Sing Fox to Me

by Sarak Kanake

  Everything expanded, and he was in a grey-blue sea that stretched out in front of him forever. Samson breathed deeply. The air felt thin in his mouth and thick in his lungs. He looked down. The mountain swirled, and it was as if his body was caught in a tidal rip spiralling downwards into green and brown. He closed his eyes and when he opened them again, he could almost have been floating on the surface of the ocean, or like a cloud, untethered in the sky. His feet carried him to the edge, but he wasn’t afraid.

  The mountain knew where Jonah was. It had kept him hidden, and there was no one left to find him. The town had given up, and his granddad. Murray would give up once his baby was born, and Mattie and Tilda had slotted back into their lives away from the mountain like oysters closing into their shells.

  No one was left, but the trees, scrub, flowers, rocks and creek were all there, all making their own noise and moving their own way. All right there in front of him. A symphony of sound with moving, changing, shuddering signals and signs.

  Samson thought of Mattie. Body syntax, she had called it. A dance, but not the kind of dance that included steps. A dance of hands and arms and fingers and language and stories and signing. Not only for bodies, but for anything without a voice and a story to tell.

  Closing his eyes again, Samson held his hands up like his mum’s favourite singer, but instead of a song his hands told the story of himself to the bush, and he felt the heartbeat of the mountain beneath his feet as he made himself a part of everything.

  He signed to the trees and the air. Trees, he signed, and the leaves answered like wind chimes, ding, ding, ding into one another. Water, he signed, and the creek slowed and then rushed with the movement of his hands. Up, he signed, because he didn’t know the sign word for treetops. Mountain, he signed, and the sign for mountain was a hand travelling up and over and back down the other side.

  He heard something. Was it drumming, deep underground? He bent forward and opened his arms wide. The air warm as flesh that was filled with life. Beneath it, the heartbeat, the hard drumming centre of the bush. He wove himself through. He’d been part of things before, often even the centre, but nothing had ever felt like this.

  Samson thought about Special School, and his friends and teachers. He thought about learning to sign and, ‘That’s right, Sam’, or, ‘Not quite, Sam.’ He thought about playing games and playing instruments. Everyone was allowed to make clanging, messy noise, when Jonah’s school was silent. They didn’t have grades at Samson’s school – it was just everyone in one big room, singing and drawing, painting, learning numbers or letters. He thought about being called ‘gang’ sometimes, and sometimes ‘pal’. He thought about the smell of glue and butcher’s paper and books.

  His dad said short books, ‘like the ones at your school, Sam’, didn’t have a smell. ‘They can’t get musty enough for a smell,’ he said, ‘because everyone is always reading them.’

  Samson thought about home time and waiting for his mum or dad and being watched. Watched by the Other School, and watched by the cars and teachers. Watched by everyone who wasn’t in his clanging messy noise gang. Pal, buddy, sport, tacker, big guy. Samson thought about the Other School and the faces coming out, and he thought about them watching as they passed by. All they saw was the toad, the extra chromosome. They were grade kids, mainstream kids, big-school kids. Grades didn’t trap him, or classrooms. There was freedom in that life, a kind of independence he didn’t have anymore. Samson thought of tambourines and clapping hands, and his mum making Jonah hold his hand while they waited for her to collect them after school.

  Maybe it was never freedom. Maybe, it had just been a slightly bigger fence and a slightly less dangerous beyond.

  Where is J-O-N-A-H? Samson signed to the mountain.

  No answer.

  He asked the mountain again. Where is J-O-N-A-H?

  The wind changed, and everything was still. Samson waited. Clouds jostled in the sky, and light from the sun caught the wind. A river of colour formed ahead of him like an oil slick in the ocean. Purple first, and then blue, pink and gold. This river wafted gently, but after a few seconds it moved with more purpose. It flooded down the side of the mountain and rushed towards the creek.

  The Rainbow Snake.

  Samson opened his mouth, and the oil slick of colour shivered into different creeks and rivers of colour. Some moved over him, some around, some past, some through. Then the Rainbow Snake worked inside him, moving things around. It swallowed the toad buried deep in his belly, and he wasn’t disabled or handicapped or special anymore.

  Samson took a deep breath, his lungs filled with air, the static on the edges of his brain calmed and he felt his insides expand, everything started to catch up, move past his extra chromosome and bring him together. With every following breath Samson Fox became more aware. He hadn’t changed in the way he wanted, because the Snake had only changed the outside of him. His hands, his eyes, his skin. But while everyone would be able to see he was different, Samson had never really minded his outsides. It was his insides he wanted changed. He wanted to think faster and know more and be something.

  The toad heard him, and Samson felt it move through the Rainbow Snake, and the Snake moved too. Slowly, it let go of them both, leaving Samson the same, but with enough rainbow left to decide how he felt inside.

  This was his extra chromosome now. It was every colour and as thin as mist.

  Samson moved his hands again, and the wind and leaves and light and dusk circled around his arms and tangled him up. They brought their bodies close and their language close, and it didn’t matter what they said, because Samson and the mountain were saying it together.

  Clancy stood in the doorway of his grandsons’ bedroom. The curtains were open, and the room was dark. Nothing looked touched, or lived in. Boxes were still packed in the corner, as though Samson and Jonah were still waiting to live somewhere else. Samson’s bed was empty. He hadn’t come home.

  ‘Maybe he’s sleeping rough,’ Clancy said, because he was so used to Queenie being there. His silent listener. Maybe the twins were together, hiding out from the olds, making a campy and having a yarn over the flames. ‘Nah,’ he said to Queenie’s empty shadow. Samson was different to other boys.

  Clancy had no idea what his grandson could manage outside the house. Samson seemed capable enough, but maybe there were hidden parts to Down’s. Maybe he’d fit, or go crazy. Clancy still wasn’t sure what the bloody hell Down’s actually was, beyond how they all looked alike and had trouble speaking. He didn’t know what to give his grandson, or show him, and he certainly didn’t know where the Down’s might take Samson. Did Down’s kids panic easily? Samson might not know what to do if he got bitten by a snake, rushed down the creek or lost in the darkness.

  Any sign of worry or weakness, and the mountain would have him. Snap, down he’d go. Clancy knew that better than most, and Samson had been distressed for days, even Clancy could see that.

  He sat on the edge of the bed and thought of the first night River had missed sleeping in her room down the hall. She was only young, seven or eight maybe. Clancy hadn’t known that she was missing until she came in for breakfast and told them she’d slept under the stars.

  After that she would often sneak out, especially on school days. Sometimes for two nights in a row. Clancy and Essie never panicked, because River always walked back into the house as if nothing happened, although she was dirty and wild-eyed.

  ‘Where were you?’ Clancy would ask.

  River would shrug or look away. ‘Hunting,’ she’d often say.

  ‘Hunting what?’

  Sometimes she wouldn’t answer him, but mostly she’d say, ‘Tigers.’ Sometimes there was blood on her clothes.

  Now, Samson’s bed was empty, and Clancy wished he’d followed his daughter or tied her up. He wished he’d found a way to stop her from disappearing. He slumped into the doorframe and tried to breathe. He was tired. The kind of tired that seeps into your bones and tangles through your
organs. ‘Weary’, his ma used to call it.

  ‘You lost another one?’ asked George. He was standing in the doorway wearing a dress shirt, rolled up at the sleeves, and his suit pants.

  ‘Great timing, mate,’ said Clancy. He wished, for once, that George would either sit down next to him and tell him everything would come good, or fuck off.

  ‘Oh well,’ said George. ‘That one was bound to go missing.’

  Clancy’s leg ached, and his head felt sluggish. He knew he should try to find Samson, but he didn’t have it in him to start all over again. Something inside him had ripped, torn in half. The log that took his leg had finally taken the rest of him. Like the crocodile, Tick-Tock, chewing on Hook in Peter Pan, or Moby Dick biting Ahab. He’d read those stories with David and River, sitting at the end of their beds as if nothing would ever change. A time before he could recognise himself in those stories.

  He wished every day that he was still living in that time, but the mountain wouldn’t let him go back, and he couldn’t take back what the mountain had stolen. It was old, older than any person or building, older even than the country that sent them all to Tassie to wait for their deaths. The mountain had felt the feet of the white men, his ma and his da, the Tiger Men and hunters, the dairy farmer and the scientific bloke, David and River, even Essie. It knew that all it had to do was wait. The mountain got everyone eventually.

  How would he explain all this to David, if he could be found? Two boys lost, or maybe three, including Clancy’s greedy son. David’s words swarmed up around Clancy again like a chattering crowd of stinging wasps. The Fox broke free on a chilly night, She prayed for heat, and prayed for light, with muddy hands, and wild eyes.

  Clancy shook his head and scattered the wasps in his son’s words. He wished he could change everything. Maybe even go back to that day in Hobart when he first saw Essie, her red hair like a burning question he had yet to ask.

  His leg clenched. He tried to rub the pain out, but his skin stung against the fleece of his trackies. He pulled up the cuff. The angry purple veins were like a Rorschach he couldn’t get wrong. There were no more climbs up that mountain left in him.

  From where he was sitting on the edge of the bed, Clancy heard the back door open and close. ‘Samson?’ He hoisted himself up. ‘Jonah?’ He shuffled to the door in time to meet Samson between the kitchen and the living room. ‘Where have you been?’ he yelled, almost in his grandson’s face.

  Samson stared at him, unblinking. ‘Looking for Jonah.’

  ‘What did we say about the bloody fence? You can’t just wander off like that.’

  ‘I didn’t wander,’ said Samson calmly.

  Clancy shook his head. No point arguing about it. They were both knackered and raw as road kill. ‘Let’s get you into bed,’ he said.

  Samson nodded. He looked like a tree about to topple. Clancy followed him to his room, where he got into bed without changing his clothes.

  ‘Will you tell me a story?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know any,’ said Clancy, but he thought of Tick-Tock and Ahab again. ‘I’d need a book to tell a story.’

  ‘Find one,’ said Samson.

  ‘I don’t have any kids’ books anymore,’ said Clancy. ‘Just your brother’s Jungle Book.’

  Samson yawned. ‘I know that one.’

  ‘Why don’t you tell me a story?’ Clancy asked.

  ‘Anything?’

  ‘Anything.’ Clancy shoved his grandson’s foot to make room. He sat down on the end of the bed, the way he used to with River and David when they were small.

  ‘The Other Samson didn’t choose. Did you know that?’

  ‘Other Samson?’

  ‘From the Bible.’

  Clancy nodded. ‘Oh, right. Of course.’

  ‘He was born the way he was,’ said Samson. ‘There was no choice for him either.’

  ‘Strong, right?’ Clancy tried to remember something from Sunday school, but all he could remember was skylarking with George at the back of the hall.

  ‘God tells him where to go. He goes. And what to do. He does it all. He doesn’t know his wife when they get married.’

  Clancy wondered if he’d known Essie on the day they tied themselves together for life. He wondered if he knew her even after she was in the ground.

  ‘On the way to his wedding, the Other Samson sees the dead body of the lion again –’

  ‘Again?’ asked Clancy.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Samson without missing a beat. ‘He kills it earlier in the story. Breaks its mouth wide open.’ The boy mimed prying the lion’s mouth open. ‘This time when he sees it, the bees have made a nest inside it. The lion is full of honey.’

  That reminded Clancy of something. Samson kept talking, but his voice sounded far away, carried down a rain-filled river. It reminded Clancy of death. Essie’s hair discarded in the bin as though the maggots were already stripping her bare. He tried not to imagine the worms and flies inside the Other Samson’s lion, but he couldn’t, and the honey turned to worms and the bees turned to flies.

  ‘Are you listening, Granddad? The lion is full of honey, and the Other Samson takes some with him. Then he turns it into a riddle, and the riddle proves that he is intelligent as well as strong.’

  Clancy shook his head. ‘Sorry, mate. You’ve lost me. I reckon it’s time to turn in.’ He stood up and reached for the light switch.

  ‘Granddad, do you miss your wife?’ asked Samson quietly.

  Clancy didn’t answer. He was like the mountain. Filled with tunnels and darkness. Pockmarked with caves. He didn’t know where the sadness ended, or where it began. It seemed to sweep in every direction, an endless sea. Clancy thought of Essie, and River, and his mother. His grandson’s question punched a hole.

  ‘You alright?’ asked Samson. His voice was warm and sweet, and reminded Clancy of feeding molasses to his da’s old nag on a hot morning.

  ‘Goodnight,’ he said.

  ‘Granddad?’

  ‘Yes, Samson?’

  ‘Jonah won’t come back unless he wants to.’

  ‘I know,’ said Clancy. He flicked the switch.

  Outside, the air and sky were dark, and the stars were glinting like a necklace Samson’s mum sometimes wore to parties. She was gone. So were his dad and Jonah, even Mattie. He remembered driving slowly up the mountain with his dad and Jonah. He looked over the side of his bed and down into the gorge that surrounded the mountain. His head swirled inside, and he pulled himself back from the edge. His brother might be down there. He might have fallen off the side.

  Samson made the sign for fall in the darkness, and the sign for fall was one flat hand above like the sky and one flat hand way below like the ground. The hand on top came towards the ground, but only halfway because it should never hit the ground. Only, Samson couldn’t see his hands, and his sky hand went too far and slapped into his ground, so he tucked his hands under his bum to keep them quiet.

  He heard the kookaburras start laughing and wondered if it was dawn. The air outside was still black and thick, but the stars were dim and reminded him of bitumen roads back home in Queensland. Then another kookaburra started, and another, and pretty soon everything was filled up with laughing, and Samson untucked his hands and put them over his ears. He cried, because even though he missed Jonah, he didn’t miss being laughed at.

  Clancy washed his face and undressed. His voice was hoarse, and he was tired and wanted to sleep. He turned on the wireless.

  ‘– this year marks a historical and sad time in Australia’s history –’

  ‘Course it does,’ said Clancy. ‘When doesn’t it?’

  His pyjamas were at the end of his bed. They wouldn’t be warm enough.

  The radio crackled. ‘– and looks as if the announcement will be made that the –’

  Clancy pulled a jumper from the top shelf of his wardrobe. Another toppled with it. He left it on the ground.

  ‘– officially extinct.’

  Clancy stop
ped.

  ‘– this year has marked half a century without a single substantiated sighting of the animal –’

  The radio crackled again. Clancy ran his finger over the tuning wheel. The woman’s voice tipped in and out of static. ‘On 7 September 1936, the last Tasmanian tiger died at the Hobart Zoo, with no confirmed reports of wild tigers in many years –’

  ‘Come on, come on,’ said Clancy.

  He found the right spot, and the static melted back into nothing. ‘– the day-shift keeper didn’t lock the thylacine in its hut, and it died of exposure in the night.’

  Clancy sat on his bed.

  He’d seen this ‘last tiger’, and he had only been a boy at the time. He hadn’t known how Benjamin died until now. In fact, he’d tried not to think about Benjamin. Now he imagined the frightened tiger balled up in the dark corner of the pen, cowering from the icy wind that blew in from the mountains. The tiger hadn’t been frightened the day they met, although maybe Clancy had got that wrong too.

  He was at the Hobart Zoo with his Aunty Sheila. It was a hot day, and she bought them each a flavoured ice. She chose red, and Clancy’s was green. ‘Let’s go,’ he said impatiently, before Sheila had finished hers. ‘I want to see the tiger.’

  ‘Hold your horses.’ Sheila fingered the last of the ice from her cup and slipped it between her lips. ‘Never be wasteful,’ she said, and threw their cups over the side of the fence to the road. ‘Ready?’ The inside of her mouth was brownish purple.

  The zoo cages were all made from chicken wire, pulled over small wooden frames and standing on cold slabs of cement. Clancy needed to piss out the water from his green ice, but he didn’t want to wait to see the tiger, so he didn’t tell Aunty Sheila.

  The first cage had two angry-looking Tasmanian devils. Everyone crowded around, pointing at the black furry bundles. ‘What beauties,’ said Sheila. They growled again, and the pressure expanded in Clancy’s bladder.

  Each cage was occupied by an exhausted-looking animal. Kangaroos and wallabies and a colony of skinny possums.