Sing Fox to Me (2 page)

one

J
onah Fox caught sight of his face in the car window. It shivered like a reflection in water. He rubbed his hand against his cheek the way he had seen his dad do in the bathroom mirror before a shave. Jonah's skin felt lumpy, like always, and he wondered how a razor could ever glide over his cheek without cutting him. He stuck out his tongue, and the reflection vanished into the darkness of the trees outside. He looked away. Jonah hated his skin. He hated the way it creased around his black eyes and stretched too-tightly over his small bones, but most of all, Jonah hated the stories his parents would tell about how he came to be the way he was. ‘You turned your skin from black to blue to grey to white,' they said, as if it was something special, as if he wasn't just fading away.

Jonah's twin brother, Samson Fox, had started suffocating him before he even took his first breath.

Samson was the first to be born. He didn't cry. Their parents said it was because he was an angel, but Jonah knew that wasn't why Samson didn't cry. Kids like Samson didn't do anything without help.

Jonah came next, tangled up and dark as a bad oyster. Sometimes, he tried to imagine what it must have been like. Did his brother sit on his umbilical cord, or did he suck the air clean out of Jonah's mouth?

His skin didn't stay black for long. The doctors untangled him, slapped him on the back, and Jonah screamed his skin all the way from black to stormy-weather grey. It stayed grey-ish pink for weeks, his parents said. ‘We mightn't have known it was grey, except we had Samson to compare it to,' they said.

By the time Jonah started high school, his skin had transformed. It turned into a bumpy white mess like the inside of a Clag glue pot. Sometimes Jonah would imagine stepping into a different skin. Forgetting who he was and letting the new skin make him into something different.

‘See,' interrupted his dad, David, as he turned the car off the road and pulled into an empty area beside a thicket of bushland. ‘I told you it was huge.'

Jonah looked out the window.

‘Huge,' repeated Samson from the front seat. His brother always got the front, no matter how many times Jonah called shotgun.

Jonah wound down the rental car window, and the scent of fake pine air fresheners was replaced with the stink of living trees. He took a deep breath of Tasmanian air. It was cold, and he coughed. This was it? This was his granddad's mountain?

‘Your granddad Clancy lives all the way up the top,' said David. ‘Well, almost at the top.'

Jonah took another breath, but the air felt even colder and made his back teeth ache. ‘Are you sure we're in the right place?' David pointed to a wooden board shoved into the ground beside a rusty drum mailbox. No number, but someone had painted an outline of an animal
on the side. It looked like a cave drawing. ‘What does that mean?' Jonah asked.

‘It's a fox,' said Samson quickly. ‘Like us.'

Jonah wanted to flick his brother on the back of the ear, but he pointed to the sign instead. ‘How come it has stripes, then?'

‘It's old and rusty,' said Samson.

‘Are you sure this is it, Dad?' said Jonah again.

‘I'm not likely to forget where I grew up,' said David, annoyed.

Jonah sniffed. His nose was cold. ‘What's it called?'

‘Your granddad never called the place anything.' David tilted his head to the side and looked up the mountain as though he was trying to see the top. ‘Would have been better for my book sales if he had –'

‘What about on a map?' said Jonah. He was tired of hearing about the sales of his dad's one published book. ‘They'd have to call it something on a map.'

‘Locals call it Fox Hill, but –' said David.

‘It's not a hill,' interrupted Jonah.

David ignored him and kept going. ‘Dad told me once that they used to call it Tiger Mountain.'

Jonah wished he had a map so he could check.

‘Can we get out now?' asked Samson. ‘My legs need a stretch.'

‘Great idea.'

David and Samson uncoiled their long bodies, got out of the car and stood on either side of the road. Together they looked up at the mountain. Jonah wasn't going to join them. Why should he? He hadn't wanted to come to this stupid little island, and even though his dad had pulled him out of school really early, he definitely wasn't going to get excited about living on top of a mountain with his dad, brother and an old man he'd never met.

‘Only till the end of the holidays,' he whispered. After Christmas, their mum would come, and by the end of January they would be living in Brisbane in a new house. Jonah would start Year Nine in a new school without Samson. His dad had promised. ‘Just until the end of the holidays,' he whispered again.

Outside the car, Samson and David both started to turn in large, looping circles, trying to see everything above. Their dad said, ‘How amazing is it … I'd almost forgotten. Look, Samson – look how far it goes.' Samson answered in sign language, but David wasn't looking, and Jonah couldn't be bothered getting involved.

‘Hop out, Jonah,' said his dad. ‘You don't want to miss this.'

‘I'm reading.' Jonah turned back to the book open on his lap.

‘Why don't you get out and have a look around?' said David.

Jonah turned a page.

‘This is going to be your new home.'

Jonah finally looked up. ‘I thought we were only here until after Christmas?'

David shook his head and glanced away. ‘You know what I mean.'

‘I think I see the house.' Samson pointed over the car to the mountain peak.

‘As if, ' said Jonah.

‘There, see?'

Jonah stuck his head out of the car window and stared up. The mountain loomed over him in a formless green haze. He squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again. This time, he saw how the trees stretched up, and how the late afternoon light danced between the trunks like runaway waterfalls, and how the narrow, almost hidden dirt road waited for them. A snake in the bush.

‘Got you!' shouted Samson, and he smiled again.

Their dad laughed.

‘Get stuffed,' said Jonah, as he pulled his head back through the window.

‘Come on, you two,' David said, but Jonah could hear in his voice that his heart wasn't really in the scolding. ‘You ready, mate?'

Samson shook his head. ‘Do we have to?'

‘You'll like it at your granddad's, mate.'

Samson nodded and got back into the car. David tried to help him with his seatbelt, but Samson swatted him away. ‘I can do it.'

Jonah and David waited for Samson to figure out the belt lock. Finally, after what seemed like ages, there was a click.

‘Arms in,' said David, when he turned the key in the ignition.

‘Arms in,' repeated Samson, but he left his elbow in the open window.

David drove the rental car off the bitumen road and onto the dirt path.

Jonah stared at the words in his book without reading them. After a few minutes of driving in silence, the page flipped over. ‘Hey,' said Jonah, as icy air poured through Samson's open window and funnelled onto the back seat. ‘Shut the window. It's cold.'

Samson's big, babyish face appeared from around the seat. He stuck out his tongue.

‘Dad,' said Jonah, ‘he's doing it again.'

‘Dobbas wear nappies.'

‘Oh, come on, Jonah,' said David, catching Jonah's eye in the rear-view mirror. ‘Give your brother a break.'

Samson signed something into the space between his seat and their dad's.

‘Use your words, mate,' said David, without taking his eyes off the road.

‘Yeah,
mate
,' repeated Jonah.

‘The air is
not
cold,' said Samson stiffly.

‘Remember what we talked about before we left this morning?' David asked. ‘You don't always feel the cold … Remember?'

Samson nodded and slowly wound the window up.

Jonah stared through his closed window, the book resting in his lap. The air outside was white, almost like smoke, but he hardly noticed. He was imagining what his granddad, Clancy Fox, might be like.

The dirt road snaked out in front of them, sometimes twisting and widening, sometimes narrowing. Twice it disappeared altogether, and his dad had to drive the car over ferns and grass to get to the road on the other side. They went up and up, following the thickening white air as it coiled around the mountain.

‘Didn't you like it here?' asked Jonah. ‘Why didn't you stay?'

His dad didn't answer.

Samson wriggled down into his seat and shoved his face into a rolled-up blanket he'd wedged against the window.

‘Dad?' Jonah asked again.

‘I don't know,' said David. ‘Your granddad and I don't see eye to eye. It's complicated.'

There was a dull thump in front of Jonah, and Samson's face flopped onto the window. His breath misted the glass.

David turned the steering wheel, and the car swirled around a bend in the road. ‘He thought your mum and I were too young to get married.' After a long pause he said, ‘We probably were.'

‘Will we have to share a room again?' asked Jonah, and he pushed his knee into the back of his sleeping brother's seat.

‘I don't think so. I'm not sure.'

‘You said the house has three bedrooms?'

Their eyes met briefly in the rear-view mirror, then David looked away. ‘You don't mind sharing, do you? Samson always makes your bed.'

‘He can't do hospital corners.'

‘What does Mum always say? If you adjust your expectations, then you won't be disappointed.'

Jonah looked out the window again. Thin grey trees moved past them slowly, like fence posts in the suburbs. Jonah felt frustrated, itchy even. Ready to get to Clancy's house and ready to leave it again. Maybe this was how his dad had felt when he was Jonah's age. Creeping up and down the mountain while he went to school or came home from town. ‘What if Clancy hates us?' Jonah asked quietly. But what he actually meant was,
What if Clancy hates Samson?

‘He's your granddad. He won't hate you.'

‘I hate us.'

David glanced at him again, and Jonah wished they were face-to-face instead of looking at each other through a reflection. He wished his dad would smile or reach back between the seats, like his mum sometimes did, and take his hand. But David's eyes darted back to the road. ‘It won't be long now.'

People say there's no pain like the pain of losing a child, and Clancy knew the truth of that more than most. He knew the missing, the aching. He knew the unending, circling misery of letting a child slip through his fingers, but he also knew the sorrow of forgetting, and being forgotten.

On the day his son was due to return to his mountain, Clancy wondered if he'd got it around the wrong way, loving his lost girl and forgetting his living boy. But parents had favourites, and any that said otherwise were pulling their own leg.

From the moment Clancy first held his second child, the quiet, blood-soaked daughter, he knew what he'd been missing with his grasping, noisy son. River Snow Fox was born eyes open, hands already making fists, with a full head of red curly hair, black eyes and rusty brown skin. She didn't scream, only stared, blinking so loud he could hear it click from across the room. In those quickly passing minutes, Clancy tied himself to River Fox.

River Fox, however, tied herself to something she followed into the trees and sang to her side. Something Clancy hadn't been able to forget, or let be. Something he'd hung up, like a warning in his house, many, many years ago. Something he now took off his kitchen wall to keep his grandsons safe.

Clancy folded the pelt over. One fold, then another. He smoothed it with his hands. It hadn't been folded or put away in years. When his da was alive, the pelt lived in the linen cupboard at the end of the hallway. After his da died, Clancy hung it on six nails he'd hammered into the kitchen wall. He could tell Essie didn't like the pelt. She never said, but Clancy could tell. He never mentioned it, though. Back then, they were still newlyweds and treated each other like horses about to spook.

Now, standing in his empty kitchen, Clancy folded the pelt so the head was on top, but then thought better of it. He shook the pelt, one, two, three, like a wet shirt about to be hung out to dry. Orange and black unfurled over the table. This time he folded the pelt with the head tucked under one of the shoulders, hiding the open mouth and dark black eyes. It looked as though the tiger was sleeping.

His old red mutt, Queenie, was half under the kitchen table. She lifted her head and stared. Clancy couldn't tell if she was checking on him, or annoyed at being disturbed. ‘Stay,' he said. Queenie answered by curling her white-tipped tail all the way around her body like a possum.

Behind Clancy was his ma's old washstand. He used it for storing letters he didn't want to open, and boxes of odds and ends. He moved a pile of unopened letters from his Huon pine ditty box. A mess inside: bullets, keys, a screwdriver, string, coins, a black-and-white photo of Essie holding David, a few faded receipts, and George's old Zippo lighter. The key to River's bedroom was down the bottom. He pulled it out and tucked the pelt under his shoulder like a parcel from the post office. The head jostled. One eye turned, looked out from under the paw and stared. Clancy ignored it. He walked down the hallway to his daughter's room and unlocked the door.

Inside, the air smelt of dust, caught sunshine and mothballs. Her things were exactly as he'd left them. Dolls she'd stopped playing with years before she went missing were standing along the windowsill above her desk. Clancy remembered taking them out of her toy box and lining them up, a quiet vigil for his lost girl.

Rainbows danced over the dolls. River's crystals hung from the curtain rod above the window, casting delicate colours across the room. Clancy turned each one gently. The rainbows rushed all over him. He could almost feel them, moth wings on his skin.