Ghost River

by Tony Birch

  Ren slapped Sonny on the back. ‘Fucken pedal!’

  The yard boss reached for Ren’s leg just as Sonny picked up enough speed to get away from him. He slipped in a pothole and hurled the iron bar as he fell. It missed Ren’s ducking head by a couple of inches and Sonny’s – tucked over the handlebars – by the width of a Tally-Ho paper. The boys sped through the yard and turned into the lane. Sonny jumped from the bike and unbolted the gate.

  ‘We’d better wait awhile, in case he comes looking for us.’

  Ren hadn’t been in the house since Rory moved in. The lino floor in the kitchen had been scrubbed clean and the the room was tidy except for a mountain of betting slips piled up on the table.

  ‘Rory must be a cleaning nut.’

  ‘It’s not him. He’s got a girlfriend comes over a couple of nights a week to stay. She’s mad on the mop and bucket.’

  ‘He’s a bit old to have a girlfriend.’

  ‘You think he’s old. You wanna see her. Like a walking corpse. It don’t stop them going at it though. They get the old man’s bed jumping off the floor. I’m worried I’ll find them dead one morning.’

  Ren found it hard to imagine Rory working up the energy to put one foot in front of the other without needing a breather. ‘You mean they have sex in the bed?’

  ‘Nah. Fucken ballroom dancing.’

  Ren dipped his hands into the pile of betting slips. ‘These winners or losers?’

  ‘They haven’t been sorted yet. There’s a lot there to go through and I’ve been giving him a hand. If I pull a winner he pays me a commission. I made more last week on the slips than I did on the newspapers.’

  ‘Maybe we could try it out? Go to the racetrack and collect our own tickets?’

  ‘Not allowed. The emu run is a closed shop.’

  ‘What’s that mean?’

  ‘Rory’s been telling me about it, in case I have to step up. He says that all the workers in the business have their own piece of ground at the track, invisible lines dividing the turf that no one can see except the emus. He says it’s always been that way. And when an emu gives the job away or dies, someone in the family takes over the run. There’s rules as well. Like the cleaners at the track don’t sweep the tickets up. Ever. They leave them to the emus. The most important rule though, according to Rory, is that if an outsider tries snitching a ticket he gets a warning. Second offence and the emus come from all over the track and dish out a kicking.’

  ‘That’s tough.’

  ‘It’s a tough business. Rory’s got the scars to prove it. He took over the run from his old man, my pop, after he died.’

  ‘What happened to your pop?’

  ‘Same as the rest of the family. The grog took him and the run was left to Rory. He was no older than I am now. Had to fight off the standovers who thought they’d take the business from a kid. Rory’s shit with my father started back then, he says, when they were kids. The old man wouldn’t help him and Rory had to battle for the run on his own.’

  The sound of the machines grunted in the background.

  ‘Hear that?’ Ren said.

  ‘The coast should be clear now. Let’s see what’s going on.’

  The steel gates guarding the mill hung from their hinges. The lock and chain on the gates had been broken so many times that whoever owned the mill had given up on the battle to keep the scavengers out. The scrap crews had weaselled their way in over the years, cutting through fences, smashing windows and stripping the mill of copper, brass and lead, as well as the porcelain toilets and sinks. Once they’d finished with the scrap they started on the timber. In the end all that was left of the mill were cavernous rooms, cobwebs and pigeons. Ren kicked the gate open. Sonny tried opening the sliding steel door into the main building. It was rusted to the frame and wouldn’t budge. He searched the yard for something strong enough to force the lock.

  ‘You find anything?’ Ren called from the loading dock.

  ‘Nothing.’

  Sonny dragged a wooden pallet across the yard and stood it on its end against the wall, under a broken window. ‘Bunk me up.’

  Ren cupped his hands together and Sonny used them as a stirrup. He balanced one foot on the pallet and the other on the ledge of the window. He thumped the frame of a shattered window with the side of his fist. It wouldn’t budge.

  ‘Take your jumper off, Ren. I’m gonna have to rest something on the bottom of the window so I don’t get cut on the jagged glass when I squeeze through.’

  ‘What about your own jumper?’

  ‘I can’t get mine off. I’m lucky to be holding on. Give me yours.’

  Ren took his jumper off and threw it up to him. Sonny laid it across the bottom of the window, wriggled through and jumped into the mill. The door shifted and flung open. Sonny was holding Ren’s jumper in his hand. He snatched it from him and put it on. It was torn at the shoulder.

  ‘Well, done, Sonny. This is the only good jumper I got. How am I gonna explain this?’

  ‘Looks as if you’ve been attacked by Zorro.’ Sonny laughed. ‘Maybe you could sew it up and your mum won’t find out.’

  Ren popped his head through the hole. ‘Sew it, my arse.’

  ‘Forget the jumper. You’ll be in more trouble for sneaking out of the house when you’re supposed to be sick in bed.’

  The saw-tooth roof of the cotton mill was eighty, maybe a hundred feet above their heads. A steel stairway bolted into the brick wall zig-zagged towards the top. They made a racket climbing up and set the pigeons off. Hundreds of birds lifted from the steel rafters, flew in an arc and came together in the shape of a boomerang. The boys stopped on a landing and watched as the birds flew the length of the mill, turned and glided above their heads, close enough that Ren could feel the breeze of their wings. The birds turned again and flew to the far end of the mill. One by one they settled along the rafters.

  A small wooden door sat at the top of the stairs. Ren pushed against it. It wouldn’t move. Sonny took a couple of steps back, ran at it and gave it a kick. The door flew off its hinges and crashed to the ground below. A cold wind hit the boys in the face and the roar of the machines blasted their ears. Ren stuck his head out of the open window. ‘Jesus. Look at what they’ve done already.’

  The paddock was being cleared of every tree and the air was full of dust. A jet of water from a broken water main shot into the sky on the far side of the paddock. Bulldozers had pushed the rubbish to one side of the cleared ground - dead trees, rotting railway sleepers, the wreck of a van that had been dumped years before, and a mountain of old couches, chairs and car tyres. Anything that could be burned had been put on a front-end loader and piled onto a bonfire. Twisted metal and rocks were loaded into the bucket of another loader and dumped on the back of a tip-truck. Another machine was pile-driving deep holes into the ground. Each time the hammer stabbed the earth it shook the ground. Workmen were following behind the machine, laying down metal poles and rolls of wire.

  The boys watched from the doorway as a worker circled the mountain of scrap wood and furniture with a can of petrol. He splashed it onto the dry timber, stood back, lay a length of cloth on the ground and soaked it with petrol. Fumes filled the air. He hooked the cloth to the end of a length of wire and lit it with a match. It exploded in flames. He poked the torch into the pile of wood. More flames shot into the air, the wood crackled and spat and black smoke lifted from the bonfire and drifted towards the river.

  Sonny was perched on the edge of the open doorway with his legs tucked under him. He rocked backwards and forwards with nothing below him but a gravel driveway. It was a long way down.

  ‘Careful, Sonny. You fall from here and they’ll scoop up your broken body and throw it on the fire.’

  Sonny ignored him. He couldn’t take his eyes off the pile-driver. A pair of workmen stood a metal pole on its end and dropped it into one of
the holes that had been made. A third worker followed with a wheelbarrow. With the two workers holding the pole upright he poured cement into the hole and pounded it with a blunt ended bar.

  ‘They’re putting a fence up, Sonny. I thought they were building a road. Why would they be building a fence?’

  ‘We’ll know soon enough. I never seen anyone work as fast.’

  The boys smoked and watched as the work continued. The sky grew dark with smoke from the fire. Diesel fumes from the machines and more dust were thrown into the air as the trucks drove about. A long-load semi-trailer drove onto the cleared ground, its tyres sinking into the dirt. The truck’s tray was stacked high with metal panels. More workmen unpacked the panels from the semi and bolted them together. In no time they’d built a workshop. The fence posts surrounding it were knitted together with rolls of cyclone wire, topped with barbed wire and finished off with a set of double gates, ready to be bolted and chained. Other trucks parked in the yard were unloaded and equipment was carried into the shed.

  Sonny sat his chin in his hands and sulked. ‘I dunno how Tex and the others will get up to the street with that fence in the way. It’s hard enough for them now.’

  ‘They’ll have to go the long way round. Us too.’

  ‘Bullshit we will.’

  ‘What will you do then? Pole-vault the fence?’

  ‘There’s a pair of old bolt-cutters in the toolbox behind the toilet at my place. I’m coming back tonight after dark to cut a hole in the fence. We’ll be taking the same track we’ve always used.’

  ‘And they’ll let us walk straight by them, Sonny? Remember the movie we saw last summer, the one about the robbery? They kept all them armoured trucks in a compound. It’s what this is. A compound. Anyway, they work so fast, we won’t have any river soon.’

  ‘Then we have to work quick.’

  ‘At what?’

  ‘Stopping them.’

  ‘No chance of that. One of them bulldozers could crush us to death. Drive straight through the front door of your house and out the back with nothing left standing.’

  A workman sitting in a bulldozer turned off his machine. He’d seen the boys. Sonny got to his feet and yanked a metal hinge from the doorframe. He yelled out and waved to the workman, ‘Hey, mate.’

  The worker lifted his hand and waved back.

  Sonny threw his arm back, pitched the hinge as hard as he could and ran for the stairs. Ren bolted after him, hearing a loud ‘ping’ of metal on metal.

  They didn’t stop running until they were at Sonny’s gate. ‘You have to go home,’ Sonny said, ‘before you get in serious trouble.’

  ‘Mum’s on afternoon shift and Archie’s driving interstate.’

  ‘Come in then. We have to make plans.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘What do they call it? Sabotage.’

  CHAPTER 10

  Sonny could hear the TV in the lounge room. He put a finger to his lips. ‘There’s someone here.’

  The front room was empty except for one of Rory’s sugar sacks sitting on the coffee table. Sonny walked over to the stairway and called upstairs for him. There was no answer. ‘He don’t usually get home this early. Must be something up.’

  Ren wasn’t listening. He was concentrating on a game show on the TV. A camera panned along the Showcase stage to reveal the winner’s loot - a pair of electric blankets, cooking pots, a two-door refrigerator, a tropical holiday, and the biggest prize of all, a new car. The boys collapsed onto the couch, unable to take their eyes off the screen.

  ‘You see that car, Sonny? If I won the jackpot I’d drive it down to the river, pick up Tex and the boys and take them on a cruise through the city with the windows down and the radio turned up full blast.’

  ‘But you’re not on the show, Ren. And you can’t drive a car. And even if you were on the show you wouldn’t win the car.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because you have to answer the questions. You can’t do it.’

  ‘I bet I could answer some of them.’

  ‘Not before one of them contestants hits the buzzer. I bet you can’t do that.’

  ‘You’re no Barry fucken Jones yourself.’

  ‘Not saying I am. Just setting you straight. Won’t be driving no new car. That’s all I’m saying.’

  ‘I bet you a dollar I can beat them on some of the questions.’

  ‘You don’t have a buzzer.’

  ‘Don’t need one. Soon as I have the answer I’ll clap my hands together.’

  ‘Okay, but only if you get five, no, six questions right. I bet you a dollar.’

  ‘You said five first. Five and it’s a bet.’

  ‘It’s a bet.’

  Ren sat on the edge of the couch going head to head with the three contestants. He surprised Sonny and himself by getting two questions right in the first round, which was one more than a lanky bank teller, wearing a name tag – David – dressed in a chequered jacket with leather pads on the arms.

  ‘See that coat he has on?’ Sonny said, during the first ad break. ‘He’s hoping to make himself look intelligent, wearing that.’

  ‘It’s not working. I’m already one point in front of him. They should kick him off and get me on.’

  Muriel, the contestant seated in the middle, wore a beehive hairstyle. She was fast on the Who am I, but paid the penalty for hitting her buzzer too quickly on other questions and giving the wrong answer. By the end of the second round, Ren had answered only one more question and the carry-over champion, Bob, was way out in front. He blitzed the final round with such speed Ren never got to clap his hands once. The champion had the showroom of prizes to himself. All he needed to do to take home the lot was answer one more question. And Ren owed Sonny a dollar.

  The losing contestants were shuffled off-stage. The champion stood next to the host of the show, who was wearing a suit that shimmered under the studio lights. Two girls in bikinis lay across the bonnet of a new car. A camera zoomed in on the host opening an envelope holding the last question.

  ‘Look at the champion’s hands, Ren. They’re shaking.’

  ‘He should stop looking at the bikini girls out of the corner of his eye. He’ll lose all his concentration.’

  The host took the question card from the envelope, read it to himself and smiled into the camera. He had perfect white teeth. ‘I will have to be honest with you, Bob,’ he said. ‘This is a tough question.’

  Bob wiped his brow on the sleeve of his cardigan. The host laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘Are you ready, Bob? To take home all of these wonderful prizes?’

  The host waved his arm the length of the gift shop. Bob couldn’t speak. He nodded and sprayed sweat all over the host, who took a couple of steps back and looked straight into the camera, at Ren and Sonny.

  ‘Bob. For this immaculate six-cylinder Holden car, equipped with air conditioning – donated by our wonderful friends at City Wide Motors – and everything you see on the floor here this afternoon, with the exception of these two lovely ladies, of course.’ He winked. ‘We need the answer to the following question … after this break from our sponsors. And don’t go away, you good people at home. We’ll be right back.’

  ‘Shit! They always do that,’ Sonny complained.

  Ren was desperate to go to the toilet. He jumped up from the couch and ran out of the room, through the kitchen and out into the backyard. When he got outside he looked up and saw Della at her open window. The rings under her eyes were so dark Ren wondered if they were bruised. A ginger cat was walking across the roof. Della watched it closely.

  ‘Hey, Sonny,’ Ren said, walking back into the lounge, ‘I just saw Della at her window. I think she has a black eye.’

  ‘Shut up. Bob’s back on. This is it.’

  ‘Her face is marked …’

  ‘Shut up! The
question’s coming.’

  A low drum roll kicked off the final drama.

  ‘For the grand prize on tonight’s Showcase,’ the host announced, ‘Bob Avon, of Glen Iris in Victoria, we need the correct answer to the following question.’ The host turned and directed his attention to the live audience. ‘And please, ladies and gentlemen, not a word from you, or Bob may be disqualified.’

  He read from the card in his hand. ‘The popular brand of dog food, Pal – another loyal friend of this program – was the original name of which famous screen canine?’

  Bob closed his eyes, as if he was praying. Sonny jumped from the couch waving his arms in the air. ‘The answer! I know it!’

  ‘Bullshit.’ Ren laughed. ‘Bob don’t know it himself. Look at him, Sonny. He’s fucked. You know nothing.’

  Sonny lapped the couch waving his arms in the air like a boxer who’d just won on a knock-out. ‘Lassie! It’s Lassie!’ he screamed.

  The drum roll got louder. Bob stuck his tongue out of his mouth and licked his lips.

  ‘Shut up, Sonny. Or we’re not gonna hear a word he says.’

  The drum slowed and stopped. The host gave Bob a serious look. ‘Time’s up. We need an answer, Bob.’

  Sonny collapsed to his knees, chanting ‘Lassie, Lassie.’

  Bob’s eyes suddenly lit up, like someone had turned the switch on. ‘It’s … is it Rin Tin Tin?’

  The host showed off his sparkling teeth to the TV audience one last time. ‘Rin Tin Tin … Rin Tin Tin …’ he repeated slowly.

  Ren threw a dirty sock he’d found between the couch cushions at Sonny. ‘Lassie, my arse.’

  The host dropped his eyes. ‘I’m sorry Bob. Your answer is incorrect.’

  The audience groaned.

  ‘It was Lassie. Also know by his handler as Pal.’