The Workshop: The Fox

THE FOX

[Extract from “The Prologue of Jemma Raglan”]

Jemma likes foxes. She’s seen pictures of them and read things and she thinks foxes would be clever. They’d move carefully and they’d always know what was going on around them, know how to keep away from the hunters, and find what they needed from the countryside. If Jemma could be an animal, she’d be a fox, then she could sniff the air and have it tell her things.

She keeps stepping quietly, checking around her, making her eyes and ears sharp. Each time she stops the scraggy white cat stops too, but stays just behind, shakes the morning grass-damp off its paws.

She’s nearly all the way to the stables, right out by the main road from Port Adelaide to the hills. She’s only ever seen the horse sheds from a distance, when she came as far as the big dirt circle once, where they train the horses in their cart things, tearing around with their drivers going TSSS! TSSS! at them, making them run with stiff legs, their bellies going unk unk unk as they huff past.

Over the other side of the track she stops again, and can see some lean-tos against the stables, made of sheets of tin the way kids make forts and cubby-houses, but she can also see mattresses and blankets in them, like grownups might sleep there.

There’s too many places here for people to hide, so she moves in slowly between the thistles and the tumbleweeds, stepping the way a fox steps, looking, feeling the air. She edges along carefully, towards a pile of rubbish that’s near the lean-tos. It’s mostly tins, but she’s fixed on two flagons that’ve been chucked on the heap. She two deep breaths, does one last check, and darts in, tucks a flagon under each arm, and she’s gone like the wind and the cat is too.

She stashes her flagons in a pile of rocks and dirt near the sauce factory fence, so she can pick them up after dark, to bring them home and hide them under the house. She has to do this way because her mother’s rule is all money from the empties has to be hers, even though Jemma and Joey scab about half of them from the drains and paddocks around Woodie North, while the rest are her dad’s leftovers. But her mother gets all the money. It’s how it works. But Jemma’s own rule is that any flagon she scabs is her own, because she’s the one who has to do the scabbing and they’re hard to find. AND they’re one and sixpence. EACH. Finding flagons is like finding money.

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It’s Bottle-oh day. His truck’s coming into the street and he’s stirring up the black dust from the Port Pirie grit-stuff they put on the roads. He honks his horn and yells Bottle-oh Bottle-oh out the open side of his truck and everyone’s pulling out bags and boxes and standing on the edge of the street. Especially the kids, because for most of them Bottle-oh day is pocket money day.

Jemma dashes around the back and counts her neat stack of bottles into the sack and drags it out. Her mother follows her to the fence to wait, because it’s still nearly a week until Endowment Day and she’s looking for every penny she can find.

‘How are you today Blossom?’ the Bottle-oh says as he takes Jemma’s bag. She likes the Bottle-oh. His truck is old and beat up and so is he. He always looks like he needs a shave and a bath and have his clothes put in the incinerator but he’s a kind old man and he knows how she does things. It’s like he understands. There’s not a lot of people who do.

‘How many today?’ he asks, and Jemma says thirty three, and he heaves her bagful up with the rest and gives her a fresh bag. He never counts hers. ‘Well, that’s two and ninepence,’ and he hands over three bob and says how he’s short of change today and that’ll have to be close enough. He always does that. Adds on a bit. But he doesn’t do it for anyone else.

She gives her mother the money and waits until she and Joey go inside, then runs around the house, looks about, quickly scrambles in under, grabs her flagons and crawls to the front edge of the stumps and waits, watching across the wasteland.

The kids and mothers on her side have all mostly gone, and the Bottle-oh finishes and crosses over the top into Ely Street. She waits until he’s about halfway along, puts her head out, checks again to make sure her mother and Joey aren’t outside, and runs for it, her two flagons held tight to her chest. Puffing, she gets amongst the Ely Street kids. When she hands them over the Bottle-oh looks at her for a second.

‘Got some Specials today have we Blossom?’ He always calls them her Specials. He twitches his head and winks at her and gives her three bob, because he knows this round’s her own, and he’s pleased for her. Jemma walks back across the paddock, not hurrying, as if she’s just out walking. Minding her own business. She goes around the back, makes sure there’s no-one about, dives in under the house, and puts the money in her treasure tin.

She sits and looks at her tin for a while and the cat comes over and looks as well, then she tips it out on the sheet of cardboard that’s her floor. There’s three-and-nine-pence-ha’penny, a soldier’s uniform button, a pink-bow hairslide made of a sort of bone-stuff, a big pearly button that’s really beautiful, some nice beads on a string that’s like a necklace, the little tin JENNIFER nametag her dad made for her at the GPO, and two pink plastic babies that came with some Salvo lollies one Christmas. And her pictures cut out of magazines.

Her favourite picture’s still the Bonnington's Irish Moss one, of the bare-foot woman with a shawl over her head, standing in front of her cottage with the sea behind, her basket of magic seaweed on her shoulder. The picture looks like her grandmother’s song, about going over the sea to Ireland and the strangers coming and the sun going down on Galway Bay, and Jemma thinks she’d like to go there one day, for her grandmother who’s never been. And for herself. It’s another part of her plan. For the time when she’s older, after she turns fourteen.

One by one Jemma and the cat look at her treasures again in the dim light, then she sets them back in her tin and puts it up on its ledge. She can feel her friend people around her now, and they’re smiling, because they’re pleased for her too. They always are. They’re on her side.

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