Pobby and Dingan Read online

  “You been drinking, Rex?”

  I walked up to Sid to put things straight.

  “My dad ain’t been drinking nothing, Mr. Sid,” I said. “You see, my sister’s got two imaginary friends called Pobby and Dingan—maybe you’ve heard of them—and she thinks my dad lost them out on the claim. And we’re here looking for them. Sounds strange, I know—but there you go, that’s the truth of it.”

  Sid looked totally baffled and pretty angry. He said: “Now, don’t you go making excuses for your old man, Ashmol Williamson! You may be a clever kid, but your daddy’s been ratting my claim, ain’t he? Some of us miners have been suspecting him for some time. But now here’s the proof of it! And you’re just trying to stick up for him, ain’t you?”

  My dad stumbled over to Old Sid with his fists clenched. He said, “Now, look here, Sid. I ain’t been ratting nothing. I ain’t no thief. I’m looking for my daughter’s imaginary friends and you’d better bloody well believe it, mate!”

  But Sid wasn’t having any of it. “You can talk about invisible people as much as you like, Rex Williamson,” he said. “But I’ve had my doubts about you. A lot of us have. I’ve already reported you to the mining authority, and as soon as I saw you on my claim this evening, snuffling around for my opal, the first thing I did was radio the police, and, as a matter of fact, here they are right now!”

  The noise of a car drove into our ears and a four-wheel-drive police jeep came wobbling down the creamy red track that leads to our claim. It pulled over by our old Millard caravan and out came two policemen. Bulky fellas with hats and badges and shit. I was getting a bit worried. Kellyanne was still looking around the claim for Pobby and Dingan, and Dad had started shouting about how dare Old Sid call him a ratter, he who’d worked honestly for God knows how long, and been a pretty good sort of bloke all round. And then I went up to one of the police blokes and told him the truth of the matter about Pobby and Dingan and what my dad was doing on Old Sid’s claim. But I hadn’t got too far when there was this noise of scuffling and a grunt and I turned around to see that my dad had lost his cool and snotted Old Sid one in the nose. Well, after that the police were on my dad in a flash, and they had him in handcuffs and everything. Kellyanne came running over in a panic, saying, “Leave my dad alone! Leave him alone!” But Dad was bundled into the car and driven away in a flash. And it was us who were left alone. And then Kellyanne sat down on a mullock heap and broke down in sobs, for I reckon it was a bit too much to cope with, losing two imaginary friends and one real dad in an afternoon.

  For a while I didn’t know what to do. I just stood there watching one of those fluffy roly-poly things go cartwheeling over the claim on a breath of wind. And I thought about my dad and what a tangle he’d got himself into. And then I said: “Kellyanne, come on, we’d better get home. Pobby and Dingan will come back tonight on their own and Dad will be fine as soon as this is sorted out and the police realize what he was doing on Sid’s land. Come on, we’ll walk back and tell Mum, and get the bad bits over and done with.”

  But Kellyanne didn’t stop looking worried. She legged it over to the mine shaft and stepped over the tape which was around the top of the hole to stop people entering. She got down on all fours and peeked over the edge. And she called out Pobby and Dingan’s names down the mine shaft. There was no reply, of course. She stayed there on all fours looking down that shaft for half an hour.

  “This just isn’t like them,” she said. “This is not like them at all.”

  While Kellyanne was doing this I walked over to Old Sid the Grouch, who was still watery-eyed with pain and holding on to his nose and mooching around his claim checking to see if all his opal dirt was still there. I said: “You’ve made a big mistake here, Mr. Sid. We Williamsons were just looking for my sister’s imaginary friends. We ain’t no ratters.”

  Old Sid spat on the ground and said something about our family needing our heads inspected, and how my poor mother was too much of a pom for this place, and how he felt sorry for us that our dad was a ratter, and how the rumour was my dad had come to the Ridge in the first place to hide away from the law. And I felt so angry I walked right away, pulled Kellyanne up by the arm and marched her home. It took an hour and a half, and all the way Kellyanne was whining about how she’d lost Pobby and Dingan, and how she wouldn’t be able to sleep or eat until she found them, and how if they’d been there then they could have saved Dad and none of this would have happened. Her worried little face was covered in white dust so she looked like a little ghost.

  Well, it was dark when we got back to our home, and my mum had already heard what had happened from the police and she sent us to bed and said not to worry because everything would be sorted out soon. But I never saw her looking so angry and panicky and unsorted-out in her life. And her bedroom light stayed on all night, I swear.

  And that night at around twelve was when Kellyanne crawled into my bedroom through the Dodge door which I’d got Dad to fix up to make going to bed more interesting. And my sister looked at me all pale and fuzzy-faced and said: “Ashmol, Pobby and Dingan are maybe-dead.” And she just sat there in her pyjamas all nervous and hurt. But I was half thinking of Dad and if he was in prison and how the whole thing was Pobby and Dingan’s fault. And then I tried to get my head round how it could be their fault if they didn’t even exist.

  And I fell asleep thinking about that.

  3

  When I woke up the next day, Mum told me how Dad had been in prison overnight but he was being released and sent home until there was a trial or something which would prove that Dad hadn’t been ratting Old Sid’s claim. Mum was pretty frantic with worry, though, and she said Dad would have to keep a low profile in the Ridge and stay at home a while, until the whole thing had blown over and he’d got his respect back amongst all the miners and stuff. Ratting, you see, is the same thing as murder in Lightning Ridge—only a bit worse.

  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.

  4

  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.

  The two problems seemed to go together somehow.

  So this is what I did. The next day I went around town calling in at the shops and telling people why Kellyanne was sick. I went to The Wild Dingo, and even to The Digger’s Rest, where the toughest miners drink. I said, “Howdy, I’m Ashmol Williamson, and I’ve come to tell you my dad’s no ratter and my sister’s sick cos she’s lost her imaginary friends.” Well, there was a silence and then one of those miners came up to me, grabbed my collar and held me up by it, so that my feet came off the ground. He pulled me so close I could smell his stinking breath and said: “Listen here, kid. You go back and tell your daddy, if he ever shows his face in here again he’s gonna be the imaginary one. Understand? Imaginary! Geddit? Dead!” Well, I was just about to shit myself when a bunch of other miners came over and said to the bloke, “Put the kid down, mate. Rex Williamson is a friend of mine and those kids of his are good kids.” Well, this bastard threw me on the floor and said, “You wanna watch who your friends are!” to the men, and then walked out. The group of miners picked me up, brushed me down and asked if I was okay. I told them yes, but I was a little bit worried about my sister Kellyanne, because she was really sick and might get taken away to hospital, and how I was gonna try and lick clean my dad’s name until it shone red on black.

  I had a busy day, all rightee. I went to the Bowling Club to tell the pokie players and also to the Wallangalla Motel, where there was some line-dancing practice going on. You should of seen me. I tried to go up to people on the dance floor and get them to stop dancing and listen, but they were too busy doing their moves to the music and I kept getting caught up between people’s arms. In the end I just walked up to the bloke with the tape decks and grabbed the microphone and shouted: “Ladies and gents! Sorry to interrupt your dancing, but my name’s Ashmol Williamson, and my sister is sick and we need to help her find her imaginary
friends tomorrow!” There was this nasty high-pitched screech from the microphone, like it didn’t exactly enjoy what I’d said, and then everyone, about fifty people in all, stopped dancing and turned around and looked at me all at once. There was a silence and then I heard people mutter my dad’s name and whisper the word “ratter” to each other, and some of them frowned at me, and I knew all of a sudden what it feels like to be a mosquito. Well, I coughed into the microphone and explained in a shaky voice about my sister and Pobby and Dingan and how my dad got into trouble on Old Sid’s claim. And I told them how Pobby and Dingan had liked nothing better than line-dancing, and that unless we found them they might never be able to do it ever again. And then I suddenly ran out of things to say and felt a bit weird with all those lines of people looking at me, so I just put down the microphone and ran out and got back on my Chopper and pedalled off wobbly-legged.

  I went almost everybloodywhere. I went to the Automobile Graveyard and spoke to Ronnie, who recognized me from the time he gave me the cool door off the Dodge. I went out to the camps at Old Chum and Vertical Bill’s and the Two Mile. And some people whispered to each other about Dad and some didn’t. And some folks thought I was nuts. And some were nuts themselves anyway so it didn’t make no difference. I even went out and told the tourists out at the Big Opal. They patted me on the head and smiled and whispered to each other in funny languages. One big American man filmed me with his video camera and told me to say something cute into it so he could show his friends back home. But when it came to the crunch I couldn’t say anything and I didn’t feel too much like smiling. So I showed him my James Blond 007 impression, where I turn sharp and fire a gun like on the video that my friend Brent’s parents gave him after they struck opal out at the Three Mile. And I told this tourist how when I grew up I might have a James Blond gun and everything. But then I realized I was wasting time and Kellyanne was sick, and my dad was being called a ratter, and these tourists wouldn’t really give a shit, but.