I Started Crying Monday

By Laurene Kelly

Laurene Kelly’s first young adult novel introduces us to fourteen-year-old Julie, who is struggling with a terrible home life, but could never imagine the horror that is about to destroy her family forever. She dreams of a new life, away from her abusive father, but when her mother doesn’t arrive to meet Julie and her brother Toby after school as planned, her hopes are shattered. She is told there was an accident, but something more is wrong...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Spinifex Press
• Release date: Apr 28, 1999
• ISBN: 9781742194264

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I’d like to thank Sandra Goldbloom Zurbo for her careful editing. Maralann Damiano, Nikki Anderson and Susan Hawthorne at Spinifex all gave me the support a first-time writer needs.

CHAPTER 1

Monday Afternoon

I got off the bus. The heat. The heat. All around. In my nose, eyes and ears. I could feel it choking me, drying up my throat. Suffocating me. It sat on top of the land and refused to budge. I was sick of it. I used my maths book as a fan. Trying to get some air circulating. It made no difference, but it felt as if I was doing something. I started the long trudge home.

It must be a month now, I thought. No rain, no breeze, just heat. No one wanted to do anything. The heat was no excuse in the classroom any more. All the rooms had air-conditioning. In fact, it was the only time of the year when everyone pushed and shoved their way into class. The school got it a couple of years ago, when there had been a fatal heatwave. A couple of kids had fainted in the class and had to go to hospital by flying doctor. Rosie Adams, from grade eight, died. Everyone cried, cause she was a real funny kid. Next thing, after the funeral, all these men in suits came and oohed and aahed and the next thing the whole school had air-conditioning.

No one ever wanted to go home in summer, except those kids who swam in the waterhole out on Aboriginal land.

My brother Toby and I always had to go home. We never got detention or kept back. We hadn’t ever been to the waterhole, but really wanted to go. Maybe our mum would drive us sometime. There was only one bus way out to Woop Woop, where we lived. It left every school day, punctually, at twenty minutes to four. If Mr Simpson the bus driver was ever late, it would mean a town emergency, like the plane crash, three weeks ago.

About thirty kids from the high school and primary caught my bus. Me and my brother were the last stop and had to walk over a kilometre home from the bus stop. Some days we rode our bikes to the bus stop and left them there. Toby had ridden his bike today and I could see him ahead. Mine had a puncture.

It wasn’t just the air-conditioning though, that made me want to stay at school. It was going home. It didn’t seem like a real home, more like the home from hell.

I stopped to rearrange my heavy backpack, and get out my drink bottle. There were only a few drops left, but better than nothing. The heat shimmered, distorting the horizon. I could see the shapes of sheep, staggering about in the dirt. The colour green didn’t figure much in this environment. There was one old gum tree and many of the sheep were crowded in underneath the paltry shade it was throwing. The leaves looked more silver, than green. I could hear some bleating. In the distance I could see the unmistakeable silhouette of a dead sheep. Crows were taking care of the disposal of the body.

‘Poor sheep,’ I said out loud. I started crying. I sat on top of my bag and cried and cried, loudly. I shook my head and strands of hair stuck in my mouth and eyes. I brushed the hair away. ‘Poor, poor sheep.’ I was crying for all of them. The living and the dead. My crying eventually petered out into sobs. It was too bloody hot even to cry properly. What would Dad say if he saw me crying over the sheep? He’d laugh at me and say I was mad. They’re only dumb sheep, he’d say.

I was boiling hot. My bag was heavy and my face streaked with tears mingled in dust. I got up and wiped my face with my handkerchief. I stared ahead. I found a hairband and pulled my hair up into the shape of an erupting volcano. One time, a few weeks ago, I burst into tears in class for absolutely no reason. I remembered my Social Science teacher saying, ‘You always feel better after a good cry.’ Well the teacher was wrong. I didn’t feel better. In fact, I felt worse. Maybe it hadn’t been a good cry, I thought, maybe it was a bad cry. Maybe you always feel bad after a bad cry. I certainly did.

I picked up my bag, looked at the sheep, sniffed and set off again. The trouble is, I thought, I don’t have the energy for a good cry.

There were no flowers to look at along the way. No birds, except the harsh cry of the crows. The fences all went in straight lines, the paddocks, big square boxes with fewer than half a dozen trees. There were dry dams and still windmills in the distance. The house was visible, and as I got closer, I could see my father sitting on the verandah in his rocking chair. My youngest brother, Jonathon, was riding around on his three-wheeler bike. My sister, Jenny, was playing in the dirt.

‘If everyone did as you did every day,’ I said angrily to my father, ‘the whole bloody town would shut down.’ He couldn’t hear me. I kicked the dirt in front of me. I knew he wasn’t the only one who had given up. For my family and many of their friends, life was becoming more and more depressing: the town was dying, just like the sheep. No one heard them dying every day. They didn’t even see the car-casses any more.

The heat was grinding its way into everyone’s moods. The only people who weren’t irritable most of the time were those with air-conditioning. Electric fans came a poor second.

I walked with my head down, remembering what many kids at school had been saying more and more. ‘Mum and Dad had another fight about the guns last night. Mum wants Dad to get rid of them.’

‘So did mine,’ someone else would pipe in. ‘Dad says we need it to get food, the way things are going.’

‘We already catch our food,’ said someone else.

‘Dad says people kill people, not guns.’

Some of them laughed at this because they knew guns killed people. Imagine, I thought, pointing your finger at someone and saying, Bang, you’re dead. Sure! The same argument went on in my house, often. Sometimes it scared me, but mostly I was used to it, and thought, Here they go again.

I sometimes wondered what would happen if my mother and father were nice to each other. I imagined the conversation.

‘Hello, love of my life, mother of the most beautiful children.’

‘Hello gorgeous husband, love of my life, father of our children.’

Then they would kiss, like in the movies, and my brothers and sister would smile at them like angels, just like in the movies. Then there would be this music, and happiness would spread out, even to the sheep.

I knew it was crazy, and wondered if I was crazy. I don’t ever remember my mother and father getting on. All I remembered were fights and arguments and violence. In the movies, children come wrapped in love. How come after me, they had Toby, Jonathon and Jennifer? Why did they have more children, even though it seemed like they hated each other? It was something I didn’t