Black Water (8 page)

Farren felt Isla’s arm around his back, her hand as light as a swallow resting. And the tears came more violently, because he was alone now and he could feel the loneliness, and understood what it meant far more than he could understand the death of his dad – although he could see his dad on the beach in the shallows, in his green jumper, face down, the foam and ripples of spent waves washing around him, the seagulls circling and crying in the wind, and in two days or something he would be buried, in a deep hole held out with green boards but really it still was just a big deep hole that would be filled in with shovels, all that great big pile of stony dirt on top of his dad.

Farren felt a howl of anguish and slumped face-down on the table, a tide of desolation overtaking him with only a few words, said by Isla in her strange, musical voice, to beat against it.

‘Oh, Fah-ren,’ she said. ‘Oh, Fah-ren, Fah-ren, Fah-ren.’

The news of the other fishermen had bypassed Farren as he sat in a corner of the kitchen.

‘The
Ocean Gull
’s been found,’ Maggie told him at two in the afternoon. ‘She’s wrecked but the men are safe. They climbed a cliff and got to a house.’

Farren nodded. ‘That’s good.’ His mind was blank, filled with the greyness of an overcast sky.

Maggie studied him as if he’d been in an accident.

‘And the
Camille
,’ she said eventually, ‘she’ll be brought home when the weather’s calmed. She’s yours now, Farren. And Danny’s. She’s a bit damaged but the men’ll fix her.’

Farren looked at Maggie, thinking of something but never completing the thought.

‘When Danny gets home.’ It was his statement about the future.

Maggie pressed his hand.

‘Yes, and until he does,’ she said, ‘you can stay with me. And later, Johnny said there’s a little room here you can have, if you want. Like Isla.’

‘D’you think the army might let him go?’ Farren put the words together as if he was completing an equation. ‘If we tell ’em what’s happened? To me?’

From the lounge the sounds of people filtered into the kitchen. Farren didn’t hear them.

‘I – well, they might.’ Maggie nodded. ‘We’ll have to ask.’ Her eyes flickered, as if she knew she had faltered with the truth, but Farren, lost in dismal hope, didn’t notice.

Hour by hour the storm lessened until the trees hung exhaustedly and the estuary calmed enough to accept the reflection of the sky. The beaches, Farren knew, would be black with weed and the sea infected with sand, a sickly green. The dunes too would be dramatically altered, bitten off by the waves or enlarged as if mysterious islands had beached overnight – but Farren didn’t want to see them.

He had no wish to kick over what had been pitched up by the ocean. He had no interest in what fish, birds, rope, or wreckage had finally been dumped at the high-water mark to lie abandoned like shoddy souvenirs. He couldn’t move. He felt as if he’d been beaten senseless.

His past was like an old calendar, years out of date, his future a road that dipped out of sight. What he didn’t think could ever happen to him again, had, and so suddenly it was as if the world wanted to teach him a lesson. He looked out, saw the railway bridge at the neck of the estuary, and wished he were there, sitting on timbers as strong as trust, the water plopping and glopping, his fishing line over his finger to complete the connection, the day like any other old day.

∗

A magpie sat in a tree by the cemetery gates, watching as mourners in black filed out. Farren had seen the bird earlier, gratefully allowing its presence to divert his attention from what was happening at the graveside. The words Reverend Purdue had spoken were so awful, so final, and so unlike the words that people normally spoke that Farren couldn’t listen.

‘
And now we commit the earthly remains of…’

Instead Farren watched the magpie cleaning its beak, filing away busily as his dad’s name was stretched out, added to, and slowed down until Tom Fox was turned into a person Farren didn’t recognise.

‘Thomas George Albert Carver Fox…’

His dad wasn’t Thomas George Albert something Fox, and Farren was not going to listen to him being changed into someone with a long, cold, serious name that sounded like it belonged in England and nowhere near a fishing boat. The others could listen – he could see Mr Derriweather was, standing next to Isla who stared down at the gravelly ground, but Farren Fox wouldn’t. He would look at the magpie, alive and alert, now attending to its wing, sawing with its beak like a mad violinist as the words drifted away on the breeze.

Farren watched the magpie as he left the cemetery, seeing it fly away over the headstones as if they were nothing but stumps in a paddock, and the two men with shovels only farmers out to clear a drain. All he wanted to do now, because his mind was either so empty or so full it wouldn’t work, was sleep.

Beyond wanting to sleep, Farren was aware only of things he no longer felt; he no longer felt like himself, he no longer
understood where he was in the world, what he was going to do, or what might happen to him. He was completely and utterly lost.

From the window in Maggie’s parlour Farren could see the headland across the waters of the Rip, the land disappearing in the lessening light, reminding him of a whale, black and massive. The sea was moving, the ebb tide running, Farren able to feel, even from behind glass, the air of treachery that it carried, close and silent, to share with the rocks and reefs.

He had not looked at the sea for days, or not carefully, and for the first time in a week it jumped out at him, the water a sombre green, the distant beaches as pale as paper, the sky receding from blue into black, leaving stars stranded like upturned shells.

Farren knew he could leave Queenscliff. His mum’s sister had offered him a job on their farm in Nyah West. He could go and live in the country and never see the sea, a couta boat, or a beach again. But he didn’t want to leave, even though his dad had been washed ashore just down the road, his face bruised and broken, because Farren had seen it and knew it was, no matter what the funeral people put on it.

No, he wouldn’t leave the sea because he loved it still – or if he
didn’t love it now, he would again; as it was the sea and only the sea, and working the
Camille
, that would allow him to be the kind of person he wanted to be. He heard footsteps, saw Robbie appear at the back door, and opened it before Robbie could knock.

‘Eh, Rob.’ Farren was buoyed up at the sight of him. ‘Whadda ya doin’?’

Robbie grinned, hopping from foot to foot on the stepping stones as if he needed to go to the toilet.

‘Lookin’ for you, of course.’ He stopped hopping. ‘You wanna come to my place for tea? My mum’s especially asked. She said she wants to show you her scar now that she’s got the stitches out.’ Robbie grinned. ‘Well, no, maybe she didn’t, but she does want you to come. We got roast chicken and that’s not so bloody bad, is it?’

No, roast chicken wasn’t so bad at all, Farren thought. Roast chicken was good and he was starving. He couldn’t remember when he’d last had roast chicken. Years ago.

‘I’ll have to tell Maggie,’ he said. ‘She’s still down the pub.’

Robbie swung like a weather vane, arm out, pointing towards the grey paling fence.

‘Then, my boy. To the pub!’

Pricey’s mum, Farren was aware, was looking at him a lot and asking him a lot of questions; but he didn’t mind because talking to her, and to Maggie, was a bit like talking to his mum. He felt cared for, not forgotten, and that he was understood. He felt less lost when he talked to ladies, that his life wasn’t so wrecked. Blokes just offered him advice or told him what to do.

‘Will you stay at Maggie’s place?’ Mrs Price asked. ‘Or do you
have other plans? Robbie was saying you might go and live at the Victory.’

Farren looked at Mrs Price across a table so crowded it reminded him of a model village. There was a butter dish, a bread board, salt and pepper shakers, a sugar bowl, a gravy boat, drinking glasses, napkins, and Pricey’s dad’s napkin, with its ancient ivory ring, which evidently Mrs Price put out at every meal, according to Robbie. Even breakfast.

‘Yeah, maybe the pub,’ Farren said. ‘I been at Maggie’s for long enough.’ He didn’t so much want to leave Maggie’s as not be in her way. ‘It’s a pretty small house.’

Mrs Price nodded. Her burgundy-coloured dress, her carefully secured coppery hair, her languid hand gestures, and her intense way of looking at Farren demanded his undivided attention – but he was not overawed. In fact he was brave enough to think he quite liked Mrs Price. He felt she was interested in him, and she’d thanked him, holding his hands, for helping Robbie when she’d cut her head.

‘Living in an hotel is not ideal for a boy.’ Mrs Price corrected the placing of her knife and fork one fraction. ‘But Mr Lansdowne-Murphy runs a decent establishment. There are worse places, I’m sure.’

Farren was relieved Mrs Price thought the Victory would be all right, because he was worried about being lonely, although the pub was quite friendly.

‘Isla’s there, too,’ he said, for his own benefit as much for Mrs Price’s information. ‘And I can take me rabbit. As long as Johnny’s dog doesn’t get it.’ He did not add that he was glad that the pub was close to the inlet, and that from the kitchen door he could see
his house across the bridge. ‘And when Danny’s back, I’ll go home. Mr O’Leary won’t let nobody else have our place ’til Danny comes back, he said.’

‘I’m sure he won’t.’ Mrs Price cut a slice of bread in four. ‘He also has a boy overseas.’ Meticulously she buttered a quarter. ‘This War is a truly nasty business. I sometimes wonder what can be achieved, if anything at all.’

It startled Farren to hear Mrs Price say the War was bad, because hardly anyone ever did, except for Mad Billy the bottle-oh, but no one had listened to him for years. You weren’t supposed to say that the War was bad, even if your husband was missing, or someone in your family had been killed. You had to say that it was worth it.

It suddenly occurred to Farren that he hadn’t given Isla the bird book. Maggie still had it. He’d give it to her tomorrow. The thought cheered him, but he was worried now to see Mrs Price rubbing her temples, as if she could smooth out the tight, close lines across her forehead. He could hear her humming, too, a gentle little tune perhaps intended to soothe away troubling thoughts.

Suddenly Robbie smacked the edge of the table, sending up a hard, silvery rattle from the knives and forks.

‘Oh, it’ll be
all
right, muvver!’ He began to thump a pretend piano, the table shaking. ‘Because good old Captain Price! Will bounce out in a thrice! As he’s been known to do at least twenty times before! Da dah!’ Robbie lifted his hands with a flourish. ‘Now what’s for sweets?’

Farren laughed. He’d never seen anyone do what Pricey could do, and at the drop of a hat. Mrs Price was also smiling, even if a plaited strand of her hair had come loose and hung down her
cheek, giving her a wild look, Farren thought, like an actress or a mad queen in a book.

‘Good
God
, Robert.’ Mrs Price did not look displeased. ‘Where
did
you come from I do not know. But I will fetch some dessert. I believe there is trifle.’

The boys watched her leave, the flames of the candles bending obediently after her.

‘Bloody hell, sergeant Roon.’ Robbie arched his eyebrows. ‘Lucky I had that piano handy, eh?’

‘So what are you gunna do with your boat?’ Robbie asked as they wandered back to Maggie’s. ‘When they bring it home?’

Farren side-stepped a pothole. Do with the boat? Jesus, there was only one thing he was ever gunna do with the
Camille
.

‘Go fishin’,’ he said. ‘Just fix ’er up and quit the pub. As soon as Danny gets back.’

Robbie nodded appreciatively.

‘Well, you can count me in. You can be skipper and I’ll bring lunch. I mean it. I’ll quit school and everything. In fact, let’s go and get it now. It’s only a fifteen mile walk.’

Farren knew Robbie was joking, but not entirely.

‘Well, you can come
out
with me –’ Farren felt the words accelerating. ‘Like any time you want. But you ain’t a fisherman, Robbie. You’d go mad in a week. You should be a – a…’ Farren was stumped. He didn’t know what Robbie should be.

‘I should be a
what
?’ Robbie stood, hands on hips.

‘A –’ Farren tried to think of something exciting or difficult that Robbie could do. ‘I dunno. An explorer. Or a doctor or somethin’. ’ Inspiration struck. ‘No, I
do
know. You said so yerself. You
should be a bloody
airman
.’ Beyond the end of the road Farren could see the Rip, broad and silver, as if a tide of moonlight was running. Yes! As the sea would be for him, the sky would be for Pricey. ‘You know, you should fly planes. Maybe even in the War. If it lasts that long.’

Above Farren the sky had never felt so close. The sheer potential it held for unknown freedoms and adventures was written all over it. If anyone could fly, Pricey could.

‘Yeah, perhaps you’re right, old boy.’ Robbie gently kicked the road. ‘Because that’s what I’ve been thinking myself, actually.’

Farren went down to the wash-house, carrying the bird book, pleased to be giving it to Isla although it weighed him down. Now, as well as the stories of the birds, it held the story of the last day of his old life, the last day when he had felt safe in the world. He hoped that she wouldn’t detect it was such a big heavy thing, and only see the pictures and the writing.

He stopped at the door, the heat pressing outwards, the smell of smoke smoothed by steam. Isla sat at the glassless window looking out at the estuary, her stick in the copper with the boiling sheets as if she was a neglectful witch bored with her brew. Farren wondered how the world might seem to her.

How different would it be, he thought, when you couldn’t hear? Would it be like watching a play? Or being in a country where all the people spoke some special silent language? And wouldn’t you always be worried that someone might be about to grab you from behind? Or be calling you, but you couldn’t hear?