Madeleine Streater

Madeleine Streater

M

adeleine Streater is from the Southern Highlands of New South Wales. She holds a Bachelor of Arts with First Class Honours from the University of Sydney and achieved a Distinction in her MA. The first chapter of her novel, The Be All and End All, was awarded the 2015 John Marsden and Hachette Australia Prize for Young Writers.

A year after his wife Sal’s death, single father Colin Schreiber – unable to cope with his new life – takes his stepchildren out of the city to Nummerak, a former sheep station, and Sal’s childhood home. Nine-year-old Marcus loves the farm; sixteen-year-old Aaron thinks Nummerak is too isolated to be bearable. For their older sister, Anna, the farm is only a reminder of her mother’s unhappy childhood. Tensions in the family are strained when they are approached by a mining company who want to purchase the property.

The children must decide exactly how they feel about their mother’s past, her home, and their place in the local community. In the following extract – which takes place early on in the novel – Aaron and Marcus meet their neighbour, Tom. madeleine_streater@outlook.com

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From The Be All and End All AARON

I

t’s our first morning at Nummerak and already the minor thrill of fleeing the city has well and truly worn off. I reckon there’s nowhere in the whole world that’s quite as boring as Gran’s place. If you ask me, when Patrick White talked about The Great Australian Emptiness, he was referring, specifically, to here. Gran’s house isn’t near Sydney or Melbourne, where things do tend to happen, even if they happen six to eight months after they happen in London and New York. And it’s not in the outback, where you can see cool things – dingoes and Uluru and snakes and scorpions and wild camels – proper Crocodile Dundee shit. Gran’s house isn’t in the mountains or in the rainforest or even on the coast. It’s on that flat and empty bit of land that surrounds all those other, more interesting places; the plain brown land that crowds around beauty like plebs swarming a celebrity at the airport. Nummerak is the kind of place you pass through when you’re on your way to somewhere else. It’s not the sort of place you’d want to live.

I’m sitting out on the verandah, trying to look out at the paddocks, but I can hardly see anything through the rosebushes. The whole house is wrapped in them: prickly, prying, heartless, gluttonous, wilting-at-theedges rosebushes. When we arrived last night and I saw just how overgrown Gran’s beloved rosebushes were, I knew immediately that something had happened to her. Colin and Anna have gone to find out just what did happen, exactly. Trust me, though, Anna doesn’t really give a damn about Gran. Gran could be six feet under or she could have run off to join the 259

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circus and Anna wouldn’t care. But Colin asked her to go with him, so she did. Anna is basically a somnambulist; she just lets people lead her around.

‘Aaron,’ says Marcus, creeping out onto the verandah with my order – a piece of toast on a plate, and one of the books I brought down from Sydney.

‘Thanks.’

‘Is that the right book?’ he says anxiously, sitting down beside me on the bench.

‘Yeah, it’s the right one,’ I say. It’s not, but that doesn’t matter. Marcus can’t really read, which you can’t blame him for. His education has been disrupted somewhat by his bad health, and the fact that his mum is dead.

‘Henry V,’ he says.

‘Yep,’ I say. It’s actually Macbeth.

I reach over and wipe a smudge of Vegemite from his chin. He’s a cute kid. His dad, Greg, is Vietnamese, and he’s inherited his black, silky hair, dark eyes, and smooth, flat nose. For his first eight years, he was all Tran, and no Wilson. But in the past six months, his round face has started morphing a little. Unlike Greg’s nose, Marcus’s nose is now smattered with freckles, souvenirs from countless Saturdays spent at Bronte beach. His chubby cheeks have deflated, exposing his wide cheekbones.

His baby teeth have all fallen out and the teeth that have sprung up crookedly in their place look too broad, too rectangular, and too large for his mouth. He doesn’t look like a baby-faced kid anymore, but almost like a little adult, with little adult thoughts running through his little adult brain.

‘It’s freezing out here,’ he says. ‘Why aren’t you inside?’

‘It’s not freezing, it’s crisp.’

‘Crisp?’

I just nod and eat my toast. I don’t tell him the real reason I’m out here, which is that there is something peculiarly depressing about being inside that house, with all those photos of dead relatives staring out at you.

If I tell him how they freak me out he’ll think they’re something to be scared of, and won’t sleep tonight.

‘Why don’t you go in and have a nap,’ I say.

‘I’m not tired,’ he says, but he can’t stifle a yawn. He was up early this 260

morning, running around in his pyjamas. I hand him my empty plate and he drifts inside.

The book he’s brought me is a fancy hardback, with silvery vines snaking down the spine and thick, grainy pages with a golden edge. It was a gift from Mum’s best friend, Molly. She turned up at our place the morning after Mum’s funeral, bringing the book along with the usual casseroles and stir-fries. She was the only friend of Mum’s who really stuck around after the separation from Greg. Most of their friends were couples, and when it came to picking sides, they tended to go with Greg. I reckon that at least some of them thought Mum was a snob and were glad to see the back of her. But Molly was single, and she had always been Mum’s friend, not Greg’s. They were roughly the same age; they were both fun and intelligent and voted for the Greens; and, most importantly, they both thought the sun shone out my arse. Sometimes I think Mum would have lived her life exactly like Molly – practising yoga, baking sourdough on Sundays, partying at Mardi Gras – if only she hadn’t been saddled with us.

I open the book and the spine cracks like a bone breaking. * ‘What are you reading?’

‘Holy shit.’ I almost drop my book. A random little boy has appeared out of nowhere, snuck up onto the verandah, and perched himself on the railing. God knows how long he’s been sitting there, staring at me.

‘Shit’s not a nice word,’ says the kid. He’s maybe ten or eleven. There are so many freckles across his cheeks and nose that they blur together in one big smudge. ‘Sorry, I scared you.’

‘You didn’t scare me. You startled me. Who the hell are you?’

‘I’m Thomas O’Leary. But you can call me Tom.’ His jumper is tied around his shoulders, which makes him look like a member of the Rose Bay golf club. The effect is almost ruined, though, by his dirty jeans and ratty, too-large T-shirt.

‘How did you get here?’ I demand.

‘I rode my bike over. I’m from Shepherd’s Run.’ ‘From where?’

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‘Shepherd’s Run?’ he says, as in, golly-gosh-EVERYone’s-heard-ofShepherd’s-Run. He points over to the west. ‘It’s the farm next to Nummerak.’

I glance in the direction he’s pointing, but I can’t see any houses or anything, just an endless stretch of brown paddocks.

‘Your dad and sister came to see my mum this morning,’ he says in a loud voice. ‘They wanted to know where Mrs Wilson went.’

‘Do you know where she went?’

‘Yeah, she’s in St. Martha’s.’

‘Where?’

‘The nursing home?’ He rolls his eyes, fed up with my hopelessness.

‘Your dad and sister went to see her.’

‘Shouldn’t you be at school?’ I say.

‘I’m sick.’

‘Then shouldn’t you be in bed?’

‘My mum said fresh air would be good for my cold.’ He sniffs, loudly, to prove he’s got a snotty nose. ‘Your phone is broken. Did you know? My mum tried to call you. She said I should come over here and see how you are going. She says you’re from the city.’ He hops down from the wooden railing, and ducks underneath it instead, swinging like a monkey and tipping his head to the side. ‘Do you live near the zoo or the Opera House?’

‘Neither.’

‘What about Bondi Beach?’

‘We’re not too far from Bondi.’

‘Hmm. Sydney’s really busy and it takes ages to get anywhere on the bus,’ he says. ‘My dad says he wouldn’t live there if you paid him. What are you reading? It looks long.’

‘Marcus,’ I yell out. ‘Come out here.’

‘Who’s Marcus?’ says the kid.

‘My brother.’

Marcus slips out the back door, rubbing sleep from his eyes. When he sees Tom he comes over and stands next to me, looking shy.

‘I’m your neighbour. My name is Thomas O’Leary but you can call me Tom.’ ‘I’m Marcus,’ says Marcus. ‘You can call me Marcus.’

‘Pleased to meet you, Marcus.’ Tom sticks out a skinny hand for 262

Marcus to shake. Marcus just stares at the floating hand, until I give him a nudge, and he takes it.

Soon enough, though, the two of them are off playing some game in the yard. Tom is ordering Marcus back and forth, to gather gum leaves and bark and magpie feathers. They’re heaping their treasures in piles, for no obvious reason. I stay where I am, trying to read, but after ten minutes Marcus is back, tugging on my arm. ‘We need your help.’

‘Why?’ ‘Tom says we have to dig a hole, and we need a shovel.’

‘I don’t have a shovel. Tell him to use a stick.’

‘You’re not meant to play with sticks.’

‘Well, then you’re definitely not meant to play with shovels. What’s up, Markie? Don’t you like this kid? What sort of game are you playing, anyway?’

He looks down at his muddy hands and doesn’t say anything. I’m feeling pretty fond of him at this very second. Thank God I ended up with him as a brother, and not Thomas freaking O’Leary.

‘I just don’t think Col would want us to dig a hole,’ he says finally.

‘Christ, Markie. Don’t worry about that. Col has bigger problems to deal with than a hole in the lawn.’

He just looks down again at his hands. But the shovel question is resolved when Tom marches up the steps onto the verandah and announces that there’s no need to worry about the digging because it’s time for him to go home for lunch. ‘I’ll come back soon,’ he promises, and Mum would be proud because for once in my life I bite back a sarcastic retort. Marcus and I watch him wobble off on his bike, which is too tall for him, and has one flat tire.

‘Aaron?’ says Marcus. Tom has now shrunk to the size of a blowfly, hovering on the horizon, begging to be swatted away.

‘Yeah?’

‘I told Tom that we live by the sea and that I’m not used to it being so quiet, because there’s usually seagulls screeching, and the sound of the waves.

Then Tom said that it wouldn’t be quiet here much longer. That soon there’ll be heaps of stuff happening, and that it’s going to get busy.’

‘I very much doubt that,’ I say, and I go inside to make myself a sandwich.

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