Days before her children went missing, Ilene Gajdos-Little gnawed on the dry skin of her bottom lip and reclined in her low-backed stool and felt, deep in her bones, that she was due a change of fortune. She reached out and pressed the poker machine’s backlit button again. Once more, the machine played its jaunty tune of anticipation. Once more, it scrolled through its motley images—casino cards, jade turtles, gold lions—and once more, it settled on a combination that was literally within an ace of winning.
Ilene threw her head back and groaned. The ceiling was adorned with circular mirrors framed by fluorescents the hue of sundown, and she was down to sixty-seven cents’ credit. When her credit was exhausted, she decided, she’d top it up with the twenty she’d pilfered from the till at work. But she glanced at her Casio watch: soon she’d have to leave the Casus Hill Workers’ Club to pick up Jack and Lonnie from school. She didn’t have time to spin through twenty extra dollars, unless she accepted that she’d be late.
Somewhere to her right, a machine paid out and blared its festive ragtime melody. That machine was called Horseshoe Saloon. She knew it; she’d won and lost on it plenty of times before. Her machine for the day, Jewels of the Orient, was due to pay out any second. If she didn’t stay until she at least broke even, the next punter would reap all the luck she’d sown.
If she didn’t stay until she at least broke even, the next punter would reap all the luck she’d sown.
She picked up her schooner and moistened her lips with the tepid froth that remained. Then she knuckled the backlit button. Rapid-fire, the digital reels wound themselves into another losing pattern. Now she had forty-seven cents’ credit left, which was twenty-three-and-a-half for each occasion she’d been late to pick her children up this month.
The previous Tuesday, she’d arrived to find them loitering on the pavement by the school gates. Neither of them approached her battered orange Datsun. Jack, who was eight, watched a magpie wheel low overhead, while six-year-old Lonnie slipped her thumbs beneath the fraying straps of her backpack. Ilene hooted, but they eyed the car as if it were a foreign object. Then the school principal, Ms Subraman, shuffled past the two pine trees and out through the gates with her Peter Pan collar flapping in the breeze.
Ilene played another spin, and this time she came close to the change of fortune she’d anticipated. Pretty close, she corrected herself—a single jade turtle shy of winning twelve free spins. She scratched her crown. It wouldn’t matter to her children if she were late. They’d be safe. They’d probably feel safer with the principal than with her. What she didn’t want to deal with was Ms Subraman’s mouth, which she’d hold on that commiserative angle, as if Ilene wasn’t even worth scolding.
From her right, the ragtime melody blared again, and she scowled at the row of pokies perpendicular to hers. Most of the gaming stools were empty, but a lone woman hunched on the stool in front of Horseshoe Saloon. She sat unnaturally still, and the glow of her machine formed a pale nimbus around her. Her hair was woven into a volute bun that reminded Ilene of a severed ear. She could not look away. The melody slowed its tempo, and the only movement was the plume of light enveloping the woman.
When the melody finished, Ilene dragged her gaze to her knuckles. She whistled cool air onto them and, too afraid to watch, played her final spin. In turn, the machine played its jaunty tune, and she imagined the images on-screen jostling for position. She willed the victory music to follow. But nothing followed. Her credit was down to seven cents, which was not enough for another spin.
She exhaled through her nostrils. Then she dug the fingernails of her right hand into her upper left arm until she made herself wince. There was only one way to break even now. She had to use the stolen twenty. She had to re-disappoint Ms Subraman. She had to make her children wait.
But she may as well make them wait. They didn’t trust her, let alone love her. She could tell this from the way Jack rolled over in the upper bunk when she greeted him in the morning. She could sense it whenever Lonnie hugged her from behind, or the side—never from the front. The reflection of the stars in the bore water tank’s murk glinted in Ilene’s memory, and her pulse crashed above her ears.
She felt as if she were submerged, and only her yearning for another spin brought her back to the surface. Her handbag lay on the bus seat–patterned carpet at her feet. She dragged it onto her lap and guddled through it in pursuit of the twenty-dollar note. When she found it, her pulse eased up, and she peered to her right. The row of pokies there was unoccupied. The woman with the volute bun must have taken her winnings and left.
She felt as if she were submerged, and only her yearning for another spin brought her back to the surface.
A cloud drifted across the afternoon sun, and from the corridor of the main school building, Ilene watched its shadow fall upon the classroom in which her children waited. Seated at a wooden desk, Jack scrawled something in a dog-eared exercise book. Lonnie crouched beside a cabinet and poked a short straw through an egg carton. The sun returned and illuminated the stains on the yellow t-shirt of her uniform; it brightened the shade of Jack’s grey hoodie, which Ms Subraman had explained was from lost and found.
In the circumstances, Ilene imagined that other children would’ve glanced around in anticipation of their mother. Hers hadn’t even noticed her belated arrival. She rested her shoulder against the wall of the corridor. Then Ms Subraman re-emerged from her office with Jack’s bloodied shirt in one hand and a form of some sort in the other.
‘He won’t tell me or the counsellor who the fight was with,’ she said. ‘Or what it was over. But it was not trivial.’
She handed the shirt to Ilene, who pinched the yoke either side of the collar and held it up for inspection. The cotton was sheer, and near the hem three tears ran through a blotch of dried blood that looked like a Rorschach test. There was something of the scarecrow about it, Ilene thought. She imagined hay protruding from the rents in the fabric, but that image soon gave way to one of deep talon wounds on Jack’s abdomen.
‘How bad is it?’ she asked.
‘The shirt came off worse than the boy, fortunately.’
Ms Subraman smiled without showing her teeth. ‘We bandaged him in sick bay—he’s all right.’ Her smile faded, and she gripped the form with both hands. ‘You didn’t check on him while I was in my office?’
Ilene draped Jack’s shirt over her arm. She peered into the classroom and almost followed her gaze inside. Lonnie had taken a seat next to Jack and was waving the egg carton under his nose. He ignored her and poured his concentration into the exercise book and raked his angry pencil over the page. Ilene longed to comfort him, to hug both of her children, but she feared that they would stiffen in her embrace—and that Ms Subraman would see.
‘Jack won’t dob in the other kid?’ she asked.
‘Perhaps you can get it out of him.’ Ms Subraman did not seem as if she were being sarcastic. She appeared merely distracted, skimreading the form in her hands and clearing her throat. ‘My staff attempted to contact you after lunch, after we wrote up the incident report.’
‘That the report?’
Ms Subraman shook her head. ‘When you didn’t answer, we tried your husband. He told us he couldn’t come.’
Ilene caught the upward inflection in Ms Subraman’s voice, and the hallway seemed to tilt. The thought spiralled through her mind that Jack and Lonnie had told the principal about what had happened that night a year earlier, or perhaps Carl had let something slip over the phone.
She blinked hard, and the school corridor righted itself. ‘My husband’s been sick,’ she offered. His sickness, if that was the right word, had actually begun two years earlier, after he’d lost his job as a brink-of-the-city farmhand; he’d been accused of slitting a sheep’s throat when in truth, he’d claimed, all he did was shepherd a couple of workers into a union. ‘He’s not in the kids’ lives for now. We made that call together.’

Ms Subraman folded the form in half. Deliberately, she flattened the crease in the paper between her thumb and forefinger. ‘Here.’
She passed the form to Ilene, who unfolded it and scanned its text. It was an application for after-school care, and a hot flush rose from Ilene’s chest to her neck. ‘I don’t need this. I work shifts at the supermarket, yeah.’
‘Ilene, you’ve been late three times this month. According to the rules—’
‘But I can drop them off, pick them up.’
‘According to the rules, I should’ve sent them already.’
Ilene sighed, and Ms Subraman’s mouth shifted to that commiserative angle. ‘It only costs twenty-five dollars to get on the waitlist, and the council gives special consideration to lowincome earners, as you’ll see.’ She pointed at the form. ‘And to sole carers,’ she added.
Ilene stuffed the bloodied shirt and form into her handbag.
‘Anything else?’
She stared at Ms Subraman and tried to force the principal to avert her gaze. But the principal looked resolutely back at her. ‘If Jack tells you who hurt him, please let me know.’
This is an edited extract from All the Missing Children by Zahid Gamieldien (Ultimo Press), available now at your local independent bookseller.