scar like this.’
‘No,’ Chris admitted, and he cast a shamefaced glance behind him at his mate. ‘I got a bit scared when Aaron bled. And…’ He swallowed. ‘I don’t like it that they all got killed last night. I reckon they’d been sniffing petrol, too.’
‘So stop it,’ Cal said gently.
‘There’s nothing else to do.’
Gina was rising now. She still had her arm round the old lady’s shoulders. Mary was weeping, Cal saw, and Gina’s face was creased in concern. Gina was upset.
She didn’t know these people. She didn’t have to get involved.
Neither did he.
Gina looked across at him and gave him a half-smile, as if she expected that he share her distress.
‘You need a swimming pool,’ Cal said, and where the words had come from he didn’t know. But he knew where the idea had come from. Something he’d heard on the radio-something he’d heard happening at a remote settlement a thousand miles from here and had thought a great plan.
Someone who might get involved might grab a plan like that and run with it.
‘A swimming pool.’ Aaron and Chris were looking at him like he was stupid.
‘That’s right,’ he said, and it was too late to retract now. ‘It’s fifty miles to the coast from here, and even then you can’t swim during the hot six months. Too many stingers. You guys need a pool.’
‘Yeah, but how would we get a swimming pool?’ Aaron demanded. Cal had been dressing Chris’s leg while he spoke and now he motioned to Aaron to take his friend’s place in front of him. Aaron’s face had a long, vicious scratch. It didn’t need stitching as Chris’s leg had, but it needed to be scrupulously cleaned if it wasn’t to be infected. Cal started work with care but the boys’ attention was caught.
‘You mean one of those paddling pools you blow up,’ Aaron said scornfully. ‘We had one. It lasted a whole day and a half before it got a hole in it.’
Gina was in earshot now. She was walking Mary over to see him, Cal realised, and he wished he could stop this conversation now, but both boys were staring at him in half-resentful expectation that this was nothing. It was definitely too late to back out.
‘If I could talk the politicians into building a swimming pool here, would you guys go to school?’
‘Nah,’ Chris said scornfully. ‘Why would we?’
‘Because Mr Robbins and Mrs Cook run classes every day here, and they never have any more than six or so kids. They have heaps of room, they’re great people, and if you guys learn to read and write then there’s so much you could do.’
‘Like what?’ Chris demanded.’
‘Well, you could get put up for selection for the national footy teams for one thing,’ Cal said. ‘They won’t look at you unless you can read.’
‘Yeah, but that’s not till we’re sixteen,’ Chris objected. ‘We might be dead before then.’
Which was the absolute truth, Cal thought grimly. It was even a probability.
OK.
OK, what?
Gina was watching him now. His conscience. And back at home was a little boy who looked like him-whose very existence seemed to make him aware that he ought to be doing more
He had to get involved. Just a bit.
‘I’m going to work on getting you guys a swimming pool,’ he told them.
They stared at him, disbelieving.
‘You gotta be joking.’
‘I’m not joking.’ He glanced up at Gina but his eyes were caught instead by the little lady she was holding. Mary’s face was swollen with weeping but her eyes were arrested. Her face was still. Waiting.
What was he doing? He didn’t get involved.
He was involved.
‘I was reading about a place like this near Darwin,’ he told them, thinking it through as he talked. ‘The locals started a collection, they got a government grant to help and they’ve built a swimming pool. They feed it from an underground bore. There’s bore water here.’
‘No one would do that for us,’ one of the boys muttered.
‘If they did it there I don’t know why they wouldn’t do it here,’ Cal said. ‘All it needs is some pressure.’
‘No one here’d be a leader enough to put pressure on anyone,’ Mary said slowly, and the old woman’s voice was husky from weeping. ‘We’re so…’ She searched for an appropriate word and didn’t find one. ‘Stuffed,’ she said at last. ‘Finished. We keep getting hit and the more we’re hit the more we can’t get up again. Now…all our young ’uns are dead…’
‘Not all your young ’uns,’ Cal said gently. He was clearing every trace of dirt and broken glass from Aaron’s face. ‘I’m so sorry about last night. But there’s kids left and we need to move forward for them. We need desperately to move forward. I’m prepared to fight on your behalf.’
‘You,’ the old woman said, and Cal grimaced inside. He’d been coming out to this settlement for years, and until now he’d never got personally involved. It was no wonder the woman’s tone was incredulous.
‘Yeah, me,’ he said ruefully, and tried not to look at Gina-who was looking as incredulous as the old lady. ‘It’s not only a way to give you some pleasure, but it’s a way to get the kids to go to school.’
‘How?’ Aaron said belligerently.
‘Stay still,’ Cal told him, and Gina moved in to help, cutting a dressing to size so he had it ready as soon as the antiseptic was in place.
‘Easy,’ Cal said. ‘Once we get the pool, there’d be a rule in place. If you miss a day’s school without a very good reason, you’d be excluded from the pool for a month.’
‘You’re kidding me,’ Aaron said. ‘That’s not fair.’
‘That’d make ’em go to school,’ the old lady said, thinking it through. Deflected for a moment from her tragedy. ‘It’s so hot and dusty here all the time, and the kids are bored stupid, and if they got to stay outside a fence, watching other kids swim…’
‘Not fair,’ Aaron said again, and Cal grinned.
‘Fair or not, you’d go to school.’
‘It’d be a start,’ Gina said, and he glanced at her and glanced away again. Fast.
He wasn’t doing this for her. He wasn’t.
‘You say you’d get it going?’ Mary whispered, and he nodded.
‘I’ll come out next week and we’ll have a community meeting. Next Wednesday?’
‘So soon?’
‘It might help,’ he said diffidently. ‘You need it, Mary.’
‘Mary has been having what seem like panic attacks,’ Gina told him. ‘I thought maybe we could give her a script for something to help over the next few days.’
‘There’s no need,’ Mary muttered, and she fixed Cal with a look that said now he’d offered there was no way he could back down. ‘I couldn’t see a way past this mess we’re in. Now, though…a pool… If you really think it’s possible…’
‘I do.’
‘Then I don’t want no tranquillisers,’ she told him. ‘I just want a plan forward.’
‘Do you mean it?’
They were in the car, headed back toward Crocodile Creek, and Gina was looking at him as if he’d grown another head.
‘Of course I mean it.’
‘You’d build a swimming pool out here.’
‘It’s possible,’ he said, and he knew he sounded defensive but he couldn’t help it. ‘I’ve been thinking about it ever since I read about the other place. It seemed such a good idea. How to bribe kids to go to school in one easy hit.’
‘And you’ll get the money? These people don’t look like they have anything.’
