Sing Fox to Me (21 page)

Clancy walked outside, jealous, confused and angry. He switched on the verandah light. The lawn throbbed with a restless green glow. The newly mown grass was littered with bodies. Lizards, frogs, small birds, possums. Dozens, maybe even more than a hundred. He wrapped his arms around his body to hold himself in, but it didn't work. He cried, wept, blubbered like a fucking baby.

With the cairns, River was marking the graves of the animals she'd killed, dismembered or skinned. Maybe she'd just been trying to understand her mum's dying body or maybe she wanted to cast the restlessness out of her own body, or maybe it was payback for sending Murray away. Clancy didn't know, but he wondered if something inside his daughter was still human and sorry for killing. The tigers would have taught her different, and she, like Jonah, would have taken to it like a fish to swimming.

Now Clancy, still on the ground, laid his head in his hands. Maybe they were both sorry.

‘Enough,' he muttered. He'd had enough of cairns, and searching, and the never-ending pain in his leg. ‘Enough!' His voice echoed through the bush, but it didn't hear him, not really. ‘Fuck you,' he said to the trees and rocks and creek. ‘Fuck you,' he said to his mountain. ‘Fuck you,' he shouted to the entire bastard island.

The kookaburras laughed as if they wanted to push him over the edge. A dawn bird screeching so late in the day. He couldn't see the little blighters but he shouted, ‘And fuck you,' at them anyway.

Something hooted in the distance. Then again, this time nearer. He stood, turned, scraped his knee across another rock. Nothing. Turned again. Still nothing. Then he saw them. Two eyes hovering, growing bigger, coming closer. Her ghost had found him. At last. He had his answer. River, River, River. Something screeched again. The flap of wings. The Tyto flew over him and away into the bush as though there was no reason to stay. As though he was invisible.

Clancy lay down in the mud and dirt, and closed his eyes. He could smell the dense, soggy scent of the king ferns. They reminded him of something from when he was young. He pushed his hands into the mud. It was warm. The trees sighed in around him, and he thought of his mother.

Her hands made circles on his back.

‘I lost them, Ma,' he said.

‘It's alright,' she said, in her golden syrup voice. ‘It's not your fault, bairn.'

‘None of it?' he asked.

‘No, no. None of it.'

Clancy pulled the sheets of warm mud up around him. Surrounded by his oldest, darkest memories, he wept. It might have taken him hours or maybe only minutes to dump the grief and pain and loss into the mud.

Then Murray lifted him to his feet, like George had decades before. He pushed himself into Clancy's armpit and wrapped Clancy's arm around his shoulder. ‘Let's get you back home, mate.'

Samson was sitting in front of the telly, watching the news. The newsreader was talking about an election. No one said anything about Jonah, though Samson thought his brother was more important than the election. He switched channels.

Clancy came in the back door with Murray. Samson peered through the archway. His granddad was covered in flaking dirt and slathers of almost dry mud. ‘Mind making me a cuppa?' he said, and he sounded breathless.

Samson turned the telly all the way down so he could hear.

‘We can look again tomorrow, mate,' said Murray, and Samson heard him fill the kettle with water from the tap.

‘It's like he just vanished,' said Clancy. ‘Who's left?'

Murray cleared his throat. ‘No one's coming back, Clance.'

‘What's that?'

‘Tilda said there was a bit of a gathering last night at the pub. No one's coming back. A week is enough time, they reckon. It'll be up to the cops from here on in.'

A silence between them. The sounds of Murray making tea.

‘They think I did it,' said Clancy. ‘Don't they?'

‘No, mate. Everyone's tired and they've got their own –'

‘Horseshit. They blamed me last time and they blame me this time. Fucking David and his fucking book.'

‘No point thinking like that, Clance,' said Tilda, as she gathered up her bag and keys. ‘I should get back to Mattie.'

Samson felt her name cut through him like a jagged oyster shell.

‘Okay, bub,' said Murray, and he kissed her on the cheek.

Samson knew why Tilda didn't want him around Mattie. It was the same reason his granddad and Murray wouldn't let him look for his brother. He knew what people thought when they looked at him. They could see the creases in his hands, his straight hair and his almond-shaped eyes. Everyone behaved as though he was a big secret, but he knew all the shapes and lines of his face better than any of them, and was more scared of them too.

His lungs constricted, and the hole in his heart opened like a mouth. It burned, twisted and buckled. It wanted to open. He tried to breathe but he couldn't. Samson, Samson, Samson, he reminded himself. His breathing slowed. Your name is Samson. The hole closed. He had to get out.

Outside the house, everything was damp. Samson ran his hand over the bark of a tree trunk just on the other side of his granddad's fence. Greenish mist floated into the air and twisted around his fingers. Above him, the white tree trunks were gathering up the light, tucking it away behind the bark.

He had been right, and not only about the rain. Only Samson knew how to bring his brother out of hiding. He had even done it once before. Not long after he first started high school, Jonah had come home with a cut lip and a dark green bruise around his eye. Samson asked,
What happened?
The sign for
happen
was like an angry snake emerging from beneath a tree, and there was no past for the sign of
happen
, so Samson wondered if that meant the snake never slept.

Jonah didn't answer. He pushed Samson away and went inside.

Samson followed. ‘Did someone hit you?'

Jonah pulled back the covers on his bed and got in. He covered his face in pillows. ‘No.'

‘Is that a lie?'

‘No,' he shouted from under his pillows.

‘Why are you bleeding?'

‘I fell over.'

‘I'm telling Mum,' said Samson.

‘Rack off, dobber.'

Jonah stayed in their room all afternoon, and his tea of chops and mashed potato waited for him on the table. Samson thought about how to take the bruise away. Finally he had an idea. He snuck into their room with a copy of
The
Jungle Book
, and that was the first time Samson read aloud to his brother, and the first time they played ‘Tiger! Tiger!' The first time Samson had fixed something inside Jonah that no one else could find.

Now Samson went back into the house. Quietly, and without asking Murray or his granddad, he gathered up everything he would need and packed it carefully into his school port. He packed a second jumper and pair of socks, his Special School hat, a bottle of water, and his brother's copy of
The Jungle Book
.

Samson crossed the lawn to the gate. He was going to find his brother. No one could stop him or tell him he couldn't. Not Murray or Clancy. This time Samson could choose, and he chose to go beyond the house and beyond the fence and beyond the gate. He wouldn't make the same mistakes as everyone else.

First he checked the mouth of the cave, just in case Mattie was waiting for him. She wasn't, and there was no sign of Jonah either.

Samson wrapped his scarf tighter around his neck and pulled his beanie down over his ears, then he retrieved Jonah's book from the inside of his jacket.

Samson read ‘Mowgli's Song' as he walked through the grey-lit bush, holding it close to his face. Dark coral shadows of trees edged in around him, moving like eerie sentinels of the bush. ‘
I have come back to the jungle
.' The sludgy ground softened beneath him like the yellow sand on the beaches back home. ‘
Two things fight together in me as the snakes fight in the spring
.' The huge grey and red rocks throbbed, moving with the heartbeat of the bush. ‘
The water comes out of my eyes
.' Everything threatened to grab, cut or sharpen itself on him. ‘
I am two Mowglis
.' Everything wanted to push or swallow him into the endless maze of caves and burrows, but Samson ignored it all and read as loud as his rocky voice would let him. ‘
All the jungle knows that I have killed Shere Khan
.' Only the mountain knew where his brother was hiding. Samson stopped and waited, but no one came. The mountain had kept Jonah's secret. ‘
My heart is heavy
,' said Samson softly. ‘
With the things I do not understand
.' He shut the book, stuffed it back into his port and kept going. He wasn't going to let the mountain win. If Jonah wouldn't come to him, he would go to Jonah.

Samson climbed up the side of the mountain, his hands outstretched in case his feet couldn't find the way. Some of the ground fell away in clumps of hard dirt, bits of tree and leaves. He pulled himself up the last few feet, straightened and looked over the edge.

Everything expanded, and he was in a grey-blue sea that stretched out in front of him forever. Samson breathed deeply. The air felt thin in his mouth and thick in his lungs. He looked down. The mountain swirled, and it was as if his body was caught in a tidal rip spiralling downwards into green and brown. He closed his eyes and when he opened them again, he could almost have been floating on the surface of the ocean, or like a cloud, untethered in the sky. His feet carried him to the edge, but he wasn't afraid.

The mountain knew where Jonah was. It had kept him hidden, and there was no one left to find him. The town had given up, and his granddad. Murray would give up once his baby was born, and Mattie and Tilda had slotted back into their lives away from the mountain like oysters closing into their shells.

No one was left, but the trees, scrub, flowers, rocks and creek were all there, all making their own noise and moving their own way. All right there in front of him. A symphony of sound with moving, changing, shuddering signals and signs.

Samson thought of Mattie.
Body syntax
, she had called it. A dance, but not the kind of dance that included steps. A dance of hands and arms and fingers and language and stories and signing. Not only for bodies, but for anything without a voice and a story to tell.

Closing his eyes again, Samson held his hands up like his mum's favourite singer, but instead of a song his hands told the story of himself to the bush, and he felt the heartbeat of the mountain beneath his feet as he made himself a part of everything.

He signed to the trees and the air.
Trees
, he signed, and the leaves answered like wind chimes,
ding, ding, ding
into one another.
Water
, he signed, and the creek slowed and then rushed with the movement of his hands.
Up
,
he signed, because he didn't know the sign word for treetops.
Mountain
, he signed, and the sign for
mountain
was a hand travelling up and over and back down the other side.

He heard something. Was it drumming, deep underground? He bent forward and opened his arms wide. The air warm as flesh that was filled with life. Beneath it, the heartbeat, the hard drumming centre of the bush. He wove himself through. He'd been part of things before, often even the centre, but nothing had ever felt like this.

Samson thought about Special School, and his friends and teachers. He thought about learning to sign and, ‘That's right, Sam', or, ‘Not quite, Sam.' He thought about playing games and playing instruments. Everyone was allowed to make clanging, messy noise, when Jonah's school was silent. They didn't have grades at Samson's school – it was just everyone in one big room, singing and drawing, painting, learning numbers or letters. He thought about being called ‘gang' sometimes, and sometimes ‘pal'. He thought about the smell of glue and butcher's paper and books.

His dad said short books, ‘like the ones at your school, Sam', didn't have a smell. ‘They can't get musty enough for a smell,' he said, ‘because everyone is always reading them.'

Samson thought about home time and waiting for his mum or dad and being watched. Watched by the Other School, and watched by the cars and teachers. Watched by everyone who wasn't in his clanging messy noise gang. Pal, buddy, sport, tacker, big guy. Samson thought about the Other School and the faces coming out, and he thought about them watching as they passed by. All they saw was the toad, the extra chromosome. They were grade kids, mainstream kids, big-school kids. Grades didn't trap him, or classrooms. There was freedom in that life, a kind of independence he didn't have anymore. Samson thought of tambourines and clapping hands, and his mum making Jonah hold his hand while they waited for her to collect them after school.

Maybe it was never freedom. Maybe, it had just been a slightly bigger fence and a slightly less dangerous beyond.

Where is J-O-N-A-H?
Samson signed to the mountain.

No answer.

He asked the mountain again.
Where is J-O-N-A-H?

The wind changed, and everything was still. Samson waited. Clouds jostled in the sky, and light from the sun caught the wind. A river of colour formed ahead of him like an oil slick in the ocean. Purple first, and then blue, pink and gold. This river wafted gently, but after a few seconds it moved with more purpose. It flooded down the side of the mountain and rushed towards the creek.

The Rainbow Snake.

Samson opened his mouth, and the oil slick of colour shivered into different creeks and rivers of colour. Some moved over him, some around, some past, some through. Then the Rainbow Snake worked inside him, moving things around. It swallowed the toad buried deep in his belly, and he wasn't disabled or handicapped or special anymore.