Ben Rice - Pobby and Dingan

We waited for him to come home and played a game of chess to help pass the time and calm each other down. I got Mum in checkmate after fifteen moves. No one can beat me at chess, and I reckon one day I’ll be a bloody grandmaster or something. Either that or a secret agent like James Blond. But I have to admit that this time Mum wasn’t concentrating too well and so she made it pretty easy for my bishops and knights to do the business. The problem was that Mum kept gazing out of the window with a dazed look about her, and I was pretty sure she wasn’t just thinking about Dad but she was also pommie-sick again and thinking about Granny Pom and the other pommie friends she left behind her in England all those years ago.

Anyway, when Dad eventually came home late that afternoon he gave us all a hug and said that the prison was okay and a bit like a motel except that the beds were hard and the bars weren’t the kind that served beer. He said not to worry, because he was going to sort out this whole mess good and proper. But he didn’t know quite how. And Mum told him he’d better not try and sort out anything but just keep his head down and keep out of trouble until the trial and all that shit. And then my dad asked me if Pobby and Dingan had come back yet. I shook my head. “Kellyanne thinks they are maybe-dead,” I said.

“She’s still very upset,” said my mum. “She’s been sulking all day. You shouldn’t have been so careless, Rex, you really shouldn’t.”

“I shouldn’t have done a lot of things,” said my dad, letting out a long sigh. But he was pleased to be back. And he was glad I think of all the attention we were giving him. I even went and got him a stubby of V.B. from the fridge and then I sat there asking him more things about prison. And after that we talked about opal all day, until it got dark and until there was suddenly this godawful shriek and Mum came rushing in from near the front door saying, “Oh, my Lord! God! Help! Get water! Get water fast!” She ran into the kitchen and started filling up a bucket from the sink.

We rushed out front and what hit me first was a smokey smell like the smell of a cigar. And then, when I peered out into the dark, I could see grey figures twisting up into the sky quite awesomely. Dancing. But my dad whispered: “Jesus! They’ve set our fence on fire!” And then I twigged that those figures were swirls of smoke, and some of the stakes were actually flaming at the tops. The light from the flame danced against the walls of our little house and showed up enormous dark lines like zebra stripes. They were letters sprayed on with an aerosol can or something, and they said:

BURN THE RATTERS

Mum threw her bucket of water over the fence post while I ran in to fill up some more and Dad just stood gaping at the words on the wall beside the living-room window. He was there when I came back, still staring, his hand on the back of his neck, not saying a word. And then he disappeared around the back of our house for paint. When the flames were out I went into Kellyanne’s room and told her what had happened. But she just hid under her blanket and said nothing.

About this time Kellyanne started getting really sick. I can’t explain it and neither could anybody else. She just lay in bed saying that she was very tired and worried because Pobby and Dingan hadn’t come back, and that she couldn’t be sure if they were dead or not. They might still be wandering around over the opal fields all lost and frightened, and there were wild pigs out there and snakes and all kinds. It made her want to puke just to think about it. Well, Pobby and Dingan had got us into enough shit as it was, thank you very much, and I felt angry with them. Pretty goddamn angry for spoiling our family name. And I thought Kellyanne was faking at first, pretending to be ill like she pretended to have friends. But then I heard her puking in the dunny. She was sick. She really was.

She wouldn’t eat anything. Mum called Jack the Quack and he came and sat on Kellyanne’s bed and did some stethoscope stuff. He told my mum that Kellyanne was suffering from a nervous illness or depression, and that she had a fever. He tried to persuade her to eat a little of something. But she wouldn’t. He told Kellyanne that if she kept this up he would have to take her to hospital and force-feed her through some disgusting pipes. I told Jack about everything that had happened with Pobby and Dingan but he just smiled and frowned and smiled again and used the words “syndrome” and “clinical” and “psychological” a lot. Well, I didn’t know what those words meant but they sounded like pretty useless kinds of words to me.

Before Jack the Quack left he hung around talking to Dad about his new jackhammer. He told him that he’d heard about the scuffle out at the claim and that he was behind Dad all the way — and didn’t believe a word of the rumours that were spreading around Lightning Ridge like a bushfire. But there was something funny about how Jack the Quack was behaving. Sort of nervousish. And when he said Kellyanne would be better off in hospital, I reckoned he said that because he didn’t trust my folks to look after her. Plus, when Mum asked him to stay for dinner he made some excuse about having to go line-dancing and scuttled away like a goanna.

My dad started to look pale too. He said, “No bastard’s taking my princess to no stupid hospital,” over and over again. “We Williamsons can look after each other just fine. We don’t need no charity or help from nobody!” Late at night he would pace up and down, shaking his head, saying: “You’re right, Mum. This is all my fault. Maybe we should never have come out to the Ridge in the first place. She’s a sensitive kid. Too precious for this place. She gets bullied at school, don’t she?” That was my dad. He started to get all emotional, and cracked open tinny after tinny of V.B. And then he cried. It was like the beer was going in his mouth and coming out of his eyes.

Well, Mum and Dad didn’t dare tell Kellyanne to stop this once and for all or explain to her straight that Pobby and Dingan were only in her imagination and that she’d better switch the bloody thing off. They’d done it once before, you see, and Kellyanne went a little bit crazy and started screaming so hard the whole town thought they was being air-raided by nuclear missiles from France. They knew better than to tell my sis that she was being stupid. Kellyanne didn’t handle that kind of criticism stuff too well.

So now Kellyanne just lay in bed. She slept or just lay whimpering. That’s all that she did. She got so thin that it didn’t look like there was any kind of body under the sheet.

Well, all this started to rattle my mind, and every day I would wriggle through the car door and clamber up on to my bunk and sit thinking. I figured this was the end of the world, because we were all going crazy. Pobby and Dingan were messing up my family and they weren’t even here. And they also weren’t even anywhere. And although I thought my sister was nuts, I didn’t like to see her like this and hear her chucking up in the dunny. And I wanted my dad to cheer up and go off to his mining again, and I wanted my mother to stop worrying and being homesick, and I wanted the Williamson family name to gleam and sparkle and be all right.

And I knew flaming well that the answers to all these problems lay with Pobby and Dingan themselves.

And then I figured out something else. I didn’t like to admit it, but it seemed to me the only way to make Kellyanne better would be to find Pobby and Dingan. But how do you go looking for imaginary friends? I stayed awake all the bastard-night trying to get my head around the problem. I reckoned that the first thing would be to have as many people as possible looking for them, or pretending to look, so that at least Kellyanne knew that people cared, that they believed in her imaginary friends and wanted to help out. See, I’d remembered that Kellyanne was always most happy when people asked questions about Pobby and Dingan. Usually that made a smile crawl over her face. And it seemed to me if a hell of a lot of people was asking questions about them then she would get better fast. I also knew darn well that there was quite a few people in the Ridge who loved Kellyanne to bits even though they were a little unsure about the rest of us Williamsons, and there were some who almost believed in Pobby and Dingan or who were real nice and understanding about it. And I had it in the back of my mind that if those people believed in imaginary friends and all that shit, or if they knew how real those friends were for Kellyanne, then they’d believe that my dad really had been looking for them out at the mine and not ratting Old Sid’s claim.