The Package on

the TramA mystery story

PREVIEW

Ian BurnsYou can order The Package on the Tram and The

Day and Night Machine by clicking here, or going

to www.lulu.com/spotlight/ianburns.

Copyright Ian Burns 2014

Published by Twevven Books September 1st 2014

National Library of Australia

Burns, Ian Bernard Graham, 1939-

The Package on the Tram

ISBN 978-0-9806606-7-8

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in

any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,

recording or otherwise, without the written permission of

the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction, and is a sequel to The Day and

Night Machine.

For Laura, who wanted her own mystery story.

Cover design: Sophie Sirninger Rankin.

Web: http://www.twevvenbooks.com

Email: ibgburns@gmail.com

This story is a sequel to

The Day and Night Machinehttp://www.lulu.com/shop/ian-burns/

1

I

’d never told anyone about the cobweb, not even Mum, and certainly not Grand-dad. Mum knew about it, because I’d yelled at her one day, when she was going to vacuum it off my bedroom ceiling. I didn’t tell Granddad because he was still getting over all the things that had happened that week when I first noticed it dangling down above my bed.

The week of the day and night machine!

I still didn’t understand it, and hadn’t done anything with it since then, or since we’d gone back to school. But I thought about it all the time! Dad would’ve called it “bottling things up”, and suggested that this wasn’t a great idea.

Summer had turned into autumn since that amazing week. It seemed to me that everyone all around the world had forgotten about it: I couldn’t, because there was now one less person in the world, and one more, sort of. Well, there must’ve been many, many more people, but only one that I

really cared about. Or had it really happened?

Maybe if I got it out from under my bed, and connect-ed the red wire to the…

No, not yet. Dad had said that it was something “special”, and something special

had definitely happened, something very special – some things very special – and I thought that those were enough for the time being.

But...

2

E

veryone says that autumn is Melb-ourne’s best time of year – Mum agrees with this, and so does Grand-dad. I’m not sure what Dad thought – it never occurred to me to ask him, before...

The Americans call it “Fall”, which I sometimes think is quite a pretty name, all those red and gold and brown and still-green leaves zig-zagging away from what would have been their winter quarters. I imagine people scuffing through rustling piles, crunching the old

leaves into trillions of jigsaw pieces which magically reappear in Spring.

Some of this happened in Melbourne, especially in the Botanic Gardens, and along some of our main roads, but most of our trees are eucalypts – gums – and they lose leaves all year round, so we couldn’t really call Autumn Fall without calling Spring Fall and Summer Fall and Winter Fall.

The Wurundjeri people, who lived around Melbourne, had six or seven seasons, which gave them clues about when it would be good

to hunt certain animals, or harvest certain plants. I think this was a much better way of going about life, but it’s probably not much use nowadays.

3

ess. Granddad and I need to talk to you.’‘JMmmm. What does that mean?

Mum and I talk all the time. Granddad and I talk all the time, though he’s mainly laughing. Dad and I didn’t talk all the time, but it felt like it. Yes, and Mum and Grand-dad and I talk all the time, too. But this sounded different.

I walked down the passage towards the kitchen. My legs felt pretty good, now – not quite as

strong as they used to, but getting there. I might start tennis again soon, at school.

It was good being back at school, but it was a little strange. I’d missed nearly a whole year, so all my friends had moved up a year and I’d had to get to know all the new kids coming to our school from their primary schools. I’d actually done some school work while I was in bed, sent out to me from the Correspondence School, but this wasn’t enough to let me go up the year.

My bedroom was near the front of the house, behind our living room. We had a long passage going from the front door, past the bedrooms and bathroom, to the kitchen – the best room in the house!

In the old days the toilet was out the back, in the garden, and people had to go down there with newspaper, and a torch or lantern at night, or so Dad said. There was even a narrow lane behind our back fence where the “night men” – who only came in the night – drove their truck, picking up the cans of you-

know-what from the toilet and leaving an empty can for the next week.

I thought this was disgusting, but Grand-dad just laughed and said it was a good time to read the paper. He said that you had to have a good balance to be a night man, and a bad nose. And he thought that a night man falling for a pretty girl would have been the funniest thing to see, as long as you weren’t

too close. I didn’t quite know what he meant by all this, but was sure that it was just as dis-gusting as reading the newspaper in the toilet, even one like ours where you pressed a button and flushed you-know-what away to somewhere else that was a long long way away.

‘Sit down, darling.’I sat on the bench seat that

Granddad had made years ago, when Dad was a boy.

Our kitchen table was a bit small, really only made for four people, though a fifth person could probably have squeezed in at one

end. Being small didn’t really matter now, because there were only three of us.

At the moment only one of us, sitting down.

Mum was standing near the old oven, in its alcove, fiddling with a couple of tea towels. Granddad was looking out the wind-ow, into the garden, though he didn’t seem to be seeing anything.

This was serious. It always is when grown-ups try to act like grown-ups.

Mum undid her apron and hung it up

on the hook behind the swing-door, which closed off the passage when it wasn’t wedged open.

‘I know you don’t like having visitors very much, especially…that…woman…’

I shuddered a bit, remembering “that woman”, and what she tried to do to me, and everyone else, but she…

‘…well,’ said Granddad, some old friends of ours – especially your Dad’s…’

‘…in New South Wales, have had some very bad luck,’ Mum finished.

Mum and Granddad often talked differ-ent bits of the same sentence.

I tried to think who that could have been.

‘What happened?’They both looked very serious.‘Well, you know the bushfires

they had up there…?’It’d been on the television all

week.‘Their house burnt down!’‘The fire was terrible! It

happened so quickly, roaring across the paddocks, they only just managed to escape …’

‘…if they’d decided to leave only a few minutes later they would have all been…’

Mum and Granddad looked at each other. I knew what they meant, because dozens of people’d died in awful bushfires in Victoria when I was a little girl.

‘Well,’ said Mum, ‘they have a lot to do, to clean up and attend to lots of things, like insurance, and planning for a new house, that they’ve asked us...if we’d...look after their daughter for a while.’

So that was it! Three would become four again. But the wrong four!

‘She has nowhere else to go.’‘What do you think?’ said

Granddad, looking at me with his happy wrinkles

wondering when they could be happy again.

A girl to stay.

4

A

girl to stay.I was not happy.For nearly all my life it’d been

just the three of us – Mum, Dad, and me. Then, since last year, just the three of us – Mum, Granddad, and me, living in Granddad’s old house.

A girl, from the country! New South Wales!

She probably couldn’t read, and wouldn’t know anything about electronics kits.

She probably had a runny nose, and red pimples, and wore dresses, and did all sorts of sissy things like putting flowers in books and cooking soft-boiled eggs and stuff.

She probably hated dogs, and had no idea about dust motes or cobwebs.

She probably wet her bed at night, and I’d have to change her sheets till we had to buy more.

She probably hated roast lamb and roast vegetables, and peas, and roast onion, and scones with butter and jam and cream for afternoon tea.

She’d probably stay forever and I’d have to share my bedroom for ever, and sleep on the camp bed for ever.

I was not happy.‘All right,’ I said.

5

‘S

he’s arriving in an hour!’An hour!‘Come on – get your things!’Granddad didn’t really know

about things. He couldn’t even remember to put his watch on in the morning half the time. And half the time he forgot to take it off at night, so all the time he had trouble with time.

Still, he was my best granddad.‘The next tram should be here in

fifteen minutes or so. Put on a nice

pair of jeans, Jess.’ Mum would never let me go out if she didn’t approve of whatever I thought was just right.

I took my time putting on the jeans, so that she wouldn’t have time to make me run back and change my favourite shirt!

The tram stop was almost outside our front door, past Sturzenhuis, and the tram came around the corner just as we went out our front gate.

We stepped inside and swiped our cards.

‘The worst thing since sliced antelopes,’ complained Granddad, who liked the old days when, he said, a conductor came around selling tickets and helping people.

Dad said this was progress and Granddad said poppycock, I think.

There was hardly anyone on the tram, so we all got a window seat and could see the Yarra as we crossed the bridge, and the MCG (that was Dad’s favourite place, on Boxing Day, and Granddad’s) on the left. The tram was going to Docklands, so we had to get off at

Spencer Street and walk up the hill to Southern Cross station.

‘This is where I got off the train from Perth,’ said Granddad, ‘back in 1951. It was a dump then.’

‘Well, it’s certainly not a dump now,’ said Mum. ‘Let’s go in and have a look while we’re waiting for Laura’s train.’

We walked in from the Collins Street corner, into a huge flat area. On the left

were stairs and escalators, going up to the suburban trains. Where we were standing there were shops and an office building; past these were the platforms where the country and interstate trains came in.

‘Look up there, young ’un!’ said Grand-dad. ‘I bet you’ve never seen anything like that before!’

And I hadn’t.But I wished that Granddad

would stop calling me young ’un. It was all right when I was young, but I was in high school, now – I might have to remind him that my name is

Jess, with a capital!Up there was the roof, or was it

the ceil-ing? I always got those two things mixed up,

but I think that “roof” was the bit that caught the rain and the sun, and that “ceiling” was what I could see when I looked up from inside.

Well, at Southern Cross station the ceiling just had to be the roof – it was enor-mous.

And it was wavy. I’d never seen a wavy roof, unless you counted the Sydney Opera House, which I had only seen in pictures, and that wasn’t really wavy, anyway.

Looking across the tracks we could see the suburban trains going backwards and forwards, some going around to Flinders Street

station, some to the underground loop, and some off to Footscray and other strange places.

We walked onto platform 1, where the girl Laura’s train would come in, and sat down on one of the benches. The notice said we had eleven minutes to wait.

6

‘H

ere she comes!’Granddad jumped up. He was

excited. Mum stood up beside him, looking at the train coming slowly into the station, a big light shining on its front.

I could see enough sitting down.The great diesel engine rolled

past me, fumes splurting out of its roof, the engine noise hurting my ears a bit. Breaks squealed and the whole long train stopped.

Mum and Granddad walked

away, look-ing at all the people getting off with their cases and bags and rucksacks, and even a man carrying a rooster!

There were hundreds of people – every-body must’ve left New South Wales. I couldn’t have stood up, even if I’d wanted to.

‘There she is! Come on, Jess.’It was a wonder that I’d heard

Mum call-ing me, or that she could still see me through the crowd.

I weaved my way towards her, slowly, and we both caught up with Granddad.

That must’ve been her, in the

carriage doorway, trying to pull a very large suitcase that didn’t even have any wheels.

And her hair. I gasped.‘Hello there, young ’un! Let me

help you with that.’

He’d called her “young ’un”! That was my name!

‘Hell..o, Uncle…Frank.’Uncle Frank!!! He was my

Granddad! He wasn’t anyone’s uncle, especially if they were from New South Wales!

‘Hello, darling!’What was Mum saying!? I was

her darl-ing.‘Hello, Aunty…Jenny…’Aunty Jenny!!!‘Jess, come and meet Laura…’But I was halfway back to the

exit. This was all too much.

7

‘Jess!’I could hear Mum calling me, but

I was off, banging on the button at the traffic lights to make them change quicker, over Collins Street, past The Age building and the old bluestone hotel that used to be the railways offices, and down the hill to Flinders Street.

The trouble was, when I got there I didn’t know what to do next.

‘Jess! I’ve never known you to be so rude!’

I looked at Mum. My face started to look like the top traffic light. I couldn’t help it. Why is it that only girls get embarrassed? Boys do much more embarrassing things, usually stupid, but they couldn’t care less and just wondered what was for dinner.

‘Miss Sturzen!’Mum looked at me, then at

Laura coming down the hill with Granddad. All the build-ings were grey, and Spencer Street was grey, even a tram was grey. But Laura’s head – her hair actually – was red.

Red! Like a spot fire. I knew she was trouble!

Granddad puffed to a halt, the sun mak-ing hundreds of glistening rainbows through the sweat drops on his bald head. I almost laughed.

‘Phew, young ’un! I’m glad that was all down hill!’

He was holding Laura’s hand and lugging her suitcase, both from New South Wales.

But he’d called me young ’un this time!

‘Here’s the tram, Mum.’She looked at me.

‘The lights are going to change, love – better hop on!’

Granddad hopping on, with a girl in hand and lugging a large suitcase, both from New South Wales, was more than I could bear without laughing. He heaved the case on board and I heaved my lungs out and Granddad dropped Laura’s case on Mum’s big toe and we all dropped our tickets onto

the floor and the lights changed and the tram driver laughed and clanged his bell and we were on our way home.

8

S

ometimes I wonder who is the cleverest person in the world.

Actually, Mum and Granddad and I talked about this after lunch sometimes, or when we went on one of our long walks.

I always thought that the cleverest people were teachers, because they had to know so much, and try to get us to know it as well. But Granddad said that they certainly couldn’t be all that clever because, if they were that clever,

they wouldn’t have become a teacher.

Mum would say that the Prime Minister was the cleverest, but Granddad said that the Prime Minister only thought that he was the cleverest because he was the Prime Minister, and got to spend all our money, even though he said he wouldn’t.

Granddad would always say that he was the cleverest, because he had the best grand-daughter in the world, which I think was true.

But, today, Mum was definitely the cleverest, because somehow

she’d managed to push Laura’s suitcase into a safe corner, find four empty seats, sit with Granddad on one, and manoeuvre me to sit on the other one, next to Laura. And she’d still had time to pick up our tickets from the floor.

And I didn’t get the window seat.

9

‘G

randdad’s put the stretcher up for you.’

I knew it! I’d be sleeping on the floor for the rest of my life! How long did it take to build a house after a bushfire?!

‘I could have put Laura in Dad’s old bed-room, but Granddad thought that it would be better for you two to get to know each other.’

What did grandfathers know about things?! I bet that if Granddad had had a visitor from

New South Wales when he was a boy it’d be different then.

Granddad looked at me a little guiltily, so maybe it wasn’t his idea; maybe it was Mum’s – mothers can be pretty sneaky some times.

No, if you look guilty you are guilty.

I wouldn’t speak to Granddad again: if there’s one thing that grandfathers hate it’s when their best granddaughters won’t speak to them.

‘There you are, young ’uns. All set.’

I definitely wouldn’t be talking to him again!

‘Thank you, Uncle Frank.’I won’t be talking to her, either.Mum and the person that I

wasn’t going to speak to again went off to the kitchen or somewhere.

‘Have you got a whistling angel in your garden?’ I said to the girl. I was pretty sure that she wouldn’t have.

Laura looked at me. ‘I don’t know. Our house burnt down.’

I would have known if I’d had a whistling angel in my garden, even if my house had burnt down. How

could you forget that? ‘We have. It’s cool. I’ll show you. Come on.’

She followed me through the kitchen: Mum was getting the lunch ready and the other person was trying not to look guilty.

‘I like those ferns.’Everybody likes ferns. ‘They

used to be Mum’s Mum’s. She was very old, once, but I

never knew her. Here it is.’Whistling Angel was one of my

favourite things in the whole world. I’d told Laura that it was cool, and it was, because it was a kind of fountain. An angel’s head was fixed to the high brick wall and cool water squirted from its mouth. (I wasn’t sure whether the angel was a he or a she, but I knew that it was an angel because of the wings.)

I sat on the edge of the bath – well, it wasn’t really a bath, but the water fell into it and filled it up, like a bath, and I didn’t know whether it

had a proper name, especially with its frogs and water plants.

‘Your garden is lovely.’ It was the best place in the

world, if you

don’t count the kitchen table when Mum’s serving up dinner. They probably didn’t have gardens in New South Wales.

‘What’s behind that wall?’‘That was the wall that I’d

climbed over in the middle of the night, when I got kid-napped.’

‘Kidnapped?!’‘Oh, it’s just Sturzenhuis.’‘Sturzenhuis?’‘Jess! Laura! Lunch is ready.’

10

‘L

aura wants to know about Sturzen-huis.’

Mum and Granddad looked at each other. We hadn’t talked about those things for months.

‘That place was weird!’‘Dad!’ Mum called Granddad

“Dad”, even though he wasn’t her dad. Sometimes people did that, which was a bit confusing – sometimes Mum had called Dad “Dad” and Granddad “Dad” at the same time, when I was there.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘all those things did actually happen, and we did see inside the house! It was weird!’

‘I think I’ll show Laura.’

11

W

e walked up the brick path to-wards Sturzenhuis.

‘It’s tiny!’‘Wait till you see inside.’The front door was slightly open

– all the padlocks had disappeared. I shivered a little as I led the way inside: I knew what had hap-pened there.

Laura gasped. ‘It’s enormous!’I took her through the first five

rooms, showing her the benches – all the batteries and cables had

gone – then down the dark passage to...

‘It’s a cell!’ cried Laura. ‘Bars!’‘That’s where they kept me.’‘Why?’This was going to be tricky.

How much should I tell her about what had happened last holidays? She came from New South Wales, so did she know anything? Would she believe me? She wasn’t wearing a dress, and she didn’t have a runny nose, or red pimples, but I still didn’t really know any-thing about her. Oh, yes, she loved the roast lamb and roast

vegetables, and peas, and roast onion we’d had for lunch. But what about dogs? And why was she wearing a bangle that sounded like bells?

‘They caught me looking in the window.

In the middle of the night.’‘That was very brave.’Well, I suppose it was, though I’d

never thought about it being brave: I just needed to know what was going on. Still, it was cool of her to say that.

‘How did you escape?’It was getting trickier.‘Ulso helped me.’‘Ulso?!’‘I’ll tell you about it later.’ What

does “later” mean? I didn’t know. I thought that it might have been like when your mother says “I’ll see,” hoping that you’ll forget what you

were asking her to give you or whatever. It’s like a Mother’s Minute – “Just a minute

…” she says and you wait all day.‘This place is really weird – I like

it.’That was really weird, that

someone said that something really weird was really weird, and liked it! ‘Come on, let’s get outa here.’

12

I’d had enough of that place. Being locked up in a cell with no light and bad people down the passage was something best for-gotten.

Laura didn’t talk much for the rest of the day, and I wondered whether it’d be any fun when Mum turned the light out.

‘That place was really weird.’‘You said that this morning.’‘I know, but it was really weird!’I thought that “weird” was very

like “wired”, which made me think about the day and night machine

under my bed, waiting for me to connect the battery again. ‘What happened in New South Wales when all that stuff happened in the summer holidays?’

‘What stuff?’‘You know, when the sun went

out…’‘The sun went out…?’‘Day turned into night, you

know…’‘Oh, like an eclipse?’‘And the night turned back into

day…’‘Well, that’s what usually

happens…’

‘No – I mean…suddenly. Suddenly it’s day, then suddenly it’s night, then sudden-ly…’

She looked at me, and I decided that all of the terrible things that I’d thought had happened everywhere maybe hadn’t happen-ed everywhere. ‘Have you got a dog?’

‘Yes. No!’ and she started to cry. ‘I did have, but she didn’t escape…from… the fire…’

Oh! ‘Oh! Laura: I’m so sorry!’ And I started to cry, too: I couldn’t imagine what I’d do if Ulso was burnt, and her poor dog!

‘She was chained up. Out the back. In her kennel. The fire came so quickly… through the wheat…What’s that!’

The moon was shining through my high bedroom windows.

‘They’re dust motes.’‘Dust motes?’ Laura hadn’t

heard of dust motes – I could tell.‘Tiny pieces of dust. Floating in

the air.’‘Floating in the air?’

‘That’s why we have hairs in our nose.’

‘Hairs in our nose? ‘To stop the dust motes going up

your nose.’Yuk!’‘Well, if we didn’t have hairs in

our nose, all those dust motes would go down into our lungs, and fill them up with dust, like a vacuum cleaner!’

‘Yuk!’We watched them float around,

slowly, then suddenly fizz silently up and up, and down again. We couldn’t actually see whether they

landed anywhere, or whether new ones joined in. Or whether any actually went up our noses.

‘Are they the motes that get in your eyes?’

I wasn’t sure about this: I hadn’t heard about motes in your eyes, but maybe some of them do float into them sometimes. Maybe there are nose motes and eye motes and vacuum-cleaner motes, and all the motes that fall onto the furniture that Mum dusts off each Christmas. Dad used to laugh about this, but Mum’d just tell him to go and get the washing in.

‘Maybe that’s why we blink so often, like windscreen wipers.’

‘Well, what happens to them,

then? The motes.’‘Maybe they go down into your

nose.’‘With the dust that you breathe

in?’

‘Yes, and when you blow your nose you blow them all out again!’

‘Yuk!’‘Then there are the face mites...’‘Yuk!!’‘And dust mites...’‘YUK! YUK! YUK!’‘And there might even be mites

on mites!’She’d definitely stopped crying.1

‘Mum wants me to take you into town to-morrow, to show you my favourite places.’

‘Oh.’

1 You will find a picture of these at the end of the book.

‘Do you have a library, in New South Wales?’

‘A library bus comes near us on Wednes-days. I borrow books from it, or at school. There’s a big library in Wagga. We go into Wagga once a month. Actually it’s called Wagga Wagga.’

I was pretty sure that the big library in Wagga would fit in our library’s bathroom. ‘And do you have a shot tower?’

‘Goodnight children. It’s lovely to have you staying with us for a while, Laura.’

Mum turned the light out.

This was the best time, snuggling into bed, even in summer, and looking up through the top window at the stars. I always wondered how many there are?

‘What’s a shot tower?’‘It’s a place where they used to

make shot. In the old days.’‘Oh.’I suppose that people from New

South Wales haven’t heard about shot towers, and don’t know what they’re for. Nor do I, really. ‘I’ll show you tomorrow.’ I snuggled further into bed, on the floor.

‘Oh, Jess, what’s that?’‘What…?’‘There…’I didn’t know what to say. It was

my ceiling cobweb, hanging down, swaying gently.

And glowing, a creamy colour, ever so slightly.

It hadn’t done anything for a long time, not since before another redhead had rushed into my bedroom with a day and night machine and tried to ki…

‘It’s a…cobweb…’‘Oh. But it seems to be…shining,

or something.’

‘I don’t know how it does that, but it’s a very special cobweb…’

Every time I said “special” I remembered that Dad had said that my electronics kit was special, and goose bumps jumped all up and down the back of my neck.

‘Sometimes it glows…different colours…’

‘Cool!’ ‘But the funny thing is, it’s

never glowed creamy before…’‘Oh.’‘It’s always been green…or

orange…or red.’‘Like a traffic light?’

I didn’t know that they had traffic lights in New South Wales.

‘Yes. Sort of. I suppose.’I could see her thinking about all

this.‘You don’t think it could be a

kind of cobweb signally thing?’I didn’t think that was what it

was at all.I knew that that was what it was.

13

I

loved books, and not only because Dad had been an author. They just looked right, they smelt right, they felt right, they turned their pages right – and they told stories.

This was why we were standing outside the State Library of Victoria, looking at the statues, and all the people sitting on the grass and the bean bags and the steps, or strolling around, or going into or coming out of the great building.

‘Come on, I want to show you

something special.’We walked into the foyer, past

the nice attendant at the door, into a very large room, filled with desks and screens, and people tap-ping on keyboards.

‘Wow!’I thought that Wagga’s library

was in a spot of trouble.‘No, this isn’t it. We have to go

up in the lift.’The doors opened at the third

floor – Wagga’s library was definitely in trouble!

‘Wow! Cool! Oooh! COOL!’‘I know.’ I was saying exactly

the same to myself, even though I’d been there before.

A huge white room, or was it creamy? It had eight sides, and three floors of books above the floor that we were standing on.

Our floor had desks and benches, and green shaded lamps, and people studying and reading.

‘Look up!’‘WOW! COOL! Oooh! COOL!!!’A huge dome! A kind of squarish

set of windows right in the middle, then another set of sixteen sets of windows, then another set of sixteen, but with even more windows in each set – there were forty-eight sets alto-gether, and I couldn’t count the number of window panes.

And it was all so light.We both just stared.

All those books, here, but not him. Why did we go for that drive that night, and why

was that kangaroo ever born?I went into a smaller room at the

side, and asked the librarian if she would look up Dad’s name. After a few seconds she turned the screen around for us to look at it, scroll-ing slowly down.

There were all his books’ names, a lot with coloured pictures of their covers.

‘Your Dad wrote all those?!’ whispered Laura.

She stared at the screen. She stared at me. I thought she was going to cry. Losing a dog is awful, especially in

a fire, but losing your father…We left the great dome, left the

lift, left the wonderful, wonderful library, and all the

people sitting and talking and eating lunch on the lawns, and crossed the road to the shot tower, holding hands.

14

W

e have two shot towers in Mel-bourne, one near the start of the Eastern Freeway, the other on top of the Melbourne Central underground rail-way station.

Our underground railway was pretty special, according to Dad, because it’s the world’s shortest – it hardly goes anywhere!

But I don’t think that its shot tower is the shortest – it certainly impressed my friend from New South Wales!

She craned her neck, almost hitting herhead on a Japanese tourist convoy that was passing a little too close to her.

‘WOW! CooL! OoOh! COOL!!!’‘It’s where they used to make

shot.’ Dad had told me that, and Granddad had told me what “shot” was – he had some when he went shooting for things that I’d wished he hadn’t gone shooting at.

‘Oh – that must’ve been the pellets for shotguns.’

‘Well, something like that, in the olden days, blunderbusses and

things.’‘Oh! What’s that!’We turned around quickly, just

missing the last of the Japanese tourists as their group stopped to listen.

‘It’s Waltzing Matilda!’

That was the other thing that I wanted to show Laura.

‘WoW! CooL! Oooh! Cool!’On the wall opposite the shot

tower hung a very large pocket watch – the kind you don’t see nowadays, except in some television shows – and the music was coming from it. Below it was what seemed to be its insides, with two little elves (playing instru-ments) going round and round, and several parrots (I think one of those was made up!).

The music stopped, the insides went

back inside, and cameras were put down.

‘Come on, we’d better head for home.’

We went back to Flinders Street through the lanes and arcades – Royal Arcade, the

oldest in Australia, with its queer statues of Gog and Magog, keeping time by hammering a couple of bells under a glass roof, and, over Little Collins Street, Block Arcade, with its amazing tiled floor, gorgeous shops, and parts of the walls made of stone (Mum had taken me to the tea rooms once), then down a few lanes and Elizabeth Street, to the tram stop next to Flinders Street station.

15

W

e only had to wait a few minutes, mainly for the touristy City Circle tram to lazy past, with our tram coming behind it.

There was only one person on board, which had never happened to me before. We sat down opposite him.

Laura glanced at him, then took out her iPod.

‘What are you doing?’‘Look.’She turned her iPod towards me.

On the screen was a picture of a man’s face,

though not exactly like a photo. She looked at the man again and brushed her fingers down from the top of the screen-man’s head. The screen-man suddenly had hair! Then she clicked on the bottom of the screen, swiping her finger across the man’s hair, changing its colour – to almost exactly the old man’s hair colour!

Magical!I looked at him, trying not to

stare. He was quite big, and sort of crumpled. His old coat had some war medals pinned on it, on his left side – I guessed that he must’ve

been in the Anzac Day march in the morning. His wrinkled face was very brown – he might have been from the outback, or one of the

First Peoples, it was hard to tell.Laura’s fingers flashed across

the screen, clicking and swiping the app, never looking up at the man across from us.

‘There!’ she said, showing me the screen.

It was the man!I couldn’t help myself – I had to

look at him again.He was looking at me!Laura clicked on something near

the bot-tom of the screen and put the iPod away.

The tram stopped outside St Paul’s Cath-edral and a mass of

people piled on: they were obviously going to the footy, with their red and black scarves and beanies (my team) and the others with black and white beanies

and scarves – they were always desperate to beat us because we’d won one more premier-ships than they had.

The crowd hid the man from us, so that I couldn’t see him – it’s so embarrassing when someone that you don’t know knows that you’ve been looking at them.

‘Where are we?’‘Jolimont, the MCG.’ I looked

out the window, at the great light towers, as the crowd crimpled off the tram, laughing and jostling and shouting “Carn the Bombers” and some silly things I didn’t

understand from the black and white fans.

When I turned back the tram was empty, except for Laura and me.

The man had gone! The driver clanged his bell, the

doors hissed closed.And we both saw the package

lying on the seat where the man had been sitting.

16

I

t lay on my bed. A brown-paper-wrapped package. The paper was a bit skungey, wrinkled, as though it’d been used lots of times before, a bit like how Dad had done up that present…The twine tying it up looked like Dad’s too…Could it be from …? No, that was silly. It was the man on the tram’s.

It had a funny feel about it. It was not heavy, but…suspicious. Not light, but… interesting.

Ever since my last birthday, in

January, brown paper seemed to me to be more im-portant than…lots of stuff. It was one of the things that had changed for me, inside. I knew that I was now a different person, older, somehow, but not quite as sad.

In fact I thought that Laura was probably sadder than I was, about her dog.

‘Shouldn’t we hand it in?’Laura was right: it wasn’t ours, it

was the old man’s, or maybe a friend of his, but something had made me bring it home. If cobwebs could change colour then packages

left on a tram weren’t always a mistake!

‘We will, I just want to think about it, first.’

She sat on the bed, not touching the package – I thought that she thought that there was something about it, too.

‘Maybe we should open it.’‘Oh! I don’t think that’s a good

idea… it’s not ours!’‘I know, but there might be a

name in-side, or an address, and then we could give it back.’

‘Well, I don’t know. Maybe.’The string was fairly tight.‘Pass me the scissors. There, on

my bedside table, behind the lamp.’They felt a bit warm, which was

strange, because it was autumn and the house was quite cool. If I’d looked up I might have seen that my cobweb was changing colour.

‘Here goes!’

S-n-ii-p…

Fuszzzzzz

*****

You can order The Package on the Tram and The

Day and Night Machine by clicking here, or going to

www.lulu.com/spotlight/ianburns.