Big River, Little Fish

by Belinda Jeffrey

  Tom scoops a handful of rocks from the ground and stands up. One at a time, he throws them in the water, watching as the ripples radiate out from the exact place the rock went under. It gets him to thinking that an event, an actual impact, occurs so quickly, it’s as if it never really happened. A car crashes into a pole, an old man falls off a ladder, a kid chokes on a grape. It’s only the effect it has that seems real because it doesn’t stop flowing. And you see it, then. Or feel it. That’s the kind of thing Tom’s good at. Seeing things that others don’t.

  Hannah bobs down on her haunches, side-on to the cliff face. She traces the fish outline puckered around the texture of the limestone. Chunks and chips are gouged out of the surface, but the outline is strong. Hannah looks down below it, to the rocky surface on the ground underneath the fish. She traces the letters.

  mot

  And underneath that.

  hana

  ‘You know what they’re saying about the river, Mot. All that rain up north this time of year means it’ll all flood through here.’ She stands. ‘I’ll be the first to go,’ she says, touching her toe to her name which is closest to the ground.

  Tom turns around to look at the fish that someone, something, left here long ago. And under that his own version of his name, and then hers. Tom knows it’s wrong now, the placement of letters in his name. But it’s not something you can undo. He looks at Hannah’s name. It takes someone truly backwards to muck up a name that’s supposed to have no right or wrong way round. It occurs to him that he should carve in the missing ‘h’ sometime. He watches Hannah sweep her hair back from her face.

  ‘Can I tell you something?’ she says, quickly.

  ‘Sure. Anything.’ This is better, he thinks. Forgetting about Miss Pinny and school and what she said. And what might disappear.

  He’d been sitting on the beach feeling like a thick ball of mud was stuck in his guts. Just sitting there, making himself still in the hope it would all go away. Everything about you is wrong, Tom Downs. Fifteen and you can’t even read or write, just like a five year old. You’re born lazy. No responsibility just like your real father. It was either that or scream or kick something. And if he kept still, if he let it melt away, then he could pretend it didn’t hurt. And might not be true.

  Tom loves the way Hannah’s eyes look when she’s got something to tell him. Like bright blue peonies. The shape of her mouth, closed and pushed to one side. She tilts her head and the way he feels in those moments is like she needs him, too, and he’ll never lose her.

  Tom doesn’t fit in to Swan Reach without Hannah around. He’s the odd boy with foster parents and everyone seems to look at him as though there’s something wrong with him. As if they can see things about him that he can’t see. Tom knows his real father couldn’t face the sight of him after he came back from war to find that Lil had died. Oliver Richardson took one look at Tom, told Tom’s foster father, Ted, he was heading up to the pub for a drink, and took off.

  There’s a lot of reasons Tom can’t cope with the thought of Hannah changing. When he isn’t with her, he thinks about what it would feel like to touch her. Really touch her. To hold her hand in his and feel her skin and run his fingers along her lines and creases. But when he’s with her, he thinks he should keep his distance and he puts the contradiction down to just another of his backward ways. He knows his idea of her – his idea of them together – isn’t real, but he likes the feel of being close to it all the same. We come from the same place, she’s said to Tom. Not a real place, but a moment, a memory. What she means is they understand each other. When he says that he talks to his mum sometimes, not Marge, but his real mum, Hannah shrugs as if it wouldn’t be normal not to.

  ‘Well,’ Hannah says. She flicks her hands in front of her body in her excitement. ‘I’m thinking about going round with Harry Caruthers. He hasn’t exactly asked me. But I think he will. What do you think?’

  ‘Shh,’ Tom says as he holds the bottle up to the lambs at the Guthries’ farm. One at a time you greedy buggers.’ He smiles and his dusty coloured hair falls around his face. He’d walked Hannah home after rowing the canoe back to the fishing beach and he won’t go home until he’s seen to the lambs.

  Tom likes looking after the lambs on the Guthries’ farm and for the last few years Mr Guthrie has left the job mostly to Tom and Hannah. The lambs tug against the bottle and his own body jerks with the effort of holding onto it. Beside the one lamb, others are bleating and begging and Tom finishes with one and moves on to the next. He won’t feel calm, himself, until they’re full. Knowing each one of them had a mother who couldn’t feed it. Or rejected it. Or died.

  Tom sets the milking buckets down inside the Guthries’ shed. He hears sounds of Hannah’s family up in the house, chairs scraping, china being set out on the wooden table. Warm light flushing through windows.

  The back screen-door creaks open and slams closed. Tom pokes his head out of the shed to wave at Mr Guthrie as he sits on the old church pew on the back veranda. The end of his pipe glows red as he lights it up. ‘Thanks, Tom,’ he calls out.

  Cobwebs hang in corners of the shed and old kerosene and stewed-fruit tins line the shelves above the bench where Mr Guthrie keeps his bits-and-pieces. Nuts and bolts and nails. With labels on each of the tins. Written in a neat hand on a strip of masking tape. Tom looks at them, like he always does, wondering if this is the day he might actually be able to read what they say without knowing them from memory. But they’re still a strange arrangement of sticks and balls and curves that don’t sit still or behave. Or say any one thing in particular.

  It isn’t that he can’t read at all. He can make out small words. If he really concentrates and doesn’t have anything else on his mind. But rarely at school. With Miss Pinny over his shoulder or standing up the front of the classroom with her ruler slapping her hand and her back so straight. And that look on her face. No lips. Just a thin line of disapproval. And all the other kids – a lot of them younger than him – looking at him, peering over his slate like it’s his eyes that don’t work. And his heart beating up so loud inside his chest and his hands sweating and his brain clamping up tight. Damn he’s fifteen years old and first graders can do better.

  When he was younger he liked looking at words. Sometimes they made pictures and the pleasure it gave him to find a picture like that was something he quickly learnt to shut down. Once he realised it wasn’t normal. Even when he writes words down, which isn’t all that often anymore – there’s a thousand ways to avoid it – people tell him the letters are either in the wrong order. Or backwards.

  Tom stops his bike at the front of the garage beside the petrol bowsers. He walks it around the back past the spare parts and old car bonnets and tyres. His foster father’s garage is in the middle of town, up from the river and the pub. Tom hears spanners clinking and hammering inside the shed and can see the light on in the kitchen in the house beside it. He can smell what’s left of his tea. Something burnt. Potatoes drying out in the oven. Scalded milk, and he thinks it might be pudding and custard for dessert. If Ted and Marge aren’t too mad.

  He leans his bike up against the wall, around the back of the house, and thinks about going inside for tea but decides to head into the garage first. His stomach can wait.

  ‘Hi,’ Tom says, his feet scuffing on the concrete floor, which is covered in a thin film of dust and oil and grease. Ted lies on a trolley underneath a car, with just his legs sticking out from the side. Hearing Tom, he rolls the trolley and appears completely. Grease streaks his face and bare forearms. Tom stands with his hands in his pockets wondering what to say. The wireless is on in the background and it’s Big-Band Hour, but the reception’s unreliable and the music cuts in and out.

  Ted looks at Tom and wipes his hands on his pants. He coughs and Tom hears him sighing and that’s the worst sound right there.

  ‘Found your way home then, son.’


  Tom nods.

  Ted stands up off the trolley to wipe his hands on a rag on the counter. He fiddles with the dials on the wireless but the reception doesn’t improve. It seems these days as if Ted just doesn’t have the energy to be bothered or know what to do with Tom anymore. It’s not like they ever adopted you, Hannah says to him. But then it’s not that simple.

  Ted sighs again and Tom realises how tired he looks. He feels bad for taking so long at the river and the Guthries’. He takes the spanner from Ted’s hand and lies down on the trolley and slides underneath the car. Ted’s feet scrape on the ground as he moves around the workshop. Over the car above Tom’s head, a string of coloured light blubs dance in the breeze and, beside the door, a metal wind-chime tinkles. He should have been home earlier to help. They could have been inside having dinner together half an hour ago if he’d been a good son.

  Tom wishes he could leave school and help Ted in the garage during the day. He could do the heavy work and Ted could take it easier and he knows Ted would let him if it wasn’t for Marge. In her words, they haven’t worked hard for years to have their only son waste his life in a grease pit. Tom watches the way Ted lowers his eyes when she says things like that. They want to give him a chance, a real chance at a better life. Marge has talked of university since he was small. Like saying the very word itself would lift him higher year by year. But Tom can’t be the kind of son they need any more than he can see a way to race bikes one day. Not with being the way he is. There was a whole lot of hope and circumstance banged together fifteen years ago and none of it a perfect fit.

  When Marge looks at him, she sees what he’ll never amount to; Tom can feel it. What Marge sees isn’t real; that Tom only exists in her imagination, a Tom she’s wishing forwards. Could be Tom has brought more disappointment to their lives than if he’d never arrived.

  Once, Tom overheard people talking in town about Mrs Guthrie losing her baby around the time Tom was born and how, according to them, she should have been the one to take Tom in. She still had her milk, one of the women said. But you can’t go back, she continued. Water under the bridge. For a long time, Tom couldn’t help but think he’d robbed Mrs Guthrie of something, too. And then Hannah came along, and Tom discovered it’s not polite to talk about where people come from. Words like ‘adoption’ and ‘foster’ make adults uncomfortable and it’s best to pretend that everything is normal; that all children were babies born to the mothers they now have. To talk about it any other way can make you sound crazy. Not being backwards can have more to do with what you don’t say – what’s not spelt out – than what is.

  Tom finishes the job and slides the trolley out from under the car.

  ‘There you go, Bert,’ Tom says, tapping the car door. ‘You’re a good old sort,’ he says to the truck. He likes talking to cars and trucks. Anything he works with. Even peas and tomatoes growing out the back; there’s a finer line between what’s considered real and not real than most people would think. Cars run a whole lot smoother, for a whole lot longer, when you talk to them while you work. Every time. Plants grow taller.

  ‘You’ve gotta stop talking to things that aren’t real, Tom. It’s not normal,’ Ted says, bending down to take a look. But he forgets about Tom’s unusual habits and shakes his head. A smile comes to his tired face. ‘Jeez,’ he says. ‘That would have taken me another hour.’

  An old 1940 Harley Davidson stands in the back of the shed underneath a sheet and when Tom was younger, he used to climb onto the seat and dream of racing away. He’d breathe in the smell of the leather and upholstery cream, and imagine hot rubber and diesel smoke and the feeling of freedom as he rode off all the way to the big smoke down Adelaide way. It’s out of bounds, that bike, but Tom catches himself looking at it sometimes. One day I might let you tinker with it, Ted will say if he catches Tom looking. One day. And Tom knows that there won’t be anything to learn, if that day ever comes. He can feel it already, like he and Harley were meant to be together. All he’ll have to do is start her up and his body will know what to do with the rest. He has a way with machines. All those parts rearrange themselves in his mind. He can see where they go and how to adjust them. But you have to learn to walk before you can run. And read before you can write. And all of that before you can get out.

  Tom lies on his bed with his hands underneath his head and feels the breeze blowing in through the window. He breathes in the taste of dirt and dust in the air and the sweetness of eucalyptus. His curtains flutter against the window-jam and a dozen disoriented bugs smack against the glass. He lifts his finger to the window. A B C 1 2 3. If only that was all there was, if writing was about laying down separate, single pieces of information. He can get that far without too much trouble. He leans over, breathes on the glass, and drags his finger through the fog.

  It evaporates and Tom thinks about how easy it is to be forgotten. Fading into the never-was. Tom hasn’t heard the name of Lil Downs forever. Or Oliver Richardson.

  BIG RIVER

  February 1956

  Tom is already awake when the sun comes up. He passes his parents’ room and they’re still asleep. Creeping down the passage, he pulls his shirt over his head and smooths down his hair. He rubs his eyes and snatches a piece of last night’s bread from the kitchen bench, along with an orange.

  Pedalling down the road in the cool, Tom listens to the town waking up and the earth rising. A kookaburra, a baby that won’t be quietened, a screen door slams. There’s the smell of fresh bread and smoke rising from the bakery chimney and Old Mother Murray has her diamonds on, sparkling in the morning light as the sun catches ripples and the tips of her waves.

  The ferry rests beside her bank closest to town. It’s supposed to run from sunrise till sunset, with the ferryman on call twenty-four hours a day. But since George retired, there’s been no one permanent to run her and some days she’s idle for hours at a time. People have been stepping in, taking turns. Community spirit.

  Tom pedals all the way down Victoria Street, past the orange orchards and lemon trees, Zimmerman’s grapefruit groves, and the paddocks of almonds and apricots up on the hill. He pedals out of town completely, down to Big Bend Road, and all the way to the river.

  There’s only a few shacks down by the river near Big Bend and Tom considers himself friends with everyone who lives in them except for the smallest one, closest to the river. The man who lives there is a grumpy old coot who doesn’t like company and spends most of his time in his fishing boat or casting off from his jetty or singing out of tune at night when he’s been on the grog. His voice carries like the song of an angry crow and it can pierce the night, setting the dogs howling. He sings of love and loss, and cries. Tom knows, better than anyone, that what he sees in Old Mother’s mirror is too hard for him to bear. Some nights, Tom sees the same thing, too. But he’s feisty during the day and, no matter what you say to him, he doesn’t like company and he’ll tell you to piss off. He was known as Larry, once. Mr Donahue. But it’s been so long since the man he’s become resembled the man he was it’s like he’s a different person altogether. Jimbo calls him Bum-crack because some mornings after the grog, when he’s down the jetty at first light, he hasn’t realised his pants are hanging halfway down his butt. Jimbo likes a laugh. And Bum-crack’s beer bottles lined up along the jetty make for good slingshot practice.

  ‘Come on Mrs Cath,’ Tom says. ‘You’re freezing out here.’ He takes the old woman’s ice-cold hands. Her skin is shrivelled and she’s like an old grey gum holding onto ground that’s hers and, thin as she is, Tom can’t make her budge.

  ‘I’ll make you a cup of tea. Okay? Plenty of sugar.’

  She looks up at him and her face breaks into a smile like she’s coming back from someplace far away and she’s only just realised he’s here. She nods and walks beside him into the shack.

  Tom clears the bench of unwashed dishes and old food, pushing it all into the sink
. With the kettle boiling, Tom searches for a rug to put around Mrs Cath’s shoulders.

  ‘You gotta think about moving into town, Mrs Cath. I can’t be here to look after you all the time.’

  ‘You might be right,’ she says, pulling the rug tight. She laughs and tells him a joke about how her mother used to call her a broomstick when she was a kid. Tom hopes she might not go getting lost inside herself again for a while. Used to be that the bad patches were only small dark moments interrupting her days. Lately they’ve been more frequent and, when they come on, they last longer. Like someone pulls the blinds down behind her eyes.

  ‘You remember anything about my mum?’ Tom says.

  ‘Not today, Tom.’

  Hannah rides beside Tom into town for school. She veers off to the side of the road, then back towards his bike, pretending they’re going to crash. Her eyes are wide and her plaits bounce up and down on her shoulders and Tom notices how her uniform hugs the shape of her body. She’s like a picture, all her lines. A famous painting or something. He’d love to carve her outline forever into the rock next to their names and learn how to read everything about her.

  ‘Keep up, Mot,’ she says.

  Tom takes off in front of her, poking out his tongue as he passes. ‘Keep up, Hannah.’