The morning sky is flat, a smooth grey pebble.
There’s a row of trees across from the house where the social worker’s car has stopped, the limbs are pitted and knotty, the bark is brown and grey. The roots jut out, like pointing toes.
Luke has been in a supervised hostel for five months, waiting for this placement. His scalp is itchy, he’s got ringworm between his fingers. He lives in boxes, bags.
At the window of a bedroom, the family is still asleep. The pyjamas they gave him are too big. The blinds are broken, there’s a sheet hanging over the window frame. He pulls the sheet to one side. The pavement is bathed in shadows, the trees bare, sloped. The bedroom is cold, he brings the blanket to wrap around him, tracing his palm along the frosted glass. Outside, cottages with high chimneys, low iron fences, sloping roofs. He’s scratching his head. His nose against the glass, waiting for a possum or a cat roaming the light-flooded street, climbing cables, or asleep under a parked car.
The social worker is holding a roll of garbage bin liners, opening the cupboard, reaching for his clothes on the top shelf, throwing them inside. Outside, lavender bells on the branches cluster in panicles. The flowers have short floral stalks, the older ones grow close to the base. They don’t have long; she has to drop him at the next placement before dark.
She’s pulling the bags down the stairs, into the backseat of the car, there is no one downstairs when they leave. His scalp is so itchy. He doesn’t ask where they’re going.
His new school is on a hill, once a quarry, the wall is like a compound, the pavement slopes, there’s an overhanging bridge adjoining both sides of the school grounds. The boys wait in clusters behind the bathrooms. There’s blood on his collar, the other boy got detention, he got off with a warning.
His head is still aching when the bell wails. Velcro, buckles, raised heels crowding the gravel path to the school gate.
At the new home, he can hear the TV through the bedroom door, a man is asleep on the couch. In the street behind the house there’s a concrete fence, a highway on the other side. The school nurse says he has lice. The carer takes him to get his head shaved.
He closes his eyes, tyres are striking the pavement, goods trucks, petrol tankers heading down the coast, diesel, rubber on asphalt, rolling, speeding, braking along the bending and paving, engines, exhausts, fumes from the chimney stacks along the spine of the junction, once a railway yard.
The smoke is tickling his throat, his nostrils, he closes the glass frame, he tries but he just can’t stop coughing, then he can hear voices, a fist against his wall, the door opens, the TV man is holding his slipper in his hand.
The school has no heating in winter and it boils in late summer. He’s chewing his nails, shivering, seated at the front of the empty classroom, his back to the board. Facing rows of plastic chairs, their metallic legs tucked beneath tables. Closed windows, a fluorescent glare.
The small jacaranda tree outside his classroom is bare, its limbs coated in frost.
After dinner, the new family watch game shows. He’s clearing the table, carrying their plates through to the kitchen. He trips on the rug along the passageway. A mug shatters on the tiles, the handle still attached. The remainder in small shards and splinters on the tray beside him. He’s a clumsy piece of shit. The man stops watching TV and comes towards him, bending down with his cigarette. Then he’s yelping, holding his upper arm, a perfectly round circle, smoke rising from his burnt skin. Slamming the door, turning up the volume, laughing. He starts to see them in his dreams at night, disfigured, he wakes up with an outline of sweat traced into his pillow cover.
Mostly it’s his mum—sitting, while he stands close to the feet of her chair, his arms raised, leaning forward, waiting to be lifted and folded into her lap. But she doesn’t speak, she turns away, then she’s lying on a bed with a wet cloth against her back, she is ill, he’s in the bathroom looking for her medicine, he can’t reach the cabinet, he’s standing on the edge of the bath, now he’s running back to her, but her eyes are hollow, her clothes are in a pile at his feet.
He’s pleading with her to open her mouth, to sit up, to swallow the medicine, but her lips are closed, she’s pulling the blanket over her face. He lifts the blanket to rest the face cloth against her burning forehead, but she is on the floor, facedown, dissolving like mist.
He begs them to keep the bathroom light on, but the TV man won’t.
When the family is out in the afternoon, he sits on the couch trying to work the TV remote. Beside the coffee table, there’s a plant. The sun pours through the window, the leaves look large and glossy. But when he leans closer, there are no veins, the leaves are flat and don’t bend. Small bits of plastic peel off the tips like stickers in his hands.
There are no brown spots or splits in the leaves, the undersides are all luminous green. The midrib in the centre feels like a rubber toy, the stems droop, the leaves are like stamps, the stems—plastic ribbon. Polyester, nylon, vinyl, they’re rough on his fingertips. Polyethylene, dye. The colour is the same from branch to twig.
A few of the moulded leaves have detached and have fallen beside the pot, gathering dust. He picks up one, it has a strange chemical smell. Carbon dioxide, petroleum. The plant has no breath, soil, water. Midafternoon light coats the artificial leaves but doesn’t filter through. Plastic, iron.
They move him, eventually, but only after a teacher asks about his arm, and the bruising behind his legs.
They’re pulling into a driveway, it’s already dark, he can’t make out anything, except the frame of the house and the roof. The social worker is piling the garbage bags on the front porch, a woman is coming to the door, he can hear a baby crying inside the house, she’s gesturing to him, come inside.
There’s a long passageway, between the upstairs bedrooms, there are five other kids staying too, he’ll meet them later. She can’t put the baby down, it’s supposed to be naptime but he’s got colic, he’s not settling. There’s some cold pasta in the fridge. She’s walking back up the stairs, the baby is still staring at him.
The other boys come out of their bedrooms to watch him pull his plastic bags along the corridor. They’re leaning against the doorframes, they’re all brothers or cousins. They look similar.
He’s asleep in his room, blanket pulled up to his neck.
Suddenly there’s a weight pressing down on his chest, he can’t inhale, his muscles are contracting, he’s gasping trying to sit up, he can hear laughter, the older brother or the cousin is rolling off him, onto the floor, the other two are waiting, hysterical, high-fiving him, as he runs towards them, slamming the door behind them.
The next morning is warmer, the carer asks him to sit with her and the baby in the small garden. It’s late spring, the jacaranda leaves are re-growing. Still yellow-brown, waiting for the first flowerings of summer. The bark is brittle and scaly. Along the midrib, suspended from a swaying branch—long leaflets, each with a cluster of smaller leaflets. There are gaps along the rows of smaller leaflets, from winter, dehydration. The old seed pods will ripen with the new flowers.
He shouldn’t worry, they’re like this with all the new kids.
She lowers her arms, the baby crawls away, towards the pot plants, the woman following behind to pick the small pebbles out of the way.
The carer’s eyes are kind, she takes him to buy new clothes. The baby sleeps in the pram while he tries on a school shirt in the change room. He’s allowed to play video games after homework (though the otherboys hardly let him).
He dreams about Mum, Evelyn and him, folding his clothes into a bag, leaning against the kitchen cupboard while the kettle boils, or reading to him while Mitch is asleep on the sofa. Then he’s lying in the grass, he’s fallen off his bicycle, Evelyn is running towards him, holding a bag of ice against his elbow, the ice is wetting the sleeve of his flannel shirt, his mum is rolling it up, then picking him up in her arms, kissing his open palm.
He wakes up around midnight, the lights in the passage are off. The doors to the other bedrooms are closed, he can see the outline of the small garden in the reflection of the streetlights. He’s about to get back into bed when he catches sight of a tail, wrapped around a bar in the gate, something jumping onto a large round pot plant, then two sets of eyes illuminating, orange-gold in the dark garden—a baby possum on its mother’s back, circling the rim of the plant, then climbing between the low branches, burrowing in the pebbly soil, chewing the leaves, jumping to another smaller plant, then back again. They’re scaling the garden fence, disappearing outside.
In the morning light, brown pellets litter the verandah. The soil smells like wee. There are holes in the leaves of the pot plants, the new buds have been broken off. The carer sweeps the possum droppings with a large broom, but they are back again the next morning, and the next.
She won’t let her baby into the garden until she’s swept the tiles. The husband trims the branches of the trees and covers the drains. She soaks the base of the plants in peppermint oil but they come back night after night. She peels garlic cloves, soaking them for hours in boiling water. The cloves take on a blue tinge and float to the top. When the mixture cools, she uses a funnel to pour it into a plastic spray bottle, coating the remaining leaves every morning.
But the holes get bigger, the last leaves are disappearing, she sweeps daily but the dried droppings collect along the edges of the verandah and beneath the door frames. She buys a portable sensor light and leaves it on the garden chair. The fluorescent light from the garden floods the edges of Luke’s bedroom window, waking him intermittently. There are fewer now but the droppings still appear. They’re there, every morning, when she opens the sliding doors.
On humid summer afternoons, she turns on the sprinklers and they fight for a turn to run through the spray. The carer goes inside with the baby to fetch them hats. He is lying in the grass, soaking his feet in a bucket. There’s no shade. The leaves sting like sunburn on his fingertips, the tree bark is scalding.
By early evening, it’s cooler. He sits in the kitchen with her while she feeds the baby, passing her a cloth from the sink to wipe the high chair.
The other boys hide bugs or sometimes dead snails under his blanket, he’ll find some stones in the garden. The baby’s chin is covered in porridge, she wants to know if he has any siblings. The baby laughs when he pulls out his tongue or pretends to hide behind the chair.
The garlic cloves sink, the mixture in the spray bottle smells sour like vinegar, the droppings appear on the tiles every morning.
When he returns from school, all of the pot plants are gone, the husband is in the driveway, piling them onto the back of his ute to take to the dump. There are no droppings the next morning, the garden is bare in the early light.
A few weeks later, the carer is driving the baby to daycare when the bell rings. The husband opens the front door.
It’s the social worker, calling upstairs to Luke, holding another roll of bin bags.
*This is an extract from The Leaves by Jacqueline Rule, published by Spinifex Press.
Born in South Africa, Jacqueline Rule has lived in Sydney for many years. She is admitted as a solicitor by the Supreme Court of New South Wales, and has worked in research (focusing on law and literature) and academic governance at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS); as an academic tutor teaching literature at the University of Sydney; and as a fiction reader for literary journals. Her PhD thesis focused on the intersections between literature and law, narrative ethics and interpretative practices and the representation of historical trauma through the form of the novel. In addition, Jacqueline spent several years working in a legal organisation, supporting a specialist committee on youth detention in the criminal justice system. The Leaves is her debut novel. www.jacquelinerule.com.au