The Lost Child by Suzanne McCourt Read Free Book Online

factory. Bullfrog’s muscles bulge and the legs of his frog tattoo threaten to leap right off his arm.
    He says: ‘Hullo, Blue Daley’s kids.’
    Faye, Dawn and Dot stop licking their toffee apples long enough to singsong: ‘Hullo, Bullfrog.’
    â€˜Mister Bullfrog, to you,’ he says with a croaky laugh.
    Bullfrog has a bigger beer belly than Denver Boland, who is the Council Chairman and lives with Mrs Denver in the biggest house in Burley Point, opposite the beach. Bullfrog lives with Mrs Bullfrog Fraser near the Point. He doesn’t speak to me because Dad says he’s a creep. My hand is hurting from the toffee burn. On the trolley, the bags are piled three high, wet and dripping. Feelers, legs and beady eyes poke through the hessian and the crays thrash about inside. They smell of dead rabbit bait and deep, rocky reefs. Bullfrog lumps his cray bags onto the weighing machine which stands guard outside the fish factory door. I hear the crunch of broken arms and legs and wonder if the hurt from my burn could be as bad as broken crayfish legs.
    Mrs Daley is picking fish, filling in for Merle McCready, Chicken and Sid’s grandma, who is sick. We wait just inside the door while Ron Quigly lifts the big basket with the pulley chain from the boiler in the corner. Mrs Daley is first in with the others, scrambling to get the biggest spiders as soon as they’re dropped hot and hissing into the trough, grabbing them before the steam has time to clear. Gert Nobel and Hazel Bird push past Pardie’s mum, who doesn’t seem to care. In their white rubber pinnies and boots and gloves, they look like factory ghosts, their hair tucked inside plastic hoods. Mrs Daley lugs her crate back to the picking table and beckons us over. Already she is separating tails and spiders, smashing her hammer onto claws and poking out meat with a long skewer spike. In no time she fills a box with cray meat, slaps it onto the roller belt and begins again, cracking, poking, picking. Faye yells in her mother’s ear and because we weren’t meant to be making toffee by ourselves, I keep my hand hidden behind my back. The fish stink is up my nose and when Mr Quigly starts hosing the floor I push out the door.
    On the jetty, I lean over the rail and watch sunlight rippling the shallows below. Three gulls are riding the swell, chests puffed out in full sail. When I look up, Aunt Cele is standing outside the fish factory door, talking and laughing with Pardie’s mum. Then Dad’s jeep swings round the roundabout. His hair is swept up like a cocky crest and I wonder why he didn’t go out with the other fishermen to pull his pots, and why Dunc is with him, and where they’ve been, and where they’re going. And I see how they look like each other and I wonder if I look like Dad? Or Mum? Or anyone? And why Dad looks at the jetty but doesn’t see me, and why he doesn’t want me for a sunbeam like Blue Daley wants Faye?
    When he’s gone, I blink dust from my eyes and see that his boat and Bullfrog’s are the only ones riding their moorings. What are we going to live on, says Mum inside my head, if you don’t pull your pots for three days? What about us?
    â€˜Come on,’ calls Faye. ‘I’ve got the lines. We’re allowed to go to Stickynet.’
    The inlet is full of secret underwater things swirling near the surface. Halfway along, we find the shady place where roots reach into the water. It is quiet except for dragonflies whip-whipping as they dip and dart, and sometimes the rumble of a car crossing the bridge. On the lake, there are pelicans and black swans with fish-hook necks and, further out, a fisherman pulling his net, his dinghy heavy in the water.
    There is no bait. Faye says we should get a stick and dig for worms. She doesn’t say how to carry them back when we find them or who is going to put them on hooks while they’re still wriggling. I walk