Swimming on Dry Land (21 page)

There are tears in her eyes as I lead her on into Eddie's bedroom. ‘Get some sleep.' I say, pulling back the cover and adjusting the pillow. I leave her in the quarter-moon-darkness to get undressed.

Later, I find her curled up on Eddie's bed, still dressed, her haunting green eyes staring out. Wheeling the chair in from Eddie's office, I sit in the corner of the bedroom and wait until she falls asleep.

The last place to sort through is Eddie's shed. I take the key from the hook in the hall, go outside and unlock the padlock. With a torch, I assess the size of the task ahead of me. This doesn't look like Eddie's shed. As with his office, all the shelves have been tidied: nails in the nail box, tools hanging on the wall in their rightful places. Only a large cardboard box with a plastic bag taped to the top obstructs the floor. I try to push the box over to the wall but it weighs a ton. Taking a Stanley knife from the tool box, I make a hole, then cut one side of the box away. It's a projector, a full-sized cinema projector. Once I cut through the plastic bag on top, I find a reel of tape, and a square paper note: Happy Birthday, Mike.

I push the projector outside and point the lens at the back wall of Eddie's house, before running an electric cable through the office window. It takes me a while to figure out how to work the thing and where to put the reel. When I flick the switch, the reel starts turning and a square of light hits the wall, a mass of grey flecks. I sit on the tarmac and wait for the picture to start.

And there I am, aged twelve, running around in that fringed cowboy suit, firing a gun. The camera bounces as Eddie runs after me. In my head, I can hear us shouting at each other.

‘You can't shoot and be the sheriff at the same time.' That's me.

‘I'm Castro,' Eddie says.

Eddie was always Castro and I was always Egor. We both had magical powers and could do just about anything. Egor, the fearless. And I
was
fearless, and brave. As I watch myself leap over what must have been the rabbit hutch in our parents' garden, something rips inside me and all the things I've packed away over the years tumble out. I can't stop them. My tears make the film look smudged.

I must have taken hold of the camera because Eddie is running now; he keeps looking back and waving. ‘Come on, Mike. Look out Father, Egor's coming!' Father is sitting in a wooden deckchair, cleaning his boots. He throws his hands in the air as Eddie points the gun. ‘Alright, boys, what do you want? Don't shoot.' He did a pretty good job, our father, when I think about it.

The reel tugs as it reaches the end, but I carry on with that day, going down to the river with Eddie to catch fish in plastic bags. Eddie almost falls in and I laugh at his panic and do a stupid dance, snagging my leg on a bramble, which makes Eddie laugh. We find a rotting sheep and get a stick and poke around inside. I think we make a fire too, but that could have been another day. We were the same back then, Eddie and I.

I replay the film over and over.

‘The police have arrived.' Caroline's voice sounds as if it's coming from a distance. ‘I heard a plane about ten minutes ago.' As I shake off the remains of sleep, I slowly realise that I'm in the shed, and pull myself up with the help of the projector. It's light again. The sky is a mess of thick clouds.

Caroline doesn't ask why I've slept in the shed. She glances at the projector and then says: ‘Moni's waiting for you. I've made coffee.' She looks like a worn-out copy of herself.

Moni is sitting crossed-legged on Eddie's bed when I go in. I sit down beside her.

Caroline talks to us from Eddie's office. ‘Maybe we can make a fire later? Cook some food outside. What do you think?'

Moni looks at me warily – she doesn't trust this talk.

‘What do you think, Moni?' I ask.

She loves fires. We used to take her to the sea, to Caroline's parents, on her birthday, build a fire on the beach, have a picnic, before Georgie was born.

‘Can we?'

I wink and she winks back.

As I head out, she asks ‘Where are you going?'

I glance at Caroline, who narrows her eyes and mouths for me to say something. So I do. ‘Uncle Eddie had an accident yesterday.'

‘Is he dead?'

I nod, unable to find more of an explanation.

Moni doesn't blink. It's as if she can't quite take it in, and then she says to Caroline, ‘Shall we play Scrabble?'

Detective Delaney and Walsh are accompanied by two other men: a sandy-haired fellow with rough features and a navy sports cap, and a younger chap who gesticulates wildly as he talks. As I reach the bend, I stop to watch them tramp across the scrub at the edge of the airstrip. Walsh waves. The sight of them sends my head spinning.

We walk as far as the tree. The youngest one moves in under the branches and we all follow. A silence cuts through the tail end of our greeting. It's as if we've broken into someone's home and the alarm has gone off. Delaney says we'd better move on.

When we have veered off onto the mine road and made some distance, Walsh asks, ‘What happened?' eyeing my bandages.

I throw my hands into the air and lift my chin slightly by way of answering. And then, perhaps because we are almost there, I dive in, dredging up the details, plucking out the key points. ‘Eddie couldn't swim. He was always terrified of water.' I've said all this before, on the phone last night, but not like this. Once I start, I'm like a burst pipe; everything floods out: bits and pieces about Father and how Eddie always overstepped the mark.

‘Georgie was a lot like Eddie,' I say, realising this only now.

I hardly notice the two men from forensics head on towards the tank. I continue talking, thinking, tripping over myself in my rush to get to the end. Then I notice the pile of equipment in front of the water tank. They must have thrown it out of the plane on their way.

‘You needn't watch this,' Walsh says, as we stop within yards of the sight. But I carry on, showing Delaney how the plug was out and how the lid was off.

‘We'll do the rest,' she says, signalling for Walsh to get rid of me. She doesn't want me to see the body. ‘Let us know when you get to Adelaide. We can talk you through the procedure then. We'll need to do an autopsy. You might want to make arrangements for a funeral.'

I can hear them unzipping a bag on the other side of the tank. They are going to put my brother in a zip-up bag.

‘How's Monica?' Walsh asks, as he directs me back along the mine road. ‘At least the rain's on its way.' The sky visibly blackens as he speaks.

I stop to let him know that I can go on alone.

Walsh scratches the back of his hand. ‘We'll call in to say goodbye,' he offers, before turning back.

Eddie's water-tight body bobs to the surface of my mind as I drift along towards the service station. I try to picture his face, the lines around his eyes, his sharp chin, but all I see is Father's white frosted moustache. And a pair of hands.

The removal van has taken most of our belongings to Susan's house. I sent the projector; we can always sell it. There's a refreshing emptiness to the caravan and most of Eddie's rooms. I pile the rest of his clothes and papers in a heap on the tarmac, ready for burning. I put the film reel there too. I'll never watch it again.

At dusk, Moni and I collect wood for the fire and poke it underneath Eddie's things, shifting the more flammable items to the bottom. Caroline is preparing a meal with the remains in the fridge.

‘Do you think Georgie will be able to see our fire, if we build it big enough?' Moni throws a bundle of sticks on top of Eddie's clothes.

‘Maybe. That depends on where she is.'

‘She's in the sea.'

‘Why would she be in the sea?'

Moni stops what she is doing and looks at me. ‘Mrs. Thompson in Hendon School told us that some people believe that when you die you turn into the thing you most want to be. Is that true?'

‘Well, I can't say it isn't true because I don't know. We believe whatever fits into the way we think, but that doesn't mean everything else is wrong, and it doesn't mean that what we believe in is right. You can't believe everything you're told.'

‘Do you remember how Mrs Thompson lost her hair and had to wear that turban? I bet she'd be a dog. She loves dogs. Or maybe an apple.' Moni picks some sleep from her eye. ‘What will you turn into when you die?' Moni asks.

I take my time thinking of the right reply. ‘That's a hard one. Let me see. I think I'll be that matchbox you keep in your pocket, so I can keep my eye on you.'

Moni laughs – it's the most beautiful sound.

I poke in the last of the wood, thinking about Moni's old teacher, who somehow managed to survive, despite the odds. Moni asks. ‘I'm going to be a bird,' Moni says. ‘An eagle or a kingfisher. I don't mind which.'

We position three crates to sit on. Moni hasn't mentioned Eddie. Sometimes with children, if you're lucky, these things can wash right through without a trace of sadness.

I light the fire while we wait for Caroline. With a splash of petrol, the flames swell, forming a tower of smoke. We sit watching the sky, seeing if we can spot the moment when the day slips into night.

Caroline arrives with kangaroo steaks and a good chunk of bread.

‘This is the lot,' she says. ‘I've thrown the rest away. Eddie had the whole carcass in the freezer.'

Moni refuses to eat kangaroo, and tucks into a slice of buttered bread instead.

Caroline slaps a steak onto my plate and hands me a knife and a fork. She's wearing an opal bracelet I haven't seen before; some present from Eddie, no doubt. He bought us all presents. Spoilt the girls rotten. His catch phrase was ‘It's only money.' I suppose he was right about that.

I pour some wine into the plastic caravan mugs we are going to leave behind. We listen to the fire spit and crackle, and talk nonsense for a while. Absorbed in the flames and this feast, I forget for a moment where I am.

Moni puts her plate down on the ground and says, ‘I can see a castle and a dragon and a tree.'

It's a game we used to play, watching the fire, seeing what we could see.

‘I can see a pumpkin, a yawning mouth, and a dog's head,' Caroline says, looking at me.

‘I can see a family dancing, wings, broken waves on the sea.'

We keep on staring into the fire, saying what we can see, until Moni gets tired.

‘Are we really leaving tomorrow?' she asks, as she follows Caroline into the caravan.

‘The plane is picking us up in the morning.' I blow her a kiss.

Caroline sings Moni a bedtime song. I haven't heard this one before.

Half a hundred days passed away

and still no footprints I can recognise

tracing shores we walked

familiar rocks seem strange

and the land is torched

with someone else's light.

There is no way I can look to tomorrow

No way I can say

That a new dawn

Will be washing the old one away.

The song goes on, but I stop listening to the words, concentrating on the notes instead, feeling myself rise and fall with each rainbow of sound. When Caroline comes back out, she stands behind me. ‘Could you really see a family?' she asks.

‘Did you see a pumpkin?'

She pulls her crate up close to mine and hunches down, holding on to her ankles. ‘Is this it?' Her voice dies away as she stares into the fire, now half the size it was. ‘Dad always said I didn't deserve you.'

‘Your father…' There is so much I could say about Caroline's father.

After a while I ask: ‘Did you love Eddie?' I want the truth, even though, at this stage, I don't think I really care.

‘Yes,' she says, without hesitation. ‘Like a fool. It's true what they say about not knowing what you've got until it's gone.'

The way she looks at me, it's hard to tell whether she is talking about Eddie or me.

She goes back into the caravan, returning with two boxes, and puts one down at my feet: Georgie's clothes, a few toys, rolls of paper.

‘Don't you want to keep any of this?' I ask, flicking through the pictures: scribbles of colour.

Caroline flings the box onto the fire. She loses her balance as she lets go, falling in after it. Her hair catches fire. I drag her out and douse her head with a wet tea-towel to stop the flames. The smell of her burnt hair is repugnant.

‘What the hell are you doing?' I kick the other box into the fire, out of rage. Her beautiful auburn hair is scorched on one side.

‘It doesn't hurt,' she says, dusting off the crate before she sits.

A silent hour passes as we watch the fire burn down to smoking embers. I think back to what she's said, roll the words over in my mind. Did she mean Eddie or me?