Читать книгу Kendra - Jane Keehn - Страница 5

Sometimes Kendra’s skin itched for the water where her tribe had come from, but she tried to limit her body’s transmutations.

She needed the ocean for food and once a week she needed to sell something so she could buy paper, candles, matches and fishing line. She didn’t like to steal but sometimes it was the only way of getting what she needed to maintain her messages to her mothers.

The abandoned Aquarium was useful for entering directly from the ocean. A year ago a concrete wall had collapsed onto a group of kids spraying graffiti over the plaster casts of maritime legends and now everyone was scared to trespass there.

Kendra found the familiar break in the pipes underneath the enclosure. Her naked human body lay drying and fully formed on the cool grey cement, rolling to its side over to the cement ledge where seals used to feed in front of happy summer holiday crowds. Kendra stumbled softly across the small caged area to a large crack in the concrete wall.

Hidden near the ceiling she removed a plastic shopping bag containing a rolled pair of trousers and a t-shirt – an old one that featured a faded emblem of the Mandalay Aquarium; a seal and a dolphin standing tall under the spray of a waterfall. In another bag she grabbed a pair of lace up canvas running shoes to protect her feet over the barnacled rocks and the rusting, broken wire cage parts. At the bottom of the bag lay wound fishing wire hangings. Shells tied together with bits of broken coral, dangling from ornate driftwood. The shells hit against wire hooks and old coins, clanging in Kendra’s pocket as she propped herself steady with her crutches.

She made her way slowly to the wharf, where a seasonal funfair had set up. Humans seemed to have set up a structure of living with rules and regulations that she was only beginning to learn about. Boundaries and structures seemed to prop up the society that didn’t exist as rigidly underwater. On land there was a system for how people should behave and how they should act towards one another. Kendra had seen it in the streets, in the cafes, libraries and wharfs she had hung around. She skittered along the lonely laneway until she reached the back of Fisherman’s Wharf and the start of the Sideshow alley tents.

Tourists and local carnival workers hung around the games of chance and lemonade stalls. Kendra sat on part of the wharf where her crutches would be slightly camouflaged with the old men’s fishing poles and nets. She heard the metal clanging of a train nearby and realized it came from one of the tents – the Ghost Train jangled inside carrying screams of delight.

Finding a low hanging branch at the edge of where the wharf started, Kendra tied some fishing line to one of its twigs and began to untangle her wind chimes and dream catcher-style ornaments made of brittle sea urchins, broken bits from the beach, woven against clear line and twine of beach plants that she had rubbed together. Trinkets Kendra has made from nothing that she sometimes sells for a few dollars of spare change.

It was a way to have a small amount of money to enable her to exist in the world humans have created on land. Kendra sat on a plastic chair at the side of the merry go round. She watched the groups, the couples.

The laughter made her look behind her and she watched some young girls hitting wooden cylinders with a small rubber ball. Then the woman behind the stall handed them a small fluffy toy in the shape of a shark. They laughed some more and linked arms – stalking off into more of the flashing lights of the food stalls.

The arm-braced crutches Kendra used to manoeuver her way through the streets enabled her to move much faster on her slight earth legs. They also seemed to render her invisible to the many people fighting for a place on the paving, rushing to restaurants to share a meal.

People didn’t like acknowledging someone who may be in need of assistance, so their eyes darted away from her gaze as she limped along the back alleys. She felt she could observe all things in as much detail as she needed. She was of no interest to anyone.

She loved the lights of the town - how they shone in the dark and surrounded the alleyways. How the fading light made her even more invisible and how people changed the way they dressed - women wore jewels, men wore suits.

There was an excitement in the air. She couldn’t describe it, she didn’t know how it came about but there was something intangible that could not be sampled and packed away in a jar or a box. It was just there. Created by the feelings, the emotions between the humans.

She smiled and looked up at the stars. The petty drug dealers and teenagers kissing in the dark had no need to look out for a dishevelled ash-haired girl inching her way along the white brick ledge.

She watched out with her nocturnal vision.

There was just enough space between each boundary for Kendra grab the grey edges for support and to slither unharmed between them, like some kind of mutant native animal, using the night to hide from their prey.