by Tony Birch
‘What time do you need to be at the track?’
‘Early as I can get there. You help me with the paper round and we’ll take off straight after that. I’ll shout you an egg and bacon breakfast in town.’
‘If we come up with a winner do we have to hand the ticket over to Rory?’
‘Nah. He says we keep everything we earn, except for ten per cent off the top. He says that’s a standard manager’s fee.’
‘Rory’s our manager now? We have Vincent running our lives as well.’
‘Will you help me or not?’
‘Sure. But tomorrow we have to come up with a plan to get out of this trap Vincent has put us in. You told Rory what’s going on? Maybe he could help us.’
‘I been meaning to talk to him about it, but with him being sick I don’t want to worry him. He’s already gone out of his way to help me.’
Ren slept poorly that night and went downstairs early in the morning. Archie was getting ready for work, pouring water into a thermos flask. ‘What are you doing up?’
‘I was gonna make a cup of tea.’
‘You look worried. Something on your mind, Charlie?’
‘Nah. I’m okay. I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep.’
Archie put his thermos in his work bag along with his sandwiches. He slung the bag over his shoulder. He looked at Ren, sure there was something more going on with the boy than a restless night.
‘You change your mind, if there’s something you want to talk about, you let me know.’
CHAPTER 14
Once Archie had left for work Ren sat on the couch with a cup of tea thinking over how he and Sonny could escape Vincent’s clutches. Backed into a corner, Sonny was likely to do something drastic that would end with him in more strife, Ren thought. He soon fell back to sleep only to be gently shaken awake by Loretta a couple of hours later. He sat up, unsure of where he was.
‘What’s the time, Mum?’
‘Nearly eight. How’d you end up down here on the couch?’
‘Eight! I’ve missed the paper round. And the emu run.’
‘What are you talking about? Emus?’
He ran upstairs, got dressed and bolted out of the house. He ran next door to Sonny’s and knocked. When there was no answer he loudly called Sonny’s name. Nobody answered. He ran around to the back lane, skipping puddles, and picked up a small stone. He threw it at Sonny’s bedroom window and waited. Still nothing. Shivering in the cold, he kicked the door open into the yard. Sonny’s bike was resting against the rubbish bin. He pushed it into the lane, jumped on and rode around the corner into the street, quickly picking up speed. A terrier ducked under the fence of a house towards the end the street and ran after him, barking madly. Ren turned the corner and almost ran into Spike, trotting down the middle of the road. He skidded to a halt.
‘Spike. I’m after Sonny. He finished his round yet?’
‘He never turned up this morning and no papers went out. Customers have been coming in the shop complaining all morning. Next time Brixey sees Sonny he will drill a hole in his head. He sent me looking for him.’
‘I just knocked at his door and he’s not home. You sure he never came into work?’
Nothing angered Spike more than the suggestion that he wasn’t quite with the world, mentally. ‘I’m not a stupid person,’ he grumbled.
‘I never said you were, Spike. It don’t make sense, that’s all.’
‘Maybe he’s afraid of that copper.’
‘Which copper?’
‘The ugly one with no hair.’
‘Foy, out front of the shop? That was weeks back, Spike. Sonny hasn’t missed a day’s work since then.’
‘But he come this morning too, the copper. He was parked out front of the shop. I saw him and he saw me. Then he took off, driving real slow with the windows down and looking round like he was after someone. I was putting the gum machine out in the street. It was just before Sonny’s start time.’
‘Did you see which way he drove after he left the shop?’
‘Yep. Along the railway line. Same way I’ve just come. You think Sonny’s in trouble?’
‘Not sure. If you see him be sure to tell him about Foy. And ask him to leave a note on my window.’
‘Your window?’
‘He’ll know, Spike. Make sure you tell him. I’m gonna try finding him myself.’
Ren rode back along the street to the lane. He was about to open Sonny’s gate when he heard a sermon coming from the stable. The Reverend must be practising, he thought. He rested the bike against the fence, walked quietly to the stable and pressed his eye to the hole in the timber wall. He could see the Reverend pacing back and forth, looking up at the roof as he spoke.
‘Is it known that the Father was the most remarkable scientist?’ he asked. ‘And though He is a man of peace, is it not a fact that it is Father Divine who is also father of the hydrogen bomb?’
The Reverend stopped, leaned on the back of a chair with one hand and took his white handkerchief from his pocket with the other, wiping his lips before going on. ‘And also, when his chosen followers, John the Revelator and Faithful Mary fell, they did so as they had dared to question Him and betrayed our leader, Father Jealous Divine …’
The Reverend began walking around in a wide circle repeating to himself, ‘Is it not known? Is it not known?’ and clapping his hands together in time. He stopped pacing, sat on the chair and brought his massive hands together. He leaned forward and repeated the question in a quiet, almost womanly voice. ‘Is it not known?’
‘Yes,’ came an answer. It was the voice of a young woman, although it was not Della’s, Ren was certain.
The Reverend stood, stepped back, looked up to the roof again and smiled. He removed his suit jacket and placed it neatly over the back of the chair. He undid the buttons on his white shirtsleeves and rolled them up as he spoke. He took a step forward and disappeared from sight. Ren pressed his ear to the crack in the timber. He could hear the shuffling of feet and what sounded like a chair scraping across the wooden floor. The Reverend whispered what sounded to Ren like a prayer, over and over, and each time the female voice replied, ‘Yes, Father.’
Ren crept away, collected the bike and returned it to Sonny’s yard. There was only one place Sonny could be.
Ren walked alongside the compound fence on his way to the river. After the night Sonny had broken into the yard and crashed the bulldozer it was patrolled day and night. A watchman walked beside Ren on the inside boundary. He took his cap off, exposing a sweaty comb-over plastered to his skull. ‘Where you heading, son?’ he asked.
‘No place.’
The watchman jangled the chain of keys from his belt, as if it provided him with some authority over the boy. ‘You have to be going somewhere.’
‘Not me. No place is good enough.’
The watchman trailed him until Ren had scrambled through the gates into the mill. He headed for the camp, but when he got to it there was no sign of Sonny or the river men. From beneath the iron bridge he could see somebody standing at the edge of the river by the pontoon. It was Della. As he walked along the track towards her he could see that the back of her long dress was covered in mud and the hem was weighted down with twigs and leaves. He snapped a stick laying across the track and Della turned around. She had her head scarf off and was clutching it in one hand.
She looked at Ren as if he was a stranger.
‘What are you doing down here on our river?’ he asked.
‘Your river?’ she answered, genuinely puzzled.
Yeah, my river, Ren thought.
Even though it was cold Della had rolled the sleeves of her woollen jumper back to her elbows. He could see that she had cuts on both hands and her lower arms. They were so fine he thought that they could only have been done with a razor blade. She noticed him staring
at them and rolled her sleeves down.
‘What are you doing here?’ he asked.
Della pushed her hair away from her face, tucking it behind her ears. She watched Sonny closely but didn’t say a word.
‘You know this is mine and Sonny’s place?’ Ren said. ‘No one comes down here without our permission.’ As soon as he opened his mouth he knew it was a stupid thing to say. He and Sonny hadn’t been able to stop anyone coming to the river. It was being bulldozed and blown up in front of them and they hadn’t been able to do a thing about it. ‘I don’t really mind you being here,’ he added, gently this time.
She turned away from him. ‘This isn’t my first visit. I’ve been here before.’
‘You couldn’t have. I come here most days and I’ve never seen you. I know everyone who comes and goes from here.’
She turned back to him. ‘I have been here,’ she repeated. ‘Last week I was watching from my window when you and your friend returned home. I waited until you were in his yard and decided to walk here.’
She might just as well have told Ren she’d broken into his house. ‘Why’d you do that?’
‘You had told me about the river and the waterfall and I wanted to see it for myself.’
After the recent rain the river was running high and fast, and the bank was muddy.
‘I’d move back from the edge, if I was you,’ Ren warned, ‘or you could fall in. That dress will weigh you down and send you straight to the bottom.’
‘Straight to the bottom?’ Della repeated after him.
‘Too right.’
Della concentrated on the passing current as it traced a swirl on the surface of the water and moved towards the iron bridge. The sky had clouded over and it was growing dark. Out of nowhere a flash of lightning tore across the sky. A fresh storm was coming. Ren looked up, sure that the rain was about to arrive.
‘We should head for home. Or you’ll get caught in the wet.’
She turned and stepped towards Ren.
‘I don’t care. I’m used to storms. I’ve lived in places where there are storms far worse than you could imagine. I’ve seen hurricanes and tornadoes so powerful that they can collect whole houses, crush them and scatter them to the wind.’
‘You must have been frightened.’
Della laughed at him as if he were a small boy. ‘I was never frightened. My father was doing His work and no harm could come to him. Or his family. You’re the one who seems to be afraid of the coming storm. Maybe you should run off home?’
Ren stuck his chest out. ‘It don’t bother me. I’m always down here. And if the rain comes I know plenty of places where I can keep dry. Like under the bridge with the old fellas that I told you about.’
Della looked towards the bridge. ‘What happened to their proper homes and families?’
‘This is their home. The river. They’ve lived here for a long time. It’s the only place they got.’
‘I want to see these men.’
‘You can’t. Tex, the boss, he’d have to invite you. And he’s gone a little crazy. He don’t like new people anymore.’
Della looked defiantly at Ren. ‘Well, I want to see them,’ she said again, before nudging past him and heading for the camp, without asking his permission.
Ren had walked down to the river in the hope of finding Sonny, with a terrible thought in the back of his head that Foy might have grabbed him in his car that morning and given him a belting. Or something worse. His stomach turned, half out of anxiety at being so close to Della, and the sinking feeling of betrayal he felt towards a friend who could be in danger.
‘What’s your real name?’ Della asked, looking back at him. ‘I haven’t asked you before.’
‘Ren.’
‘I mean your true name. I’ve heard your friend call you by that name. It’s not a proper name though, is it?’
‘It’s the name Sonny calls me. And the old fellas down here. It’s proper enough to me,’ he said defensively. ‘You talk posh. Do you go to a private school?’
‘I’m schooled at home, by my mother. It’s best for me. And what do you mean by that word? Posh?’
‘It’s the way rich people talk. And how they act. My mother says that they talk with a plum in their mouths, and Archie, my stepfather, reckons the pole up their arse don’t help either.’
‘My family is not rich, if that is what you’re thinking. We work for the church and keep no money of our own.’
‘What work?’
She stopped, turned around and looked at him, again, as if he was a child. ‘God’s work,’ she answered.
Like she means it, Ren thought.
The campsite was empty. It was also a mess. Ren stood the stove up and stacked the pots and pans by the fire. He re-tied the lengths of rope from the tarp to the bridge supports, shook out the blankets and hung them over the string clothesline to dry. Broken Mary was laying on her side. Ren stood her up and cleaned her face.
‘You really care a great deal for these old men.’
‘They’ve been the best friends Sonny and me have known.’
‘How many of them live here?’
‘There used to be five of them. Then one of them, the Doc …’ Ren paused, looked downstream, and thought about the day Tex and the others had put the Doc’s body in the river. ‘The Doc, he got up and left and nobody has seen him since. And then Tallboy went away to find his family. That leaves Tex, Cold Can and Big Tiny.’
‘Your name is Ren. Your friend is called Sonny. And these men have strange names also. Do any of you have proper names?’
‘Oh, Sonny does. He was born with that name. Sonny Brewer.’
Della pointed to the ground. ‘What are these?’
She was looking at two recent drawings that could only have been done by Cold Can. Two faces. One was long and thin, the other more rounded. The long face had one eye wide open and the other one was sleeping. It could only be Sonny’s face. The other, with long full curls sprouting from its head was Ren himself.
Another clap of thunder exploded above them. ‘We really should leave,’ he said.
Della ignored him. She was full of questions. ‘The men who go missing from here, do they come back?’
‘Not often. Tex once told us, Sonny and me, that an old man is like a sick animal. When he’s coming to the end of his time and he knows he’s going to die, he goes off on his own to find some peace and not make a fuss.’
That is what the Doc had done. Ren was certain of it. But he’d only made it as far as the wheelhouse door. He’d left his run a bit late, Tex said at the time. When Tallboy had waved goodbye to the boys for the last time, Ren had later wondered if he was really leaving the river to join his family. Tallboy may have known, like the Doc, that he was sick, and went off on his own to die.
‘It is not right for people to die alone,’ Della said. ‘They must be prayed for.’
‘There’s no one to pray for them and no family to take care of them. And none of them wants to go into the hospital sick. No one would come and visit, except for Sonny and me. Left on their own they’d rot away in a hospital bed. I wouldn’t want to be lonely like that at the end of my life. And the river men don’t want it happening to them.’
‘But if these men have been together for so long and are such good friends they would visit and take good care of each other.’
‘They would visit sometimes. But they have the camp to look after and a feed to chase. And the grog. They like a good drink of a night and wouldn’t be up to leaving the camp.’
‘They would put alcohol before their friends?’ She looked over the empty campsite with disgust. ‘That’s selfish. And sinful.’
Ren felt a need to defend the men again. ‘It’s the way they are. They understand how the grog works. It’s not a sin. It’s the way their life is. Nothing more than that.’
‘Yeah. It’s a convent with a stone church and graveyard belonging to the nuns. And they have a farm with animals.’
‘Show me,’ she ordered.
Ren looked up at the bruised sky. ‘If it rains we’ll get wet.’
‘I don’t care.’
Ren was enjoying Della’s company a little less each minute.
They followed the bend in the river circling the boundary of the farm. Just for a second Ren was sure he’d spotted Cold Can standing in a row of corn and thought that maybe he was working for his and Tex’s supper. When they got closer he saw it was a scarecrow. Della looked across the fields, at the sheep, cows and hens.
‘You must enjoy it here?’
‘Hardly come here. We’re trespassing. Nun’s don’t cop it.’
They reached the graveyard. The wind tore across the fields and it started to rain. Ren ran for the cover of a weeping willow tree and Della followed him. The branches of the tree touched the ground. They were hidden from view.
‘Who is buried here, in the earth?’ Della asked.
‘Old nuns. And I mean ancient. If you read the headstones you’ll see that some of them lived to nearly a hundred years old. Sonny reckons it’s because they never had a drink of beer or smoked a cigarette for their whole lives. And they died vir … vir …’
‘Virgins?’
Ren blushed. ‘They say there are orphan kids buried here too. Nobody knows for sure how many of them there are. Because there are no marked graves and no visitors with flowers.’
‘That’s sad. A grave must be marked for mourners to return and pray for the dead in waiting.’
‘What do you mean, waiting?’
‘The souls of the dead who have yet to be chosen for Heaven or Hell. Prayers must be said for them over the grave if God is to win.’
Ren was tired of Della’s religion talk. ‘Well, can’t find the graves of these kids. Nobody knows where it was they came from, who their family was, and what they did when they were here.’
