FEELS LIKE HOME

written by I love music
ideas and suggestions by Skykat

It feels like home to me
It feels like home to me
It feels like I'm all the way back where I come from
It feels like home to me
It feels like home to me
It feels like I'm all the way back where I belong

© Chantal Kreviazuk

"Summer Bay's a small town, Irene," Barry Hyde said, his voice choked with tears. You'll be ostracised if you associate with a murderer."

She only drew him closer. "I never gave a fig for what other people think, Barry. You should know that by now."

Eleven-year-old Irene McFarlane tapped her foot as she strummed guitar and winked at Benji who sat in the front row between Katie and Jill, their twin sisters. Mrs Macklin's lips were set in a thin line and that glare could have frozen the local park lake but there was absolutely nothing the principal could do about Wild Irene being on stage and both she and Irene knew it. Irene had as much right as everybody else to take a turn.

Bonhomie was the theme Harper Junior School had chosen (no doubt to Mrs Macklin's eternal regret now) to celebrate the final day of the top class who would be moving on to high school after the summer break. Everywhere was decorated in French style with French flag colour posters, banners and balloons, all lovingly created by the youngest class who had for several months been exchanging letters, cards and small gifts with a class of similarly aged children in a small village in northern France. The idea was for photographs of the event to be sent to their pen-friends (the French kids would be hosting a "UK Day" the following week when their own school reached its end of term and its top class moved on to high school too) but Irene had a strong feeling that the four proud little seven-year-olds who had been chosen as "official photographers" and who were now innocently clicking their cameras would have certain pictures carefully removed at the development stage.

It had been Benji's idea that she go out with a bang that told everybody exactly what she thought of them and the way they had looked down their noses at the rough, tough, foul-mouthed McFarlanes and their mother who slept around and lived on welfare hand-outs - that is, they looked down their noses until extremely recently when snobs like Mrs Macklin realised little Benji just might make Harper Junior School famous. Irene no longer had any qualms about leaving him behind. Even the twins wouldn't need to look out for him anymore because Benji could and did look out for himself these days. In the last month or two he had grown taller, begun to lose his chubby baby face and had not only come out of his shell but was proving to be extremely popular. Nobody bullied Benji now, not even the racist Sharp brothers. And while he had plenty of mates to sit with nowadays, the McFarlane family led by Irene were united whenever they needed to be.

Benji's new found confidence was mostly down to the music teacher, Mr Halford, who, unlike the previous music teacher who passed timid little Benji by unnoticed, had discovered and encouraged Benji's obvious talent for music, lifting him from the obscurity of being too shy to sing above a whisper to the forefront of the school choir and a place in the school band, where Benji was busy learning to play a variety of musical instruments with kids three and four years older.

All of the McFarlanes had a good ear for a tune but as the seven siblings (three of whom were too young as yet to start school) had five different fathers between them, it's fair to say that their musical ability must have come from their mother's side of the family although Evelyn herself, who, surprisingly, didn't have a particularly good singing voice, couldn't think who. Her own father, she was told, had been a soldier and was killed in the war when she was very young and her mother was "distant" - although, Evelyn recalled, she did occasionally play piano and then quite well in the brief glimpses she had of her when she came home from boarding school. Her maternal grandparents she never once saw although they paid for her education until they faded from this earth within weeks of each other shortly after her seventeenth birthday, having delivered the final blow by leaving every penny of their estate to a cats' home and nothing whatsoever to their only child and grandchild.

Once her own mother died, Evelyn had no choice but to make her way as best she could and with remarkable tolerance in a world that, with a clutch of qualifications in subjects such as Ancient Greece and Embroidery together with a total inexperience of life in general, she was ill prepared to meet. It wasn't until Irene pointed out to her that she was almost certainly born illegitimate and her grandparents wanted to hush up the "scandal" that it even occurred to Evelyn her grandparents might not have had her best interests at heart when they sent her away for an exclusive private education.

Irene grew up fast not only because she was the eldest but because she had to. Despite her expensive education, Evelyn wasn't the brightest button in the box and her refined accent and ways marked her out from the folk she now mixed with. One of Irene's earliest memories was of throwing orange peel at a couple of women who had upset her mother and her mother being absolutely horrified (even though, to Irene's annoyance, it missed and passed its intended targets by unobserved) and telling her it "just wasn't done." Okay, it wasn't, Irene decided. At least not when Mum was around to see it...

She saw by Mrs Macklin's expression that she recognised the tune. Good. The very first moment Irene heard it (when she'd been browsing through her mother's record collection) she'd thought it summed up their narrow-mindedness perfectly. Its name had been a delightful coincidence. She smiled sweetly and launched into song.

...I want to tell you all a story 'bout a Harper Valley widow wife
who had a teenage daughter who attended Harper Valley Junior High...

But it was the last the few lines that gave Irene most satisfaction and she deliberately sang them over and over pretending she'd forgotten the rest of the words. It was a moment of triumph that often came to her, that strong family bond she shared then with Benji, Katie and Jill who were clapping their hands and singing along.

...When you have the nerve to tell me as a mother I'm not fit
Well this is just a little Peyton Place and you're all Harper Valley hypocrites
No, I wouldn't put you on because it really did, it happened just this way
The day my momma socked it to the Harper Valley PTA...

"Irene, how can you always be so strong?" He asked wistfully, wishing he could give something back to this woman who gave him so much, wishing he could be with her in that faraway memory of something only she saw.

"I wasn't always." Her voice quavered with emotion as it brushed against his chest and he tangled his fingers gently in her hair glad he could at least give her that small comfort. "After my family's death in a tragic accident and my brother's death by his own hand when he was only seventeen I didn't sing again for a long time."

And Irene crumpled into tears while Barry held her.

--

Clutching a mug of steaming hot chocolate, Dani Sutherland tweaked open the bedroom curtain a fraction and peered out the window to admire the storm. Her first Summer Bay party had been awesome. Will was cute and she'd enjoyed putting that slag Gypsy Nash and that snob Hayley in their places. She'd seen the guy of her dreams at that party tonight and she was still on a high. Talk about gorgeous! They must have invented the word just for him. Sex on Legs, as her friend back in the city Alison Parr used to say. She couldn't wait to ring Ally tomorrow and tell her all about how hot he was. Lovely eyes, great smile, and oh, wow! that manly physique! She gasped suddenly, her thoughts tailing off as a flash of lightning lit up the unmistakable figure of Will Smith creeping up the path in the pouring rain.

Dani's bedroom was to the side of the house and so she had an ideal view of the front door. She watched intrigued as he slid something under it and then, looking round all ways as though he half expected lions to be unleashed, raced back into the night. Did she dare sneak down again to find out what it was? The olds - well, okay, just Dad - had had a hissy fit when she'd gone down for the hot choccie, no doubt imagining Will had been hiding round the corner and she was going to sneak him in for pashing session. Yeh, well, as if!

Although if Will had only been Davey Molyneaux it might have been a totally different story...

--

Martha McKenzie rolled her eyes in exasperation. "No. In answer to your question, I don't believe in ghosts," she replied.

After her initial terror (obviously what Phillips had intended when he fired the shock question, the two of them being all alone as they were on this eerily silent island) and the unexpected roller coaster of emotions telling her she couldn't hate someone who'd just saved her from drowning she felt suddenly back on terra firma. Why couldn't she hate him? There was no law said she had to be eternally grateful, was there? Fate may have thrown them together but that didn't mean she had to like it or like him. She might have well have washed up on shore anyway. Years ago just before she set off on a school boat trip her brother Macca, busy smearing butter and strawberry jam on a thick slice of toast for his brekkie and still sore with his kid sister because she beat him in a swimming race across Shrewton's pond the day before, had remarked that bodies floated anyway so there was little point in her trying to battle the waves if she happened to fall in.

"Chill, babe. I just wondered." He stretched to retrieve the discarded plastic Volvo mineral water bottle, shook out the last drops of water and newly acquired dirt and glanced up to regard her with the same patronising smirk he reserved for most people especially girls. She knew the smirk was there simply to annoy her and what was more he was succeeding.

"Why?" Mac could feel her hot temper slow burning like a neglected pan on a cooking ring.

Her ex-boyfriend Jack Holden and her three older brothers had liked to deliberately wind her up at times too but she'd never taken any nonsense from Jack and her three older brothers and she was damned if she was going to start taking it now from this jumped-up little jerk. Who did Phillips think he was? He may have rescued her, she owed him that, but nothing changed history. Nothing changed what he'd done to Cassie and Hayley.

Kane Phillips shrugged lazily and slicked back his hair, still smirking. "You really wanna know? Okay, sweetheart, I'll tell you. When we were out there on the water I saw something weird. A kind of misty shape following us. Whatever the hell it was, wasn't interested in me, love. I swear I heard it whispering your name though..."

Martha glared. "If you're trying to scare me, you're wasting your time. And get this, loser. I'm not your babe, sweetheart or anything else, never have been, so that stops right here, right now."

He laughed. It was never a good idea to laugh at Mac when her anger was slow burning but he wasn't to know that. Not yet.

"Sheesh! You ever think of becoming a cop like Jacky-boy wants to be? If they ever remake Prisoner and need some extras, babe, you'd shape up well as a sadistic screw like Vineg... Jeee-zus!" He stopped laughing suddenly and reeled backwards in both shock and not a little pain as Martha's fist caught him square on the chin and made him bite down hard on his tongue.

"S--t!" He spat out salty blood two or three times and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

Mac sucked in a breath, not caring how far she'd gone now. "Well, STOP calling me babe and DON'T call Jack Jacky-boy and DON'T compare me to...to..."

No way would she give him the satisfaction of seeing her cry. Martha gulped back the onset of tears. When she'd first come to live in Summer Bay, her grandfather Alf Stewart had blown the dust off the Stewart family album to introduce her to family that until then she never knew she had. Great Aunt Celia, still out doing missionary work somewhere, had looked so much like Vera Bennett from Prisoner that Mac had done a double take. And she'd swallowed a lump in her throat then just as she did now because the same memory returned.

The memory of an autumn evening, leaning back against Mum's arm-chair - despite the abundance of comfortable furniture, Mac preferred to sit on a large cushion on the floor, half doing homework, half watching TV - stroking Prince's floppy ears as the dog rested his head and two front paws across her lap, one ear cocked to listen out for trouble. (Although exactly what Prince intended to do if there ever was trouble was anybody's guess - during his last outing with Mac, a big dog had snarled back at him and, despite his size, he'd tried to jump into her arms like he used to when he was a puppy.)She'd psyched herself up for a furious row with Kane but to her amazement he was grinning. "Okay. Guess I earned that, Mac. Go, girl power! Re-spect!"

But Prince was safe enough from snarling dogs now and his tail swished contentedly at their laughter. Prisoner was on TV. Lizzie and Bea were brewing grog in the prison laundry and Doreen had been sent to cover for them because warden Vera Bennett had become suspicious, but the outlandish stories she was concocting to stall Vera were baffling the prison officer more and more. Martha remembered turning to grin at her mother and her mother putting down her knitting because she needed to wipe away tears of laughter. She could remember the colour of the wool, her father and the boys - as everyone, including Mac, referred to her bros - chopping something and calling to each other out back, Prince's breath tickling her lap, the smell of the delicious stew they'd eaten for supper. It was one of those moments when nothing happens and yet stays forever in our mind, some magic touches and years later reels us back like an invisible thread. Perhaps it's pure happiness captured and bottled for all time.

"I can't." Martha ignored the high-five to ruefully rub her painful shoulder, a smile that hadn't been invited and had no business to be there hovering at the corner of her lips. "Prisoner was a pretty good TV show. I used to watch it with Mum sometimes. She was hooked. I guess your Mum was too?"

"Nah. Ma didn't really do television." He shifted uncomfortably and seemed keen to change the subject. "What were you thinking about just then? You were miles away. I take it I'm...uh...allowed to ask?" He grinned again and raised his arms in mock surrender.

"Nothing much. Just the Farm where I used to live. My family. Prince, my dog. Prince!" She smiled fondly. "I got him for my birthday. He didn't have to work like dogs on a farm do, like our border collies did, he was there to be a pampered pooch and, Jeez, didn't he know it! Used to go round with his nose in the air like he was Royalty. My bros reckoned he was doing it on purpose, rubbing the other dogs' noses in it kind of thing. You should've seen the collies' faces whenever he walked past. You just knew if they hadn't been so well trained, they'd have soon put him in his place! Did you ever have a dog when you were a kid?"

"Yeh. Well, my Dad did. Two."

"What kind of dogs? What were their names?" Martha loved animals and immediately wanted to know more.

"Rottweilers. Brutus and Caesar. Dad bought them as guard dogs."

"Wow!" Mac was hugely impressed. "I bet nobody gave you a hard time with pets like that."

He snorted. "What kind of -- fluffy bunny planet d'you live on? I just told ya, they were -- guard dogs!"

Martha bristled. "Does it hurt you, Kane? I mean, does it actually physically HURT you to talk to anyone female civilly? How'd you like it if someone spoke to your Mum like that?"

He looked shaken. "Sorry," he muttered after a long pause, for the first time ever since she'd known him seeming genuinely ashamed of himself. Even when he'd backed down earlier it had been simply because he found the whole thing funny.

"It's okay," she said, dropping the anger from her voice, slightly appeased.

"Did you ever listen to the rain when you were a kid, Mac?" He spoke in the same uncharacteristic pensive tone she'd never heard him use before. "I mean, really, really listen? I don't mean when you were snug in bed and it was hitting the windows, I mean...ahh, it don't matter!" He broke off suddenly to rise and brush imaginary dust from his trousers and walked away to stare out at the sea and the storm playing out beyond.

It sounds as though the whole world is weeping. It sounds as though the wind is screaming in despair. The black clouds of late evening are floating over the horizon, coming home to cloak the night. A steady flow of water runs along the guttering, dripping monotonously down the chipped, rusty pipe where it spills into the muddy, overgrown sprawling front garden of the detached and dilapidated old house. The rain isn't heavy yet, but soon it will be and it's cold enough already on thin, sodden clothes covering small, thin, sodden bodies. For the world, the warm world, is far away and it's lonely out here in the ever-falling darkness. Traffic swishes past, a TV blares out a football game, drunken voices shout through the distance of night.
Gritting her teeth against the agonizing pain of each movement, Martha finally managed to struggle to her feet and limped across to where he stood.

And the dogs bark.

They bark a warning to two frightened, hungry, pathetic little boys stealing pitifully towards the light of the window.

"It's no go! Even if that door's locked they're ready to break it down," Scott Phillips tells his younger brother, jumping back as the barks turn to growls and the two enormous animals snarl ferociously, eyes red and wild, large, sharp canine teeth bared, leaping up and pounding the glass with massive paws, determined to keep out intruders. Inside they are warm. Cosseted, well fed, given the best steak, the freedom to sleep on soft, comfortable chairs. Nothing asked in return save that they protect Richie "Gus" Phillips' latest drugs haul and let nobody inside while he's out drinking. Not even his own kids and no matter how bad the night.

"Maybe Ma...?" Kane suggests hopefully, keeping a wary eye on the frantic Rottweilers, and trembling at the knowledge only glass separates them from being torn to pieces.

"-- that, ya jerk, she'll still be out cold after the bloody bashing she took tonight," Scott says dismissively.

His little brother looks up at the bedroom window. It had started the way it usually started with Dad shouting, swearing and insulting her. This time Ma had been putting out supper. Dad always had his supper first and if they were lucky Mum, Kane and Scotty might get to have something later. But tonight Dad wasn't happy with the food. Something was burned or undercooked or too tough or too chewy. It didn't matter what it was though because he never seemed to need an excuse for laying into her.

Kane and Scotty looked warily up from the muted TV because his voice was rising and crept as one to peer round the kitchen door in time to see their father in the act of pressing their mother's face into the dish of food. Things happened really fast then. Drunk and cursing, he dragged her past them while Mum was yelling frantically "Get out! Get out!" to him and Scott because often they would be the next victims of his violence. And so they ran out although she was screaming and the night was cold and wild and they knew Dad must have a new stash because when the screaming finally stopped and just before he left the dogs were unchained from out back and put in the front room.

"Nah, it's shoppin' at -- 'Arrods again for dinner, innit?" Scotty adds with ironic humour.

And so, sick with hunger, bellies aching, the two young brothers trudge through the cold rain to the garbage bin to forage for left-over food scraps. Perhaps in that miserable, lonely night if there had been puppies left whining and shivering someone might have alerted an animal rescue centre. But incredibly people could and would and did pass children by. A group, a rowdy group, eight or more, men and women talking, laughing, swaying, they passed by so close they MUST have seen the two kids, they MUST have wondered at them tumbling garbage out of the trash cans...and if the kids had been cute puppies or fluffy kittens would...or if they hadn't been so drunk would...or if Kane or Scott had run to them for help would...Or had the whole world simply spun on its head and forgotten to tell two small boys it just didn't care?

"It does matter," she said gently, strangely moved. "If it means this much to you, it does matter."

He didn't seem to hear her. Not until she placed her hand on his shoulder and then he jumped as if suddenly aware of where he was again. A flicker of a smile crossed his face and she smiled tentatively back as her brown eyes met his blue ones. Perhaps it was only the sound of the sea or her mind playing games, perhaps it was only the cry of gulls or a playful breeze, but for a moment it sounded as though she could hear Chantal Kreviazuk's song being carried across the water...

There's something in your eyes
Makes me wanna lose myself
Makes me wanna lose myself in your heart...