‘Pricey,’ he murmured. ‘Robbie.’
Robbie came closer, embarrassed, his face flushed, his blue eyes steamy.
‘I just thought, you know –’ he shrugged at Farren. ‘Like maybe you might need someone to feed the rabbit or something like that. While you’re down here.’
Farren felt guilt. He glanced toward his house.
‘Geez, I’d forgotten about her.’
‘Just tell me what to give it.’ Robbie nodded. ‘You stay here.’
‘I don’t want to stay here.’ Farren spoke without thinking. ‘I’ll come with ya. We’ll go now.’ He did want to go to his house with Pricey. With Pricey it’d be all right, for some reason. He thought of Hoppidy and wanted to be holding her, her good front paw and her little stumpy one on his shirt, her nose poking in under his chin. ‘I gotta go feed the rabbit.’ He spoke to Maggie. ‘And then I’ll come back.’
‘Yes, why don’t you?’ Maggie’s face was touched with sunshine that seemed to belong to a different, better day. ‘And then you can both come up to the kitchen for breakfast. Promise?’
‘Yep.’ Farren was hungry, but that could wait. Going home to the rabbit with Pricey seemed like the only good thing left to do in the world. ‘We will, I promise.’ He wished he was off the wharf already.
THIRTEEN
In the parlour, Farren held Hoppidy while Robbie poked sticks into the stove. It wasn’t until they’d arrived that Farren remembered Pricey’s dad was also still missing, the realisation leaving him to wonder how Robbie was happy most of the time when it seemed that that would have to be impossible.
‘She’s a funny rabbit.’ Robbie screwed his face up against smoke leaking from the firebox. ‘Hey. So, Farry, you can stay at my place. You know, tonight, if you want. If your dad’s not, you know, um, home. But anyway, he should be back by then.’
Farren nodded. It took him a while to think of something to say.
‘I stayed at Maggie’s last night.’ He could hardly remember. ‘I could stay there again, I guess. Or here. I wouldn’t mind.’ He looked around the parlour. It seemed to have changed. It was emptier somehow and colder. ‘I’ve done it before. By meself.’
Robbie sat in Danny’s chair, the fire in front of him a crackling black and yellow framework.
‘Nah,’ he said. ‘Too lonely. Come up to my joint. Or go to Maggie’s. Don’t stay here.’
‘D’you think the army might let Danny come home?’ Farren spoke slowly. ‘To look after me. If me dad don’t get back?’ He felt a kind of distant hope; a second-best type of hope, as if he knew it was really only wishful thinking. ‘They might, mightn’t they?’
Robbie evaded Farren’s eyes. ‘Yeah. Maybe.’ He stood up. ‘What’s the sugar in? Where d’you keep it?’
As Farren went up onto the bridge he saw there was a policeman on the wharf talking to people in front of the fisherman’s sheds. He stopped, and unwillingly, so did Robbie.
‘I dunno what that’s about.’ Robbie’s voice was not convincing. ‘C’arn. Let’s go. You’d better go get something to eat, like Maggie said.’ He gave Farren’s jacket a quick tug. ‘Come on, Farry. Let’s get outta here and go to the pub.’
Farren followed, and when he looked back to see Jack and May talking to the policeman, he felt he might fall to his knees. Robbie got hold of his arm.
‘C’mon, ’Roon. Keep goin’, mate. It’s the only way.’
Charlotte bustled around the kitchen, forcefully cheerful, every so often glancing warily at Robbie as if he was Farren’s protector and dangerous to be near. Robbie appeared not to notice, mostly watching the back door while Farren looked out the window, entranced, as if the day was so hot he could not move or think.
‘Shouldn’t you be off up to school, Robert?’ Charlotte picked up his empty mug. ‘It’s almost ten. Mr Derriweather’ll be wonderin’ where you are.’ She moved off fast, not waiting for an answer, quickly rinsing and drying the mug as if this extra task, if not completed, might bring the hotel to a standstill. She hung the mug on a hook.
‘Nuh.’ Robbie leaned back in his chair and folded his hands on his head. ‘I’m in no hurry at all. So can I have another cuppa tea?’ He laughed at Charlotte’s strained-looking face. ‘Go on, Charley. Mine’s the brown one on the hook there. It’s clean and everythink.’
Farren didn’t hear what Robbie was saying. But he did hear voices out in the lounge that were gruff, spare, and serious. He turned to the swinging doors, his head as empty as a ploughed paddock, watching impassively as Maggie came in, walked around the table, drew out a chair and sat next to him. Poking out between her knuckles he saw a white handkerchief embroidered with yellow daisies.
‘Farren, they need to talk to you.’ She touched his knee. ‘Come on. I’ll look after you. You’ll be with me. We’ll go together.’
Farren, like a trusting dog about to be shot, did as he was asked.
‘Chin up, Farry.’ Robbie lifted his gaze from the table top. ‘Good luck, mate.’
Now that the policeman and Jack and May had left the hotel, Farren didn’t know what to do. He was aware of Maggie next to him, but all he could do was look at the fire, at the three big logs propped on each other like a fallen bridge.
He lifted his hand then put it down. Then he thought about walking somewhere but he couldn’t think of anywhere to go. Outside he was surprised to see the world was still there. It even seemed pretty much unchanged; the trees moved with the wind, the grocer’s brown and white horse was at the trough, and there were clouds, not very special ones, just grey and puffy, moving along.
My dad is dead, Farren thought, saying it in his head, testing to see if he actually could and what might happen. Yes, he could say it, and although he did feel some musty old cemetery, funeral-type of fear, it wasn’t much. So he said in his head: my dad is dead, my mum is dead, and Luther is dead.
The words were impossibly heavy and what they meant didn’t sound as if it could ever be true. He couldn’t imagine those three people not breathing, not moving, ever again. Not all three. Not now. Not with Danny away and him here by himself.
Not that anyone had said his dad was dead exactly.
The policeman said he was passed away. The policeman said he was found washed ashore ten miles west of the Heads, with Luther, and the boat. Luther was passed away, too. And May had crossed herself, he remembered, making that magic church sign he knew nothing about. Only Jack said they were drowned when Farren had not known, for certain, what ‘passed away’ really meant.
Well, they would be drowned, wouldn’t they? Farren thought reasonably. What else could they be in that storm?
At least his dad was with Luther, he thought. At least his dad wasn’t the only one drowned. Farren couldn’t believe, though, that neither of them, at least one of them, couldn’t have got up off the beach and been alive. But he had seen dead things: birds, cows, fish, sheep, his mother, a drowned boy on the wharf, and he knew once something was dead it was really dead, it wasn’t coming back. Then he wondered about the Ocean Gull, as he looked into the slow-pulsing heart of the fire.
He hoped she hadn’t been lost. He liked that boat and the blokes who worked her. They were funny. Tony Gallow and Leo Marks. He’d seen Tony throw a fish at the mayor once, across the inlet, over some voting thing.
‘Farren.’ Maggie spoke as if she was waking him from a dream. ‘I’ll go and get you a cup of tea, all right? Then we might work out where you can sit because people’ll be coming in for lunch pretty soon. All right? Do you want some shortbread?’
Farren shook his head and watched Maggie go out through the swinging doors. He was alone. It felt as if the room was expanding, the walls racing away, him getting smaller and smaller but never disappearing. He listened to the fire, a log shifting, the hiss of sap, the clinking of charcoal, and looked at his hands. A sense of hope came to him, as small and bright as a flower or a flame, in the form of something gratefully remembered.
Danny.
The door
opened, Isla coming into the lounge so quietly that Farren thought it might’ve been he who was deaf. She touched nothing, not even the floor it seemed, and when she sat next to him he felt only the faintest breath of warmth. She looked at him, blinking once, Farren feeling it like a beat of his heart.
‘Ver sohr, Fah-ren.’ Her hands were in her lap, like Maggie’s had been, fingers woven into a pale pattern. ‘Ver sohr.’
Farren nodded. ‘It’s orright.’
Isla looked at him and Farren looked away. Then he put his elbows on the table, covered his face with his hands, coughed once and felt tears, heavier than blood and endless, flow down his face and through his hands because they were unstoppable because the world was ended, his dad was gone and never would be back, and now he had no one to look after him, no one to be with him at night or in the morning, or to teach him fishing, or to give him anything, or buy him anything, or make sure he was all right when he was sick, his dad gone without even saying goodbye or saying he loved him, or telling him that things’d be all right, like he always did, no matter what was wrong.
Farren felt Isla’s arm around his back, her hand as light as a swallow resting. And the tears came more violently, because he was alone now and he could feel the loneliness, and understood what it meant far more than he could understand the death of his dad – although he could see his dad on the beach in the shallows, in his green jumper, face down, the foam and ripples of spent waves washing around him, the seagulls circling and crying in the wind, and in two days or something he would be buried, in a deep hole held out with green boards but really it still was just a big deep hole that would be filled in with shovels, all that great big pile of stony dirt on top of his dad.
Farren felt a howl of anguish and slumped face-down on the table, a tide of desolation overtaking him with only a few words, said by Isla in her strange, musical voice, to beat against it.
‘Oh, Fah-ren,’ she said. ‘Oh, Fah-ren, Fah-ren, Fah-ren.’
FOURTEEN
The news of the other fishermen had bypassed Farren as he sat in a corner of the kitchen.
‘The Ocean Gull’s been found,’ Maggie told him at two in the afternoon. ‘She’s wrecked but the men are safe. They climbed a cliff and got to a house.’
Farren nodded. ‘That’s good.’ His mind was blank, filled with the greyness of an overcast sky.
Maggie studied him as if he’d been in an accident.
‘And the Camille,’ she said eventually, ‘she’ll be brought home when the weather’s calmed. She’s yours now, Farren. And Danny’s. She’s a bit damaged but the men’ll fix her.’
Farren looked at Maggie, thinking of something but never completing the thought.
‘When Danny gets home.’ It was his statement about the future.
Maggie pressed his hand.
‘Yes, and until he does,’ she said, ‘you can stay with me. And later, Johnny said there’s a little room here you can have, if you want. Like Isla.’
‘D’you think the army might let him go?’ Farren put the words together as if he was completing an equation. ‘If we tell ’em what’s happened? To me?’
From the lounge the sounds of people filtered into the kitchen. Farren didn’t hear them.
‘I – well, they might.’ Maggie nodded. ‘We’ll have to ask.’ Her eyes flickered, as if she knew she had faltered with the truth, but Farren, lost in dismal hope, didn’t notice.
Hour by hour the storm lessened until the trees hung exhaustedly and the estuary calmed enough to accept the reflection of the sky. The beaches, Farren knew, would be black with weed and the sea infected with sand, a sickly green. The dunes too would be dramatically altered, bitten off by the waves or enlarged as if mysterious islands had beached overnight – but Farren didn’t want to see them.
He had no wish to kick over what had been pitched up by the ocean. He had no interest in what fish, birds, rope, or wreckage had finally been dumped at the high-water mark to lie abandoned like shoddy souvenirs. He couldn’t move. He felt as if he’d been beaten senseless.
His past was like an old calendar, years out of date, his future a road that dipped out of sight. What he didn’t think could ever happen to him again, had, and so suddenly it was as if the world wanted to teach him a lesson. He looked out, saw the railway bridge at the neck of the estuary, and wished he were there, sitting on timbers as strong as trust, the water plopping and glopping, his fishing line over his finger to complete the connection, the day like any other old day.
∗
A magpie sat in a tree by the cemetery gates, watching as mourners in black filed out. Farren had seen the bird earlier, gratefully allowing its presence to divert his attention from what was happening at the graveside. The words Reverend Purdue had spoken were so awful, so final, and so unlike the words that people normally spoke that Farren couldn’t listen.
‘And now we commit the earthly remains of…’
Instead Farren watched the magpie cleaning its beak, filing away busily as his dad’s name was stretched out, added to, and slowed down until Tom Fox was turned into a person Farren didn’t recognise.
‘Thomas George Albert Carver Fox…’
His dad wasn’t Thomas George Albert something Fox, and Farren was not going to listen to him being changed into someone with a long, cold, serious name that sounded like it belonged in England and nowhere near a fishing boat. The others could listen – he could see Mr Derriweather was, standing next to Isla who stared down at the gravelly ground, but Farren Fox wouldn’t. He would look at the magpie, alive and alert, now attending to its wing, sawing with its beak like a mad violinist as the words drifted away on the breeze.
Farren watched the magpie as he left the cemetery, seeing it fly away over the headstones as if they were nothing but stumps in a paddock, and the two men with shovels only farmers out to clear a drain. All he wanted to do now, because his mind was either so empty or so full it wouldn’t work, was sleep.
Beyond wanting to sleep, Farren was aware only of things he no longer felt; he no longer felt like himself, he no longer understood where he was in the world, what he was going to do, or what might happen to him. He was completely and utterly lost.
FIFTEEN
From the window in Maggie’s parlour Farren could see the headland across the waters of the Rip, the land disappearing in the lessening light, reminding him of a whale, black and massive. The sea was moving, the ebb tide running, Farren able to feel, even from behind glass, the air of treachery that it carried, close and silent, to share with the rocks and reefs.
He had not looked at the sea for days, or not carefully, and for the first time in a week it jumped out at him, the water a sombre green, the distant beaches as pale as paper, the sky receding from blue into black, leaving stars stranded like upturned shells.
Farren knew he could leave Queenscliff. His mum’s sister had offered him a job on their farm in Nyah West. He could go and live in the country and never see the sea, a couta boat, or a beach again. But he didn’t want to leave, even though his dad had been washed ashore just down the road, his face bruised and broken, because Farren had seen it and knew it was, no matter what the funeral people put on it.
No, he wouldn’t leave the sea because he loved it still – or if he didn’t love it now, he would again; as it was the sea and only the sea, and working the Camille, that would allow him to be the kind of person he wanted to be. He heard footsteps, saw Robbie appear at the back door, and opened it before Robbie could knock.
‘Eh, Rob.’ Farren was buoyed up at the sight of him. ‘Whadda ya doin’?’
Robbie grinned, hopping from foot to foot on the stepping stones as if he needed to go to the toilet.
‘Lookin’ for you, of course.’ He stopped hopping. ‘You wanna come to my place for tea? My mum’s especially asked. She said she wants to show you her scar now that she’s got the stitches out.’ Robbie grinned. ‘Well, no, maybe she didn’t, but she does want you to come. We got roast chicken and that’s
not so bloody bad, is it?’
No, roast chicken wasn’t so bad at all, Farren thought. Roast chicken was good and he was starving. He couldn’t remember when he’d last had roast chicken. Years ago.
‘I’ll have to tell Maggie,’ he said. ‘She’s still down the pub.’
Robbie swung like a weather vane, arm out, pointing towards the grey paling fence.
‘Then, my boy. To the pub!’
Pricey’s mum, Farren was aware, was looking at him a lot and asking him a lot of questions; but he didn’t mind because talking to her, and to Maggie, was a bit like talking to his mum. He felt cared for, not forgotten, and that he was understood. He felt less lost when he talked to ladies, that his life wasn’t so wrecked. Blokes just offered him advice or told him what to do.
‘Will you stay at Maggie’s place?’ Mrs Price asked. ‘Or do you have other plans? Robbie was saying you might go and live at the Victory.’
Farren looked at Mrs Price across a table so crowded it reminded him of a model village. There was a butter dish, a bread board, salt and pepper shakers, a sugar bowl, a gravy boat, drinking glasses, napkins, and Pricey’s dad’s napkin, with its ancient ivory ring, which evidently Mrs Price put out at every meal, according to Robbie. Even breakfast.
‘Yeah, maybe the pub,’ Farren said. ‘I been at Maggie’s for long enough.’ He didn’t so much want to leave Maggie’s as not be in her way. ‘It’s a pretty small house.’
Mrs Price nodded. Her burgundy-coloured dress, her carefully secured coppery hair, her languid hand gestures, and her intense way of looking at Farren demanded his undivided attention – but he was not overawed. In fact he was brave enough to think he quite liked Mrs Price. He felt she was interested in him, and she’d thanked him, holding his hands, for helping Robbie when she’d cut her head.
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