Rainfish

by Andrew Paterson

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  ‘You don’t kill them rainfish ’cause they’ll bring trouble. Rainstorms and floods and bad things.’

  Aaron lives with his mum and older brother in a small town on the edge of a rainforest in tropical Far North Queensland. He’s sick of being the little brother, left out of all the interesting stuff the older kids get up to.

  So when he meets Damon he’s keen to impress him. It’s all going well, until Damon suggests they break into the church. Aaron’s nervous and uncomfortable. But he can’t back out now—he’s only just beginning to be accepted.

  When the theft is reported in the local newspaper and the police knock on the door, Aaron finds himself hiding the truth in a tangle of lies. And before long his deep sense of guilt and fear of being found out overwhelm him.

  And then, when he discovers that the mudcod in the old bath in the backyard—the fish he’d caught in the river in the rainforest—are the rainfish of local legend, he becomes convinced that he is responsible for the terrible rainstorms and floods that devastate the town.

  Rainfish is a delightful middle-grade novel exploring childhood innocence—a warm and humorous portrayal of a young boy trying to undo an impulsive mistake.

  To Dad

  CONTENTS

  COVER PAGE

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  1: THE WORST THING I EVER DID

  2: TREASURE

  3: THE END OF THE UNIVERSE

  4: DETECTIVE CONNOR

  5: THE CLUE

  6: AN OLD STORY

  7: BROKEN GLASS

  8: THE BLACK PANTHER

  9: A PLAN

  10: BAIT FOR THE BARRA

  11: AARON AARONSON

  12: PRISON

  13: ANOTHER SECRET

  14: FINGERPRINTS

  15: THE NECKLACE TRAP

  16: MURKY WATER

  17: THE MONSTER

  18: A CONFESSION

  19: THE START OF TERM MASS

  20: GRAN’S SECOND VISIT

  21: THE LAST RAINFISH

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT PAGE

  1

  THE WORST THING I EVER DID

  MUM WAS AT work, Connor was in his room and I was dropping rocks down the storm drain at the end of our street. They ticked and tocked off the concrete sides on their way down. Sometimes you could hear water at the bottom, but not that day.

  I pretended a baby had crawled in there.

  Help, somebody help us, screamed the baby’s imaginary mother, but everyone just stood around doing nothing.

  Let’s make room, ay? I said as I jumped down from my imaginary fire engine, then called, Hang in there, brave little fella. I jammed my arm down the drain as far as I could. Reach out, mate, just a bit further. My whole shoulder and my head were wedged in there. Got ya. All right, mate, I’m gunna pull you up now. Hold on tight.

  My head was stuck. I couldn’t even turn it, and when I tried to move my shoulder it felt like it was dislocating. I pulled harder: lots of pain but no movement. The cool dark air caressed my face. I tried a not-too-loud help, and heard it echo down the depths of the drain. The actual fire brigade might have to rescue me. The whole street would be standing around laughing at my bum sticking up in the air. It’d be on the news: ‘Local idiot gets head stuck in drain.’ I pulled back again; my head felt like it was swelling, getting stucker and stucker. Then suddenly I was out. My shoulder and chin were scratched but I was free, and that felt great. I realised there was nothing to stop me doing whatever I wanted or going wherever I wanted.

  I knocked on Oliver West’s door to see if he wanted to go for an adventure before I remembered he was visiting his cousins in Ingham for the whole holidays.

  I started following the gutter looking for money—a kid I knew once found five dollars in a gutter—but I didn’t even find five cents. No surprise: the people on my street weren’t the clumsy-with-money type. I turned left and left again and then I was on the street behind ours.

  It was so hot and sweaty no one else was outside; the houses and the blue sky were my personal kingdom. I could have walked right through town and out onto the highway with the cars zipping through the cane fields on their way to Cairns or maybe Sydney. I started singing—and not just to myself either, out loud: Thri-llerrr, thri-ller ni-ght—but I stopped when I saw a boy coming along the gutter on the other side of the road.

  His face glinted. He was wearing glasses. It had to be Connor’s friend Damon: no other local kid wore glasses. (Connor wore them but only when he was reading.) Apart from the glasses, his walk gave him away. He walked like a gunfighter, arms hardly swinging, palms turned in towards where his holsters would be. Like he’d practised it in front of a mirror. I felt the urge to turn and run, but in the end I just stood and waited.

  Soon there was only the road between us.

  He said, ‘What was your name again?’

  I’d always thought kids with glasses were wimps, but he wasn’t like that. He had freckles, big caramel blotches all over his face right up to his lips, and a cool Transformers digital watch like the ones they sold for $30 at Mellick’s.

  ‘Aaron,’ I said. ‘What was yours?’

  ‘Damon. What’s Connor up to?’

  Connor was my big brother. ‘Reading a stupid book, probably,’ I said.

  Damon took a cricket ball from his shorts pocket, tossed it up high and caught it. ‘This town’s so boring I’m gunna kill something.’ Damon was new to Fingleton.

  ‘Yeah,’ I agreed, trying to imagine what a big place like Townsville, which is where he came from, was like. Probably had skyscrapers. Traffic lights. McDonalds.

  ‘Astonishing how boring,’ added Damon, repocketing the ball. ‘May as well go to your place and see what Connor’s doing.’

  ‘Or we could go and catch guppies in the swamp behind your place,’ I said hurriedly. ‘There were some fantails there yesterday.’ Fantails are those big guppies with rainbow-coloured tails.

  He squinted at me. And then, to my surprise, said, ‘Come on then, let’s go.’

  We were walking side by side like mates. I tried to copy his walk; from a distance we might have even looked like brothers.

  Connor had told me I should stay away from Damon because he had done ‘illegal things’.

  I said, ‘What’s the worst thing you ever did?’

  ‘I can’t even tell you,’ said Damon. ‘You wouldn’t sleep for a month if I told you.’

  The stones along the side of the road spiked our feet. In Fingleton kids wore shorts and T-shirts and no shoes—shoes were for stuck-up kids. I watched the houses we passed, hoping someone I knew would see us, but no one did.

  Damon said, ‘One time I had a fight and I put the other kid in hospital for a month, and that’s not even the worst thing I did.’

  ‘Wow,’ I said, trying to think what I could tell him if he asked me what the worst thing I’d ever done was, but he didn’t ask.

  The way to the swamp was through the vacant lot next to Damon’s house, which the council only remembered to mow every few months; in between times the grass grew high and people dumped tyres and empty paint tins there, and once an old fridge.

  We picked our way through the grass. There was no fence to mark where the swamp began, just a line where the council stopped mowing, where the knee-high guinea grass changed to shoulder-high guinea grass.

  ‘Definitely croc country,’ said Damon. ‘Hey look, see how the grass is all bent? A croc’s been through here. Uh-oh, it’s a bloody huge one.’

  He was watching me while he was saying this, but I suspected the stories about crocodiles in the swamp were made up to keep kids out, and so I just shrugged and said, ‘
Is that right?’ And, gritting my teeth, I led the way along the thin track, brushing the grass away as I went.

  We came to a dirt bank two metres high, which we slid down into a small clearing. It was surrounded by tall grass on one side and on the other by the reeds that grew along the creek. A concrete drainpipe, half a metre wide, protruded from the bank.

  ‘Not a bad spot, ay?’ I said.

  The clearing had a private, secret feel about it, though from where I was I could still see Damon’s backyard fence. I’d often thought of building a cubby house there and had even drawn a plan once: five storeys with a fireman’s pole to slide down. Damon was looking back towards his house.

  ‘Let’s see if there’s any guppies,’ I said.

  The creek was a tea-coloured, oil-slicked, lukewarm, mostly ankle-deep trickle. Through the reeds I could see some guppies tickling the surface with their tiny mouths.

  ‘There’s some huge ones,’ I said excitedly.

  Armed with an ice-cream container I’d left there the day before I eased into the water and immediately sank shin deep into the muddy bottom. When a guppy came near enough I sprang, landing with a splat.

  ‘Watch it,’ said Damon, wiping his glasses.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said as I scrambled out.

  We peered into the container, now full of pee-yellow water. There was a fantail and a baby and an almost-transparent prawn.

  ‘You can keep them if you want,’ I said. ‘I’ll let you. You can put ’em in a fish tank.’

  ‘Nah.’

  ‘Or just a big bowl or something.’

  Damon stretched his arms. ‘I’m goin’ into town. You can come, or you can stay here.’

  ‘What about the guppies?’ I said, but he just walked off. ‘Wait, I’m coming.’ I poured my catch back into the creek.

  ‘You got smokes at your place?’ Damon asked.

  I’d washed the mud off my legs, and was walking soggily beside him. ‘I don’t think so.’

  We did, but I’d never smoked. I’d never even been to town without an adult.

  ‘I’d kill for a smoke,’ said Damon. ‘Let’s see if we can find one in the gutter. Or I’ll have to bum one off someone.’

  We were on Shoe Street, which was like the other streets in our suburb, with lots of houses that were basically wooden boxes on stilts, with front stairs and back stairs and sometimes a spare room under them like our place had.

  Shoe Street was a main road for local kids but I avoided hanging around there for three reasons. Coldy’s place was the first reason. Coldy was in my class. His mum and dad worked on fishing boats and spent months at sea. Sometimes they took Coldy along. Getting rocked by ocean waves all day while eating nothing but baked beans and getting home-schooled by his less-than-Einstein parents had curdled Coldy’s brain. He was always eating people’s glue sticks, stuff like that, to get attention. For some reason he’d barnacled himself to me—maybe because I lived so close and had been over to his house. If he saw me in the playground or on the street he’d follow me, be right at my elbow, watching me with his fish eyes.

  Their ute wasn’t in their driveway, which probably meant they were fishing, which meant I was in the clear.

  The second reason, hidden behind a neatly clipped hedge, was the only one-storey house on the street. A witch who cursed people to death and disappeared neighbourhood dogs lived there. She could change the colour of her house whenever she wanted. People called it the Magic Red House, and it was bad luck to even look at it, but there it was, white, and looking as innocent as a house could. I’d seen the witch hobbling stiff-kneed in her front garden, and I’d once smelled a meaty, tomatoey smell there: dog stew according to Coldy.

  The third and most important reason to avoid Shoe Street was Stevie Harmison. Stevie had blond hair and the kind of turned-up nose that made girls pass little notes to him in class. He was famous for having jumped off the Henry River rail bridge which was so high it would’ve made a Hollywood stuntman think twice. Stevie was a bully. Once he’d chased me up a tree with a cricket bat and hadn’t let me down for half an hour—all because I’d said you when he’d asked me what I was looking at. He was in grade ten, a year above Connor who was in grade nine, but for some reason he never picked on Connor.

  ‘The houses here suck,’ said Damon. ‘Our house in Townsville’s got three storeys. Everyone on our street’s a millionaire except us. The richest person in this whole town wouldn’t be able to buy a house there. Everyone’s got a pool. Proper in-ground ones, not plastic ones. My ten-speed and all our cool stuff’s still there.’

  Looking round I saw with Damon’s eyes the broken toys bleaching in the front yards and the fallen-down letterboxes. He stopped in front of the Harmisons’, the envy of the street with its tinted windows and wall cladding white as a new Porsche, but he only seemed to notice the pile of junk under the house, which included a broken ping-pong table (I could picture Stevie kicking its legs in after losing a game) and a life-sized cardboard cut-out of a girl in a bikini from a beer promotion. Damon shook his head and walked faster, like he couldn’t bear to be around such crap houses.

  On the whole of Shoe Street we found only two cigarette butts and they were thoroughly smoked.

  ‘I bet you’re wondering how come we live in such a dump now,’ Damon said.

  His house was a dump—worse than our place, even.

  ‘It’s ’cause my dad and my gran had a fight and she kicked us out. But they’re gunna make up soon and then I won’t have to stay here anymore.’

  We crossed the road and cut across the oval that St Rita’s Primary School shared with St Rita’s High School. The oval had a concrete cricket pitch at its centre and in one corner a cricket net under a giant fig tree. Living so close to school was good because I could wake up at eight forty-five and be at school by nine—earlier if I didn’t have a shower.

  ‘I bet you got in lots of trouble in Townsville,’ I said.

  Damon had picked a grass stem and was sucking it like it was a cigarette. ‘When I got caught. I was in a gang called the Evil Deads and I was the leader. I made a rule that to get in you had to have a fight with someone and you had to win. We used to do night raids: that’s when you go out in the middle of the night when everyone’s asleep and smash windows and steal stuff, do break-ins, stuff like that. At school we used to go behind the toilets and have fights and smoke all the time. I bet you never smoked.’

  ‘I want to.’

  ‘Well, you will today.’

  We passed the high school, crossed School Street and were at my old school—I’d just finished grade seven—three concrete double-storey blocks together in a C shape all painted cream, the inner bit of the C being the courtyard. It was eerily quiet, but the stale-lunchbox smell was the same as always.

  ‘I bet you know everyone in this school,’ said Damon, squinting like it was too small to even see. ‘That must be weird.’

  ‘It’s sort of boring. Are you good at schoolwork?’

  ‘Yep. Especially maths and physics. You probably don’t even know what physics is. They teach it in grade twelve. It’s about electricity and space and stuff. When I was in grade eight, me and another kid at my school used to finish our maths early so they taught it to us so we wouldn’t get bored. Which one’s your old classroom?’

  It was on the top floor of the middle block. We climbed the stairs and looked through the glass louvre windows at the plastic desks and chairs facing the blackboard, the statue of Jesus on the cross, and our paintings, which were still Blu-tacked to the back wall. I thought better of pointing mine out: a flame-mouthed dragon I’d been so proud of. It was attacking a stick-men’s castle while the stick men ran about saying, ‘Aaargh’.

  Damon crouched down and began pulling at one of the glass louvres.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Seeing if any are open.’

  ‘Why?’

  There was a loud grating sound. Anyone within a hundred metres would have heard it.


  ‘That’s loud,’ I said, but he kept doing it.

  Breaking and entering is what the police would call it, which was a step up from my previous worst thing I’d ever done—killing our classroom goldfish by pouring chocolate milk into the tank. I wasn’t ready to jump straight to criminal offences. I had to do something.

  ‘There’s someone coming!’ I hissed.

  He stopped, and we both listened, but there was no noise. He looked up at me, eyebrows raised.

  ‘Probably a security guard,’ I said. I was lying: I hadn’t heard anything. ‘They patrol here on holidays,’ I continued. Another lie. I was pretty sure they never patrolled.

  ‘So where is he, then?’ said Damon. He slid the louvre out of its holder and leant it against the wall.

  ‘You can fit through there, right? You’re smaller than me.’

  ‘Nah, I don’t think so,’ I said, though I knew I could. ‘Unfortunately.’

  People went to prison for breaking and entering. Maybe they’d let me off with parole because it was my first offence. Stop being pathetic, Aaron, I told myself. You made the security guard up. We’re not going to get caught.

  It was at that precise moment that I heard the loudest noise I’d ever heard in my entire life.

  2

  TREASURE

  SMAAASSSHHHH!

  Instantaneously we both sprinted down the stairs and out into the playground and threw ourselves behind a bush.

  ‘Whoops,’ said Damon once he’d got enough breath. ‘I accidently kicked the louvre over.’ He started to laugh. ‘You should’ve seen your face.’

  I was puffing too hard to say anything.

  ‘Bet you never ran so quick before, ay? You pushed me out of the way.’

  I shrugged. His eyes narrowed. ‘If you want to hang out with me, you can’t be a chicken.’

  ‘I’m not a chicken.’

  He nodded like he was saying, sure you’re not.

  We took the hedged lane that led between the school and the church, which was a copy of some old church in Europe. Its doors were open so we stuck our heads in. Blue and red light filtered through the stained-glass windows, and clear light from the small windows around the dome high above the altar, but it was mostly dark because of the shadows from all the pillars. We could hear the faint sound of town traffic.