The Minnow and I are down at the inlet. Jonah walked us there when he got home from school. He carried the Fish-Master. He’s returning at dusk to walk me and the Minnow and the FishMaster back home.

I’m not really enjoying it. There is no Bill, there has been no sign of Sarah, the Minnow can’t seem to get comfortable and, to put the pie in the freezer (another Nana saying), a cold breeze has picked up from behind Ponters Corner and I’m starting to shiver. I should walk home, but I don’t want to leave the FishMaster.

‘Look at who the cat dragged in.’

‘Hi, Bill, I was just thinking that if you were here you could walk me home.’

‘You’re a lazy pike,’ he says.

‘I’m getting cold.’

‘Come on then,’ he says, helping me to my feet. ‘Where’s your line?’

‘I didn’t cast,’ I say, feeling a bit silly. ‘It’s not the same,’ I say, stopping before finishing the sentence. But Bill knows how the sentence ends.

He leans down and grabs the FishMaster. ‘How’s the Minnow?’ he asks.

‘Uncomfortable,’ I answer.

It is Saturday afternoon and I’m in town. Jonah finishes work at two today, so I’m pottering around till then. The pet shop shuts anytime between midday and one-thirty (depending on business) so the Minnow and I go there first.

‘You look well,’ I say to Oscar.

‘I’ve felt better, truth be known,’ he says back. ‘How’s the Minnow?’

‘Good, thanks. Can I ask you something?’

‘Sure.’

‘You know how the police have been asking around about stuff.’

‘I told you they’d been here.’

‘Should I go see Sergeant Griffin?’

I’ve known Sergeant Griffin all my life. He’s been the town cop for as long as anyone can remember. He, Dad, Paul, Jacko and Bill go way back. The five of them used to fish together, in the early days, before Dad met Mum.

Before the flood, Sergeant Griffin was everyone’s friend But the flood changed everything. Papa says it changed everyone, just some more than others.

But Sergeant Griffin looked on The Crossing as his responsibility, so he took it personally. Small communities can be like that.

Before the flood, things were predictable. Every Friday night, Sergeant Griffin would lock up the drunk’n’disorderlies. Bill says they weren’t bad blokes if it weren’t for the drink (although I’d have thought that was the point). Anyway, they would be given a bed in the cop shop, they would sleep it off and then, in the morning, the wives would come and take them home. Sergeant Griffin had been doing it for years. Some of the women thought he was better than a marriage counsellor.

The rain started to bucket down late Thursday, and by Friday evening the creeks had begun to rise. At ten o’clock, Sergeant Griffin did his rounds, collected a couple of drunks from the Pearl and Swine, tucked them in for the night and went home. But the rain turned angry around midnight. The storm became fierce. The power went out at one, and Sergeant Griffin was caught between staying at home with his wife and four-week-old baby daughter, or battling the weather and driving to the station. I don’t know if he debated it much. From what I know of Sergeant Griffin, he has always been a cop first.

When the rain hadn’t eased by two, he headed out. But he didn’t get far. He had only driven a few kilometres when the flood waters threatened to sweep his truck into the creek. He had to turn back.

He made it home. The two men in the lockup drowned.

The flood peaked at around midday, Sunday. Mother’s Day. When the water subsided, there were bodies and trees and mud and dead cows and upside-down cars and rubbish. It smelled pretty bad. Sergeant Griffin borrowed a tinny with an outboard and was rounding up people by first light, Monday morning. He rescued me from the roof of the fire station. I don’t know how I got there. I don’t know how long I’d been there. By the time he found me, I was cold and hungry and probably in shock.

Once I was safely in the tinny, Sergeant Griffin handed me a jar of peanut butter and a spoon. ‘Here kid,’ he said. ‘Get that into ya.’ I’ve never liked peanut butter, but Nana says hunger is the best ingredient in any dish. That’s not really a saying; it’s just an observation.

Sergeant Griffin spent all day Monday ferrying people to the Mavis Ornstein Home for the Elderly, which was high and dry on the hill above town. It became a sort of emergency centre, and some of the residents had to be sedated because they couldn’t cope with the intrusion. I was lucky. Nana showered me, dressed me in her flannel pyjamas, wrapped me in her arms and rocked me to sleep. For the next two weeks I ate, slept, cried and waited for Mum and Dad and Sarah to collect me and take me home.

Sergeant Griffin arrived one morning and told Nana that the house had been washed away. There was an emergency fund, he said, that would help with expenses. And the public pool was full of fish.

‘You want to come along, Tom?’ he asked. ‘Help us get them out?’

Nana looked at me and nodded.

‘Yes, thanks Sergeant Griffin, but I don’t have any clothes.’

‘It’s fancy dress,’ said Sergeant Griffin.

Nana said I could wear anything I wanted. She suggested her blue checked dress and Betsy Groot said I could borrow her fish brooch. But I’d never worn a dress in my life. So, instead, I wore Mr Greerman’s grey-and-green striped pyjamas. Mr Greerman only ever wears pyjamas and he has an extensive collection. In fact, he has so many pairs of pyjamas that he houses them in a capacious wardrobe.

Okay, I made up the bit about the wardrobe. I just wanted to use the word ‘capacious’. It’s one of the alternatives for ‘extensive’ and Mr Wo (James) has been encouraging me to expand my repertoire. ‘Repertoire’ is listed in Nana’s thesaurus under ‘repertory’. My thesaurus leaps straight from ‘repercussion’ to ‘repetition’.

Mrs Blanket is so devastated when Oscar dies, she closes the shop. Just for the day, not forever. The Minnow and I are standing outside, peering through the front window. But we can’t see anything because of all the clutter in the middle isle. Under the ‘closed’ sign on the door, Mrs Blanket has written ‘death in the family’.

‘The Minnow knew he was dying,’ I tell Jonah that night over dinner.

‘Tom, you gotta be careful who you say that kind of stuff to,’ says Jonah.

‘What do you mean?’

Jonah is often like this. Mr Concerned. I tease him sometimes. ‘So, Mr Concerned,’ I say, ‘what do you think about the situation in Afghanistan?’ Jonah will usually start to smile. ‘Really?’ I say, pretending he has answered. Then I continue, ‘So, Mr Concerned, do you have an opinion on the money crisis?’ I keep on going until I’ve made him laugh.

‘I’m serious,’ says Jonah. ‘You’re not in the best situation.’

‘Not in the best situation? Wow, Jonah, that’s awesome.’

‘I’m sorry, Tom,’ Jonah says, because now I’m crying and we haven’t finished dinner. ‘I worry about you. What are you going to do when the Minnow arrives? Where are you going to live? What are you going to use for money?’

I can’t listen anymore and I get up from the table and go to my room. Jonah’s room. And I’m upset because he’s right. I don’t even have my own room.

‘Tom,’ Jonah says. He’s standing outside my door—his door. ‘Tom, can I come in?’

The weather’s quite warm, which is lucky because none of my clothes fit. Jonah says I look beautiful. No one around here has ever shown off their belly before, and everyone has been quite lovely, touching it and putting their ear over my bellybutton to listen to my little Minnow swimming around.

The police station is really a house. It is cream and white, with a half-porch out the front. You don’t have to knock— even though there’s a big brass knocker on the front door.

Mum used to say that if we were a bad town, there’d be more than one cop. She used to say Sergeant Griffin was proof enough. Nana always says ‘the proof of the pudding is in the eating’, but I’m not sure how that relates to Sergeant Griffin.

He looks up as I enter and smiles. ‘Well, speak of the devil.’

‘Hi, Sergeant Griffin,’ I reply.

‘We were just talking about you,’ he says and he’s nodding across to the couch. I turn and follow his eyes and there are two people, a man and a woman. I don’t know them, which means I have no idea why they would be talking about me.

‘These people are from West Wrestler,’ he continues, ‘and they want to ask you a few questions about Bill.’

‘I haven’t seen Bill in ages,’ I say. My voice sounds shaky.

‘There’s something wrong,’ whispers the Minnow.

‘I know,’ I say back.

‘What’s that?’ asks the woman. But I don’t answer. Something strange is happening. I think I should probably sit down.

‘She doesn’t look too good,’ the woman says to the man.

‘Something’s wrong!’ shouts the Minnow, and I know everyone can hear her because all three are staring at me.

‘Quick,’ says the woman, ‘call an ambulance, her waters have broken.’

The Crossing is too small to have a hospital. Well, that’s not exactly true; it has a hospital building, just no one in it. After the flood, only about half our population was left and we didn’t qualify for funding. There’s a sort of hospital at the Mavis Ornstein Home for the Elderly, but it can’t do procedures. Nana had to have a procedure and they had to take her to the Mater Women’s Hospital in West Wrestler. It’s a really big town with two hospitals, one just for women. That’s where they’re taking me. The Minnow and I are in the police car. The police woman is driving. Fast. It’s three hundred and twenty kilometres to West Wrestler and we’re going to make it in less than ninety minutes. It would’ve taken too long to wait for an ambulance.

Jonah’s grandfather, Jonathan Whiting, is Nana’s best friend. He’s younger than Nana and she calls him her spring chicken. She flaunts the friendship in front of Papa

Jonathan is a keen gardener and that’s how their friendship started. He used to help Nana with the awkward stuff. She was very independent and got angry with him if he tried to do too much. She was famous for not speaking to him for two whole months after she came home from work to find he’d trimmed the hedge. It looked beautiful. All neat and square at the edges, with a gentle inward curve at the front gate. But the hedge had been Papa’s job. Nana didn’t really like the way it was going to the dogs, but that wasn’t the point. The more unruly the hedge, the more everyone noticed that Jude Seth Wolkoff was dead. The hedge had been testament to her loss.

‘He was just being helpful.’

‘He didn’t know.’

‘You can’t blame him.’

‘For god’s sake, Valerie, forgive the poor man.’

It didn’t matter what her friends said. She was too upset. She closed all the curtains at the front of the house so she wouldn’t accidentally see the hedge in all its neatness. The neighbours didn’t dare say anything because they rather liked Jonathan’s handiwork. Most of them hadn’t appreciated the hedge’s deterioration. In fact, Nana told me that she’d overheard the next-door neighbours saying as much to a real-estate agent. They wanted to sell and move closer to their daughter, and they thought the state of Nana’s hedge might threaten their sale. Apparently the agent had agreed, saying that the hedge had the potential to lower the tenor of the neighbourhood.

‘What’s a ‘tenor’? I’d asked Nana.

‘Don’t interrupt,’ she’d replied, ‘I’m on a roll.’

Just like me, Jonah has only one living relative.

‘Thanks for the vote of confidence,’ says the Minnow.

‘Can I get you anything?’ the nurse asks me.

‘I need my thesaurus and my dictionary,’ I answer. ‘Jonah can bring them,’ I add. Luckily, my waters didn’t actually break. I have a weak membrane or something. Anyway, I’ve stopped leaking and I’m hooked up to a drip which is putting the water back in.

The Minnow has settled down for a nap.

‘Dr Patek will be in to see you at about six,’ says the nurse, as she leaves my room.

‘She’s a bit weird,’ I say to Papa, who has been with me since this morning.

I have a phone next to my bed. It rings. ‘That’ll be Nana,’ says Papa.

‘Hello, Tom speaking.’

‘Hello, darling,’ says Nana. I wink across to Papa to let him know he is right. ‘That lovely nurse put me straight through, said you have your own phone and everything.’

‘And my own bathroom.’

‘Oh, my,’ she says to me. ‘She has her own bathroom,’ I hear her relay to someone. I hear Jonathan’s gentle laugh.

‘Hi, Jonathan,’ I say via Nana.

Papa’s face squelches.

‘Hi, Holly.’

Nana has put her hand over the phone and she’s saying something to Jonathan. She finishes whatever she’s saying— probably admonishing Jonathan for calling me Holly—and clears her throat. There is a long silent pause. Nana and I never speak on the phone. Bill’s boatshed didn’t have a phone, and Jonah’s house used to have one but it hasn’t been reconnected.

‘How’s the Minnow?’ Nana sounds relieved that she has thought of a question.

‘She’s sleeping,’ I answer. ‘They’re putting in more water, so she’ll be swimming around in no time,’ I add. If Nana says something back we’ll be having a conversation.

‘The nurse who answered the phone. What’s her name?’

‘I’m not sure, Nana,’ I say, ‘but I can find out.’

Nana likes to know names. She’d like to get off the phone and show off to Jonathan and Mavis and Betsy Groot and say nurse Tamsin says this and nurse Tamsin says that. I don’t know if the nurse’s name is Tamsin, I’m just making that up.

‘Well…’ Nana says.

‘Thanks for calling, Nana,’ I say.

‘Okay, dear.’

‘Nana, can you ask Jonathan to ask Jonah to bring my thesaurus and dictionary?’

‘All right dear, but remember you’re a long way from The Crossing. I’m not sure how Jonah will get there.’

‘But I need my thesaurus and dictionary,’ I say, borrowing the Minnow’s whiny voice.

‘Okay, dear. I’ll see what I can do.’

There is an enormous fish tank at the entrance to the maternity ward. If you take the lift, it’s the first thing you see as the doors open. ‘Thanks to all the staff, with gratitude and love, the Spencer family’ says a small brass plaque. It has a sad tone to it. Like someone’s missing.

The tank is home to numerous fish, about a hundred tiny snails with red and brown striped shells, some pretty awful plastic weed and one lone turtle. None of the fish are talking, which makes me think of something Oscar said. ‘The tank’s full of mixens,’ says the little turtle.

‘Mixens?’ I say, hoping he will explain.

‘Dunghill,’ he answers. For a turtle, he is being extremely unhelpful.

‘Shit,’ he adds. I don’t know if he is explaining or swearing. I wait to see if he’s going to elaborate and, when he doesn’t, I decide that he is what Papa would call a smart-arse.

Papa says the best thing about smart-arses is they usually give themselves away pretty early.

‘Uh huh,’ I say, ‘…well, we were just passing.’

‘Yeah, whatever,’ he says.

I almost don’t want to leave; he is such a complete tosser.