Tommo & Hawk (3 page)

'Yes,' I say, trying to look more hopeful than I feel. 'He'll get that and more. I hope you're right, Mama. The wilderness took a lot from our Tommo.'

'Not more than it took from you!' Sudden tears well up in her eyes and Mary points to my neck, to the rope burns, the permanent scars that ring it in a band of silver tissue an inch wide against my black skin. 'The wild man took your voice.' Her lips are pulled thin as she wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. 'Nothing could be as bad as that, now could it?'

She has never said anything about my voice before. Never spoken about it since it happened, since the day she found me in the mountains. Now I can see that it's more than she wanted to say, that she thinks it's come out wrong. So she thinks a moment, then smiles, brushing away the tears, trying to brush away the horror she's felt all these years at what was done to me.

'It were such a nice voice, Hawk. You was just a little un but your voice were already deep.' She smiles at me. 'Did you know that, son?'

I nod and she continues. 'Lovely it were, like a melody. Folk would listen when you talked, even when you were a sprat. The wild man took that, there's no making up for that.' She shrugs, eyebrows high, mouth twisted. 'You've come good. Tommo's got no lasting damage, a little to his hands but not like what happened to you, not like that.'

'It's inside, Mama.' I think about how Tommo's afraid. 'That's where he's broken, something's broken inside him.'

Mary looks strangely at me. She doesn't tolerate folks who feel sorry for themselves. When she speaks her voice is sharp again. 'Whatever it were what happened to Tommo, it were no worse than most of us gets in life. This poxy island be full of past suffering. Sadness be a part o' this place. Suffering beyond the wildest imaginings of them what's not like us. Tommo's still young, only just growed up, plenty o' time for him to settle down. Work will fix what ails him.'

She says all this quickly as if she has thought it all out. Mary mostly keeps things to herself. Thinks them out, then keeps them, holds them tight to use only when needed. Now I sense she's worried about my brother too. When you've lost your speech and must talk in hand language you learn to watch people more carefully. Ikey always said, 'Listen with your eyes, Hawk, it be your eyes what's your best ears,' and he was right.

I don't want to say it but I must. 'Mama, I don't think Tommo will want to work in the brewery.'

Mary draws back sharply. 'What's you saying? What's you talkin' about?'

It is late Sunday morning with a high blue sky over the mountain and the winter's sun polishes the river like mirror glass. Mary's kitchen is bathed in sunlight. The window panes reflect bright squares that burn out the colour where they make a pattern on the dark brick floor. Specks of dust, turned to gold, dance in the shafts of light.

Tommo has gone down to Wapping to drink at Brodie's sly grog shop. Since he's been back he does a lot of walking on his own, learning Hobart Town that's grown and changed so much since we were kidnapped. He walks then stops off to play euchre or poker in a pub or grog shop, coming home late and drunk. Sad drunk. A fifteen-year-old who finds no cheer in the drinking he does.

Mary and I are sitting at the kitchen table, which is covered with a white cloth. On Sunday, Mary always spreads a white cloth on the kitchen table. Damask, she calls it. It's like her Sunday altar. We don't go to church. Mary doesn't believe in it and Ikey, the closest thing we had to a father, was a Jew. So was our real mother, or so he said. He used to tell Tommo and me that we were too.

Mary says she doesn't know anything about that. All she knows is our mother was Sperm Whale Sally, a whaleman's whore. She says Ikey made up a lot of things to suit, like the X he put in both our names. Ikey added it on the spur of the moment when the government man said it wasn't Christian to have only one name and demanded a second be given. So Ikey scratches his noggin and thinks a moment then says, 'Israel and Moses,' and the man says they aren't Christian either and he isn't going to write anything down until Ikey comes up with good Christian names for seconds.

'Tell you what,' says Ikey, 'I'll put X and then they can both choose a second name to their own liking when they've grown a bit.'

The government clerk thinks for a moment, scratching his head. 'Fair enough, all right then, X it be.' He can't immediately think of a reason why X is not Christian, it being a sort of cross and all, and he doesn't really care. So now it's Hawk X Solomon and Tommo X Solomon forever after.

'Can't trust the silly old bugger to get nothing right!' Mary said when she first told us she wasn't our real mother, nor Ikey our father, even though he gave us his name with the X added.

'Probably gave you his name then got nervous that maybe it weren't quite kosher, so he cancelled it by adding the X. Nothing would surprise me with him.' Mary snorts each time the story comes up but she's got a smile on her face too as she thinks of him. 'Ikey always did have a bet each way.'

Mary also told us that Tommo and I are twins, the same but different, the same mother but different fathers. A fluke of nature, she said, that happens sometimes with whores. Tommo came out with white skin and blue eyes, small as a tadpole, and I as black as the ace of spades and big as a bullfrog! It's very confusing to other folk, but not to Tommo and me. We're twins in the heart and in the head. Whether Jew or Mohammedan, twins are their own religion.

Anyway, Mary isn't much concerned with religion. 'Tell 'em you're Church of England,' she says when we're asked. 'Don't suppose it matters, do it? God ain't got no religion, now does he? As far as worshipping goes, it's best not to take sides.' She decided for all of us when she pointed to the mountain towering above us, 'Best off worshipping that!' She was not jesting either, for she loves the mountain. 'God lives in that mountain, right above the organ pipes!' she told us once. The organ pipes are the shafts of rocks that form a steep cliff to one side of the top of Mount Wellington.

When we were little, Tommo and I always skirted well clear of those pipes when we climbed the mountain, just in case Mary was right and we should bump into God.

'What would you say to God if we should meet Him up there?' I once asked Tommo.

Tommo thinks for a moment then says right off, 'I'd invite Him to Sunday dinner.'

'Why?' I asked.

'Because that's the most holy place we got, silly!'

He was right, too. Once when Mary spread her damask cloth we asked her why, and she said, 'It be our way of giving thanks to Him what keeps our bellies full. It be our altar cloth.'

'We belongs to the White Tablecloth Religion,' Tommo once told the curate at St David's who stopped us in the street and asked why we didn't come to Sunday School.

As for not going to church, Mary always says, 'If folk don't like it, well, that's just too bad now, ain't it? Knowing right from wrong is all what matters and I've yet to meet the preacher on this Gawd-forsaken island what does!'

There is little doubt Sunday is important to her, though, and a special occasion. Almost every time she spreads the cloth she says, 'One day I'm going to buy us some silver, some Sunday silver!' But I don't think she ever will. Such a gesture would be much too flash for Mary and we're still eating off the same tin plates and using the most ordinary cutlery you can buy.

Since I have come back from England with Ikey's stolen fortune, Mary could have a crystal chandelier in the kitchen if she wanted, and bone china and silver cutlery heavy enough to sprain your wrist. But Mary doesn't want people to think she's a free settler or a toff, or that she believes herself better than the rest of the lags. She isn't ashamed of who she is, a convict who has earned her ticket-of-leave and had her freedom granted after serving her sentence.

'It's who you is when folk knocks at the door of your heart what counts,' she always said when we were young. 'Hide the past and it gives them what's jealous of you the power to bring you undone.'

I remember her telling us always, 'Never give no one the power to shame you. Keep everything clear and in the open. Hiding from the past be the main business o' this cursed island, people trying to pretend they's better than other people, when they's dirt, the scrapings o' the barrel, just like what we is. Hannah Solomon be the prime example, putting on airs and graces, talking like a toff and trying to be a free settler, what she ain't and never can be.'

Hannah was Ikey's lawful wife, but all she did was try to do him harm. Now she and Ikey's children live with a cove named George Madden in New Norfolk. Mama once taught three of Ikey and Hannah's brats, David, Ann and Sarah, when Hannah was a prisoner seamstress in the Cotton Factory. 'They was bright too, those young uns,' Mary told me.

Mary doesn't care much for the free settlers here. 'Who'd come to this miserable place even if it were free, 'less they was third-rate to begin?' is what she says. But she is not being altogether truthful about her feelings. She'd not return to Blighty even if the governor granted her free passage. Mary loves this island, it is where she found the chance she was always looking for. Tasmania is what saved Mary and gave her back her character. She doesn't pine for the good old days like Ikey did.

'Blimey, what good old days was they, then?' she'd say sarcastically when Ikey got to reminiscing about London Town. 'For the likes of me they was shit!'

'And this ain't shit, my dear?' Ikey asks, sweeping his arm to include the whole island.

'Yes, but there be a difference,' Mary snaps back. 'There you was buried permanent in it, born in shit and drowned and died in it, no bleedin' hope o' rising above it. Here if you pushes 'ard enough you can get your 'ead up through the surface.'

'And when you does, my dear,' Ikey cackles, 'all you can see is arseholes!'

But Mary would not give in. 'Life's too bleedin' short to be frightened o' what's already been,' she'd say. 'Can't get yesterday back and change it, now can you?'

That is why Mary can't see what has gone wrong with Tommo. She won't ever look backwards. When we were put to bed as young uns she'd often say, 'Today is all we got, ain't it? I mean, who knows, tomorrow we could all be dead.' She'd take Tommo's hand and mine so that we were joined to her. 'Be honest, fair, listen, keep yer gob shut. Anyone can get through one day at a time. It's light and then it's dark and then it's bleedin' over, ain't it? Persistence, that's all what gets you there in the end. Believin' in yerself and persistence!'

Then, after she'd made this little speech, she'd let go our hands and tug at the chain about her neck and produce from her bosom the gold Waterloo medal Ikey gave her. She'd hold it tight in her fist. 'What's it say?' she'd demand.

'I shall never surrender!' Tommo and I would shout together, that being the legend written on the back of Mary's talisman.

'And don't you never forget it,' Mary would say. 'Persistence and character!'

That is everything Mary believes - never give up no matter how painful the journey. Overcome and persist. I know that in her heart she can't understand Tommo, how he's sorry for himself and won't forget the past now that things are good again. Drowning his sorrows in grog, not showing grit in his character, that's what she can't abide in my twin. I can sense she sees too much of Ikey in him. Not the Ikey of London Town, not the successful fence and forger much admired amongst thieves and villains and even accorded a grudging respect by policemen and magistrates; but the broken Ikey, the Ikey who was brought to his knees by hard convict labour and trained to obedience with the warder's whip.

Now I've told her Tommo doesn't want to take up her legacy of persistence and character, to work at her beloved brewery. She looks down at the white damask cloth and begins to smooth it with both her poor broken hands. A little frown forms, her top lip covered by the bottom one, then she begins to speak quietly without looking at me, like she's thinking out loud.

'Course he'll want to work at the brewery! Tommo never were a lazy boy. He'll do his share. He'll come good,' she says, as though she's trying to convince herself, as though she secretly fears she might not be right about my brother.

'Mama, it's not that. He isn't ready to come back to us yet.'

But Mary will not look, doesn't want to see my hands, and continues. 'We'll buy all the new land in the Huon Valley we can get. We'll do it through Mr Emmett, so nosey parkers what can't mind their own business don't catch on. Surprise the buggers! We'll grow all the hops we need for the use o' the brewery and maybe some for the new colony of Victoria.' Mary lifts her chin and her eyes narrow. 'We'll not be caught short again because some bastard beer baron tries to put us out o' business. Not never again!' She grips the sides of the table, then she looks up and becomes aware of me again. 'Hawk, you'll not talk to no one about the money, Ikey's money, ever, you understand?'

I've been back from England three months and this is the first time Mary's talked about what we'll do with the fortune I took from his and Hannah's old Whitechapel home. Ikey's stolen treasure had lain there for years, hidden in an Austrian safe, for though Ikey and Hannah knew half its secret combination each, they never trusted each other enough to tell each other their half. Hannah believed she and her brats deserved the lot and sent her son David to claim it, but with a little luck and cunning, I got there first.

'You know I won't tell anyone, Mama,' I nod.

'Not even to Tommo, you hear!'

I look at her, shocked. There is nothing I have ever hidden from Tommo. 'Mama, Tommo's my twin!'

Mary gazes down at the table. 'Tommo's been away, we don't know where, he won't say!' She looks up, her eyes steady. 'You hear me, Hawk Solomon, don't you never tell your brother until I say!'

There is a part of Mary that's hard as granite, that won't brook any contradiction. Her mouth is drawn in a thin line, the skin seeming to barely conceal the hardness of the skull beneath. Mary has a look that can frighten me and now she's used it against Tommo, her dearest Tommo whom she loves with all her heart.