Luka

By Sarah Anna James

Luka was supposed to be a girl. He knows he was supposed to be a girl because his older brother Ray told him so. It's not that he always believes what Ray says, under normal circumstances he doesn't trust Ray at all, but in this case he knows Ray's telling the truth because he heard his mother say the same thing. Well not exactly the same, but a

• Language: English
• Publisher: Seahorse Publications
• Release date: Feb 29, 2024
• ISBN: 9780987112378

Sarah Anna James

I have had many different roles in my life - nurse, midwife, craniosacral therapist, mother. The constant thread though, weaving its way through everything, including my heart, is writing. Midwife Wisdom, Mother Love ( my first published book), was the natural culmination of these different aspects of my life. It was a privilege and so rewarding to share my experiences of pregnancy and birth - both professional and personal - with so many. Nonfiction is definitely a love of mine, but my true passion lies with fiction. Since I was a little girl hanging upside down on the monkey bars at school I have been dreaming up stories, imaging the time when I would have my very own novel on the bookshelf.In 2015 that dream came true. My first novel Luka, a young adult novel, was published. The weight of the book in my hand, the smell of the pages, the pelican on the front cover. It was as if I had birthed (sorry, midwife writing here) my very own book baby. I was infatuated. But shortly after the book launch, in-fact the day after, my life took an unexpected turn, blocking my creativity and leaving Luka stranded without having really taken his first steps. It was a deeply traumatic time in my life, that seemed to be never ending, but finally, slowly, the tiniest buds of creative longing started to sprout in my heart and the urge to write returned in a powerful way.Since then I have completed a Post-Graduate Diploma in creative writing at Southern Cross University and my creative drive is at an all-time high. I am currently editing a new novel while in the process of writing a memoir. I have never been busier on the creative front, but also never more fulfilled. Writing sustains me in a way that nothing else does.Luka, after a wobbly start all those years ago, has been selected to be part of the high school curriculum in several schools throughout Queensland. I am thrilled to be sharing this novel with students and looking forward to workshopping it in the classroom. This is the beginning of what I hope will be a long-term and successful partnership with many schools throughout Australia.

Book preview

Sarah Anna James grew up on the edges of the bush in Sydney. She currently lives in South East Queensland, with her horses, a crazy kelpie and an obnoxious cat. She is the author of Midwife Wisdom, Mother Love (non-fiction). This is her first young adult novel.

For more information visit www.sarahannajames.com

I live and write on Bundjalung country, the land of the Kombumerri language people. I acknowledge the elders past, present and emerging of this land that I create on and the elders past, present and emerging of the lands that this book is read on. This land was never ceded. Always was, always will be, Aboriginal land.

Luka

Sarah Anna James

1st Edition 2023: printed by Seahorse Publications

Currumbin, Queensland 4223

Authors website www.sarahannajames.com

Copyright Sarah Anna James 2023 First published 2023

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any

form by any means without the prior permission of the

copyright owner. Enquiries should be made to the publisher or author.

Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the

National Library of Australia

ISBN 978-0-9871123-7-8

Cover design by Josh Durham

To Jack, Noah and Kai –

for introducing me to the beautiful world of boys

One

The day I missed the school bus home was April Fools’ Day, the day before my birthday. At first, before I knew all the details, I thought if I’d caught the bus, been sitting there between the window and Tom, I might have heard the explosion or seen the smoke shooting straight up, angry and racing, then watched as the smoke slowed and puffed, gently settling in the air. I thought I might have seen the flames shooting like firecrackers into the afternoon sky. And if the bus had been close enough, maybe a bit of debris would have smashed through the bus window and landed in my lap or scratched across my face or smashed into my shoulder. A bit of burning swing, or metal from the slippery dip, flung like a cannon ball, colliding hard enough with my head to take me too.Tom was on the bus that afternoon. He sits next to me in maths, copies my answers when he can’t figure them out and offers me his when he thinks he’s got it sorted. ‘Here you go, Luka, mate,’ he says when he passes his answers to me, ‘this will keep you out of trouble.’ I always pretend to take his answers, say ‘thanks’ and look like I’m writing them down. I don’t want to offend him or make him look like a dumb-arse, because he’s not; he does really well in tech drawing and art, it’s just that maths isn’t his thing.

Tom said that none of them on the bus heard the explosion or saw any flames shooting up into the air. He said there was no debris being flung at the windows. But there was smoke, everywhere. Not the sort I’d imagine, wafting this way and that, but thick smoke, the type of smoke that gets inside your nose and deep down in your lungs, making it hard to breathe and impossible to see. The type of smoke you smell on your skin and in your hair, for days after a bonfire.

He said the bomb must have exploded before they were close enough to hear. When they drove past, there were already barricades up, making the bus drive in a wide arc so as not to become engulfed by the dark-grey cloud that filled the space where the building used to be. There were sirens everywhere, as if every car in town had suddenly sprouted a red flashing light. They were all racing towards the smoke. Once they were let in past the orange plastic barricade, the sirens were turned off. The red lights, however, kept going around and around. He said you could see them, dull and flashing, like a jet descending through heavy fog. He said it was eerie, like something out of the opening scene of a movie you knew you didn’t want to watch but wouldn’t be able to walk away from. He’d never heard the bus so quiet. Even Eddie, who sits up the back and throws paper and bits of sandwich at everyone, was sitting there with his face squashed up against the window, staring.

I don’t miss the school bus often, but that day, our geography teacher insisted we finish writing down what was on the board, not seeming to care how late it was. On the rare occasion that I do miss it, it means walking twenty minutes to my uncle’s house in Elanora, so I can phone home for a lift. Unless I have coins in my pocket for the pay phone, which I never do. Uncle Scott, Mum’s brother, leaves a key under the pot plant at the front door. I’m allowed to let myself in, use the phone, and wait for someone to come and get me.

The pot plant with the key under it has one of those spiky cycad things in it. It’s big and heavy, the perfect place to hide a key. The pot itself is the shiny-blue one that’s popular now, but it’s the type Mum can’t stand. There’s a lot about Uncle Scott’s house she doesn’t like. According to Mum, the man needs to get a life.

When I got to Uncle Scott’s on April Fools’ Day, I threw my bag onto the grass, got down on my hands and knees and pushed the pot carefully back with one hand while reaching in underneath it with my other. It was important to get the balance just right: a smashed pot meant an Uncle Scott tantrum; a pot coming down too early meant crushed fingers. The tiles under the pot were cold, but the key, attached to its small St Christopher’s medal, was colder. I pulled it out and let the pot rock gently back into place, quickly glancing over the tiles to make sure none of them had cracked.

My uncle’s house is different to ours. He doesn’t have kids, just girlfriends. Mum says he rotates them on a yearly basis. Sometimes, though, they don’t even last that long. You’d think a guy like him would live in a pigsty – beer bottles and dirty undies everywhere, pictures of naked women taped to the toilet wall – but it’s not like that. It’s one of those houses where you have to take your shoes off before you walk through the door, even when no one’s there. The tiles are cream and so’s the carpet. There’s no use trying to sneak and leave your shoes on, because he’ll always know; he’s a dirt freak. It’s like one of those prize homes that they send the brochures out for in the mail. Everything’s where it’s supposed to be, everything matches, and everything’s wiped clean. Don’t get me wrong, I love Uncle Scott, we all do – particularly us kids. He can be a lot of fun, and he comes in real handy when the surf’s pumping down south and Dad doesn’t want to get out of bed on a Sunday morning. He’s just got this pedantic side; Mum calls it his ‘control freak side’, and he can be a right pain in the arse when it comes to his house.

The bench in the middle of the kitchen is white, cold and hard. There’s a sink sunk into the middle and four stools on the other side. If you’re in the kitchen, you can talk to people sitting on the stools, or if there’s no one there, you can watch the wide-screen TV that faces the bench.

There was nothing on the bench except for a phone. After I let myself in, I picked up the phone and plonked myself down on one of the couches (cream, of course, to blend with the tiles and the carpet and the bench) in the adjoining lounge room. I punched in our home number and waited, wondering if I could turn the TV on without stuffing up the remote controls like I had last time.

The phone at home picked up.

Mum’s voice at the other end, all smiley and happy like she’d just discovered she’d won a weekend away, greeted, ‘Hello, you’ve reached Kate, Nat, Ray, Luka, and Jazz. We’re not here at the moment, but if you’d like to leave a message, we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.’ And then the long beep.

‘Anybody home? Hellooo? It’s Luka. Pick up the phone, Jazz. Pick up the phone or I’ll come in at night while you’re asleep and take Rocky. I’ll give him back to his real bear family, where he belongs.’

No one answered. The sound of nothing pressed warm up against my ear.

Jazz, my three-year-old sister, is the only one in our family who answers the phone. No one else bothers because they know she’ll race past yelling, ‘I’ll get it! I’ll get it!’

It was possible that she was there on the lounge room floor, distracted by some stupid imaginary game or something.

‘Jazz? You there? Jazz?’

Still nothing.

‘Okay then, I’ll talk to the machine. I’m at Uncle Scott’s. I missed the bus. I need a lift home. Can someone ring me back so that I know I’m not going to be waiting here all afternoon? Bye.’ I hung up thinking how stupid it was to say goodbye to an answering machine.

The remotes for the TV were still sitting in my lap. I lined them back up on the coffee table and walked over to the sliding glass doors. I pushed my face up against the cold glass. A pelican sat out on the lake, not far from the shore. She – for some reason I assumed it was a girl – was so still it looked like the water had frozen around her, frozen her in place. Pelicans are my mum’s favourite bird. She loves the way they glide, as if they are never going to have to expend another bit of energy, the way they land on the water, as if it is them who invented water skis. Mum always says that she will come back as a pelican in her next lifetime.

I could have pulled my books out of my bag. There was maths homework and a history assignment and German verbs that I needed to be moving on with. I hadn’t even started one of the assignments. Chances were though, as soon I settled into it, Mum would arrive, and I’d have to pack up mid-sentence.

Not for the first time, I wished my mum didn’t have a thing against mobile phones. Before I started high school, I spent the whole Christmas holidays trying to convince her I needed a mobile phone. I told her it would be better for her, as she’d always know where I was, and she wouldn’t have to worry. I told her it wasn’t like primary school where she knew I was safely tucked away, knew I couldn’t go anywhere without her coming and getting me.

‘What if I miss the bus?’ I questioned. ‘It’s a long walk home … you never know who I might meet on the way.’

‘We survived quite well without mobiles when I was a kid, Luka. There still are such things as coins and public phone boxes. I’m sure you’ll be fine.’

I didn’t launch into the fact that it was 2014 and time had moved on. She wasn’t a kid anymore, and things were different. And I certainly didn’t tell her that everyone at high school would have a mobile besides me. There was no point – the end argument was always the same: mobile phones are bad for growing brains. And besides, my chances of convincing her I should have a mobile were slim when she didn’t have one herself.

I went back and sat on the couch and looked at my watch: three-thirty. Maybe Mum had stopped to get milk and bread on the way home from picking up Jazzie and that’s why they weren’t home yet. Maybe she was walking through the door right about now. If she had a mobile, I could have rung her before she got Jazz out the car, could have saved her the hassle of having to buckle her back in.

At school that day, Tom had said he might come around in the afternoon, bring his skateboard so we could go down to the park and celebrate. He’s got this thing about celebrating the day before your birthday, says he would much rather celebrate goodbyes than hellos. ‘Makes sense, doesn’t it,’ he said. ‘You’ve got the whole year to celebrate being fourteen, but this is it for being thirteen. The last time in your life that you’ll ever be thirteen.’ I can sort of see his point.

Uncle Scott asked me what I wanted for my birthday a couple of weeks back. I told him, like I’d told everyone else, a new surfboard. Mum wasn’t impressed. She says you should always say, ‘I don’t know’ or ‘a lovely card’. Yeah, right, as if a lovely card is all you want. And besides, Uncle Scott’s got money and not much to spend it on, apart from his neat and tidy house. You can always try.

I got up from the couch and wandered from room to room. Uncle Scott’s house has four bedrooms: one for him to sleep in, one for any friend who wants to sleep over (I was surprised when he said this, as I thought sleepovers stopped the year you turned twenty-one), another with a desk, computer and bookshelves, and one more with a full-on gym set-up in it: weights, bench press, chin-up bar. He said when I turned fourteen, he’d show me how to make the pimples on my arms into muscles. ‘Very funny,’ I said, but secretly, I hoped he could show me how to make my muscles as big as his.

I walked into every room, opening cupboards, looking up on top of his bookshelves. I went into his bedroom and got down on my hands and knees on the carpet and looked under the bed. I even slid back the wardrobe door and looked in there too, but there was no surfboard. There was nothing in the laundry either, just his washing tucked neatly into a dirty-washing basket. In the garage, the only surfboards I found were his, stacked high on a rack that came down from the ceiling. It was possible he’d already given the intended one for me to Mum, ready as a surprise for tomorrow. Chances were, though, that he’d bought me another CD: one of the bands he liked to go and see on Friday and Saturday nights, one of the bands I couldn’t stand.

The surfboard I already had was okay, I mean I wasn’t desperate. It didn’t have any dings or repair jobs that needed doing, so it would do for now. But by the time Christmas came around, it would be another story.

Still no phone call.

I picked up the phone on the kitchen bench again and pressed redial. In my head, I could hear the phone ringing at our house. I could see it on the coffee table next to the couch, see Jazz, almost as if I was watching a movie, skipping to the phone, picking it up.

The answering machine cut in. ‘Hello, you’ve reached Kate, Nat, Ray, Luka and Jazz. We’re not here at the moment, but if you’d like to leave a message, we’ll get back to you as soon as we can,’ then, again, the long beep.

‘It’s me, still sitting here, still waiting.’ I hung up.

There were three Tracks magazines spread out like a fan on the coffee table. I picked up the one on top. Brent Dorrington was on the front cover, a barrel chasing him. I started to flick through the pages, ad after ad, and then more waves with surfers, cut-backs, barrels, a three-sixty.

Mum was never late. Dad was, all the time.

I kept turning the pages.

Mum had taken to waiting in the car when we were all going somewhere together. She’d get Jazz ready, organise me, and then we’d all go and sit in the car while Dad ‘fart-arsed around’ – Mum’s words, not mine. You could tell she was mad by the way she said nothing, the way she looked out the window when Dad finally sat himself in the driver’s seat and said, ‘Are we all ready now?’ Laughing as if he’d cracked a funny joke.

I picked up the phone and rang again. Same message, same beep.

I hung up without leaving a message. I put the copy of Tracks back on the coffee table, neat and tidy on top of the fan. My insides were starting to tingle, a nervous sort of tension beginning to pulse and build, making me feel off in the guts. I stood and went back to the closed sliding doors. The pelican was still there.

I walked back to the phone and punched Dad’s work number in. It was quarter to four; the school bus would be at my stop. If I hadn’t missed the bus, I’d be almost home. Mum was usually there with afternoon tea ready when I walked through the front door: a sticky bun with a glass of milk, or some fruit chopped into pieces along with cheese and biscuits.

The phone was ringing at the other end. It was possible Dad would know where Mum was. He and Mum were always talking on the phone during the day. He might know where I could reach her, so I could get her to come and pick me up. I didn’t even let myself think the words he might know if she’s okay.

A woman answered the phone.

‘JB Steel and Construction, can I help you?’

‘Can I speak to Nat Kelly, please?’

‘Just a moment, I’ll put you through.’

And then that awful music came on the line, tuneless chimes.

‘I’m sorry, he’s not here at the moment. Can I take a message?’

‘Ummm, no, don’t worry. I’ll call back.’ I hung up. Dad did

have a mobile phone, but he never knew where it was. Never had it charged.

I phoned home again.

No answer.

I don’t know if it’s possible to know when something bad has happened. If there’s something quiet and secret, hidden deep inside that figures it out first, not wanting to tell you but also unable to hide it. Or maybe it’s got something to do with the invisible umbilical cord Mum used to talk about. She said they cut the cord when you’re born – this slippery, bloody thing that looks like a twist of life and innocence, shiny white with pink intertwined. But she said that was only the physical cord