Lonesome Howl

  STEVEN HERRICK was born in Brisbane, the youngest of seven children. At school, his favourite subject was soccer, and he dreamed of football glory while he worked at various jobs, including fruit picking. Now, he’s a full time writer and performs in many schools each year. He loves talking to students and their teachers about stories, poetry, soccer and even golf.

  Steven lives in the Blue Mountains with his wife and sons. Visit his website at www.acay.com.au/~sherrick

  Love, ghosts & nose hair – shortlisted in the 1997 CBCA awards and the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards

  A place like this – shortlisted in the 1999 CBCA awards and the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, and commended in the 1998 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards

  The simple gift – shortlisted in the 2001 CBCA awards and the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards

  By the river – Honour Book in the 2005 CBCA awards and winner of the Ethel Turner Prize in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards

  LONESOME

  HOWL

  Steven Herrick

  First published in 2006

  Copyright © Steven Herrick 2006

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or ten per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander St

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Herrick, Steven, 1958 .

  Lonesome howl

  ISBN 9 781741 14656 1.

  ISBN 1 74114 656 9.

  1. Teenagers – Juvenile fiction. 2. Father and child – Juvenile fiction.

  3. Self-actualizatioin (Psychology) in adolescence – Juvenile fiction.

  4. Wolves – Juvenile fiction. I. Title.

  A823.3

  Cover photograph from Photolibrary/Brad Green

  Cover design by Sandra Nobes

  Set in 10.5pt Apollo by Midland Typesetters

  Printed in Australia by McPherson's Printing Group

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Teachers’ notes are available from www.allenandunwin.com

  When I was eighteen, I told Mum I wanted to be a writer. The next day, she went out and bought me a desk and a chair from a second-hand furniture store. Nearly thirty years on, I still write my books at that desk.

  Mum died last year.

  I like writing at her desk. It brings us closer.

  With love.

  S.H.

  Also by STEVEN HERRICK

  Water Bombs

  Love, ghosts & nose hair

  A place like this

  The simple gift

  By the river

  for children

  The place where the planes take off

  My life, my love, my lasagne

  Poetry, to the rescue

  The spangled drongo

  Love poems and leg-spinners

  Tom Jones saves the world

  Do-wrong Ron

  Naked Bunyip Dancing

  CONTENTS

  One Lucy

  Two Jake

  Three Holidays

  Four Lonesome howl

  Five The deep silence

  Six The mist

  Seven The cave

  Eight This is what happens

  Nine Morning

  Ten Home

  ONE

  Lucy

  Lucy

  My name’s Lucy Harding.

  Lucy’s not short for anything,

  it’s just Lucy.

  That’s right, with a ‘y’.

  Only people from the city

  spell it with an ‘i’,

  or call themselves Lucienne.

  I’m not French,

  and I’m not from the city.

  I’m from Battle Farm.

  My grandma named it that,

  on account of her always saying,

  ‘It’s a battle to keep this place;

  a battle to survive.’

  And she did pretty good.

  At surviving, I mean.

  She died a few years ago,

  aged ninety-two.

  She’s buried up the hill

  next to Grandpa,

  overlooking their farm

  and I reckon she’s up there

  thinking,

  Why did my daughter marry

  someone like him?

  Mr Right.

  He’s never right. He just thinks he is.

  He is Dad,

  but I don’t want to talk about him.

  Swampland

  There are two farms in this valley.

  No one else can be bothered

  cutting through the ragged paperbarks,

  the Paterson’s curse

  and the creeping lantana.

  Wolli Creek flows deep into the valley

  through a sandy swamp,

  alive with mosquitoes and bugs.

  From the banks, big granite boulders

  step up to the hills.

  Nothing for farming.

  Everyone at school says

  we live in the arse-end of the earth.

  They all tell stories about

  diseased feral animals prowling,

  quicksand that swallows you whole

  and strange lights hovering above the bog.

  Sometimes, when I’m bored, I join in.

  I tell the little kids

  about long-winged bats

  and wild pigs, big as lions,

  and blood-curdling screams at midnight.

  It’s all I can do to stop from laughing,

  but, hell,

  it passes the time.

  The Hardings

  So there’s me.

  I’m sixteen.

  And my mum,

  who milks our cow, Martha,

  and cooks what she grows,

  scraping dirt off potatoes and carrots,

  washing them in the sink.

  Every evening after dinner

  she sits on the back verandah

  looking up at her parents’ graves.

  She doesn’t say much

  and that suits me fine.

  And there’s Peter, my brother,

  who’s twelve, but acts like he’s eight.

  You know, always pestering me,

  or playing shoot-’em-up games on his PlayStation.

  Once, he climbed up on the shed roof

  in his Superman cape.

  Yeah, no kidding.

  I bet you’re thinking

  he jumped off and broke his arm.

  Right?

  Wrong.

  Superman was scared.

  Mum got the ladder

  and she sent me up

  to help him down.

  I had to talk all nice and careful,

  like I was worried.

  ‘Come on, Peter. It’ll be all right.

  Superman can’t die.’

  Dad kept fiddling with his car.

  That’s all he ever does.

  Tinker with the engine,

  shoot his rifle at targets

  and go on a
bout

  everything I do wrong.

  The death of poor Winnie

  If Peter thinks he’s Superman,

  Dad acts like some

  straight-shooting outlaw.

  He sets himself

  on the old vinyl car seat against the gum tree

  and he gets Peter to draw pictures,

  rabbits and deer and kangaroos,

  on big sheets of paper.

  Then he sticks them on the shed

  and fires away.

  Does he hit the target?

  Well, he hits the shed, at least.

  Except one time,

  when he had way too much to drink.

  I sat under the house

  hoping he’d shoot his foot off.

  Now that would be funny.

  He blasted away

  doing his best to hit the mark

  but he missed everything

  except Winnie, the pig.

  You should have heard Superman cry.

  Mum rang Mr Samuels, the town butcher,

  who drove out and cut up poor Winnie.

  We had pork for dinner

  and bacon for breakfast,

  every day for a month.

  It’s the only time

  I can remember the old bastard

  doing anything useful.

  Questions

  When Dad’s head is so far under the bonnet

  I imagine walking up behind,

  giving him one swift kick

  and running away,

  never coming back.

  But not Peter.

  He tries to help.

  He hangs around,

  shuffling his feet in the dirt,

  picking up tools,

  leaning over the engine,

  asking questions.

  Dad only ever answers

  with a grunt or a shrug.

  Peter keeps talking,

  jabber jabber jabber.

  Dad lifts his head and frowns,

  spits in the dirt

  and picks up another spanner

  as he’s forced to listen to his own son.

  If that was me doing all the talking

  he’d tell me,

  straightaway,

  to piss off.

  I lounge around,

  pretending I’m reading,

  listening to Peter

  and knowing that my stupid father

  doesn’t know how to shut him up.

  ‘Keep talking, Peter,’

  I whisper to myself.

  ‘Ask another question.

  Go on.’

  Lucy, and the work

  Mostly I stay out of his way.

  Simple as that.

  At dinner I eat quicker than I should

  and keep my head down.

  Whenever anybody asks me

  to get the cordial from the fridge

  or the salt from the pantry,

  I do it without a word.

  Don’t think I’m weak.

  I’m not.

  I’m snarling underneath

  and they know it.

  I’m doing what I’m told to avoid getting hit.

  When Grandma was alive

  Dad would take his dinner outside

  because she stared him down.

  Grandma said what she liked.

  She wasn’t afraid of anything.

  She’d grin across the table.

  ‘You don’t own nothing, Lucy,

  unless you work for it.

  Remember that.

  Working is the owning.’

  She’d look at Mum,

  daring her to say something,

  but no one crossed Grandma.

  Some people die

  In the last year of her life

  Grandma could barely walk.

  Every morning she’d struggle out to the verandah,

  one arm around my shoulder,

  her shaky hand holding a walking stick.

  There she’d sit, watching the farm.

  He’d keep out of the way,

  in the shed or out the back,

  smoking one fag after another.

  Grandma knew what went on.

  She waved her stick at him

  whenever he came near.

  She’d tell my mum to stand up to him,

  to fight back.

  Mum was deaf to all that.

  When Grandma couldn’t leave her bed,

  a week before she died,

  I sat beside her.

  She asked me to draw back the curtains

  and open the window,

  so she could see up the hill

  to Grandpa’s grave.

  I stayed with her for hours

  on the faded old lounge chair,

  ready to help if she needed water

  or her pills.

  It was safe there.

  One morning, Grandma heard Dad shouting.

  She reached for my hand,

  squeezing tight each time his voice

  stormed through the walls.

  She said, ‘Lucy, some people die

  long before they’re in the ground.’

  Lucy’s will

  I don’t believe in omens

  or signs and stuff like that.

  But every morning,

  before I get out of bed,

  I lean over to look at Beaumont Hill

  rising above our farm

  like a wild animal about to pounce.

  If there’s a dark cloud behind the hill

  I stay in bed for five more minutes,

  waiting to see if the wind blows it past.

  I close my eyes

  and picture the cloud

  moving away from our farm

  with the westerly.

  If I open my eyes too soon

  I know that cloud will stay there all day.

  It doesn’t mean bad luck.

  He’ll be in a crappy mood,

  cloud or no cloud.

  Nothing can change that.

  I close my eyes and focus

  on the darkness drifting away.

  By force of will

  I want to move the cloud.

  That would be some trick,

  if I could do it.

  The witness

  Ranting, yelling, stomping

  around their bedroom.

  Sometimes she answers back

  and I hear his voice change:

  deeper, menacing.

  It’s the quiet that scares me.

  I pull the blankets tight

  and hide in my dark cocoon

  waiting for another explosion.

  I should help Mum, somehow,

  be on her side.

  But she does nothing to stop it.

  ‘Just keep out of his way, Lucy.’

  As if it’s our fault;

  as if we made him like this.

  She takes it without a whimper,

  too scared to move.

  And when he starts on me

  in the daylight,

  she just looks away

  and I’m thinking,

  She’s just glad it’s not her.

  I’m not sure what hurts more,

  his ugly words,

  his backhanders,

  or watching Mum seeing it all

  and doing nothing.

  Floating

  I got the idea

  when I helped Superman

  get down off the roof.

  When I want to escape,

  I climb the wooden ladder

  onto the shed roof

  and lie back on the iron,

  looking at the high clouds floating by.

  I can hear the farm below me:

  the dogs growling,

  the click of each peg

  as Mum hangs the washing,

  Dad coughing, sniffing,

  lighting another smoke;

  Peter talking to anyone who’ll listen,

 
or when that doesn’t work,

  talking to himself.

  I know they can’t see me,

  they don’t even miss me.

  I close my eyes

  and imagine the clouds, feather-soft,

  holding me high above everything.

  My body tingles.

  I’m alone, if only for a while.

  I stay here until the sun fades

  behind Beaumont Hill,

  when Mum calls me to help with dinner.

  I stand and stretch my arms

  open to the valley.

  On a good day I can almost fool myself

  that I belong here.

  Preparing dinner

  Mum washes the potatoes in the sink,

  scrubbing the dirt loose with a plastic brush.

  I peel them, ready for the boiling water,

  and stare out the window at him

  sitting on the seat,

  his head tilting forward as he dozes.

  ‘Just stay out of his way.’

  Mum’s so caught up in her work

  she doesn’t know she’s said it aloud.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing, I was just . . .’

  ‘You were talking about him, weren’t you?’

  She turns away from the sink,

  drying her hands on her apron,

  getting the cutlery from the drawer.

  ‘What if he comes after me, Mum?

  How do I get out of his way then?’

  ‘Lucy . . .’

  ‘It’s a bit hard to escape

  when he‘s blocking the doorway,

  don’t you reckon?’

  She sets the table with nervous hands,

  taking extra care with each knife and fork;

  anything to avoid answering me.

  She shakes her head.

  ‘I don’t want to fight, Lucy.’

  Bloody hell.

  I chuck the peeler in the sink

  and storm past her.

  ‘Neither do I, Mum.’

  TWO

  Jake

  Jake

  I’m Jake.

  Jake Jackson.

  I’m fifteen years old.

  I live in an old timber house

  a stone’s throw from Wolli Creek.

  Mum and Dad and me have lived here forever.

  My Great-grandpa Ellis wandered into this area