And it was still raining hard, making a mist over the surface of the water.
I ran downstairs. The water was ankle deep, clear and cool. It had even spread onto the concrete under our house. I heard sploshing; Connor was up.
‘Is it in your room?’ I called.
‘Nearly,’ said Connor. ‘It’s astounding. It’s bloody astounding.’
We ran through the curtain of water that overflowed from the roof gutter, then ran back through it, and we were soaked. We jumped and splashed, whooping and shouting.
Suddenly Connor yelled, ‘There’s something there.’ And he pointed out into the yard. A dark shape was moving against the green of the submerged grass near the clothesline, making a small bow wave on the surface of the water. ‘What the hell is that?’
It marooned itself, had to wriggle free.
One of the gratings was leaning against the side of the bathtub.
‘It’s a mudcod,’ I said.
Connor ran out after it and I climbed the stairs and yelled, ‘Mum, Pete, come and look!’
Pete appeared at the door, took in the scene, and said, ‘Bloody hell.’
There were mudcod milling under the banana trees, mudcod in twos and threes in front of the chook pen, and in the dripping shade of the orange trees. And who knew how many were lurking around the bathtub where the water was deeper, and a grey colour. There weren’t many near the base of the clothesline where there was only a couple of centimetres of water. One or two of the mudcod, like the one Connor was chasing, were urgently zigzagging across the grass, but most of them hovered where they were, like the yard was their place and we were the trespassers.
I turned to Pete. ‘What do we do now?’
‘Just got to catch them,’ he said.
‘Okay.’ I sprang at the nearest mudcod but it slipped through my hands like soap and made a dash for the orange trees. I intercepted it, sprang at it again and missed it again. But on the third attempt I managed to trap it with my forearms against my stomach. Hunched over, I staggered to the bathtub, which was full to the lip, dropped it in and put the grates back on.
‘Good work, mate,’ said Pete. He was after one. His long legs were pumping. He darted down and came up triumphant with a fish in his hand. Mum helped out, using a bucket—a much better way. Connor caught one with an ice-cream container. I stalked up behind one near the chook pen, eased my hands round its soft belly and lifted it without it seeming to notice or care.
After ten minutes the remaining mudcod were mainly bunched under the banana trees, shadowy shapes moving slowly. I took Mum’s bucket, and Pete, Connor and I moved on them together, scattering them as we pounced but catching two as well.
‘There’s one under the house,’ yelled Mum.
We ran to help her.
‘Don’t jump about so much,’ said Connor. ‘You’re stirring up the dirt.’
Mum said, ‘Don’t let it get to the pot plants.’
But it was already there. We began picking up the pots one by one. There was a swish of a tail. It was the big one—Connor Two.
‘He’s coming to you,’ I shouted to Connor.
We all lunged at it. I got Connor’s foot, and Pete got the mudcod.
After Pete put Connor Two back we tallied the ones we had caught. I was starting to shiver.
‘There’s only nine,’ said Connor. ‘The rest must be around here somewhere.’
Connor and I kept up the hunt while Mum and Pete had a shower, but we didn’t catch any more. I checked around the side of the house where the water got shallower and became a stream that flowed down our driveway to the foaming brown torrent of the gutter. I could picture some of the mudcod flicking and slithering their way to it—after all I’d seen how far they could go on dry land. From the gutter it was a quick ride to the stormwater drain at the end of our block, from there to be sucked down to the flood gates that lead to the river, and then to the sea. Some might even have managed to find the mouth of their own creek and returned to their little pond in the rainforest. I watched the gutter water running past, and hoped that they had.
‘You think the whole town might flood, Mum?’ I asked while we had our breakfast and listened to the rain thundering on the roof. Pete was in his truck driver’s singlet with his bilum slung over the back of his chair.
‘Hey, school might even be cancelled tomorrow,’ said Connor. ‘That’d be so cool.’
But I knew he couldn’t wait for school to start.
‘You’ll be going to school even if you have to swim,’ said Mum.
Connor turned to Pete. ‘Where do you think the other mudcod went?’ he asked.
‘Be down round the bananas still, I reckon. It’s pretty deep back there.’
I said, ‘I reckon some got into the gutter and swam back to their pond.’
Connor scoffed.
‘Stranger things have happened,’ said Pete.
The phone rang. I beat Connor to it and then passed it to Pete, who gulped a quick mouthful of coffee before answering: ‘Peter…Yep…Yep…Nup. No worries. Yep, yep…No, she’s right. Good one. Righto.’
He hung up. ‘Highway’s flooded at Feluga.’
That’s where it always flooded—cutting off the whole top bit of Australia. ‘Robbo reckons there’s a jam in front of it a K long. Looks like I won’t be going on that job unless something changes pretty quick smart.’ He smiled over his mug at Mum.
‘So are they postponing it?’ she said.
‘Dunno. Said he’ll ring back, but I reckon it’ll be a few days at least. Just average rain, she says.’
Mum leaned over his chair and hugged him from behind. ‘Oh, Pete.’
Pete gently wriggled away. ‘It’s all right. Bloody hell, it’s good. I get to keep me holiday going,’ he said and he leaned back on his chair and put his arms behind his head like he was on a hammock slung between two coconut trees. ‘Might have to make the next one a beer.’
‘I’m gunna go and see how Damon’s place is,’ said Connor, and I said, ‘Me too.’
‘No!’ Connor said, turning to Mum. ‘Tell Aaron he can’t come.’
Mum, still wrapped around Pete’s shoulders, sighed. ‘Let him go along, Connor. He won’t get in the way. Will you, Aaron?’
‘I promise I won’t,’ I said.
‘He will, Mum. He always does.’
‘Off you go and play nicely together. And take the umbrella.’
Connor was fuming. He banged the umbrella tip on each one of the front stairs on his way down before unfurling it into the face of the pelting rain.
I followed him. Out on the footpath I said, ‘It’s raining. You have to let me under.’
He stopped, turned round deliberately and said, ‘F. Off.’
‘I’m gunna tell Mum you swore.’
He didn’t answer, just kept walking, and I kept following.
The stormwater drain at the corner was working hard to suck in all the water from the gutter. It gave out a hollow crashing sound like there was a Niagara Falls deep underground. It made me shudder: the thought of getting sucked down there.
Connor stopped. He picked up a rock from the footpath and cocked his arm as if he was going to throw it at me. ‘Go home. Go find your own friends.’
‘If you chuck that I’m telling.’ You’d miss anyway, I added to myself. I wasn’t going to be put off that easily.
On Shoe Street, out the front of the Harmisons’ house, we came across Damon under an umbrella, watching none other than a soaking wet Stevie Harmison racing paddle-pop sticks along the gutter. Stevie was calf-deep in the gutter, but he was still almost as tall as Damon who was standing on the footpath.
‘How ya going, Connor?’ said Damon, without looking at me. ‘Check out the rain last night. The weather round here’s nuts.’
Stevie was watching us, smiling to himself like bullies do, with that wolf smile. The rain had made his blond hair into ringlets on his forehead and he had a streak of mud on his face that looked like it had been ad
ded by a make-up artist. His bike lay by the footpath.
‘Hey, Damon,’ said Connor uncertainly. He’d stopped a way off, and I was further back still.
Damon, still ignoring me, said, ‘Me ’n’ Stevie are racing paddle-pop sticks.’
Stevie stepped out of the gutter and up to Connor and said, ‘Hey Minnie Mouse, good ta see ya, mate.’ And he shook Connor’s hand with mock respect. To Damon he said, ‘People call this one Minnie Mouse and that one Mickey.’
No one had ever called us that.
Damon looked from Stevie to Connor.
‘G’day, Stevie,’ said Connor. ‘What have you been up to lately?’
‘What have I been up to? None of your ugly loser business is what I’ve been up to.’
‘Interesting. Have you been round the primary school lately? And is that a new bike? Very nice. Come into some money, maybe?’
Stevie shook his head, took a step back, baffled, trying to find a thread of meaning in Connor’s words. ‘Umm. No, it’s not a new bike. It’s like a year old. You are honestly weird, you know that? Honestly not right in the head.’
‘Huh,’ said Connor with an enigmatic smile, and he turned to Damon. ‘You got much water at your place, Damon?’
‘You could say that. The backyard’s totally flooded.’ He pointed his chin in my direction. ‘How come you brought him along?’ he said.
Connor looked round at me. ‘I didn’t. Go home, Aaron.’
I was trying to signal to Damon that I had something to tell him.
‘No, you gotta do it like this,’ said Damon. ‘FUCK OFF!’ he yelled at me. ‘And then if he doesn’t go you chuck something at him.’ He made a show of looking around for something to throw.
Stevie, of course, thought it was hilarious. Damon had found a rock and was brandishing it in one hand and holding his umbrella in the other, advancing on me, with his piggy eyes wide behind his glasses.
‘Aaron,’ said Connor, in a warning tone of voice, but I had already started for home. They had another think coming if they thought I was going to cry.
As I turned the corner I heard a yell, and footsteps behind me. It was Damon.
‘Now I got ya,’ he called for the benefit of the others. He tossed the rock aside, grabbed my shoulder, then hissed, ‘What the hell are you doing? We’re supposed to not know each other, remember?’
‘What are you doing?’ I shot back, ‘Why’d you nearly chuck a rock at me? And why’d you say fuck off like that?’
He pulled me close up to his face and whispered excitedly, ‘What was I supposed to say? Hi Aaron, old buddy, old pal? Do you want us to get caught or something? Tell me what you wanted to tell me. Quickly.’
I took a deep breath. ‘The police came to my place. They made me and Connor write stuff down. They’re going round checking everyone’s handwriting. They’re gunna go to the end of Shoe Street. To your place.’
‘Why?’
‘You wrote dickhead on the pad, remember? They’re gunna catch us. You have to give the beads back.’
‘Why?’ he said, but he was thinking, biting his lower lip as raindrops popped hollowly on the umbrella and rolled off onto my back. He let go of my shoulder.
I couldn’t stop the crack in my voice when I said, ‘’Cause they’ll catch us.’
Damon took his glasses off, wiped them, put them on again, and then said, ‘I’ll just write with my left hand. My uncle’s a cop, and he told me that if you get caught for something, if you don’t admit it they can’t prove it, so you’ll get off. So if they catch you don’t say it was us. You can say it was someone else, or even just say nothing, but don’t admit it. All right?’
‘But will you put them back? Please.’
‘They’ll have our fingerprints on them.’ He was right. We were stuck.
‘I’ll think about it,’ he said at last, ‘but you have to promise not to come round my house or try to hang around me, okay? Not till it’s all over.’
‘But…’ But I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
‘I’ll see you soon,’ he said. Then he shoved me towards home and added loudly, ‘And don’t come back,’ as Connor had peeked round the corner, looking relieved to see me not beaten to a pulp.
As they left I heard Connor say, ‘Why are you hanging around him?’ He meant Stevie Harmison. ‘He’s the one who broke into the church.’
I pondered what Damon had said as I walked home and as I waded through our backyard watched by a mudcod hovering in the water in front of the chook pen. The yard seemed foreign, like the tidal lagoon of an island I was shipwrecked on. I imagined coral in the shallows, a giant clam and, lurking in the deep, a shark. I climbed the avocado tree—going carefully because the trunk’s skin of lichen and moss had been softened and sliprified by the rain.
Eventually I made it to the fork in the branches and I clung there like a stranded possum, feeling as sorry for myself as I ever had in my life.
You could say someone else did it. Could that work? I could say Connor did it. I pictured the police arresting Connor, the scared look on his face, him crying like a baby, pee all down his leg, probably, and as I thought all this a cold chill swept over me and I shivered.
‘Wotcha doing up there?’
An umbrella swayed above the back fence, under it Byron’s face was just visible through the rain, his eyes wide. ‘Holy hell, your place’s almost as bad as mine.’
I climbed down from the tree and splashed over to the corner behind the chook pen, stopping with the water at my knees. No spiderweb. Where did spiders go when it rained?
‘Is your place flooded too?’ I asked.
‘Yeah, it’s right under my house.’
I jumped up but I couldn’t see over the fence. ‘It’s under my house too a bit,’ I said.
Byron stretched his neck to see under my house, but he couldn’t. He scratched his nose and made a clicking noise with his tongue. ‘Hey, how are the fish?’
‘They got out. We got some of ’em back, though.’
‘I asked my gran how come they’re called rainfish. She said they’re always called that. She says you’re not supposed to catch ’em.’
That was when it clicked. Of course—the rainfish from Aboriginal Tales of the Far North. Why hadn’t I thought of that before?
I said, ‘I know people who catch them all the time.’
‘That’s just what she said, anyway.’
An idea struck me, ‘Did you let them out?’
‘No. Hey, did your friend take that toy he stole back to the shop?’
Out of nowhere, I felt myself getting angry. ‘That’s dumb about them being rainfish, no one calls them that, they’re just mudcod.’
Byron frowned. I held his gaze. Finally, he said, ‘Dumb, hey? Want a smack in the head, ya dumb fuck?’ He disappeared. Moments later a rock flew from behind the fence and landed near me with a splash. My third near miss with a rock that morning.
‘Good one,’ I called sarcastically but got no answer.
‘Dickhead,’ I yelled. But by then I knew he was gone.
I went upstairs. Mum and Pete were in the kitchen drinking beer and listening to the radio.
I had a shower, then went and sat out on the front veranda. I thought about what Byron had said. Could all this rain be because we’d caught some rainfish? ‘Of course not,’ I said out loud to the street that was grey from all the rain that was still pouring down. Primary-school stuff. I went inside and watched TV.
Later that afternoon when Connor came back, Mum roped me into helping him take his things upstairs. Most of it we put in the corner of the lounge room where our presents were piled every Christmas. I wasn’t talking to Connor, and he wasn’t talking to me.
‘Has anyone seen The Lord of the Rings?’ he asked.
I just smiled to myself.
Pete helped us drag Connor’s bed up the stairs—we left it on its side in the hall next to a bucket that was catching water from the leak in the roof.
That nig
ht was the first time I’d ever paid attention to the weather report. They mentioned the highway being out. They even mentioned Fingleton by name. ‘Fingleton: more showers expected.’
‘So it’s going to keep raining, is it, Mum?’ I asked.
‘Weather people are wrong as much as they’re right. But we’ve got everything out from downstairs ’cept the Datsun, and it’s not going anywhere. Maybe you should think about moving the truck though, Pete. It’s pretty low where it is.’
Pete had been drinking all day. He had a lazy grin on his face.
‘She’ll be right,’ he said.
Mum looked at him for a while, then gave her trademark irritated sigh. ‘And has anyone seen my necklace? The one the police found? I put it in the sideboard bowl and now it’s gone again.’
No one said anything. Connor just kept watching TV like he hadn’t heard.
‘So it grew legs and ran off, ay?’ said Mum, ‘There’s certainly some unusual stuff happening around here.’
That night Connor slept on the top bunk. ‘It’s not bad being back in the old bunk,’ he said.
I didn’t reply.
‘You’re probably wondering why I didn’t tell the police about Stevie, right? It’s ’cause I need more proof. I’m going to get it too. I’d love to check his house, but his mum’s home all the time. Must be something wrong with her.’ He yawned. ‘I set a trap for him today while you and Damon were talking about whatever it was you were talking about. He’s my only other suspect now by the way.’
I couldn’t help myself. ‘Who?’
‘Damon. I mean I can’t see Damon doing that—he’s my best friend—but logically it’s got to be one of those two.’ He made a stretching noise, and after a while he said, ‘I hope school’s flooded out tomorrow.’
I heard him rummaging. ‘Look what I found,’ he said, and dangled the miniature Rubik’s cube by its keyring from his bed. ‘I wonder how it got up here?’
‘Beats me,’ I said.
‘Yep, definitely hope there’s no school tomorrow.’
I didn’t say anything.
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