Sing Fox to Me

by Sarah Kanake

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

In 1986, fourteen-year-old twins Samson and Jonah travel from the Sunshine Coast to the wild backcountry of Tasmania to live on a mountain with a granddad they’ve never met. Clancy Fox is a beat-up old man obsessed with finding his long-missing daughter, River. He’s convinced that she was taken by a Tasmanian tiger pack.The resentful, brooding Jonah and thoughtful, inquisitive Samson become entranced, in different ways, with themountain. While Samson – who has Down syndrome – finds mystery and delight all around, Jonah develops a dark obsession as persistent as Clancy’s desire to bring River home.

Release date: March 1, 2016

Publisher: Affirm Press

Print pages: 272

Sample

Clancy Fox waited on the back verandah, his eyes fixed on a horizon just visible beyond the edge of his mountain. There’d been nothing but rain for days, and even though the sky had cleared over the morning, he knew in his gut that the worst was yet to come. Black clouds roiled through the sky, turning like bodies tangled up in bedsheets.

Clancy made his kids stay inside, even after the rain let up. He looked through the open door behind him, across the kitchen and into the living room. River was in her mum’s armchair, biting her nails and staring out the window, a trapped animal. She wore a white nightie, and her red hair was loose around her shoulders. David sat by the fireplace with a stack of books, as if he was going to be there for days.

George was down the other end of the verandah having a durry. Clancy couldn’t tell what his best mate was thinking – maybe he was feeling grateful that they were all far away from the rain and mudslides, thunder and black clouds. Or maybe George was thinking about when he’d be able to get down Clancy’s mountain and fortify his shack for the worst of the storm still to come.

‘Still in a lull,’ George said hopefully.

‘The eye, more like,’ answered Clancy. ‘You seen that?’ He pointed beyond the drop-off.

George nodded. ‘Might be worth heading down now. Catch a bit of calm while we have it.’

‘It’s … quiet. Not calm.’

George’s hand shook, slightly, as he finished what was left of his durry.

Clancy walked back inside and told the kids he was leaving to check on the shack. River didn’t want to stay. ‘No, Dad.’ She tugged his shirt with her damp, nail-bitten hand. ‘I can help. I can.’

He didn’t respond to her. Instead he spoke to his son. ‘Keep an eye on your sister.’

David nodded without looking up from his book.

Clancy kicked the boy’s foot. ‘You hear me?’

‘Sheesh, Dad. Yes, alright, I’ll keep her inside.’

Clancy and George dressed for the weather. Akubras, Blundstones, boot covers and riding coats. They took the ute, but Clancy drove slower than usual because the mountain drive was sheer and he’d seen the power of an angry mudslide.

‘Might not be much there,’ he said gently, as they crept down the road.

‘Anything is worth saving,’ said George.

They reached the walking track that led in from the road to George’s place. Clancy turned the ute off the road, and they went the rest of the way on foot. While they were walking, the rain started back up.

By the time they got to the shack, it was gone.

The roof was in the creek, and the structure itself had toppled sideways. A broken tree had pierced through one window and out another as if the shack were a harpooned whale. It took them most of the afternoon to find what was left of George’s belongings, carry them up to the road, load them into the ute and bring it all back to the main house. George didn’t say much as they unloaded his life from the sodden ute tray and spread it across the concrete floor of Clancy’s shed.

They were just lifting George’s small kitchen table out of the tray when Clancy heard the front door of the house open.

‘Hear that?’ he asked.

The front door slammed.

George nodded.

‘Bloody kids.’

‘Better check on ’em, aye.’

Clancy walked around the fence to the front of the house. The gate was open. He crossed the lawn and walked inside. His son was waiting right inside the door. David’s face was pale, and he held his arm as though it was about to spring away from him.

‘You right?’ asked Clancy.

David nodded. ‘She ran out,’ he said, and his eyes darted to the door.

‘In this? Did you try and stop her?’

David released his forearm for a moment to reveal a deep, angry bite mark in the skin just below the inside of his elbow. Bloody but not bleeding. ‘Said she would sick the tigers on me, Dad.’

‘Why’d she bite you?’ asked Clancy, panic rising inside him like rain in the water tanks out back. ‘What did you do?’

‘Nothing, Dad,’ David said, but his voice trembled.

Clancy grabbed his son by the shoulders. He dug his fingers in, the way his own da would’ve done.

‘Nothing. Honest!’

This time Clancy shook him. ‘Bullshit.’

‘I didn’t. I didn’t. I tried to make her stay inside, I swear, but she’s crazy, Dad. She bit me.’

Clancy didn’t feel his hands move, but he saw them wrap around David’s thin, pale neck. He watched his hands shake his son harder – he watched them take control of the boy’s breath, and George’s large brown hands pull them away. ‘Let him loose, mate. Let him loose.’

Clancy’s hands let go. His son slid to the ground.

George gathered the boy up in his arms, and David, who was almost sixteen, looked like a toddler again. ‘Breathe.’ George wrapped his own hand around David’s bite wound. ‘Take it easy.’

‘I didn’t do anything … I didn’t.’

Clancy left his blubbering son in the arms of his friend, embarrassed by the intimacy between them, and went to find River.

Outside, a thin trail of bare footprints led from the door to the bush. He followed them. Rain lashed the ground. The wind picked up. His Blundstones sank into the mud. He struggled to get them back out again and soon gave up. Clancy followed River in bare feet.

Hail broke from the sky with a crack. He plunged beneath the sound. The mountain shook as if in response.

‘River,’ he shouted, but the wind was louder and cut his voice to shreds before it could reach her. How could a girl survive all alone in the scrub and rain when she was only just fourteen? Where would she go? ‘River …’ The rain pounded harder into the earth. ‘River Snow Fox!’ he called again, but his voice was only another drop of rain in the thunderous din.

Clancy tried to steady his body on a nearby tree. He missed and slumped to the ground. Mud soaked through his jeans. He was just like everything else on the mountain. A falling rock, a broken tree trunk. A new wound in the side of an old body. He was the severed root and the thundering mudslide. He was the buried footprint of a girl and the cavernous mouth that had swallowed her whole.

‘Riv–’

When the tree hit his body, Clancy could no more struggle against it than the rock could struggle against the mountain. He thought of River, and his body wrapped around the trunk, embracing it as it fell. Legs, arms, spine all tangled together, rolling down the mountainside. When the tree finally stopped, Clancy was underneath.

Somewhere in the rain and mud and crashing trees, he heard a laugh, faint and far away. River? He tried to call for her, but her name was heavy and his lungs were buried beneath the tree. The laugh sounded again. Kookaburras. This time, Clancy knew River was lost. The laughter turned to cackling as the kookas gathered in the branches overhead.

The rain fell over him like broken glass. He closed his eyes.

Then the rain stopped.

Clancy opened his eyes again.

There was George, surrounded by a white mist of rain and sleet. ‘Easy, mate,’ he said. ‘We’ll get this load off you.’ The brim of his Akubra protected them both.

one

Jonah Fox caught sight of his face in the car window. It shivered like a reflection in water. He rubbed his hand against his cheek the way he had seen his dad do in the bathroom mirror before a shave. Jonah’s skin felt lumpy, like always, and he wondered how a razor could ever glide over his cheek without cutting him. He stuck out his tongue, and the reflection vanished into the darkness of the trees outside. He looked away. Jonah hated his skin. He hated the way it creased around his black eyes and stretched too-tightly over his small bones, but most of all, Jonah hated the stories his parents would tell about how he came to be the way he was. ‘You turned your skin from black to blue to grey to white,’ they said, as if it was something special, as if he wasn’t just fading away.

Jonah’s twin brother, Samson Fox, had started suffocating him before he even took his first breath.

Samson was the first to be born. He didn’t cry. Their parents said it was because he was an angel, but Jonah knew that wasn’t why Samson didn’t cry. Kids like Samson didn’t do anything without help.

Jonah came next, tangled up and dark as a bad oyster. Sometimes, he tried to imagine what it must have been like. Did his brother sit on his umbilical cord, or did he suck the air clean out of Jonah’s mouth?

His skin didn’t stay black for long. The doctors untangled him, slapped him on the back, and Jonah screamed his skin all the way from black to stormy-weather grey. It stayed grey-ish pink for weeks, his parents said. ‘We mightn’t have known it was grey, except we had Samson to compare it to,’ they said.

By the time Jonah started high school, his skin had transformed. It turned into a bumpy white mess like the inside of a Clag glue pot. Sometimes Jonah would imagine stepping into a different skin. Forgetting who he was and letting the new skin make him into something different.

‘See,’ interrupted his dad, David, as he turned the car off the road and pulled into an empty area beside a thicket of bushland. ‘I told you it was huge.’

Jonah looked out the window.

‘Huge,’ repeated Samson from the front seat. His brother always got the front, no matter how many times Jonah called shotgun.

Jonah wound down the rental car window, and the scent of fake pine air fresheners was replaced with the stink of living trees. He took a deep breath of Tasmanian air. It was cold, and he coughed. This was it? This was his granddad’s mountain?

‘Your granddad Clancy lives all the way up the top,’ said David. ‘Well, almost at the top.’

Jonah took another breath, but the air felt even colder and made his back teeth ache. ‘Are you sure we’re in the right place?’ David pointed to a wooden board shoved into the ground beside a rusty drum mailbox. No number, but someone had painted an outline of an animal on the side. It looked like a cave drawing. ‘What does that mean?’ Jonah asked.

‘It’s a fox,’ said Samson quickly. ‘Like us.’

Jonah wanted to flick his brother on the back of the ear, but he pointed to the sign instead. ‘How come it has stripes, then?’

‘It’s old and rusty,’ said Samson.

‘Are you sure this is it, Dad?’ said Jonah again.

‘I’m not likely to forget where I grew up,’ said David, annoyed.

Jonah sniffed. His nose was cold. ‘What’s it called?’

‘Your granddad never called the place anything.’ David tilted his head to the side and looked up the mountain as though he was trying to see the top. ‘Would have been better for my book sales if he had –’

‘What about on a map?’ said Jonah. He was tired of hearing about the sales of his dad’s one published book. ‘They’d have to call it something on a map.’

‘Locals call it Fox Hill, but –’ said David.

‘It’s not a hill,’ interrupted Jonah.

David ignored him and kept going. ‘Dad told me once that they used to call it Tiger Mountain.’

Jonah wished he had a map so he could check.

‘Can we get out now?’ asked Samson. ‘My legs need a stretch.’

‘Great idea.’

David and Samson uncoiled their long bodies, got out of the car and stood on either side of the road. Together they looked up at the mountain. Jonah wasn’t going to join them. Why should he? He hadn’t wanted to come to this stupid little island, and even though his dad had pulled him out of school really early, he definitely wasn’t going to get excited about living on top of a mountain with his dad, brother and an old man he’d never met.

‘Only till the end of the holidays,’ he whispered. After Christmas, their mum would come, and by the end of January they would be living in Brisbane in a new house. Jonah would start Year Nine in a new school without Samson. His dad had promised. ‘Just until the end of the holidays,’ he whispered again.

Outside the car, Samson and David both started to turn in large, looping circles, trying to see everything above. Their dad said, ‘How amazing is it … I’d almost forgotten. Look, Samson – look how far it goes.’ Samson answered in sign language, but David wasn’t looking, and Jonah couldn’t be bothered getting involved.

‘Hop out, Jonah,’ said his dad. ‘You don’t want to miss this.’

‘I’m reading.’ Jonah turned back to the book open on his lap.

‘Why don’t you get out and have a look around?’ said David.

Jonah turned a page.

‘This is going to be your new home.’

Jonah finally looked up. ‘I thought we were only here until after Christmas?’

David shook his head and glanced away. ‘You know what I mean.’

‘I think I see the house.’ Samson pointed over the car to the mountain peak.

‘As if, ’ said Jonah.

‘There, see?’

Jonah stuck his head out of the car window and stared up. The mountain loomed over him in a formless green haze. He squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again. This time, he saw how the trees stretched up, and how the late afternoon light danced between the trunks like runaway waterfalls, and how the narrow, almost hidden dirt road waited for them. A snake in the bush.

‘Got you!’ shouted Samson, and he smiled again.

Their dad laughed.

‘Get stuffed,’ said Jonah, as he pulled his head back through the window.

‘Come on, you two,’ David said, but Jonah could hear in his voice that his heart wasn’t really in the scolding. ‘You ready, mate?’

Samson shook his head. ‘Do we have to?’

‘You’ll like it at your granddad’s, mate.’

Samson nodded and got back into the car. David tried to help him with his seatbelt, but Samson swatted him away. ‘I can do it.’

Jonah and David waited for Samson to figure out the belt lock. Finally, after what seemed like ages, there was a click.

‘Arms in,’ said David, when he turned the key in the ignition.

‘Arms in,’ repeated Samson, but he left his elbow in the open window.

David drove the rental car off the bitumen road and onto the dirt path.

Jonah stared at the words in his book without reading them. After a few minutes of driving in silence, the page flipped over. ‘Hey,’ said Jonah, as icy air poured through Samson’s open window and funnelled onto the back seat. ‘Shut the window. It’s cold.’

Samson’s big, babyish face appeared from around the seat. He stuck out his tongue.

‘Dad,’ said Jonah, ‘he’s doing it again.’

‘Dobbas wear nappies.’

‘Oh, come on, Jonah,’ said David, catching Jonah’s eye in the rear-view mirror. ‘Give your brother a break.’

Samson signed something into the space between his seat and their dad’s.

‘Use your words, mate,’ said David, without taking his eyes off the road.

‘Yeah, mate,’ repeated Jonah.

‘The air is not cold,’ said Samson stiffly.

‘Remember what we talked about before we left this morning?’ David asked. ‘You don’t always feel the cold … Remember?’

Samson nodded and slowly wound the window up.

Jonah stared through his closed window, the book resting in his lap. The air outside was white, almost like smoke, but he hardly noticed. He was imagining what his granddad, Clancy Fox, might be like.

The dirt road snaked out in front of them, sometimes twisting and widening, sometimes narrowing. Twice it disappeared altogether, and his dad had to drive the car over ferns and grass to get to the road on the other side. They went up and up, following the thickening white air as it coiled around the mountain.

‘Didn’t you like it here?’ asked Jonah. ‘Why didn’t you stay?’

His dad didn’t answer.

Samson wriggled down into his seat and shoved his face into a rolled-up blanket he’d wedged against the window.

‘Dad?’ Jonah asked again.

‘I don’t know,’ said David. ‘Your granddad and I don’t see eye to eye. It’s complicated.’

There was a dull thump in front of Jonah, and Samson’s face flopped onto the window. His breath misted the glass.

David turned the steering wheel, and the car swirled around a bend in the road. ‘He thought your mum and I were too young to get married.’ After a long pause he said, ‘We probably were.’

‘Will we have to share a room again?’ asked Jonah, and he pushed his knee into the back of his sleeping brother’s seat.

‘I don’t think so. I’m not sure.’

‘You said the house has three bedrooms?’

Their eyes met briefly in the rear-view mirror, then David looked away. ‘You don’t mind sharing, do you? Samson always makes your bed.’

‘He can’t do hospital corners.’

‘What does Mum always say? If you adjust your expectations, then you won’t be disappointed.’

Jonah looked out the window again. Thin grey trees moved past them slowly, like fence posts in the suburbs. Jonah felt frustrated, itchy even. Ready to get to Clancy’s house and ready to leave it again. Maybe this was how his dad had felt when he was Jonah’s age. Creeping up and down the mountain while he went to school or came home from town. ‘What if Clancy hates us?’ Jonah asked quietly. But what he actually meant was, What if Clancy hates Samson?

‘He’s your granddad. He won’t hate you.’

‘I hate us.’

David glanced at him again, and Jonah wished they were face-to-face instead of looking at each other through a reflection. He wished his dad would smile or reach back between the seats, like his mum sometimes did, and take his hand. But David’s eyes darted back to the road. ‘It won’t be long now.’

People say there’s no pain like the pain of losing a child, and Clancy knew the truth of that more than most. He knew the missing, the aching. He knew the unending, circling misery of letting a child slip through his fingers, but he also knew the sorrow of forgetting, and being forgotten.

On the day his son was due to return to his mountain, Clancy wondered if he’d got it around the wrong way, loving his lost girl and forgetting his living boy. But pare. . .