Read The Lost Child for Free Online Page B

safe there too. Another time, they built a nest on the tractor and every time I drove the tractor, they came for a ride.’ Is he telling a lie? When I look up his black eyes are smiling into mine. ‘It’s true,’ he says before I look away. ‘When the eggs hatched, the young came too, squawking their heads off.’ He replaces the egg in the box and carefully fits the lid. ‘I reckon those Willies learned to fly a whole lot sooner than they should’ve.’
    He returns the box to the space between Brush Bronzewing and Western Whipbird . Then he reaches to the top shelf and takes down a box marked Emu . ‘This’—he opens the box and holds it out so that I have to stand and move closer—‘is one of the best emu eggs you’ll ever see. I found it for Dunc at Bindilla.’ Again he sits on the bed and places the box on his knees, carefully lifting out the egg. ‘You want to hold it?’
    It is warm and light, greenish black, a precious thing. ‘You probably don’t know this,’ he says, ‘but every season emus lay several batches of eggs. And you know who sits on the eggs?’
    â€˜The mother?’
    â€˜The bloody father. Doesn’t even get off the eggs to eat, and loses half his body weight over eight weeks. And then he’s the one who raises the young. The female goes strutting off to find another mate and lay more eggs.’
    He takes the egg from my hands and places it back in the box. ‘Sometimes nature gets things a bit wrong, but that’s how it is. Anyway,’ he says, returning the box to the shelf, ‘you’d better be careful. You’ll be in the poo with Dunc if you break something.’
    When he’s gone, I sit on the bed, empty of air. I hear him whistling in the kitchen, his footsteps on the drive, then his singing. ‘ …shake hands with your Uncle Mike, me boy…da da, da da, da da…you’re welcome as the flowers…da da…’ The car drives off. I think of him taking baby Willies for a ride on the tractor, their squeaky beaks and scrubby feathers. Da da, da da, da da. ‘Haven’t I told you to stay out of here and leave his comics alone?’ says Mum. ‘Put them back where you found them. You’re staying with the Daley kids while I go to Muswell.’
    Mrs Daley is the tiniest mother I know; she comes up to Mum’s shoulder. I like Mrs Daley but not Faye, who bosses me around worse than she bosses her sisters, Dawn and Dot. Faye and her sisters are the dead spit of each other, only one year apart, with the same curly brown hair. At the Institute Fancy Dress, they went as Snap, Crackle and Pop, wearing big cereal boxes decorated by Mrs Daley. I wore my bathers and Mum wrote ‘Miss Burley Point’ in red lipstick letters on a white satin sash. I threw up in the dunnies and smudged the words and had to go home with Mum pulling me by the arm and not speaking.
    In the sunroom, I take my time and read Dunc’s new Phantom . The Ghost Who Walks is feared by bad men everywhere. When Mum calls out again, I stack the comics next to Dunc’s bed. The Phantom moves as silently as fog. At the door to the Deep Woods, I wait with the cunning of a fox and a thousand eyes and ears.
    In the kitchen, Mum is dying. ‘I’m dying on my feet,’ she tells Mrs Daley. She puts her head in her hands and talks to the table but the Phantom can hear a whisper through the jungle. ‘I have to see a solicitor. Get some advice. He’s playing around with that trollop again, I know he is.’
    â€˜What’s a trollop? What’s a solicitor?’
    Mum lifts her head and stares at me.
    The Phantom can knock a flea off a warthog at a hundred paces without hurting the beast. There are no warthogs in Burley Point but Bullfrog Fraser and his deckhand are first in with their catch, pushing their trolley along the jetty then crossing the road to the fish