Metal Fish, Falling Snow

by Cath Moore

  Blue pearl: hot water freezes faster than cold water.

  White swirl: water is the only liquid with a memory.

  Black jet black: people can drink up to forty-eight cups of water a day. Forty-nine and you might internally explode.

  Purple and pink dots: water boils faster in Colorado than in New York.

  Big fat orange: four million people die every year from toxic water.

  Soon enough those buttons make Joni go to sleep (except for big fat orange which he didn’t point to much) and I put my hand on his chest, let it rise up and down.

  One day I tell William I want to go back into the mangroves where it had all gone so wrong. Maybe Mum had made it without me, I say. But when we walk down the path there are pieces of the boat everywhere, smashed, splintered, shattered.

  ‘I think...she’s wherever you choose her to be.’ William clasps his hands together and looks to the ground.

  There is room for the sadness we feel. Might get smaller and lighter but it will always be there like a stain you wash and wash but can’t get out.

  I don’t go to the mangroves after that. I follow William’s river instead. Down near the old convent where girls my age used to wash sheets all day because nuns said they’d done shameful things and had to clean out their soul. Down to the river that soaked up their sorrow and William’s all the same, ’cause it had seen him pray through my sickness. He said with all his tears it doubled in size. Just between you and me, I think William’s poetic licence is out of date. Rivers can only rise with water from the sky. And Mr Nancy the spider-man is in charge of that.

  We still walk that river but not with words or wishes. We watch the birds call for one another. The snap of branches as they jump through bushes collecting sticks for their nests. The sound of someone close, unseen in the trees. We watch the sun retire for the night sending shadows soft and long across distant fields. I know in those moments we are both scared of things to come. But as that wolf of mine would say, there’s no point running from yourself ’cause wherever you go, there you are.

  When he hears I am out of hospital Pat comes. He’s got himself a new job recycling cardboard boxes. Things can change just like that and become better than they were before.

  I don’t know why but I stay in my room when William tells me he’s arrived. Even though I’ve changed my outfit and done my hair in a ponytail I need to change again. Green corduroy skirt and striped pink T-shirt. The ridges in the skirt go up and down and the T-shirt stripes across. My head is all cloudy and I feel colourblind. I creep out and stand in the hallway, watch as William shakes Pat’s hand and his head bobs a bit with all the mateness going on between them.

  ‘Cuppa tea?’

  ‘I’d murder a coldie.’

  ‘Right you are, long trip.’

  And they both drink their beer straight from the bottle.

  They look like one of those TV cop duos: one short and skinny and the other with a potbelly and bony fingers.

  ‘Aha!’

  My stripey/ridgey camouflage fails and William spots me. I inch forward. The wall is cold on my back ’cause William’s had the air-con blasting all day. He’d rather be cool and broke than hot and rich.

  ‘G’day stranger.’ Pat stands up and holds out his hand. William says he has some more filing to do which is not true.

  I run back into my bedroom. Joni’s disease must be contagious because I cannot speak.

  After a while Pat knocks but doesn’t wait for an answer. Comes straight in. Rude.

  ‘How’s the head? William says you’re doing really well.’

  ‘Maybe I am, what’s it to you?’ I don’t know why I’m being so standoffish but everything feels starchy between us. Pat sits on the bed and talks about how he’s cleaned up his act, that he’s working for the Salvos with the boxes and they’ve got him in a program where people talk every week about their gambling. Got his fridge back too. He pauses to rub his neck, then says he’s moved into a nice two-bedroom flat and made up the spare just for me for when I visit. Put a Johnny Farnham poster on the wall. I didn’t tell Pat I already knew. That I visited him when I was asleep for all those months. Saw all the cleaning up and clearing out. Lying awake at night in cold sweats. Taking flowers to Mum’s grave. Even going to the library and listening to French language tapes. Bonjour, ça va toi? Ça va bien, toi? The burning shame as he hands his photo to the lady at the RSL club, anywhere that’s got a pokie machine: ‘I’m a recovering addict. Please do not let me enter.’ Taking the double shift every weekend just to keep temptation at bay. That he wanted only to love and be loved the right and honest way. And the only right thing to do was to look after me.

  ‘I talked to Mrs Whatsher…your teacher back home and she said there’s still a place for you there. Things could be like normal again.’

  It sounds great because I miss my old friends, even Amanda Pearson who was never nice to me and talked through her nose like she was always whining. But when you get older you have to make tough life choices. Like how and where you choose to live it. So I put my quiet voice on and tell Pat I’d wanted the same thing too, but it couldn’t ever be that way. Pat had brought me to William who’d brought me to the hoatzin bird who’d brought me to Joni, and that’s where the journey ends. Can’t reverse time because everything that’s happened has changed who you are and what you know.

  Pat’s shoulders slump and for a moment that movie The Wizard of Oz flicks into my head. Why the hell did that tin man want a heart? Didn’t he know that people can punch the love out of you, even if they don’t use their hands?

  ‘Oh. Righto. Yeah. You see, the thing is…’

  What Pat wants to say is he didn’t know he needed me until I was gone. I know because that is the same way I feel about him. But you can’t be in two places at the same time.

  ‘Pat, I have to tell you something.’ I know it will come as a surprise but William said I couldn’t keep those big secrets anymore. ‘I’m a full half-black now. And it’s okay ’cause William’s put me back in the real world.’

  I tell Pat I want to stay where I am so I can make tinned spaghetti jaffles with William and brush his hair with a special frizz comb because he says it feels like heaven. To dance up front when Jules plays at the pub first Sunday of the month. Draw animals on Joni’s back when he can’t get to sleep. I also have to stay in case somewhere along his own timeline Joni feels skin shame and looking at his reflection feels like stepping on shattered glass. I’ll try and suck his shame out like venom from a snakebite. I need to be here so I can remind him that we are fine, even if it doesn’t always feel that way.

  When the Olympic Games are on, Joni and I sit on the couch and drink hot chocolate. William shows us when the athletes from Guyana came out. I cheer and whoop even though there are only five of them and they have never won anything except way back in 1980 when we got a bronze medal for boxing at the Moscow Olympics. I’m a lover not a fighter so am a bit disappointed to hear that. But you won’t believe this: that boxer’s name was Michael Anthony Parris—what are the chances?

  I take Pat outside and down to the back gate. William and I had made a cross out of the boat wood, stuck it in the ground and put ferns all around the bottom because Mum always thought they looked exotic. I made a picture of us in the boat sailing across the sea and covered it in contact so it was waterproof. Then we stapled it to the cross.

  Pat stares at the cross for a long time. I say he hasn’t lost me, that I will always be just down the phone. Pat says half the time it wasn’t him talking; it was his addiction that made him cranky and short-tempered, unable to listen and ask what I needed. But that he is practising to be better. I show him that splinter of wood from the boat, still stuck way down in my finger.

  ‘It’ll come to the surface in its own time,’ he says. Pat holds my hand and kisses that splintered finger. Nothing is forever and I can always change my mind if I feel like it, that’s what he says, still not believing he’s come all this way only to
go home without me.

  I didn’t tell him that some things are forever. Like statues made out of marble.

  We go back inside and while Pat finishes his beer I have a can of Solo. I chink my can on his bottle and we say cheers at the very same time. Aunty Cecilia and Jules and Joni come because they want to say hi. Their hellos don’t really have a goodbye so Pat is stuck there until after dinner, which he says is okay because the food on the plane is rubbish and it’s the last flight out. Everyone is talking and Joni is on my lap twiddling Augie Belle’s ear over his own. I see that Mum was right. My skin brings together different people and places. Pat and I nod at each other.

  ‘How you goin’?’

  ‘I’m goin’ all right.’

  Later I sit with Pat out on the front steps while he waits for his taxi. The moon has come out to say goodbye, big and round like a spotlight shining down on the front porch and leaving the rest of the street a patchwork of shadows. I know Pat’s trying to keep those floodgates closed.

  ‘When you’re lonely, find the moon, Pat. I’ll be watching it too.’

  I wait as the taxi heads off down the road, hear it on the gravel for a good while after. And I let the cicada drone turn my sadness into static.

  Back inside I sit on the couch where Pat had been. It’s still warm.

  William’s eaten too much again and he rubs his stomach. ‘I need a magic cure for this damned heartburn.’

  ‘It’s called restraint,’ says Aunty Cecilia. ‘As in slow down with those Turkish Delights I know you stash in your sock drawer so I won’t find them. Seriously, who does your laundry, Dad?!’

  I say maybe we have some restraint in the bathroom cabinet. Everyone laughs which is inappropriate because you have to take your health seriously.

  Then Joni says he knows where it is. Out of the blue Joni cashes in on those words he’s been storing up. I knew he’d been listening all along. He got a glass of water, put it down next to William and whispered in his ear.

  ‘The magic,’ William says as he looks up at Aunty Cecilia and Jules who can’t believe what they’re hearing. ‘He says the magic is inside the water.’

  There are tears in everyone’s eyes, but I just roll mine ’cause I’ve been saying that for years.

  Epilogue

  Sometimes I can still hear that wolf inside of me, howling quietly. Like he’s getting smaller and wants someone to hear him before he disappears altogether. That wolf is sad because his words are fading into the past. We’re always losing time and love, I tell that wolf. But he doesn’t reply.

  I don’t really know if Mama ever got back home. She is with me but she has also disappeared. Now I think of being inside that painting she used to stare at in the art gallery, where the sheep is crying over her dead baby in the snow. I get goosebumps because the wind is howling all around. I’m crouching right next to the sheep feeling like that lamb of hers is mine too, and the world is empty apart from our grief. It doesn’t matter that I’m human and she’s a sheep; we have lost the same part of ourselves. Maybe with time I’ll be somewhere else in that picture, further back and out of sight. Down the hill where a warm fire burns on. I’ll sit by the window knowing I am safe because any sound in the night is too far away to hear.

  It’s Tuesday and I’m expecting a call from Pat. I have a feeling he’s gonna let me know about the special someone his heart has found. I will let him tell me even though that blue-faced, orange-mohawked hoatzin bird still flies over his place keeping watch for me. No one knows the shape of their heart until someone else steps inside; let them see how deep and wide it really is.

  I can hear the phone ringing now. That Pat O’Brien, he’s right on time.

  Thanks to Mum, Dad, Andreas, Edwin, Kez, Nina, Jess, Monica, Dr Jeanine Leane, Aunty Maureen and Lucy the magpie.

  Cath Moore is of Irish/Afro-Caribbean heritage. She was born in Guyana, raised in Australia and has lived in Scotland and Belgium. She now lives in Melbourne. Cath is an award-winning screenwriter, a teacher and a filmmaker. Metal Fish, Falling Snow is her first novel.

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company

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  Copyright © Cath Moore, 2020

  The moral right of Cath Moore to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  Published by The Text Publishing Company, 2020

  Book design by Jessica Horrocks

  Cover images by oxygen/Getty and iStock

  Typeset in Stempel Garamond 11.5/17 by Duncan Blachford, Typography Studio

  ISBN: 9781922330079 (paperback)

  ISBN: 9781925923513 (ebook)

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia.