Big River, Little Fish

by Belinda Jeffrey

  ‘So you found it.’

  Tom and Hannah veer over to ride on the road shoulder as three cars pass by, coming from Swan Reach. Clouds of dust sweep up behind them and Tom waves it away from his face.

  ‘You finish your sampler for the show?’

  Tom brakes on his bike and his tyres screech on the road. ‘I clean forgot.’

  Hannah stops just ahead of him. ‘Miss Pinny’s gonna have your guts, Mot.’

  ‘I’m not going.’ Tom turns his bike around.

  ‘Mot, you’ll only make it worse. I’ll do it for you.’

  ‘She’ll know.’

  ‘I’ll write it quick. Make it look like your best effort ever.’

  Tom feels his chest heat up in a vice and he can’t get out. No matter what he does. What’s worse? His own muddled up twisted handwriting up on the school display at the show or Hannah’s worst effort? His hands hurt and he stretches them.

  ‘Hey,’ Hannah says, pointing to the cars.

  Tom turns his bike back around to see one of the cars – having turned around – approaching them. The police car pulls over to the side of the road, tyres crunching on the rocks. Sergeant Kingston’s car.

  Hannah turns to look at Tom and he shrugs.

  ‘Tom,’ Sergeant Kingston says, getting out of the car. ‘Been looking for you.’

  Tom feels his hands sweat as Kingston straightens up, placing his hat on his head.

  ‘Been some trouble in town this morning, Tom. I’ll be needing a word with you about your friend, Murray Black.’

  Tom stands beside his father in the garage as Kingston licks the end of his pencil and opens a small, palm-sized notebook.

  ‘Well, it wasn’t someone smart,’ he says, ‘taking a bike you say doesn’t run. Won’t get far.’

  There’s a space in the corner where Harley used to be.

  ‘Wheeled it out?’ Kingston says, his eyes following a faint tyre track through the dust and grease on the floor. ‘And you didn’t hear anything?’ He turns to Ted.

  Ted shakes his head. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Uh,’ Kingston mumbles, his eyebrows darting upwards like he’s surprised. ‘Well,’ he says with a sigh, ‘he can’t have got too far. Not likely it was someone around town. I mean, where would you hide a bike, right?’ Kingston looks towards them again, closing his notebook and sliding it back in his top pocket. ‘Market day yesterday and Black was here selling his fish and you say he saw you with the bike out front?’

  Tom looks to his father.

  Ted clears his throat. ‘Yeah. That’s right.’

  ‘And nothing else is missing?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Anyone suspicious hanging around lately?’ Kingston adds.

  Ted shakes his head.

  ‘Anyone you know who wanted that bike?’

  ‘No one besides Tom here.’

  Kingston looks at Tom, his eyebrows rising.

  ‘That bike was already mine,’ Tom says defensively.

  ‘That right, Ted?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking,’ Tom hears his father say. ‘I promised it to him.’

  ‘I see,’ Kingston says looking out through the garage door towards the sunshine. He walks over. ‘This door, here,’ he says, sliding it along the tracks, the gap of sunlight shrinking. ‘Noisy,’ he says, looking back at Tom and Ted. ‘I’ll file a report.’

  ‘You think Murray did this?’ Tom says to his father when Kingston leaves.

  ‘He was the only one that looked at it yesterday, Tom. Like it was something impressive.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean anything. It wouldn’t have been him.’

  ‘Look...’ Ted says.

  ‘It just wasn’t him.’

  It could have been anyone who took Harley, Tom thinks. Anyone but Murray. And it bothers him, thinking Ted had wheeled it out front yesterday. To Tom’s knowledge it had never been anywhere but in the corner of the shed.

  Before Tom goes back to school he decides to see if something can be done about Mrs Cath.

  The people who live along the river are roughnecks, Marge says. People that lost all their money in the Depression and had nowhere else to go. Or drank their money away or don’t have the smarts to better themselves and take jobs and live decently. Tom thinks it’s no wonder Mrs Cath won’t go up to town or Bum-crack drinks alone and cries. A town of people like Marge thinking you’re something less than they are and no understanding the kind of hurt some people carry. Better to live with only Old Mother; at least she has a way of understanding. Tom’s parents know he goes down there, but they don’t forbid it anymore and Tom doesn’t tell them much either.

  Shh, Old Mother whispers on dusk. Look, little fish, and Tom will look in her mirror.

  It’s fine living down by the river, mostly by yourself, when you’re fit and strong. But time takes you away whether you’re ready or not and Tom knows Mrs Cath needs help. Tom might not be around when she needs him.

  Tom opens the door to the police station and waits at the counter while Constable Rosen finishes his phone call.

  ‘I think someone needs to see to Mrs Cath at the river,’ Tom says as Rosen puts down the receiver.

  ‘And who is Mrs Cath?’ he says absently, rummaging though the paperwork on his desk.

  ‘She lives down the river.’

  ‘She in trouble?’

  ‘She’s sick, I think. In her mind. Sometimes I find her out all night and I can’t get her back inside.’

  Constable Rosen takes off his glasses. ‘Listen, Tom. If she’s not doing anything wrong and she’s not dead and she’s not needing a hospital, then what do you want us to do?’

  ‘School,’ Ted says when Tom returns.

  ‘But–’

  ‘Now,’ he says, walking back into the house without looking at him.

  Before Tom leaves for school, he runs up to his room to get his handwriting sampler from the drawer beside his bed.

  He presses the paper out on the table, trying to remove the creases, but it doesn’t make much difference and the paper still looks like it’s been crumpled in a ball too long. It’s brown, in patches, from where it’s rubbed against his satchel. Tom looks at the paper and thinks that something as simple as writing his name in the Queen’s good English shouldn’t be so hard. It should be something to show for all his years at school. Proof he’s ready to move on; high school, an apprenticeship, college. Something more than where he is and what he has. But there’s only one way out, in Tom’s mind. And that’s the road and Harley. And they’re gone.

  If Tom wasn’t so used to feeling this way, if there wasn’t always something hard he had to face and couldn’t change, he might cry himself to sleep at night. Because that’s all you’ve got left inside you, sometimes, when there are no words. Just feelings and sounds. And sadness.

  Once Tom had a dream he was one of Murray Black’s big cod and he was thrashing through the river and it was quiet. He saw a hook, shining up through the mirror, and he leapt up from his hole to catch hold of it. Only, when he did, he was lying in his mother’s lap and he was so thirsty he rolled over and drained the whole river dry. When he turned back to the bank, Lil was gone and he was round with it all inside him. And nothing could get out.

  If Tom tore up a hundred alphabets and threw them in the river, he’d have an easier time of finding words from the water than he does from his mind.

  Tom has a thought, then, looking at that paper. And he takes the pencil and draws across the crumpled lines and shadows. There’s only one good way to write his name.

  Pinny screws up his sampler and throws it in the bin. Tom gets it out. He smooths it and puts it on the pile on her desk.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re playing at, Tom, but this is jibberish, rubbish,’ she says, taking it once more from her desk and throwing it in
to the bin.

  ‘I can read it fine,’ he says, taking it out again.

  The whole class is seated behind Tom and Pinny is stiff and angry beside him but, for once, Tom doesn’t care what Pinny does to him.

  He places it on the pile again and stands up straight. Pinny’s face is flushed and she holds her hands together in front of her in a tight ball.

  Tom holds out his hands, palm up towards her, his blisters now pale pink circles. ‘Outside, now!’ she says, thrusting her arm outwards towards the door. ‘I don’t want to see you for the rest of the day.’

  At the door, he turns to face the class, and sees Hannah in the back row, smiling. Biscuit beside her. Hannah raises her hand just above the edge of the desk and waves her fingers.

  It’s been too long since he’s sat by Old Mother with his line, feeling for cod and listening to life. He plans to catch a fish, cook it for tea, and head over to the Caruthers’ to see to the tractor. Then he’ll go home. He hopes Murray Black will show up but he fears he won’t. There’s no way he could face Mrs Guthrie today.

  Beside him is the pile of letters he’s found. More than he imagined would be possible because, when you think about it, what are the chances that nature knits letters under your feet? But then it occurs to Tom – in the way backwards thoughts come to him – it might be stranger, still, that nature would not. Murray would understand that kind of thinking.

  Tom digs his rod into the sand and spreads the letters out. He turns them around and puts them in order and leaves spaces for missing letters. Dragging his hand across them all, they bunch into a pile again. He spreads them out and tries a simple word. SAT. He finds the letters and makes the word beside his feet and it’s a definite thing, this word. MAT and BAT. He searches through the remaining letters for an H and remembers giving it to Hannah. Tom uses his finger to write in the sand underneath the root letters. The damp, gritty feel of the sand feels good and connected in his mind. He writes the words again and again and it’s almost no effort. He scoops up the letters and puts them back into his pocket, scratching out the words with his feet. After all, this is about kissing.

  Tom reels in the fishing line.

  ‘Hello.’

  Tom hears a voice behind him.

  Murray Black’s smile is wide and easy as he crouches down beside Tom.

  ‘Didn’t think I’d see you,’ Tom says. ‘I was about to leave, walk with me up to the top road?’

  Murray nods.

  The sun disappears completely as Tom stows his fishing gear in the corner of the hut beside the canoe. He looks around the space and has a sense of what it might have been like, living here with his mother. Murray waits in the place that might, once, have been the door.

  It’s a quiet night as they walk up the track away from the river towards the road with Tom pushing his bike. Murray could almost disappear completely in the dark if he didn’t have his white shirt on.

  ‘Thanks,’ Tom says stopping at the top of the road. ‘People are saying you took my Harley, but I know it wasn’t you.’

  ‘Yeah. What would I want with it?’ Murray smiles and pats Tom on his back.

  Headlights appear on the horizon, bouncing up and down the road, until the car rounds the bend and is coming towards them along the straight. Murray waves to Tom. He turns and leaves, heading back down the track.

  Tom grips the handlebars of his bike and throws his leg over. The car passes in a gush of wind, the headlights opening up an arc of road and bush in front of the car through the dark. A shape appears in the light. Moving, at first, then completely still. Tyres screech and a horn blasts and there’s the smell of burning rubber. The car hits the dark shape with a thud before there’s the sound of screeching metal and the car tips over, twisting and snaking on the ground. Lights zigzag everywhere for a moment before it’s completely dark. Murray is suddenly beside Tom again, running towards the accident. Tom pushes off from the ground, his feet finding the pedals.

  ‘Go get help,’ Murray yells as Tom slows beside him. The wreck groans, sparks and wheezes. Tom can’t make out anything much in the mess. Dark shapes, wheels spinning. The smell of petrol chokes his throat.

  Tom pedals along the main road into town. Past the Zimmerman’s farm, past the garage.

  ‘Tom, where are you going?’ Ted calls out from the veranda.

  ‘I can’t stop,’ Tom yells. ‘Been an accident on the main road.’

  Sergeant Kingston is just finishing his shift, about to pull the door closed behind him, when Tom arrives outside the station. Kingston opens the door again, lifts his hat from the rack along the wall, and closes the door. He holsters his gun and rushes to his car.

  Tom pedals after him, cycling through the dust clouds in the wake of blaring sirens and flashing colours, back down the road. He calls out as he rides, ‘Car crash on the main road.’

  When Tom arrives at the scene of the accident, he lays his bike on the ground behind the police car. He walks towards the wreck where Sergeant Kingston waves his torch at people arriving in their own trucks and cars, from both directions, ready to help. Vehicles park at angles leaving their headlights on, criss-crossing the wreckage like streamers. Tom tries to find Murray. He skirts the side of the accident where men are huddled around the car, talking, giving instructions.

  Kingston’s voice rises above the crowd. ‘Stay back. You, over there, don’t touch it till I tell you.’

  No one takes any notice of Tom. He doesn’t know whether it would be better to see Murray or not, and he begins thinking that Murray might have cleared off already.

  ‘Bloody kangaroo,’ Tom hears someone say. Torches flash across him.

  The driver is still stuck in the vehicle—a ute, Tom sees now. And the talk is about how to get him out. The accident replays in Tom’s mind. The sight of the headlights, Murray beside him, and then the collision. Happening out of nowhere and breaking up the quiet night like a lightning strike. And the thought that if only that kangaroo had jumped a few seconds earlier, or later, the ute would have passed straight on through and there’d be no carcass by the roadside, or a mangled car on the bitumen. Tom looks at what’s left of the kangaroo lying on the side of the road.

  ‘Ah, Jesus,’ Kingston says.

  Tom looks up, but faces and bodies are silhouettes in the streaking light. A group of men pull the driver out through the window and lay him on the ground.

  ‘Ah, Jesus,’ Kingston says again.

  Tom looks back at what’s left of the ute. Twisted and smashed. Tom knows that ute. A dark stain of dread bursts inside him.

  Tom races the wind home. His legs are a windmill, his wheels are a blur and there’s the steady whizzing sound of his tyres on the bitumen, and oh what it would feel like to open up the throttle and accelerate forever. People lose loved ones every day, all over the world. You wake up one morning and find something crucial missing, your world hacked off in pieces and all you can do is to look across the distance.

  When Tom’s foster parents sat him down and told him about Lil, they told him the bare facts, none of the wonder. That was after he had already begun stealing off down to the river and meeting up with Murray Black and maybe they thought explaining a few things to him might put a stop to it. We’re your parents now. And it was a strange beginning, then, for Tom. Losing something at six he had never known was missing before. It was the same with words. Not knowing there was something wrong with you until someone pointed it out.

  There’s a man out there by the side of the road and he’s dead and it doesn’t matter what words are used to tell that story, it can’t change what happened. Or how it’s going to feel when it hits. Ripples find you. At least in the river you can see them moving. It hasn’t hit Tom yet. Not completely. But he feels it chasing him, no matter how fast he pedals. Circles moving out from that accident, all over.

  Tom breathes on his window and writes with his
finger.

  ded

  dad

  Even in a mirror, those words are the kind that don’t change. No matter which way round they go.

  Tom can’t sleep.

  Tom rides out to the Guthries’ place, past the wreckage and the kangaroo’s body, which is still there, down Big Bend Road to the farm. Lights bleed through the windows and Sergeant Kingston’s car is out the front. Even before Tom props his bike against the shed, up from the lambing fence, he can hear Mrs Guthrie crying and there’s a ripple right there as it sinks in. Ray Guthrie gone, just like that.

  Tom sits underneath Hannah’s window, his back against the bricks and his knees drawn up to his chest. From the front of the house, Tom hears Kingston say, ‘goodnight’. ‘We’ll be okay,’ Mrs Guthrie says. The sound of his car is eventually swallowed up by distance. Then it’s only the sound of Hannah in her room, crying.

  Tom walks across the grass out back to Mr Guthrie’s shed. The smell of rust and dust is confined in the small space and there’s no light. Tom reaches up to the top shelf, runs his hands over the tin lids feeling the rough edge of tin rims. His fingers rub across the labels until he finds the last tin on the top shelf. From memory Tom knows it says ‘small nails’ but it really hides a packet of cigarettes.

  ‘You can use the shed whenever you like, Tom,’ Mr Guthrie had said to him once. A long time ago. ‘For helping out around the place like you do. You’re always welcome here, you know. We like having you around.’

  Tom takes one cigarette back to his place underneath Hannah’s window. He marks time, for a while, with each breath he inhales and breathes away. In this way he measures the life of a cigarette. It’s finite. Before you even start breathing in and out, there’s a certain end point. When there is only the flick of the butt left between his fingers, he throws it on the ground and squashes it with his shoe.

  It was Mr Guthrie that was going to give their baby a name; the one that died around the time Tom was born. Tom was sitting up beside the back door, he was only a kid, when he heard him talking with Mrs Guthrie about their baby that died. ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ he said.