Metal Fish, Falling Snow Read online

  About The Book

  Dylan and her adored French mother dream of one day sailing across the ocean to France. Paris, Dylan imagines, is a place where her black skin won’t make her stand out, a place where she might feel she belongs.

  But when she loses her mother in a freak accident, Dylan finds herself on a very different journey: a road trip across outback Australia in the care of her mother’s grieving boyfriend, Pat. As they travel through remote towns further and further from the water that Dylan longs for, she and Pat form an unlikely bond. One that will be broken when he leaves her with the family she has never known.

  Metal Fish, Falling Snow is a warm, funny and highly original portrait of a young girl’s search for identity and her struggle to deal with grief. Through families lost and found, this own-voices story celebrates the resilience of the human heart and our need to know who we truly are.

  Contents

  Cover Page

  About the Book

  Title Page

  1 The running wolf

  2 God-knocking box

  3 Hand in hand

  4 Clouds moving too fast

  5 Never-knowing

  6 Barry

  7 He’s right on time, that Pat O’Brien

  8 White vultures

  9 Why you always park in the middle

  10 A darkly shadow

  11 Drawings on the back

  12 Lending time

  13 Broken bottles

  14 178 little specks

  15 Rabbit pie

  16 Flutter by

  17 Bleed ’im dry

  18 I can get you out

  19 Creatures below the surface

  20 Trickling through the cracks

  21 The wardrobe revolt

  22 Painting myself outside in

  23 Cutting the cord

  24 Reckoning

  25 Joni

  26 Buttons

  27 Our secret caper

  28 The night sea with its black heart

  29 Chickpea

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  For Ishika and Felix

  1 The running wolf

  I could be anywhere. Shadows from flickering tree branches dance across the bed and the floor is littered with a mountain of junk parts. Aha, now I know. Bits and pieces of the world Pat has collected, sure he can make them new again if he just tightens a screw. True enough, machines are only alive if we want them to be. They have a different system inside that can be manipulated. And there he is, in the middle of the kitchen flipping bacon like a pancake. Fat spits onto his arm but Pat doesn’t even flinch.

  ‘Siddown.’ Pat’s not one for hairs and graces. Not at 6 am in the morning. There are fried eggs too. I break the yolk and watch as it runs the wrong way down my plate.

  ‘From now on, you eat what you’re given and ya don’t play with your food,’ Pat says real quiet.

  ‘But it’s moving south.’ I knife the bacon rind off and put it under the runny yolk. It stops going any further, so I eat the bacon and leave the yellow puddle, even though it’s the best part of the egg.

  ‘You finish that plate. It’s a long drive.’ Pat scrapes his knife like fingernails on a blackboard. Joelle Parkinson did that once because she thought it would make us squirm but in the end she bent a nail backwards and cried.

  I try to finish my eggs I really do, but Pat’s in a mood and I can’t tell him that his forks are the wrong kind of metal. The thin kind that gives my teeth a headache. I took a fork from home but right now I don’t know where it is. We had a complete set of estate cutlery. Bought it from Mr and Mrs Dickson when they both went into a nursing home ’cause they’d forgotten who the other one was. Even though they’d been married for sixty-eight years. Kept ringing the police on each other, screaming that there was a burglar in the house. Mrs Dickson even hit Herbert on the head once with a 500-gram tin of home-brand peaches in syrup. But I’m happy we got their forks because they were proper good. Heavy with a fancy D engraved on the end so it looked like they were supposed to be mine all along.

  It’s a dragon-breath morning. Fingers so cold they don’t feel like a part of my body. I stand on the front porch trying to tap some warmth into my toes and start the motor in my heart. It’s a morning so quiet you’d think we’d already been forgotten. Or were never here at all. But a town like this doesn’t wake up just to say goodbye. And maybe that’s okay because for now it’s all mine. The maggies with their morning song, warbling joy into the pale blue sky. Dewy spiderwebs all over the bushes, each one like a perfect equation. Across and down the road little Jackson and his dad are walking to their car.

  ‘But I don’t have anything for show and tell!’

  ‘Well you can’t take a pot plant. Make something up.’

  His dad trips over a garden gnome. ‘Shit,’ he says with the volume turned down. I can hear the garbo coming too; scratching a mole on the back of his neck that’s been bothering him for weeks. Then a car door slams behind me and rattles the porch windows. My maggies fly off to find some worms and the spiders pack up their webs.

  ‘Dylan!’

  Even though my name swings both ways, the doctor told everyone I was going to be a boy. Probably thought he saw a willy on the ultra-song that was actually just my little finger in the wrong place at the wrong time. ‘That’s deception,’ my dad said when he found out I was me instead of a son, and drove off for a few days. But he came back and said they still had to call me Dylan because it was a good, strong name. Plus it was the name of his friend who was in jail and he’d sent me a baseball cap with Little Dylan on it.

  ‘Come on, quick sticks,’ says Pat. He looks at the ground, says we’d best get going but his words fall into the hole he’s diggin’ with his boot.

  I wanna slip into those dry cracks and stay put. Lie in the ground with Mama. But I know the earth and this town are only for those who belong. And without someone to love, you can’t belong anywhere.

  We’re leaving this back-paddock town. As you hit the main drag there’s a sign that says ‘Welcome to Beyen! Keep driving.’ Mitchell Baker who’s always selling homemade cigarettes round the back of the bike shed wrote that last part, with a black marker he stole from the art room. It’s true, though. You can miss this town and not miss a thing. It’s where I’ve long been but never belonged. Not like Piper or Lily or the Magann twins. Their families go way back to the beginning of time and even then, people are still calling them coon and Abo like they shouldn’t be here either. My time is up before it really began and I can’t say I’m too glum about that. I am sad to leave Mum behind though, because now she’ll always be part of this town even though no one will ever see her again.

  Before I made a mess of it all, Mum and I were gonna sail back to her belonging. Back to where she’d been a happy little girl drinking hot chocolate out of a bowl and skipping to school with a big chunk of stinky cheese in her bag. Mum missed Paris so much it felt like she’d pulled a muscle in her heart and some days she would just curl up on the bed trying to remember what cold felt like. It was never really winter in Beyen—I couldn’t imagine snow falling from the sky. Each flake one-of-a-kind, like a frozen fingerprint that only lives between the sky and the earth.

  We really were gonna make it happen. Get away from the heat and the flies and the non-belonging that was always making us feel heavy here in Beyen.

  I know Mum is in the ground now, but I still need to take her home. Because we are more than our bodies.

  Tiffany who runs Mysticize, the candle and crystal shop above the Chinese takeaway, told me Mum’s spirit was free now, so all I’m thinking about is getting her to the water. I’ve never see
n the sea, felt the waves slap onto my back, saltwater spray across my face. The town pool in Beyen isn’t the same. Most of the time it’s only half-full and you can always tell when Ash Malone’s done a stinky wee in the deep end.

  It’s a long way from Beyen to the ocean. It’s numbers ticking over and over on the dashboard and a whole lot of sleeps trying to dream yourself there. And I have, because it’s the only thing that matters if you want to stay real.

  The land out here is a sea of dry dust. It covers the ground and stops living things from breathing. Nothing comes out of the earth and the only things that go in are bones and history, death and regret. That’s what the old men propping up the front bar say when they’re talkin’ themselves through another pint of stout.

  Water is a miracle. What else can slip through your hands or crush you in two seconds flat? What else is soft and strong enough to carve patterns into stone? It regulates, generates and lubricates body parts we didn’t even know we had. Babies are seventy-eight per cent water when they are born. The older we get the less we have. Right now I’m only about fifty-five per cent. That’s all teenage girls have. But when I get to the sea, the salty air will fill my lungs up like a petrol pump and maybe my numbers will change. Mum used to say that everyone’s soul is connected to water because it’s a life force.

  Even though Paris is a dirty city far from the ocean. The sea is always a passage home.

  Water is where this story begins and ends. A question chasing its tail for the answer. And what lies in the middle? Well I’ll save that for the car ride. Pat was right about that. It’s a long trip. He locks up the house, flicking pieces of dry paint off the porch. Stares at his hand, a few red specks caught under the nails. And I reckon that’s about all he’s taking from the place. If I squint hard enough, I can see Barry standing tall in the field at the bottom of Novis Lane. Now you might think I’m silly for naming a tree. Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been called dumb as a stump, or smart as a stick. Duncan Glover used to call me a teabag: takes a while for things to filter through. But Barry’s not a regular tree; he’s where I used to go and hide myself. Barry knows I’m going now. He knows what happened too.

  Pat catches my eyes on him and brushes something invisible from his pants.

  ‘You remember everything?’

  Suddenly I’m afraid. Have I packed all the knowledge?

  ‘’Cause we’re not comin’ back,’ he says with a big fat full stop.

  ‘But I don’t know all the galaxies or what disease emphysema is.’

  Pat rolls his eyes.

  I’ve got it wrong again. People don’t always use words to say what they think. Sometimes it can be a long unblinking stare from the other side of Parker Street one Tuesday arvo that burns like a branding iron. ‘Go back’ is what those eyes mark on your shadow so you’re always in the wrong place no matter where you are. Right now I’m using that eye-talk with Pat. He hasn’t said anything about the boat so I don’t know if he thinks he’s coming too. I give him this cowboy glare that says ‘Sorry mate it’s not on the cards. Not even the four of spades. This is a family trip and you and me are not that.’

  I know the boat will be made out of metal. Or wood. I just don’t know where it is yet. But I will feel it in my waters as Margie says about the rain that mostly always never comes. She’s eighty-nine and has lived in Beyen forever. This town is the beginning, middle and end of the whole world for her. Margie’s life map is very small but mine is just about to start. A single crack in the dry earth travelling east from the middle of nowhere to the wide, open sea.

  Sometimes I find my way into memories that aren’t mine. Saturday just gone I walked past a lady picking up pork ribs from Gary the butcher, and suddenly I’m at her kitchen table watching as she plays gin rummy with the girls, cackling like galahs when Theodora says that Ian sleepwalked into the kitchen and peed into the geranium pot by the window but, gee, hasn’t it flowered well since then. I’m only there for a few seconds before I get sucked back out, but I know a lot of people in this town and the secret things they do. I didn’t ask for that kind of knowing and sometimes I wish I could shut it off, especially when I see things I don’t want to. Like Mr Kelly’s grandson who lives in Adelaide but comes here for the holidays. I passed him one day sitting on the front porch. Looked into his eyes and watched as he drowned a cat in a bucket of water behind Mr Kelly’s back shed. It was all gone in a flash and when I looked back at him sitting on the porch, he held up a kitten for me to see. Cuddled it close to his chest and smiled.

  I had a kitty once, called Ashtray. He’d cuddle close to me as well, purr loud as a lawnmower. Did Mr Kelly’s grandson know that too? People like him are why you keep your eyes to yourself. When I told Mum about the things I saw, I thought she’d say, ‘It’s only a hop, skip and a jump from heaven to hell for telling a lie.’ But she whispered that life was full of things we could not understand. That it must be hard to suddenly see a glimpse of what makes people tick, for better or worse.

  I won’t be taking any of those memories with me if I can help it. Got no room for drowned cats or potplant pee.

  Brown foam bulges out from under the wrecked car-seat cover and I think the whole world is second-hand. What does new smell and look like? How do you feel if you’re pretty? The engine chokes on its own smoke and splutters into action. We pull out and follow the sun as it rises. No one but us, like we called ahead and booked out the whole damn road. If we were bandits on the run, we’d have special names like Fury and the Tadpole. Or Buster and the Choc Drop. But in this bomb-of-a-ute, held together with rust and rubber bands, it’s just me and Pat and the only thing chasing us is a tornado of dust. It spurts out from the tyres and hits the back window like a hazy brown blanket.

  You’d think it just being the two of us we’d have a cracker of a conversation going but Pat’s sold all his words for a big slice of silence. Clenches the wheel so hard it looks like his knuckles are gonna pop through the skin. And when someone has angry hands you don’t talk. But I know we’re thinking the same thing—that it’s my fault she’s not here. True enough, I’ve never been very good at keeping people around and now I’m basically an orphan. Although Pat’s grumpy like Daddy Warbucks (without the bucks) it’s really not at all like Annie.

  Pat’s not my dad. He’s Mum’s boyfriend. Was. Now everything is past and I’m not sure what he is to me. Or vice versa.

  Dad’s the one who made me black. A darkness so deep down you cannot take it out or scrape it off.

  Besides I’m fourteen and by now it’s probably seeped into my bone marrow. Even though Mum had the safe kind of skin, I only got it on my palms and the soles of my feet. Not much good there. Maybe none of that matters anymore because this is the end of the beginning.

  We’re coming up to the Red River Hotel. Might as well have been Pat’s second home. I bet he’s scared that the magic will happen without him. But just because you believe in something, doesn’t make it true. Mum said he was stupid to fill a metal box with a gas bill or a week’s worth of shopping. Pat goes there a lot because he can’t sleep and the lights are so bright that night is always day. They all know his name, the tap beer he likes and the pokie where he has to sit. One time he got into a fight because Les was at his machine, so Pat tipped Les’s cup on the floor and everyone scrambled to pick up the coins like they were piñata lollies.

  But the Red River’s also where Mum used to work. She was only supposed to stay for a year, making her way around Australia one pub at a time. Mum was like some kind of exotic bird with her French accent. They used to joke about lining the floor of the bar with mattresses on account of all the fellas falling head over heels. Including my dad. And, even though there are black people in Paris, maybe he was kind of exotic to Mum too. At first they got on lovely because Dad wanted to make a go of it for real. But there was a complicated knot in Dad’s head, and when it got too twisted, things got bad. Snap, bang, heart’s in your mouth pounding like a racehorse. A hand whips a
cross Mum’s face and she holds her cheek, red with slap burn. Dad slams the door so hard the whole house shakes.

  Dad gave me my skin. It’s not really his fault though ’cause he got the blackness from his dad. That’s called a legacy, which is usually a good thing like having a five-octave singing voice or being double-jointed. I can only click my knuckles when it gets real cold. Mum kept saying my skin was special, that it brought people and places together. ‘Who and where?’ I used to ask, but she’d just look out the window at something that wasn’t there. Mum didn’t want to scare me but I already knew.

  My grandad William Freeman is a bottom-of-the-well kind of black. Darkly deep and deeply dark, a no-way-out kind of black that cracks the pavement wide open and swallows you whole. That kind of legacy’s no good. Neither is my surname. I don’t know why I got stuck with Freeman because I don’t feel free at all, having this blackness weigh me down. Even though my skin is one shade lighter than my dad’s and two shades lighter than William Freeman’s, it’s still dark enough to bring me trouble. Back gate banging in the wind. Black like a wolf running through the night panting with hunger. It might tear down the door with its sharp nails and turn into a ball of smoke, which I’d accidentally breathe in. Have that wolf hibernate in my chest and make me do bad things. When I told Mum about the smoky wolf she took me to a lady doctor to have a chat about it all, but she just sat there and made me play with emotion-face cards. Like I was a baby or something. The blackness always made me feel wrong. Sometimes we’d go for a walk and people would look at me and then glance at Mum. Like we didn’t fit together. Once, a fat boy with a yellow front tooth rode past on a bike and called me Sambo. It sounded like a pretty word but Mum chased after him. Couldn’t hear what she said but that boy turned around and stared me down for the longest time. He saw the wolf and the wolf saw him.

  Another time on a school trip to the Blue Mountains these two men said I should go back to where I came from. I said we weren’t going home ’til Tuesday but that was the wrong answer because they laughed. They said I was from Africa, but that’s not true. I’m from Beyen. And how could I get to Africa anyway? I don’t have a passport or anyone to stay with. I know they think brown skin is always ‘somewhere else’ on a map. But I can’t say mine comes from Guyana because when I do people always crinkle their eyes and say ‘Ghana?’ like they just haven’t heard me right. Then I have to say ‘No, that’s in Africa, Guyana is in South America.’ And I’m tired of talking about that map and all the different consonants. Continents. I didn’t think those men would care anyway so I just kept my mouth shut and looked at the ground for a very long time.