Nate

The river red-gums look earnest in the morning light. I woke early, with a sense of unease in my gut – probably a hangover from last night’s fight with Beth. When I couldn’t shake the feeling, my instinct was to head out for a run. I don’t get much further before my quads begin to protest, joined by a ruthless stitch in my side. I slow down, recalibrate, while a white heron watches me from the opposite bank. It’s been a while since I’ve done this. I used to come down here for a dawn run when I first moved back to the Wimmera, and all the memories it carried. The idea had been to crash into the day before it crashed into me. In the branches above me, corellas offer a raucous commentary as they arrive from wherever it is they go. Gatyekarr. Never was a town so well named.

The track widens and drops down to the river. Before me stands the weir. Debris is backed up against it, the stains on its concrete darkest where it’s been the longest submerged.

I put my hands on my hips and try to catch my breath. Watch the water slide innocently past.

Maybe there was more to my instinct. This is where they found Lil.

Mist skims across the surface and appears animate, testing even the strongest argument against the existence of ghosts. I was further upstream that night, searching the riverbank on my own; Cally was at the house in case Lil had survived and made her way back. Jesse, who’d led one of the search parties, wanted me to join them, but it was my fault – I was the one who was meant to have been watching Lil while Cally took a turn resting in the sun – so I would be the one to find her, return with our beautiful girl safe and alive in my arms. It took till dawn for her to surface at the weir, though nobody would tell me which section, as if the exact location would be more unbearable than the fact that she was dead.

Wiping the sweat from my top lip, I scramble down to where the reeds slice through the river. Then I do something I haven’t done for a long time, not since the year Lil drowned. I crouch at the edge of the water and, sifting through the debris, select two stones – not the flat type perfect for skimming, but substantial ones, dirt and dead leaves clinging on. I scrape one clean with my thumb and measure its weight in my palm. Half a kilo, maybe more.

The corellas goading, I pull back my arm as if drawing a bow – take aim and throw the stone with everything I have. It hurtles through the air before arcing down towards the deepest part of the river, the reflections on its surface shattering as the stone breaks through. Something about it feels right, always has. The shattering. This show of strength. I grab the other stone and throw it harder and further than the first, my shoulder wrenching as I release it.

Pain rips across my back.

‘Fuuuuck!’

The sun pulsing on my forehead, I picture the stone’s trajectory. It’s too heavy to be carried by the current on its way north, not enough purchase, no hair or limbs, the water darker and denser as it sinks until there’s no more light, only the disturbed silt of its arrival at the bottom. When we discovered Lil was gone – not answering to her name – I ran down to the river, saw her footprints in the mud and dived in, Cally’s scream still ringing in my ears. As I pushed down into the depths, the current so strong, unrelenting, the water got murky, littered with dead matter, until I could only feel for her in the half-dark, and as I flung my arms around – felt for her with my whole body, resurfaced, dived again – even in that moment, I knew. If I wasn’t careful, this would be the course of my life from then on.

I massage my shoulder where I wrenched it and the pain feels good, somehow. True. That intuition I had in the middle of the river turned out to be close; so many of the decisions I’ve made over the years filtered through that day and the weeks that followed. But I’m no longer the man picking through debris on a moon-savaged night. No longer convinced that the brutality of nature is personal, or even if that word applies.

On the opposite bank are two scar trees, the trunks bulging around the place where the bark was removed to make canoes or maybe shields. Lauren would no doubt draw some neat line between a wound in the landscape and the wound on a human heart. But I don’t know about that. A corella lands on top of the closest one and I want to warn it, warn all of them, not to stick around. It’s a precarious time. The Harvesters, desperate for some kind of spirit guide. Lauren, a Rorschach test for a nation’s psyche. And all the others, with their white-fox theories and fading folklores, clinging to remnants of an idea.

But what is it I’m hankering for? Because I feel it deep in my bones. A phantom itch, impossible to scratch. And this more than anything makes me fear for Neme.

That we seek revenge on a river.

Or believe in the curative power of a hurled stone.