Sing Fox to Me (12 page)

The pup slept in his lap all the way home. A rough ride, but he kept his hand across her back to keep her from flying off whenever they went over bumps.

At the house, George gave her some milk with honey, and together they buried the bag filled with pups beneath the Huon behind the house.

‘They've got no respect for life,' said George, and Clancy had always wondered what he'd meant by ‘they'.

These days, Clancy's memories of the time after River disappeared came and went like uninvited guests. Catching him up in the ebb of what once was, and leaving him again. As he walked up, Clancy moved a long fern frond out of his way. It flicked water across his body and, for an instant, he wondered if the sound he heard was the tiger pelt growling gently from inside his sleeve.

After what seemed like hours of silence, Jonah opened his hands. Inside his fingers was the body of the black kookaburra. He nudged the body. It flopped against him like a limp baby.

Jonah thought of Samson. There had been a time, his dad told them, not long after they were born, when it was as if Samson had no bones at all. After lots of hard work and courage, their dad said, Samson turned his soft muscles hard and his loose sinews tight. No one ever mentioned Jonah learning to walk and talk or change his blue-black skin white.

Samson loved the story and made their parents tell it to him at bedtime. He always asked the same way. ‘Was I a cute baby, Mum?'

‘Yes.'

‘And strong?'

Their mum had never liked it when he asked that question, but he asked anyway. ‘Not strong exactly. You were very floppy. Like a ragdoll with almost no stuffing. As you grew, your muscles hardened. You got strong later.'

‘Like the Other Samson?'

‘Sure,' their mother would say. ‘Like the Other Samson.'

Some nights, Jonah would hear his mum and brother on the other side of the accordion partition for what seemed hours, passing stories back and forth between them like tiny wooden boats on a calm sea.

Jonah turned King's body over in his hands. It was still warm. He ran his finger across the blue streak and thought of struggling for space alongside his brother. It was as though they all wanted him to stay small.

After tucking the dead body of the kookaburra into his pocket, Jonah walked back to the house. For the first time in a long time, he didn't feel angry or hurt or lonely. He didn't feel anything. The kookaburras started cackling again from the trees, but this time he didn't cover his ears.

Clancy wanted to get as far into the scrub as he could before he undressed. His leg didn't hurt as he stepped over rocks and fallen branches. He made good time.

The tiger stirred inside the sleeve of his cardigan. It wanted out.

Clancy reached a wide, flat rock near the edge of the drop-off. The rock was surrounded by mud and leaves. The mud looked hard. He nudged the ground with his foot. The skin of the mud broke. Thick, strong-smelling sludge oozed through the surface and squelched between his toes. ‘As good a place as any,' he said, removing the pelt from inside his sleeve.

He dropped the pelt onto the rock while he undressed, and the tiger basked in a trickle of sun. Getting his kit off wasn't easy, even on days when his leg wasn't too bad. Often he wore the same duds three or four times in a row to avoid taking them off. He braced himself against the rock and tried to wriggle out of his trackies.

The tiger watched from the rock, spread out like a tame dog, until Clancy was starkers. It had seen these rituals before and wasn't fazed. So much so that Clancy reckoned he almost saw the tiger yawn. The next part of the process set them apart. He and the tiger both knew that. No tiger ever needed to hide its scent with mud and scat – it belonged to the trees and rock and mud, and could hear the ancient symphony inside of the bush. Clancy didn't know those notes.

He tossed his clothes onto the rock and lowered himself into the mud. His hands dug down through the sludge. Still warm underneath. He slathered it across his body, covering his pale, freckled skin.

The tigers that had River, and maybe even Queenie now, would never smell him coming.

He stood up and braced himself on the rock. His hand left a dirty brown print. He reached for the pelt. It slid off the rock, swung easily over his shoulders and onto his back. The front paws draped either side of his clavicle, and the head settled next to his. The tiger furled in around him, but he was still cold. His hand reached instinctively for his groin. His dick was tiny, his balls shrivelled and sore. He needed a pouch of warm fleshy fur, like the male tigers. The cold made his headache worse.

He knew he must look mad as a cut snake, dragging himself around in the bush the way he did. But it remained his secret. No one but George had seen him, and while George hadn't liked it, he'd only tried to stop him once.

Clancy stopped beneath the overhang of a large rock. The earth was still very damp and so it was easy to dig up. He took handful after handful of soil and dead leaves, and smoothed it over his skin. Just like when he got clean in the shower, he started with his armpits and shoulders. A bit further up the track, he found fresh wallaby scat. He crushed it in his hand and rubbed it into his skin and hair. The pelt moved slightly to accommodate him.

River used to say that she could sing the tigers to her. Clancy remembered one night, not long after they sent Murray away, hearing her sing. He followed her voice and found her perched on the edge of the verandah, her arms locked in behind her knees, rocking back and forth on the balls of her feet. ‘
Eenie meenie miny moe, catch a tiger by the toe
.'

Essie moved past him and sat next to their daughter. Her hair was gone, and she was wearing a soft green scarf like a turban. ‘Do you know what that song is about?' she asked her daughter.

River nodded. Her long red hair fell in over her face. She refused to let them brush it, and dreadlocks were forming at the nape of her neck.

‘What's it about?' Essie asked.

River stopped rocking. ‘Catching slaves trying to get away.'

Clancy reached over and tugged her hair. Some of the dirt crumbled away, and her dreadlocks turned back to soft red ringlets.

‘Please don't sing that song, darling,' said Essie.

River nodded.

‘Will you come inside?' Clancy asked.

She shook her head. ‘Where's Moonie?'

Neither of them answered her.

After Essie died, River's wanderings got longer and longer, and she seemed less happy when she was inside with him and David. Once or twice Clancy had even caught her pacing the circumference of her room, as though she was somehow trapped by the feeling of four walls.

Now Clancy shook his head. No point to all that – memories just slowed him down. He pulled the pelt forward by the nose to make sure it was on firmly. Then he lowered his shoulders and moved through the trees.

If the kookaburras and roosting possums had looked down, they might have mistaken the lumbering orange and black pelt for a living tiger, but the wombats and echidnas knew better. They could see Clancy Fox for what he was, and stayed hidden in their burrows and logs.

Sometimes on these long treks, Clancy felt the eyes of something watching him. They followed him up through the dusky evening light on one side of his mountain, and down through the late morning air on the other. It wasn't the bush. After all these years, it knew him. Several generations of wallaby had watched him shuffle through the trees, starkers but for the pelt, and were not afraid. They didn't even stop chewing.

From somewhere overhead, the kookas started up. Clancy looked through the canopy. The light danced between the trees. Clancy couldn't see anything. ‘Bloody mongrel birds,' he mumbled, but the laughter only got louder, and pretty soon it was as if the entire bush was laughing at him.

Samson and Mattie reached the edge of the scrub surrounding Clancy's house, but Mattie refused to come in. She wouldn't walk on the lawn – she wouldn't even leave the trees.
I don't go inside that house
, she signed.
It's too creepy.

Samson peered through the lace of leaves and branches to the house and lawn and the white fence like teeth holding it all in. He'd never had a friend like Mattie and wouldn't leave her as long as she wanted to stay, but at the end of each day he was happy to break free of the thick canopy and damp ground. This close to the fence, he could almost feel the relief in his lungs.

It is not too creepy
, he signed.

Mattie made a face as though she didn't believe him.

It's not
.
Samson wanted her to come inside and have dinner with him and watch TV and sit on his bed and let him introduce her to Clancy and Jonah. Samson wanted to make sure that Mattie Kelly really existed.

She shook her head.

Samson looked back at the house. Rainbows glinted behind a window, and he remembered the room that Jonah had wanted to get into.
There's a locked room next to ours. We're not allowed inside.

A girl went missing
, Mattie signed.
She was my age too. It's probably her room
.

What girl?

R-I-V-E-R
S-N-O-W F-O-X.

Fox. Samson knew the shape and power of his own surname, but he didn't know of any River Fox. He'd never heard of any Foxes but his. There was Clancy and his wife when she was alive, his parents, Jonah and him.
Who?
he asked, and the sign for
who
was one finger spinning upright in the air.

His daughter. The old man's
.

But Clancy didn't have a daughter.

Mattie's eyes were dark and serious.
She went missing. A long time ago. Everyone said tigers took her.

‘Tigers?' asked Samson, with his hands and his voice. Images of Shere Khan stalking the edge of the bush, waiting for children to wander too far from home, filled his insides.

Mattie nodded.
T-A-S-M-A-N-I-A-N tigers
.

Samson shrugged. His dad had told him about the Tasmanian tigers when he and Jonah were little, but Samson had never seen one, not even at the Brisbane Museum. Would it look like Shere Khan? Was it bigger, meaner?

My mum says there are no more tigers left
, signed Mattie.
People say it was actually Clancy that got her. The missing girl. But, my mum says that's a lie
.

Samson nodded.

All of a sudden, the bush behind them burst into hysterical laughter.

Samson pointed into the trees.
Laughing
.

Mattie smiled so wide, it looked as though the laughter was coming out of her mouth.
Kookaburras
. The sign for
kookaburra
started with two fingers held up to the mouth like smoking a cigarette, but then the fingers jumped forward, one, two, and became like a gun shooting.

Samson nodded.
Loud.

I love kookaburras
.
Mattie held her arms out like wings. Then she turned on her heel and, with a streak of long brown hair, started running back up the mountain. Branches cracked beneath her feet and leaves whipped against her arms, but she didn't seem to mind. Mattie had told him that she could run up the mountain faster than anyone. Her legs got restless, she had signed to him, and so sometimes she ran all the way up and all the way back down again, just for fun.

Samson watched her dart between the trees and jump over rocks, and in a matter of seconds she was gone. He wasn't worried. Mattie always left him like that.

As he walked through the white fence and across the lawn, he told himself to remember what Mattie had told him about River Snow Fox. Jonah would want to know, and Samson's memory had already failed them once.

‘Queenie!' shouted Clancy through the terrible laughter of the kookaburras. The muscles inside his leg pounded against the skin, and the bone behind his missing kneecap clicked. He stopped and took several deep breaths, but the pain didn't ebb. He heard another click, and this time it wasn't inside him. He turned his head to listen. Not a click, more like lots of clicking. Something was running.

For a moment Clancy didn't know what to do or where to put his hands. He held them out in front of him.

She burst from the bush about twenty yards ahead. Her dress billowed over her skinny legs and arms. Without stopping or turning to look at him, she leapt over a rock, flung herself forward and disappeared into the trees as if she'd never been there.

Clancy's balance wavered, and he reached out for the support of his dog's neck, but Queenie wasn't there. River, he thought, and his hand stroked the air. River, River, River Snow Fox.

The back door was open, and Samson went inside without removing his shoes. The house was dimly lit and quiet. Even without looking, he knew no one was home. It just
felt
empty. He went to the fridge and stared inside. Eggs, bacon, sausages, cheese, left-over mashed potato. Everything needed cooking. At home, his mum always made sure there was ready-to-eat food in the fridge. Fruit Roll-Ups, small tubs of flavoured yogurt or pudding, cheese sticks and sometimes even a ham and tomato sandwich.

Samson didn't know how to cook. No one had ever shown him. His mum didn't like him in the kitchen. Too dangerous, she said. He closed the door to the fridge. Jonah might be home soon, and he knew how to make all sorts of nice food.

Samson left the kitchen and wandered through the living room to the front verandah. He sat on the steps and tried to ignore the rumbling in his stomach.

After a while, the back door slammed.

Jonah was through the kitchen and down the hall before Samson had even stood all the way up. ‘Hey wait!' he called, but Jonah didn't wait. Samson tried not to feel huge and clumsy. His chromosome was heavy, he reminded himself. It was harder for him to get up quickly.

Jonah slammed their bedroom door.