‘It’s for you,’ I said. ‘Shelley.’
Kevin picked up the phone as the screen door finally settled into its frame with a bang.
I suddenly remembered the kitchen of my five-year-old self, back when Mum and I used to visit Grandma. I saw myself sitting at the massive wooden table in the centre of the room and Grandma at the sink in front of me, staring out into the backyard the way she did when she washed up, her mind wandering over the top of the dense forest canopy. I remember waiting for the banana cake to come out of the oven, the smell, sweet and buttery, wafting through the room, my stomach rumbling.
The kitchen looked different now. The table was still there – a sturdy old pine full of dents – but the room needed a face lift. Kevin had tried to keep it clean but the wallpaper was peeling and the white lace curtains hanging over the windows were black with mould. I’m sure that would have been on Mum’s to do list. Trouble is, I knew what she was like; she probably got sidetracked by some other project, like making a patchwork quilt or macaroni people or something. Dirty curtains wouldn’t have been high on her list of ‘must dos’.
Everyone came back to the house after the funeral. As they filled the kitchen, talking and drinking tea and beer, I’d been embarrassed about the shabby wallpaper. Why was she so disorganised? Why didn’t she get stuff done like other mothers? Later on I’d wept about that, thinking bad things about her. It had been childish.
I walked over to where a large patch of wallpaper hung, curled up like an old treasure map. It was decorated with herbs – coriander, parsley, rosemary, thyme – the names in curly writing below the picture. I remembered as a child tracing my tiny finger over those delicate little green and brown sketches, wondering what the words meant, thinking them some magical incantation.
‘Still no sign of him?’ I heard Kevin say into the phone. He shook his head and turned his back to me. ‘I thought he would’ve turned up by now.’
Shelley was one of those loud talkers and I could hear her excited garbling from across the kitchen. I tore off the wallpaper with a loud rip. Kevin crouched over the phone and covered his ear with his hand.
‘Yes, I checked … yes, okay.’ A strained tone emerged in Kevin’s voice. ‘Alright, what time?’ He glanced at me as I folded the piece of wallpaper into a wad and shoved it into the top of the bin, crushing the rubbish down. ‘Okay, we’ll see you then.’
We’ll see you, I thought. Was he talking about me? I had found the kettle by this stage, sitting atop the gas stove. I walked to the sink where Kevin stood, rubbing at the dark bristles that had appeared on his chin overnight, like pencil shading on a cartoon baddy.
He hooked the receiver back onto the wall mount. ‘A kid went missing night before last. They still haven’t found him,’ he said.
‘Yeah?’ I filled the kettle and replaced the lid. ‘Who?’ I glanced at Kevin.
‘Dylan.’ Kevin frowned, rubbing a hand over his bristly chin.
‘Dylan?’
‘Koslovski. From two farms over. You know, Karen’s kid who’s been here a few times, helping me out?’
‘Oh, him.’
I knew Dylan. But not well. He’d hung around our place a bit doing odd jobs on the school holidays. Kevin said the boy’s dad, Gary, worked away at the mines and wasn’t around much. I remember seeing Dylan at the winter barn dance they had at the community hall in the July holidays. Mum and Kevin dragged me there, hoping I’d make friends. Dylan had been mucking around in the dirt outside with the other twelve-year-olds. Too young to be standing coolly inside near the bar and too old to be skipping around the hall with the little kids, the half-growns wrestled in the yard, kicking up dust and getting their freshly washed jeans filthy.
Dylan had yelled out as we walked in, ‘Hey, Kevin!’, and I remember Mum looking sideways at Kevin. She hadn’t liked the Koslovskis much, and had said once, when she didn’t know I was listening, that the dad was a drunk.
‘It’s not the boy’s fault, Lily.’
‘I know,’ she’d said to him. ‘You’re kind to Dylan. It’s good of you.’
That had been the last time I’d seen the kid.
Kevin ran his hand through his greying hair.
‘A group of us went out looking with the police yesterday, before I picked you up.’
‘And you didn’t find anything?’
‘No.’
‘Did he run away?’
‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘I have to go look for him. The SES are coming in today to organise a bigger search.’ His eyes were cloudy, a mesh of red lines below heavy lids. Normally Kevin’s eyes were a rare, bright blue; Mum used to say they were like glimpses of a coral sea. But they looked duller than I remembered. ‘We need as many people as possible to help.’
‘Oh.’ I placed the kettle on the stove and held a lit match to the gas, which whoomped into neat blue feathers. That was his way of asking me. I knew that much about Kevin; he was one of those people who spoke around the topic and you had to read between the lines. Most of the time, I didn’t bother. Sometimes there weren’t any lines to read between; he was a man of few words.
I know it sounds selfish but I didn’t really want to go out with Kevin and look for some stupid kid who had got himself lost. I mean the boy was twelve and could probably look after himself, right? He’d turn up in a couple of hours. Besides, I didn’t want to be around people or face all the curious glances I was likely to get from the locals who hadn’t seen me since the funeral.
‘I’m doing a dump run.’ He walked over
