by Sarak Kanake
‘I understand,’ said Tilda. ‘But Clancy Fox is still out there.’
The policeman looked deflated, useless. Samson thought of Mattie, and his stomach flipped, landing him somewhere between excitement and distress. Mattie would do better than this policeman. ‘There’s not much I can do about that, Ms Kelly.’
Tilda nodded. ‘Thank you,’ she said and she walked the policeman out.
A few hours later Samson heard someone shout. He stood up and looked out the window just in time to see Murray run across the lawn, drenched. Tilda was waiting at the door with a towel in each hand and one on the floor. He was shaking, his Akubra still running with water like an awning on a house. Tilda wrapped her arms around him. ‘No luck?’ she asked.
‘Lost him in the rain,’ said Murray.
‘Who? Jonah?’
‘Nah, Clancy. Fuckin’ sly bugger. I bet he was just waiting for a chance to give me the slip.’
‘What for?’ asked Tilda, as she dried his neck and dreadlocks.
Murray kissed her, and Samson looked away. ‘You should get back to Mattie tonight,’ he said. ‘Or bring her up with you, if you want.’
Tilda shook her head, lowered her voice and said something Samson couldn’t hear.
Murray wiped the rest of the rain from his face. ‘Fair enough.’
‘Should I wait for Clancy to get back? What if he’s hurt himself?’
‘The mountain’s let him be so far. Worrying here won’t keep him any safer.’
‘I’d like to stay a bit longer –’
Samson opened the door and went outside. Beyond the shelter of the verandah, the rain fell. He wondered if Clancy would be okay in the storm, and Jonah too.
He left his socks and jacket and even his jumper on the verandah, and walked out into the rain. His shirt and pants were soaked in seconds. It was cold after a while, but this cold reminded him of home. The cold of deep water and swimming down, down, down. He held his face to the sky and opened his arms and mouth. He caught water in his hands and tasted it on his tongue. The water collected inside his belly, and slowly he turned it into rivers and then lakes.
Samson opened his eyes and looked down. Water on the grass was nothing like rain falling with purpose and defiance through the sky. He picked up a stone, probably from Clancy’s fallen towers, to remember the feel of the rain and the ache inside him. The stone was wet, and that meant the storm was inside.
He thought of Mattie. Maybe she would never come back to his side of the mountain, and maybe he would never leave. Sometimes his brother said he was dumb, but Samson knew more than what was in Jonah’s books. He knew the story of things. The way moments poured and pushed into one another. He knew the way they flowed and changed and evaporated when they were gone. He knew what it was to be a storm caught inside rocks.
Clancy opened his eyes. His heart raced inside his chest. Where was he? He searched for some landmark to show him where he was and maybe even how he’d managed to walk himself into the bush alone. ‘George?’
From deep inside the scrub he heard the whoop whoop of a nocturnal bird, early to its post. The late afternoon air was already cold and icy. It wasn’t exactly like ice, though – the mountain air was more alive than that. It slithered as if it was out to get him. He knew he should go home and make the boy some tucker, but he also knew he wouldn’t. He didn’t kid himself. He knew there’d been a moment, not long after the boys first arrived on his mountain, when he thought maybe he could be an alright granddad, but that’d gone south with his dream of being a good father, and husband.
Another whoop whoop from the trees. The bird squawked and burst from the canopy. A big bugger, probably an owl. His heart thumped so hard, he thought it might burst from his chest and take flight too.
Leaves bristled. He kept walking, his hand out in front like that of a blind man with a stick. Something darted away as he approached. Something bigger followed. Wasn’t that always the way of it?
‘River,’ he shouted. ‘River fucking Fox!’
No answer.
Clancy tried to catch his breath. He shouldn’t have let her sing to the tigers, or chase them. He should have walked her home himself every afternoon. He should have kept her mum alive. What a mug he was. How could he let the mountain get the better of him? Where the fuck was George? He was supposed to help with things like this. Wasn’t that the point of him coming back, to help Clancy find their daughter?
Clancy couldn’t give up on her. Not River, not ever. Might even have to sleep rough for the night. Give her a chance to find the campy. Start fresh at first light.
He and George used to sleep rough all the time when they were young. They didn’t need a tent, only a shiralee each. But that was many years ago, and George had since replaced him in the night with Essie.
An animal scurried up the tree next to him. Clancy launched himself forward, but his crook leg buckled. Hands hit mud, and the skin on his knee ripped. Then the bush fell silent, ready to hear his voice, but he wasn’t sure who to call for anymore. Where the fuck was everyone?
He closed his eyes, and River was licking the thick red honey from his fingers again.
He took a deep breath. He knew what the stone cairns were. Had always known. They were the sorry leftovers from the terrible, empty want to kill. It had returned like dark tendrils of smoke, not for his daughter this time, but for his grandson. River had found the darkness first – or maybe it had chosen her, like the disease that killed her mother. It hadn’t been her fault. No child could come down from the mountain unscathed, certainly not with her mother slowly dying right in front of her.
Clancy remembered the first time he’d found a dead animal in his house, even though he didn’t want to. Even though he tried every day to swallow the memory down into his gut where he could keep it quiet and hidden.
Only a few weeks before Essie left them all for good, Clancy held his wife for hours through the night while she sobbed and vomited into the stainless steel laundry bucket. When she was done, he wished he could kiss her, though her mouth smelt like acid and infection. They both fell asleep eventually.
In the early hours, Clancy woke to the sounds of River singing. Essie was coiled into a ball next to him, still asleep. He tried not to disturb her as he got up.
‘The Fox is on the town-o, town-o, town-o …’
He opened the back door and closed it gently.
At first, River didn’t notice him. Her face was damp with sweat, and her hair was pulled back in a knot. The outline of her skinny body was just visible beneath the white nightie her mum used to make her wear. She was still singing.
‘River girl?’
The front of her nightie was tucked up into her undies, and her thighs and knees were covered in dirt.
‘What’re you doing, love?’
‘And the little ones chewed on the bones-o, bones-o, bones-o. And the little ones chewed on the bones …’
Clancy picked her up, and as he did, it was as though the life fell out of her body. Her skin smelt like fresh kangaroo shit. He carried her inside and called for Essie. She removed the kangaroo scats from River’s underwear and ran her a bath. They lay her down in the water and left her there for a moment. Outside the bathroom door, Clancy held his wife’s bare head to his chest as she cried.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
Clancy touched the back of her head. Her skin felt cold and exposed.
Pulling away, she reached for her beanie. ‘I can’t fix this,’ she said, as she put the beanie over her scalp.
‘She’ll be better soon.’ Clancy didn’t know what else to say. His wife was dying.
‘Mum?’ David was in the hallway, wearing his pyjama pants and carrying a book. ‘You alright?’
Essie took a step towards Clancy and pressed her head into his chest. She rubbed her face against his shirt and dried her eyes. He breathed in. Her skin smelt like honey. She turned back to face their son and smiled. ‘Come on,’ she said as she took David’s hand. He lo
oked surprised. ‘Let’s go have a talk.’ Together they walked down the hall to his room. Clancy shook his head. Since finding out she was sick, Essie had started treating David like a child again, even though the boy was almost sixteen.
Clancy waited outside the bathroom. He leant against the door and closed his eyes. The silence of the hallway was broken only occasionally by splashing bath water.
After a while, ‘Dad?’
‘Yes, darlin’?’
‘Get away from the door.’
Clancy walked down the hallway and past the open door to David’s bedroom. He stopped and gazed in. David was held in the nook of Essie’s thin white arm. Her beanie was pushed back, making her forehead seem unnaturally long. She was reading to him as though he was still a little boy. ‘The valley opened out into a great plain dotted over with rocks and cut up by ravines. At one end stood a little village, and at the other the thick jungle came down in a sweep to the grazing-grounds, and stopped there as though it had been cut off with a hoe …’
Clancy walked outside, jealous, confused and angry. He switched on the verandah light. The lawn throbbed with a restless green glow. The newly mown grass was littered with bodies. Lizards, frogs, small birds, possums. Dozens, maybe even more than a hundred. He wrapped his arms around his body to hold himself in, but it didn’t work. He cried, wept, blubbered like a fucking baby.
With the cairns, River was marking the graves of the animals she’d killed, dismembered or skinned. Maybe she’d just been trying to understand her mum’s dying body or maybe she wanted to cast the restlessness out of her own body, or maybe it was payback for sending Murray away. Clancy didn’t know, but he wondered if something inside his daughter was still human and sorry for killing. The tigers would have taught her different, and she, like Jonah, would have taken to it like a fish to swimming.
Now Clancy, still on the ground, laid his head in his hands. Maybe they were both sorry.
‘Enough,’ he muttered. He’d had enough of cairns, and searching, and the never-ending pain in his leg. ‘Enough!’ His voice echoed through the bush, but it didn’t hear him, not really. ‘Fuck you,’ he said to the trees and rocks and creek. ‘Fuck you,’ he said to his mountain. ‘Fuck you,’ he shouted to the entire bastard island.
The kookaburras laughed as if they wanted to push him over the edge. A dawn bird screeching so late in the day. He couldn’t see the little blighters but he shouted, ‘And fuck you,’ at them anyway.
Something hooted in the distance. Then again, this time nearer. He stood, turned, scraped his knee across another rock. Nothing. Turned again. Still nothing. Then he saw them. Two eyes hovering, growing bigger, coming closer. Her ghost had found him. At last. He had his answer. River, River, River. Something screeched again. The flap of wings. The Tyto flew over him and away into the bush as though there was no reason to stay. As though he was invisible.
Clancy lay down in the mud and dirt, and closed his eyes. He could smell the dense, soggy scent of the king ferns. They reminded him of something from when he was young. He pushed his hands into the mud. It was warm. The trees sighed in around him, and he thought of his mother.
Her hands made circles on his back.
‘I lost them, Ma,’ he said.
‘It’s alright,’ she said, in her golden syrup voice. ‘It’s not your fault, bairn.’
‘None of it?’ he asked.
‘No, no. None of it.’
Clancy pulled the sheets of warm mud up around him. Surrounded by his oldest, darkest memories, he wept. It might have taken him hours or maybe only minutes to dump the grief and pain and loss into the mud.
Then Murray lifted him to his feet, like George had decades before. He pushed himself into Clancy’s armpit and wrapped Clancy’s arm around his shoulder. ‘Let’s get you back home, mate.’
Samson was sitting in front of the telly, watching the news. The newsreader was talking about an election. No one said anything about Jonah, though Samson thought his brother was more important than the election. He switched channels.
Clancy came in the back door with Murray. Samson peered through the archway. His granddad was covered in flaking dirt and slathers of almost dry mud. ‘Mind making me a cuppa?’ he said, and he sounded breathless.
Samson turned the telly all the way down so he could hear.
‘We can look again tomorrow, mate,’ said Murray, and Samson heard him fill the kettle with water from the tap.
‘It’s like he just vanished,’ said Clancy. ‘Who’s left?’
Murray cleared his throat. ‘No one’s coming back, Clance.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Tilda said there was a bit of a gathering last night at the pub. No one’s coming back. A week is enough time, they reckon. It’ll be up to the cops from here on in.’
A silence between them. The sounds of Murray making tea.
‘They think I did it,’ said Clancy. ‘Don’t they?’
‘No, mate. Everyone’s tired and they’ve got their own –’
‘Horseshit. They blamed me last time and they blame me this time. Fucking David and his fucking book.’
‘No point thinking like that, Clance,’ said Tilda, as she gathered up her bag and keys. ‘I should get back to Mattie.’
Samson felt her name cut through him like a jagged oyster shell.
‘Okay, bub,’ said Murray, and he kissed her on the cheek.
Samson knew why Tilda didn’t want him around Mattie. It was the same reason his granddad and Murray wouldn’t let him look for his brother. He knew what people thought when they looked at him. They could see the creases in his hands, his straight hair and his almond-shaped eyes. Everyone behaved as though he was a big secret, but he knew all the shapes and lines of his face better than any of them, and was more scared of them too.
His lungs constricted, and the hole in his heart opened like a mouth. It burned, twisted and buckled. It wanted to open. He tried to breathe but he couldn’t. Samson, Samson, Samson, he reminded himself. His breathing slowed. Your name is Samson. The hole closed. He had to get out.
Outside the house, everything was damp. Samson ran his hand over the bark of a tree trunk just on the other side of his granddad’s fence. Greenish mist floated into the air and twisted around his fingers. Above him, the white tree trunks were gathering up the light, tucking it away behind the bark.
He had been right, and not only about the rain. Only Samson knew how to bring his brother out of hiding. He had even done it once before. Not long after he first started high school, Jonah had come home with a cut lip and a dark green bruise around his eye. Samson asked, What happened? The sign for happen was like an angry snake emerging from beneath a tree, and there was no past for the sign of happen, so Samson wondered if that meant the snake never slept.
Jonah didn’t answer. He pushed Samson away and went inside.
Samson followed. ‘Did someone hit you?’
Jonah pulled back the covers on his bed and got in. He covered his face in pillows. ‘No.’
‘Is that a lie?’
‘No,’ he shouted from under his pillows.
‘Why are you bleeding?’
‘I fell over.’
‘I’m telling Mum,’ said Samson.
‘Rack off, dobber.’
Jonah stayed in their room all afternoon, and his tea of chops and mashed potato waited for him on the table. Samson thought about how to take the bruise away. Finally he had an idea. He snuck into their room with a copy of The Jungle Book, and that was the first time Samson read aloud to his brother, and the first time they played ‘Tiger! Tiger!’ The first time Samson had fixed something inside Jonah that no one else could find.
Now Samson went back into the house. Quietly, and without asking Murray or his granddad, he gathered up everything he would need and packed it carefully into his school port. He packed a second jumper and pair of socks, his Special School hat, a bottle of water, and his brother’s copy of The Jungle Book.
Samson cr
ossed the lawn to the gate. He was going to find his brother. No one could stop him or tell him he couldn’t. Not Murray or Clancy. This time Samson could choose, and he chose to go beyond the house and beyond the fence and beyond the gate. He wouldn’t make the same mistakes as everyone else.
First he checked the mouth of the cave, just in case Mattie was waiting for him. She wasn’t, and there was no sign of Jonah either.
Samson wrapped his scarf tighter around his neck and pulled his beanie down over his ears, then he retrieved Jonah’s book from the inside of his jacket.
Samson read ‘Mowgli’s Song’ as he walked through the grey-lit bush, holding it close to his face. Dark coral shadows of trees edged in around him, moving like eerie sentinels of the bush. ‘I have come back to the jungle.’ The sludgy ground softened beneath him like the yellow sand on the beaches back home. ‘Two things fight together in me as the snakes fight in the spring.’ The huge grey and red rocks throbbed, moving with the heartbeat of the bush. ‘The water comes out of my eyes.’ Everything threatened to grab, cut or sharpen itself on him. ‘I am two Mowglis.’ Everything wanted to push or swallow him into the endless maze of caves and burrows, but Samson ignored it all and read as loud as his rocky voice would let him. ‘All the jungle knows that I have killed Shere Khan.’ Only the mountain knew where his brother was hiding. Samson stopped and waited, but no one came. The mountain had kept Jonah’s secret. ‘My heart is heavy,’ said Samson softly. ‘With the things I do not understand.’ He shut the book, stuffed it back into his port and kept going. He wasn’t going to let the mountain win. If Jonah wouldn’t come to him, he would go to Jonah.
Samson climbed up the side of the mountain, his hands outstretched in case his feet couldn’t find the way. Some of the ground fell away in clumps of hard dirt, bits of tree and leaves. He pulled himself up the last few feet, straightened and looked over the edge.