Brown Skin Blue (17 page)

The fire inside me changes colour. At first it's white hot and light and then it's black and heavy and then it's sky blue, brilliant blue light filling up all of the darkness like a rising sun and the ball of panic has gone, but I'm not there yet. I'm swooping down on it all and there's a rush inside me like burning rocket fuel, and any minute I'm going to be back inside myself and there won't be any stories, no more dark places. There's the body of me there, Barry-bloody-Mundy, in the water floating like a bloated fish. I can see my skin, my brown bloody skin and then I'm inside it again, my body is suddenly a heavy connection within me and I'm still alive and I know. I just know who I am and maybe I always have or some part of me has had it tucked away inside and it took the crocs closing in on me to push against the life and death of me to bring it out, and my mind being opened up by the jaws of death. There are no shadows lurking inside me any more. For what it's worth, I'm all known to myself. I'm Brown Skin Blue.

It was all there, in the stories my mum told me and in what she would never say. In the way she tried to rid me of where it showed through on my bum. It was there in the emptiness of the box of umbrellas in the van and in the cocktail umbrellas that she wished me on. It was there in the brown box on the table the day of the bad thing. Blue was the colour of the bad thing and the sky where kite birds fly and blue is the colour of my blood. Blue. My father was McNabm Blue.

Everything is quiet. There's no pulse on the river, no beating inside me, just the up and down motion of my own floating body and a lightness inside. I hear voices on the bank. I don't want them to see me. Barramundy in the water. I don't want to end up on someone's plate. Cold and mute, my lips flapping soundlessly against the inevitable end. Not now. Not now after I've survived.

But they've got me. I can feel the truth of it around me, dragging me closer. The noose is around my whole body and I don't fight it.

It's my boots that bring me round in the end. The feeling of my toes snug inside. The water rushing round them. They're nothing, these boots. They won't really save me from anything. But I still like the thought that they might.

I'll tell you a few things about these crocs. These guys have expert senses. Colour and movement. So if you ever fall in to a river full of crocs, your only chance of surviving is to be as dark as the water and as dead as a log.

Cassie is on the loudspeaker and I'm upstairs with the meat hook. ‘Come on Albert. I know who you are, you cheeky bugger. Come on over. Got a bit of meat for ya.'

The speaker clicks and Cassie is quiet for a minute. Then she's back on:

Someone here just asked whether anyone has ever fallen in the river and survived. Well it just so happens that one person has. The only one we know of.

Cassie thumps the roof with her stick. It's the way she signals me:

Young Barramundy, one of our workers – in fact the one up top feeding your crocs today – fell in a while back while he was fixing the jetty. The only thing that saved him was that he had no shirt on and his skin was as dark as the water. And he didn't move. The current eventually washed him close to the bank and we were there with a net. But even he'll tell you he's bloody lucky. There ain't no reason why these things happen.

Cassie pauses while I dangle the pig meat over the side and Albert jumps for his dinner. I feel the jerk on the line and smile as his great chompers clamp around the meat. Pig meat, not Barramundy meat. In a strange way the crocs have freed me. I left my fear in the river that day. It washed me clean in dirty water. Nothing's changed on the outside. I'm still the same. Everything that happened still happened. And everything that's going to happen is still going to happen.

Mum died the day after I fell in the river. Boof sent the package to the hospital that morning but she never opened it. They sent it back to me, unopened. Just as well. They wouldn't have understood what was inside.

I covered Mum's grave with cocktail umbrellas. I opened up every one of them and planted them all around the mound of dirt. Every different colour I could find.

Sally was with me all the day after they pulled me out of the river. She sat with me at the hospital while they stitched up a few nicks here and there in my leg. Wasn't the crocs but them dragging me out of the river that did it. She stayed most of the night because they wouldn't let me go in case shock set in. She didn't say much and neither did I. But I gave her the keys to the car and the van and said they were hers. She could go wherever she wanted. She didn't need Bob or me. She could have herself. She hugged me and said she wasn't going to leave. But in the end she did.

I don't know what happened to her, but I hope one day she'll send me a letter. I've thought a lot about what happened with Sally. The baby and Bob. And while I never actually asked her, I don't think she ever told Bob. I think I'm the only one who knew.

Sometimes I imagine being grown up and her kid coming lookin' for me. My name on his list.
Barramundy.
He'll be hoping the bloke with my name isn't his father for sure.
There's a story about him, though,
Sally will say,
and it goes like this ...
It makes me smile to think of things like that. Because the world goes on. Rivers flow, floods come and go. And some things just don't have answers. I still feel the noose around my neck, sometimes, but I know it's not real.

I'd like to thank you for choosing Top End Croc Jumping Cruises today and to thank you for bein' on my final run. It's my last day at work today before I take time off to have this baby.

I can hear clapping and cheering underneath me. We haven't got a replacement for Cassie yet, but I'll be the main man with the meat hook. Boof will take over in the office and Bob will still do his thing.

I don't hate Bob as much as I used to. I don't like him, either, but he's just around. There's a new girl in the café. Rose. She's an old goat. Grumpy, stubborn, ancient and ruthless. Just the kind of worker Cassie and Boof need. But there's no fear things will happen like with Sally a second time around. I don't think even Bob is that desperate. Though I've been wrong before.

The reporter that came lookin' for me about the sexual abuse investigation caught up with me in the end. Except he came lookin' for the boy that survived the crocs, not the one that survived Blue. Boof saw him comin' – they have a look about them, he says – a satchel on his shoulder and an open, palm-sized notebook in his hand. Boof looked at me then stepped out of the café and met him on the ground in front of the office. ‘I told you before, the kid you're lookin' for is gone.'

‘Na, mate,' the reporter said, ‘I'm lookin' for the boy who fell in the river.'

As the movie
Pitch Black
neared the end all I wanted to know was whether Riddick was going to do the right thing and save the others. And you couldn't tell one way or the
other until the very last moment. The woman in charge gets to the ship and begs Riddick to go back for the remaining two survivors who are trapped in a cave with no source of light. He tries to convince her just to save herself and instead she says that she'd die for them. When it came down to it she was prepared to die for them.

Riddick is attacked by the beasts and he's almost beaten. She lifts him up and tells him not to give up. She won't let him die either. At that moment a beast spears her from behind and she's dead. In the end she saved him and Riddick says she was supposed to die for them, not him. He could look a beast, with blue blood, in the eye and say,
bring it on,
but it took another person, fearless enough to risk her own life for his, to slay the beast inside himself. In her own way my mum stood in front of the beast of my own life in the only way she could and she died making sure I didn't know.

It's too easy to keep quiet and say nothing. It's easy to hide in the shadows and stay shut up inside yourself. What's hard is having the guts just to say something at all.

I walked out of the café to stand next to Boof.

‘What do you want to know?' I said to the reporter.

‘Everythin', mate. Start from the beginning and tell me everythin'.'

So I did.

I'm throwing the meat to the kite birds. They're circling around the boat, diving and catching in their beaks. Sometimes I see their talons, long and sharp on their feet, but I don't see embers and I don't hear McNabm Blue's name inside my head anymore. It's all out there in the river.

‘Right,' Cassie says, standing awkwardly up from her chair.

It's Friday drinks and Cassie's farewell. The boats are lapping on the water, the sun's sinking and it's still like a bloody oven. That's the Top End.

‘Let's get to this before I go off and have this baby.'

Not long after all the hoopla settled down after my brush with the crocs, Boof and Cassie took the boat out one day, further up river outside the borders of their Croc Jumping permit. They found five new crocs in one neat stretch of the river, which Boof swore black and blue he'd never seen before. They were re-thinking the arrangement of the business anyway – with Cassie and the baby coming – and wanted to divide the run into three boats and cut down their own workload. So they decided to put on a new boat and extend the run. The government granted an extension of their permit, Rob and Victoria came on board with their boat,
Thistle,
and all that has to be done now, before they start work on Monday, is to name the new crocs.

‘Over to you, Barramundy,' she says. Cassie nods towards me and I stand up. I knew this was coming but my hands are sweating all the same. I wipe my hair back from my face and reach into my shirt pocket for a scrap of paper.

‘Carn, Barry,' Boof says, ‘those crocs didn't take your balls, mate.'

Boof is smiling and I laugh with him. He's takin' to jibbing me lately and I like it.

‘They wouldn't dare, mate,' I reply. ‘Though I'd be careful where you go standing. I'm not so sure they wouldn't try it on with you.'

Boof laughs.

‘You watch your mouth, Barramundy. I might be knocked up but I could still take a bloke out.' Cassie holds her hands up in a pretend boxing pose.

‘Come on, let him speak,' Boof says.

I know this means something. Asking me to name the crocs is their way of saying that they want me to stay and I'm a part of the place.

I clear my throat. ‘Right,' I begin. ‘Well. I feel real privileged that you asked me to name the crocs. I mean that,' I add.

When Boof came back that day after spotting the new crocs, he said to me, ‘Go on Barramundy, take a bloody guess how many there are!'

I didn't need to guess because I just knew. I knew who they were.

I'm thinking about being out there in the water and everything I let go of and hung on to, and how most of what happened inside and out of me I'll never be able to explain to anyone. The knowledge of Blue being my father doesn't bother me as much as it might and I've got a new respect for my mum because she never told me, even if she sent me on a wild croc chase. Some stories don't need telling and I bet there are rivers of them all over.

The piece of paper in my hand is the same piece of paper I've had with me ever since I came here and maybe this is what it's always been meant for. And then I realise why naming crocs is such a big deal. You see a croc out in the wild and it takes you by surprise, it's all untamed terror right
there. Everything wild and uncontrollable about nature is like a mirror where you see your own small self in a big bloody world. Cyclones can tear you to shreds, bullets and war can reduce you to a crying child, alone and afraid. Raw, untamed nature can turn your own determination into fool's hope and the sea and all her treasures can rub your courage thin. But somehow names put nature on our terms and sometimes that's all a person can do. Cyclone Tracy, Albert, Mavis, Elvis, Scoop, Sweetheart, Blue.

‘So. Here they are. Teabag, Lovejack, Stumpy, Boomboom and Toucan.'

‘Croc names for sure,' Cassie says, rubbing her hands over her stomach.

‘Out with their stories, Barramundy,' Boof says.

Rose coughs and sniffs and generally looks disinterested. She checks her watch.

‘There's always a story,' Cassie says in Rose's direction.

I open and close my mouth like I'm a fish out of water and make a show of trying to swallow.

‘Ask the river,' is all I say.

I could not have written this book without the support, insight and honesty of my husband, Michael.

Many thanks are due to Sophie Hamley, Kristina Schulz, Jody Lee, Madonna Duffy and University of Queensland Press. Mike Lefcourt – for your particular care and enthusiasm for reading every version of the manuscript – Laurie Lefcourt and Cameron Lefcourt, The Queensland Writers Centre, my wonderful family and friends.

Information on ‘Sweetheart' courtesy of Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory. Thanks also to Rod Parry.

‘Great Southern Land' – Iva Davies © 1982 EMI Songs Australia Pty Limited (ABN 85 000 063 267) PO Box 35, Pyrmont, NSW 2009 International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

James Roy

In this award-winning novel, James Roy uses the short story to explore the lives of the young residents of an Australian town and the social tapestry of their community. This town doesn't have a name. But if it seems familiar, it's because we recognise the people who walk its streets.

From the serendipity of an unexpected moment of connection, to the sadness of leaving home and the pain of the desperate decisions we make, these stories take a personal and uncompromising look at life. Love and loss, grief, humour and passion. Hope and hopelessness.

Thirteen linked stories, spanning a year in the lives of thirteen young people, from a town near you.