Goodbye Lullaby. Jan Murray
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‘Did you drop them? Answer me, Brenner!’ The prefect came in closer, hands thrust on her hips. ‘Well, did you? Did you?’ the girl shouted.
‘Yeah...’ said Jude as she looked from the prefect to the desiccated peel and back again. ‘... sometime last century.’
Miki suppressed a giggle. One to Jude! Prefect, nil!
‘Well pick them up! At once!’ She put her hands on Jude's shoulder and pushed her down, hard to the ground. 'Every last piece!' She threw the lunch wrap at Jude. 'Do it, Brenner!'
Miki knew better than anyone about her friend's short fuse. She held her breath.
But Jude took the bully's abuse as if she were born to be persecuted. She stared up at the senior from her crouched position in the dust and threw a military salute. ‘Yes'm!’
Jude’s resentment was reinforced by her tight smile. At her own pace, with attention to detail, and using only her left hand, she began gathering up the stale peel and laying them carefully on the spread-out lunch wrap. St Brendan’s authority was being challenged by the slow pace of the work. Miki could see by the rigid stance of the bully standing over Jude, the anger levels rising.
‘Move it!’ barked the infuriated seventeen-year-old to the insubordinate fifteen-year-old at her feet.
Jude smiled as one hand worked the ground and the other stayed in her tunic pocket.
‘Okay, then, Brenner. That’s how you want to play it? Then see me after school!’ The frustrated girl looked as if she might slap Jude's face any minute to settle the score.
Detention orders. The missed bus. The long walk home in the heat carrying heavy school bags. The two of them. Good one, Jude, Miki cursed.
Jude was still bent over her one-handed job, picking up every last bit of dried-up peel as she advanced closer and closer to the large feet of the prefect towering over her.
Jude's face was at the hem of the senior’s tunic.
The prefect held her ground. Miki knew she had not seen the secret signal that had just passed between herself and Jude. Or seen what it was that Jude had flashed at her in her open palm.
But she had seen it. And she knew immediately what was about to happen. And what was expected of her.
She brought the Box Brownie to her chest again, and again, with steady hands looked down its lens. Her last shot, she realized as she kept her index finger poised on the red button and held her breath. Her last, but they had to do it.
Jude shot her the signal.
She had the prefect's head and shoulders in perfect focus. ‘Smile, everyone!’ she called out.
The stunned senior turned to look at the student she had forgotten about.
In the space of that second, Jude sprung up and jammed the cigarette into the corner of the senior’s open mouth.
‘Gotcha!’ said Miki triumphantly, as she heard the familiar click and lowered her camera to her side.
‘Tut, tut!’ Jude waved a finger as the apoplectic senior as the girl hurled the cigarette across the playground. ‘Quell horror! Wait till Sister Augusta sees this! Wait till she finds out!’ called Jude to the retreating figure. ‘Or should we talk? About that detention stuff?’
They watched the older girl melt into a distant playground group. Miki returned the Box Brownie with its exposed roll of film to its leather case. She would need to save up her pocket money to buy a new roll of Kodak. But one thing was for certain; they would be on the school bus this afternoon.
‘C'mon, genius. The bell’s going any minute,’ yelled Jude as she ran past, flicking Miki’s plaits. ‘Do you want to take this picture of me down there, or don’t you?’
Jude ran down the sloping lawn to the gates and positioned herself in front of the ornate ironwork, centring herself perfectly under the St Brendan’s College sign. Her body was slightly turned as she looked out onto the wide world beyond.
‘What are you waiting for?’ she called to Miki, indicating the distant figure of their victim. ‘An encore or something?’
–1–
The Daintree Rainforest (Far North Queensland) 1971
She was aiming for a shot of the the enormous Ulysses, already picturing it as the star of her cover, not daring to breathe behind her camera for ear of scaring off the magnificent creature. Suddenly, from somewhere above the rainforest’s canopy she heard them. Choppers! Two of them at a guess.
She flung the Leica into her rucksack and took off for the beach in a panic, bashing through the undergrowth, leaping the slippery logs blocking her path.
A quick sign of the cross. No more than a flick of the wrist. Habit. A lapsed Catholic unable to let go a lifetime’s conditioning.
She had warned them. Be careful. Called out to them about box jellyfish, about crocs, about the deadly irukandji. It was the Coral Sea, for God’s sake, not Bondi. Good, but why hadn’t she warned them about army surveillance helicopters?
She pushed a large spiky palm away from her face and kept stumbling forward through the tropical denseness towards the clearing and the beach.
They were three ordinary city kids, one from Sydney, the other two from Melbourne. Would they even be conscious of threats from overhead? She doubted it. They had put up with a bitch of a road trip, eaten dust, hid under the hessian bags whenever they caught sight of a vehicle coming at them they figured might spell trouble. But even before she’d brought the Jeep to a halt they’d leapt out and taken off through the rainforest, headed for the beach.
Like ferrets out of a cage, she thought as she ran, her ear cocked for the sounds of the rotor blades.
What would happen once she breached the rainforest and lost the protection of the thick canopy, faced the endless stretch of sand out there? Miles and miles of it, white silicon sand. The Bloomfield. A person had nowhere to hide on that unblemished canvas. Anyone running down the beach would be of interest. Someone running and gesticulating to three conscription-aged youths would be of particular interest to the men up there in those army helicopters.
She was a fool to let them run off like that. Unlike them, she knew the territory and knew the dangers. It was her job to deliver them safely to the Blackburns.
She cursed again, remembering her own situation which was every bit as precarious as theirs. She would be no good to anyone behind bars. She put on more pace, dodging the fallen logs and taking the sprawling roots of the ancient figs at a leap, trying to avoid being torn by the treacherous wait-awhile vines hanging down in her path.
The choppers were coming closer. Estimation? About three or four minutes away. Definitely two of them up there. Iroquois. Following the line of the Bloomfield.
The line of the Mekong.
Run, woman, run! Her boot tangled with a vine, sending her flying, landing face-down in a clump of fungi.
She staggered back up and brushed red spores off her khakis, ignoring the hurt, taking off again until breathless, she pulled up just short of the beach.
Another flick-of-the-wrist blessing before quitting the rainforest, she made a run for it out into the open and scudded along the fringe of the beach. With luck––or God––on her side the giant spreading mangrove roots and the sparsely distributed coconut palms would offer at least some protection from the men above.
Stamping the bleached corals and shells into the hot sands beneath her boots, hurtling over sprawling tangled roots, she came closer to the part of the beach where her charges, distant figures down at the water’s edge, were splashing in the surf, still unaware of danger.
Once she was lined up with them she called out but