CHAPTER 21

The day after Mum came home was hot, well over ninety degrees, and the road in front of the house shimmered so you weren’t always sure where the edges were.

I looked out of the lounge room windows and noticed all the plants were starting to lie over sideways in the heat. They just didn’t have the heart to fight the blazing, relentless sun, and I didn’t blame them. Mr Driver had been up watering at 6 am, but that wasn’t going to make a difference. Today was the day flowers were going to die on him. I did all this noticing not from our lounge room window, but from Mr Driver’s.

The day before, the day Mum had actually returned from Scotland at last, Mr Driver had taken his car to the Adelaide Airport to collect Mum from the plane with us, because we needed two vehicles to fit everyone and all Mum’s bags. Dad had rung Mum to come home, but she had gone on a trip with a cousin somewhere far away and they weren’t able to contact her. They said they might not see her for weeks and weeks. We buried Caleb six weeks before she touched down in Adelaide. Dad asked Ruthy and I to stay with the families we were living with until Mum came home because he had lots of things to sort out about Caleb and trying to find Mum to bring her home. And I think he asked us to stay where we were because he was so sad and because I should have told him about the sacrifice thing, and I didn’t.

Aunty Jean got crosser and crosser with me because I picked my head so much in the night, and she would only let me sleep on one old pillow that was stained yellow from snot and ear wax and dribble, and which was covered in an old towel she had pinned around it.

Ruthy and I were allowed to go to the main service when we buried Caleb, but we had to go home to the Roystons and the Hodgesons straight after because they didn’t think it was suitable for children to go to the graveside. I think they were very wrong about that, and I had two kinds of nightmares for the longest time afterwards.

The first nightmare was like a play where I was a Catholic priest who was organising the service, but I couldn’t get everyone to behave and line up by the graveside. I wanted them all to march around the grave to ‘Colonel Bogey’ from Bridge on the River Kwai, but they just wouldn’t do it properly, even though I waved a big ball of incense at them and threatened I could send them all to Hell. And then we were all standing by the open grave but the dirt kept dropping into the hole and filling up and I had to get down into the grave with a spade to try to get it out. When we finally buried Caleb, Ruthy and I cried and cried and cried, and then Ruthy would say, ‘Dorcas, you forgot to put him in the box – we have to do it all again,’ and the play would start from the beginning.