I ran back upstairs and tried to control my breathing to make it look like I hadn’t moved from in front of the TV, but I needn’t have bothered, because the first person home was Mum, and that wasn’t till about half-past four. At six Connor still wasn’t back, and Mum and I had had our showers and were ready to go to Mario’s. Mum had her red dress on and her hair tied back, and make-up on, which made her look angrier than normal.
‘You’re not wearing that! Go and put your button-up shirt on,’ said Mum, but before I could she asked me again, ‘Did he say where he was going?’
‘No, he didn’t say.’
I put my button-up shirt on—it had little ice-creams all over it—then took the prayer card out of my undies drawer and put it in my shorts pocket. I immediately felt calmer. The undies drawer was such an obvious hiding place for Connor to look; I’d have to think of somewhere else.
By the time Connor came trudging up the back stairs like a returning explorer we were late and Mum wasn’t happy. ‘Where the hell have you been? Come on, you haven’t got time for a shower. Just put your good clothes on and get in the bloody car.’
Connor got ready and we drove in the Mini to Edith Street, to ‘Mario’s Italian Restaurant’, as the sign said in red and green on a white background, with red-and-white-checked plastic tablecloths and cane chairs. And there was Peter, sitting at a table for four by the window, looking out at the street. When he saw us he stood up.
He was a tall man with tattoos on his arms. The tattoos were the first things I noticed. Especially the dolphin on his hairy forearm, in two shades of blue, and a crude anchor that looked like a dot-to-dot picture on his wrist.
He had a short red beard and big ears that stuck out like mug handles. His hair was receding, and he had freckles like a boy’s. His checked shirt looked new and out of place against the sunburnt skin and tattoos of his arms.
I’d pictured someone like the photos I’d seen of Dad, or maybe a bikie in a leather jacket, but he wasn’t like that. He looked more like a pirate who’d just taken off his eye patch and shooed away his parrot.
‘Hey, Peter,’ said Mum. ‘Been waiting long?’
‘Nup. Not at all,’ he said.
‘Connor, Aaron, this is Peter.’
‘Hello, men,’ Peter said in a gruff jokey voice.
He shook hands with me like I was a businessman, squeezing my hand so tightly that it hurt, though I’m sure he didn’t mean it to.
When we looked at the menu he snorted and said, ‘No steak and chips!’
We all smiled.
Mum got gnocchi, Connor got lasagne, I got lasagne, and Peter got lasagne too.
‘Where’d you go?’ I whispered to Connor while we waited for our food.
‘All over the place. I even went into town.’
‘Find anything?’
‘Found a clue.’
‘What clue?’
‘That’s for me to know and you to find out,’ he said with a little smile that I didn’t like one bit.
Peter turned to Mum. ‘Might be goin’ up to Malanda in the morning.’
‘Peter drives a truck,’ said Mum to Connor and me.
Connor stopped playing with his knife and fork. ‘What sort of truck?’ he said.
‘It’s a little Ford,’ said Peter.
‘How many wheels does it have?’
‘Geez, let me think. Eight, how’s that?’
Connor snorted, ‘Some trucks have way more than that.’
‘Yep, that’s true,’ agreed Peter, and he had a sip of his beer. ‘Have you ever tasted beer?’ he asked Connor.
‘We’re not allowed.’
‘One taste won’t kill anyone!’
‘Can we, Mum, please?’ I said.
‘All right. Just this once. And just a sip.’
Both of us had a sip, Connor first.
‘Yuck!’ I said, and Peter laughed loudly.
‘It’s not all that bad,’ said Connor.
‘Peter used to be a sea captain,’ said Mum.
‘What sort of ship was it?’ asked Connor.
‘A prawn trawler,’ said Peter.
‘Peter’s a famous barra fisherman. One of the best in town, aren’t you, Peter?’ Mum gave him a wry smile. ‘That’s what I’ve heard, anyway.’
‘Come off it!’ said Peter, but he reddened and grinned from ear to ear.
‘How come you’re the best fisherman?’ I asked.
‘Well,’ he said, and he leaned in.
We all leaned in with him.
‘I’ve got a secret spot,’ he whispered. ‘Only me and maybe one or two other people know about it.’
‘Can we go?’
‘Usually when I take people, I blindfold them.’
Connor smiled. ‘That’s not true.’
Mum said, ‘He’s serious.’
Peter said, ‘I’m serious all right. You can’t have everyone blabbing about it—there’d be no fish left.’
‘What’s so good about fishing?’ said Connor, meaning that he didn’t like it.
But Peter took it as a serious question and so he attempted an answer. ‘What’s so good about fishing? Let’s see. You get to breathe some fresh air for one thing.’ He took a drink, smacked his lips, put his beer down. ‘Tell you what—instead of me just saying it, how ’bout I tell you a fishing story?’
‘Do it, Peter,’ said Mum, and Peter said, ‘All right,’ and he settled back in his chair. ‘Now this happened to a mate of mine not long back. One day, he goes out in his tinny up the river to Sandfly Creek to check his crab pots. You been to Sandfly Creek?’
We hadn’t, but I’d heard friends talking about it. It was in the swampy part of the river just near the mouth, where mangroves crowded the banks and egrets made their nests on branches that hung over the water.
‘Well, it’s a bendy little mangrove creek, and the water’s always murky so you can’t see how deep it is. It’s kind of a dark, kind of creepy, crawly sort of place. Anyway, my mate anchors right in the mangroves, then drops a handline with a prawn on it over the side. Then he sits down and starts havin’ his lunch. Next thing he sees the line move so he picks it up and he feels a little bite: nibble, nibble.’ This bit he whispered. ‘Then nothing. Then nibble, nibble, nibble. Then nothing. Then bang!’
He said that loud enough to make the waiter and the people next to us turn around.
‘At first it was just a steady pull, so he pulled back. Then it ran, full bore. He sees something’s just under the surface upstream making a bow wave, something really big just under the water, but because it’s so murky he can’t really see what it is. Anyway, he starts his motor up to follow it. He doesn’t want to play it too much in those mangrove roots because he’ll get a snag and lose it. So he’s following the bow wave, going upstream and he still can’t see what it is. Then, just when he’s getting closer, the thing turns and goes up a big drainpipe that’s feeding into the creek. Inside there it’s dark like a cave. You can’t get a boat up in something like that, so he can’t do anything, just puts some pressure on the line. But it’s not stopping, it just keeps goin’ and goin’ and eventually—bang! Snaps the line. And that’s the story.’
And Peter sat back, looking pleased with himself.
Connor said, ‘So what was it?’
Peter’s beady eyes sparkled. ‘Croc? Something else? Who knows? Me mate could’ve gone up the drain if he really wanted to know. Anyway, that’s the point. That’s the thing about fishing. Whenever you chuck your line in and something bites, till you get it up flappin’ in the boat, it could be anything.’
I said, ‘Tell us another one.’
But Mum put her arm out as if to hold him back, and said to me, ‘Let him have a rest, Aaron.’
After dinner we all got dessert. Peter and Mum were both giggly. Mum had moved her chair closer to his so their arms were touching, like she was a schoolgirl, though she was probably older than him. She laughed at some dumb joke he made, and let her head fall to rest on his
shoulder.
When the bill came, Peter said, ‘Don’t worry about it, Tracey, I’ll pay for everything,’ and he grandly placed four twenties on the little plate.
We left without getting the change. And Peter shook my hand again when we said goodbye, this time not as tight as the first one.
Before we went to bed Mum made us hot chocolate. We sat at the kitchen table waiting for it to cool.
‘You don’t make much money being a truck driver, do you,’ said Connor.
‘I think he does all right,’ said Mum. ‘And he knows a lot about cars. He’s going to help me buy one. I think he’s nice.’
I said, ‘I hope he takes us fishing to his secret spot.’
‘He might,’ said Mum, ‘if you’re good. You never know.’
5
THE CLUE
ON MONDAY MORNING I was under the house in the driver’s seat of our Datsun. The left front wheel was buckled and you couldn’t open the left front door, because Mum had rammed it into a pole. By accident of course. On school holidays we used to drive to the beach or to Polly’s Creek, which was in the rainforest and had a tree you could jump off into the water. You could catch fish and turtles there too. But the poor old Datsun wasn’t going to see Polly’s Creek again.
The panther was on the back seat watching me, which was a bit of a surprise. I’d kind of assumed he’d wandered off somewhere, but there he was. ‘The police are going to catch you,’ it purred. ‘And today’s Monday and you know what that means.’ What that meant was that the Fingleton Gazette was coming out.
The Fingleton Gazette came out on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays. The Monday and Wednesday papers were usually only twelve pages of stories about sugarcane and pawpaw and banana prices, and how bad the flying foxes were, and ads for used sugarcane harvesters, and one measly Phantom strip, and on the back page stories about Fingleton’s hopeless league and cricket and soccer teams. And the Police Round-up with headlines like: ‘Garden Gnome Stolen’, ‘Man Drunk and Disorderly’, and ‘Windows Broken in Vandalism Spree’.
Mum usually brought the paper home from the pub where she worked, which meant I had all morning before I’d find out if there was anything in it about you-know-what.
A sudden panic hit me. Where was the prayer card? I checked my pockets. It wasn’t there. Then I remembered—I ran upstairs and got it out of yesterday’s shorts where they lay crumpled on the floor. I hadn’t noticed the guardian angel’s face before: her smile was kind of frozen as she watched the boy and girl playing. Did she even care whether or not they fell off the cliff? I couldn’t think where to hide it, so I transferred it to the pocket of my new shorts, and then I took yesterday’s clothes and put them in the laundry basket in the bathroom. The black panther’s hot cat breath was on my neck all the while. Why was it a black panther? Maybe because it was my favourite animal, if anyone ever asked. The name was cool, and I liked a picture I’d seen of one: it was jet black like a hole in the world with a pair of eyes peering out. If I had one as a pet I’d take it to school, and if anyone annoyed me I’d whisper in its ear and grrrcrack!—that’s the sound of the annoying person’s spine breaking. And chew, slurp—that’s the panther eating their limp remains.
While I ate breakfast that morning the rosary beads incident was forced to the back of my mind by another huge event. In school holidays either nothing happens or everything happens in a bunch, and I was in the middle of the king of all bunches because the new huge event wasn’t just any huge event: it was a bombshell explosion, an earth-shatteringly momentous huge event. But this isn’t the best time to get into it.
Anyway, after the huge event happened Mum went to work for an hour, then at lunchtime she came back, without the paper, and made us sandwiches. Then she picked up Gran’s car keys and her bag again.
‘Are you going back to work?’ asked Connor, who’d been out most of the morning ‘sleuthing’, as he put it. I was beginning to hate the snaky sound of that word.
‘Nup. I’m going into town to get some spaghetti and maybe some ice cream if you boys are good.’
‘Can you please get the paper this time?’ said Connor.
‘What do you want the paper for?’
‘I’m investigating the break-in at the church.’
‘Are you, just?’ she said, in a tone I didn’t think he’d like. It was kind of condescending, but Connor didn’t seem to notice.
‘Yep. And I’ve found a clue too!’
‘Really?’ said Mum. ‘What’s the clue?’
‘It’s too early in my investigation to make that information public.’
She said, ‘Okay, well, I respect that. I’ll just have to see if I can live with not knowing.’
When she’d gone he looked at me smugly. ‘I know you want to know what the clue is.’
I said, ‘Not really,’ just to annoy him, and I went and watched TV. I had to turn it up because by that time the huge event was making lots of noise scraping rotten leaves out of our gutter.
I was back in the kitchen when Mum came home. She plonked the paper in front of Connor and said, ‘You might want to look at the Police Round-up.’
He snatched it up and turned to the middle pages and read, then reread whatever it was very slowly. Then he closed it, very, very slowly. ‘Interesting,’ he said.
‘What? Can I have a look?’ I asked.
He tossed me the paper and I turned to the Police Round-up column, with its cartoon policeman in sunglasses blowing a whistle at the top.
There were four stories: ‘Local Man Arrested Driving while Twice the Legal Limit’, ‘Service Station Toilet Door Damaged’, ‘Gunshot Heard on Number Three Branch Road’, which was probably some farmboy shooting pigeons with an air rifle, and:
Church Broken Into, Two Boys Seen
On Saturday it was reported that St Rita’s Catholic Church had been broken into and a number of items had been stolen, including a valuable string of rosary beads. Police wish to speak to two boys aged about twelve who were seen in the area on Friday. If you have any information regarding this or any other crimes please call Crime Stoppers on…
‘Kids don’t do that sort of stuff,’ said Connor in a moronic voice that was meant to be me. ‘You’d make a great detective, Aaron.’
‘Might not be them,’ I said.
‘Yeah, whatever,’ said Connor as he made his way down the back stairs.
Mum was still reading her magazine, and the huge event was still outside cleaning the gutters. More than anything I wanted to follow Connor and ask what clue he’d found. To distract myself I went back to watching TV, but there was less than nothing on. I walked twice around the house, including along the weedy side between our house and Joe and Wilma’s place, the side we never went down, and under the kitchen window I found a fork, and under Mum’s window I found Boba Fett. That was weird, but then I remembered that he’d fallen off Mum’s windowsill while fighting Chewbacca and C3PO in the Time Wars back before the universe was destroyed, which seemed like an age ago.
I knocked on Connor’s door but he didn’t answer, so I ended up kicking the soccer ball round the backyard by myself. After a while I decided to play out the Intergalactic Soccer Finals, which was something I did a lot—I had the teams and all the players in my mind. Earth was playing Mars that day. I was every player on both teams, but I was especially Aaron Aaronson (rather than Aaron Tate, which was my real name), captain of Australia in soccer, cricket and rugby league, and the greatest individual athlete of all time.
Apart from the fact you had to play around the clothesline and the avocado tree, our backyard made a pretty good soccer field. One goal was two upturned buckets, the other was two stinkbug-covered orange trees that grew about three metres apart near the back of the yard. The banana trees along the back fence and the old empty chook pen in the corner were out of bounds. And if I got hungry I could pick a mandarin from the trees along the side fence we shared with Mrs Melchiori—half the year they were covered with fruit and on the grou
nd rotten mandarins squelched orange-blue-grey through your toes.
I whistled play on, then under my breath took up the commentary in an American accent I’d learnt from TV: ‘Aaronson to Maradona. Maradona runs with it, Gwu Gwu (that was the Martian captain) dives in. And misses! Maradona to Aaronson, Aaronson beats one, beats two. Oh no, Gwu Gwu’s got it back. He’s tricky this Martian…’
By then I was already sweating. The ball’s cracked fake leather scratched my bare feet.
‘Intercepted! Earth’s got it!’
I charged down the centre of the field.
‘Aaronson. Oh my God! What a performance! Surely he’ll get Man of the Match for this. He beats one, he beats two, he—’
I shot for goal but kicked it way harder than I meant to and the ball flew off towards the back fence.
I didn’t find it in the banana trees. Had I kicked it over the fence? I’d never managed that before. Probably it was behind the chook pen, which meant ball lost. Behind the chook pen was a small rectangle of tall guinea grass full of cane toads and hairless tennis balls. A stunted lemon tree that never had any lemons grew there, and under it was an old concrete bathtub with ankle-deep black water in which a million mozzie wrigglers wriggled. The place had a bad air about it. Connor reckoned someone was buried in there.
Sure enough, the ball was peeking through the grass—it was pretty much exactly two metres from me.
It was primary-school thinking to be scared about part of my own backyard. I started for the ball, but a glance at the lemon tree stopped me: there was a spider on a leaf on the branch closest to me. Watching me. It was bigger than my hand. It was so big its weight was causing the leaf to sag. Long shiny legs, yellow spots on its joints, a long, slim, caramel-coloured abdomen. The lemon tree, which was only just taller than me, reached towards the chook pen, so I would have to go side-on to avoid it. Past the spider. It must have been a bird-eating spider. It certainly looked big enough to eat a bird. It was bending its legs rhythmically, like it was gauging the distance it would have to jump to land on me, setting itself to spring.
Rainfish Page 4