24

Louisa does have friends, mostly others like her, standing at the fringes. Gail ‘Goddie’ Godwin is not one of these. She’s popular in a heart-swelling way, at least to Louisa. She loves watching kids swarm around Goddie. Makes her feel like something’s going right. They sat next to each other at primary school on that first morning and have remained mates.

In the last year of school Louisa works Friday nights and Saturday mornings selling shoes in an arcade in the city she loves. She also loves the lights and the money and the shoes. She got the job when she was sixteen by walking up and down Bourke Street with Goddie asking every shop if they had a vacancy. Taking it in turns to be rejected, it was amazing how fast they got used to the word ‘no’. Since she started working, she has not asked for money from her mother and this is a source of pride. Not a farthing, not a brass razoo, she tells Goddie with delight.

But now at seventeen she has another job. It’s Louisa’s responsibility to take Jessie to her crèche and to pick her up every day. She boards the bus with her two-year-old sister as women board buses laden with bags of groceries, sighing and feeling every atom of their weight.

She has given up trying to look cool for the boys on the bus and now they are as distant as mountain ranges but just as appealing.

Each day she sits Jessie beside the window and sometimes she engages with the child; mostly though, she ignores her and tries to read some novel or another from the school library. She reads The Catcher in the Rye and wonders bitterly how Holden Caulfield would go looking after a two-year-old.

She reads Slaughterhouse 5 and sometimes on the bus she looks up, seeing Footscray and thinking of Dresden. She reads a book on British rock and roll and pinches it from the library because she wants to be droll and knowledgeable like the author, Nik Cohn.

Rainy days, she draws pictures of cats and dogs on the steamy windows for the child. She’s almost always aware that she was delivered a burden when this child was born, but it takes too long to work out that it isn’t the child’s fault.

At the bus stop nearest to the school, the other kids streak ahead while she tows Jessie down Morrison Street. There are days when the weather opens itself upon them. The wind and the sun and the rain and the cold and high indigo skies, each of them shadows Louisa and Jessie.

In a thunderstorm one day with the bruised sky heaving from ocean-green to purple, Louisa pushes Jessie under her coat and runs through the lashing rain. Every drop that lands scalds as if it’s boiling and they run all the long way to the crèche and Jessie loses a shoe.

Often though, if they’re early, they nick across to the mangy paddock opposite where a raddled old swayback horse lives. They name the horse Chester because of his chestnut colour. Jessie loves him until he mistakes her fingers for grass and nips her with his great yellow teeth. Louisa holds the sobbing child and feels her distress in her own body.

At the crèche, Louisa deposits the rashy two-year-old – her cheeks look like they’ve been sandpapered – with a goodbye kiss and a wave. Then she walks the last bit down towards the school, listening to the broadcast of Jessie’s anguish for longer than she would believe possible.

Squatting at the end of the street, Footscray High is a pile of drab grey concrete bricks with a sagging tin roof and a gathering of scraggly shrubs making some kind of effort to be a garden.

She swings her bag over her shoulder and decides there will come a day when she will not have to look after babies. And a day when she will be free of her family. Free to be herself. But she always remembers acutely, as if pricked by a pin, that she has to collect Jessie at three-thirty sharp. Or else her mother will have to pay more – and this cannot be.

On the bus on the way home, the little girl is tired and wants her mum. Louisa holds the child’s hand as if she is chained to her. At the service station, she gets off first and Jessie jumps down the big steps all on her own and into her sister’s arms and Louisa swings her in a big arc that silently speaks of love.