Sadie Tree lived in a house downstream, where the little Murray and the big Murray joined. Her father, Jack, owned a Dodge tourer and he was the Pastoral and Livestock Inspector for the district: a strict, soldierly man who, as an Anzac at Gallipoli, had discovered something good in the best moments of soldiering. In the attack on Suvla Bay he had taken charge of a machine-gun position when all the officers and sergeants had been killed, and he had done it well enough and bravely enough for a General to raise him from Private to Officer in the field. Since then he had kept his faith in soldiering and in old soldiers as the best thing in his life. He was the Secretary of the St Helen’s branch of the Returned Soldiers League, and his first loyalty in the town (apart from his family) was to any man who had been a soldier. Old Anzacs always knew that he would help them if he could, they could count on him, but this belief in the comradeship and pride of arms made something of a disciplinarian of him at home, although for his luck he had married a silent and obedient and gentle wife, Grace, and now had a silent and obedient and gentle daughter, Sadie, both of whom accepted his discipline, and respected and loved him nonetheless. In the end, Spit’s predicament would make a change in this mix of modesty and discipline, but that was to be the end, not the beginning.
Sadie was a quiet girl and a clever girl who watched everything, saw everything, and said so little that she was hardly noticed even by girls her own age. Nobody resented her and nobody bothered her, and those who did notice her said that she got her silence from her father, the strong silent Jack. But if Sadie had inherited his silence (it was really her mother’s) she did not have his strength, because Jack was used to having his own way so that Sadie and her mother always gave into him, as if it was the normal and the right thing to do. There was never any conflict in the Tree family.
Spit liked Mrs Tree because she was always silently there. She was often alone with Sadie when her husband was away on one of his inspections, and she would sometimes walk by herself, or with Sadie, along the river bank and stop to admire old Fyfe’s garden. But neither she nor Sadie would ever say anything at all to old Fyfe. They left him alone if they passed by when he was in the garden. When Spit, in turn, offered Mrs Tree a fresh cod at her back door on a Friday (they were Catholics) and wriggled it fiercely under her nose, she would smile, almost laugh, and wait without saying anything for Spit to name his price. She would always accept it, pay it, and take the fish without saying a word except to say, ‘Thanks Spit’. If Sadie was around when this was happening Spit hardly noticed her, although he was often faintly aware that she was always inspecting him as she did everybody else. But she would say, ‘Goodbye Spit,’ as he left, and that always startled him because he would shift a little on his bare feet and shout back, ‘G’day, Sade,’ and then forget her a few moments later.
It was the river that eventually made them friends. Spit’s passion for watching the currents and sending small, flat, pointed ‘boats’ along the river carrying messages to unknown destinations, took him often along the bank downstream to pass by the Trees’ house, which was not right on the river but a little way back from it nearer the railway line. Spit would write his left-handed messages on old newspaper saying, ‘Help. I’m shipwrecked. 20 longtude, 62 latude. Come quick.’ His grandfather had once given him a hard and shortened version of Kidnapped. Tying the message around the mast of his little flat boat he would swim out to the middle of the river, launch it, and then walk along the bank to follow it through the swirls and eddies until it either lost its message, got stuck on the opposite bank where it was too far away to swim to, or finally disappear for ever into the faster mainstream of the big river.
He loved to guess or calculate the complex twists and turns in the currents and eddies, or puzzle over the reasons for their endless variety, and he was absorbed one day in one of his little boats when a voice behind him said, ‘They always end up under that big tree, near the bridge.’
Spit, surprised by the sudden and very quiet arrival of someone behind him, swung around and found Sadie Tree standing with her hands behind her back watching him.
‘How do you know?’ Spit said.
‘Sometimes I follow them when they’re in the big river.’
‘Tell us another one,’ he said disbelievingly. He knew that once they were in the big river they either got swamped by the fast current or were lost to view. ‘You can’t see them in the middle.’
‘Yes, you can,’ Sadie said. ‘They always come in on the other side near our place. Then they go around and around where the posts are, then they cross to the other side again and come back near the bridge.’
‘You can’t see them across the other side,’ Spit insisted.
‘Yes you can, with my father’s field glasses.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You can see for miles through them.’
‘Tell us another one,’ Spit said.
‘Honest, Spit. Wait here and I’ll show you.’
When she came back with the field glasses – a worn but good pair of military 8 x 30s – she showed Spit how to focus them, and then handed them over.
‘You’re right,’ Spit said generously. ‘You can see everything.’
Sadie blushed and put out her hand for the field glasses. But Spit wasn’t going to part with them so quickly. They were hanging around his neck and he meant them to stay there for a while.
‘If we run for it we’ll find the one I just put in,’ he said and set off along the river bank without waiting to see if Sadie was following.
She followed, and in thus proving the accuracy of her observations, she and Spit established their mutual fascination for the weird behaviour of the river. But it was a private discovery and it became at first a secret friendship. Sadie knew that her father would object because he thought Spit wild, and in need of discipline. So rather than create a situation which would end in a downright denunciation of it, Sadie kept it to herself. That is, she told only her mother.
Mrs Tree thought about it for a moment and then said, ‘Don’t tell your father. He’ll only tell you to keep away from Spit.’
Implied in this response was Mrs Tree’s permission for Sadie to talk to Spit if she wanted to, because Mrs Tree liked him and trusted him. And, in allowing it, there was also a silent contract between them which left Jack out of it, even though he liked to rule the house even in his absence. But it was not a serious conspiracy. Grace Tree respected and admired her husband, and Sadie loved her father, but because neither one had any particular friend they depended on each other to keep for themselves some of the fragments of their own lives – the unimportant fragments which mother and daughter considered harmless and inoffensive to Jack. After all, Spit was only a small boy, and Grace Tree had always felt, like Betty Arbuckle, that some day Spit was going to need help, although she wasn’t quite sure what sort of help it would be. Certainly not Betty Arbuckle’s Boys Home, she knew that much.
It seemed natural thereafter for Spit to devise a system of sending messages downstream to Sadie, rather than addressing them to unknown and unlikely persons. At first it was a trial run of one little flat pine boat which they both followed, and the message on this one was written by Sadie and read, ‘I am sick. Send me a doctor,’ which Spit had instantly rejected.
‘If he’s sick, all he has to do is walk up to the railway line and ask somebody in one of the houses to get Doctor Stevens. So what’s the use of that?’
‘What’s the use of saying you’re shipwrecked?’ Sadie said. ‘It’s the same thing.’
‘No it isn’t. Nobody’s around when you’re shipwrecked, so you can’t ask somebody up the railway line to help you.’
‘You can’t get shipwrecked in a river,’ Sadie insisted.
‘What do you mean? What about the old Mundoo where the boiler came from?’
‘That was years ago. There aren’t any river boats on the little Murray anymore, so nobody would believe you.’
Spit conceded the point because his private world had finally been penetrated, and his imagination now had a companion.
They operated their message system successfully all summer, so that in the end Spit was writing genuine messages to Sadie. ‘I am going swimming tonight.’ Or ‘I am up at the old Point. Home at six.’ When Spit went swimming off the steps near the boiler (he never swam with the other boys higher up) Sadie would sit on the hard mud steps and watch him. She couldn’t swim herself, and when he tried to persuade her she said, ‘Not me, Spit. I’m afraid of the water.’
‘But it’s dangerous living by the river and not being able to swim. What if there’s a flood?’ he told her.
‘My father doesn’t want me to go in when he’s away,’ Sadie said. ‘That’s why I’m afraid, I think.’
‘He won’t know.’
‘He’d find out.’
‘What does your mother say?’
‘I don’t know, Spit. If you ask her she might let me.’
‘Me? Why should I ask her?’
‘She trusts you. Only don’t tell anyone else.’
Spit as a plenipotentiary was blunt rather than diplomatic. ‘It’s no good if she can’t swim, Mrs Tree,’ he said, and this was his one-and-only argument.
In fact Mrs Tree agreed with him. ‘But I’ll have to be there, Spit. At first anyway, and she’s never to go in unless you’re near her.’
‘Okay, Mrs Tree,’ Spit agreed.
With Mrs Tree sitting on the mud steps, and Sadie in a new bathing suit, he taught her to swim. His methods were not persuasive but impatient, as if it astounded him that she couldn’t just walk straight in and do what he did.
‘Just paddle your arms and legs,’ he shouted at her.
Mrs Tree listened and watched and took the girl’s punishment for her, but she said nothing. Sadie was twice in tears, shouting (for her) at Spit, ‘I can’t. I can’t …’ which Spit treated with anguish and contempt. ‘Yes you can,’ he said. ‘You’re not even trying, Sadie. Look.’
To demonstrate the ease of it, Spit was under and over the water and halfway across the river and back in a violent, skilful, splashing demonstration of how easy it was.
‘I’ll never get it,’ Sadie said.
‘Go on. You just have to do it.’
In the end she did it, so that in those first miraculous strokes of a dog-paddle Sadie accepted thereafter a lifelong debt to Spit. Her mother too was so pleased that she insisted on Spit (dripping wet) sitting in the kitchen and drinking a glass of raspberry vinegar. It was the first time that Spit had been invited to sit in anybody’s kitchen, and though he was always bold in the grip of a new experience, he was about to leave quick. But then Mrs Tree offered him a second glass. Anything more than the essentials was manna to Spit. He would sometimes buy an icecream or an aniseed ball because he had a sweet tooth, or a snowball for a penny, but this was a different kind of indulgence so he said, ‘Yes thanks,’ and Mrs Tree gave him the second glass of the thick red cordial. Sadie had been watching him and smiling, still happy with her first few strokes in the water.
‘Can we do it again tomorrow?’ she asked him.
‘All right,’ Spit said. ‘But you have to learn to put your head under. It’s no use learning to swim unless you can put your head under.’
‘All right, all right,’ Sadie said. ‘I’ll give it a go.’
Mrs Tree watched them both, and in a moment’s pause between Spit’s long draughts of the red vinegar she said, ‘How old are you, Spit?’
‘Eleven,’ he said, and then as if in this silent kitchen he had suddenly heard the violence of his own voice for the first time, he said it again a little quieter, and he retreated too. ‘I’m eleven now, Mrs Tree,’ he said, ‘but I’ll be twelve next birthday.’
‘I thought so,’ Mrs Tree said. ‘You’re the same age as Sadie. She’ll be eleven in January. When is your birthday?’
‘Last week – the fourteenth,’ he said.
It was, in its way, another tie, and instead of wanting to get out quick Spit looked around him at the kitchen and, seeing an old, marbled, mantle clock above the fireplace, he said, ‘We can fix that if it stops.’
‘I know,’ Mrs Tree said. ‘But it’s still going strong. It belonged to my father.’
‘It probably needs cleaning,’ Spit said.
‘No. I think it’s all right,’ Mrs Tree said.
‘Well … if it stops,’ Spit said threateningly at the clock.
‘Don’t worry,’ Mrs Tree said. ‘We’ll have it around to your grandfather in a jiffy.’
Though Spit and his grandfather seemed only able to shout at each other, Spit was also used to long silences with old Fyfe, so it was easy for him to sit in this kitchen of silence with two people who said little or nothing at all. He had finished his raspberry vinegar and he was aware that Mrs Tree was looking at him the way nobody else in the town looked at him, although he didn’t know what exactly it meant. Sadie seemed simply to be waiting for him to do something or to tell them something. When he finally decided it was necessary he said to her at the top of his voice, ‘I’m going fishing tonight by the willows. Do you want to come?’
‘In the dark?’ she said.
‘Of course. That’s the best time, up by the willows.’
‘What will your grandfather say?’ Sadie asked him.
Spit looked surprised. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I’m always up there. Sometimes he comes with me.’
‘Is he going with you tonight?’ Sadie asked.
‘No. He’s …’ Whatever Spit was about to say he changed his mind about it. ‘Do you want to come?’ he said to Sadie.
Sadie was readily frightened and yet she was also determined. ‘Can I go?’ she said to her mother. ‘Just for a little while.’
‘But it’s so dark,’ her mother said. ‘You won’t be able to see your way near the river.’
‘That’s nothing,’ Spit said. ‘I know the way blindfold.’
Mrs Tree looked worried, but she too had her own way of making a difficult decision. ‘You’ll have to hold her hand, Spit. I shan’t let her go otherwise.’
‘You mean just on the way up there?’ Spit said.
‘Yes. And when you’re at the willows, Sadie has to sit right away from the river. No paddling or swimming. I want you to promise me that.’
‘That’s all right,’ Spit said. ‘It would frighten the fish anyway.’
Mrs Tree was still worried but she said to Sadie, ‘Do you really want to go?’
Sadie pulled in her lips nervously and nodded.
Spit said he would come at seven o’clock, and he would give a special whistle, which he demonstrated piercingly. Then, saying in a business-like way, ‘I have to go home now,’ he was up and out in a few seconds, leaving Sadie and Mrs Tree feeling rather sorry in their quiet kitchen that they had suddenly lost a noise and a force and a small attack on their isolation, which left them feeling rather empty.
‘It’s such a pity,’ Mrs Tree said to Sadie.
Sadie didn’t ask what was the pity, but her silence and her slight frown asked the question anyway.
‘He’s a very nice boy, considering all the problems he and old Mr MacPhee have had to live with.’
‘He doesn’t seem to mind,’ Sadie said.
‘I don’t think he really understands,’ Grace Tree said but did not go any further. She shook her head a little and left it there.
At first nobody was aware of Spit and Sadie’s friendship. It wasn’t difficult to keep it modest enough to be unobtrusive, and it gave them a chance to enjoy themselves. Sadie was a good pupil, and it wasn’t too long before she was swimming more than a few strokes and learning to dive and keep her head under water. Spit also taught her how to fish, how to bait with worm or mussels, and how to cast the line out. She knew where all his crayfish drums were, a secret that Spit normally kept to himself, because someone in town was sure to take a look at them and maybe steal the crayfish if they knew where they were. He couldn’t get her across to Pental Island because that was going too far for Mrs Tree’s comfort. But Mrs Tree no longer walked along the river bank at night waiting anxiously when Sadie went with Spit to the willows, or to inspect his crayfish drums. She had given Sadie an electric torch, but after trying it out one night when it was particularly dark, Sadie said to her mother, ‘It’s not much use, Mum, because when your eyes get used to the dark you can see a lot more than you can see with a torch. And Spit can see everything.’
What became a habit, too, was Spit’s visits to the Trees’ kitchen, although he would never accept their invitation to eat his six o’clock tea there. ‘I have to eat with my grandfather,’ he would say, and they didn’t press him. But he knew, without being told, to keep away when Jack Tree was at home, although he was now curious about Mr Tree. Previously he had taken no more notice of Jack than he had of most of the adults in town who either greeted him, ignored him, or treated him and his grandfather as freaks. Occasionally Jack Tree – deciding to notice him – would say ‘Goodday, Spit,’ in his crisp, upright, disciplined way, and Spit would return the greeting equally at the top of his voice.
So, like everyone else in town, Spit kept his distance from the Tree household when he had to. But the day that he saw Mr Tree by the river looking carefully at the water’s edge, Spit considered himself to be on equal ground. The river was his domain. He watched Mr Tree without greeting him, and when he was finally noticed Mr Tree said, ‘Hello, Spit. It’s still pretty low, isn’t it? It isn’t rising at all.’
‘It hasn’t started yet,’ Spit said.
‘It’s been a long summer,’ Jack Tree said.
To Spit the longer the summer lasted and the longer it took for the river to begin its autumn rise, the better. But for Jack Tree, and his district stock and pasture problems, it was a question of water in the Riverrain where the dairy herds were. Jack would always look back on these long dry summers as harbingers of drought, and if the weather didn’t change soon there could be trouble.
‘You haven’t noticed any rise at all in the last week or so?’ he said to Spit.
Spit always kept a willow sprig on the very edge of the river at right-angles to see if it was rising or falling, and he could report to Mr Tree that the river had fallen another two inches in the last week. ‘It’s still going down,’ he said.
‘They’re keeping the weir wide open too,’ Mr Tree said thoughtfully. ‘So we’re going to be in trouble. How are the fish?’ he asked Spit.
‘All right,’ Spit said. ‘Do you want to buy a cod?’
‘You shouldn’t catch so many,’ the soldier replied. ‘You’re depleting them.’ And he was on his way up the slope to his house when Sadie came running along the river path from upstream calling, ‘Spit, it’s your grandfather. You’ll have to come quick.’ Then she saw her father and stopped where she stood.
Spit said, ‘Goddamn,’ and was off, running like a muscular, fleet-footed hare along the path, with Sadie and Mr Tree following him. They found old Fyfe lying twisted-up on the very edge of the river, his hands clamped tight over his ears, his face distorted as he groaned and swung his head from side to side, and his legs stiff and straight. He was shouting something that was too broken to understand.
‘He’s having a fit,’ Mr Tree said, kneeling over him.
‘No he isn’t,’ Spit shouted. ‘It’s not a fit. Don’t touch him.’
‘We’ll have to get him inside,’ Mr Tree said.
‘That’s no good,’ Spit said. ‘Just leave him alone. Don’t touch him.’ And Spit tried to push Jack Tree out of the way.
‘He’ll fall in the river if you don’t move him,’ Jack insisted as Spit kept pushing him off.
‘No, he won’t. Just leave him alone, and go away. Go away.’ Sadie and Mr Tree stood for a moment, undecided, watching the old man’s suffering. But then Sadie said, ‘Come on, Dad,’ and she pulled at his arm. ‘Spit will do everything.’
‘He needs some help.’
‘No, he doesn’t,’ Sadie said, pulling at her father. ‘You’ve got to leave them.’
Reluctantly, Mr Tree allowed himself to be led away by Sadie as Spit took one of the buckets of water, always waiting at the river bank for kitchen use, and threw it over his grandfather. Fyfe groaned a little and ground his teeth but then he subsided, and as Mr Tree followed the fleeing Sadie up the slope they heard Fyfe shouting, and Spit replying angrily, ‘You’re too near the river, Grandpa. You’ve got to get up.’
‘Poor Mr MacPhee,’ Sadie said miserably as they hurried around the big trees to their fenced-in house to get to the back door instead of the front.
‘He’s a tough old bird,’ Mr Tree said. ‘Although I’ve never seen him like that before.’
‘Why is he like that?’ Sadie asked her father. ‘Is he really mad?’
‘Not all the time,’ her father said. ‘But he’s getting worse, and some day he’s going to go clean off his head. No doubt about it.’
‘What’ll happen to Spit then?’ Sadie asked. ‘What’ll he do?’
‘Betty Arbuckle will probably get him,’ Mr Tree said.
‘But she’d send him away to the Boys Home in Bendigo, wouldn’t she?’
‘Probably.’
‘That’s not fair.’
Mr Tree was surprised to hear so much sudden conviction from his daughter. ‘It doesn’t have to be fair or unfair,’ he told her severely. ‘It’s just the way it is. Spit needs some discipline, and that’s the sort of place where he’d get it.’
Sadie didn’t accept it, even though she knew she must accept it.
‘You keep away from that old man,’ Mr Tree told her. ‘In case he gets dangerous.’
‘Yes, Dad,’ she said, and when they had joined Mrs Tree in the kitchen Sadie said nothing at all about old Fyfe because if anything was to be said about it her father would do the saying.
That night, when Sadie had gone to bed, Jack Tree told his wife what had happened. ‘The old man was lying there like a grizzly bear in agony,’ he told her. ‘His hat was off, but he had on a sort of felt skull cap which looked as if it was glued to his head.’
‘Last week,’ Grace Tree said, ‘Mrs Evans told me he was seen walking around the town in the middle of the night, shouting at all the dogs and opening all the front gates, with Spit walking behind him closing the gates again.’
‘You keep the back door locked,’ Mr Tree told her.
‘But he’s harmless, Jack,’ Mrs Tree said quietly. ‘He could never hurt anybody.’
They were sitting in Mrs Tree’s spotless, linoleum kitchen. While Mrs Tree labelled the glass jars of her preserved apricots, Mr Tree was saving electricity by working on his reports at the other end of the kitchen table – not only a soldierly man but a neat man with a neat moustache, organised papers, and a dry pipe in his mouth which he sucked but didn’t smoke.
‘You’re not to take a chance,’ he ordered his wife. ‘The old boy could easily turn violent.’
Mrs Tree didn’t argue, but she inspected her husband carefully for a moment before saying, ‘We really ought to do something about that boy, Jack.’
‘What do you mean – do something? Do what?’
‘I don’t know,’ Mrs Tree said. ‘But he and old Fyfe can’t go on much longer the way they are. Spit is a nice boy, and someone should help him.’
‘How?’
‘I don’t know how,’ Mrs Tree said unhappily. ‘But there must be some way.’
‘Leave him to Betty Arbuckle. She’ll do something. The best thing for him is probably that home in Bendigo.’
‘That’s not right Jack.’
‘Well, right or wrong, there’s nothing you can do about it, Grace, so leave him alone. He’s a grubby little devil, and he’s like the old man. He can look after himself.’
‘He can’t be grubby if he spends so much time in the river.’
‘Keep him away, that’s all I’m saying. Don’t let him hang around.’
‘He doesn’t hang around.’
‘Then what are we arguing about?’
Grace felt guilty now. She wanted to tell her husband more about Spit, but Jack had made his position too firm and clear to do it now. Nonetheless, when he went off again on one of his inspection tours she allowed Sadie to go on swimming and fishing with Spit. The trouble was that other people had seen the children together, the Evanses, Mrs Andrews up the slope, the station master’s wife, and Mr Moon the butcher. Sooner or later it would all leak out.
It was Sadie who told her more than anyone else could possibly know about Spit and his grandfather, because Sadie had been watching and listening and thinking about them, and she had reported everything she had seen and done to her mother. Sadie had not only seen inside the boiler, but she could now sit quietly in Mr MacPhee’s workroom with Spit and watch them together. It had been quite simple. She had said to Spit after they had been swimming one day, ‘Can I see inside your boiler house?’
Spit’s first reluctant reply was, ‘I dunno …’ But Sadie simply waited as if she knew he would change his mind, and he did so. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘But no telling anybody.’
‘No. I won’t tell anybody.’
Spit took her through the front door of the house, through the workroom where old Fyfe was working on a clock, and into the extension which finally opened into the boiler itself.
What she saw amazed her, because there was nothing else like it in the town of St Helen. The inside walls of the boiler were painted yellow, and though rust from the rivets had streaked the sides, the whole interior had its own painted designs – not the wavy line of the outside walls but a black fish, a lily-like flower with a green stem, something that looked like a firework bursting, and a red tomato. She had never seen anything like it. Spit’s narrow, wooden bunk with an old quilt on it was at one end under a cut-out window, and at the other end she could see a table painted bright red, and on it a bundle of old books, mussel shells, lines, and the bits and pieces of clocks and watches. She could not take it all in at a glance, but afterwards she remembered a flower pot with a fern in it, an old acetylene bike lamp, and a painted kerosene tin which had been cut into curls and twists around the top. It was full of old wire and pieces of wood and horseshoes and dried crayfish claws.
‘It’s fantastic,’ Sadie said. ‘It’s great, Spit. It’s absolutely great.’
‘Don’t say anything about it,’ he said. ‘That’s all.’
‘No, I won’t. I swear.’
It seemed quite simple thereafter for Sadie to sit in the extension, which was where Spit had his own bench and where she could watch him shape the little pine messenger boats, make sinkers for his fishing lines out of lead slugs, and (another of his secrets) fit spokes into a rusty bicycle wheel which he would eventually add to the rest of a half-built old bike which still needed a front wheel, handlebars, two pedals and a seat.
‘But where did you get it from?’ she asked him.
‘I got this and that from the back of Sykes’ bike shop, and some at the blacksmith’s, and here and there and everywhere.’
Spit almost forgot her sometimes as she sat on a small three-legged stool; and when his grandfather shouted at him, ‘Ye maun put the potatoes on, or ye won’t be eating supper,’ she moved with him into the small kitchen at the end of old Fyfe’s workroom where she helped him peel the potatoes. Spit was a quick impatient peeler of potatoes, and he filled a cooking pot from a bucket of river water on the floor. He put it on the wood stove, which he poked fiercely, and then shouted at his grandfather, ‘You didn’t put any wood on the fire.’
‘Well put it on now.’
‘That’s what I am doing.’
Sadie listened to them and whispered to Spit, ‘Why are you always so angry with each other?’
Spit didn’t lower his voice but said indignantly, ‘We’re not angry with each other.’
‘But that’s how it sounds, Spit. Everybody thinks …’
‘They don’t know anything about it,’ Spit said, and he was putting two mutton chops in a wire folder to grill them when he said, ‘Do you want a chop?’
‘No, thanks. I’ll have to go home in a minute for tea.’
She left reluctantly, but thereafter she would come and go to the little house without any difficulty. Old Fyfe had looked quizzically at her once and said with a sort of grim laugh, ‘How are ye dressed, Jean Armour, aye sae clean and neat.’
Sadie, in her own advice to herself, had always been frightened of old Fyfe, but in the little house with Spit she lost all her fear of him, and though she didn’t understand what he said to her most of the time, she always smiled at him and one day said to him, ‘Can I watch you mend the clocks?’
The old man’s face, grey as it was and grizzled as it was, and so often pained, ground itself into a smile. He stared at her for a moment. ‘Stand there,’ he said.
‘Give her the glass,’ Spit said to his grandfather.
‘You be quiet, ye cairn …’
‘I was only trying to help,’ Spit shouted back.
Sadie listened and watched, unafraid, and the old man pointed to the clock he was working on and said, ‘Ye don’t need the glass. It’s the clock of Mrs Andrews, and if ye look at the coggies there ye’ll see all her powder, pink and dirty, and look at her grey hairs that she brushes into the clock. All in a bedroom, the clock stays, and it maun tick with its face down.’ He showed Sadie the scratched glass of the clock. ‘And all that grease on her face. She’s winding it up wi’ her fingers thick with that awfu’ gruel.’ Mrs Andrews’ face-creamed finger marks were stained into the clock where she held it to wind it.
‘I never thought …’ Sadie began in amazement.
But old Fyfe had lost interest in his demonstration, and Sadie stood still to watch his quivering hands working with the diminutive screwdrivers, holding them miraculously still long enough to undo the minute screws. The old man crouched over his bench, a tiny figure. It was neat and clean, and she could smell the fine oil he used on the clocks he was repairing. Sometimes it seemed to be a quiet, rumbling fury, and other times it was more like a Scottish bee buzzing. Noise, in fact, seemed to be his only relief, as if it were a desperate diversion from whatever was going on in his head.
Like that, Sadie learned to sit and watch not only old Fyfe’s clock and watch repairing, but the way he re-set planes and razors on his oilstone and with the tiny grinder, using a strop to finish them with.
While she watched old Fyfe, Spit would sometimes behave like a housewife, sweeping the floor or cleaning the stove; or he would leave her when he watered the garden or chopped the wood for the stove, and she began to love the place. But she was surprised one day when, helping Spit with the spokes of the old bicycle wheel, she heard her mother calling her.
‘Oh, my gosh,’ she said, handing Spit the pliers with which she was holding the spokes in place for him. ‘What time is it?’
‘I dunno,’ Spit said, ‘but – maybe your father’s come home.’
‘Goodbye, Spit,’ Sadie said as she rushed out. ‘Goodbye, Mr MacPhee,’ she shouted. And, calling over her shoulder, she said, ‘Be back tomorrow.’
But in fact she would not be back on the morrow, because that night old Fyfe burned down the house, and Spit’s days of security and safety were finally over.