When Laura crouched low on the tailboard and held her fingers to her lips, the woman smiled again, repeating the gesture in a confidential way. The afternoon traffic was as bad as the morning’s, and the stench of the city had increased with the effects of a hot day; in addition, millions of sticky flies now added to the discomfort of the heat.
When the wagon passed Brennan’s street, the girl grabbed his hand again; and they slipped from the tailboard and dodged swiftly through the traffic of carts and horses to the footpath. It was quieter and much more pleasant in the narrow lanes the farther they travelled away from the main road, and the noise of protesting animals and mixed human voices slowly receded as they neared Brennan’s house. As they walked, they noticed people sitting about on their verandahs, sipping tall cool drinks and smiling at the children as they passed. “I’ll walk with you to your door,” Laura said gaily. “Then I better get on home; my parents worry if I am even a little late.”
They walked together to Ede’s small whitewashed house and found the old lady waiting anxiously at the front gate. “Where have you been all day, Brennan, you bad boy?” she said sharply, her gnarled old hands shaking and her hawk-like eyes peering at him accusingly. “I have been looking all over the place for you.” The boy turned and smiled at Laura, who laughed. “I see what you mean. I’ll see you in school tomorrow.” She ran skipping along the street towards her own house, leaving Brennan to explain matters to his aunt.
They became firm friends after that, and he started to look forward to school just for the opportunity to spend time with her. However, although she was a gifted student, it soon became apparent that Brennan was in a different league altogether. Taking to the lessons with ease, he was soon ahead of every other student in his age group. By the end of the first month he knew and understood the contents of all the books he had been given and had started on the books designated for the upper grades, which he obtained simply by checking them out from the school library. It was then that his education accelerated dramatically, and he soon left the rest of the students, at all levels, in his wake. After a few weeks, he was ahead of the teacher as well.
It was at this point that the school suddenly became boring for Brennan, the work that was supposed to have lasted for years having been assimilated by him in a couple of months. Desperately wanting to advance to the next level of study, he often deserted his own class to sit with the seniors; but the system required him to spend a year in each grade. Trapped, he felt he had no choice but to amuse himself until the lessons again challenged his knowledge.
Gradually Laura and Brennan began to spend more time together outside of school hours. He would visit her house, or she would come to the small cottage in Mariner’s Lane where they would sit on the splintery front verandah and read or talk for hours. Ede had an old rocking chair on the verandah, Laura would sit in it and rock gently while Brennan sprawled on the floor. Sometimes during the long summer evenings they would sit in silence in the growing darkness, savouring the warm night air and looking up at the stars.
One particularly fine Saturday afternoon found Brennan resting on his back on the bare boards, watching the hundreds of butterflies that hovered around the roses in Ede’s flower garden, while Laura sat quietly in the rocking chair, the loose red hair cascading down her shoulders. They had just finished a reading assignment for their school homework, testing one another until each knew he or she could discuss the work with confidence in school on Monday. Now they were just lounging about in the cool of the afternoon, idling their time until supper, and grateful that the daytime flies had departed at last. “You know what I want to do when I grow up and finish school, Bren’?” Laura asked.
“You mean today?” he teased, because Laura changed her career ambitions regularly. “Well, it may be that you want to be a nurse, or a doctor, perhaps even a famous author, actor or ballerina.” He grinned up at her. “Or do you now want to be a barrister like your father?”
“Certainly not,” she said, tossing her flaming red curls and blushing, a bit put out by his teasing. “I honestly don’t know how daddy can be a barrister, standing up in court the way he does and defending people he knows in his heart are as guilty as sin; it just doesn’t seem right.”
“But if only people who were known to be innocent had lawyers, we would not need the courts at all,” he laughed.
“That’s not what I said, and you know it, Brennan,” she scolded. “I’m talking about daddy’s morals here. Sometimes he knows the person he is defending is guilty, but he still fights to get them off. I simply could not do that. Besides, girls can’t become barristers or doctors, can they?”
“They will one day, I hope. But I think you better cross law off your list for now.” Brennan stared past the eves of the verandah’s iron roof into the afternoon sky. “So what do you want to do, then?”
“I think I want to be a teacher of some kind,” Laura said slowly. “Perhaps not a normal school teaching job, but one where I can help people open their minds and learn new things.”
He nodded. “That way you could be any of the things you have considered. First learn the trade yourself, then teach it to other people.”
“Why of course!” she exclaimed. “I never thought of it like that. You really are clever.” A few quiet minutes passed as they watched the weekend traffic. “What do you want to do, Bren’?” she asked at last. “You are so smart, you could be anything you want.”
He didn’t deny it. After giving it some thought, he rolled on to his elbow and stared up at her. “I don’t know, exactly,” he said earnestly, “but whatever it is, I know I will be helping people. Ede has told me that I am to have some special gifts that will come to me in time. I won’t even have to go to the university to learn them, she says they are inside me, a gift from my parents; but I won’t get them until I am older. She says that then she will tell me all about my parents and where I came from, but she can’t tell me when that will be. In the meantime, I just have to wait.” He scrambled up into a sitting position, drawing close to her on the rocking chair. “But I do know that I am going to travel,” he added. “All over this land – but just Australia, I don’t want to go anywhere else. I am going to see all of the places that are in the books, and more. However, if I am going to be doing something to help people, then I will need to be on the move so I can meet them.”
“That sounds so wonderful,” Laura said, her eyes taking on a faraway look as she began to rock gently in the old chair. “I would love to do that. To wake up in a different place every morning, meeting and helping new people everyday.”
A thought struck him. Taking her hand and staring up into her eyes, he said eagerly, “You could come with me. We could travel around together; you said you want to help people as I do. We could be a team.”
Closing her eyes as she tried to imagine what it would be like to travel the countryside with him, Laura absently ran the fingers of her free hand through his untidy hair. “I think that would be wonderful,” she said softly. “Thank you, Bren’. But we must finish school first, before we decide what it is we are going to be that will allow us to travel about and help people.”
He stood up and stretched. “It will come to us when the time is right,” he said simply, matter-of-factly. “What say, in the meantime, we go down to the waterfront and look at the ships? While we’re there, we can get a beef pie and some sarsaparilla from the wagon café on the pier. I’ll leave a note for Ede so she knows not to make supper and won’t worry.”
“Let’s do that!” Laura said. “We can stop at my house on the way and tell Mummy where we are going.” With a smile she added, “Thank you for offering to take me along on your travels, Bren’.”
He smiled in turn, squeezing
