Rainfish

by Andrew Paterson

  Someone said, ‘Hey!’ and I nearly had a stroke.

  There was a head sticking up above the back fence. A kid my age, with big ears. He was chewing. I got the feeling he’d been watching me for a while.

  I said, ‘You nearly made me crap myself.’

  He stopped chewing and said, ‘You did crap yourself.’

  He wanted me to look around and check, but I just said, ‘No I didn’t.’

  ‘It’s all down your leg.’

  ‘Yeah, good one.’

  He seemed to think for a while. ‘Fuck off,’ he said finally, and then he disappeared.

  ‘No, YOU fuck off,’ I yelled, though not so loud that it could be heard by Mum in the kitchen.

  He didn’t answer.

  I declared the ball lost and the Intergalactic Finals officially postponed, and as I went back to the house I thought about the reality-shifting fact that there was a boy my age on the other side of my back fence.

  That he’d told me to fuck off didn’t bother me; most kids in Fingleton said fuck all the time when adults weren’t around. Those who didn’t were rich—they drove around in nice cars and ate chocolate biscuits. The kids who did say it were rough and poor—they got in trouble, got dirty. If you pushed them too far you’d get a punch in the ear. Everyone wanted to be the second type of kid, so everyone said fuck, which made it hard to distinguish one type from the other. The clue was the way you said it: you needed a casual punchiness. I used to practise saying it, but I never got it quite right because I was a third type: I was like the posh kids but I was poor. Not many kids wanted to hang around with me—usually only Oliver West or Coldy. Connor was even worse at saying fuck than I was, but he had the excuse of being smart. Smart people almost never said fuck right.

  The kid over my back fence said it right. I could get walky-talkies, I thought, and throw one over the fence to him and we could talk to each other. Connor wouldn’t even know he existed.

  I walked around the house a few times, then walked out the front gate and found myself turning right then right again into Shoe Street of all places. I realised I was going to the swamp. Why I was going I had no idea; all I knew was that I had an overpowering urge to be there and that all of a sudden my heart was pumping fast and I had a cold sweat on my neck.

  I’d just passed Coldy’s place when I heard him yell, ‘Aaron!’

  He was in his driveway waving at me. He said, ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Nowhere,’ I replied.

  ‘Want to come over and play with my train set?’ The famous train set: I’d gone over his place with the promise of a go of the train set before, only to be told it was broken or something. There probably wasn’t any train set. On the other hand, that time his mum had given me three mint slices.

  ‘Yeah, all right,’ I said. ‘But just for a bit.’

  Coldy’s place had fishing nets piled in the front yard with bits of seaweed stuck in them and a crab’s claw, and fishing nets spread out under the mango trees in the backyard. Everything smelled like petrol and fish. Under the house was a pulled-to-bits motorbike that belonged to some brother who was so old he had a beard and a girlfriend.

  We went upstairs.

  ‘Ross?’ Coldy’s mum called from their kitchen.

  ‘Yeah, what?’

  He shocked me the way he talked to his mum—when he said stuff like that he’d look at me as if to say, See what a rebel I am?

  ‘Have you got a friend with you?’ she asked in a too-hopeful way, and she stuck her head round the kitchen door with a friendly smile on her face and a smoke in her hand.

  Coldy grabbed my arm and pulled me back downstairs, saying, ‘Course I have. We’re going to go look at the trains.’

  ‘Remember what your dad said about just looking, okay?’ said Coldy’s mum.

  The train set was in a downstairs spare room which was in exactly the same position as Connor’s room at our house, which is what had first made me realise that our house and Coldy’s were exactly the same. Mum told me that that was because most of our suburb had been built by the sugar mill for the workers in the old days, and it’d been cheaper to just build the same house over and over.

  The train set was on a ping-pong table in the middle of the room, complete with painted papiermâché mountains, a lake of blue cellophane, a city of Monopoly houses and matchbox skyscrapers. Coldy pressed a button on the remote and the train buzzed round the track.

  When I asked if I could have a go he held the remote behind his back. ‘Dad said I can show people but only I’m allowed to control it.’

  After a while there was a knock, and Coldy hid the remote as his mum came backing through the door with two cups of Milo and some cream-cheese sandwiches on a tray.

  I said, ‘Thanks, Mrs Caulderson,’ and Coldy said, ‘Thanks, Mum,’ and she smiled and backed out of the room and we ate the sandwiches and drank the Milo in silence.

  Eventually Coldy let me have a go of the train, hovering nervously as I pushed the little lever to full speed.

  I had a few goes and then I said, ‘Well, I better be off.’

  ‘You can come over and play with it whenever you want. There’s more trains in the box. There’s a really new one,’ said Coldy.

  ‘Yeah, okay. Sounds good,’ I replied.

  ‘And I’m getting some new GI Joes next week. A mate of mine’s dad works at the GI Joe factory and he said he can get me however many I want. Even ones they don’t sell in Australia. You should come over and play with them.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said as I left, thinking, I, Aaron Tate, hereby pledge not to play with Coldy again for the entire holidays.

  By then it was late afternoon. The cane beetles had begun to emerge from wherever they spent their days, and as I hurried along Shoe Street they were buzzing all around me, and above me the first flying foxes were heading to the banana fields. By dusk they’d be a black stream across the sky.

  It occurred to me that I was returning to the scene of the crime just like they say criminals always do. I raced to the T-intersection, then crossed the vacant lot and began to make my way along the path towards the clearing. I thought about crocodiles. They were probably unlikely. But it would have been full of snakes for sure. Don’t think about snakes, I told myself. Or anything. Just keep going.

  It was twilight when I slid down the bank. Cicadas were throbbing in the grass all around me. The inside of the drain seemed even blacker than before, and I thought back to Peter’s story about the river thing that his friend had caught and wondered if it had escaped up a drain like that one, or maybe one connected to it.

  I closed my eyes and put my arm in and felt around. I felt a breath of cool air. The cold concrete. And then the bottle. And the rosary beads. I pulled them out. For some reason I was relieved to have them in my hands. The rosary beads were heavier than they looked. The gold shone dully, even in the weak light. Some of the beads were worn smooth. I imagined people praying with them down the years, kneeling in churches, over coffins, by sickbeds. I imagined the red jewel being prised from the wall of a jewel mine, and the wonder in the dirty-faced miner’s eyes as he held it with both hands. I imagined the beads being passed from the shaky hand of an old man to his young priest son. And now they were my responsibility.

  A TV was on in someone’s house not far off. I slid the beads back up into the drain and, as the last of the daylight left, started for home.

  As I neared our front gate I noticed something in the gutter—it was one of Mum’s necklaces. Red glass beads that she never wore. I picked it up.

  ‘What are you doing?’ yelled Connor. He was sitting on the front veranda with his back to the wall so you could hardly see him. ‘Put it back and come up here.’

  I did what I was told. He had his schoolbag next to him and his homework book with the list of suspects.

  ‘It’s bait,’ he said. ‘I think the thieves live close by. If I see someone taking it, then I’ll have my prime suspect.’

  I knew better than
to question his plan: when Connor got an idea in his head it was impossible to get it out. It was reassuring, in a way. He wouldn’t be trying something so dumb if he was close to catching us.

  ‘So what was that clue you were talking about?’ I asked.

  He didn’t answer. He was watching the necklace, which was barely visible now in the darkness.

  ‘You didn’t find a clue, did you,’ I said.

  He put his hand into his pocket and then put something into my hand. It was one of the religious medallions.

  ‘Found it on Shoe Street,’ he said. ‘Detective work, Aaron, is like a giant game of Guess Who. Everyone in the world is on the board to start off with. You get your clues, you start flipping people down. It was someone from around here. For sure. Two boys. They probably live within a block. And I’m going to find them.’

  6

  AN OLD STORY

  THE BEST TREE to climb in our backyard was the avocado tree—it had hardly any green ants or stinkbugs, and there was a branch where you could sit without needing to hold on, and if you tucked your legs up it was a pretty good hiding spot. The next morning I was up there trying to work out what I’d do if the police came. I’d decided to run to the bush near Polly’s Creek and find a little hollow and pull a sheet of corrugated iron over it for a roof and then sneak into town on moonless nights to get stuff like a sleeping bag, fishing line to catch fish on and a Swiss army knife for everything else. Also, I was in the tree to avoid Connor, hoping not to give him any more clues.

  And apart from that I was reading a book called Aboriginal Tales of the Far North by Alistair Clarke, which was a collection of stories an explorer reckoned he’d been told by local Aborigines a long time ago. Clarke Park in town was named after Alistair Clarke even though, according to Mum, his ‘exploring’ had never actually taken him any further north than Brisbane. On the book’s tattered cover was a picture of a snake that was supposed to be the rainbow snake that made all the rivers. I was reading it because the thing in the drain in Peter’s fishing story had reminded me of the bunyip in the story on page fifty-two. The story was called The Rainfish.

  ‘In the Dreamtime,’ the story began, ‘the local Aboriginal people lived by the riverbank. They ate wallaby and goanna and they speared fish and cooked it on the fire. They had lots of ceremonies, but of all of them the rain ceremony was the most important. But one rainy season, though the people performed their ceremony, the rains didn’t come. The old men sang rain songs around the fires at night, they used rain-making stones, but each morning the sky was clearer and bluer than the one before. The water in the streams dried up and all that was left of the river was one muddy little puddle. The kangaroos went off to look for water, and the snakes and the lizards hid in their homes because it was too hot to go outside. The people were thirsty but when they drank the muddy water they got sick.

  ‘One day the old men of the tribe got together and made a plan. They knew that the rainfish controlled the rain and they knew the waterhole where they lived but no one ever went near it because a bunyip lived there. They decided that someone better go and see the rainfish. A boy named Mullaya asked if he could be the one to go.

  ‘Though Mullaya could be reckless, he was a fast runner and brave boy and the elders agreed. So Mullaya set out the next morning carrying his favourite spear.

  ‘The further from the river he got the drier the land became. The rainforest which was usually very green was all dead and grey and the earth was dusty and the grass was curled up and black like it had been burnt in a fire. He walked across the country, he walked for days until he arrived at the home of the rainfish. He knew he was in the right spot because the forest there was still green. But no birds were singing and no animals were around because they were all afraid of that place. Mullaya tiptoed in there, keeping his spear handy, but there was no sign of the bunyip. Soon he came upon a waterhole that was full of clear water. He crept to the edge to take a drink and that was when he saw the rainfish all huddled together asleep in the middle. He splashed with his hand and shouted, “Wake up, rainfish, it’s time for it to rain.” He threw a rock into the water, but still they didn’t wake up. Mullaya became angry then, and he threw his spear into the water and killed one of the rainfish.

  ‘There was a noise like thunder. The rainfish scattered and hid in the reeds, and Mullaya became afraid and ran away, leaving his spear in the water. And as he ran there was a strong wind and behind the wind came rain.

  ‘When Mullaya returned to his tribe they greeted him like a hero and called him “Mullaya the Rainmaker”.

  ‘But the rain kept on and didn’t stop and soon there was a flood, and the people had to climb the tallest tree in the land so they wouldn’t drown.

  ‘Now the bunyip that lived with the rainfish was the sort that swam about. When the floodwaters rose up he left his waterhole and circled the tree, calling out, “Where’s that one they call rainmaker?” The old men became suspicious and demanded Mullaya tell them what he had done. When he confessed that he had killed a rainfish they threw him into the water, and the bunyip ate him up. After that the bunyip was satisfied and swam back to his waterhole and the rain stopped and the water went down and the people climbed off the tree again. But from that day on they were careful never to kill a rainfish.’

  I closed the book. Just as I thought, it didn’t actually say what the bunyip looked like. The first time I’d read it I’d pictured a skeleton monster, or maybe a spider. I hated spiders. Now it sounded more like a dragon or a dinosaur. Maybe a miniature tyrannosaurus that could swim.

  ‘What are you up to?’ said Connor, nearly surprising me right off my branch. He was under the avocado tree, with his cricket bat resting on his shoulder. He practised a perfect on-drive.

  ‘Nothing.’

  He practised a leg glance. ‘You seen the cricket ball?’

  ‘No,’ I said. It was in a pot plant under the back stairs.

  He practised a hook shot. ‘I was thinking of maybe going and hitting a few balls in the nets.’

  ‘By yourself?’ I asked. He obviously wanted me to play with him. There was no way.

  ‘Course not. Damon’s gunna come later, he said. And we might go sleuthing after that, which is another word for detecting, for your information. In the meantime you can play if you want.’

  Damon!

  ‘When did you organise this?’ I asked, trying to sound like I didn’t care.

  ‘He came round this morning while you were having brekky.’

  ‘Did he say anything about me?’

  Connor looked at me as if I’d just slammed a cream pie into my own face. ‘Why would he say anything about you?’

  I thought he must have come because he’d wanted to give me a message.

  ‘I’ll come if I get to bat first,’ I said.

  ‘Nup. But if you bowl I’ll hit catches.’

  I knew he wouldn’t hit catches—but it was a chance to talk to Damon.

  ‘Fine,’ I sighed, and I jumped down from the tree. ‘Let’s go.’

  7

  BROKEN GLASS

  I FOLLOWED CONNOR out the front gate and past Mum’s glass-bead necklace, which was still in the gutter.

  ‘Aren’t you going to pick that up?’ I asked.

  ‘I still might get clues off it. You never know, when we come back it might be gone,’ said Connor.

  And so we went to the nets on the oval, in the shade of the fig tree, and I soon found myself bowling and bowling and bowling without Connor hitting a single catchable catch.

  I always bowled my best against Connor. But unfortunately my best was so crappy that even Connor, who was woeful against kids his own age, could smack ball after ball effortlessly into the net. ‘That’s a four’, he’d say under his breath as he hit it, or ‘excellent shot’. If I asked what he’d said he’d look innocent and say ‘nothing’. And if I did manage to get him out I’d usually only last a few balls before he got me out. I don’t know why I bowled and bowled at him an
d only stopped when I had a tantrum or he lost interest. I can only say it was because he was the big brother and I was the small one.

  He’d just slogged another ball past my ankles and mumbled ‘there’s his fifty’, and I’d just decided to hell with him and cricket in general, when I saw Damon strolling across the oval towards us.

  Right, Connor, I said to myself, you’re gunna get it now, see how you like this one.

  I went back to my mark, and kept going till my run-up was twice as long as usual. I carefully positioned the ball between my fingers. Then, without even glancing at Damon, I tiptoed, then jogged, then charged towards Connor with all my spite. Just before my front foot hit the crease I leapt and turned side on, pointed my elbow at his head and, with the other arm, sent the ball searing down the pitch.

  Connor walked up on it and executed a textbook forward defence.

  The ball rolled back to me.

  ‘Not bad. You’re getting better,’ he said.

  Damon was laughing. He was doubled over with laughter, slapping his leg. ‘What a classic,’ he said.

  I left the ball where it was and turned for home.

  Damon said, ‘Aren’t you coming sleuthing?’

  Connor said, ‘His knickers are in a twist.’

  ‘No they’re not,’ I said. They were, but Damon obviously wanted me to go along. So I turned back.

  ‘I’m coming,’ I said.