I heard her say after we’d finally dragged ourselves away from the TV. And she collected cans, bottle tops, cigarette butts, magazines and paper from all over the house. Things disappeared into green garbage bags and the furniture was moved around to uncover more rubbish.

  “We’re not getting ready to move or something, are we?” I asked, but she ignored that.

  “Want a job?” she said instead. “Grab any clothes that need washing.”

  So I gathered up clothes of mine, Dylan’s and quite a few of Mum’s and the washing machine hummed back into life after a long silence.

  In the lounge room she was dodging around where Dylan was crawling and chasing the vacuum cleaner. I took the cushions off the couch and dived fingers into all the cracks and crevices.

  “Revenge!” I told myself, once I’d found about ten dollars worth of small change that had probably fallen out of Darryl’s back pockets. It all went into my moneybox, savings for some new bike parts.

  After the washing had been pegged onto the line, we sat on the back steps. The last of the morning fog had cleared away.

  “We’re not moving, are we?” I asked, “into town?”

  Mum shook her head. “There’s nothing available. So we struggle on a bit longer.”

  “Good.”

  A truck passed by on the road and as my eyes followed it away towards the range, I caught sight of the old school, and a car parked under the playground trees.

  I stood up. “Going riding,” I told Mum.

  Out on the road, I coasted the bike slowly, so slowly that I could see the detail and colour of every lump in the bitumen. There was the smell of cows and the smoke of someone’s wood stove fire, and suddenly, the smell of the dead sheep that I knew was somewhere beside the road. It was up from where the school bus stopped for me each day. When I got too close, a couple of interested crows hopped away from the carcass before deciding to fly off. The smell was still a bit disgusting, but I stopped anyway. It wasn’t so much like an animal any more, more like an old bedspread that someone had thrown from a car.

  The crows had landed on the road a little further ahead and were walking to and fro, waiting for me to pedal away from their snack.

  I looked ahead at the road to Patrick’s for a moment, before getting the bike going. The pedals were harder to move and already my legs felt tired. “Bloody bike,” I mumbled, “bloody heap.”

  When I came to where the road passed the old school, I let the bike coast, hoping to see someone there. I could hear a faint sound of music, but no kid noises or even adult voices. I stopped for a better look.

  Suddenly, someone appeared between the building and the car. It was as though they knew I was passing by, and I saw a hand go up in a kind of wave. I could see it was a man with a beard and wearing overalls. In the awful moment that I somehow thought it was Darryl, I jumped on the pedals to get going, but the chain sprang off the wheel cog and my foot crashed off one pedal and onto the road.

  “Shit!” I shouted out, because my ankle was skinned and bleeding. I clenched my teeth and swore again, angry, furious. Picking up the bike, I chucked it with as much strength as I had. It bounced and clattered across the road into long grass.

  I breathed through clenched teeth, mopping at the blood on my ankle with a tissue that had been in my tracksuit pants for weeks. Then, sitting down on the gravel beside the road, I put my head on my knees and tried to calm down.

  Footsteps came near.

  “You okay?” asked a voice that was not Darryl’s.

  “Yeah,” I muttered.

  “Hate doing that, too. Hurts like mad. Is the chain broken?”

  “No. It came loose. Off the sprocket.”

  “Can you fix it?”

  “No tools.” I made myself look up. He had Darryl’s kind of beard, but was going bald. There was a little tuft of hair at the back of his head, tied into a pigtail. He was older than Patrick’s dad.

  “I’ll fix it, if you like.” It wasn’t the kind of voice Darryl or his mates had. It was more like a teacher’s voice. “I’ve been unpacking tools and stuff all morning.” He walked over to where the bike had landed and picked it up, wheeled it across to me. I didn’t stand up. “D’you want it fixed? Suit yourself.”

  So I stood up, tested my ankle and decided I wasn’t going to pass out from the pain. I took the bike from him.

  He walked away from me then, straddled a leaning wire fence and set off across the grass that had once been a playground. “I’m Neal,” he called back to me as I began to follow.

  Don’t talk to strangers, Mum had told me lots of times.

  Don’t bloody talk to anyone you don’t know, Darryl had told me just the once, before he decided I wasn’t worth bothering about.

  I figured I could run if anything I didn’t like was about to happen and kept a distance in the meantime. We reached the steps of the school verandah before I said, “I’m Steven.”

  “Do you live around here?” he asked. There was a mess of tools on the verandah and picking up a shifting spanner, he upended the bike.

  I sat on the ground a little bit away. “Up the road,” I told him, “in the green house next to Vidler’s farm.”

  “I know the house. Don’t know the Vidlers.”

  “Mr Vidler,” I pointed out, “there’s only him.”

  I looked at Neal closely while he wasn’t watching. The hair on top of his head was going grey and there were freckles on the bald spot.

  He caught me looking. “How come you bought a school?” I quickly asked. “I mean, to live in?”

  He shrugged. “I saw an ad in the paper. Checked it out with the real estate people in town. It sounded like a bit of a challenge.”

  “It was a bit of a dump,” I said, and then figured that didn’t sound polite. “I mean, it was pretty wrecked up.”

  “Sure, but nothing I can’t fix. I’m a carpenter.”

  “Does anyone else live here? D’you have a family or something?”

  “No. Just me.” He slipped the chain back over the sprocket, pulled the wheel tight and adjusted the nut. “I’ve got three kids. Youngest one’s about your age. But I’m divorced.”

  “Oh.”

  He changed the subject then. “So was this your school once?”

  “It closed down before me and Mum moved here. Some kids I know used to come here, but the government said it was too small and they closed it.”

  “Some governments are like that,” Neal replied, “although I guess it was a lucky thing for me. It’s a nice old building, this. You’re bleeding all over my playground.”

  I went over to a tap and splashed water over the mess on my ankle.

  “D’you want a bandaid or something?” he called.

  I shook my head. “You’ve got the same sort of car as us,” I said when I noticed the station wagon parked behind the building, “except ours has more rust and it’s yellow.” I corrected myself. “I mean, it’s been stolen. So we don’t have it any more.”

  “Stolen? From
around here?”

  I told him the story.

  “So what’s your mum doing for transport?”

  “A friend gives her lifts into town,” I replied, and then didn’t feel like talking any more. Instead, I wanted to swear in a very loud voice because my ankle was still throbbing. “I’d better go,” I said, more to my ankle than to Neal. I remembered my manners, then. “Thanks for fixing my bike,” I added.

  “No worries. Tell your mum to let me know if she’s stuck for transport or anything. I’d be happy to help out.”

  As I walked away with the bike, I could hear him clattering tools around on the verandah once more.

  So I didn’t get anywhere near Patrick’s house that day. Later instead, when the sun was resting itself on the outline of the mountains, I put on an extra jumper, rugged Dylan up in a cocoon of blankets and took him riding in his stroller.

  Mum had exhausted herself with housework and was watching afternoon quiz shows. “Back before dark, please,” she told me, and even said it in a friendly voice.

  I was good at making Dylan laugh. First I let the stroller roll by itself and sped out in front, pretending I was being chased by a vehicle with no driver. Then, at the front fence, I lay down on imaginary train tracks and let the stroller clunk into me. And Dylan was giggling so much by now, it was more like a shriek.

  “You’re not going to be like your dad, are you?” I said in a quiet voice, getting up and gently squashing my nose into his so that he giggled some more. “Don’t be like him.”

  His fingers reached over to grab at my nose and scratch lightly at my face. I leaned my head over so that my hair fell like a curtain across his forehead. That tickled, and he gurgled and grinned at me with a gummy mouth.

  You can hear his heart beating. In a hushed voice, ages and ages ago, Mum had said that to me, and let me press an ear to her big tummy where the baby was before he was born. It was like magic. As soon as Dylan came home from hospital, he had slept in Mum and Darryl’s room, and I used to sneak in early enough so that Darryl wouldn’t be awake. I’d gaze at Dylan sleeping in his cot and carefully unclench his tiny fingers and let them wrap around my own index finger. Then I’d wait for the tiny dark eyes to open and stare back at me.