Big River, Little Fish

by Belinda Jeffrey

  ‘You’ll pay for that,’ she says and Tom looks behind to see her pedalling faster. Her head down.

  Tom takes his hands off the handlebars. He holds them in the air and closes his eyes.

  Hannah rushes past.

  ‘Well, Tom Downs. You may as well fill the ink-pots while the rest of the class gets to work preparing for their futures.’ Miss Pinny turns to face the blackboard and she sniffs.

  Tom digs his hands in his pockets and kicks the ends of his shoe against the floor. He waits until the class is busy with slates and copy books before taking the ink-pots, one at a time, to fill them.

  As one of the older kids, Hannah sits up the back in a line with the other girls on the left. The older boys line up alongside each other on the right-hand side of the classroom and, seated from the back to the front in order of descending age, the rest of the twenty-five students of Swan Reach Local Area School fill in the gaps. Some of the older kids have already gone off to high school; if their parents were rich enough to afford the boarding fees. Tom and the others have to wait, which for most of them is next year. Tom should already have gone. But Miss Pinny won’t pass him. He’s the oldest kid there and that, in any other situation, might give him some power. But in his case, it’s a weakness.

  Miss Pinny has lived in the area all her life. Except for the few years she spent boarding at teacher’s college. Her face is plain and she’s never been married, and sometimes there’s a rumour around the town about her having a secret beau. She comes to the dances and the pictures, but she has a teacher look about her all the time, unless you happen to catch her with her nose in a book. She has a regular supply of Mills and Boons sent from England and collects them from the post office. There’s few secrets in a small town. Especially when the postmistress is a friend of the family. Just yesterday, in front of Tom, she told Marge that Kate Guthrie was expecting a baby. Miss Pinny looks like a different person with a book in her hand. Her body relaxes and she almost looks pretty. Or happy.

  ‘Tinker Tom, Ding dong,’ says Wilson under his breath.

  Beside him, Harry laughs as Tom leans across them to get the ink-pots. Tom elbows Wilson in the ribs and he almost passes it off as an accident except that Alison Caruthers, Harry’s sister, sitting on the end of the girls’ pew beside Hannah and Biscuit, shoots her hand straight up in the air.

  ‘Miss,’ she says. ‘Tom hit Wilson in the ribs.’

  Pinny doesn’t even turn around. ‘Outside, Tom,’ she says. ‘A page of lines.’

  Tom still has an ink-pot in his hand when Hannah stands up and reaches across Alison for it.

  Tom walks towards the front of the classroom leaving Alison squealing behind him. He turns to see a stream of ink running from the top of her blonde hair onto her forehead.

  ‘I am sooo sorry,’ Hannah says, bringing her hands to her face. ‘It was an accident.’

  There are always kids leaving school entirely when they’ve turned twelve or thirteen. Going to work with their parents on the farm – harvesting oranges, shearing sheep or ploughing the ground for root crops. But Tom’s folks have made it clear for years that Tom has to see out his education, and it’s a rare and valuable thing they’re doing; giving him an opportunity to better himself. Not something either of his parents had.

  There’s a way of dealing with things in town. If you need bread baked by morning, you stay up all night to get it done. You need the sheep shorn by late spring, you hire in help, you work harder. You need those apricots picked before they spoil, you work until your fingers bleed. You can’t read and write? Principle’s the same.

  I must lern to rite

  I must lern to reed

  ‘Race you all the way home,’ Hannah says when the bell rings.

  Tom sees Harry standing behind her, talking to Wilson.

  ‘In your dreams,’ she calls over her shoulder. But she winks to Tom.

  ‘You’ll lose, Hannah,’ Tom says.

  ‘It’s just three afternoons a week,’ Ted says over tea. He looks at Tom quickly, then down at his plate. ‘I know there’s things you’d rather be doing...’

  Tom rolls the peas around in his mouth before swallowing. ‘But–’

  ‘Look, Tom,’ Marge says. ‘We can’t have you going on like this. You’ve gotta get some help and Ted and me are prepared to pay someone. It’ll help. You’ll see.’ Marge holds her fork in the air between her mouth and her plate like she’s waiting for permission to continue. They look more like someone’s grandparents than parents. That cuddled-up, padded look old people get. Marge smells of rose-petal soap and her clothes are perfect. Tom doesn’t think he’s ever seen her apron dirty. He rubs the dark smudges on the back of his hands.

  ‘But there’s everything down the river.’ Tom stops eating and feels something twisting, rising inside him. ‘I don’t want to do it.’

  ‘Tom, you’ve got to get your head in the real world. Just–’

  ‘No.’ Tom says, standing up so quickly his chair falls on the floor. ‘I won’t.’ He runs out the back door.

  Tom has no idea how late it is when he arrives back home. He’s long past feeling angry. It’s just a familiar sense of confusion banging away inside him. He tiptoes in through the front door and down the passage and a light comes on in his parents’ room. He feels like he just might throw something if they don’t leave him alone to sleep on it. He doesn’t want to talk to anyone.

  ‘Listen, Tom,’ Ted says. ‘I know–’ he stops and rubs his chin. ‘Your mum, she–’ he sighs. ‘Reckon you can have the Harley, Tom, if you give those lessons a go.’

  ‘Not biting today,’ Murray Black says to Tom.

  It’s late afternoon as Tom sits on the beach with his fishing rod in the river. He rests his finger on the line feeling for every subtle change; the movement of the water, what might be a snag or a fish bumping into the bait. Or a bite. He swipes at the flies buzzing around his head.

  Murray sits beside Tom, his shirt rolled up to his sleeves and a rabbit-pelt hat on his head.

  ‘Some things are going to change,’ Tom says, looking straight at the water.

  ‘Everything changes sometime.’

  ‘I might not be able to come down here so much.’

  Murray Black clears a mound of sand for a fire and forms a small pyramid with sticks and bark. He pokes leaves inside of it. There’s a permanent ring of rocks they use when they’re here, unless someone has been down disturbing their place. Murray lights a match to get the flame started and kneels down close to the ground to blow on it. The bark and leaves spark as they catch alight, crackling and snapping, and he fans it with his hat until the flames have hold of the sticks. Only now he adds a few thicker pieces of mallee wood and stands back, claps his hands together to remove the dust.

  The smell of smoke and the sound of the bush and the water, and the lazy way the afternoon melts away into the night, makes Tom feel like everything’s all right. There’s nothing more he needs to be or do. The crackling timber seems to echo against the cavity of the cliffs and fine black ash-wings, like fireflies, float up towards the sky and disappear along the line of water.

  ‘I tell you about that Murray cod?’ Murray sits beside the fire, feeding in more sticks and leaves, waving the smoke away from his face.

  Tom looks over towards him and smiles because he’s only heard that story about a hundred times before.

  ‘There’s a photograph taken with the blacksmith holding up that huge Murray cod he caught in 1911. It’s as big as him. Me an’ my brothers would take our boat out and we pulled up plenty, but none as big as that. You know them Murray cod, they find theyselves holes in the river bed and they get comfortable down there an’ you won’t find ’em till they’re ready to come out. That one ’e pulled out, that’s nothing. Plenty more down there. All waiting and hiding. You only catch them little fellas and we ’ave ’em for our
tea ’cause they don’t know how to find theyselves a place to wait. All over ’ere was a big inland sea, once. All that water coming is a memory waking up. Plenty big fish then all washed out of their hiding places. Old Mother going to push them out, make them swim.’

  Behind them, further away from the water, is what’s left of Lil’s place; the pug and pine house her father built. Most of it’s fallen down over the years, but parts of the walls are there and one section still has a roof where Tom keeps his canoe.

  Tom sticks his fishing pole into the sand beside him and digs around in his pocket for the mallee roots Murray gave him for his birthday. He’s looked at them every so often and wraps them back up in the bark strips. It’s not that he’s ungrateful for the present, but he can’t understand what it is.

  He lays the parcel on the ground and unwraps the bark to expose the three root pieces. Murray is busy with the fire, fanning the flame, when Tom picks one root up and glances towards him.

  ‘You figured it out yet?’ Murray asks.

  Tom shrugs. He hears Murray laughing and he smiles, too. He never feels stupid around Murray. Even when he can’t understand things.

  Murray bobs down in front of him and his curls fall forward against his forehead, hanging low over his eyes. But below that, his smile is white and warm. Murray takes the roots and places them in a row. He turns them around, flips them over then looks up at Tom.

  ‘I was digging around ’ere for worms one day and I found this,’ Murray points to the first root. ‘See?’

  Tom looks again. He traces the shape of it.

  ‘You see?’

  Tom looks again. It looks like a letter M.

  ‘I found this here letter M under the ground and I thought if there’s one letter buried under our feet, then there’s bound to be a whole alphabet. I only found these,’ he points to them again. ‘Couldn’t find O. Or T,’ he smiles.

  ‘S,’ Tom says pointing to the second letter. ‘H’

  ‘Reckon you could find more if you started looking.’ Murray stands up and heads back to the fire. Tom wraps up the letters and puts them back in his pocket before taking the fishing rod in his hands.

  ‘Hey,’ Tom says, pulling back on the line. ‘Got one!’ Tom stands up, leaning back on the weight of the line, turning the reel to pull it in. The fishing rod bends low towards the water with the weight of the fish. A commotion breaks out on the surface of the water. Fins and tail and a fish fighting against the rod. Tom reels it in all the way and hooks the cod under his arm. He removes the hook and passes the cod to Murray.

  ‘Bloody good,’ Murray says.

  ‘Bloody good,’ says Tom.

  ‘Friday night, Tom,’ Ted says, sweeping metal shavings into a neat pile on the garage floor.

  Tom looks up from the sign he’s fixing because some drunk idiot coming home from the pub decided to chuck stones at the metal Caltex sign and dented it in the middle.

  ‘You should head on down to the hall with your friends. Pictures are on.’

  Tom shrugs and rubs his hand over the sign, which is now smooth. He blows on it to remove the paint flakes and metal shavings. All that’s left to do is paint over the letters.

  ‘I mean it. I can finish up. Way of saying we’re proud of you for agreeing to the lessons.’ Tom watches Ted out of the corner of his eye and there’s a hope about him tonight. ‘You’ll see, Tom. With a bit of one-to-one help, you’ll come on a treat. You’re a smart kid. Never any doubt about that.’

  Tom looks at the sign. There’s a full C and an A and the middle letters are mostly gone. A patch here and there of paint and that’s about all. The X is perfect. Only the middle of the word needs touching up. But the imprint of the letters is still there.

  ‘I’ll go after I’ve finished.’

  ‘Suit yourself,’ Ted says, emptying the contents of the dustpan into the bin. ‘Right,’ he says. ‘I’m done.’ He whistles all the way back into the house.

  Tom takes the red paint tin down from the shelf and the enamel smell stings his nose when the lid comes off. He re-paints the letters with a thin paintbrush and, when he’s done, stands back to look at it. C A L T E X.

  He washes his hands in turps, then soap and water and, before he turns off the lights, looks over at the Harley in the corner under the sheet. It’s almost real, the feel of them carving up the road together.

  The newsreel is already finishing when Tom makes it to the Swan Reach Town Hall. It’s half full as Tom wanders inside and stands at the back against the wall. He looks around the crowd, and the light from the screen casts patches of colour around the room. Seats have been set up on the floor, the film projector is at the back, shedding its image onto the canvas screen hung at the front of the hall.

  There’s giggling and jostling coming from a group towards the back of the crowd on the left hand side. From somewhere down the front comes a male voice ‘show some respect, will you’. Tom walks across the hall, still against the back wall, to get a better look. On the screen are images of crops and the river system through New South Wales and Victoria. Farmers saying it’s the biggest downpour they’ve seen in years.

  Tom watches as a group of people stand up and shuffle along in front of the people in their row until they’re all out in the aisle. Tom recognises Wilson and Biscuit, then Harry. They’re all giggling as Hannah appears behind Harry.

  ‘Tom,’ Biscuit says, seeing him near the door.

  ‘Shut up,’ someone yells at them.

  ‘Come with us, Mot,’ Hannah whispers, taking Tom’s arm.

  Harry waves Tom towards the door.

  Harry is the kind of son a parent can be proud of. He does well at school – not too well – and he’s the local age champion footballer. Muscles like tree trunks already and the right combination of confidence, cheek and parent-smarts. He can shmooze grown-ups like a pro. Even Mr Guthrie likes him and he’s a tough old goat who grunts more than talks and you’re never sure if he’s pleased to see your face or the back of you. Hannah says it’s just his way and Mrs Guthrie pretends not to notice. But Harry is as deep as a pothole when it comes down to it. And it bothers Tom that Hannah likes a boy like that.

  Tom follows Hannah, Harry, Wilson, Biscuit, Pam and T-Bone down to the river. They walk away from the hall down the road along the water’s edge, passing the ferry resting against the bank, to sit on rocks against the cliff face. The pub sits on the top of the hill above them. They’re all supposed to be at the pictures and Biscuit keeps telling everyone to be quiet. Biscuit is Hannah’s age, but she’s plain and quiet and her father used to run the Arnott’s truck. T-Bone’s the son of the butcher; fat and not too smart. Hannah says Tom should take more of an interest in Biscuit because, according to her, she’d make a good match for Tom. It’s not that he doesn’t like Biscuit. He does. She’s pretty in an unassuming way, but she’s not Hannah. Pam is T-Bone’s older sister.

  Wilson is two months older than Harry, though he looks a good year younger with his blond-white hair. He has hips like a girl and needs Harry for muscle. They’ve been best friends since first grade when they discovered their fathers were second cousins.

  Tom sits on a rock, Hannah on one side of him, Biscuit on the other. Wilson and T-Bone perch on a rock by the water and Harry stands between them all.

  Harry walks away, bending down to the ground, looking. He finds something, holds it up and walks back to the group. The stick he’s found is as thick as his arm. Harry is a silhouette in the pale moonlight as he holds the stick out from him and places one hand to his heart. ‘You are more lovely than any girl in Nildottie,’ he says to the stick.

  Wilson and T-Bone laugh.

  ‘Go on, Harry,’ T-Bone says, throwing a handful of small rocks at his feet. ‘You can do better than that.’

  Harry laughs.

  ‘Shh,’ says Biscuit. ‘Someone’ll hear us.’

 
Harry makes a show of being scared, bringing his hands up to his mouth like he’s horrified, and Biscuit pokes out her tongue.

  Harry turns his back towards Tom, Biscuit and Hannah and takes the stick to his chest. He wraps his own arms around himself with his hands reaching the sides of his back and moves his hands so it appears as if he’s wrapped in an embrace and someone else is running their hands over him. Wilson and T-Bone fall off their rock, laughing.

  Harry stands up and faces them. ‘This stick is frigid,’ he says, throwing it on the ground.

  T-Bone’s laughter is a pudgy, gurgling sound.

  ‘You’re a joke,’ says Pam. She stands up and walks away.

  ‘Not that any girl around here’s got enough guts to try it out,’ Harry calls after her.

  Tom feels Hannah straighten up beside him. He can almost feel her heart beating and wishes it was because she really wanted to be with him tonight.

  ‘Go on, Biscuit,’ Tom says, suddenly.

  Biscuit turns and glares at him. She shrinks down, her shoulders sag.

  Harry looks back to Wilson and T-Bone and they’re laughing.

  Biscuit glances to Tom again, but he looks down. Hannah stands quickly and walks towards Harry before Biscuit can. Tom can’t bear to watch. He jumps up and runs away from the river, up the hill around the side of the pub towards home, hearing Wilson call behind him. ‘Aw, Arnott you gonna try the Biscuit?’

  Tom hears something clink against his window. He stands up from his bed and there it is again. Clink. Clink. He opens the window and leans out to see Hannah down below, looking up at him.

  ‘Wait with me until Dad comes?’ Her smile is stretched out all the way across her face and she wraps her arms around herself. ‘Please, Mot.’

  Tom decides on five different ways to make her feel bad, on his way down from his room to the side of the road beside the garage where Hannah’s waiting. But by the time he get’s there, and sees her, he’s forgotten what he was going to do and it doesn’t seem to matter anymore. They sit together on the side of the road with their feet in the gutter and the night has a dry wind and the town seems too quiet for a Saturday evening after the pictures. There’s a faint noise travelling downwind from the pub, but it seems further away than usual. Hannah sighs and kicks Tom’s foot. She throws rocks on the ground and hums.