Birrung the Secret Friend Read online

  We sat there, the three of us, the fire flickering, the pot steaming. None of us said anything. I think I was as close to Elsie and Mr Johnson that night as I have ever been to anyone, the three of us hoping and praying so hard for the same thing that we had no need for words.

  I heard a shout in the bedroom. It was Sally’s voice, I thought. Or was it? Someone laughed in triumph. Birrung? Why would Birrung laugh now?

  There was only one reason I could think of. I squeezed Elsie’s hand harder, and she squeezed back.

  Mr Johnson stared at the bedroom door. His lips moved again in a silent prayer.

  A baby cried, a sort of choke at first, and then a wail.

  Sally looked out of the room. ‘Hot water,’ she ordered, just like she was the mistress, and Mr Johnson the servant. Then she smiled and said, ‘You have a daughter.’

  Mr Johnson cried out, but not to Sally or to me. Maybe he cried to God. He grabbed the pot and ran into the room.

  Smoke came from the bedroom, funny smoke that made me feel like I wasn’t quite there, as if the hut had floated into another land.

  At last the door opened again. Mr Johnson came out, with a baby wrapped in a blanket. He looked red-eyed. The baby had a red face too. He sat on the splintery chair by the fire, and looked at the tiny baby. Looked and looked, like he’d never seen anything so lovely. ‘God has not forgotten us,’ he whispered. ‘Even if England has.’

  I got up, and Elsie too, still holding my hand. I peered at the baby. She wasn’t lovely at all. Her face was all crumpled and screwed up. She looked a bit angry, as if she was saying, ‘What have you brought me to?’

  ‘She’s got no hair!’ I said, before I could stop myself. Poor Mr and Mrs Johnson, going through so much and getting a bald daughter!

  Elsie let go of my hand and gave me a sharp elbow in the ribs.

  Mr Johnson didn’t even glance up. ‘Babies often don’t have any hair,’ he murmured. ‘It will grow. She will grow. She will be tall and happy . . .’ His voice died away. His eyes shut, like he was asleep, but he still held the baby close to him.

  It was getting light. Sunbeams danced through a crack in the wall. Down at the barracks the drum rolled, telling the convicts to get up and go to work. I opened the shutters and glanced back into the bedroom. Mrs Johnson lay on the bed. Her eyes were shut, but she was smiling. She was breathing too, her chest going up and down.

  Birrung sat beside her, holding a big shell with smoky burning stuff in it, what I had smelled before. Birrung’s basket lay on the floor next to her. Sally was doing something in a corner I couldn’t see. At last Birrung put the shell down. She and Sally came out. Sally shut the door behind her.

  Sally picked up the frying pan. ‘Potato cakes for breakfast,’ she said.

  Birrung began to peel and grate the potatoes without being asked. Elsie cut up the onions and beat the eggs, just as Mrs Johnson had shown her. I was embarrassed sitting in my shirt and bare legs. I went and put my trousers on. I wondered if I should put my shoes on, like it was Sunday, for the baby. But then I thought: The baby won’t notice. Nor would Mr Johnson neither. And those were the only shoes I had and no chance of getting more till a ship came from England.

  Mr Johnson still sat by the fire, the baby in one arm, his eyes closed, despite the noise Sally was making with the frying pan. The baby was asleep now too.

  Birrung set the table quietly, plates and knives and forks and spoons.

  The potato cakes smelled good, pan after pan of them fried in mutton dripping, piled up on the hearth to keep warm. Sally kept mixing and frying, and Mr Johnson sat dozing with the baby. I just wanted to get my stomach around those potato cakes.

  At last Sally said loudly, ‘Breakfast’s ready.’

  Mr Johnson opened his eyes. Sally smiled. She didn’t often smile like that. ‘What name have you given her, sir?’

  ‘Milbah,’ said Birrung softly.

  Sally glared at her, like she hadn’t forgiven her for taking charge in the bedroom. ‘What name have you given her, sir?’ she repeated.

  Mr Johnson looked down at the baby again. ‘Her name is Milbah.’

  Sally glanced at Birrung, then at him. ‘But that’s a native name.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mr Johnson. ‘My daughter is Milbah Maria Johnson.’

  And he looked at Birrung like she was his daughter as well, looked at her with so much love that I knew it was all right that I loved Birrung too.

  CHAPTER 9

  The Brother

  The young man came to get Birrung a week later.

  Heat sucked at the leaves of the lettuce and cucumber plants, row after row of them limp on the neatly turned soil. I’d been lugging buckets of water to the vegetables since dawn. Only the watermelons and the corn looked happy, over a hundred melons on the vines and more than an acre of corn, each plant with four to six fat cobs. The melons were bigger than my head. Later I’d have to go to the other plots to water the pumpkins and the fruit trees. No one had stolen anything from Mr Johnson’s gardens yet. Mr Johnson kept crops like corn and potatoes that were easy to steal near the house. The convicts couldn’t steal the fruit, because the trees were too small to give much yet, and a ripe pumpkin was too big for a man to carry away unnoticed, so it was safe to leave them unguarded.

  Down at the other end of the garden Elsie picked beans and carrots and turnips for our dinner. The convict men, Old Tom and Scruggins, were off digging pails of pig manure to feed the garden. These were different convicts from the men we’d had before, because the others had kept on swearing in front of Mrs Johnson. Even when she warned they’d get no more corn and potatoes if they used bad language, they kept on swearing so much I wondered if they knew other words to say.

  Pig manure stank. The garden would stink too, but Mr Johnson said that muck and manure grew good vegetables. Old Tom and Scruggins would stink as well, after getting the manure, but they stank anyway. I don’t think they’d ever had a bath in their lives, except when they’d been scrubbed when they came aboard the ships that brought us here.

  Mr Johnson came out with Birrung. He said, ‘Abaroo says Mrs Johnson must have oysters to make her strong.’

  Birrung laughed and nodded. I thought: Birrung wants to go down to the beach again. She wants to swim without any clothes on in the waves. I felt my face grow hot.

  Elsie looked out the back door. Mr Johnson said, ‘We’re going oyster gathering. Will you come with us?’

  Elsie looked at me. She looked at Birrung. She shook her head and went back inside.

  We hadn’t even got past the garden though when Mr Johnson stopped. A black man was walking up the track, a real wild Indian. He didn’t even wear clothes like some natives did, including Bennelong, who was friends with the governor. There had been more of them around lately. They hadn’t all died in the plague except for Birrung and Nanberry, like we’d thought, just moved away for a while. This native carried two spears, with big sharp barbs.

  ‘Go inside,’ said Mr Johnson quietly to me and Birrung.

  I turned to go. Birrung stayed where she was.

  I hesitated.

  ‘Go,’ said Mr Johnson. I went, but just to the door. I peered outside.

  The three of them talked, the Indian man and Mr Johnson and Birrung. They seemed angry, every one of them.

  I thought: If the black man hurts Birrung or Mr Johnson with his spear, I’ll . . .

  I wondered what I could do. Mr Johnson didn’t even have a musket, like the soldiers had. Then I thought of the big frying pan. I ran across the room and grabbed it, ignoring Sally’s and Elsie’s stares.

  ‘What is it?’ cried Mrs Johnson from the bedroom as I ran outside.

  I was too late. The black man was walking back down the track, away from us. Birrung ran past me into the house. Her face was wet and all scrunched up.

  I wanted to hug her, to tell her not to cry. But I just stepped back, holding the frying pan and feeling silly.

  Mr Johnson walked slowly back to the ho
use. He looked at the pan in my hand. ‘What’s that for?’

  ‘In case the Indian hurt you,’ I said.

  Mr Johnson smiled and shook his head. ‘They were fishing spears, not fighting spears.’

  I hadn’t even known that there were different types. ‘What did he want?’

  ‘Abaroo,’ said Mr Johnson.

  I felt anger sweep up from my toes. The black man had seen how pretty she was. He wanted Birrung to be his wife . . .

  ‘He is her brother,’ said Mr Johnson quietly. ‘Abaroo wanted to go with him, to live with her father, Maugoran, or with Barangaroo, the wife of Bennelong. I told her she must stay here. We must try to teach her to be civilised, to know God . . .’

  To help Mrs Johnson if she gets sick, I thought. Sometimes women did get sick afterwards, even if they didn’t die when they had the baby. Childbirth fever, they called it. That’s what had killed lots of the women who had babies back in gaol. But maybe Birrung knew how to make that better too . . .

  ‘I didn’t know she had any family,’ I said. ‘I thought they all died in the plague.’ It felt funny, to think that all along she’d had family. I’d thought she was an orphan like me.

  ‘They left her to die when she was sick! We are her family now. She must stay here,’ said Mr Johnson. He hesitated. ‘The governor wishes her to stay too. Barney, perhaps I shouldn’t tell a child this . . .’

  A child, I thought. I’m ten years old! I’ve sailed across the world! And stayed alive in Newgate Prison, which was harder.

  ‘There’ve been more attacks by the natives. Even people killed. The natives have been sadly provoked, I know, but . . . well, the governor hopes Abaroo, like Bennelong and little Nanberry, might be an ambassador to their people. Teach them to like us . . .’

  By keeping Birrung away from her pa and brother? I thought. By keeping Bennelong prisoner? It was a funny way to make friends.

  ‘And to know the ways of God,’ finished Mr Johnson.

  I looked down as Elsie’s hand took the frying pan from mine. Back in the lean-to I could hear Birrung sobbing.

  CHAPTER 10

  Birrung Stays

  April 1790

  Birrung didn’t go. It would have been easy to leave us, to leave our house, to leave the colony. The colony was a prison without any walls. Any of the convicts could have wandered off, except they’d starve, or be killed by the natives.

  Birrung could have gone back to her family. She could have fished in a canoe with Barangaroo, swum every day instead of working in the garden. But she stayed with us.

  The melons ripened, and more corn. We spent night after night shucking the paper husks off and cutting the kernels from the cobs, to make the crop smaller to store, me and the Johnsons and Birrung and Sally and Elsie sitting in the firelight, and baby Milbah sleeping in the cradle made from a sea chest.

  When Milbah wasn’t sleeping, she made a lot of noise, crying or laughing, and made messes in the napkins Sally had to wash. But her face wasn’t red now — it was pink and white — and she even had a tiny curl of hair at the front. Sometimes Mrs Johnson let me hold her. She squirmed a lot, but she felt sort of nice too.

  We hung the bags of corn on ropes in the shed, with sharp rounds of metal halfway down to stop the rats running up the walls and down the rope and eating all our harvest.

  There were bags of dried beans and dried peas, and pumpkins and marrows left in the sun till their skins hardened so they didn’t rot during the winter. Sally boiled some of the watermelons, then strained the juice till it was a sweet clear syrup, and poured it into tightly corked old wine bottles, to sweeten our puddings in the year to come. There was no sugar left in the colony now, not even treacle or molasses. Birrung hadn’t brought us any honey for months — she didn’t go off by herself to forage now. I wondered if it was because she had decided to stay and if she saw her family it might be too hard to leave them again.

  Mr Johnson decided that this year the carrots and beetroot could stay in the ground over winter. Root vegetables didn’t rot in the cold like he said they did in English winter gardens. It didn’t even snow here in winter: there were just the cold winds from the south. I was glad. I’d been colder in England than I ever wanted to be again, and digging up carrots and beetroot to store was a lot of work.

  Work had always been something you were supposed to try to get out of before. Work was Ma leaning over, bashing the oysters off the rocks, day after day till she said her back was crying in agony, and her hands were raw and bleeding from the shell cuts. Though Ma never shirked a day in her life, far as I knew. But working up here, with Birrung and Elsie, or Mr Johnson, or just by myself, watching the harbour and the green and red birds, thinking of all the good food in the ground and in the shed, the food I’d helped grow, I was the happiest I’d ever been. I learned that work can be one of the best things in the world. I’ll never forget it was Mr Johnson who taught me that.

  They were good days. Mrs Johnson held Milbah like she was a precious jewel from Araby. I felt like I did when a carrot seed and dirt turned into a crisp fat root. It was like our colony; nothing but trees yet now we had a village and gardens, though the colony stank more than Milbah did when she made a mess in her napkin. And the way Mrs Johnson smiled at Milbah and Birrung seemed to light up the house. We all laughed a lot in those days.

  I was penning up the goats one afternoon after dinner, giving them each a carrot — goats need a bribe if you’re to get them to go where you want them. There was one with a black foot who wouldn’t go in even so. ‘Get in, you b—’ I said, using a word I wasn’t supposed to. I heard a laugh above me. It was Birrung, sitting right up on a branch of a gum tree.

  She threw down a carrot. It landed whump in the pen. Old Black Foot scrambled in after it. I shut the pen quickly.

  ‘Thank you!’ I called, careful not to look up again in case I saw her bare legs.

  I heard a swishing sound. Birrung slid down the tree next to me. She pushed her skirts back into place and grinned at me. ‘Walk?’

  Go for a walk with her? Just the two of us, when Sally expected me to bring her a bucket of fresh water for the morning, when Mrs Johnson would be waiting to say evening prayers, which she did on the nights when Mr Johnson was away in Rose Hill as he was this evening?

  I grinned back and nodded. I was glad Birrung was happy enough to go for a walk again. I was even gladder it was with me.

  I thought we’d go down to the harbour. Maybe she’d even teach me to swim. But instead she scrambled up the hill, past the brick pits. At last we came to a big smooth boulder, sitting near the top. She sat down on it. I sat next to her, feeling the warm stone, smelling strange trees, hot and cold breezes weaving around us.

  I looked at the harbour. You could see the flagpole from here. As soon as the lookout saw sails from England, they’d run a flag up the pole.

  The flagpole was empty. Day after day, no matter how much everyone stared at it.

  Would a ship ever come?

  It’d be winter soon. We’d landed here with food for three years, but rats and humans had stolen a lot. Even the officers didn’t dig their own gardens, but sat back while their convicts did it for them. Would some folk starve? The lazy ones, the ones who’d rather steal than work?

  I glanced at Birrung. We wouldn’t starve. Governor Phillip’s garden was raided night after night. But the convicts were too grateful to Mr Johnson for helping those who were sick or in trouble, like me and Elsie, to steal from the Johnsons.

  Or at least they were so far.

  Birrung gestured to me to be still. I froze. I thought a snake was about to bite me — there’d been a big brown one among the corn one day till Birrung had grabbed it by the tail and lashed it down and broke its neck. I waited for this snake to put its fangs in me . . .

  Birrung put her arms around a big old tree next to our rock, and then hugged it with her knees. It looked strange, her black legs under her petticoat. She made her way up that tree like a slug, except slug
s are slow and she was fast. I thought: That must be how she climbed up the tree by the garden.

  She reached into a hole and pulled out an o’possum. It hardly had time to wake before she yanked its head back, sharp, so. The head hung limp, dead.

  ‘Meat,’ said Birrung. She threw it down. I caught it. I watched her legs under her skirts as she climbed down, then flushed when she saw me watching.

  She laughed. She picked up a bit of rock. Looked like any old rock to me. But she bashed it against a boulder, and then bit the edges with her sharp white teeth. And suddenly the bit of rock was like an axe blade crossed with a knife.

  Birrung cut the o’possum around the neck and paws and backside, glanced at me, then went more slowly, so I could follow what she did, pushing her thumbs under the skin to take the fur off.

  Meat. It had been weeks since we’d eaten fresh meat. We’d had to live on the salt pork ration, so hard Sally had to cut it into shreds so we could eat it, just two pounds a week for a grown-up and I got two-thirds of that and Elsie even less, because she was a girl. It was against the law now to kill any hens or goats or pigs or sheep to eat. They had to be kept to breed more animals.

  The governor had given the officers their own shooters, convicts who had guns and powder and could bring in wild ducks and kangaroos for their masters. But when Mr Johnson had asked for a shooter too, the governor had said no, even though Mr Johnson was a gentleman, like the officers.

  And now a girl had got fresh meat for us. She didn’t even need a musket and lead shot and powder.

  Birrung looked at me looking at her. Her hands moved again, slowly, in the grass now, showing me what to do: tearing off tussocks and sort of plaiting them — and there was a basket, to carry the meat.

  I wondered if somehow Birrung could make bread for us too. I missed bread nearly as much as fresh meat. More maybe, because I’d never eaten meat much back in England, but Ma usually had a few farthings for a loaf of bread, soft white bread with a hard black crust, English bread, not Sally’s heavy cornmeal damper . . .