Max (10 page)

‘I get two calls today – at work! One I took straight away, because I thought something might have happened to you. I'd just been involved with a particularly difficult birth, and I pick up the phone and it's your principal ringing me at work to tell me our phone's out of order! Then he tells me about some assault on a railway policeman and about your ID card being found near where it all took place. Then the cops ring to say they wanted to check with me on your alibi. Your alibi? And, Max, when did you lose your bag? I didn't know anything about that.'

Max stared at the rug on the floor. Dave stared at Max.

‘You come home with a gash under your eye. Davidson tells me you've been walking around school like a zombie. And tell me, Max.' Dave gulped down the rest of his drink. ‘What in God's name – I can't believe you did this: “Autumn leaves and ants. The tunnel waits for us all. Good luck'. What's that supposed to mean?'

‘I told them I didn't do that.'

‘Doesn't matter what you told them, mate. It's what you tell me that matters at the moment. I'm worried. What should I do? You're too old to be grounded. You've obviously invented some cock and bull story. The principal should be OK. But the detective...'

‘Gillespie. Detective Gillespie'.

Max rested his head in his hands. How could things turn so quickly? For the first time in weeks he'd felt good. Felt as though he was worth something. As though life was worth something. Now here he was, hearing a list of his crimes and feeling like jumping off a cliff.

‘I must say I didn't like his attitude very much. He was as angry as a bee in a bottle by the sound of him. I heard it in his voice. So I backed up your story about babysitting Woody, whatever night they were asking me about. He just about exploded over the phone.' He held his glass out to Max. ‘Here. Go and get me another drink. I'm the one who should be holding his head in his hands.'

When Max returned, Dave sipped and then held the glass up to the light. ‘What'd you do, Max? Put half a bottle in here? Figured you'd get me a bit mellow and stop hassling you?'

Max allowed himself to smile.

‘Well, mate,' his father went on, ‘can we let things settle down a bit? Can you calm down? I know all this has to do with Lou, but God Almighty – you can't just throw everything to the wind.' He stood up and faced Max. ‘I'll tell you, mate. All this graffiti – and don't tell me you didn't do it. Getting into trouble. The cops. It all has to stop!'

The last words bellowed around the room. In the next room, Woody hugged an old stuffed rabbit to his chest. ‘I mean it, Max. I'm serious this time. I don't know what to do with you. Maybe your mother might know – in fact, if there's any more crap, that's where I'm sending you. I'll be ringing her tonight. You should talk to her at any rate. You haven't spoken to her for ages.'

Mum. Up there at Brown's Beach, full of oceans and rivers and eagles. All her wacky alternative friends with mud-brick houses, yoga on the beach and tarot readings. At times, the idea of moving up there appealed to Max. But he hadn't thought about it for ages and now there was Mai to keep him in the city. Not to mention this stuff in his head called Lou.

This stuff called suicide.

T
HEY HAD DECIDED on a nine o'clock start. Mai and Max in his father's old powder-blue rapid rider, now a family heirloom, chipped and scratched with a hairline fracture in the fibreglass hull.

‘What story did you tell them this time?' asked Max.

‘Working in the library again. Anything to do with study and my parents are happy. I told them the school was opening its library for Senior students on Saturday mornings.'

‘Won't they check up? Ring the school? Or do they trust you?'

‘I don't know about that. But they wouldn't ring up because of their English. They're not confident.'

‘Anyway, what's so wrong? You're only going for a paddle.'

Mai stopped paddling and dragged her fingers through the water. ‘Don't worry about it, Max. You wouldn't understand.' She looked up at the dripping mistletoe hanging in thick clumps from the trees. ‘I'll try to explain one day. Let's not talk about it.'

Pulling hard, they slid out and into the hush of the Maramingo. Sleek black water hens with orange-red beaks scratched in the mud, only pausing for a minute in their morning ritual as the canoe surged and then glided, surged and then glided.

‘He might not be there, you know. The old bloke I was telling you about. This time of the day he's sometimes hard to find. Hard to find the island as well. For some reason.'

‘I don't care. This is good enough.'

‘Oh, you would care. He's pretty interesting in a mad sort of way. You're the first person I've ever taken to the island. Lou wouldn't go. I don't take Woody and Dad's never seen him.'

Mai smiled. Grey-tinged cumulus clouds ambled across the sky. Mai and Max dipped their paddles into the calm current, a soft wind pushing at their backs.

‘If your back hurts, reach further out to the front of the boat and only drag it back as far as your bodyline. Otherwise you feel like your paddle is heavy as a bucket of water.' Max sat at the back, scrutinising Mai's paddling.

‘OK. OK. God, you're bossy. It's my first time, you know! I thought I was doing pretty well, actually.'

‘You are. You are. I was giving you a few tips, that's all.' He grinned. ‘Another thing – I'll say this and then I'll shut up – it's usually better if you alternate the side you're paddling on. About ten strokes to each side.' Then he added, ‘But you're right. You're doing fine. I don't know why I'm going on like this. I guess I'm a bit stressed. School rang Dad – and the cops called him as well.'

‘Did your father go mad at you? Did he lose it?'

Mai concentrated on the chipped plastic blade as it cut into the water. The old bulky canoe moved up the river like a barnacled whale heading out to sea.

‘No, not really. He just – well, he did kind of lose it. Didn't shout too much, considering. Drank a bit, though. He sat on the end of my bed as though he really didn't have an answer.'

‘An answer to what?'

Mai stopped and turned around, resting her hand on the deck behind her. Max kept on paddling, staring at her. ‘She's really beautiful,' he thought. ‘Why didn't I notice her before?'

‘Answer? Oh, I don't know. An answer for me. Maybe an answer for himself. He thinks a lot – takes a lot of things to heart.'

‘No wonder,' laughed Mai, turning to her paddling once more.

A capful of wind helped them along. The air was still crisp enough to chill the tip of your nose. A line of rocks jutted out in a curve. Around the bend the paper mill slid into view, looking stolid and ugly with no hint of the mystery it possessed at night. A gaping drain, big as the mouth at Luna Park, dribbled a constant flow of warm water over a dark green mossy concrete shelf. A rat, furtive and gimlet-eyed, faced their canoe as it passed and then darted back into the cavernous dark of the drainpipe.

‘So who's the man we're going to see? Is he really a hermit?'

Mai felt the muscles in her arms warming, her forearms beginning to ache, blood coursing through her veins. She was aware of her arms and shoulders as if she had just discovered them.

Max stared at her back, her neck. It was good sitting behind her. He could watch for ages, unnoticed.

‘I feel as though your eyes are boring into me,' she said. ‘What are you doing back there?'

‘Nothing – just watching the river.'

There were lies. And then, there were lies.

‘Yeah. Nick's a hermit. But sometimes he's not there. It's difficult to know.'

‘You weren't joking, then? What happens to him and his island? Does it disappear or do we have to say a magic spell?' she said mockingly.

‘You'll see. C'mon, paddle. Otherwise we'll never get there,' Max bossed.

Another bend and there was the island. Plain as day, bathed in more light than Max had ever seen. The canoe slid up onto the sand, the hiss and crunch of the waterlogged gravel disturbing the crows who began cawing like a raucous choir.

They found Nick mooching around his camp, cradling his little crow. ‘I am this bird's foster parent,' he started, as though they had been there for hours.

‘Hi, Nick,' Max said but Mai held back. She cast a look around the camp and the island. ‘This is Mai. Hope you don't mind. Can't exactly call you up and let you know that I'd be bringing someone else.' Then, to state the obvious, ‘She's a friend of mine.'

‘A friend?' Nick walked over, holding out his hand to Mai. ‘How amazing you are, Max. Fancy paddling with a friend. And what kind of friend are you, Mai? A friend who's a girl or a girlfriend?'

Neither spoke nor looked at each other.

‘Ah, you don't know yet,' Nick grinned and pointed a finger at Max. ‘But I think he is hoping. Here, Mai, come with me. I'll show you my island.'

Max had never seen him like this. It was as if Nick had put on the uniform of a tourist guide. The old man took Mai's arm and guided her along the path, leaving Max to dawdle behind.

Nick couldn't stop explaining his theories or his philosophies on life. He pointed out landmarks, explained why he had fences, expounded on his ‘life line' – a thin steel cable that ran from his island to the trunk of a tree about five metres up the bank. It was his invention, designed to save his life in the event of a flood. He also had a raft made out of remnants of packing boxes that he'd stashed in some bushes. When the waters rose, he intended to stand on his raft and pull himself hand over hand along the rope to safety, well above the flood line.

Mai murmured encouragement. She was having a lovely time. Max considered returning to the half-dead fire but decided to hang around. When they found themselves at the dilapidated, matchstick jetty the old man turned to him and said, ‘Why don't you go and make us all a cup of coffee? I'm sure your friend could do with one.'

This time Nick was a maître d', ordering his staff around.

Max felt like pushing the old guy into the water.

‘Alright. Would you like one, Mai?'

She smiled ‘yes' and almost burst out laughing at Max's face.

When he returned, they were still sitting on the end of the jetty, Mai swinging her legs. Nick's charcoal-black bird hopped around the base of a giant red gum that housed the flock of crows. Fifty of them sat in the branches, watching, making mental notes of scraps and leftovers to be scavenged later. They were more like a tribe than a flock.

‘Thank you very much, Max. Most hospitable of you.'

Now Nick was behaving like the landed gentry treating Max like one of his serfs. He was giving Max the shits. ‘The crow, Mai – it is the most misunderstood bird. Look at them all!' He pointed to them, jostling for position on the branches, some knocking their blunt- nosed beaks on the wood.

‘Some people think the big brown hawk and the wedge-tailed eagle are the birds of spirit. They call the crow a scavenger, a tip bird. I tell you – go to Mount Kosciusko, to the trails across the highlands. You know what you find? Crows! Wheeling and flapping. You see how they walk – like an old man with arthritis in his hips. They don't walk as well as other birds. They prefer to fly – and they don't just flap, flap, flap.' Nick moved his arms up and down, mimicking the crows. ‘They glide too. What's more, they do not attack humans. Once I saw, just along up there, a crow snatch a tiger snake swimming across the river. Its little head waggling just above the surface and whack,' Nick smacked his hands together, ‘the crow has it in its beak. But that is rare, eh, Max?'

‘If you say so,' said Max, swishing a stick in the water.

Snake-catching crows, he thought. There's no end to his stories.

‘Yes, I do say so,' Nick was irrepressible. ‘So the crow is the spiritual bird for me. It likes to glide but it knows it has to flap hard sometimes to survive. If crowman survives, then he has the chance to glide – the opportunity, at least. Even my little foster bird might have a chance.' He threw the dregs of his coffee towards the crippled bird. ‘What about you, Max? Have you been flapping or gliding? How did you do that to your head?'

Max's fingertips felt the sewn flesh and the raised red welt. He thought of Fatman, Dave, Lou, Woody, his mother. Pictures of the trestle bridge, the tunnel, abseiling down the face of the school. Suddenly he felt very foolish. So foolish that he wanted to unload his story. Not to impress Mai nor to bring attention to himself. The urge to tell them what had been going on came from somewhere else. He was hoping to find some wisdom to help him back, to help him glide instead of flap.

So he told them. All of it. The graffiti, the school, the cops, the tunnel, everything – well, nearly everything. He said little about the words on the walls and the Da Vinci man. What could he say about that, when he himself didn't know where they came from? All the time he spoke, he felt as though he was flapping without direction or purpose.