Until the End of the Year

(longlisted in the Newcastle Short Story Award 2025)

For my ninth birthday they gave me a Seiko watch with a red and navy nylon strap. The sun sulked behind clouds all day, so its glow dots were sleepy. I guessed it was 1am, unless I’d read it backwards. That didn’t make a squeeze of difference. I was just glad to be awake.

At the foot of the stairs, the hall clock pushed its minute hand like a labouring Sisyphus. I padded across the checked tiles, worn smooth by decades of small feet, and at the entrance to the boarding house I slipped on my school shoes. The laces got double knotted. The moment my foot crossed the threshold the spell had to break, and I sprinted into the night.

Mum aged a decade the day I ran away from school. She hated reliving the 25th of September 1979. To be kind, I never told her how much it aged me.

They say the bike shed below the sports oval was once horse stables. The midnight sky listened above me. Ollie promised he didn’t mind me taking his Raleigh Racer, even though the front wheel was slightly buckled. He never said so, but I could tell he hoped for my success more than believed in it.

Riding on gravel at night sounded like someone eating cereal with their mouth open. Any moment, angry boots would be after me. I didn’t pause at the school’s entrance, just rolled on through the ivied pillars that dissolved into the shadows of sappy pines. Above me, an iron arch held the motto, In Domino Confido. I didn’t trust the Lord any more than I trusted the teachers or students.

I leaned into the breeze as pasture replaced the resinous pines while on the bitumen the unfamiliar gears slipped. All hope converged on the hundred and twenty-kilometre ride home.

Every Monday morning in English we had to write a letter. To anyone. Only pencils and fountain pens were permitted. My writing was an inky mess as I tried telling my parents whatever I could without making them as miserable as me. Each reply was treasure. Mum’s delicate cursive told of Dad, church neighbours, and whether the frosts had ended. She hated the cold. Dad’s sentences were like caterpillar trains, and he added drawings to help me understand. Both went to boarding school; Mum aged twelve, Dad aged eight. Then my turn at nine. They never said a nice word about their experiences. That day I was going to arrive at our farm gate on Mum’s birthday and show them both how much I loved them. Because I thought they’d fallen out of love with me.

I shivered in the darkness; fingers cramped on the odd handlebars. My nose ran and I’d forgotten a handkerchief. Not a soul stirred in Moss Vale. So alone, a cow’s bellow nearly made me fall. A sign said Goulburn was a hundred kilometres away. If I made it to the southern side of Goulburn, they’d never catch me.

When daylight broke, I had thought of my parents’ morning. Bottles of colostrum warming in a saucepan for the orphan lambs. Sheep dogs released from their kennels and scraping the tin bowls by the kitchen door. Louis the rooster fussing over his hens, crowing to the valley that he’d survived the night. Dad’s last letter had included comical dogs mustering cloudy sheep with stick legs. Grey Hen perched on a pyramid of eggs in the corner of the page. He promised to leave them, so I’d have chicks in the school holidays. 

Clumps of fennel grew along the roadside where water pooled in drains. Picking it was something to do rather than because I was hungry. Now eating liquorice brings memories of mist and aching legs.

Forty kilometres from the school a policeman invaded my world. I hadn’t even reached half-way. He was uniformed and conditioned in all the ways I was determined not to be, and we didn’t speak on the drive back.

Later I was told the search party centred on the Moss Vale train station, because past escapees thought the train their only option for success. No-one ever tried to bike their way home. For their lack of courage, they’d never got past town, only 4km away. I’d just done ten times that on a dodgy stolen bike. Not that it mattered. All I could think about was how I wished I’d left earlier. Then Mum arrived.

We went to a café for a curried egg sandwich. I can’t remember much that was said, although she told me I would not go home that day. I withdrew, the way I always did when I couldn’t change something.

A crowd was waiting at school. My housemaster cleared it and together we went to see the headmaster. I’d never been in the headmaster’s office. It was heavy timbered and smelled of tobacco. Even with Mum beside me, I sat small and alone, as he meticulously cleaned and filled his pipe. When it came to life, he addressed me like I was the only person in the room.

Every other boy before me had been punished for running away, but I wasn’t to be. I was to think of the activities not available at other schools, on how I needed to study hard, and everything would settle down. As I looked at my lap, he said friends stayed silent until they knew the situation was hopeless and only then had one said to check the bike shed. There was a curl in the corner of his mouth when he said the staff were stunned by how far I’d got.

When Mum left, she promised I only had to make it until the end of the year. Then we’d see. I didn’t have time to cry as a fresh crowd blocked her car. Two year six boys lifted me onto a tree stump, and people took turns to ask how on earth I’d got all the way to the edge of the world. What was it like to be arrested? That was retold as a struggle for life and death. You would have done the same.

Forty-five years on, my record remains. I’d have thought my success gave hope to others, or maybe the new kid who walked on his toes, from a farm too small to afford a horse, had more guts than all of them.

***

A month after the second world war ended, Mother called to tell me my father had died. At the time, I was two hours away in a girl’s school at Mittagong. He’d battled tuberculosis for years, so they’d bought the weekender at Leura to help his lungs recover from the smoggy city. Even though we knew it was coming, I sobbed at the news.

I didn’t cry that hard again until we sent our little Will to boarding school. The local school was rubbish: Will’s class spanned children two years older and younger. We simply wished for more.

Perhaps it was providence that we chose a school near where I had gone during the war. I hope you never experience giving your child away. That abrupt separation; handing your child to strangers. Very few of my teachers were any good. Pat rarely mentioned his own schoolmasters, which leaves me wondering whether he enjoyed any part of his upbringing.

How can you decide whether teachers will do your child good or harm?

I asked what punishments they used. Memories of the cane for writing with my left hand made me ask. I’d no choice but to adapt. We were told here they used a sandshoe. I imagined a size twelve shoe, six times across your bum, would be enough to put anyone off wrongdoing. I’d asked out of curiosity rather than concern. Will was shy and not the type to be courageous or misbehave. After only a term, we discovered I was wrong on both accounts.

The nightmare began at sunrise when the headmaster called to say Will was missing. He wasn’t on the school grounds, and the police had been called. The train station came up blank, which had them worried, as it was the usual target for runaways. Would you believe Will had picked my birthday, of all days, to run away?

My child was alone on a road in the country with God knows what type of people watching him.

Pat and I panicked. Should we both go? He said it wouldn’t make finding Will any faster. I said we should have waited longer; he was too young. Pat said we’d sent him to the wrong place. We were both wrong, of course. Within an hour, a second call both relieved and shocked us.

Our timid boy had found the strength to pedal seven hours in the dark to Marulan. I told the school it would be me, not his house master, who would go to the police station.

Scenes of our reunion played in my mind, while I sped along gravel and then tar for two hours. If I was angry and firm, would that strengthen him? If I was relieved, might he take advantage and plead to come home with me? Should he be punished or praised for his courage and determination? A shock encounter in your formative years leaves a mark that never goes away. Like a branch torn from a tree where the bark won’t heal, it stays open and desiccated. How I behaved would mark him forever.

Will told me he was hungry. As he ate, I thought to fill the space with news about home but found I couldn’t speak. Eventually Will said he was angry at being stopped. I saw that what had begun as homesickness had, during those solitary hours in darkness, developed into a battle against his own will. The policeman had taken away the chance to see what he could achieve. I knew then he didn’t have to come home with me that day.

Back at school we saw the headmaster. I couldn’t imagine what he was thinking, whether he thought I was judging him for letting this happen or was he judging me for not being stricter with our child. Yet his attention was on Will. Only later, in private, did he say to give our boy a chance to recover after this ordeal. Now he’d shown what he was capable of, he might use that strength to cope better.

The headmaster caught me again on the verge of tears as I was leaving. He touched my arm and said, they cry plenty when they arrive, but even more when they leave. It did little to help, for as you can imagine, the drive home was worse than the drive there.

Sometimes, I think back to my father taking me to see his racehorses. Carson the strapper, a fellow not much older than me, spoke with a stutter and was gentle with the animals. The trainer, Mr Urquhart, would say things like that’s true and coming along nicely between sentences. I’d run my hands across the necks of mares like Britannic and Punjab as I thought of clever questions to ask. If Mother had allowed it, I’d have been a vet. Some people never find the balance between holding on and letting go. Let your child find their own way to cope with adversity. I learned how to do that on my 48th birthday. Two years later, when Will left primary school, the headmaster’s words came true.