Jack's Island Read Online Free

bad enough to have to keep looking over our shoulders for Japs without ghosts to worry about as well.
    â€˜Hey, look at these.’ Banjo had lifted a sheet of rusty tin and uncovered about a dozen ship’s pulleys. Large wooden blocks with four-inch brass wheels fixed inside them lay scattered about. Termites had made a good feast of the wooden parts. ‘We’ll break ’em open and take out the wheels,’ he said excitedly. ‘We can make hill trolleys.’
    This was the best idea Banjo had had in ages. All thoughts of ghosts and spooky unknown dangers suddenly disappeared as we imagined ourselves racing down hills on the brass wheels.
    â€˜Can we go to your house?’ I asked Banjo. ‘My dad gets really mad when I use his tools. He reckons he can never find any of them afterwards. Besides, your dad has hundreds of tools.’
    â€˜My dad gets mad whether I use his tools or not, so I suppose so,’ Banjo said with a resigned shrug.
    â€˜And we’ll need some fruit boxes,’ I said. ‘For seats. There’s usually some outside the shop.’
    â€˜All right, then. You go to the front of the shop and carry on like an idiot as a decoy while I sneak out the back. That should be pretty easy for you—carrying on like an idiot.’
    But Mrs O’Keeffe had run out of things to sell and had closed the shop early and gone home for the day. We took two fruit boxes without being noticed. Then we hung round down by the ferry, watching Little Eric, Red Eric’s son, wash out the deck of the ferry.
    â€˜Bugger off,’ he called when he got tired of us staring at him.
    â€˜We need some rope, Eric. For steering reins for our hill trolleys,’ I said. ‘Give us some rope and we’ll let you have a ride.’
    â€˜I’ll give you a length of rope,’ he called back, flicking us with dirty water from his mop. ‘Bugger off, I said.’
    â€˜Aw, come on, Eric. We only need a few feet,’ said Banjo.
    Little Eric pulled out his clasp knife from the leather pouch on his belt and I thought for a moment he was going to kill us, but instead he cut off a length of white rope from a coil near his feet. ‘Here. Go hang yourselves. Now bugger off.’ By the afternoon we’d built the two best hill trolleys the world had ever seen. They each had a fruit box with the front cut out for a seat, a wooden T-shape for steering, and a brass wheel in each corner.
    â€˜I reckon we should paint them,’ said Banjo.
    â€˜Why? Don’t you want to be known as Chin’s Fruit and Vegetable Market Garden, South Perth?’ I said.
    Banjo looked at the sign stencilled on the side of his new seat and just grunted.

Racing the Trolleys
    I couldn’t believe the noise of the brass wheels on the bitumen road as we headed out of the settlement and past the Carters’ house, pulling the trolleys behind us. But as loud as the wheels were, we still heard Mr Carter’s 1928 Chevy truck start up. It was one of those models with no doors and a flat tray on the back. The muffler had fallen off years before.
    Mr Carter was the nightcart man. Carter the Nightcarter, we called him. It was his job to drive down the dunny lanes to collect all the stinking dunny pans and replace them with empty ones. What a job. Often they overflowed and a couple of times Mr Carter had even had the bottoms fall out of rusty ones while he carried them. Re-volt-ing!
    When his truck was new, Mr Carter had built a wooden frame on the back to hold the pans. The frame had once been painted white but it was impossible to believe that, looking at it now. Disgusting brown splashes and stains covered every surface. Huge blowflies swarmed around it all the time, even in winter, and the smell was bad enough to stun a mallee bull. Mr Carter smelt even worse than the truck—more like a long-dead, maggot-blown mallee bull.
    We pulled the hill trolleys up towards the lighthouse at