Rainfish

by Andrew Paterson

  After the special reading there was a minute’s silence for Coldy, during which Father Lockhart rested his hand on top of Coldy’s picture like he was comforting a real person. Instead of his special mass robe he was wearing his priest’s plain white short-sleeved shirt and black pants, and he looked like he hadn’t combed his hair: a few strands were sticking up at right angles to his head.

  When we sang ‘The Lord’s My Shepherd’, Father was off key and out of time. He seemed more focused on watching us kids as we sang or pretended to sing or hid behind hymn books.

  After the hymn it was homily time. Father bumped the microphone as he took it from its stand but held back from speaking a while, making sure we were all looking at him.

  ‘As we begin today let us first think of the Caulderson family in this time of great loss.’ He glanced toward the front pew, but Coldy’s family wasn’t there. I remembered his mum’s cream-cheese sandwiches, how she’d even cut the crusts off. The thought brought with it a pang of guilt.

  Father was pacing up and down in front of the altar. He said, ‘The holidays were a difficult time for many of us. I’ve been told it was the worst flood in Fingleton for almost thirty years. Some people were forced to spend a few nights camping in the classrooms, a few of you, I see.’ He squinted as he looked out over our faces. I dipped my head further into my hymn book.

  ‘I’m not sure whether many of you know,’ continued Father after another dramatic pause, ‘that somebody broke into the church over the holidays and stole something very dear to me. Something that had been passed down through my family for generations.’

  He’s going to point his finger at me and say, ‘Thief! I’d know that face anywhere. Stand up. Someone hold him!’

  ‘I know it’s only a thing,’ continued Father, ‘but I fell into a funk about it. I even considered resigning.’

  There was a murmur among the congregation. The ladies in the front row half-turned to show their disapproval.

  ‘I prayed to God for guidance,’ he continued. ‘I felt I’d hit a brick wall. And then the flood came. And I was so busy doing things for others I forgot my own problems. Now, I see the flood as a message, to me, from God. And the message was: “Father Lockhart, get to work.” So I did. And once I’d started working, I couldn’t stop. If you look around you may notice some of the pews have been sanded back and revarnished.’

  The first two rows of pews had been freshly sanded and revarnished, and they were now a paler colour and shinier than the rest.

  ‘And then,’ he said, and suddenly he was trembling with emotion, pointing at the roof with his index finger. And even the kids beside me, who’d been whispering and snickering the whole time, even they shut up.

  ‘While I was sanding, with the sweat upon my brow,’ he continued. ‘God spoke to me. In a voice sweet and clear, He said, “You will find your father’s rosary beads. They are close by.”’

  A shot of electricity ran through me.

  Father kept on, his words slow and deliberate. ‘And I was at peace. I believed—I believe it still—that they will be found. They will be returned.’

  The church was silent.

  Then he seemed to relax back into himself, and after a deep breath he smiled apologetically. ‘And I learnt something: that it is in our darkest hour, when the floodwaters are at their highest, that we recognise those things for which we should be truly thankful. For our faith. Even for the simple gift of being alive. So let us pray again for the Caulderson family. Please bow your heads.’

  After the homily it was time for communion. One row at a time we stood up and filed down the central aisle. Too late I thought of rushing to the toilet, but that would probably have drawn more attention to me anyway. Best get it over with. Just look down, and keep quiet, I told myself.

  We shuffled along, drawing nearer to Father. Why was it taking so long? And then his moon face was looming over me, saying, ‘Body of Christ,’ and I heard myself reply, ‘Amen.’ And I took the wafer and put it in my mouth, and before I could stop myself I was meeting his gaze. He smiled his distracted priest smile and then looked over my shoulder to the next kid.

  He’d forgotten me. I was in the clear. I was so relieved I floated more than walked back to my seat, bumped into the kid in front and nearly caused a chain-reaction pile-up.

  After the final hymn, Father said, ‘Go in peace to love and serve the Lord,’ and we filed out of the church then broke into a race for the bag racks while the adults had tea and biscuits with Father Lockhart. I spent an hour playing handball with the kids who were waiting to get picked up. When the last of them left I walked home.

  20

  GRAN’S SECOND VISIT

  GRAN’S MINI WAS in the drive. She was in the kitchen with a tray of triangle sandwiches and biscuits on the table in front of her, as well as a cup of tea, which she must have made herself because Mum was still at work.

  ‘There you are, Aaron,’ said Gran. ‘I’d been wondering when you’d get home. Have a sandwich. They’re leftovers from mass.’

  Connor was at the table, with his mouth full of sandwich.

  ‘I was showing Connor my new shoes. I got them in Rockhampton. Aren’t they a knockout?’

  They were high heels the same green colour as her dress. I nodded.

  ‘And what did you boys think of Father’s homily? “You will find your rosary beads.” Have you ever heard anything like it? You know how he was thinking about resigning? Don’t say anything to anyone, but I heard he got a reply to his resignation letter directly from the Pope, urging him to stay. And he did such a professional job on the pews. Jesus was a carpenter, you know. Oh, he’s a rock of strength. What did you think about it, Aaron?’

  I hadn’t been expecting the question, ‘Umm, what? The pews?’

  ‘Father’s homily.’

  ‘It was good.’

  Gran sipped her tea. ‘And the part about him finding his rosary beads—what did you think about that part?’

  I said, ‘It was interesting.’

  She nodded but didn’t say anything. But she was getting at something. She took a sip of tea. Then she leaned in, eyes sparkling, and said, ‘Now boys, I gave your father your letters. He told me he was very impressed and said what lovely letters they were. He told me to tell you that he loves you both very much and that he’ll write a letter back soon.’ Then she put a biscuit from the tray in front of each of us and watched as we ate them.

  It was while I ate the biscuit that it suddenly hit me why she’d been asking me about Father’s homily. She must have been the lady in the church back when me and Damon took the rosary beads. She must have known it was me all along. I stopped mid-chew and stared at her.

  She sensed me staring. She said, ‘And what did you boys think about the bit in the sermon where Father talked about repentance for your sins? What did you think about that?’

  ‘I don’t remember that bit,’ said Connor.

  ‘Connor, would you be a dear and get my bag out of the car for me?’ Connor gave her a funny look, but he went.

  Gran waited till he was gone, and then she said quietly, ‘I won’t tell on you if you give them to me.’

  I was too shocked to say anything.

  She waited, watching me coldly.

  ‘I haven’t got them,’ I finally stammered. ‘Another boy’s got them.’

  ‘Are you telling me the truth, Aaron? Really?’

  ‘I am, Gran. I swear.’

  She nodded then.

  I took a deep breath to calm myself. ‘You knew all along,’ I said. ‘You were the lady in the blue cardigan.’

  ‘Blue cardigan? No, I just happened to see the letter you wrote to your father. You’re so much like him, you know.’ She shook her head. ‘Once, when your dad was a boy, he broke into our neighbour’s place and took some trinkets. It was innocent, really. But I made a mistake; I told his father. And then there was hell to pay. And your dad blamed me for that. He never confided in me again. Never forgave me. And I blame
myself. So I won’t tell on you, you don’t have to worry.’

  She sighed. ‘He still blames me after all these years. So much anger in him. He still won’t see me. Sends my letters back unopened.’

  ‘What about our letters? What about the letter he wrote to me at Christmas?’

  She shook her head. ‘I wrote that. But I’m sure that’s what he’d like to say, if he could. He’s just all over the place at the moment. You won’t tell Connor or your mother, will you? I want you kids to have a good relationship with him, when he gets back on his feet. He’s had it tougher than you. People were always picking on him. And his father was so strict. Far too strict, at times. He got mixed up with the wrong people. Listen—I won’t tell on you to the police or anyone, but you have to do something for me. You have to confess to Father Lockhart. You have to get your soul right with God. Otherwise, well…I’m giving you a chance, though God knows no one gave your dad a chance. But oh, he was the sweetest little boy you ever saw…’

  Gran was still smiling to herself thinking about Dad as a kid when Connor came up the back stairs. ‘Did I ever tell you boys about the time your dad was one of the wise men in the school concert?’

  We listened to Gran’s story even though we’d heard it before. Then we stood on the front veranda and waved as she reversed her Mini out of the driveway. She gave a brief smile up at us, then her eyes went back to the rear-view mirror, and she was gone.

  ‘I heard what she said,’ said Connor. ‘I was on the stairs. So it was you all along. Pretty sly.’

  I stared at him.

  ‘It’s okay. I’m not gunna tell. But I wouldn’t tell Father Lockhart. You never know what he’ll do. Don’t tell anyone. It can be our secret.’ He patted me on the shoulder.

  I said, ‘Okay,’ and I felt a weight lift off me.

  ‘Just don’t do it again, okay?’

  I nodded emphatically. ‘Definitely not.’

  21

  THE LAST RAINFISH

  THE FIRST SATURDAY after we’d gone back to school, Mum got me to mow the yard. I shoved the mower through the thick grass, with sweat getting in my eyes and the engine’s thrum drowning out everything. My hands were throbbing from the push bar.

  ‘After that you can clean out that old tub,’ said Mum. ‘I’m sick of looking at the damn thing.’

  I emptied the grass-catcher’s last load behind the chook pen. The spider wasn’t there—another victim of the flood, probably—and gone with it was the corner’s scary vibe. The bathtub was clogged with branches and weeds, and flies buzzed around it. It stank. I cleared out the big branches then felt around for the plug and pulled it out. Not much water drained, so I got a bucket and began to bail.

  Something moved in there. At first I thought I’d imagined it, but there it was again. I saw a fin. I moved the bucket around, trying to scoop it up. Suddenly there it was in the bottom of the bucket, brown against the white plastic, its fins undulating. The last remaining rainfish.

  I ran upstairs. ‘Mum, I got a mudcod. It was still in the bathtub.’

  ‘You’re kidding. That’s amazing, Aaron.’

  ‘What should I do with it?’

  ‘You could put it in a tank.’

  ‘Can I go and ask Pete what he thinks?’

  She leant back against the sink and brushed a hair from her eyes. She smiled and said, ‘All right. Sure. But don’t be long.’

  ‘Great.’

  I got the bike and rode towards town, keeping well off the edge of the road to avoid the bustling Saturday-morning traffic. It didn’t take me long to get to Robbo’s workshop. And there was Pete, arms striped with grease, talking to a customer.

  Pete had moved out of our place a week after the flood and he was sharing a flat with one of his fishing buddies. He’d sold his truck to a sugarcane farmer who’d put it in his back shed and was fixing it on weekends. The day after Pete left, Bernie came round on his motorbike with beer from his bottle shop, put his feet up on a kitchen chair and started gossiping like nothing had changed.

  When Pete saw me he smiled and wiped his hands on his overalls.

  ‘Good to see ya, mate. How ya been? How’s Connor and your mum going?’

  I told him they were well and he nodded and frowned like we were two men talking business.

  Then I said, ‘Hey, Pete, guess what? I cleaned the bathtub out and there was a mudcod still in there.’

  ‘Yeah? Who’d a thought it, ay?’

  ‘What should I do with it?’

  He squinted at the open workshop door. ‘Mate, you should probably take him back to where we got ’im.’

  ‘Okay. Yep. Good idea.’

  ‘Listen mate, I’ve got a fair bit of work on this morning so I better get back to it, but it was good seeing ya, ay? Thanks for dropping in. And say hello to your mum and Connor for me.’

  ‘No problem. See you, Pete.’

  ‘Take care, mate.’

  But as I rode home I began to see how impractical it would be to take the fish back to the rainforest pond where we’d caught him; after all we still didn’t have a car. Better to take him to the swamp behind Damon’s place and release him there, I thought. So when I got home I balanced the bucket on my handlebars and set off.

  I turned into Shoe Street. It was back to its usual self, though you could still see the high-water mud line halfway up the doors of the houses of people who hadn’t bothered cleaning it off. The street behind ours was back to normal as well. I’d walked past Byron’s place a few times, and I’d thrown some baby oranges at the back fence, but he hadn’t reappeared. I asked Mum if she knew anything about the family over the back fence, but she just shrugged.

  Coldy’s front door was closed. It had an air about it like it never wanted to open again, or maybe it looked the same as usual and the air thing was just in my head.

  Likewise the witch’s place was closed: it didn’t look scary at all anymore. When I asked Mum about her, she said that she was Mrs Contarino and that she used to run an Italian restaurant in town and that she was ninety-two and she had been inside the house through the whole flood. She’d managed to get up on her kitchen table and had sat there while her kitchen filled up with water and all her things floated off, and she hadn’t eaten for days, and eventually someone had thought to check on her and she’d been taken to hospital while Connor was there, dehydrated and nearly dead, but they’d got her better and now she was in an old-people’s home.

  The Harmisons’ house was completely mud free. A brand new dirt bike was parked under it.

  As I rode slowly, carefully along on that cloudless, perfect day I thought about Father Lockhart’s homily, how he’d thought the flood had been a message to him—kind of like he’d caused it. I still had the feeling that maybe we’d caused the flood when we caught the rainfish. Or maybe Damon and I really had made the universe or something angry when we’d taken the rosary beads. Everything had gone wrong since then. I wondered how many other people felt like they’d caused the flood. Most likely the flood was no one’s fault; most likely it was just what happened.

  Damon’s house was deserted. They hadn’t cleaned it at all; there was a mud coating ten centimetres thick under the house and muddy boxes lying about the yard. A dirty sheet was hanging off their front veranda rail.

  I left the bike next to the road and trudged through the vacant lot with the bucket. The ground there was still soft.

  As I arrived at the clearning I heard the rustle and scurry of small things departing. The creek water was higher and cleaner than it had been. I poured Aaron Aaronson in—I liked to think that it was Aaron Aaronson that had stayed in the bathtub while all the others had swum away. He darted straight for the reeds and was gone.

  I straightened up and looked around. There was a prayer card in the mud, bent and soggy. I picked it up. The guardian angel’s face still had that weird look, only now, wet and slightly warped, she looked like she was creeping up behind the children, like she was about to push them off the cliff. An
d there in the reeds, only a metre from me, was the bottle of wine. I fished it out of the mud and wiped it off. It was unopened. The drainpipe, our hiding place, had a dangling tongue of green slime at its mouth, and over the tongue fell a timid trickle of water.

  Something caught the light far inside the darkness in the drain.

  I reached my arm in. All the way to my shoulder and stretched a little further. I felt something. I pulled: out came a piece of fishing line with a rusting hook on the end. It glinted in the sun as it turned from side to side. Lucky I’d grabbed the line and not the hook: I might have cut myself and got tetanus.

  I peered into the drain again because I had a feeling there was something else up there. Maybe I could reach it if I crawled in a bit. I’d probably fit. There was no point being chicken about it.

  ‘I wouldn’t do that,’ said a voice.

  ‘What? Why not?’ I said.

  ‘Because you don’t know what might be in there, that’s why. Whatever it is you might not like it.’

  ‘What’s in there?’

  The black panther right behind me didn’t answer, but the way it was breathing, really fast, and the way the hair on the back of its neck was standing up was starting to concern me.

  I thought about it for a bit more, but in the end I took a step backwards and I scrambled up the dirt bank and then walked and didn’t run back through the tall grass and through the vacant block.

  I got on my bike and rode home and then I went over to Oliver West’s house and we played with his remote-control cars all afternoon. Then Oliver came over my house and Mum made spaghetti for dinner, and me and Oliver and Connor and Mum watched TV till late, and Oliver slept over in the top bunk.

  I stayed away from the swamp after that day, and from rainfish. And from then on, maybe coincidentally, the panther stayed away from me.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks and love to my family and especially to Megumi and Naomi for supporting and being patient with me throughout the ages that it took me to write Rainfish. Thanks to Duncan and Mum and Linda for reading early versions of the manuscript, and thanks to everyone at Text Publishing and especially to Jane Pearson for all her sensible suggestions.