Free Black Water by David Metzenthen

his statement about the future.
    Maggie pressed his hand.
    ‘Yes, and until he does,’ she said, ‘you can stay with me. And later, Johnny said there’s a little room here you can have, if you want. Like Isla.’
    ‘D’you think the army might let him go?’ Farren put the words together as if he was completing an equation. ‘If we tell ’em what’s happened? To me?’
    From the lounge the sounds of people filtered into the kitchen. Farren didn’t hear them.
    ‘I – well, they might.’ Maggie nodded. ‘We’ll have to ask.’ Her eyes flickered, as if she knew she had faltered with the truth, but Farren, lost in dismal hope, didn’t notice.
    Hour by hour the storm lessened until the trees hung exhaustedly and the estuary calmed enough to accept the reflection of the sky. The beaches, Farren knew, would be black with weed and the sea infected with sand, a sickly green. The dunes too would be dramatically altered, bitten off by the waves or enlarged as if mysterious islands had beached overnight – but Farren didn’t want to see them.
    He had no wish to kick over what had been pitched up by the ocean. He had no interest in what fish, birds, rope, or wreckage had finally been dumped at the high-water mark to lie abandoned like shoddy souvenirs. He couldn’t move. He felt as if he’d been beaten senseless.
    His past was like an old calendar, years out of date, his future a road that dipped out of sight. What he didn’t think could ever happen to him again, had, and so suddenly it was as if the world wanted to teach him a lesson. He looked out, saw the railway bridge at the neck of the estuary, and wished he were there, sitting on timbers as strong as trust, the water plopping and glopping, his fishing line over his finger to complete the connection, the day like any other old day.
    ∗
    A magpie sat in a tree by the cemetery gates, watching as mourners in black filed out. Farren had seen the bird earlier, gratefully allowing its presence to divert his attention from what was happening at the graveside. The words Reverend Purdue had spoken were so awful, so final, and so unlike the words that people normally spoke that Farren couldn’t listen.
    ‘ And now we commit the earthly remains of…’
    Instead Farren watched the magpie cleaning its beak, filing away busily as his dad’s name was stretched out, added to, and slowed down until Tom Fox was turned into a person Farren didn’t recognise.
    ‘Thomas George Albert Carver Fox…’
    His dad wasn’t Thomas George Albert something Fox, and Farren was not going to listen to him being changed into someone with a long, cold, serious name that sounded like it belonged in England and nowhere near a fishing boat. The others could listen – he could see Mr Derriweather was, standing next to Isla who stared down at the gravelly ground, but Farren Fox wouldn’t. He would look at the magpie, alive and alert, now attending to its wing, sawing with its beak like a mad violinist as the words drifted away on the breeze.
    Farren watched the magpie as he left the cemetery, seeing it fly away over the headstones as if they were nothing but stumps in a paddock, and the two men with shovels only farmers out to clear a drain. All he wanted to do now, because his mind was either so empty or so full it wouldn’t work, was sleep.
    Beyond wanting to sleep, Farren was aware only of things he no longer felt; he no longer felt like himself, he no longerunderstood where he was in the world, what he was going to do, or what might happen to him. He was completely and utterly lost.

FIFTEEN
    From the window in Maggie’s parlour Farren could see the headland across the waters of the Rip, the land disappearing in the lessening light, reminding him of a whale, black and massive. The sea was moving, the ebb tide running, Farren able to feel, even from behind glass, the air of treachery that it carried, close and silent, to share with the rocks and reefs.
    He had not looked at the sea for