Birrung the Secret Friend Read online

  ‘There he is!’ The hut roof lifted off us. Light speared into the hut, so bright I couldn’t see who was out there.

  Elsie rolled quickly under a bit of fallen roof, silent as a mouse, invisible. She couldn’t talk, but she could hear danger good enough.

  I hoped whoever was out there hadn’t seen her hide. No use trying to run, not trapped among the wreckage of the hut. I was cornered. I blinked up at the light.

  ‘You can have me rations. Here.’ I held them out. Just don’t hit me, I thought. If you hurt me too bad, I can’t bring Elsie water. We can live for a few days more with no food, but we can’t live without water. Please, don’t find Elsie . . .

  ‘I don’t want your rations, boy.’ I looked up, my eyes still getting used to the light. It wasn’t Bullock Man. This man sounded like a gentleman. He even sounded gentle too. ‘Come out of there.’ He also sounded like he was used to telling people what to do.

  I glanced back into the shadows of the fallen hut. Elsie was still hidden. I wriggled out into the daylight and stood up.

  And there was the black girl, just like she’d looked by the storehouse, except now she wore a bonnet over her hair. She grinned at me, triumphant because she’d tracked me down, showing those white teeth again.

  I glanced at the man she was with, ready to hand over the food fast, so he’d go away. Then I relaxed a bit. He was only Mr Johnson, the chaplain to the colony. We were all supposed to go to church to listen to him preach each Sunday, except there wasn’t a church, just a big tree Mr Johnson stood under, or a crumbling storeroom when it rained. Most of the convicts didn’t bother to go, and no one made them either. Neither Elsie nor I went, of course, because Elsie was scared and I couldn’t leave her. But when Ma was alive, I’d liked the singing, and how Mr Johnson spoke to us like we were people just like him, not convict scum. Not that I was a convict, but you know what I mean.

  And here was Mr Johnson now, not in his good Sunday suit, but the old rusty black he wore when he was in his garden. Mr Johnson had the biggest vegetable garden in the colony. Three big plots, one near his house and another two Ma had told me that he’d bought from one of the soldiers.

  Mr Johnson would want my weevily flour, or salt pork. I bobbed my head to him politely, like Ma had shown me. ‘Sir,’ I said.

  Mr Johnson lifted his hat to me, just like I was a gentleman. I’d have lifted my cap for him, except I’d lost the cap I’d been given on the ship or, most likely, someone had nicked it.

  ‘Good morning,’ said Mr Johnson, just like I was a blooming duke. ‘I am Mr Johnson and this is Abaroo, a member of our family.’

  ‘Hello,’ said the black girl.

  My jaw dropped. I hadn’t known Indians spoke proper words. I shut my mouth before the flies could land in it. Then I said, ‘My name’s Barney Bean. I weren’t doing nothing wrong, sir.’

  ‘I wasn’t doing anything wrong,’ he corrected. ‘No one is accusing you of wrongdoing, lad. But perhaps wrong has been done to you.’

  He looked at our hut. My cheeks grew hot. Our hut stank. There wasn’t much I could do about that. It was filthy too, and so was I.

  ‘Where’s your mother?’ Mr Johnson didn’t ask where my pa was, like someone might in England. Almost no young’un in the colony had a pa, not one who’d claim them, anyhow.

  ‘Ma is dead, sir. My pa died when I were a baby,’ I added.

  His voice was even gentler. ‘I’m sorry, lad. How did your mother die?’

  ‘Cut on her hand from an oyster shell. It puffed up red and then she died. Mr White did his best.’ Mr White had been good to Ma. He’d even made the hospital convicts give me dinner while I sat with Ma before she died.

  ‘No one looks after you?’

  ‘I looks after me!’

  Mr Johnson looked at the rotting hut I’d crawled out of. Then he looked at me. I squirmed, embarrassed at how dirty I was. Even in prison and on the ship Ma had taught me to try to keep my face clean. At last he seemed to reach a decision. ‘How would you like a job?’

  I glowered at him. ‘Don’t have to do no job. I ain’t no convict.’

  ‘We are all born into this world to work,’ said Mr Johnson. He held out his hands. They had calluses and cracked nails. All the officers’ hands here were soft, like a gentleman’s. ‘We should labour for each other according to the will of God. If you work for me, you will have a room to sleep in. Not much of a room,’ he added. ‘But better than this. You will eat at my table. The food is simple, but there is plenty of it.’ He smiled. ‘I believe I have the biggest potatoes in all of the colony.’

  Potatoes! I hadn’t eaten a potato since before we left England. There’d been a hot potato seller on the street as Ma was led in chains to the cart to take us to the ship. She used her last farthing to buy me one. I’d held that potato till it was almost cold, loving its warmth.

  ‘How many potatoes?’ I asked. I wasn’t going to work for one potato a day, no matter how big it was.

  ‘All you want to eat,’ said Mr Johnson calmly. ‘If you dig my garden well and help me weed it. And follow the rules of our home.’

  I looked at him suspiciously. ‘What are they?’

  ‘No swearing. No insolence to me or my wife. To treat each other as you’d like to be treated.’

  I could do all that, I reckoned. To work in a garden! I loved watching the gardens grow in the colony. Nothing but tussocks and trees when we’d landed, two years back, then bare dirt. But then people put in seeds and soon there’d been bits of green, then big plants growing. I’d watched a man pull a carrot out of the ground and eat it. It was like magic — food coming out of the dirt. Lot of the plants had died. But not Mr Johnson’s.

  Mr Johnson would let me work in his garden! Feed me potatoes. He’d teach me the magic that made his garden give so much food. Maybe one day I’d even get land for a garden of me own . . .

  But I couldn’t do it. I had to keep Elsie safe. She wasn’t strong enough to work. Even if Mr Johnson would take a girl who couldn’t speak, Elsie would be too scared to go with him.

  ‘No,’ I said. Then added, ‘Thank you, sir,’ as Ma would have wanted me to.

  Mr Johnson stared at me. ‘Lad, I’m offering you a second chance. You don’t have to live like this.’

  We’ll have a second chance at Botany Bay, Ma had said to me as we sat in the ship in the stink below deck.

  And now I couldn’t take it.

  ‘No, sir. Thank you, sir,’ I said again.

  Mr Johnson shrugged. ‘Very well.’ He turned away. It was like the sun had slid down behind the mountain, but this time it would never come up again! I’d lost my chance. But I’d done the right thing . . .

  ‘Mr-Johnson-sir.’ The black girl made it sound like one word.

  He looked back at us. Abaroo lifted the bit of roof. Elsie stared up at us, white as a rabbit, her arms around her legs and body as if she was trying to make herself so small they couldn’t see her.

  ‘Ah.’ Mr Johnson bent down. He didn’t touch her. He smiled, the gentlest smile I’d ever seen. ‘What’s your name, child?’

  ‘Her name’s Elsie.’

  ‘Let her speak for herself, lad,’ he said quietly.

  ‘She can’t talk. She’s dumb. Not stupid,’ I said quickly. ‘Just can’t say anything.’

  ‘She is your sister? Has she always been like this?’

  ‘She’s my sister now.’ I’d found Elsie the day after Ma died. She’d been curled up under one of the rock ledges, trying to make herself tiny like she was now. Looked like she hadn’t eaten for days, or hardly ever. ‘Don’t know where she came from. Don’t know why she can’t talk neither. I call her Elsie ’cause it was me ma’s name. That’s all I can tell you, sir.’

  And it was the truth. I’d thought and thought about where Elsie mighta come from. But I couldn’t find no answer. And Elsie couldn’t tell me neither.

  It was a mystery, like how the moon knew how to follow the same path across the sky each night. There
weren’t a lot of us in the colony — few enough to know everyone pretty much by sight. I’d have seen another young’un in the colony, especially since most got sent away.

  Where had Elsie come from? How had she got under that rock? And why couldn’t she speak? I knew she had a tongue, because I saw it when she ate.

  Mr Johnson looked at me as though I’d done something great, like Captain Cook finding this place or King Someone Or Other winning a war with France. ‘You look after a stranger? That’s a true Christian thing to do, my boy.’

  I shrugged. I didn’t want to say it had been cold, sleeping by myself. At first Elsie was just someone to huddle with at night. But then, well, I don’t know. She needed me. It felt good to be needed, like I wasn’t just a worthless urchin. And there was something about her that was, well, Elsie, that made me want to look after her.

  ‘Is she why you won’t come and work for me?’

  I nodded. ‘Elsie gets scared, see? Scared if there’s strange men about. Too scared to get rations or even water. Won’t even let me touch her, except pat her on the hand . . .’

  Abaroo knelt next to Elsie. She touched her cheek with one black hand.

  Elsie didn’t pull away.

  I stared. ‘She never let me do that . . .’

  Beside us, Abaroo helped Elsie to her feet. Elsie weren’t too steady — she’d never walked much all the time I’d known her, hiding away. Abaroo put her arm around her, to help her walk.

  And Elsie let her.

  I stared at Abaroo. She wasn’t just the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. She was like one of the angels Mr Johnson talked about in a sermon when Ma was alive. Abaroo had saved me from Bullock Man. Now she was leading me — and leading Elsie too — towards the new life Mr Johnson had promised us.

  ‘One day,’ said Mr Johnson quietly, ‘there will be a refuge in this colony for all orphans. There will be food for body and mind and soul for every child who needs it. Until then, will you come with me?’

  I didn’t have to answer. Abaroo was leading Elsie along the muddy track. Mr Johnson and I followed her.

  CHAPTER 3

  House and Garden

  ‘Wash,’ said Sally.

  Sally was Mr and Mrs Johnson’s servant.

  She was as skinny as a ferret and had two hairs on her chin. She hadn’t seemed too happy to see Mr Johnson bring two filthy children into their clean house. But Mrs Johnson had smiled at us like he’d brought her the king’s crown, not two grubby brats.

  Now Sally pointed to the water trough behind the shed. Mr Johnson had a proper well with planks around it so no one would fall in. Most other people washed in the Tank Stream, and got their water from it too. It was pretty when I first saw it, with ferns and flowers. It was stinking mud now.

  Sally glared at me like I was something a dog had dropped. ‘You wash every bit of your body, then draw up fresh water and wash your clothes. You wash them till they don’t smell at all. When they’re dry and you’re clean and dressed, you can come inside. And if I can smell anything but soap and water, you’re going back outside.’

  I didn’t like Sally ordering me about. She was a convict and I was free. But I had a feeling Sally was the one who cooked the potatoes.

  What was soap? I hoped that was good to eat too.

  ‘What’s happening to Elsie?’

  ‘The mistress and that Abaroo are washing her inside.’ Sally handed me a bowl of goo.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Soap. You never used soap before?’ Sally sighed. ‘You rub it on yourself, then wash it off. Makes the dirt come off. Rub it into your clothes too, then rinse them. Pour the water onto the garden.’

  I sniffed it. ‘What’s it made of?’

  ‘Lard and wood ash . . . Look, never you mind what it’s made of. You just use it.’

  Soap was funny stuff, all right. Made me skin all slippery and covered with bubbles. I had to haul up bucket after bucket of water to get it off me. But, like Sally said, it got the dirt off. It tasted terrible though, when I ate a bit, even worse than the butter they’d given us in the rations, till it ran out.

  I sat in the sun, leaning against the shed till my clothes dried, listening to the noises, leaves rustling and birds’ wings up above and things going creak, creak, creak in the grass. I’d grown up with noise in the prison and on the ship, but that was people noise, except for the wind and sea. I’d never heard land noise till I come here.

  I could see the garden from here. Big plants and little plants and tiny plants in bare ground. I wondered which ones grew the potatoes. Did you pick potatoes off trees like apples and acorns? Two convict men dug the tussocks with mattocks, but slowly, like they’d been dipped in treacle.

  One day, I thought, I’ll have a hundred potato trees of my own.

  I peered around the shed at the house. It was made of cabbage-tree logs stuck together with mud with a bark roof, like all the houses except the governor’s, but bigger and better made than most. The walls sagged a bit, but someone had propped them up with poles. It had a proper stone chimney, with smoke coming out of it, and two lean-to rooms out the back, where logs had been propped against the wall and covered with sheets of bark, with a rough wooden door at one end. And all around was even more garden, full of all kinds of plants, ones that grew up and ones that climbed over the ground.

  Down past the garden was the big pit, with ragged convicts digging clay to make bricks — or digging when the overseer was watching, and sitting down when he wasn’t. Beyond the pit was the bush. Then more bush, and more, until the mountains rose up, dark blue against the clear blue sky.

  ‘You, boy! You coming in for your dinner?’ That was Sally, her voice as sharp as a pickpocket’s knife.

  I scrambled into my clothes, even though they were still damp, and ran through the door, then slowed down and looked around again.

  I’d never seen a room like this one, not in prison or before. It was . . . clean, even with its mud walls and dirt floor. The floor was packed down hard and all the loose dirt had been swept away. The walls looked like they’d been swept too. And it was more than clean. There was a sort of quiet. It was pretty too. I had never thought a room could be pretty.

  A table in the middle had a flowered cloth spread over it — all that cloth just on a table. And plates on it, shiny white china ones like I’d seen in shops, not battered tin or even pewter. And books, right up one wall, like Mr Johnson’s house was a book shop, and more plates on shelves along another wall, like they were in a shop too. And a big hearth made of flat stones fitted together next to the fireplace with its wood fire, and a big pot hanging over it out of which came a smell that was better than anything I’d ever known.

  I forced my eyes away from the pot. Mr Johnson sat at the table with the Indian girl and Mrs Johnson. Mrs Johnson was pretty too in a shawl and green dress. Beside her sat Elsie, in a blue dress that was too big for her, but sort of bundled up at the waist with a scarf for a belt so it didn’t drag on the ground. Her hair was clean like mine. She looked scared, but not like she was going to run.

  Then I looked at the pot.

  Mrs Johnson smiled at me. She had all her teeth, it looked like. I’d never known a woman her age who had all her teeth like that. ‘Sit down, Barney. Welcome to our poor home.’

  It didn’t look poor to me. I sat next to Abaroo. She grinned at me.

  Mr Johnson bent his head. He shut his eyes. So did Mrs Johnson and Abaroo. Sally gave me a cuff on the ear. ‘Shut your eyes while the master says grace,’ she hissed.

  ‘Who’s Grace?’

  Mr Johnson opened his eyes. ‘Grace is when we give thanks to God for the treasures he has given us.’

  If treasures meant the food in that pot, I would say ‘thanks’ all right. So I shut my eyes and waited till Mr Johnson’s voice had stopped.

  Then I looked at the food.

  CHAPTER 4

  Dinner

  Food!

  You should have seen what came out of that pot
. First of all Sally lifted out a pease pudding, wrapped in a white cloth, with a pair of tongs. She undid the cloth and cut off a great slice for each of us and put them on our plates. It had bits of meat in it — real fresh meat, not salt pork. Then four fat boiled potatoes on every plate, a pile of boiled cabbage, a smaller pile of sliced boiled carrots, and a red boiled vegetable I’d never seen before. I tried to eat with a knife and fork, but it was too slow. That food smelled so good and I was so hungry. I picked up a slab of pudding in my fingers and shoved it in my mouth, then looked around to see if anyone minded.

  Mr and Mrs Johnson pretended not to notice.

  I stared. My mouth fell open, still full of pudding. There was Elsie on the other side of the table, using her knife and fork, one in each hand, like she had used them all her life.

  Then Sally sat down next to Elsie. A servant and convict eating at a gentleman’s table, instead of eating in the kitchen — if there’d been a kitchen, which there wasn’t, or at least out on the back step, though there wasn’t actually a step either.

  But it was no stranger than a black girl and the two of us eating with a lady and gentleman. Sally even knew how to use a knife and fork, and so did Abaroo. I was going to have to learn to use them fast.

  Mrs Johnson neatly forked up a piece of carrot, chewed and swallowed. I tried to copy how she did it. ‘What did you see down at the harbour, Abaroo?’ she asked. I glanced at Mrs Johnson’s belly under her shawl, then looked away before Sally saw me noticing. I reckoned Mrs Johnson was going to have a baby one day.

  Abaroo considered. ‘Men.’

  Men down at the harbour? Well, we weren’t going to stand up and cheer about that news, were we? Not like maybe a ship at last from England, or the Frenchies attacking. I got on with eating. One potato, two potatoes, more of that good pease pudding.

  The drum rolled down at the barracks, the signal it was time convicts could stop work. You could hear it even up here.

  The back door opened. The two convicts came in from the garden and sat at the table too. Sally got up and gave them dinner. The men didn’t talk much, just shovelled food in, like me.