These days she talks about places in Queensland where she’d like to live: Coolangatta, Noosa Heads, Surfers Paradise, Southport. She talks about them as if they’re heaven.
‘You’d love it up there, Tiff.’ She tucks her bare feet under her. Mum always has the heating on high or the wood heater, or both. ‘The water’s warm, the sun’s delicious, and the sand’s like sugar. And I want to be there before I get too old.’ She smiles as she shakes her head. ‘One day,’ she adds. ‘One day.’
Well, it won’t be this day. It’s Friday night and tomorrow Nathan and Dad are coming up. So bad luck, Mum. You’re stuck right here.
Yes, I know Queensland looks nice, but I don’t know if I’d want to live there. Mum loves everything about new places and travelling. She likes planes and airports and getting dressed up to go. Not Dad. He likes to pull on his dirty old boots and head down a track or up a mountain.
My parents are so different I wonder how they ever did get married. I mean, I’m glad they did – otherwise no me – but when they split up it was frightening because I could tell Mum didn’t care what happened to Dad. It made me feel sick. It was like everything was Dad’s fault – but it wasn’t. I think it was hers. Mostly.
‘Your dad is a good person,’ Mum told me, after Dad and Nathan had gone to live down in Mitta. ‘Better than me, anyway.’
That’s rubbish, but I didn’t know what to say back.
I can always tell when Mum’s thinking about Nathan. She has this small smile, but worried wrinkles around her eyes. Sometimes, if I talk about him, she starts to cry. So I don’t, even though I think about him quite a lot. I even miss not seeing him at school. I mean I was just kind of used to knowing he was there.
I hate it when Mum says she’s not a good person. She is; it’s just that sometimes she thinks her life’s not going right, but I tell her we’re okay. We’ve got a nice house and she’s got Lane, and he’s got a new black Falcon with a sunroof and a CD player.
Lane bangs around the house, car keys jangling. He’s always talking Mum into going to parties or wearing shorter skirts. He gave me earrings and a bottle of perfume.
‘She’s too young for those things, Lane –’ Mum held back my hair. ‘And besides, she hasn’t even got pierced ears. She can put them away for later.’
‘What?’ said Lane. ‘Her ears?’
I showed the things to Cass.
‘Ooh, baby,’ she said. ‘Hollywood!’
Lane wears aftershave that smells like fruit salad. My dad never would! And my dad always wears ‘sensible’ clothes – and shoes you could climb cliffs in.
‘Your mum doesn’t wear sensible,’ says Cass. ‘She wears cool. She’s got sneakers, those Pumas, and those oinky-poinky pointy things.’
If I left Tilgong I would miss Cass so much. When we talk about doing stuff we talk about doing it together. But if Mum left I’d have to go, too. And that could be to anywhere in Australia where there’s a beach.
Classic awkward moment
Most Saturdays, Dad and Nathan drive up from Mittavale. Sometimes Nathan comes fishing, but he always ends up chucking rocks in, so usually he and Mum have lunch and get a video.
I can see the street from our lounge. Along the window ledge are glass ornaments. Mum and I collect them. There’s a dolphin, a butterfly, a bird, a starfish, a penguin, and others. They sparkle, but if you pick one up thinking it will be warm, it won’t be. I think Mum’s ideas about Surfers Paradise and Queensland might be like this.
Surfers Paradise looks wonderful, but perhaps if you went there to live, you might find it isn’t as good as it seems. As Cass says, ‘Hey, it rains there as well.’ And that has to be true.
Dad and Nathan turn up late on Saturday morning in our old red Subaru station wagon. It’s always muddy from their adventures.
‘The dirt holds it together,’ Nathan says. ‘It can’t be washed.’
Mum’s got a Subaru wagon, too. It’s white and newer than Dad’s. You need a four-wheel drive up here if it snows. Mum hates driving in snow. Dad loves it.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
That’s Nathan knocking. Mum comes out wearing a light blue jumper and white jeans. When I open the door it’s what Cass would call a ‘classic awkward moment’. After Mum hugs Nathan, she and Dad just look at each other. They never know what to say. So Dad talks to me.
‘Got your gear, Tiff?’
I hold up it up. Dad looks briefly at Mum.
‘Things all right, Sian?’ Dad is pretty polite and he hardly ever loses his temper – except when he and Mum had their big arguments.
‘Yes, things are fine,’ she says. ‘Be careful. See you soon.’
I go out into the fresh air. End of awkward moment!
*
Dad’s car smells of boots, oilskin coats, and sandwiches. We get in and he kisses me. For a fraction of a second I feel like crying. I don’t know why. It often happens when Dad or Mum kisses me.
‘Things all right, Tiff?’ he says, which is just what he’s asked Mum.
So I say, ‘Yeah, things are fine,’ like she did, as a joke, but he doesn’t get it.
Off we go. Dad smiles more away from our house.
Mum has told me that if I want to live with Dad and Nathan I can. It would be noisy, fun and happy with them. I mean, I love my mum but on certain days her sadness fills the house. It hurts me right through. She often will sit just looking out the window.
‘God, I hate those mountains!’ she says, then smiles, because she knows it isn’t really the mountains she hates.
I cry sometimes. In my room or outside. Outside there’s a big gum tree. I sit on a little board my dad nailed down, and snuggle back into the tree’s curve. First I check for spiders. The leaves swish and swirl and eventually I calm down. After crying, I never know if I feel better or worse.
The Brumby Run River
Sunshine fills the river and the water makes a sound as soothing as someone tickling your back. Dad and I take it in turns to cast. We sneak upstream. Trout are easily spooked.
‘Take it easy,’ Dad says. ‘And don’t fall in, preferably.’
Dad and I study the next pool. Trout like to stick to their own territory. Then they know where their food is most likely to come from.
Dad casts his fly and it floats like a tiny furry-brown boat, but no trout grabs it.
Now Dad casts his fly to the bottom of a small waterfall. I watch it carefully. Sometimes I get so involved in fishing I imagine what everything looks like from under the water – which is a bit embarrassing for me.
‘Come on, trout boys,’ Dad says. ‘It’s lunchtime.’
Splish! The fly has gone. A fishy shape shoots away. Dad’s rod wiggles.
‘Go, little feller!’ Dad calls out. ‘Rock and roll!’
‘Rock and roll,’ is my dad’s most modern saying. It’s easy to tell he doesn’t live in the city.
The fish veers into the shallows then scoots away. I can see it clearly, the same yellow-gold colour as the pebbles. It’s a little brown – no, a little gold trout! Gently Dad guides it in then lifts it out. The fish looks at us with its round black eye.
‘Back you go,’ Dad says, twists the fly loose, and slips the trout back into the river. Then he looks up at the mountains that seem to hold up the entire blue sky. ‘This is the best place in the world.’
It is. The mountains stand over us like giants. It’s wild country, but I feel safe. It’s nice to be with my dad, though. I’m not allowed to go fishing by myself, not even in the lake. We move on to the next pool where Bob, the big old brown trout lives.
When Dad was at home, Mum often talked about things she wanted, although she knew we couldn’t afford them. It was like she was wishing out loud.
‘I wish we could go to Dunk Island. I wish we had a Range Rover. I’d really like to have a massage and facial every week.’ It’s those kinds of things Mum really likes – not natural things that are already here for us and free.
At first Dad jok
ed about it. Then, when she’d say those type of things he’d say something like, ‘Yeah, I know you would,’ and just before he took Nathan to live in Mittavale, he’d ignore Mum, or go and work on the car, or go for a walk.
Mum would never watch him go, call him back, or say sorry. I told Cass about Mum’s wish list.
‘Imagine my mum on Dunk Island,’ Cass said. ‘She’d be like a beached whale. They’d have to tow her out into the water with a ship.’
Cass’s mum is big, but who cares? She’s cool, Mrs Jurgens. And funny. She once put out a little bushfire with a garden hose, and didn’t even spill her cup of tea!
Sheets of rock tip into the deep shadowy water of Bob’s pool. Bob generally stays towards the top of the pool where the water rushes in. That way, he gets all the food.
‘Cast to the middle first,’ Dad says. ‘In case he’s out swimming laps.’
I sneak onto the little pebbly beach and cast – not very well – but never mind. In the bush a wren chatters as if she’s telling someone off. Slowly my brown and white fly drifts down, past a tiny ferny island, but nothing happens. I cast again, really badly this time.
‘Don’t worry.’ Dad’s eyes are invisible behind his black glasses. ‘Just strip it in and try again.’
I cast to the top of the pool. The fly lands and has gone a little way downstream when something big and black glides out for a closer look – my heart seems to swell – it’s Bob! But with a flick of his tail he’s gone. I feel my chest collapse. I must’ve been holding my breath.
‘Ohhh, wow!’ I say. ‘Did you see him?’ I reel in. ‘I wish, I wish –’ Well, I don’t really wish I’d caught him.
Dad walks out onto the beach, boots crunching. Time seems to have slowed. The river swirls like honey. The air smells of gum leaves.
‘Good try, kid.’ Dad pokes a pink musk stick into my shirt pocket. ‘What the hell. Let’s do lunch.’
We sit beside Bob’s pool and eat floppy brown-bread sandwiches and apples that are still cold from the fridge. Up further, the river flows down between elephant-sized boulders and the mountains look like the shoulders of the earth. It would be a lonely place if you were by yourself.
Cass doesn’t like fishing or fish.
‘If they came with hot chips I might,’ she says. ‘But they don’t. And they stink. And Rex Hunt is a maniac. Even more so than Wally.’
Trout don’t STINK. They smell like the river. And Rex Hunt isn’t a total maniac, even if he does kiss fish. Not that I would.
Dad and I walk back. The sound of the river is friendly beside us.
‘Things okay at home, Tiff?’ Dad only glances at me when he asks these types of questions. ‘Everything all right?’
‘Well,’ I say, ‘Mum still wants to go to Queensland.’ We splash along in the shallows. My legs feel heavy and hot in my waders.
Dad nods, his sunglasses dangling on their cord. Dad only wears sunglasses when it’s really sunny or when we’re fishing. Mum wears them nearly every day. And so does Lane, mostly on the top of his head, even at night, which is so dumb I can’t believe it.
‘Your mum thinks she’ll be happier up there,’ Dad says. ‘And she may be right.’
I should’ve tied my hair back. It makes my face itch like this.
‘She says she could get a hairdressing job,’ I say. ‘And work on her clothes at night.’ Mum wants to be a clothes designer. She sketches stuff, makes things, and studies magazines as if they’re full of secrets. If there’s a fashion show on TV she tapes it, and she’s always asking me what I think about this shirt or that swimsuit – as if I would know! I normally only ever wear jeans, a T-shirt, and a jacket.
I tell Dad she’s going to call her swimming stuff, ‘Sian for Swim’, and that she thinks the Gold Coast would be the best place to sell it.
‘Could be right,’ Dad says. ‘Then again, she could be wrong.’
I wish Dad hadn’t said that. If Mum’s ideas didn’t work out, she’d be even sadder than she is now, and I don’t think I could handle that. It hurts me so much when she’s not happy, because she should be.
‘She can do it,’ I say to Dad’s back. ‘You should see the stuff she’s made already. It’s fantastic.’
‘Yep.’ Dad walks on. ‘She did a good job with that jacket she sent down for Nathan.’
When Mum was sewing the special skateboard buttons on Nathan’s jacket she was crying – but I concentrated on The Simpsons, otherwise I would’ve gone INSANE.
Thank God for Homer!
Old paint
After fishing, Dad, Nathan and I sit outside on wooden seats that Dad made. Between us is a plate of supermarket biscuits supplied by Mum. I can see her inside on the phone, probably telling Lane that Dad is still here.
Last year, when Dad was home, I think he nearly hated Mum. In the mornings it was like the air between them was frozen. Dad would look at her but she would never look at him. It made me dizzy and sick. Tea-time was worst. Silence surrounded us like clammy fog.
One night we had roast chicken. Mum put the plates down, everyone said, ‘thanks’ and that was it. I tried to think of things to say but I couldn’t. All I could hear was knives and forks scraping and Nathan was looking at Mum, at Dad, and at me, trying to work out why no one was talking.
‘They should make chickens bigger,’ he said. ‘That’d be a good idea. With more legs, because people like drumsticks the best.’
‘Yep,’ said Dad, ‘that would be a good idea.’
Then Mum walked out, leaving her tea, and she didn’t come back. I heard her bedroom door shut.
‘Where’s she gone?’ Nathan stood up, worried. ‘What about her tea?’
‘She doesn’t want it,’ Dad said. ‘Or so it appears.’
‘Well, I don’t want mine, either,’ said Nathan, and he wouldn’t eat.
Then I couldn’t eat mine and Dad couldn’t eat his. So we all sat around looking at this poor chopped-up old chicken until Nathan began to cry.
‘Don’t worry, mate,’ Dad said. ‘Things’ll get better soon.’ And although Dad said the words softly, his eyes were angry.
Two weeks later, he took Nathan to live down in Mittavale and that was that.
Cass couldn’t believe it. For days I didn’t believe it myself. I expected Dad and Nathan to be there when I got up, or at home after school, but they weren’t, and now I know they won’t ever be.
I told Cass the day after it happened. I didn’t go to school on the day that it did. Cass wouldn’t walk out of her front gate.
‘You’d better come back inside.’ She looked really worried. ‘And have a rest. And tell my mum.’
So I went inside with Cass, told her mum, had some toast, watched TV, and Cass I went to school after recess with a letter in an envelope for Mrs Petrucci from Mrs Jurgens. And, as everybody knows, things are serious when notes for teachers arrive in envelopes.
But I guess I knew that already.
Nathan’s happier now. He misses Mum, but the fighting between her and Dad was driving him crazy. He and Dad get a kick out of being together. Dad even manages to tell him off using jokes.
‘Nathan’s been a bit slack with his homework,’ Dad said once, looking right at Nathan. ‘So unfortunately he’s going to have to leave school and work as an ear counter out at the meatworks. Or he can start at the golf course. They need a kid to stop the worms falling in the holes.’
‘Golf course,’ Nathan said. ‘Worms are better than ears.’
I don’t like to think about all the good things that I miss out on. Dad and Nathan are pretty funny together.
Mum and I don’t joke around much, but we get on fine. It’s as if we couldn’t stand to have a real fight, because it would hurt too much. It’s as if we know there’s been enough fighting done around here to last forever.
‘Do you want to come and stay with us next weekend, Tiff?’ Dad asks. ‘Might go to the pictures or out for tea.’
‘I’ll ask,’ I say, but Mum always lets me go.<
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My room at Dad’s place is small, but it’s all right. It has a central heating duct, though, which is good. Every time I stay there I leave something, like a book, socks, or a shirt. It’s like I’m moving in bit by bit, but I’m not, I’m just taking stuff that I might need. Some Sunday afternoons, I must admit, I feel like crying when it’s time to go back up the mountain, but when I get home I’m all right. Things seem worse on Sunday afternoons. Cass reckons they should be banned. And Monday mornings. Saturdays and Fridays are my favourite days.
It’s nice sitting out here. Even Nathan’s behaving himself. There are flowers in pots and we can see canoes on the lake. It’s an ‘inland’ view, as Dad calls it – which is exactly why Mum doesn’t like it. And the closer winter gets, the more she talks about leaving. Mum hates winter. She stays inside, but if she does go out, she wears lots of clothes, which annoys Lane.
‘Don’t hide yaself away, Sharney-babe,’ he says. ‘You look like a polar bear in that outfit.’
Mum never looks like a polar bear, but she does remind me of a bird in winter – a bird who’d like to fly to where it’s warm, and never come back. Cass isn’t so sure.
‘She’ll stay for you, Tiff,’ Cass says. ‘And because Nathan’s down the hill and she’s got her job here and that. I reckon she’ll stay.’
I don’t. Not even with all those reasons. She’ll still go. It’s just a matter of time.
Moonlight
On Sunday night, Cass and I are in her room. Outside it’s dark, and I know when I cross the road to go home the mountains will look like huge black waves – but they don’t scare me and they never have. We’re supposed to be working on a project about electricity – how exciting – but we’re not getting much done. We’re talking about Hildy.
‘Why would she just vanish,’ Cass says, ‘if something really suss didn’t happen?’
In a way Cass wants something weird to have happened to Hildy – but not me. It’s different for Cass, with her family all around her – but now that my parents have split up, I know people aren’t as reliable as they want you to think. Adults don’t tell you everything. Some parents do have secrets. And bad things can happen to kids when parents aren’t happy with each other.
Tiff and the Trout Page 2