Tom stumbles through the scrub. He hears something. Not his name. Not ‘help’. Just a sound. A thousand images plague his mind and he can barely swallow. He hears it again and runs, orienting himself to the river, breathing in slow and out long. He hears the sound again. A flicker of colour or maybe movement catches his eye. ‘Mrs Guthrie?’
Tom becomes overwhelmed with a feeling that everything is lost. He is lost, they are lost. He can’t understand it, his head is scrambled. He retraces his steps from the dance to the farm and down to find Mrs Cath. And Hannah. He sees them in his mind. All those things happened. But nothing makes sense and through it all he feels an overwhelming responsibility, as though he has done something wrong.
‘Tom!’ It comes as a scream this time, piercing through his confusion. It rouses him from the dark and he runs again. ‘Mrs Guthrie, Mrs Guthrie!’
There they are, by the tree. Mrs Cath leaning up against the trunk and Mrs Guthrie in a strange position. She has her knees bent up and her hands seem to be pulling her legs. She’s breathless. Tom berates himself. He can’t believe he didn’t bring blankets. He’s stupid. He really is.
‘Are you cold? Come on,’ he says trying to take her hand.
‘Tom?’ Mrs Cath says as though she has just woken up.
‘Come on, the car is just back there.’
Mrs Guthrie screams. Her face contorts and her head shudders. She lets it out, her breath in one long unending pain.
‘Oh my God,’ Tom says kneeling down. ‘Mrs Guthrie!’ He has no idea what he’s saying. He doesn’t know what to do. She’s in pain and he has this aching fear that it’s to do with the baby, but he knows absolutely nothing about it. He reaches out to take her hand and all at once there is a river breaking free from her all over the ground. It splashes up and gushes over his shoes.
‘The baby,’ she says, gasping. ‘I can’t move. You have to help me.’ Pain takes her over. It seems to start in her stomach and floods her body. Her face is pulled by it and she is taken somewhere else. Lost inside it. Tom squeezes her hand. He has absolutely no idea what to do. She screams and groans and the pain throws her back against the tree, gasping, before small sobs choke her. Her shoulders heave.
‘The car isn’t far,’ Tom says.
She shakes her head. ‘I can’t.’
‘I have to get help.’
‘Don’t leave me,’ she launches herself forward and grabs his arm. Her eyes look wild. ‘Don’t leave, Tom. Whatever happens. I can’t lose another baby,’ she says.
‘I won’t,’ he says.
‘You’ve got to watch for it,’ she says before gripping her knees again. The pain consumes her and she pants and groans and Tom has no idea what to watch for. His stomach goes weak and his head feels light. Mrs Guthrie clutches at her dress and pulls it over her knees. Tom can’t look. He stands and feels something rushing up inside him. He runs and vomits on the ground. Something deep and lasting is rushing up through him and he can’t hold it in any longer. He wipes his mouth and staggers back. He’s never felt more useless before because she could die, he knows right then. Having babies by yourself means you’ll die.
‘Hannah!’ Tom calls. His throat chokes up and he feels tears running down his cheeks. He wipes them away and kneels down beside Mrs Guthrie again. She squeezes his hand as though she’ll break it.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ he says but she’s beyond hearing anything. Something animal comes out of her mouth and it scares him, the sound of it. He is beyond thinking and nothing makes sense. It’s not happening. It’s not real. He’s imagining it.
Mrs Guthrie screams again. She’s hot and wet.
‘Tom,’ Mrs Cath says from the other side of her. ‘Watch for the baby,’ she points at Mrs Guthrie’s legs.
‘I can’t.’
‘You can. I think I’ve been gone somewhere.’
Tom scrambles beside her, to her legs. Rocks and sticks bite into his skin and he closes his eyes. He might breathe to death, he can’t help it.
Tom has no idea whether Mrs Cath is talking to him or she’s telling him rubbish or whether she’s come back or she’s still gone, but he can’t think of anything else so he does what she says. Mrs Guthrie is leaning back against the tree, crying. Her legs are spread apart and Tom thinks he might be sick again.
‘You’re bleeding!’ he says and Mrs Guthrie cries harder. Her head rolls and she mouths something that Tom can’t understand. ‘Please Mrs Guthrie, I don’t know what to do! Hannah wouldn’t come, she’s gone, I...’ he stammers. His throat chokes up and his tears blur the world. ‘I couldn’t bring her with me.’
‘What?’ Mrs Guthrie manages to whisper. ‘My Hannah, how do you know that name?’ her face contorts and she is taken away. ‘Shouldn’t be blood. Please, Tom. You have to see.’
Tom holds his hands over his eyes, but what he sees through all the blood and gore and dirt and rock, is a life he has to bring into the world. A real life, not someone he wished into being. Not Hannah. She was never real – he did always know that – but the feeling of her was enough. He’d brought her to life through words, his words, their words; a piece of life gone missing that he’d simply replaced. It wasn’t fair that he had been born backwards and lived when she died for no good reason, and her name was never written down. So the backwards boy did what he did best and brought her ... back. And wrote her as forwards as he could, as far as he could. Here. Now. He has to grow up sometime, and words won’t help him now. If this baby is going to be brought into the world, it will be with his hands. He takes them away from his eyes and rests them on Mrs Guthrie’s stomach.
‘TOM!’ Mrs Guthrie screams. Something inside Mrs Guthrie launches her body forward. It has her, like she’s snared and can’t break free. She grabs her knees and strains against it. Tom has no idea what he should be looking for. He doesn’t want this, he doesn’t want to be here. He wants to disappear.
Mrs Guthrie grabs his shoulder and squeezes so hard Tom cries out too. He looks again and he has no words for what he sees. It is barbaric. Something moves and he thinks he might pass out. He pants, too. Like Mrs Guthrie. He looks to see Mrs Cath and she looks so cold. ‘That baby might need help,’ she says quietly.
How does a boy help a baby that’s not been born? Something moves again. Like there’s a door trying to open, and then it closes. Like Larry’s shack door. Like Doc nosing his way out of the pouch and retreating back inside. He feels better thinking of those things. Things that are real. Not this, this...
‘Help, Tom,’ Mrs Guthrie says again before the pain comes and she strains and screams. Tom tries to imagine what Murray would do, what he would say. He wishes Old Mother would talk to him and he can’t understand what’s happening.
Everything changes. Nothing is ever lost. Those big cod wait and hide in holes carved out through the cliff under the water. Waiting till the water floods them out and someone’s waiting to catch them.
Tom opens his eyes. The door moves. A big Murray cod he has to catch. He feels calmer. He thinks of himself on his fishing beach with his finger on the line. Listening. Closing his mind to everything on the outside world so he can tap into the undercurrents of life. He closes off from Mrs Guthrie and Mrs Cath. Even the baby. He reaches up and places his hand on Mrs Guthrie’s stomach again and he can feel that fish fighting under that cliff. The muscles stretched hard and tight. That fish rippling underneath. Fighting to get out.
‘She can’t come out,’ Mrs Guthrie says in a whisper. Her stomach relaxes and tightens again with barely a pause. Tom waits for Mrs Guthrie to sit up and strain, but she’s back against the trunk and she has the look like Mrs Cath gets. Tom panics. He grabs her shoulders and shakes her. There’s blood on her clothes and Tom takes his hands away and they’re covered in blood, too.
Beside him Mrs Cath stirs. She stands. ‘Tom, is that you? Muriel, you have to reach in for that baby.’ It�
�s all she says before stumbling forward.
‘Mrs Cath!’ Tom screams. He holds his hand out towards her, but she moves away, stumbling towards the river. All he knows is that there’s no one else who can help Mrs Guthrie but him. And then he sees Hannah appear, taking Mrs Cath’s elbow, or thinks he sees her. He can’t be sure. He’s never been more alone than this moment and one way or another he must bring this baby into the world. No imagination, no words, no thoughts. This cannot be read or learned or understood; he must do this thing. This real thing.
He moves his hands up slowly towards that door and closes his eyes. Something moves and he feels a pressure against his hands. A round, head-like pressure, before it is gone, quickly. He plunges in and grabs the head of that cod before it gets away from him. Mrs Guthrie screams and he pulls back on the line, like he would down on the beach, and he reels it in. Pulling against the tide, against life, against the past, this is one of those cod who wait, hiding and growing, until their time to emerge. He hears Mrs Guthrie groan that animal sound and he closes his mind to it. He thinks he is crying and, like this, he doesn’t know where he is. He is disoriented. Or maybe he is back, finally, where he always was; pulling someone back to life against an invisible unknowing. Tom won’t let go, he feels that fish slide out onto the bank as slippery as any he’s caught before. Mrs Guthrie sobs. Behind him the sound of Old Mother rushing forward pounds in his ears.
Little fish, big river.
He lifts that fish up, holding it on his two palms; a silvery, bloodied offering. He places that baby on Mrs Guthrie’s chest and brings her hands up to wrap around it. If only it would rain now. And wash them clean. Because the steely taste of blood is in his mouth. On his clothes, on his hands. And someone is gone.
‘Mrs Cath,’ Tom calls. ‘Hannah!’ There is no mistaking the smell of death. Here it comes, he thinks. That last ripple that began with Mr Guthrie and that car and the kangaroo. Doc! he thinks suddenly. But that ripple hits him. It smashes him in the chest and he cries with it. This is as real as it gets, Little Fish.
LITTLE FISH
Yesterday, today, tomorrow
The night I was born, half the town of Swan Reach was lost. The garage, the post office, the general store. The floor buckled and heaved under the hall and it was a year, or more, before it was useable again. Oliver lost the livelihood of his ferry and Marge and Ted watched the garage go under. Everyone rallied around with food and blankets, clothes and a spare room or a mattress on the floor. And when the waters finally peaked, people thought the worst was over. They breathed easy. But when Old Mother finally receded, she left behind an unholy mess. The town smelt of mud and sewage for months. There was more shovelling and building than ever as the mud had to be cleared from houses, sometimes a metre thick. The cemetery flooded and Old Mother brought up the dead with no regard for the living. They found Mr Guthrie’s coffin wedged in beside Larry Donahue’s tinny near Big Bend.
Debris had to be shifted and stacked and hauled away, houses had to be rebuilt and after that, well that was when people really felt what they had lost. It would be years before crops would yield again. Some farmers lost everything and had to start from scratch. Some couldn’t face the grief and left the riverland for good. Some stayed. And built. And planted. And waited. Time, we knew, could bring things back. Not everything was lost forever. Perhaps, only those things you were never meant to hold on to.
When we laid Mrs Cath to rest, she was surrounded by most of the town for, perhaps, the first time in her life. Despite the tragedy and injury brought with the flood, Mrs Cath was the only recorded death in the mid-Murray and the manner of her passing, the timing of her slipping away while I was being born, wove her memory more keenly to the people of the town than her presence in life.
It was Tom who held me close while the minister recounted some of her life, because my mum was still in hospital with an infection that set in because of the way I came out. Tom’s pa was hardly seen at home because of all the time he spent at her side.
But I was fit and fat and pronounced healthy enough to go home. Marge and Ted bunked in Mum’s room while they sorted through what was left of their house, and the doctors let me go into their care, but it was Tom who looked after me. He’d hold me and rock me, test the temperature of my milk on the inside of his wrist and touch the teat to my lips. Our eyes would lock in those moments and I would clutch one of his fat fingers and squeeze.
‘You’re as greedy as any lamb,’ he would say to me.
There’s no one that can soothe me quite like Tom. If I won’t settle, or if I cry so hard my face turns red and I won’t take the bottle, Tom’s the only one for me. I think it’s because we knew each other first. Before anyone else. We share a bond written in the stone of life because the end and beginning of our being touched, and never let go. Tom says we passed through time.
After Mrs Cath is lowered into the ground, Tom walks us away from the crowd to the other side of the cemetery. He sits on the ground beside a gravestone and holds me close to his chest and uses his hand to shield the sun from my eyes. Only we know that Mrs Cath was not the only person lost to the flood, that night. Tom lost Hannah, too.
Tom tells me about my father and how he had called their first baby Hannah. Only Tom and my mum had ever heard that name before. And Tom was so lonely after Miss Ladley died, and no one seemed to understand him. Tom thought Larry would be someone to pass the days with, but the sight of Tom seemed to remind him of what he lost. Tom wrote Hannah’s name on the cliff underneath his because it didn’t seem right that there was no real record of her passing at all. He spoke her name and, the way Tom tells it, she just came to him. Hannah may not have been alive in the way that I am alive, or his pa is alive, but his need of her was as real as the feeling of losing her. If not for her, he may never have had the guts to take Biscuit’s hand one Saturday morning down on the fishing beach. It was Biscuit with Harry that night in the dark by the gum tree beside the Caruthers’ place. And he says he knew it, really, or part of him did, but he was too wound up in her, and his feelings for Biscuit were too complicated. Real girls were more mysterious than imaginary ones.
He’d known he had to give Hannah up, but he didn’t want to, not really. It was easier weaving her into the story of his life, of Harry and Old Mother. This way, she may not have been alive, but her loss was real. All these months had been ripples leading back to that original event; someone he loved, but had never really known, died. Some days we had trouble remembering whether it ever happened or not, what part of it was real.
‘You’ve got to stop talking to that baby like that, Tom,’ Marge says to him when he hears us whispering together. ‘It’s not normal.’ But I can feel everything about Tom, as if we are one connected, wordless being. I think forward to the time when I will have so many words I am told to be quiet, and whether my body will forget all of this. I laugh when Marge says things like that.
When I am four I will say to Tom, ‘Hannah wants to know what it’s like to kiss Biscuit.’ Tom will look at me like I’m crazy – it will only last a moment – and his eyes will change back to knowing me and he will bend close to my ear and whisper, ‘you tell Hannah that kissing Biscuit is like living forever.’ When Tom marries Biscuit, I insist on holding his hand throughout the ceremony.
Murray Black comes to visit us one day, not long after Mrs Cath’s funeral. He looks at me and smiles and Tom says he has to hold me. He shakes his head but Tom insists. His hands are so large and warm. His body smells like earth and fire and forever, and I wish my arms were longer and my body were taller so I could wrap myself around him, just for a moment, and hold him to me. He will be my one regret.
Murray kisses me on my nose and his whiskers tingle on my skin. I reach out and grab a lock of his hair and I feel lost in the white of his smile as he laughs. He shakes Tom’s hand and points to Doc. ‘Think I’ll take him with me,’ he says. ‘Time I let him go.’
This room had always been Hannah’s room to Tom. My window is where he would sit and talk to her, sometimes. But there’s never been her bed, just my baby cot in the corner that my dad started making for me when I was smaller than a bean inside my mum, and Tom finished after he died. And apart from the cot, the room is the way it has always been since the real Hannah died; left in the hope that Tom might have been given to my parents and, after that, in the hope I’d be made and born one day.
Tom shakes his head. ‘Won’t be long before the ferry will need to run again.’
‘You and me make a good team.’
Tom runs his hand along the cot rail and flicks the mobile so that the mallee root letters swing on the string suspended from the roof, and I’m fascinated by the simple pleasure of their colour and movement. As if I have no other thoughts, no wisdom or knowing that can compare to the passion of childish, earthly wonders. My eyes are so new.
‘I’ve been thinking,’ Oliver says, holding out the key to the Harley. ‘I left that behind a long time ago and,’ he pauses. ‘I got no right taking it back now.’
Tom turns from me and his pa takes his hand and places the key in his palm.
‘Only thing I want now is to see you ride,’ Oliver leans against the wall, his hands behind his back. He takes the weight on his good leg.
‘What happened,’ Tom says, looking at his leg.
Oliver sighs. He slides down the wall and sits on the floor beside the cot and I would like to jump from my bed and snuggle between them. I can’t wait to be thrown and tickled and chased. I have a life bursting out of me.
‘I had dreams, Tom. Thought I’d be the next speedway champion and all. But the war, well,’ he pauses. ‘You never saw so much mud and rain. And snow. You don’t know you’re alive until you’re begging for God to take you away from life just to end it. Guns going off in your head. Your brain can’t let you rest and you’re alert to everything. You forget what it feels like to be safe because every nerve in your body is on fire. You forget everything. Life is just another minute. Holding your gun and shooting straight. You watch your mates go down beside you. You take nothing for granted. Nothing.
Big River, Little Fish Page 20
