STEVEN HERRICK was born in Brisbane, the youngest of seven children. At school, his favourite subject was soccer, and he dreamed of football glory while he worked at various jobs, including fruit picking. Now, he’s a full time writer and performs in many schools each year. He loves talking to students and their teachers about stories, poetry, soccer and even golf.
Steven lives in the Blue Mountains with his wife and sons. Visit his website at www.acay.com.au/~sherrick
Love, ghosts & nose hair – shortlisted in the 1997 CBCA awards and the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards
A place like this – shortlisted in the 1999 CBCA awards and the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, and commended in the 1998 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards
The simple gift – shortlisted in the 2001 CBCA awards and the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards
By the river – Honour Book in the 2005 CBCA awards and winner of the Ethel Turner Prize in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards
LONESOME
HOWL
Steven Herrick
First published in 2006
Copyright © Steven Herrick 2006
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or ten per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.
Allen & Unwin
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Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
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National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Herrick, Steven, 1958 .
Lonesome howl
ISBN 9 781741 14656 1.
ISBN 1 74114 656 9.
1. Teenagers – Juvenile fiction. 2. Father and child – Juvenile fiction.
3. Self-actualizatioin (Psychology) in adolescence – Juvenile fiction.
4. Wolves – Juvenile fiction. I. Title.
A823.3
Cover photograph from Photolibrary/Brad Green
Cover design by Sandra Nobes
Set in 10.5pt Apollo by Midland Typesetters
Printed in Australia by McPherson's Printing Group
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Teachers’ notes are available from www.allenandunwin.com
When I was eighteen, I told Mum I wanted to be a writer. The next day, she went out and bought me a desk and a chair from a second-hand furniture store. Nearly thirty years on, I still write my books at that desk.
Mum died last year.
I like writing at her desk. It brings us closer.
With love.
S.H.
Also by STEVEN HERRICK
Water Bombs
Love, ghosts & nose hair
A place like this
The simple gift
By the river
for children
The place where the planes take off
My life, my love, my lasagne
Poetry, to the rescue
The spangled drongo
Love poems and leg-spinners
Tom Jones saves the world
Do-wrong Ron
Naked Bunyip Dancing
CONTENTS
One Lucy
Two Jake
Three Holidays
Four Lonesome howl
Five The deep silence
Six The mist
Seven The cave
Eight This is what happens
Nine Morning
Ten Home
ONE
Lucy
Lucy
My name’s Lucy Harding.
Lucy’s not short for anything,
it’s just Lucy.
That’s right, with a ‘y’.
Only people from the city
spell it with an ‘i’,
or call themselves Lucienne.
I’m not French,
and I’m not from the city.
I’m from Battle Farm.
My grandma named it that,
on account of her always saying,
‘It’s a battle to keep this place;
a battle to survive.’
And she did pretty good.
At surviving, I mean.
She died a few years ago,
aged ninety-two.
She’s buried up the hill
next to Grandpa,
overlooking their farm
and I reckon she’s up there
thinking,
Why did my daughter marry
someone like him?
Mr Right.
He’s never right. He just thinks he is.
He is Dad,
but I don’t want to talk about him.
Swampland
There are two farms in this valley.
No one else can be bothered
cutting through the ragged paperbarks,
the Paterson’s curse
and the creeping lantana.
Wolli Creek flows deep into the valley
through a sandy swamp,
alive with mosquitoes and bugs.
From the banks, big granite boulders
step up to the hills.
Nothing for farming.
Everyone at school says
we live in the arse-end of the earth.
They all tell stories about
diseased feral animals prowling,
quicksand that swallows you whole
and strange lights hovering above the bog.
Sometimes, when I’m bored, I join in.
I tell the little kids
about long-winged bats
and wild pigs, big as lions,
and blood-curdling screams at midnight.
It’s all I can do to stop from laughing,
but, hell,
it passes the time.
The Hardings
So there’s me.
I’m sixteen.
And my mum,
who milks our cow, Martha,
and cooks what she grows,
scraping dirt off potatoes and carrots,
washing them in the sink.
Every evening after dinner
she sits on the back verandah
looking up at her parents’ graves.
She doesn’t say much
and that suits me fine.
And there’s Peter, my brother,
who’s twelve, but acts like he’s eight.
You know, always pestering me,
or playing shoot-’em-up games on his PlayStation.
Once, he climbed up on the shed roof
in his Superman cape.
Yeah, no kidding.
I bet you’re thinking
he jumped off and broke his arm.
Right?
Wrong.
Superman was scared.
Mum got the ladder
and she sent me up
to help him down.
I had to talk all nice and careful,
like I was worried.
‘Come on, Peter. It’ll be all right.
Superman can’t die.’
Dad kept fiddling with his car.
That’s all he ever does.
Tinker with the engine,
shoot his rifle at targets
and go on a
bout
everything I do wrong.
The death of poor Winnie
If Peter thinks he’s Superman,
Dad acts like some
straight-shooting outlaw.
He sets himself
on the old vinyl car seat against the gum tree
and he gets Peter to draw pictures,
rabbits and deer and kangaroos,
on big sheets of paper.
Then he sticks them on the shed
and fires away.
Does he hit the target?
Well, he hits the shed, at least.
Except one time,
when he had way too much to drink.
I sat under the house
hoping he’d shoot his foot off.
Now that would be funny.
He blasted away
doing his best to hit the mark
but he missed everything
except Winnie, the pig.
You should have heard Superman cry.
Mum rang Mr Samuels, the town butcher,
who drove out and cut up poor Winnie.
We had pork for dinner
and bacon for breakfast,
every day for a month.
It’s the only time
I can remember the old bastard
doing anything useful.
Questions
When Dad’s head is so far under the bonnet
I imagine walking up behind,
giving him one swift kick
and running away,
never coming back.
But not Peter.
He tries to help.
He hangs around,
shuffling his feet in the dirt,
picking up tools,
leaning over the engine,
asking questions.
Dad only ever answers
with a grunt or a shrug.
jabber jabber jabber.
Dad lifts his head and frowns,
spits in the dirt
and picks up another spanner
as he’s forced to listen to his own son.
If that was me doing all the talking
he’d tell me,
straightaway,
to piss off.
I lounge around,
pretending I’m reading,
listening to Peter
and knowing that my stupid father
doesn’t know how to shut him up.
‘Keep talking, Peter,’
I whisper to myself.
‘Ask another question.
Go on.’
Lucy, and the work
Mostly I stay out of his way.
Simple as that.
At dinner I eat quicker than I should
and keep my head down.
Whenever anybody asks me
to get the cordial from the fridge
or the salt from the pantry,
I do it without a word.
Don’t think I’m weak.
I’m not.
I’m snarling underneath
and they know it.
I’m doing what I’m told to avoid getting hit.
When Grandma was alive
Dad would take his dinner outside
because she stared him down.
Grandma said what she liked.
She wasn’t afraid of anything.
She’d grin across the table.
‘You don’t own nothing, Lucy,
unless you work for it.
Remember that.
Working is the owning.’
She’d look at Mum,
daring her to say something,
but no one crossed Grandma.
Some people die
In the last year of her life
Grandma could barely walk.
Every morning she’d struggle out to the verandah,
one arm around my shoulder,
her shaky hand holding a walking stick.
There she’d sit, watching the farm.
He’d keep out of the way,
in the shed or out the back,
smoking one fag after another.
Grandma knew what went on.
She waved her stick at him
whenever he came near.
She’d tell my mum to stand up to him,
to fight back.
Mum was deaf to all that.
When Grandma couldn’t leave her bed,
a week before she died,
I sat beside her.
She asked me to draw back the curtains
and open the window,
so she could see up the hill
to Grandpa’s grave.
I stayed with her for hours
on the faded old lounge chair,
ready to help if she needed water
or her pills.
It was safe there.
One morning, Grandma heard Dad shouting.
She reached for my hand,
squeezing tight each time his voice
stormed through the walls.
She said, ‘Lucy, some people die
long before they’re in the ground.’
Lucy’s will
I don’t believe in omens
or signs and stuff like that.
But every morning,
before I get out of bed,
I lean over to look at Beaumont Hill
rising above our farm
like a wild animal about to pounce.
If there’s a dark cloud behind the hill
I stay in bed for five more minutes,
waiting to see if the wind blows it past.
I close my eyes
and picture the cloud
moving away from our farm
with the westerly.
If I open my eyes too soon
I know that cloud will stay there all day.
It doesn’t mean bad luck.
He’ll be in a crappy mood,
cloud or no cloud.
Nothing can change that.
I close my eyes and focus
on the darkness drifting away.
By force of will
I want to move the cloud.
if I could do it.
The witness
Ranting, yelling, stomping
around their bedroom.
Sometimes she answers back
and I hear his voice change:
deeper, menacing.
It’s the quiet that scares me.
I pull the blankets tight
and hide in my dark cocoon
waiting for another explosion.
I should help Mum, somehow,
be on her side.
But she does nothing to stop it.
‘Just keep out of his way, Lucy.’
As if it’s our fault;
as if we made him like this.
She takes it without a whimper,
too scared to move.
And when he starts on me
in the daylight,
she just looks away
and I’m thinking,
She’s just glad it’s not her.
I’m not sure what hurts more,
his ugly words,
his backhanders,
or watching Mum seeing it all
and doing nothing.
Floating
I got the idea
when I helped Superman
get down off the roof.
When I want to escape,
I climb the wooden ladder
onto the shed roof
and lie back on the iron,
looking at the high clouds floating by.
I can hear the farm below me:
the dogs growling,
the click of each peg
as Mum hangs the washing,
Dad coughing, sniffing,
lighting another smoke;
Peter talking to anyone who’ll listen,
or when that doesn’t work,
talking to himself.
I know they can’t see me,
they don’t even miss me.
I close my eyes
and imagine the clouds, feather-soft,
holding me high above everything.
My body tingles.
I’m alone, if only for a while.
I stay here until the sun fades
behind Beaumont Hill,
when Mum calls me to help with dinner.
I stand and stretch my arms
open to the valley.
On a good day I can almost fool myself
that I belong here.
Preparing dinner
Mum washes the potatoes in the sink,
scrubbing the dirt loose with a plastic brush.
I peel them, ready for the boiling water,
and stare out the window at him
sitting on the seat,
his head tilting forward as he dozes.
‘Just stay out of his way.’
Mum’s so caught up in her work
she doesn’t know she’s said it aloud.
‘What?’
‘Nothing, I was just . . .’
‘You were talking about him, weren’t you?’
She turns away from the sink,
drying her hands on her apron,
getting the cutlery from the drawer.
‘What if he comes after me, Mum?
How do I get out of his way then?’
‘Lucy . . .’
‘It’s a bit hard to escape
when he‘s blocking the doorway,
don’t you reckon?’
She sets the table with nervous hands,
taking extra care with each knife and fork;
anything to avoid answering me.
She shakes her head.
‘I don’t want to fight, Lucy.’
Bloody hell.
I chuck the peeler in the sink
and storm past her.
‘Neither do I, Mum.’
TWO
Jake
Jake
I’m Jake.
Jake Jackson.
I’m fifteen years old.
I live in an old timber house
a stone’s throw from Wolli Creek.
Mum and Dad and me have lived here forever.
My Great-grandpa Ellis wandered into this area