On Cringila Hill (13 page)

‘You work hard to be her fren again. Tell ya why. She gonna need that. I don' mean nothin' about the man-woman thing. That isn't gonna be any good for her for a long time, maybe never. It be good for her, have a man jus' be a fren. Maybe help her. Terrible thing happen.
Big
thing in her life. Everyone sayin', “What happened to Abdul, who
done
that?” He's dead, no good comin' from doin' no worryin' about him.
She's
from Cringila as well. She's the one we should be thinkin' 'bout. Maybe you can help her with her things. Be a good thing to do. Take care of her a little bit. See?'

‘I will if I can.'

‘Then. Last thing.'

Jimmy waits.

Eventually Lupce says, ‘You saw Abdul get shot.'

‘What?'

‘You listen to you grandfather. Someone came see me last night. This is what he told me: he's watchin' you walkin' up the hill near the high school, someone come, is that fren of yours. You stoppin', you talkin', then Abdul's comin' down the hill, this person see that, knows about you an' that Luz, knows what Abdul done to her, he's watchin', thinkin' maybe you gonna fight Abdul. Then a van comes along.'

Jimmy stares down into the steelworks, because he's not willing to look up at his grandfather.

‘An' this why he come to me: he ain't
tol
'
no one. He's thinkin', he ain't tol' the police, maybe obstructin' the course of justice, accessory after murder. But he tells them, now, he gotta tell them about
you
, maybe get you in big trouble, an' he don' want that. He don' know what ta do, so he come see Lupce.'

‘Well …'

‘You get in trouble over this, maybe no union for you, maybe no Labor Party for you, cos this ain't the old days, this has got a
gun in it, which there ain't never been before. Tha's a big thing, you know, maybe tha's the
biggest
thing.'

Jimmy turns to look at his grandfather, who is staring at him.

‘So you gonna see the police, say you saw this thing happen. But was a big shock, you know, you just gettin' out of being crazy with it, you come straightaway then, when first you could. I'm gonna come with you. “My grandson is a good boy, think what he's been through seein' such a thing, he's a victim here.” Your fren gonna say, yeah, me too, saw it, been sort of crazy. Get everyone out of this.'

‘Yes, Grandfather.'

A car has parked on the street beneath them. A plump woman, no longer young, has emerged and is drawing cleaning utensils from the boot. Jimmy rises, starts down the front stairs, pauses, turns, looks back up at Lupce.

‘An' now you goin' back to your mother.' Lupce shakes his head. ‘
All
of it! Stuck in
drawers
!'

‘Is good you know about Abdul, about me seein' that. Is good, you know?'

‘Yeah?'

‘Yeah. Because I
learned
somethin' out of that.'

Both men share the same dark skin, high cheekbones, heavy brows with deep-set dark eyes. They watch each other.

‘This is what I learned – people get murdered. That ain't somethin' just on the television, or in the movies. People you actually know get murdered – not killed, murdered. Someone decides to kill 'em, an' sets out, an' does that.'

Lupce watches his grandson. Lupce's eyes have narrowed, his lips are pulled back over his teeth.

‘Tha's what happens to some. Is their fate.'

The lady from the car has struggled her way to the gate. She's laden. ‘Oh, Mr Valeski!' she calls. ‘Sorry I'm late! Got held up!'

‘Don' matter,' old Lupce calls down to her, though he's still watching his grandson.

‘So,' Jimmy says. ‘See you at fishin'.'

‘Sure,' Lupce says. ‘We goin' fishin'.'

On a lower stair Jimmy asks the cleaning lady, ‘You need a hand with all that stuff?' And to his surprise, his voice is thick with emotion.

‘Nah, Jimmy. I'm fine. Been doin' it a long time.'

Chapter Fourteen

It's five a.m. when Luz decides she won't get back to sleep. She lies in her bed, curled with her back towards the bedroom wall. The light in her room is on as it's been throughout the night. There's wind outside and at times Luz can hear it, though the sound is drowned by snoring that comes from her brother Samuel. Luz opens her eyes. Samuel is sitting upright across the room from her. His head rests on one shoulder, a column of saliva droops from his open mouth onto the front of his shirt. The blanket he's used to keep warm has slipped from him and lies on the floor. Luz slips from her bed, gathers up the blanket, spreads it over Samuel, turns off the light and leaves the room.

Sound blares from the television when Luz switches it on in the lounge room. She quickly mutes the sound, sits on the lounge, curls her legs beneath herself. She hears the slap of big, bare feet on linoleum. She turns her head. Her sister has been disturbed by the noise. Still in her pyjamas, she sits beside Luz. They watch together.

Luz's sister says, ‘Any sleepin'?'

‘Not too much.'

‘Bad dreams?'

‘Yeah.'

‘Same one?'

‘Same one. Devil's got me. Laughin' at me. Tearin' off my clothes. Got long nails.'

‘Ah.'

The sister reaches for Luz's hand, holds it, squeezes it.

Luz doesn't reply.

‘I was asleep when you come in,' her sister says. ‘How did it work out?'

‘Yeah. Okay. Good. Glad I went. I was frightened to go.'

‘I know that.'

‘Hadta beat that feelin'. But it was good I went. When you get in there, there's people comin' in, gotta get served, gotta get their order right, soon enough you forget about what was on your mind, just gettin' the job done. An' the people down there I was workin' with was lovely, funny, you know, made me laugh.'

‘Good.'

‘One thing happen.'

‘Yeah? What was that?'

‘Boy come in late, been drinkin'. I'm servin' him an' he says to me, “Geez you got nice tits.”'

‘Oh! Lovely!' Alisha says, shaking her head.

‘Then the girl workin' with me looked over to where Samuel was sittin', at one of the tables, readin' a magazine.'

‘Oh, God! Samuel
heard
him!'

‘Yeah. So I thought, here we go, everythin' 'bout to get worse. So, this boy looks over, where my fren's lookin', sees Samuel, sees him get up, and Samuel walks over slow, lookin' the way he looks sometimes, an' he puts his big hand on that boy's shoulder, an' he says, “You got you chicken. Now fuck off!”'

Alisha claps her hands and chuckles. ‘What then?'

‘That boy got outta there, fast. I didn' even give him his change. People sittin' aroun' heard it all and laughed. One woman was clappin'.'

‘Ah. Samuel.'

‘Yeah.' Luz frowns. ‘Carn go on, but.'

‘What can't?'

‘People followin' me round, lookin' out for me, sittin' up all night in my bedroom in case I have a bad dream. I gotta get over that, let people live their own lives.'

‘When you're ready.'

‘Think I nearly am.'

‘You goin' downtown, later, have a coffee with Yasemin?'

‘Yeah, early. She got a shift at DJs. We'll have coffee before she starts.'

‘Tha's good. Tha's a
good thing for you to be up to. An', you know, Samuel's gonna wanna be there.'

‘Oh, well. He can be where he can see me, make him feel better. He's gotta get over that sometime, but.'

Alisha shrugs. ‘I'll make you a good breakfast. Then I'll help you get ready. You gonna be dressed good, look real pretty. Got money?'

‘Yeah, I got plenny of money.'

Luz showers, dabs perfume onto those spots her sister has taught her. She puts on tight jeans then tucks into them at the waist a scarlet blouse made from a synthetic cloth that looks like silk. Alisha brushes her hair and catches it at the nape of her neck in a ribbon. Luz pulls on her high-heeled sandals with the colourful straps and silver baubles. She's ready.

Yasemin, when they meet, is dressed in a way so similar that they might be members of a club, though her blouse is white, as her employer prefers, and she wears black slacks rather than jeans, but so tight over her buttocks as to draw disapproving scowls from her father and brother, which Yasemin finds entertaining. Her lustrous hair hangs free to her shoulders.

On Thursday evenings and Saturdays, Yasemin serves at a perfume counter in David Jones in the CBD. Recently, after a long absence, Luz has returned to her job at KFC in Warrawong. Both have long valued their wages, and manage their funds carefully.

They meet at the entrance to the mall, near where old men watch a chess competition played out with giant pieces. They make their way around the tables in the food hall, skirt a crowd watching a display of martial arts fighting on the stage, glide on the escalator to a higher level, take up places just inside the doorway of a coffee shop. They place orders in a tone of self-deprecation to a smartly dressed waitress, one of Yasemin's classmates. They sweeten their drinks with Equal, order nothing to eat.

Waiting for their drink, Yasemin seems pensive. ‘How are you?'

‘Not too good. I'm still sleepin' with the light on, so if I have nightmares and wake up I won't be in the dark. There comes these times an' suddenly I'm back there again, where it happened, with that tough grass in my face, the big stones on the ground, an' them doin' what they done.'

‘Oh, Luz. You look so tired.'

Luz looks through a window at the passing throng. ‘Is bad for me. But is bad for my family too. Hurts 'em seein' me feelin' bad, not gettin' over it. Every night one of 'em sits up with me. Tha's no good for them, not good for the boys, need their sleep for that work they do. But it comforts me to know they're there, not gonna let anythin' bad happen to me. Still, hard on 'em. What happen to me happen to
them
, too. Not over it yet. Not over for none of us.'

Luz watches the passers-by who stroll with their purchases under the inconsequential music of the shopping centre.

‘Maybe it be good if I could get away from here, go somewhere an' be a whole new person with no past. But bein' away from the people who comfort me, that would be a scary thing.' She shrugs and smiles gratefully at Yasemin.

‘Luz,' Yasemin says, ‘there is something I must explain to you. I told you about Jimmy, a thing he said, all that time ago before all the things that happened.' Luz's smile shifts but is still there. ‘That thing I told you about Jimmy … saying certain things, you might have believed that I had actually heard
him
say them.'

‘You hear him say it. You say you hear him say it.'

‘No, Luz. I didn' ever say that. I said that he'd said it, not that I'd heard him with my own ears.'

‘You didn' hear him say that?' There's no smile now.

‘No. Someone
told
me he'd said it. I
believed
he'd said it.'

‘Maybe Jimmy didn' say it? That what you tellin' me now? Maybe Jimmy didn' say nothin' bad about me?'

‘I don't know, Luz. When I told you, I truly believed that he had. I've had to think it over. Back then, you know, after I told you and you said what you said to him and got suspended, then that terrible thing was done to you. The police moved you away, to hide you, then not long after you got back Abdul was killed. There was all that terrible rush of events and I was just … numb about it all. And now just lately I've had time to think about it all again, what happened at school that day.'

‘Someone tol' you Jimmy said bad things? Who tol' you that?'

Yasemin looks down at the kids performing on the stage. Tears burn her eyes. ‘Abdul,' she says, as firmly as she can.

Luz has covered her eyes with her hands. The hang of her shoulders is that of someone deeply tired.

‘I'm sorry,' Yasemin says. ‘I intervened. I had no right.'

She has dismissed the temptation of crying herself, understanding the irrelevance and inadequacy of such behaviour. In case this is her last conversation with her friend she is also determined to state some other matters that have come to her in her sleepless nights. ‘But, what if he did say those things and I didn't tell you? And if you'd come to some terrible point in your life with me having knowledge that might have saved you, and I'd withheld it? What sort of friend would I have been then?' She shakes her head and glares at the escalator's passing parade.

Luz lowers her hands and smiles at her friend. After a while Luz says, ‘Lets go for a walk like we used to.' Yasemin tries to smile, shrugs, nods. She calls for their bill. Heading back by the food hall Yasemin stands for a moment in shock, recognising a figure she has seen at a table. When they emerge onto a footpath on King Street she says, ‘Did you see who that was?'

‘Sure.'

They head south, past a vast stairway that leads up to the cinema complex. They cross a busy side street. It's a long walk and they go at a serious clip. They leave the shopping precinct, pausing at the start of a track that will take them through a fringe of coastal scrub to the dunes above Port Kembla beach. Yasemin looks back the way they've come and says, ‘He's followed us.'

‘Course.'

They remove their sandals and pick their way up to the crest of the slope. They walk beneath boughs and foliage of tall gums. There's coastal scrub tight in beside the track they follow. It's winter, so the sand of the path is cold beneath the soles of their feet and between their toes. They break out of forest at the crown of the hill.

They're above a beach now. The bay runs north and south but is narrow with open sea beyond. It's an overcast morning so the water is lead green, flat and glassy under the wind that bites across it from the west. To their left water runs in front of a squat cement surf club, with its inadequate little carpark. Further along there's a painted wall that borders an Olympic pool and beyond that big houses crowd onto each other on a hill. To their right, the thin line of beach sand runs south to where far-off pine trees show the place that salt water enters the lake, at Windang. They turn right and stroll south together along the rim of the ridge.

Luz says, ‘You brung me here my first time.'

‘Did I?'

‘Yeah. You showed this place to me jus' after we come to this town, my family an' me. Oh, it was good to see this here! Helped me. We never seen anythin' like this town. All them houses sort of crouched on Cringila Hill. Looked like we all come at the same time inna night, people who live there, threw down places to live inna dark, woke up, there it all was. Saw them steelworks, shed after shed after shed, all so giant. So many, an' big. Like people was nothin', was how big it looked. Never saw nothin' like that before. Frightenin', you know? Like it could crush ya any time it wanted. Looked so strong
, the steelworks. An' I felt so tiny. An' frightened.

‘Then you brought me here, one afternoon. An' seein' it made me think of how things was back on our island. Sometimes I'd come down here by myself, an' all those other things back away over behin' them trees, carn see nothin' of 'em. Could preten', you know, for a little while, they wasn' there. In summer time I'd go down an' walk in that sea water, when the warm currents had gotten down, made me think of walkin' in the sea back on our island. An' I felt bigger, you know? Little bit bigger.'

They reach the place they've come to in years gone by, sit on clumps of the sparse grass, watch small, pale green waves build and curl, hear their slap as they break, the roll of foam. Back where they turned in from the bushes Samuel emerges.

Yasemin says, ‘Does he imagine that we don't know he's there?'

‘He don' care.'

‘It's like … have you ever gone for a walk and then this nice, friendly dog follows you and you're worried where you're leading him and not sure that he'll get home?'

‘You sayin' my brother's a dog?'

‘No! No!'

Luz laughs. ‘Tha's jus' how Samuel is now. He worries for his little sister. He's love me a long time now, since first I was born. Maybe since
before
I was born.' Luz watches the heave of the sea, thoughtfully. ‘I'm gonna tell ya about Jimmy an' me.' She watches the seabirds hang, motionless against the weight of the wind, their tails towards the sea. Luz says, ‘Started with my dancin', what I came to feel about Jimmy.'

‘Your dancing?'

‘Yeah. I like dancin', you know, movin' the way music makes you feel. I like workin' with my frens, to get up routines to do.'

‘I know that. You're all very good dancers. I used to love seeing you dance together.'

‘When school had them concerts an' we danced, some boys would be stupid, make stupid noises.'

‘I know. I heard. Irritating.'

‘Then you pass them in the corridor after an' they say, “You some hot babe.” Worse things sometimes. What they'd like to do, that sorta thing, make sure you hear. Must make 'em feel good 'bout themselves, sayin' that sort of stuff so you can hear.'

‘Sure. Most of the boys are sensible and nice. Some still have a lot of growing up to do.'

‘Anyway, Jimmy was never like that. Jimmy say, “You dance real nice, Luz,” just passin' me in the corridor, wanna say somethin' nice to me. Smilin' that nice way he got. Make me feel good when he say them things. Make me feel I'm part of somethin' nice.'

She watches clouds scud across the sky. ‘Then I notice the way he walk, the way he … hold hisself.'