Change the Locks Read online

  We found a parking space for the car and a parking meter hungry for Neal’s small change. I stood on the footpath with Dylan in my arms, turning him in a slow circle to show him where we were, watching as Neal lifted the stroller out of the back and set it up, as Mum sat against the side of the car, brushing her hair and staring at the ground. When I put Dylan into the stroller, he rubbed at his eyes and began crying.

  Neal crouched down beside him. “Hey there, little man,” he soothed, patting Dylan’s head.

  Clumsily, stupidly, I kneeled down too. “It’s okay, I know what to do,” I said as Neal backed away. In my bag was the Vegemite-on-cracker-bread breakfast Dylan hadn’t eaten, so I unwrapped that and handed it to him. He turned it upside down like he always did and clamped it into his mouth. I thought then how it seemed that we’d known Neal for a long time, that I’d probably hurt his feelings. Swinging my backpack over my shoulders, I clamped my hands onto the stroller handles and felt angry with myself.

  The four of us set off together, picking our way along the back streets. It was the city I knew from TV news and books at school, and I kept seeing buildings, bridges and parks that were somehow familiar. But I spent as much time watching Mum and Neal; how Neal kept glancing around to make sure I was still following, how he walked next to Mum, their arms almost touching. If it had been Darryl, he would have strode ahead of us or had Mum by the hand, leading her along as though he owned her. Neal didn’t.

  I wondered what they had talked about while I’d been asleep in the car. I couldn’t work out what was different, and I almost forgot where we were going. The wheels of the stroller clicked like a train over the cracks in the footpath. There were crowds of people around us now, and the smell of traffic filled my nostrils.

  It was when we reached the glass doorway of the police station that things changed. Mum stopped on the last step up and stood staring ahead. The doors had slid open as Neal reached them, but now he stopped and turned around. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  She stared at the doorway again and then looked at me. “Stay out here,” she said, “you and Dylan stay out here.”

  “Why?” I demanded.

  “Just stay out here,” she repeated. “I don’t want you coming in.”

  “I’m coming with you,” I said, glancing across at Neal.

  “Do as you’re told,” she replied in a flat voice. “Stay out here.”

  “I’m coming in too.” I’d meant it to sound cranky, but when I looked at her to say so, I realised she looked frightened. And I felt as though I was arguing with the teenage girl in the newspaper picture, not my mother of twenty-six who was old enough to look after everything.

  Neal was next to her now, “What is it?”

  “It’s …” she began to say, “it’s just that I don’t like the police. I don’t like having to deal with them.”

  Neal shook his head. “But they’ve found your car. It’s nothing that you’ve done wrong. Is it?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Come on,” Neal said in a quieter voice, “we’re all going in. It’ll be over in a few minutes.”

  “I’m coming in as well,” I said again, although I didn’t need to argue any more. “I’m staying with you.”

  “Keep an eye on Dylan for me,” she said softly.

  There were tiles and the smell of floor polish, an enquiries counter and police. Police everywhere. My stomach started to feel tight and fluttery, the backpack suddenly felt very heavy. I thought of the zipper on the front pocket picking this moment to break open, for the newspaper page to fall onto the lino floor, for people here to realise who we were. And I glanced around nervously, wondering if anyone here would recognise and remember us.

  Police in the city yesterday arrested more than a dozen squatters.

  I looked across the counter at the faces of people beside computer screens, who sat at desks with their heads down reading or writing, who strode past us at the counter and stared back at us without speaking.

  Previous attempts to evict the squatters had failed, so the Police Tactical Unit were called in.

  “Are you being attended to, mate?”

  The voice made me jump and I looked up to see shirt sleeves with badges and stripes, a face leaning across the counter at me. My voice stuck in my throat.

  “He’s with us,” Neal explained, and looked at me with a worried frown.

  Four men and three women between the ages of seventeen and twenty-two were arrested.

  “Are you the owner?” a policewoman behind the counter asked Neal. “Have you identification?” she said to Mum then, who fumbled in her shoulder bag until she found her driver’s licence and the car registration papers.

  I kneeled down on the floor beside Dylan, away from the gaze of the people behind the counter. Next to me, Mum’s nervous voice told about the night our car was taken. She didn’t say anything about Darryl.

  A four-year-old boy was placed in protective care.

  The policewoman led us down a corridor and a small flight of stairs, past lots of doorways until we reached another set of glass doors that took us outside.

  Here was a yard filled with cars: a police patrol car smashed, another ordinary car burnt out, cars with bits missing … and our own rusty yellow station wagon.

  “Did the car have a sound system fitted?” the policewoman asked, “because it doesn’t now.”

  I looked through a window and saw a gaping hole in the dashboard with coloured wires dangling everywhere. I looked at Mum and said, “It was your birthday present and he took it.”

  The policewoman looked interested at that. “You know who stole it, then?”

  “No,” Mum replied, shaking her head at me rather than the policewoman, “we don’t know.” She walked over to the car and looked inside.

  The policewoman watched us in silence for a moment. “Seems to run okay,” she told us then. The keys were left on the floor. Very considerate thief.”

  Neal had opened the driver’s door and pulled the bonnet catch, started to check the oil and water.

  “Everything seems okay,” he said.

  I opened each of the other doors. Our CDs had gone as well, but everything else had been left alone. I worked through the list I remembered writing in my homework book, and found Dylan’s baby seat, the small change in the glove box, my sleeping-bag, the blankets and spare pillow, Mum’s wind chimes hanging from the rear-view mirror, my school library book. And Dylan’s favourite rattle.

  I glared at the hole in the dashboard where the sound system should have been. And to myself, I called Darryl rude names.

  Neal sat in the driver’s seat and turned the ignition key. For a moment it didn’t sound as if the motor would start, but after a few lazy turns it coughed back into life.

  The policewoman was still watching us. “You’re lucky, I’ll say that much,” she told us. “Apart from your car stereo, you’ve got it back in one piece. That’s rare these days.” She looked at each of us in turn before saying, “I’ll leave you to it, then. Cheerio,” and walking back into the building.

  We loaded ourselves back into our car.

  “You going straight back?” Neal asked, leaning down next to Mum’s open window, “or making a day of it?”

  “Everything down here costs money,” Mum replied. “The car needs a tank of petrol.”

  “Are you right for money?” he asked then. “I can lend you some if you need it.”

  “I’ve enough to get home with.”

  “Museums don’t cost money,” Neal continued, “walking around a park or looking in shop windows doesn’t cost money.”

  Mum didn’t look convinced. “What about you?”

  “Visit my kids,” he answered. “Take them out somewhere. Movies, maybe. The usual teenage stuff, I guess. And back home tomorrow. Got a pen?”

  On a piece of paper, he wrote a phone number. “I’m staying with my parents. If you need to get in touch … if the car plays up or anything … give me a ring or leav
e a message. Okay?”

  Mum took the piece of paper and nodded. “Thanks,” she said quietly.

  “And give yourself a break, eh? No need to hurry back, is there?” He didn’t wait for a reply. “Bye for now,” he said to me and Dylan, “see you back in the Valley. Look after yourself, eh?” he added, just to Mum.

  We watched him walk through the gateway to the road outside, waving over his shoulder to us as he stepped onto the footpath. He was gone then, walking back to his own car, off to see his own kids for one whole day. Briefly, I thought about the empty baby seat in Neal’s car, and his long drive home.

  The engine was still idling.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Mum said.

  “He’s nice, isn’t he?”

  “Who?”

  “Neal.”

  “Mm,” she said, glancing back at Dylan and then at me, “he is.” She slid the gearstick forward and headed the car towards the street. She seemed to know what I was about to ask next, and answered for me, “Let’s check out the big city before we go home, eh?”

  So we did. We left the car parked in a back street and we walked and walked. We saw shop windows and crowds, explored the edges of the harbour and the insides of the museum. Mum hardly spoke. Sometimes she strode ahead as though she wanted to leave us behind, and sometimes she slowed right down to look closely at uninteresting things … signs, a building, the ragged people who sat in doorways or shuffled along footpaths. Finally we came to a stretch of quiet park.

  Traffic streamed along on a distant expressway and the sun was reflected orange in the glass walls of city buildings. The skyscrapers behind us threw long shadows onto the grass and trees. For a while I played chasings on my hands and knees with Dylan, and then left him to crawl in circles around me.

  Mum sat a short distance away from us; staring into space.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about the newspaper page and the story it told. I wanted to get it out of my bag and wave it in her face, to make her say something. Take us to where we used to live. It would have been so easy to say that, but I didn’t. Instead I picked Dylan up, turned slow merry-go-round circles and wondered how near we were to Victoria Street.

  “Time to go,” Mum said at last as the sunlight faded from the sky.

  We found our way back to the car and drove a short way with the traffic leaving the city. We stopped for takeaway food, but Dylan hardly ate. He was fed up with being carted everywhere and was grizzly and tired. At first when we set off again, I thought we were going home. But in the dark, I could see the lights and the city buildings getting closer again.

  “This isn’t the way home,” I pointed out.

  “I know,” Mum replied, as though she was sure of what she was doing.

  “Why are we going back?”

  “We just are.”

  “But why?”

  “I’m too tired to drive all the way home, that’s why.”

  “But where’ll we stay?”

  On the seat behind me, Dylan began to cry in a weary voice. The car hiccuped through traffic lights and along the streets shadowed with skyscrapers.

  “We’re staying right here,” she said.

  It took me a moment to realise what she meant. “Here? In the car?”

  “Sure, why not? Plenty of blankets in the back, your sleeping-bag. You’ve slept in the car overnight before.”

  “Yeah, at parties in people’s backyards. Not in the city. We can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s dangerous.”

  “There are plenty of people in this city who live in cars. At least we’ve a house to go back to. Tomorrow.” “I want to go home now.”

  Her hands thumped the steering wheel. “And I’m too tired to drive that far! I don’t have the money for a motel, so the car is our motel. Stop hassling me, Steven.”

  “So where are we staying?”

  “A quiet street. Somewhere I know.”

  We were in back streets now, driving past darkened factories and railway yards, back to where we’d driven that morning. I could see laneways and rows of old houses. There was a lump in my throat and I had to take a deep breath to speak.

  “Where are we going?”

  But she didn’t answer me, and as I stared out at the darkness, I wondered what was going to happen to us.

  CHAPTER 10

  Like clockwork, I kept waking.

  It was the city around me, the hum of traffic that wouldn’t go away, the glare of the streetlight that stung my eyes whenever I turned my face too close to the car window. And it was the footsteps and voices of strangers nearby, shoes scuffing and clicking by on the footpath.

  Mum slept on the front seat. I could see the shadow of her head resting against the window, hear her steady breathing from where I lay stretched out in the back. Close to my ear came Dylan’s short, quick sleeping breaths. He had cried himself into a sleep that ignored all the noises I heard now, all the things that made me blink my eyes open and stare at the shadows blankly before I remembered each time where we were.

  I don’t know when I fell properly asleep, when what was real blurred into some kind of dream. And the dream was the house we had lived in long ago, the room filled with people, mattress beds and the little gas stove I was warned away from. I saw my little feet in sneakers, taking plodding steps across a floor, my hands stretched above my head and clutching my mother’s fingers. There was my bed and the smell of pee, a mosquito net above me like a veil, faces that came to watch me and whisper, Shh, he’s nearly asleep.

  Somewhere nearby was the soft click of a door opening and closing.

  And I woke.

  Dylan stared solemnly back at me.

  “How long’ve you been awake?” I whispered, and he blew a raspberry at me before putting his wet fingers back into his mouth.

  The windows were all fogged up and the sun was struggling to shine through. I opened my mouth to speak to Mum in the front seat, but realised I couldn’t see her. On the passenger seat was her blanket in a crumpled heap, on her own seat a note written on a scrap of paper.

  “Finding breakfast, back soon,” I read out loud. I wiped a spot clear on the fogged up window so that I could see outside, then wound the window down. The street was quiet and lined with parked cars. There was no one in sight. I rolled my eyes and muttered, “Where is she?” as Dylan kicked off his blanket and crawled alongside me. I wrinkled my nose at him. “Wet, huh?” I said and reached over into the front to where my school backpack sat on the floor beside the gearstick. “Not wet, soaked,” I told Dylan as I changed him. I glanced into the backpack. “Only one nappy left,” I added, “so control that waterworks of yours …” Then I looked at the backpack again. The front pocket was unzipped, and the newspaper page was gone.

  I climbed into the front and looked on the floor, under the seats and everywhere else I could think of. When I picked up the note Mum had written and left, I realised it was the back of a school note that I’d had in my bag for weeks. And I knew then that I hadn’t lost the newspaper page or left my backpack undone.

  “Where is she?” I said again, feeling more and more uneasy. I picked Dylan up, quietly opened the door and stepped out into the cool morning air. There was still no one I could see, and so I pulled the stroller out as well and buckled Dylan in. Then, hitching my backpack over one shoulder and closing the car doors, I set off. Down the hill from where we were parked there was a larger road with traffic lights and a dribble of traffic. If Mum was finding breakfast, I figured she would have to be somewhere in that direction.

  As I walked, I began to see people – joggers heaving and puffing along the footpath, someone asleep in a doorway with bottles scattered nearby, a couple of people who looked as though they’d been to an all-night party. The main road grew busier with Sunday morning traffic and a city bus hissed by. I spotted people stepping out of an open shop and walked up to the doorway and peered inside. There were tables and chairs, food warming under a glass counter, people waiting t
o be served.

  “Are you right?” the woman behind the counter asked me when I stepped a bit too close. I couldn’t see Mum anywhere. “D’you want something?” the woman asked and I shook my head quickly and turned away. When I glanced back, I could see her staring at us, her face creased into a frown.

  I set off back up the hill. In the distance, I could see our yellow station wagon. There were voices and sounds now from inside some of the houses I passed, and the sun was warm on my back. Dylan was quiet and uncomplaining, but I could feel a familiar tightness in my stomach.

  “Where are you?” I whispered through clenched teeth, and paused at a street corner, glancing for traffic that wasn’t there. Our car was only one block ahead now, parked in a street of tiny, old two-storey houses that were a dirty rainbow of colours.

  Victoria Street, said the sign on the high brick wall of the building in front of me.

  Victoria Street.

  It was almost a laneway that led past bare ground covered with broken bricks and weeds. There was an orange steel container filled with garbage and beside that, the body shell of a car. On one side of the street was a row of old houses that were in ruins, broken windows, graffiti and mess.

  I could see someone sitting on the gateway step outside one house, and recognised the clothes and the mop of black hair.

  “There she is,” I told Dylan quietly. “We’ve found her.”

  I dodged the stroller over broken glass and shattered footpath cement. It all looked like a building site gone wrong, work that had been started but never finished. Victoria Street looked like a place that nobody could ever live in again. Outside some of the houses were people’s things: cups and bottles, a couch stained and broken. One house gaped with its insides burnt out, but another had windows still with glass and curtains and a front door closed, as though someone still lived there.

  Mum saw us coming and watched us, saying nothing. I swallowed hard and wondered what she would say.

  “Found you,” I told her in a shaky voice.

  Next to her feet was a white plastic shopping bag and I could see drink and food inside. In one hand, she held the newspaper page, but I tried not to look at that.