Black Water

Penguin Books

David Metzenthen was born in Melbourne in 1958. He began to write fiction after abandoning a career as an advertising copywriter. He has lived and travelled overseas, but regards Australia and its citizens as a major source of inspiration for his work.

David has won several awards for excellence, including, in 2003, the Prize for Young Adult Fiction in the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for
Wildlight
and the award for best Young Adult Book in the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards for
Boys of Blood and Bone.
In 2004, David won the NSW Premier’s Literary Award and an Honour Book award in the Children’s Book Council Book of the Year Awards, also for
Boys of Blood and Bone.

David lives with his wife and two young children in Melbourne.

I would like to express my appreciation to residents, past and present, of Queenscliff, Victoria, for creating and preserving their remarkable history. I would also like to thank Ron Ryder, of Toll Shipping, for making possible my Bass Strait crossing, and Tim Phillips and Wayne Parr of the Wooden Boat Shop, Sorrento, for sharing their knowledge of the famous Queenscliff barracouta boats. I’m also indebted to designer, David Altheim, for such an evocative book cover, and finally I thank my editor, Christine Alesich, who only ever makes better what I have done.

This novel is a work of fiction and although based on certain facts, its characters, storyline, and mistakes, are all of my creation.

Swan Bay was like one of those happy heaven pictures from a Sunday school story book, Farren thought; all the different birds together on water that was flat, black, and silver like a new frying pan. He watched, listening, their contented quiet honking and whistling coming to him sweet and sour on air that smelled of seaweed, saltbush, and tidal mud. Here he belonged. Right here.

The colours of the estuary, sky-blue over fifty tones of green and brown, merged and soothed, the occasional beating of wings and the furrowing of water causing no more fuss than the ticking of a clock. But the crashing of a rifle, as flat and sharp as shattering glass, caused instant commotion. Across the inlet hundreds of waterbirds rose, more like a swarm than a flock.

‘Who’s bloody shootin’?’ Farren murmured without anger. ‘Scarin’ the bloody birds.’ He got up from his place amongst the low scrub and the soft banks of dried seagrass, and set off around the shore, his fishing bag light on his back.

In front of him the railway embankment drew a sweeping line around the shore then climbed away through small hills dotted
with sheep and stained with bracken. It was his mother’s birthday soon, he remembered – no, not her birthday. What was the day called when you died? When it was five years or one year, or whatever, since you went? He didn’t know. Maybe it didn’t have a name.

Still, he remembered the day; it was July the seventeenth, and he knew the year, 19
13
, because he’d never liked the number thirteen. He didn’t mind the
seventeenth
. That wasn’t a bad number, even though his mother had died two years ago on that day, in the dead of winter when the southerlies blew and the boats hardly went out, and the wind got down the chimney and rattled as if it had a stick. Now whenever Farren heard that rattling, and those numbers, that’s what he thought of, his mother dying.

And being dead, dressed in white, so still, her head sunk low in the pillow, her face the wrong colour, like new beeswax and just as smooth. That’s what he remembered and was trying to forget; and other serious things that his brother, Danny, and their dad, Tom, did at the time. But now Danny was away with the war in Gallipoli, and Farren worried about that so much he often found it hard to even think about the past.

So, with the simple hope that Danny was giving the Turks a good belting, Farren Fox walked on beside the olive-coloured water of the estuary, and in ten paces had reclaimed the feeling of a Queenscliff Saturday afternoon, as joyful as permission.

Farren fished the still black water under the bridge, the green cord line taut over his finger. Here bream lurked, strong silver fighters that flashed in the depths when hooked. He loved them, these fish, even when he was killing them, smacking their hard foreheads
with a piece of wood as thick as his wrist. Beside him, laid out along the bridge timber, were seven of them, their staring eyes as firm and round as fingertips.

Packing the fish into a hessian bag, Farren climbed back up onto the railway line then crossed the bridge, heading away from town, liking the feeling of being somewhere between the sky and the water. He thought of Danny but found it hard to picture him being in the War. He couldn’t imagine Danny marching along, always wearing boots and a tunic – but he could imagine Danny hiding and shooting in the hills of Gallipoli because Danny was a beautiful shot and he was fit, fast and strong.

Farren walked up the train tracks, picturing Danny at work in the sail loft, cutting the big sheets of canvas with silver shears, in bare feet, the sun through the high dusty windows shining bright on his brother’s dark hair. And then he pictured Danny running through the Gallipoli scrub, boots flicking sand, to throw himself down and shoot Turk soldiers right through the head, the .303 rifle big in his hands because Danny was only light, but he was tough and fast-handed, a real good fighter.

Those Turks could never hide, or get away, from Danny Fox. Farren reckoned that his brother could find anything, or see anything, even in the dark, if he put his mind to it. Once Danny had given Farren a knife, an American knife, two-bladed with white sides made of whalebone, and when Farren had lost it within a week, Danny simply went outside and found it.

‘Don’t go losin’ it again,’ was all he’d said, putting the knife into Farren’s hand. And Farren never had; he had the knife in his pocket now, heavy and secure.

Farren left the train tracks and went through a fence into a
paddock. A rabbit lolloped across the hill, and when it stopped Farren sighted down his outstretched arm and made the sound of a shot.

‘
Kcher!’
He lowered his arm. ‘Gotcha.’

Without haste the rabbit hopped into the bracken, perhaps reassured that the boy’s intentions were harmless, but if that’s what it felt, it was mistaken. Farren Fox would snare it, trap it, shoot it, or wring its neck without a thought, and sell it for threepence. Farren walked on.

By a burrow near the fence, Farren could see a trapped rabbit. It was caught by a hind leg and kicked. As he approached it squealed, a desperate, awful whistling, the trap dragging, the chain jangling as it pulled up against the peg that Farren had hammered in with the same piece of wood that he killed the fish.

Farren pinned the rabbit and broke its neck with quick, brutal skill. He put it into his bag, separating it from the fish then again checked to see that no one was around. He was alone, the hills empty, visited only by the wind that pressed the grass to the ground and pushed the cobwebs that clung on the fence wire. And so he sat, arms-on-knees, looking at the blank silver water of the estuary.

Farren could feel hunger like a deep crease in his stomach but he ignored it. Instead he thought of his dad, Tom Fox, fishing out on the open water of Bass Strait, having sailed on the morning tide in the family’s boat, the
Camille
, named for Farren’s mother.

Boats were great things, Farren thought. He loved everything about them: the timber they were made from, the sounds and feel of them sailing, the way they could go out onto the ocean that was a thousand feet deep, and take you to places strange and new. All the Foxes liked boats. And all the Foxes liked making things,
knowing things, fishing for things, and hunting for things. It was in their blood.

Farren looked at his hands. They were smeared with dirt and grime from his fishing and rabbiting. He was no different. Or he hoped he wasn’t.

Fishing boats moved slowly up the darkening river, gently pushing their slack white sails before them, the sound of voices see-sawing from the water to the wharf. Eyes straining, Farren could see that the
Camille
had not yet tied up. His dad and Luther must still be somewhere out on the river, up to their ankles in barracouta, fish like pick handles with cats’ teeth, rat trap mouths, and shiny silver eyes like half-sucked lollies.

Farren loved the
Camille
. She was a twenty-six footer made from kauri pine and so beautiful to look at it was like someone was caressing his eyes. Wide and heavy, she sat low in the water, and when he saw her sailing he couldn’t help but come up with memories of his mother, although he didn’t know why, except that without the boat the Foxes would have nothing and be nothing. He would’ve liked to go and meet the boat; to take the lines, tie her up, and see the fish but he kept on for home, to get some sort of tea ready for his dad.

Starting up onto the bridge he saw someone coming the other way, a stooped figure carrying a bucket and what looked like a rifle but was, Farren knew, a long-handled shovel.

‘’Ow are yer goin’, Farren?’ Jimmy the Scrounger muttered, the steel toe-caps of his boots shining like bottle tops, his dirty old coat slashed open. ‘Ya get ’ny? Seen ya over the line and out along De Crespigny’s hills.’

‘Yeah, gotta few.’ Farren knew that Jimmy would’ve known he’d got more than a few. ‘Bream’n a mullet and a couple’a rabbits. How about you? You find anythin’ worth a bob or two?’

Jimmy laughed, the breath in his chest rattling like marbles in a jar.

‘Not today.’ He rested on his shovel as if it were a crutch. ‘Not today. But every day I don’t is bringin’ me closer to the day I do.’ Jimmy let go a wet cough that Farren ducked like a slap. ‘And that brother of yours, Farren? ’Ow’s old Danny-boy gettin’ along? You see, I did go up the church and ask the good reverend to put up a few prayers for him special.’

‘He’s orright.’ Farren didn’t like to talk about Danny much. It just seemed better that way, to keep his name safe and sound, like a secret. ‘It’s good you asked the reverend, though,’ he added. ‘For prayers.’

‘Oh, I do me best,’ Jimmy said. ‘For them that deserves it. Anyway, son, I’ll be seein’ ya. And if I don’t I won’t. Cheerio.’ And he limped off into the darkness, the blade of his shovel ringing on the timbers.

Farren sat quietly with his father in the small room that served as a kitchen and a parlour, Tom Fox staring straight ahead as if he could see into the silence, and make some sense of it. Farren was used to this. Or he was now; not always had his dad been so quiet, their house so untidy, the meals so rough, the table grainy with spilled sugar that would most likely be cleaned up by mice. When Farren’s mother died, everything had changed.