Pobby and Dingan Read Online Free PDF Page A

people were real nice about it. On one of the camps a woman gave me a Mello Yello and a cake and asked me how my mum was doing at the supermarket. She said: “The sooner they get your pretty little sister to hospital the better.” I answered: “Yup. But it’s more complicated than that, Mrs. Wallace. See, Kellyanne’s sick-with-worry sick; she ain’t hospital-sick sick.” I also met this kid who knew as much about Pobby and Dingan as I did. He said he didn’t like Kellyanne too much but he thought Pobby and Dingan were all right. He said he had a much better imaginary friend than Kellyanne. It was a giant green ninja platypus called Eric. He didn’t talk to it, but.
    One twinkly and crazy old-timer with a parrot took me into the bust-up old tram where he lived and told me he had heard Kellyanne talking to Pobby and Dingan once when she was at the town goat races. She had been standing with three lollies on Morilla Street. This old miner said he believed that Pobby and Dingan really existed and he would look out for them as carefully as he could when he was walking around town. He would also check in at Steve’s Kebabs to see if they’d stopped by for a feed, and he would write a poem called “Come Home, My Transparent Ones!” and hand it around his bush-poet mates. This old codger didn’t seem to understand that I just wanted him to pretend to be looking for Pobby and Dingan. But there you go.
    I stayed out till dark explaining to all these Lightning Ridge families how they had to make a big show of looking for Pobby and Dingan so that Kellyanne could see that people really cared about them. And I did some explaining about what had happened to my dad and what a mix-up there had been. And how Pobby and Dingan weren’t real but Kellyanne thought they were and that’s what counts, and how my dad wasn’t a ratter but people thought he was and that’s what counts too. Some of the people were real nice about it and gave me some bags of Twisties, and I went around munching them and putting up signs I had made saying:
    LOST! HELP!
    KELLYANNE WILLIAMSON’S FRIENDS POBBY AND
    DINGAN. DESCRIPTION: IMAGINARY. QUIET.
    REWARD IF FOUND
    And I put on the address of our house and tacked the notices up on telephone poles and walls and machinery and shit. When I cycled home I watched people looking at the notices, and I saw that some of them had been graffitied-over with the word “Ratter,” but I also noticed that a lot of them hadn’t been. Well, that was a good sign. And a lot of folks were smiling and laughing. I went to bed that night pretty full of myself for having had a go at least at clearing my family name and standing up for everybody. And I hadn’t got beaten up or anything, either—which was cool.
    Well, Kellyanne wasn’t getting any better and she wasn’t saying anything except muttering the names of Pobby and Dingan, and Mum and Dad were spending all their time by her bedside taking her temperature and telling her everything was going to be all right and making her soup which she never ate. And Dad was still pacing up and down clutching at this letter from the hospital which said that Kellyanne had to go there immediately, and that they needed to do some tests. My folks, I reckon, were beginning to think hospital was the only way out.
    When the blanket everybody calls night was tucked in all snugly over Lightning Ridge I stayed in my room and hung my head out of the window and said a sort-of-a-prayer. I said something like: “Please let people go looking for Pobby and Dingan!” And I squeezed my hands together. When I’d finished the prayer, I realized I hadn’t put no address on it, and I was just whispering, “P.S. This prayer is for God or anyone powerful who can hear me,” and wondering if it wouldn’t be better to pray to someone cooler like James Blond, when I was distracted by the sound of Mum and Dad shouting at each other in their bedroom. And I only caught a few words, because it sounded