Sing Fox to Me (20 page)

‘Don't hover,' said Clancy without looking away from the telly.

‘What are you watching?' asked Samson, trying not to stare at Clancy's leg.

‘I hate adverts. Only thing the mute button is good for.'

‘Can I watch too?'

‘It's just the news.' Clancy winced as he shifted his weight.

‘I like the news.'

‘Sit down,' said Clancy, and Samson did.

He didn't really like armchairs or the couch. He preferred to sit cross-legged on the floor, close to the screen, because at home they didn't have a remote control, and it was his job to change the channel or adjust the volume.

After a few seconds of flashing ads, he asked, ‘What happened to your leg?'

Clancy smiled, but it wasn't a happy smile. It was more like a smile Samson's dad made sometimes. What other things about his granddad were the same as his dad?

‘Wondered when one of you boys was going to ask that,' said Clancy. ‘Your brother isn't exactly direct, though, is he?'

Samson nodded in agreement, although he wasn't sure what he was agreeing to.

‘I fell. Well, actually, I didn't just fall. I was clobbered by a tree, and then I fell.' Like with his dad, Samson could hear the story in his granddad's voice bubbling like a kettle. ‘I was up there in a storm,' said Clancy, and he gestured to the curtained windows. ‘A tree came loose and collected me. Shattered my leg. Would've died, but my mate George pulled me free, took me to hospital. It never healed right, though.'

Samson wanted desperately to run his fingers over the knobbled weave of veins, but he didn't. Instead he asked, ‘Does it hurt?'

‘Does it ever.'

The last ad finished, and the news came back on. Clancy unmuted the telly.

‘Why were you up the mountain in a storm?' asked Samson, but his granddad didn't answer. He probably couldn't hear over the newsreader.

Samson excused himself and went back outside. The stars twinkled overhead, and he wondered where Jonah was and if he was happy.

The next morning, Tilda and Murray convinced Clancy that they should call the police. Samson watched as Murray made the call. Later that day, a detective came from town to oversee the search and brought three uniformed officers. They looked for Jonah along with everyone else from town, but no one found him. The police also asked Clancy lots of questions, and he only got angry at a few. No one questioned Samson. They probably thought he didn't know anything.

He did, though. He knew that most of the town blamed Clancy because, as Mattie had told him, there had been someone else gone missing. That girl, River Fox.

A man from a newspaper came. Tilda told Clancy not to answer the door, because the journalist's answers were in the new dirt streak of Clancy's old bad leg.

‘We won't find him this way,' Samson said to his granddad.

‘Why not?' asked Clancy.

‘He doesn't want us to know where he is.'

‘Tough shit. The bloody little galah. He could be dead in a ditch for all we know.'

Samson imagined his brother hidden like a newly hatched chick inside a large brown crater. Jonah wouldn't die that way. Not his brother.

On the fifth day, as Clancy opened the gate, he said, ‘Don't go beyond the fence, Samson. It's not safe anywhere else.'

Samson nodded, but he wondered what had changed.

Most people from town got bored or went back to work. Some stayed, about half a dozen older men and women whose children were grown. Samson waited on the steps for everyone to arrive, leave, and then return around sunset with empty hands and sore feet. He listened to them talk.

On the seventh day since Jonah's disappearance, an older man from the town said, ‘No use. Kids always go missing up here.' His friend nodded. Then Tilda came gingerly down the steps, her big belly out in front of her, and said, ‘Not in front of Samson, lads.' The men looked at him, but Samson could tell that neither of them cared if he heard, because neither of them cared that Jonah was his brother.

Samson left them staring and walked to the edge of the fence. Beyond the bush, through the scrub, he could see the edge of the mountain. It wasn't close, but the trees parted as if they wanted him to know there was something beyond the house. He watched the sky change. It went from ocean blue to a mix of dark blue and grey. The clouds turned dark.

Rain again
, he told Tilda with his hands, but she said the forecast was for fine weather. Samson shook his head. She was wrong. His mum always said dark clouds meant rain. ‘Don't be afraid,' she'd say. ‘All clouds are just water.' Samson wasn't afraid of the rain, only the clouds. He hated the drawn-out expectation, the knowing before something actually happened.

By late morning, the rain swept over the mountain in greyish white sheets and hammered the dirt road, turning the dust from golden yellow to stripes of orange and black. The trees trembled. Leaves disappeared from branches and reappeared in the underbrush. The windows misted and then ran with rain as though the house was inside a waterfall. By lunchtime, the police and the few remaining townspeople had abandoned the search and driven down the mountain. ‘Not forever,' said one of the policemen, trying to be comforting. ‘But there's no use losing anyone else in this dodgy weather.'

‘I understand,' said Tilda. ‘But Clancy Fox is still out there.'

The policeman looked deflated, useless. Samson thought of Mattie, and his stomach flipped, landing him somewhere between excitement and distress. Mattie would do better than this policeman. ‘There's not much I can do about that, Ms Kelly.'

Tilda nodded. ‘Thank you,' she said and she walked the policeman out.

A few hours later Samson heard someone shout. He stood up and looked out the window just in time to see Murray run across the lawn, drenched. Tilda was waiting at the door with a towel in each hand and one on the floor. He was shaking, his Akubra still running with water like an awning on a house. Tilda wrapped her arms around him. ‘No luck?' she asked.

‘Lost him in the rain,' said Murray.

‘Who? Jonah?'

‘Nah, Clancy. Fuckin' sly bugger. I bet he was just waiting for a chance to give me the slip.'

‘What for?' asked Tilda, as she dried his neck and dreadlocks.

Murray kissed her, and Samson looked away. ‘You should get back to Mattie tonight,' he said. ‘Or bring her up with you, if you want.'

Tilda shook her head, lowered her voice and said something Samson couldn't hear.

Murray wiped the rest of the rain from his face. ‘Fair enough.'

‘Should I wait for Clancy to get back? What if he's hurt himself?'

‘The mountain's let him be so far. Worrying here won't keep him any safer.'

‘I'd like to stay a bit longer –'

Samson opened the door and went outside. Beyond the shelter of the verandah, the rain fell. He wondered if Clancy would be okay in the storm, and Jonah too.

He left his socks and jacket and even his jumper on the verandah, and walked out into the rain. His shirt and pants were soaked in seconds. It was cold after a while, but this cold reminded him of home. The cold of deep water and swimming down, down, down. He held his face to the sky and opened his arms and mouth. He caught water in his hands and tasted it on his tongue. The water collected inside his belly, and slowly he turned it into rivers and then lakes.

Samson opened his eyes and looked down. Water on the grass was nothing like rain falling with purpose and defiance through the sky. He picked up a stone, probably from Clancy's fallen towers, to remember the feel of the rain and the ache inside him. The stone was wet, and that meant the storm was inside.

He thought of Mattie. Maybe she would never come back to his side of the mountain, and maybe he would never leave. Sometimes his brother said he was dumb, but Samson knew more than what was in Jonah's books. He knew the story of things. The way moments poured and pushed into one another. He knew the way they flowed and changed and evaporated when they were gone. He knew what it was to be a storm caught inside rocks.

Clancy opened his eyes. His heart raced inside his chest. Where was he? He searched for some landmark to show him where he was and maybe even how he'd managed to walk himself into the bush alone. ‘George?'

From deep inside the scrub he heard the
whoop whoop
of a nocturnal bird, early to its post. The late afternoon air was already cold and icy. It wasn't exactly like ice, though – the mountain air was more alive than that. It slithered as if it was out to get him. He knew he should go home and make the boy some tucker, but he also knew he wouldn't. He didn't kid himself. He knew there'd been a moment, not long after the boys first arrived on his mountain, when he thought maybe he could be an alright granddad, but that'd gone south with his dream of being a good father, and husband.

Another
whoop whoop
from the trees. The bird squawked and burst from the canopy. A big bugger, probably an owl. His heart thumped so hard, he thought it might burst from his chest and take flight too.

Leaves bristled. He kept walking, his hand out in front like that of a blind man with a stick. Something darted away as he approached. Something bigger followed. Wasn't that always the way of it?

‘River,' he shouted. ‘River fucking Fox!'

No answer.

Clancy tried to catch his breath. He shouldn't have let her sing to the tigers, or chase them. He should have walked her home himself every afternoon. He should have kept her mum alive. What a mug he was. How could he let the mountain get the better of him? Where the fuck was George? He was supposed to help with things like this. Wasn't that the point of him coming back, to help Clancy find their daughter?

Clancy couldn't give up on her. Not River, not ever. Might even have to sleep rough for the night. Give her a chance to find the campy. Start fresh at first light.

He and George used to sleep rough all the time when they were young. They didn't need a tent, only a shiralee each. But that was many years ago, and George had since replaced him in the night with Essie.

An animal scurried up the tree next to him. Clancy launched himself forward, but his crook leg buckled. Hands hit mud, and the skin on his knee ripped. Then the bush fell silent, ready to hear his voice, but he wasn't sure who to call for anymore. Where the fuck was everyone?

He closed his eyes, and River was licking the thick red honey from his fingers again.

He took a deep breath. He knew what the stone cairns were. Had always known. They were the sorry leftovers from the terrible, empty want to kill. It had returned like dark tendrils of smoke, not for his daughter this time, but for his grandson. River had found the darkness first – or maybe it had chosen her, like the disease that killed her mother. It hadn't been her fault. No child could come down from the mountain unscathed, certainly not with her mother slowly dying right in front of her.

Clancy remembered the first time he'd found a dead animal in his house, even though he didn't want to. Even though he tried every day to swallow the memory down into his gut where he could keep it quiet and hidden.

Only a few weeks before Essie left them all for good, Clancy held his wife for hours through the night while she sobbed and vomited into the stainless steel laundry bucket. When she was done, he wished he could kiss her, though her mouth smelt like acid and infection. They both fell asleep eventually.

In the early hours, Clancy woke to the sounds of River singing. Essie was coiled into a ball next to him, still asleep. He tried not to disturb her as he got up.

‘
The Fox is on the town-o, town-o, town-o
…'

He opened the back door and closed it gently.

At first, River didn't notice him. Her face was damp with sweat, and her hair was pulled back in a knot. The outline of her skinny body was just visible beneath the white nightie her mum used to make her wear. She was still singing.

‘River girl?'

The front of her nightie was tucked up into her undies, and her thighs and knees were covered in dirt.

‘What're you doing, love?'

‘
And the little ones chewed on the bones-o, bones-o, bones-o. And the little ones chewed on the bones
…'

Clancy picked her up, and as he did, it was as though the life fell out of her body. Her skin smelt like fresh kangaroo shit. He carried her inside and called for Essie. She removed the kangaroo scats from River's underwear and ran her a bath. They lay her down in the water and left her there for a moment. Outside the bathroom door, Clancy held his wife's bare head to his chest as she cried.

‘I'm sorry,' she said.

Clancy touched the back of her head. Her skin felt cold and exposed.

Pulling away, she reached for her beanie. ‘I can't fix this,' she said, as she put the beanie over her scalp.

‘She'll be better soon.' Clancy didn't know what else to say. His wife was dying.

‘Mum?' David was in the hallway, wearing his pyjama pants and carrying a book. ‘You alright?'

Essie took a step towards Clancy and pressed her head into his chest. She rubbed her face against his shirt and dried her eyes. He breathed in. Her skin smelt like honey. She turned back to face their son and smiled. ‘Come on,' she said as she took David's hand. He looked surprised. ‘Let's go have a talk.' Together they walked down the hall to his room. Clancy shook his head. Since finding out she was sick, Essie had started treating David like a child again, even though the boy was almost sixteen.

Clancy waited outside the bathroom. He leant against the door and closed his eyes. The silence of the hallway was broken only occasionally by splashing bath water.

After a while, ‘Dad?'

‘Yes, darlin'?'

‘Get away from the door.'

Clancy walked down the hallway and past the open door to David's bedroom. He stopped and gazed in. David was held in the nook of Essie's thin white arm. Her beanie was pushed back, making her forehead seem unnaturally long. She was reading to him as though he was still a little boy. ‘
The valley opened out into a great plain dotted over with rocks and cut up by ravines. At one end stood a little village, and at the other the thick jungle came down in a sweep to the grazing-grounds, and stopped there as though it had been cut off with a hoe
…'