Ghost River

by Tony Birch

  ‘What a shot! Can we get down to the bike from here?’

  ‘There’s no way down. We’ll have to cross at the falls and swim over from Deep Rock.’

  ‘We have to be quick, before the branch breaks off and I lose the bike to the river.’

  Deep Rock was bordered by a concrete ledge separating the pool from the river. Sonny stood on the ledge and looked across to his bike, dangling from the tree above the water.

  ‘How we gonna get it down?’

  ‘Easy. We swim across, one of us climbs the tree and unhooks the bike and lowers it to the water. We tow it back across the river between us.’

  ‘I don’t reckon we have much time before that branch snaps.’

  ‘After you then, Sonny.’

  Sonny dived into the water, swam to the far bank and rested on a tree stump at the bottom of the cliff-face, waiting for Ren.

  ‘Hurry.’ He waved.

  Ren dipped his hand in the water and scooped out a bug. It swam in circles in the small pool of water cupped in his hand. He was about to slam his hands together and squash the bug, but changed his mind and dipped his hand into the water a second time and watched as the bug swam away. He stood up, dived, turned under the water and swam across the river backstroke, catching the sun on his chest. He threw his head back as far as possible, until he could see the hanging bike. He flipped over onto his stomach and swam the last few strokes to the cliff edge.

  Sonny welcomed him by spitting a mouthful of water in his face. ‘Could you be any slower, face ache?’

  ‘Don’t be calling me names, Sonny. Or you can get the bike on your own.’

  Sonny spat another mouthful of water at him. ‘I reckon you should climb the tree. That branch looks like it’s about to snap. You weigh less than me.’

  Ren scaled the tree quicker than a cat. As he got higher he wrapped one arm and both legs around the tree trunk and tried to guide the front wheel of the bike over the end of the branch it was hooked on. The bike was too heavy. He let go of the wheel and collapsed against the tree trunk.

  ‘I can’t do it, Sonny.’

  ‘Yes, you can. Climb a little higher and get a better grip.’

  ‘I can’t get higher.’

  ‘C’mon, Ren. One more try.’

  Ren shifted his weight and stretched out his arm, grunting and swearing until he’d lifted the wheel over the top of the branch. The bike slipped from his grip at the moment he called out to Sonny, ‘In the water! Grab it!’

  Sonny dived from the bank as the bike was about to go under, and hooked a leg through the frame. Ren jumped out of the tree, landed next to the front wheel and wrapped an arm around the handlebars. He roped a leg through the frame and tried swimming breaststroke with his stomach resting on the handlebars. He wasn’t sure how Sonny was doing, but he felt like he was getting nowhere. He was about to give up and let the bike sink, when between them they got into a rhythm, making their way to the opposite bank until they could stand, their feet sinking into the muddy riverbed.

  ‘Hold on to it, Sonny,’ Ren spluttered, coughing up water. ‘I’ve had it.’

  Sonny dragged the bike the last few feet and tried lifting it onto the bank. He couldn’t do it on his own. Ren waded across to him and grabbed the front wheel.

  ‘One … two … three.’ The boys hurled the bike onto the riverbank, where it landed with a heavy thud. They stood in the waste-deep water laughing. Sonny crouched down, brought a handful of mud up from the bottom and slung it at Ren. The ball of mud hit him in the centre of his forehead and slipped down his face. Although they were worn out they got into a celebratory mud fight until Sonny called a truce, ducking below the surface and washing the mud from his body. Ren paddled to the edge of the river.

  Sonny waded across to him and whispered, ‘Ren, look at this.’ A brown snake, no more than a couple of feet long, slid between them.

  ‘Which snake’s poisonous? The black or the brown one?’ he asked.

  ‘Not sure. One of them. I forget which.’

  They didn’t move an inch until the snake had slipped away. Ren got out of the water and picked up the bike. He noticed someone further along the bank, midway between where he was standing and the falls, a man dressed in army greens, crouching forward and peering into what Ren thought looked like a telescope.

  ‘Sonny, take a look at this fella.’

  ‘Can’t see nothing.’

  ‘Not from there, you can’t. Hop out of the water. There’s someone spying. See him now?’

  Sonny scrambled onto the bank. ‘Yeah, I see him. What’s he doing snooping down here? I’m gonna ride over and ask him what he’s up to.’

  ‘You can’t do that.’

  ‘Course I can. This is our river.’

  Sonny took the bike from Ren, straddled it and pedalled off.

  The workman spotted the two boys heading his way. He waved at them and smiled. When they got close Ren read the words sewn into the pocket of his shirt – ROAD TRANSIT AUTHORITY.

  ‘How are you going, lads? Warm day.’ He smiled, looking up at the sun. He had straw hair and wore sunglasses. He seemed friendly enough to Ren.

  ‘What are you looking at with the telescope?’ he asked the workman.

  ‘It’s not a telescope. We’re surveying along here. This instrument provides accurate measurements of distance, height and the contour of the land. Would you like to take a look?’

  He smiled again. Sonny was having none of his friendliness. He leaned back on the bike and crossed his arms.

  ‘I’ll take a look,’ Ren said.

  ‘Good. Hang on a second.’ The workman pulled a walkie-talkie from his belt, pressed a button and spoke into it. ‘Stan, give us an upright, mate.’ He put a hand on Ren’s shoulder. ‘Okay. You take a look through the level and you’ll see my mate holding an upright pole.’

  Ren bent forward and closed one eye. He could see numbers and lines, and in the distance another workman standing on a rise, dressed in the same uniform, holding a striped wooden pole.

  ‘Can you see him?’

  Ren stood up. ‘What’s he doing?’

  The man pointed to the words on his chest pocket. ‘We’re from the RTA, and we’re doing the survey ahead of the excavation for the freeway coming through here. It’s our job to measure and peg the ground before the explosives team come in and begin their work. Once the powder monkeys have done their job it will be over to the bulldozers. We can’t lay a major new road without knowing exactly where it has to go. We don’t want to blow up the wrong hill.’

  He laughed out loud, as if he’d told a joke. But there was nothing funny about what he’d said as far as the boys were concerned.

  ‘But there’s no roads down here,’ Ren said.

  ‘Not yet. But there will be soon enough. Five lanes of freeway, each way, stretching from here to the eastern suburbs.’

  Ren couldn’t make sense of what the man was saying.

  ‘Going where?’

  ‘Exactly where you were looking through the level. We’re going to gouge out that hill and excavate through here, and …’ He turned and faced the other way. ‘See the marker ahead, through the trees there?’

  He was pointing towards another striped pole, pitched in the ground on a low hill above Deep Rock.

  ‘The freeway will head in that direction.’

  ‘How they gonna do that?’ Sonny interrupted. ‘You can’t put a road next to the old swimming pool. There’s no room for it.’

  The workman’s smile disappeared. ‘It’s a freeway, son, not a road. And it takes up a lot of land. Accordingly, the hill here will be dynamited, the ground will be bulldozed, and a stretch of the river will need to be realigned. The derelict swimming basin you’re referring to will be dynamited and demolished. As will most of the land you see here.’

  Sonny’s face expre
ssed the bewilderment both he and Ren felt. ‘You can’t go and blow it up. Tell him, Ren.’

  ‘It will be demolished,’ the workman interrupted. ‘And it’s a good thing too. You boys shouldn’t be swimming anywhere along this section of river. The water here is contaminated.’

  ‘No, it’s not,’ Sonny protested. ‘We swim here all the time and we’ve never been contaminated.’

  The man packed up his gear and rested the tripod on his shoulder. ‘Oh, it is contaminated. Our scientists have tested the water along here. Whether you like it or not, you won’t be swimming here for much longer. All of this land, all that you can see, will be bulldozed and built over within the next three years.’

  He studied the boys a little closer, their muddy faces, scrawny hair and Sonny’s prehistoric bike. ‘I don’t know how it happened, but somehow the world has passed this place by. These old tracks and pathways don’t appear on any of our survey maps. This whole area has been a dumping ground for too long. The job has come to us to clean it up and prepare it for the future.’

  He turned his back on the boys and walked away, whistling as he went.

  Sonny leaned over the handlebars of his bike. ‘Can it be true, what he said?’

  ‘Course not. Nobody can blow up the river. He’s a smart-arse.’

  ‘He looked like a smart-arse, alright. And did you hear the big word he used? Accordingly. Only a smart-arse would use a word like that.’ Sonny defiantly spat on the ground. ‘Nobody’s touching our river.’

  Sonny dinked Ren along the track, passing the falls, the wheelhouse and the pontoon. The sun had fallen behind the cotton mill. It left a sawtooth shadow across the river, biting it in half. Ren could smell the campfire ahead and saw someone moving about under the bridge.

  ‘We should tell Tex about the road, Sonny. If the bulldozers are going to come through here they’ll be thrown off their camp again.’

  Tex was resting in an old car seat. He was mumbling to Tallboy and sharing a drink. Big Tiny and Cold Can were curled up in the humpy, and the Doc was resting on his haunches over the fire, warming his hands. Tex shielded his eyes with one hand. He had trouble seeing anything at all from a distance.

  ‘Who are yas?’ he called, as the boys rode towards him.

  ‘Cool Hand Luke,’ Sonny called out. ‘Shaking it here, boss.’

  ‘Ya can fuck off then. I don’t know any Luke.’

  The boys jumped off the bike and let it fall to the dirt. Tex pointed a finger at Ren. ‘And you’d be?’

  ‘Come on, Tex. You know who I am.’

  ‘Is the bird,’ Tallboy shouted across the fire. ‘Young Wren and the Sonny Boy.’

  ‘Oh! Good then. Me own outlaws. Be good to me and fetch some wood for the fire,’ he said. ‘Old Cold Can’s hit it hard today and gone useless on me. Can’t hold his drink no more, that one.’

  The boys ran around the campsite and along the riverbank picking up dead branches and short logs until they’d built a decent pile of wood next to the fire.

  ‘You after any food?’ Ren asked.

  Tallboy pulled a tin of baked beans and two potatoes out of one coat pocket and a large can of beer from the other.

  ‘You’re some magician,’ Ren said. ‘You got a rabbit in there?’

  ‘Might have.’ Tallboy grinned, showing off a pair of black pegs that passed for his front teeth.

  Sonny loaded the fire with wood and Ren dropped the potatoes in the coals. He also helped Tallboy out, piercing a hole in the baked-bean tin with a rusted screwdriver.

  ‘You want me to open your beer for you too, Tallboy?’

  ‘No need for that, Wren. A feed comes first. Then me and old Tex here will kick on.’

  Ren kneeled next to Tex’s car seat and told him about the surveyor and the plans he’d talked about. ‘He said some of the river will be blown up to build a road here. He called it a freeway.’

  Tex shook his head furiously from side to side and slammed a fist into his open hand. ‘What the fuck is a freeway, Tallboy?’

  ‘Oh, it’s a big wide road and the cars drive real fast on it. I seen one of them up north one time. Frightening, it was.’

  Cold Can woke, stood up and staggered over to the fire. With Tallboy’s help Tex got to his feet. He tugged Ren by the sleeve of his shirt and waved Sonny over to him. ‘Two of you. Outlaws. Fight’s coming and Tex needs you to be ready.’

  He rested a palm on Ren’s head just as he’d done the first day they met. He lay the other hand on Sonny’s shoulder. ‘The river. Now, she needs you most of all. Tex’s time is nearly up and there’s nothin I can do. That’s all I can say. Are you ready to help me?’

  Ren didn’t know what to say. He loved the river, but didn’t know what he could do to stop any change that might be coming.

  ‘I’ll stop em,’ Sonny said.

  ‘Good boy,’ Tex said. ‘You got some mongrel in ya, Sonny. I like that.’

  Big Tiny stuck his head out of the humpy. ‘Neither of them can do bugger all.’

  Tex picked up the end of a fiery log from the fire and threw it in Tiny’s direction. The log landed in front of the humpy and sparked to life.

  ‘Shut your mouth. Ya done nothing for this river. Anytime. She don’t forget. Don’t you be having an accident and fall in. Ya do, Tiny, and she’ll thieve the last breath from your body.’

  Tiny backed into the humpy, fearful of Tex’s words.

  The boys said goodbye and headed for home. Although the air was warm Ren shivered as he neared the wheelhouse, sure he could hear a tangle of snakes slithering in the cellar water. They dragged the bike up the track between them, reached the top, then turned and looked down at the campfire smoke-signals rising in the air. Ren looked further on to Deep Rock. He couldn’t make sense of the idea that someone would want to destroy the river just so people could go for a ride in a car.

  ‘Last smoke,’ Sonny called. ‘Pass the tobacco.’ He fixed his eyes on the water the whole time he rolled his cigarette. ‘They can’t do it. Blow it up. There must be a law to stop them doing something like that.’

  ‘Maybe they can. One of my aunties used to live in a house she and my uncle paid money for. They owned it. Never stopped the government coming along and taking the house away from them. Knocked it over with all the other houses in the street.’

  Sonny stuck his head between his knees and took a deep breath. ‘This is our place. We can’t let them do it.’ He passed the cigarette to Ren. It was perfectly rolled.

  Ren looked up at the sky and watched as a hawk lifted from one of the girders of the iron bridge. It swooped down and glided along the river, its wings tipping the surface of the water. The bird suddenly dipped its beak and plucked something out of the water. Ren couldn’t be certain from such a distance, but it looked like the bird had a rat in its mouth. The hawk flew into the sky and hung over the river before turning and flying back to the bridge.

  Ren left Sonny at the back gate and sat sulking in the backyard toilet, thinking about the damage that might be done to the river. A little while later he heard the sounds of digging in the lane. Except for stray dogs nobody used it but him and Sonny. He went into the yard and opened the back gate. Della was scraping mud along the lane with a shovel and tipping the mess into a rubbish bin. She was without her scarf and her hair hung across her face.

  Ren was surprised when she looked up at him and smiled. ‘My father doesn’t want the bad smell entering our church. We will begin services soon.’

  ‘Services?’

  ‘Yes. We have been sent here by the Messenger to hold the Gatherings.’

  ‘From where? Your father, he sounds like an American. You too, sort of.’

  ‘Oh, we’ve been there, to the United States. My father trained there, with the Messenger himself. When the time came for my father to be tested, and he passed the test, he was sent to missio
n. We’ve been to many places across the world, my father speaking His word. And now, he has been called here to save.’

  ‘To Collingwood? Good luck to you. People are too far gone to be saved round here. What was the test your father passed?’

  ‘A test of pain,’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Another follower held one of my father’s hands on a wooden table and stood a nail on it. We watched as my father drove the nail through his hand with a hammer.’

  Della spoke the words with no more drama than if she were telling Ren how to thread needle and cotton. He was sure the story couldn’t be true, but was polite enough to say nothing. He watched as Della collected a shovelful of muck. ‘It’s dog shit,’ he offered, which wasn’t really necessary, he thought, as soon as he had made the comment, seeing as Della was the one shovelling it. ‘It’s dumped mostly, out of the backyards.’

  Della didn’t seem interested in Ren providing her with the history of local dog shit. She tucked her fringe behind her ears, grabbed hold of a broom leaning against the stable wall and began sweeping. Ren couldn’t think of anything better to do so he grabbed the shovel and worked the shit and mud towards the broom. Della swept muck onto the shovel and he tipped it into the bin. It wasn’t long before the section of lane behind the stable had been swept clean.

  ‘I saw you, just now, coming across the road from behind the factory wall, with your friend. I’ve seen you coming from there before. Where do you go?’

  Her eyes blinked a little nervously, as they’d done when Ren first saw her in the stable. He was caught off-guard and wasn’t sure what to say.

  ‘Where do we go?’

  ‘You don’t have to tell me, if you don’t want. I’m sorry for being curious. My father tells me that curiosity leads to sin.’

  ‘I must be a big sinner myself,’ Ren said. ‘I’m always curious. My mum reckons it’s a good thing.’

  Della raised a corner of her mouth. Ren was pleased. It wasn’t quite a smile, he thought, but he’d get one out of her soon enough.

  ‘We go to the river, down behind the mill.’

  Her eyes lit up. ‘There’s a river close by?’