The River Baptists

by Belinda Castles

  ‘That’s what my mum always says,’ he laughed quietly. ‘You probably want to get to bed.’

  ‘No. I’m going to have another glass, actually. Keep me company.’ He hadn’t let go of her hand. Her knees were bare. She was wearing a cotton maternity skirt and a stretchy T-shirt. She felt deeply unsexy all of a sudden. He touched the skin below the hem of her skirt with his free hand.

  He started to stand. ‘I’m sorry, Rose. You just looked so pretty, sitting there.’

  ‘It’s all right, Kane. Really, stay for a while. I’d love the company.’

  She took his hand, dangling by his side, and kissed his long fingers, her eyes closed. He pulled her up, out of her chair. She laughed. ‘I need a crane.’

  He shook his head. ‘You’re lovely, Rose,’ he whispered, and laid his head on her shoulder. ‘I can’t believe someone left you all alone. He’s mad, whoever he is.’

  Early next morning Danny was woken by the sound of someone shuffling about on deck. A boat motor had briefly registered in his dreams, but you learned to ignore those; they were simply a subconscious reminder that you were where you belonged—somewhere on the river and reachable only by boat. Not a form of transport his old man would be big on these days. Then Rob’s voice: ‘You decent? Got company?’

  ‘Come down,’ Danny called back.

  ‘No thanks, mate. Not till you’ve aired it out down there. I’ve got a flask of coffee if you’re interested.’

  Danny emerged a few moments later in his shorts.

  ‘Something happen to your clothes, Dan?’ Rob was leaning on the balustrade. He looked him up and down.

  ‘I didn’t bring her back. Promise is a promise.’

  ‘Don’t make me laugh. So what you doing here? Not that my home isn’t your home, etcetera . . .’

  ‘It was low tide. Didn’t want to deal with the swamp at the beach.’

  Rob nodded warily. ‘If you say so.’

  Behind Rob, Danny saw a small movement from Rose’s house, a reflection glancing suddenly off sliding glass. Rob noticed him looking at something and turned towards the shore. ‘Keep still for a tick,’ Danny said softly. Rob gave him a quizzical look but didn’t move. First the lanky, ambling figure of Kane appeared on her verandah, then came Rose, slower, more contained.

  ‘Tell me he slept on the couch,’ Rob whispered. But as they continued to watch, Rose wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him. She seemed to be going for his cheek, but he caught her elbows, held her still, and gave her a long kiss on the mouth before hopping off the deck and next door to the boatshed. Rose peered out over the water for a few seconds before disappearing inside.

  ‘She must like it rough,’ Rob said.

  ‘Mate—’

  ‘Did you see him at the pub last night?’

  ‘Yeah, I pulled him off that bloke. There’s someone who owes me a beer.’

  ‘You think she likes that?’

  ‘She didn’t see it. She was already home.’

  Rob gave him a searching look. ‘Right. Think someone should tell her?’

  ‘Tell her what? That the bloke likes a fight? Everyone in the pub liked a fight last night. It was nuts.’

  ‘She’s gonna have a kiddie any minute. He’s bad news all round, I reckon.’

  ‘Yeah, maybe.’ He gave Rob a quick look.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Jesse knows him, from up the river.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Drug dealer, she reckons.’

  ‘Well everyone knew about the pot.’

  ‘Looks like he goes after the kids, gets them onto it. One of their dads was ready to see him off, but he skipped.’ He paused. ‘Sounds like maybe he bashed his girlfriend, too.’

  ‘Shit, Dan. We’ve got to sort him out. We don’t want that round here.’

  ‘What’s it got to do with us?’

  ‘I’d say it’s got plenty to do with you, the way you’re sleeping on my boat and spying on him.’

  ‘He heard us, the other night. He was down there in his tinny when we were talking about Dad.’

  ‘I say we sort this out before it gets anywhere. I know plenty of blokes who’d be happy to help.’ He nodded at Mancini’s. ‘Would have thought you’d want to help her out, with your history.’

  ‘What’s that meant to mean?’ he snapped. Slow down, he told himself. ‘It’s her lookout,’ he said quietly. ‘She chose him.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Rob studied him for a second. ‘Guess it’s none of my business. Want me to tow you home before my shift starts?’

  ‘Thanks. Feeling a bit tender.’

  Danny sat in the morning sun, streaming sleekly through the glassy water on his towed dory, patting the water occasionally with a paddle to keep himself upright and straight. Rose—she was on the brink of a new life, in a new place. A pretty girl about to have her first child. Danny let himself imagine how his mother might have looked and felt, waiting to have him. He’d seen photos. She looked happy, sunlit. What would she have said if someone had tried to warn her? Could anything have made any difference? Or would she have plunged straight in regardless? Tied her fate and her baby’s to a drunken thug, become so frightened and small that she wasn’t even up to protecting her kids.

  He was one to talk about duty to your kids. Here he was, no better than any of them, hiding on the river. He tried to imagine the girl, his girl. She’d been tiny when he left; she hadn’t seemed his. She’d be seven now. A proper girl. At school, in a uniform and those cloth sunhats they wore. He wondered if they still lived in the next street, if his mum saw her. Did she need protecting? Was that his job? He paid what he should—more than any judge would ask for. The mum, Jackie, he’d heard she had a new bloke now. How could he know what sort of a bloke? But they were a family. No one would welcome his interference. The brothers. They’d made it quite clear he should keep his distance.

  Bugger all of this, he thought. He had made his life simple; it had been a relentless, pure act of will to do it, one that he had to keep repeating every morning when he woke up. Rose was not his problem. From the look of it, she was a magnet for trouble. What could you do about people like that? His child—well, the girl’s family had shut him out from the beginning and now there was this bloke. Jackie was all right. Jackie was always all right. You had to make choices. He’d made his. But this Kane character, he was Danny’s problem. The choice had been made for him.

  Chapter 9

  Tom was hung-over, bruised and shaking at his girls’ graves, in a secret corner between the village and the old highway. A hundred tourists drove past it every day in the summer without noticing. He parked his ute in the shade so Dog wouldn’t get too hot in the cabin and made his way to their corner. There they were, side by side—Edith Cathleen Shepherd, Molly Elizabeth Shepherd. Spot for him, too, grass overgrown. He regretted doing their headstones in granite. Never seemed to get old. Like it happened just the other day. Not like the sandstone ones, wearing away, peacefully crumbling back into the earth.

  He wasn’t alone. Iris Jensen was spending her Christmas Eve over at the old man’s grave, kneeling, praying. How she could stay on her knees at her age, wrong side of eighty, he couldn’t imagine. After a few moments she left. Nodded at Tom as she passed. ‘Sorry for your loss,’ she murmured.

  ‘And you, Iris.’ Both their losses decades old.

  A red ute, big engine, growled at the edge of the cemetery. A young dark bloke jumped down from the cab and trotted over to her. Bred a different race of young people now, Tom thought. All huge. Make us look like midgets. Iris, next to the young man, was papery brittle—a dry leaf alongside the tallest, broadest tree in the forest, one that had survived fire after fire and only grown stronger, when they were the ones, really, who’d done the surviving. These young people were still wet from their mothers. The young fellow made as though to help her into the cab, but actually lifted her into the air a good couple of feet like she was nothing.

  Grandkids, Tom thought. One would have been
something. The years on their graves were different but they were gone within six months of each other. What was he doing still here? Proved what he’d always reckoned. Wily old buggers would inherit the earth. The meek would go to God before it was time and you’d spend the rest of your days missing them.

  It was twenty-five years ago; he’d been a young man then, not that you think you are, when you turn forty. Remembered through all the fog of thousands of nights of drink, his Molly stumbling into the pub. First thought: what’s she doing this side of the water this time of night? Then he saw. Blouse ripped. Mini-skirt muddy. One shoe. Lipstick across her cheek. His second thought: Mancini. The way he watched her from his verandah next door; he’d seen him. Looking at her legs like they took the wind out of him, even with his boy on his lap. Talking to her over at the public wharf when he thought Tom wasn’t around. He’d stand over her, lean against the boatshed, looking down at her, looking down her blouse. Behind the bar Marian was tutting. ‘Shut up, Maz,’ he said. Molly was there in front of him. Panda eyes with wrecked make-up. Curly hair limp and wet. Looked like she’d crawled out of the river, a swamp thing. She pushed herself into his arms; he had to tell himself to hug her. He didn’t want to touch her. He didn’t want this to be his daughter. He could feel the skin at her chest, her ripped blouse covering next to nothing. She was sopping, and she smelled of low tide. ‘I washed in the river, Daddy,’ she said. ‘I got myself clean.’

  The pub was silent as they crossed the floor. It was awkward to move; she wouldn’t let go of him until they got down to the boat. Even then, he had to peel her off. He held her away from him. ‘Who was it, love?’ She wouldn’t look at him. She climbed into the boat, took his blanket from under the dash and huddled in it on the floor at the back. Wouldn’t sit up front with him.

  Edie was asleep when he got home. He had to wake her up, to bathe the girl. Molly was sitting in the lounge room with a cup of tea, her hair in her face. They whispered in the corridor. When the colour had come back to Edie’s face, she said, ‘We can’t wash her. The police, she has to go to the police.’

  ‘She’s already washed herself in the river,’ he said.

  ‘Did she say who it was?’

  He shook his head. ‘I’ve got a fair idea.’

  Edie nodded. ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Go round there. Put him in the river.’

  ‘Don’t go there now,’ she said. ‘Don’t go upsetting her.’

  ‘Talk to Alf then, I reckon. In the morning. We’ll sort something out.’

  He wished now he’d gone, straightaway, just got him while the rage was hot, while you didn’t have to think. In the end, they’d done everything short of it. They wrote things on the wall of his fish and chip shop; they cut his tyres; Alf stole his petrol so he ran out in the middle of the river, but a pleasure cruiser, someone who didn’t know the river business, picked him up.

  Molly never said a thing about all that, because she didn’t know. She just sat in her room, playing with the tag on her teddy. She let her mum tidy her hair, and cuddle her, but she didn’t come out, and she never talked. Hadn’t talked much in the first place, but used to laugh. Had a laugh so low and dirty no one could resist it; you had to laugh, too. That was gone now, like the part of her she needed to do it had been cut out that night on the river.

  Then Mancini went back to Italy, and the wife and the boy went to live in the city with relatives. And the day after they left, Molly walked into the river, and never came out again.

  He knelt by Molly’s stone, knees creaking, his hip making a sharp pop. He touched the cool granite. ‘Little mate,’ he said. ‘Little Molly.’

  He stayed there until an insistent barking broke into his thoughts and the sun started to blister on his neck. Dog was going nutso in the ute. ‘Coming, Dog,’ he muttered, raising himself stiffly to his feet. His knees were sore and his neck was slick with tears he hadn’t noticed shedding. He looked around him, but the cemetery was empty.

  Rowing back, he turned it over again in his head, what Alf had said. He supposed this was what he’d be spending his time doing, going over it all to the point of bloody exhaustion, if his days were almost up. That was what you did, it seemed—poked yourself endlessly with the sharp stick of regret till you were worn out with frustration and couldn’t remember how anything had happened in the first place.

  If he’d sorted old man Mancini out, lit a little fire under his house and locked him in, say, how would he have been sure to get him and not the wife and little boy? Not that he lost any sleep over that pointless yuppie these days, but back then he was just a mite. Molly used to push him on his swing on the Mancinis’ verandah, let him help her with her crab pots.

  He could have done something to the boat; something a bit more decisive than Alf’s little stunt. God knows, he’d thought about it, at the time. But again, how not to get the missus and the kiddie? She took the little fella everywhere on the river in their dinghy—no way to know who’d be in it next. Couldn’t have that on his conscience. And the other ways there were to kill a man . . . well, he couldn’t even look them in the eye. When it came down to it, he’d been scared. Wasn’t scared of anyone now, too pissed usually, but in those days he’d been different. Mancini was a bloody big fellow; and he couldn’t prove anything. Didn’t do the DNA stuff then, and anyway, Molly had washed herself in the river, afterwards. So he did things the Shepherd way— made a pest of himself until the bloke got the message and shot through.

  If I’d done it, Molly, when I had the chance, he thought, his bones creaking as he rowed his tiny boat across the wide river, I would have spent the rest of my days inside. Wouldn’t have made it out again, that’s for sure. A pelican dived into the water right in front of him and came up with a gleaming mullet, scarfing it into its big bill sack in a convulsing movement before soaring low over his head. It made him ashamed, to think he couldn’t have given up the river for his girl, but there it was, and now it was done. He knew he wouldn’t be joining her, one way or another, old goat like him. There was just the river for him, too old and sauced to even get out past the heads on the rumour of a school of salmon these days. There was just the river, and the bottle, and the few old-timers he’d managed not to piss off beyond repair. And after the river, there’d be a bloody great fire, or more likely, nothing at all, a black hole like sinking down beneath the water, beneath the mud, it closing over your head so you were hidden, and then forgotten, the last of your kind all gone.

  Chapter 10

  Kane felt the warmth of the morning sun on his neck as he made his way down Rose’s steps and back to his shed. The pub, the fight, his blindness while he hit that bloke, it had all gone, though he felt the tenderness of his bruised ribs and temples like there were hot fingers pressing his flesh. His whole body felt awake, energetic, alive. The bruises simply reminded him of his skin, of the touch of hers.

  He let himself into his shed and lay down on the unmade bed, closed his eyes. Naked, she’d been creamy, gorgeous. Huge breasts, tight round tummy, long limbs, and her hair when it was out was amazing. So much of it.

  And they’d talked afterwards. Well, he’d talked, she’d listened. Nothing much, shooting the shit, about the river, about where he was before. But she was interested, didn’t use all those little tricks they do to put you in your place. Maybe, someone like her—that was what he’d been missing, why he’d never made much of himself.

  He had this feeling now, in his belly. The world was looking out for him for once; that was what it was. This was what it was like for all those people who had everything handed to them on a plate. It was pure warmth he felt, a gorgeous heat. A feeling that everything was for a reason, that anything was possible.

  Rose lay back in bed, strangely restless. She needed to get off this little strip of land between the cliff and the water. She wondered whether she wanted breakfast. The queasiness of the first trimester had returned, and yet she was beginning to spend large parts of each day thinking abou
t food. It was hard to tell what time it was just from the light in the room, there was so little in the morning. She guessed it was between eight and nine. She had work to do; she’d gotten behind and would spend Christmas catching up, but she knew if she tried to work in the morning she’d just end up making too many cups of tea and finding pressing little tasks to do that weren’t work.

  A tall shadow passed by the blind at her bedroom window. She recognised the walk and burrowed deeper under the covers. Bloody hell, Rose, she thought. She would have to talk to him, though. He’d said she could borrow the boat whenever she wanted, and she wanted it now. Better to get things back to normal straightaway, in any case.

  She got out of bed and dressed, and knocked on his door. The glass slid back instantly. She’d never actually seen inside the shed since he’d come. She caught a glimpse behind him of a dark, squalid space: coffee cups, strewn clothes, the smell of socks and ashtrays and his body. He stepped outside and closer to her, wearing only shorts. She knew the shape and colour of him already, the scar on his chest. She wondered, as she did last night, what it was from. ‘War wound,’ he smiled.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to stare.’

  ‘That’s all right. Seeing as it’s you.’

  ‘Listen,’ she said quickly. ‘You know you said I could borrow your boat? Do you mind if I take it now for a couple of hours? I’ve got a few things I want to do. Just if you’re not using it.’

  ‘Help yourself.’

  ‘Thanks.’ She turned and began to head back to her place for her things.

  ‘Need any help with it?’

  She turned back. ‘No, I’ll be fine. Thanks.’

  He watched her until she was on her verandah; she could feel it. She waited inside, though her bag was packed and she was itching to leave, wondering if he was still out there. She gave it a minute, then heard his door slide shut, and bolted without bothering to lock the door.

  Fortunately, he’d left his little boat tied to the ladder at the end of the jetty. She would have had no chance getting down to it alone if he’d tied it to the wall; it was low tide. The motor started with the first pull, and she settled into a balanced spot in the middle of the bench and headed out onto the river. This was a good boat, slow and small. She’d found James’s big and twitchy, too powerful for a novice, too liable to flip. There’d be no flipping this one—she weighed too much.