bream and whiting and flathead fishermen and those three local kids pulling backflips off the tallowwood decking, spinning into a full and choppy green-brown tide so high the water lashes the iron safety rails that are peeling with yellow paint.
Rain on my head and I know I should have worn a raincoat but I love the rain on my head and the smell of the rain on the bitumen.
The sky gets darker the closer I get to the middle of the bridge. This is where we always meet, so this is where I find him, seated on the concrete edge of the bridge, his long legs dangling over the side. He wears a thick green raincoat with a hood over his head. His red fibreglass fishing rod with an old wooden Alvey reel rests between his right elbow and his waist as he hunches over, rolling a smoke. With his head under the hood, he can’t even see me pull up in the rain, but somehow he knows it’s me.
‘Why didn’t you wear a fuckin’ raincoat,’ Slim says.
‘I saw a rainbow over Lancelot Street and I thought the rain was done,’ I say.
‘The rain’s never done with us, kid,’ Slim says.
I lean the bike against the yellow rails and inspect a white plastic bucket resting beside Slim. Two fat bream swim without moving forward or backwards inside the bucket. I sit beside him, my legs over the side of the bridge. The high tide water heaves and swells in peaks and valleys.
‘Will the fish still bite in the rain?’ I ask.
‘It ain’t raining down there under the water,’ he says. ‘The flathead come out in this. Mind you, different story fishing in a river. I’ve seen yellowbelly out west go bonkers in the rain.’
‘How do you know when a fish is going bonkers?’
‘They start preaching about the end of the world,’ Slim chuckles.
The rain gets heavier. He pulls a rolled Courier-Mail from his fishing bag and spreads it out for me to use as a shelter.
‘Thanks,’ I say.
We stare at his taut line, dragged up and down by the Bramble Bay waves.
‘You still want to go through with this?’
‘I have to, Slim,’ I say. ‘She’ll be all right once she sees me. I know it.’
‘What if that’s not enough, kid?’ he asks. ‘Two and a half years is a long time.’
‘You said it yourself, a lag gets a little bit easier every time you wake up.’
‘I didn’t have two kids on the outside,’ he says. ‘Her two and a half years will feel like twenty of mine. That men’s prison is filled with a hundred blokes who think they’re bad to the bone because they’ve done fifteen years. But those blokes don’t love nothin’ and nothin’ loves them back and that makes things easy for ’em. It’s all those mums across the road who are true hard nuts. They wake each day knowing there’s some lost little shit like you out there waiting to love them back.’
I take the newspaper off my head so the rain can hit my face and hide my wet eyes.
‘But the man on the phone, Slim,’ I say. ‘Dad just says I’m crazy. Dad just says I made him up. But I know what I heard, Slim. I know he said what he said. And Christmas is coming and Mum loves Christmas like nobody I’ve ever seen love Christmas. Do you believe, Slim? Do you believe me?’
I’m crying hard now. Hard as the black sky rain is falling.
‘I believe you, kid,’ he says. ‘But I also believe your dad is right not to take you up there. You don’t need to see that world. And she don’t need to see you in it. Sometimes it makes it hurt worse.’
‘Did you talk to your man?’ I ask.
He nods, taking a deep breath.
‘What did he say?’ I ask.
‘He’ll do it.’
‘He will?’
‘Yeah, he will.’
‘What does he want from me in return?’ I ask. ‘Because I’m good for it, Slim. I’ll square it, I promise.’
‘Slow down, Road Runner,’ he says.
He winds in his line, turning the old Alvey reel three rotations, gentle and instinctive.
‘You got a bite?’
‘Nibble.’
He winds in one more rotation. Silent.
‘He’s not doing it for you,’ he says. ‘I kept his brother safe through a very long porridge a very long time ago. His name’s George and that’s all you need to know about his name. He has a fruit wholesale business and he’s been making fruit deliveries into the Boggo men’s and women’s for the past