The energy collectors wear special suits and gloves that protect them almost one hundred per cent from all the loose electric particles. Sometimes when they pick up the metal boxes they can still get a little shock, like when you run on the carpet during library time and then sit next to Cole Larsen and touch his arm and you hear that ‘crack!’ They also wear special glasses because if you look too closely at the energy it makes your eyes go see-through and zaps all the colour out. Then no one would know how to talk to you because eye colour reflects your personality. Brown is warm and open, blue is intolerant and aloof. The energy is then put in trucks that carry it all over the country. Not too many people know they are watching the Friday night footie or cooking spag bol because of those boxes underground.
Pat says the propeller machines are called turbines and if he could, he’d watch them go round all day, until the sun had set and turned them into giant shadow puppets.
8 White vultures
Ahead I can see the outline of a petrol station. There’s a coach there too and all the people milling around look like the little dwarfs from Snow White marching off to the mines. The gold’s long gone from here but they’re spoilt for choice if they’re after roo nuggets. When I step out of the car and straighten my legs, oh boy my knees feel Gerry-hat-trick. Dropping my head I look between my legs and see the last of the dwarfs heading back towards the bus. Even upside down I can see they’re as old as my knees are painful. A whole gaggle of them with high-pitched voices, sun visors and sneakers so white they gotta be straight out of the box. But one of them, I can feel it, has sorrow like a sharp stone in her shoe. Something that lady thought she’d left behind was dragging her down all the same. I could help that woman come up for air; tell her what she needed to hear even if it hurt.
‘Now you stay there, righto?’ Pat says and he goes inside the petrol station to pay just as his big old clunky phone starts to ring.
Divine intervention—a sign from JC himself. I press a button and hold it to my ear. A man with a voice like gravel answers so maybe it is actually God.
‘Are you there yet?’ he barks.
The oldies are lining up, ready to board the bus again.
‘Almost.’
I hang up, stuff the phone in my pocket and run over. They’re all talking at the same time like channel-hopping on the TV.
‘…oh, but that’s what I told Joe!’
‘…she’s so surly, pay no mind.’
‘…grew over half her neck!’
I follow one thread but get the tale end of another, all the words knotted up like I got crazy voices in my head. And before I know it I’m on that bus sitting in the ninth row on the left-hand side by the window. (Inside the servo Pat’s thinking about whether to get a Chiko roll or not. I still got time.) Then this nice-looking lady sits down next to me, but it’s not her I’m looking for. She’s a human dot-to-dot, hundreds of freckles jumping up and down between her wrinkles. Her name is Lou and she’s come from Atlanta, which is where they make Coke for the rest of the world. She says she hadn’t seen me at the last pick-up and am I one of the guides for the Indigenous Reservation? Involving the young people in these tourism ventures she says, is such a positive thing to combat all the problems we have, which their First People have as well. She isn’t making much sense but I don’t want to embarrass her so I say that yes, this is a working trip and I push some buttons on Pat’s phone to make my story look real.
When I look up more of the old ladies have gathered round me in the ninth row. Like these vultures in a cartoon Mum thought was very sad because it showed how indifferent the west had become to despair that was not its own. In the cartoon the vultures were standing over this starving African baby. It looked very sick and one of the vultures says, ‘Look, it’s still moving.’ Sometimes there are messages in cartoons that people can read through the pictures, but I am not one of those people.
The ladies on the bus kind of look like vultures because of their craggly skin and wide-open eyes, gaping. But they smile like a hungry grandmother. One of them asks if I could tell a story from the Dreamtime and I don’t know which one she means. So I tell her about the last dream that got stuck in my head. I could fly and ran really fast off a cliff, flew over to the shops, got some milk and a can of peas and even though it was not on the list a Violet Crumble which I ate in the shopping line. Then all these ants came and ate the crumbs so I had to run out because they were suddenly huge but then I couldn’t fly and my feet felt like lead so I had to leave the peas behind. I went up in the sky again but then crashed down into a paddock and woke up with a really big shock.
The women stare in wonder nodding their heads and Doris says that their First Nations people also had an affinity with nature and animals. Ants aren’t animals; they’re in a different category, genus buggus. I’m scared they might turn into real vultures if I tell them I’m not Aboriginal. But I am browner than some Koori kids ’cause I saw a girl once with blue eyes and blonde hair even though her brothers were all dark. Sometimes when we went to Boyd’s Creek, which has two IGA supermarkets one at each end and a drive-through Maccas, I’d be waiting for one of them to look at me and say, ‘I know you feel shame, ’cause I feel it too.’ Even though sometimes I got called ‘sis’ or ‘tidda’ there was nothing underneath my skin that made me one and the same. I still wished and wished for it because maybe then I’d have a sister or brother for real. And thirty-seven relatives called Aunty. Is skin enough to be family? No one’s ever set me straight there.
‘Tell us more about your…knowing,’ Doris said, real low and quiet.
‘If I cannot be a singer like Tina Arena I will work with the animals, mostly orangutans which are technically primates so I would be a primatologist.’
Now I feel like I’m the monkey. Stuck in a zoo with all these faces staring at me wondering if I’m gonna do a trick. But I keep going because no one ever listens to me. Not like this.
‘An ologist is someone whose brain is very specific. Mine is. Doctors have said so. I will go to Borneo and look after the baby orangutans that have lost their mothers because we use too much palm oil. They have big eyes and always seem to hunch over like they do not know how to start the day or where they are supposed to be and if they could speak the only thing they would say is “oh well” and then climb very slowly up into a tree and go to sleep.’
Still not a word from the granny brigade. I take the silence as permission to continue, like I’m giving my maiden speech in parliament and everyone has to be quiet even if I’m way boring.
‘If I cannot be a primatologist I will be a taxidermist, which is not a dentist who drives around. It is a person that gives dead animals an eternal smile. It is legal to hang them on the wall. If you have a library you can put them on the mantelpiece.’
Then the bus pulls away and I see Pat bolting back to the car, slipping on the gravel. One leg falls from under him and he has to crouch on the ground for a moment to get his balance. That’s when he sees me looking through the window of the bus. And three shades of red rise up his neck covering his entire face. ‘Right!’ he thinks, ‘You bloody little ratbag!’