PENGUIN BOOKS

TOMMO & HAWK

Bryce Courtenay is the bestselling author of The Power of One, Tandia, April Fool’s Day, The Potato Factory, Tommo & Hawk, Jessica, Solomon’s Song, A Recipe for Dreaming, The Family Frying Pan, The Night Country, Smoky Joe’s Café, Four Fires, Matthew Flinders’ Cat, Brother Fish, Whitethorn, Sylvia and The Persimmon Tree.

The Power of One is also available in an edition for younger readers, and Jessica has been made into an award-winning television miniseries.

Bryce Courtenay lives in the Hunter Valley, New South Wales.

Further information about the
author can be found at
brycecourtenay.com

Bryce
Courtenay

TOMMO & HAWK

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First published by Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 1997

This edition published by Penguin Group (Australia), 2006

Copyright © Bryce Courtenay 1997

The moral right of the author has been asserted

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

penguin.com.au

ISBN: 978-0-14-194221-6

For Alex and Brenda Hamill

CONTENTS

BOOK ONE

BOOK TWO

BOOK THREE

BOOK FOUR

BOOK ONE

Chapter One
TOMMO

It ain’t long now before Hawk comes to fetch me, to scrape his brother off the floor of Brodie’s sly grog shop.

Funny that, when you’re mostly scared in life you feel things brave folk don’t bother to feel. I know he’s coming. I can hear his big footsteps coming down the hill two mile away. When you’ve been listening to fear as long as me, you can’t never be fooled. Fear is always the little brat in you, ears pricked, heart thumpin’, listening to what can’t be heard, knowing what’s gunna happen by the way your arsehole is puckering like a rabbit’s nose. No matter what you learns in life, the fear in you never grows up.

That first fear, when you was seven and stolen from your family and took into the wilderness, that first big begetting of fear in your life becomes a part of every fear you has ever afterwards.

Fear builds up, like rust in a metal water pipe. Its beginning, its first trickle, is always about being alone. Not loneliness, but being alone and helpless, with no one what cares, no one what gives a fig, what will flick an eyelid if you lives or dies. You’re a small creature alone what has no defences of its own and so is the natural prey to a world full o’ hungry mongrels.

It don’t matter if you grows to be big and strong, and cunning as a shithouse rat. It don’t matter if you can defend yourself with fisticuffs or use an axe or knife like nobody’s business. Fear don’t take notice of them things, it just don’t grow up and start being brave. It stays with you, so you can’t put faith in nothin’ and nobody. If you can’t trust, then it stands to reason you can’t love, ’cause if you does, you’ll become some mongrel’s prey.

There is always someone watching you in the tall timbers. You learn to feel him like an itch under your skin. Like a chill breath on the back of your neck. You knows in your thumping heart it’s a wild man comin’ for you, a mongrel with harm in his heart. You can’t see nothing, but he’s lurking, creeping, minding his feet so his steps don’t warn you. He’s moving closer, one foot raised like a kangaroo dog, but you don’t know where or which way to run. The wind roars in the treetops like waves crashing against the shore, killing the small sounds, the snap of myrtle thicket, the sudden flutter of a bird, all the things you depends on to catch him out.

You pull the air through your nose, sniff deep, testing for the sour smell of a grown man, but the early morning sun’s sucked the perfume from the eucalypt, the sassafras and King Billy pine, filling the frosty air so you can’t smell nothing behind the sweetness at the end of your nostrils.

You begin to tremble. You know what’s coming. If he gets you he’ll bugger you. Put his thumb and finger to his nose and snort his snot onto your back as he swives his cock into your arse. Then he’ll hold you pinned, and whistle over to his mates to come. If you struggle, he’ll pull back your head, twist and snap your scrawny neck like you was a new-born pup. Other mongrels comes over, charging through the undergrowth, brushing aside the fern, boots cracking twigs, urgently pulling down their breeches, tripping as their pants fall to their ankles, laughing. You stretched over a felled Huon log what has its bark ripped off, its lemon-yellow naked, just like you, your face kissing the damp, dark, musty earth.

‘Eh you, dog shit!’

‘Yes, boss?’ Your teeth chattering.

‘Ya ain’t seen nothin’ now, ya hear?’

‘No, nothin’, boss! I ain’t seen nothin’, no one!’

‘Wha’ are you then?’

‘Dog shit, boss.’

‘Louder! Say’t loud, boy!’

‘DOG SHIT!’

‘Tha’s better. You’ll say naught t’no bugger, yer understand? Tell and we’ll come agin, kill ya, cut yer froat ear t’ear!’

‘Yes, boss.’

Then the crash of myrtle twigs as they melt into the trees, ghosts in the morning mist. You alone again in the forest. The bellbirds begin to call again, the sound of an axe striking deeper into the bush. You snivels a while, and try to wipe away the blood from your arse with a bunch of green leaves, then you scrapes the muck from your back and what’s running down your legs with a strip of bark, ashamed. Nobody you can tell what cares. You shit bright red for a month after.

That’s the all of it. It never changes, one fear begets another, but it’s always the same fear. The same small brat in you facing the same mongrels. Once fear gets a hold of you, you can’t trust no one no more, not even yourself, ’cause you know they be right – all you be is dog shit, and all they wants to do is bugger you so you never forgets what you is.

I got to drink down fast, get a few into me. Brother Hawk don’t countenance me staying on no matter how much I plead at him to let me be. I’m not afraid of Hawk, just of Hawk coming. I’m afraid of Mary. Of Sunday dinner. Of meself.

‘Mr Brodie, sir! Another snort o’ acquadine!’ I hold up me last shilling, won yesterday at euchre. Got to find a game today, but it ain’t so easy on the Sabbath. ‘Ere!’ I twist the silver coin to catch the lamplight. ‘I got the money, now quick, Mr Brodie, if you please!’

Brodie shuffles over, sniffing, stepping over bodies, spilling some of me precious tot. He grins toothless and puts the little glass down. ‘There ya go, Tommo.’ He grabs up me shilling in dirty woollen mittens what’s got no fingers. Then he holds up sixpence change he has ready in his other hand. ‘Shall I fetch t’other half then?’ He twinkles the sixpence.

‘Why not? I got to go soon. Bring it right off, will ya?’ I nods.

Brodie smiles, a smarmy smile on his ugly gob, like he don’t believe me and he makes a fuss of fumbling at the front of his waistcoat, pushing the sixpence back into a greasy pocket, his dirty fingers dancing like spider’s legs over his pot belly.

The acquadine don’t hit as hard as it should. Barely tickles me throat. Bastard’s watered it down, doused the fire in it to make it last longer, though it’s better than the Cape of Good Hope brandy he serves to most of his Sunday drunks. More like Cape of No Bloody Hope, all the good hope in it watered down to make a gallon of misery out of half a pint of trooper’s joy.

Don’t suppose I blames him, human nature being what it is. Fair enough, I reckon, the pubs are closed Sunday, so we’re in his hands, ain’t we? He’s got us drunks all to himself. Brodie milking a few more pennies from the slops of Saturday night’s barrel and charging us double for the privilege. Daresay I’d do the same. Can’t feel too sorry for a Sunday drunk, can ya?

The sun should be well up by now, if it ain’t raining outside. That be Hobart Town all right, sunshine, then rain, snow, hot, cold, calm and blow, all in the course of the same morning. Not that I mind, used to it, the wilderness be mostly rain and wind and bone-snapping cold. It could be nearly noon, though who’d know here in the oil lantern darkness. The shadows be the same now as if it be always midnight in the world.

I comes in early, not much past dawn, with the mist still hanging on the river. Birds just beginning t’ chitter, currawong, kookaburra, green rosella calling and silver gulls wheeling. They be the early risers and the noisy buggers. Then come the little uns, scrub tit, scarlet robin, yellow wattlebird and blue wren, kipping in a bit, then starting to talk with the sun. Tide coming in, slapping, spiffing and spuming on Salamanca beach. I couldn’t sleep no more, even though I were sozzled last night and should’ve been well able. But me restlessness is getting worse. Time to move on. Hawk knows I ain’t gunna stay in Hobart Town now he’s back from England. But he still talks of us joining Mary, of being a proper family again and doing brewery work up at Strickland Falls. ‘It would be our fortune made, Tommo!’ he reckons.

Ha bloody ha! A fortune in me hands would be poured down me throat, or lost at the dogs and horses. Can’t make a copper penny stay long enough in me pocket to even gather warmth.

Hawk’ll be here soon. Silent, bending double to get through the door, a great dark shadow hunched over, his head bumping against the rafters. Him so black the lamplight don’t show nothing but the whites of his eyes, the silver sheen of the scar on his neck, and the shine on his nails where he holds his fingers to his nose. A nigger for me brother though I be as white as one o’ Mary’s best Sunday tablecloths. Hawk be twice my size too though we be born of the same mama. Different from the start, Mary reckons, from the day she set eyes on us, two mewlin’ orphans in a basket. Even more different now. Hawk wouldn’t be caught dead down here if it weren’t for yours truly, even the stink’s too bad for his well-raised nose.

But I don’t smell nothin’ no more. Don’t take no notice. Not even of the farts from the drunks lying at me feet or curled up in the dark corners, snorting bubbles in their spew or seeing things terrifying what ain’t there.

Reckon that’ll happen to me soon enough. A few more years on the grog, then some mongrel like Brodie’ll add too much acid to give a kick to his watered down spirits and that’ll be the end of dear little Tommo. Over I topples, a nicely pickled feed o’ flesh for the waiting worms. Or it’ll be the horrors. I seen it happen to some younger than me, holding their ears and closing their eyes and screaming for the snakes to be took away. You’d think I’d be shitting meself. But I ain’t. Truth be, I’m more scared of Hawk coming to fetch me to Mary’s Sunday roast! More feared about sitting at her clean white tablecloth and chewing through a plate o’ mutton with Mary’s green eyes watching on me, so’s I want to jump up and make for the door and keep running until I don’t feel the disappointment in her eyes no more.

There be so much I’ve forgot in the seven years since I were snatched from Mary’s tender care. Seven years I’ve been in the wilderness, but I never forgot Mary’s white cloth spread on the kitchen table for Sunday dinner. She’d spread it like forgiveness, like whatever we done wrong in the past week was forgiven when we sat ’round her Sabbath table. Mary’s white tablecloth religion was most accommodating of our weekly wickedness. You’d sit down a sinner and rise up with a full belly and a clear conscience, not a holy word spoken neither.

When I were left to mind Sam Slit’s whisky still beside the river, cold, wet, starving, drunk and alone in a timber getter’s bark hut, I’d recall into my mind Mary’s kitchen of a winter’s Sunday. The same wind churning the river and howling in the Huon pine. I was that wind, battering at Mary’s kitchen door, rattling on the glazed windows of her cottage. And then, when it couldn’t find no way to come into the warmth, howling its protest high up in the eaves. ‘Wind off the Antarctic sea, the banshees howling be the widow ghosts o’ dead sailors,’ Ikey, picking his teeth with his pinkie nail, would say when it got particular furious outside.

Inside Mary’s warm kitchen there were no need to heed the rain beating on the steamed-up window glass like a boy’s tin drum. We was seated there at her Sunday table, snug as a bug in a rug. Mary at the head o’ the table, Hawk and me at either side, and at the end, tucking in like there was no tomorrow, Ikey Solomon, what handed us over to Mary’s care when we was born. It were Ikey what give us his name too though he weren’t our papa nor Mary’s husband neither. Ikey died before I found me way back, but he comes to me mind often. When we knew him, he was just Ikey. But before he got nabbed, he were the most high regarded villain in all of London Town. The Prince of Fences they called him, with a finger in every pie. I’ve heard say that he and Mary were in the brothel business together. But Mary be a ticket-of-leave now, and owner of The Potato Factory brewery, and she don’t like much to dwell on the past.

So there we’d sit, a small, strange family. In front of us, on a big white oval plate with a picture of blue willow trees and two Chinamen on a little bridge, were a huge leg of hot roasted mutton. The very best butcher’s hogget, with Mary standing over it, big fork in one hand, knife in t’other, carving onto each tin plate, then pouring on a rich, steaming river of gravy. Little pearl onions glistening and swimming in the bright brown gravy what covered the thick slices o’ tender meat. Mary always putting the same on my plate as Hawk, her full knowing I could never eat all of it, that Hawk would polish off what I left, then eat Ikey’s left-overs and then what meat was still on the bone. It were her way of feeding Hawk while not showing me up to be a runt.

And that’s where I always supposed God would be on a howling winter’s Sunday. He’d be seated at our kitchen table sharing our leg of mutton, with Mary’s best sharp knife and fork in His almighty hands, His holy elbows on the snowy white tablecloth of forgiveness, fork stabbing at great chunks of meat, champing away like nobody’s business. He, Him, the nabob of heaven, there with us ’stead of presiding over all the God business going on down at St David’s church, where the true merinos, free settlers and lags what should’ve known better be praying and hymn-singing and freezing their bollocks and titties off. Them in church thinking they be earning extra points in heaven for going out in all the flurry and howl of a winter’s blustering morning, and meanwhile God be sitting at our kitchen table all cosy-like, getting a good feed of Mary’s best mutton and enjoying Hisself.

‘Touch more gravy, God?’

‘Don’t mind if I do, Tommo, m’dear.’

God polite as you like while I pours Him more gravy, little onions tumbling out of the jug. God ever so grateful to be out of the devil’s breath weather what comes roaring and snorting down the mountain.

I’d lie there in the forest hut wrapped in me wet blanket, coughing and shivering, dreaming of Mary’s Sunday kitchen. ‘I’ll come back, Mama,’ I’d cry, teeth chattering fit to break. ‘You just watch and see, little Tommo’ll be back sure enough soon as I can find me way to Port Davey and stow away aboard a timber ketch.’

But now since I come back, me appetite’s quite gone. Nothin’ tastes good no more. Sundays were always me best days in them old days. Now they’s bloody purgatory with me afraid to look into Mary’s sad face. Me here drinking Brodie’s sly grog, scared shitless because Hawk’s gunna make me sit down to Sunday dinner with our own mama. How can I face Mary when I’ve forgot how to deal with kindness in me life? Hawk with his hands moving thirteen to the dozen, trying to make cheerful conversation, and me with me eyes on me plate, not wanting none of it ’cept to get up and run for me life.

Though Hawk can’t talk no more with his voice, I can still hear him in my head. When he speaks with his hands I can hear him clear as a bell. All them years away and I never lost the sound of him. I promised meself when I were miserable that I were going back to my mama’s Sunday dinner and to my brother’s deep, sweet voice. Now it’s gone. His voice what was always a comfort to me when I was away, always steady, unafraid, Hawk’s beautiful blackie boomer voice is gone, rubbed away by the wild man’s horse rope. Even then, in the wilderness, I had most strange feelings like something were trying to choke out Hawk’s voice, but I tried to put it out of me head, for remembering was all I could hang onto.

Mary’s told me what happened to Hawk when we was both kidnapped on the mountain and later became separated. A wild man took Hawk and starved him and led him behind his horse by a hide rope around his neck until his voice was rasped away. All he’s got now is his necklace of scars. I’ve asked Hawk about this time, but he says with his hand language he can’t remember anything except that we was took on the mountain by four men and afterwards nothing. I can’t remember the early part either. I can remember how it were with Sam Slit, but I don’t want to talk about it. Maybe one day we will.

I suppose I should count meself the luckiest cove in the world that I were spared the terrible thing done to make Hawk lose his voice. But I don’t think meself lucky. Poor dumb Hawk, he’s the lucky one. He didn’t stay away long enough from Mary to learn to be afraid. Fear never took him and introduced him to the mongrels. He can still feel things. I’ve seen the tears brimming when he tries to ask what happened to me in the wilderness, his confusion when I shakes my head because I can’t say for the bitterness inside of me.

I can see my brother’s concern for me. But I don’t feel it. Can’t feel the love I know Hawk has for me. I could do before I was took. I could feel everything he were feeling, like we were two fingers on the same hand. Shit, now I don’t feel nothing no more. Not for Hawk, not for Mary, not for meself. That’s what the wilderness done to yours truly. It took all the feeling out of old Tommo and left only the fear of the mongrels what’s always lurking in the tall timbers waiting to get you.

I calls for another shot. Brodie brings it, but before I can pretend to search for a sixpence I know I ain’t got, a drunk on the floor begins to shout and jerk, taking a fit. Brodie curses and forgets to ask for me money. He goes over and kicks the poor sod in the head. Brodie knows his stuff – when a man’s took to fitting, a kick in the head sometimes’ll bring him to calm again. I suppose it be the shock. I can feel Hawk is close. Better drink up quick, Tommo.

Hawk says we got a purpose, him and me. Me, quick and nimble with a mouth full o’ cheek. Him, strong and thoughtful and silent. It’s a right rare combination what could work together, he says. Mary says we are her team to build up the brewery she started soon as she was freed. It’s up to us now to gain folks’ respect, be someone what our kind has never been before, what them merinos think the likes of us can never be.

‘It’s the world’s best opportunity for the taking,’ Hawk says. ‘We’d soon be proper toffs, and your children, Tommo, they’d be true merinos!’

But old Tommo here knows that’s crap. There’s no purpose, no opportunity for the likes of me. You can’t make nothing good out of nothing.

Take a look at me, will ya? Mary’s little lamb is become a drunk, a useless scum what wakes up and needs a drink. Somebody what can’t think of nothing but a bottle to leach the anger and the hate out of his rotting guts. What’s I gunna do? Wear a clean collar and learn clerking? Sit in a high chair with a green eyeshade, sharpened quill and blacking, working at profit and loss? Mary’s precious little bookkeeper, Tommo X Solomon, beer baron in the making? Load o’ rubbish, if you ask me!

I ain’t clever but me hands, now, they’s a different story. Dog-baiting and fist-fighting and timber-getting and burns from Sam Slit’s whisky still, that’s what’s made ’em look bad. Every finger and knuckle looks broke or dog-bitten, and what’s skin for other folk is scars for me, scar-tissue what can take most kinds of pain. They don’t look much chop but they be good hands, even if I do say so meself.

That’s the difference, see, they ain’t like Mary’s hands what are black and twisted and broken and I think most painful of movement. That’s me one big secret, hands what looks battered but are sly as a fox.

Other broadsmen see me holding cards at cribbage or the Yankee game of poker what’s catching on among the troopers and gold miners, and they thinks: ‘Here’s a go, little bugger can’t do nothin’ nasty with the flats using them poor sodding little mitts.’ Ha!

What they sees is timber getters’ hands, bashed in the sawpit, calloused on the axe handle, cut, broken, burnt. Hands what ain’t capable of handling a deck or palming a card in broad daylight so that the most suspicious sharper can’t see what’s going on right in front of his very own eyes. No danger in them pathetic, scarred and sorrowful little paws. No sir, not them!

But that’s where they be wrong! That’s their biggest mistake! What Ikey taught us at cards, me hands took to natural, like they had a mind of their own.

Ikey himself were most complimentary about this. ‘Most elegant and nimble, full o’ guilefulness and most diabolical of purpose, flippers tailor-made by the devil himself to belong to a broadsman o’ most superior talent. Congratulations, my dear.’

Ikey were right, me hands has a pure and natural ability for winning at cards by means of cheating. They’s good enough kept on the straight, mind – they hold their own and more in any honest game, if such an event be possible. But they is most amazing on the cross. Sometimes they do things with a deck o’ flats what can even astonish me. Never’s the day they don’t earn me grog enough to dampen down what’s ugly and frightening and burnin’ inside me. There’s always some mouth who fancies himself at cards and who’s got a silver sixpence to lose in a hurry. Or a trooper with the Queen’s florin he wants to double or treble and who grows most confident when he watches Tommo’s clumsy little hands busy at spreading the cards around the table.

That be me only asset, hands what are up to no good, good only for cheating at cards, fist-fighting, dog-baiting and being most fast and nimble when they are clasped around the handle of a small lopping axe, like the one I always carries on me belt in case of mongrels.

Them’s me total credentials, me hands. Hawk says he’ll learn me reading again, the trick of which I’ve long since forgotten. But I’m not so sure I can pick it up again. ‘Look,’ he says, ‘you learned Ikey’s hand language soon enough again. Reading is the same, you’ll soon be schooled back to it again.’ But reading be a thing of the head, and Ikey and Hawk’s hand language be a thing of the hands. That’s the big difference, me head’s fucked but me hands ain’t.

Nastiness is the only thing what I’m well schooled in now. Mary’s nicely brought up little lad, Tommo, what even at seven years old had some book learning and writing, is now everything what’s deemed bad. But Mary and Hawk expects that with a bit of plumping up, kindness and affection, what I am become will go away again. That the niceness is still inside me, only for a moment drowned out by me wilderness life, that with a bit of gentleness and love and a few gravy-soaked Sunday dinners under my belt, it’ll all bob back to the surface, like a cormorant what’s been fishing. And there I’ll be, good as new, floating merrily down the river of happiness and contentment.

How the hell, I begs to know, does I do that? For seven sodding years I had the living daylights kicked out o’ me by mongrels the like o’ Sam bloody Slit! Now I’m supposed to pretend all is forgiven and the world ain’t no longer a bad place. Can’t them two see that ain’t possible? That what’s inside me is all screwed up for good?

A large hand come down on the back of me neck and squeezes. Not so it hurts but firm enough. Crikey, it be Hawk! I didn’t see or feel him come in, so lost am I in me own stupid misery.

I grabs at the tot in front of me and tries to knock it back, but me head won’t go back because Hawk’s holding me neck and I spills most o’ the precious liquid onto me blouse. ‘Damn!’ I twists away angry and looks up. Sure enough, Hawk’s got his finger and thumb pinching at his nose, lamplight shining on his fingernails. I can’t help but smile.

Hawk lifts me from the bench by me scrawny neck. He don’t do it rough but he don’t intend to have no protest from me neither. I could still twist and kick him in the bollocks, double him up, then head-butt him as he’s coming down – I’ll take on any cove what’s up to a foot higher than me and bigger yet if I be drunk. Besides, I got me axe. But I don’t, of course. I don’t fight Hawk, who’s like a band of iron around me neck. It ain’t him what’s making me angry, so I lets him steer me towards the door.

Brodie shouts I owe him sixpence.

Hawk lets go my neck, digs in his coat and flips him a shilling. Then he touches me lightly on the shoulder, directing me once more to the doorway. Brodie claps his mittened hands together but misses the spinning coin and curses as it clatters to the floor and two wretches, growling like a pair o’ pit bitches, come alive and scramble for it at his feet, tits falling out. Brodie jumps aside dancing a jig, then kicks out wildly at the two soaks, screeching like a demented cocky-parrot.

Outside the sunlight be so bright I’m blinded and Hawk waits while I hold my hands up against my eyes and rubs. He can’t say nothing to me ’til I can see proper, ’til me eyes adjust to the sunlight. So he stands and rests his big hand soft on my shoulder.

We stand outside with all the tiny lights flickering in front of my eyes, little stars and explosions floating in blackness. Hawk’s hand on my shoulder feels safe. It feels good. Jesus! He’s coming back to me, coming back into me heart! But then I thinks, maybe it’s only Brodie’s crook grog what’s pumping through my veins giving me a drunk’s false hope. So I rolls me shoulder and shrugs off his hand. No point him imagining what ain’t true.

I can see clearly again and I note it’s well past noon by the position of the sun. Hawk is standing waiting. Now he has his arms folded and clasped to his chest, looking down at his boots. His dark shadow cast in the dust is nearly twice the size of my own.

‘Mary, is it?’ I sneer. ‘Commanding yours truly to Sunday bloody dinner?’

Hawk looks down sideways at me, his eyes narrowed, then he shakes his head slowly and spits to the side of his boots. ‘Come,’ he signals to me, ‘our ship is leaving on the afternoon tide.’

Chapter Two
HAWK

Tommo’s come back to us bad. The wild men have made him bad, taken his niceness and smashed it. His blue eyes are hard, the laughter in them gone.

‘Tommo’s come back to us damaged, Mama,’ I say to Mary with my hands, the language I now use between us. ‘He’s lost himself somewhere.’

‘Hush, you hear!’ Mary says. She doesn’t like what I’m saying. She looks at me accusingly. ‘You’re still good despite what you’ve suffered, so why not him?’

I shrug. ‘It’s not the same. I’m a nigger, niggers aren’t supposed to have feelings.’

She leans forward across the table. ‘Nonsense. Now you listen to me, Hawk, he’ll come good. All he needs is a lot of loving.’ She purses her lips. ‘I’m not much good at mothering no more, a bit old for all that malarky, but now he’s back, he’ll get lots of good food and proper care. Least I can do!’

‘Yes,’ I say, trying to look more hopeful than I feel. ‘He’ll get that and more. I hope you’re right, Mama. The wilderness took a lot from our Tommo.’

‘Not more than it took from you!’ Sudden tears well up in her eyes and Mary points to my neck, to the rope burns, the permanent scars that ring it in a band of silver tissue an inch wide against my black skin. ‘The wild man took your voice.’ Her lips are pulled thin as she wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. ‘Nothing could be as bad as that, now could it?’

She has never said anything about my voice before. Never spoken about it since it happened, since the day she found me in the mountains. Now I can see that it’s more than she wanted to say, that she thinks it’s come out wrong. So she thinks a moment, then smiles, brushing away the tears, trying to brush away the horror she’s felt all these years at what was done to me.

‘It were such a nice voice, Hawk. You was just a little un but your voice were already deep.’ She smiles at me. ‘Did you know that, son?’

I nod and she continues. ‘Lovely it were, like a melody. Folk would listen when you talked, even when you were a sprat. The wild man took that, there’s no making up for that.’ She shrugs, eyebrows high, mouth twisted. ‘You’ve come good. Tommo’s got no lasting damage, a little to his hands but not like what happened to you, not like that.’

‘It’s inside, Mama.’ I think about how Tommo’s afraid. ‘That’s where he’s broken, something’s broken inside him.’

Mary looks strangely at me. She doesn’t tolerate folks who feel sorry for themselves. When she speaks her voice is sharp again. ‘Whatever it were what happened to Tommo, it were no worse than most of us gets in life. This poxy island be full of past suffering. Sadness be a part o’ this place. Suffering beyond the wildest imaginings of them what’s not like us. Tommo’s still young, only just growed up, plenty o’ time for him to settle down. Work will fix what ails him.’

She says all this quickly as if she has thought it all out. Mary mostly keeps things to herself. Thinks them out, then keeps them, holds them tight to use only when needed. Now I sense she’s worried about my brother too. When you’ve lost your speech and must talk in hand language you learn to watch people more carefully. Ikey always said, ‘Listen with your eyes, Hawk, it be your eyes what’s your best ears,’ and he was right.

I don’t want to say it but I must. ‘Mama, I don’t think Tommo will want to work in the brewery.’

Mary draws back sharply. ‘What’s you saying? What’s you talkin’ about?’

It is late Sunday morning with a high blue sky over the mountain and the winter’s sun polishes the river like mirror glass. Mary’s kitchen is bathed in sunlight. The window panes reflect bright squares that burn out the colour where they make a pattern on the dark brick floor. Specks of dust, turned to gold, dance in the shafts of light.

Tommo has gone down to Wapping to drink at Brodie’s sly grog shop. Since he’s been back he does a lot of walking on his own, learning Hobart Town that’s grown and changed so much since we were kidnapped. He walks then stops off to play euchre or poker in a pub or grog shop, coming home late and drunk. Sad drunk. A fifteen-year-old who finds no cheer in the drinking he does.

Mary and I are sitting at the kitchen table, which is covered with a white cloth. On Sunday, Mary always spreads a white cloth on the kitchen table. Damask, she calls it. It’s like her Sunday altar. We don’t go to church. Mary doesn’t believe in it and Ikey, the closest thing we had to a father, was a Jew. So was our real mother, or so he said. He used to tell Tommo and me that we were too.

Mary says she doesn’t know anything about that. All she knows is our mother was Sperm Whale Sally, a whaleman’s whore. She says Ikey made up a lot of things to suit, like the X he put in both our names. Ikey added it on the spur of the moment when the government man said it wasn’t Christian to have only one name and demanded a second be given. So Ikey scratches his noggin and thinks a moment then says, ‘Israel and Moses,’ and the man says they aren’t Christian either and he isn’t going to write anything down until Ikey comes up with good Christian names for seconds.

‘Tell you what,’ says Ikey, ‘I’ll put X and then they can both choose a second name to their own liking when they’ve grown a bit.’

The government clerk thinks for a moment, scratching his head. ‘Fair enough, all right then, X it be.’ He can’t immediately think of a reason why X is not Christian, it being a sort of cross and all, and he doesn’t really care. So now it’s Hawk X Solomon and Tommo X Solomon forever after.

‘Can’t trust the silly old bugger to get nothing right!’ Mary said when she first told us she wasn’t our real mother, nor Ikey our father, even though he gave us his name with the X added.

‘Probably gave you his name then got nervous that maybe it weren’t quite kosher, so he cancelled it by adding the X. Nothing would surprise me with him.’ Mary snorts each time the story comes up but she’s got a smile on her face too as she thinks of him. ‘Ikey always did have a bet each way.’

Mary also told us that Tommo and I are twins, the same but different, the same mother but different fathers. A fluke of nature, she said, that happens sometimes with whores. Tommo came out with white skin and blue eyes, small as a tadpole, and I as black as the ace of spades and big as a bullfrog! It’s very confusing to other folk, but not to Tommo and me. We’re twins in the heart and in the head. Whether Jew or Mohammedan, twins are their own religion.

Anyway, Mary isn’t much concerned with religion. ‘Tell ’em you’re Church of England,’ she says when we’re asked. ‘Don’t suppose it matters, do it? God ain’t got no religion, now does he? As far as worshipping goes, it’s best not to take sides.’ She decided for all of us when she pointed to the mountain towering above us, ‘Best off worshipping that!’ She was not jesting either, for she loves the mountain. ‘God lives in that mountain, right above the organ pipes!’ she told us once. The organ pipes are the shafts of rocks that form a steep cliff to one side of the top of Mount Wellington.

When we were little, Tommo and I always skirted well clear of those pipes when we climbed the mountain, just in case Mary was right and we should bump into God.

‘What would you say to God if we should meet Him up there?’ I once asked Tommo.

Tommo thinks for a moment then says right off, ‘I’d invite Him to Sunday dinner.’

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘Because that’s the most holy place we got, silly!’

He was right, too. Once when Mary spread her damask cloth we asked her why, and she said, ‘It be our way of giving thanks to Him what keeps our bellies full. It be our altar cloth.’

‘We belongs to the White Tablecloth Religion,’ Tommo once told the curate at St David’s who stopped us in the street and asked why we didn’t come to Sunday School.

As for not going to church, Mary always says, ‘If folk don’t like it, well, that’s just too bad now, ain’t it? Knowing right from wrong is all what matters and I’ve yet to meet the preacher on this Gawd-forsaken island what does!’

There is little doubt Sunday is important to her, though, and a special occasion. Almost every time she spreads the cloth she says, ‘One day I’m going to buy us some silver, some Sunday silver!’ But I don’t think she ever will. Such a gesture would be much too flash for Mary and we’re still eating off the same tin plates and using the most ordinary cutlery you can buy.

Since I have come back from England with Ikey’s stolen fortune, Mary could have a crystal chandelier in the kitchen if she wanted, and bone china and silver cutlery heavy enough to sprain your wrist. But Mary doesn’t want people to think she’s a free settler or a toff, or that she believes herself better than the rest of the lags. She isn’t ashamed of who she is, a convict who has earned her ticket-of-leave and had her freedom granted after serving her sentence.

‘It’s who you is when folk knocks at the door of your heart what counts,’ she always said when we were young. ‘Hide the past and it gives them what’s jealous of you the power to bring you undone.’

I remember her telling us always, ‘Never give no one the power to shame you. Keep everything clear and in the open. Hiding from the past be the main business o’ this cursed island, people trying to pretend they’s better than other people, when they’s dirt, the scrapings o’ the barrel, just like what we is. Hannah Solomon be the prime example, putting on airs and graces, talking like a toff and trying to be a free settler, what she ain’t and never can be.’

Hannah was Ikey’s lawful wife, but all she did was try to do him harm. Now she and Ikey’s children live with a cove named George Madden in New Norfolk. Mama once taught three of Ikey and Hannah’s brats, David, Ann and Sarah, when Hannah was a prisoner seamstress in the Cotton Factory. ‘They was bright too, those young uns,’ Mary told me.

Mary doesn’t care much for the free settlers here. ‘Who’d come to this miserable place even if it were free, ‘less they was third-rate to begin?’ is what she says. But she is not being altogether truthful about her feelings. She’d not return to Blighty even if the governor granted her free passage. Mary loves this island, it is where she found the chance she was always looking for. Tasmania is what saved Mary and gave her back her character. She doesn’t pine for the good old days like Ikey did.

‘Blimey, what good old days was they, then?’ she’d say sarcastically when Ikey got to reminiscing about London Town. ‘For the likes of me they was shit!’

‘And this ain’t shit, my dear?’ Ikey asks, sweeping his arm to include the whole island.

‘Yes, but there be a difference,’ Mary snaps back. ‘There you was buried permanent in it, born in shit and drowned and died in it, no bleedin’ hope o’ rising above it. Here if you pushes ’ard enough you can get your ’ead up through the surface.’

‘And when you does, my dear,’ Ikey cackles, ‘all you can see is arseholes!’

But Mary would not give in. ‘Life’s too bleedin’ short to be frightened o’ what’s already been,’ she’d say. ‘Can’t get yesterday back and change it, now can you?’

That is why Mary can’t see what has gone wrong with Tommo. She won’t ever look backwards. When we were put to bed as young uns she’d often say, ‘Today is all we got, ain’t it? I mean, who knows, tomorrow we could all be dead.’ She’d take Tommo’s hand and mine so that we were joined to her. ‘Be honest, fair, listen, keep yer gob shut. Anyone can get through one day at a time. It’s light and then it’s dark and then it’s bleedin’ over, ain’t it? Persistence, that’s all what gets you there in the end. Believin’ in yerself and persistence!’

Then, after she’d made this little speech, she’d let go our hands and tug at the chain about her neck and produce from her bosom the gold Waterloo medal Ikey gave her. She’d hold it tight in her fist. ‘What’s it say?’ she’d demand.

‘I shall never surrender!’ Tommo and I would shout together, that being the legend written on the back of Mary’s talisman.

‘And don’t you never forget it,’ Mary would say. ‘Persistence and character!’

That is everything Mary believes – never give up no matter how painful the journey. Overcome and persist. I know that in her heart she can’t understand Tommo, how he’s sorry for himself and won’t forget the past now that things are good again. Drowning his sorrows in grog, not showing grit in his character, that’s what she can’t abide in my twin. I can sense she sees too much of Ikey in him. Not the Ikey of London Town, not the successful fence and forger much admired amongst thieves and villains and even accorded a grudging respect by policemen and magistrates; but the broken Ikey, the Ikey who was brought to his knees by hard convict labour and trained to obedience with the warder’s whip.

Now I’ve told her Tommo doesn’t want to take up her legacy of persistence and character, to work at her beloved brewery. She looks down at the white damask cloth and begins to smooth it with both her poor broken hands. A little frown forms, her top lip covered by the bottom one, then she begins to speak quietly without looking at me, like she’s thinking out loud.

‘Course he’ll want to work at the brewery! Tommo never were a lazy boy. He’ll do his share. He’ll come good,’ she says, as though she’s trying to convince herself, as though she secretly fears she might not be right about my brother.

‘Mama, it’s not that. He isn’t ready to come back to us yet.’

But Mary will not look, doesn’t want to see my hands, and continues. ‘We’ll buy all the new land in the Huon Valley we can get. We’ll do it through Mr Emmett, so nosey parkers what can’t mind their own business don’t catch on. Surprise the buggers! We’ll grow all the hops we need for the use o’ the brewery and maybe some for the new colony of Victoria.’ Mary lifts her chin and her eyes narrow. ‘We’ll not be caught short again because some bastard beer baron tries to put us out o’ business. Not never again!’ She grips the sides of the table, then she looks up and becomes aware of me again. ‘Hawk, you’ll not talk to no one about the money, Ikey’s money, ever, you understand?’

I’ve been back from England three months and this is the first time Mary’s talked about what we’ll do with the fortune I took from his and Hannah’s old Whitechapel home. Ikey’s stolen treasure had lain there for years, hidden in an Austrian safe, for though Ikey and Hannah knew half its secret combination each, they never trusted each other enough to tell each other their half. Hannah believed she and her brats deserved the lot and sent her son David to claim it, but with a little luck and cunning, I got there first.

‘You know I won’t tell anyone, Mama,’ I nod.

‘Not even to Tommo, you hear!’

I look at her, shocked. There is nothing I have ever hidden from Tommo. ‘Mama, Tommo’s my twin!’

Mary gazes down at the table. ‘Tommo’s been away, we don’t know where, he won’t say!’ She looks up, her eyes steady. ‘You hear me, Hawk Solomon, don’t you never tell your brother until I say!’

There is a part of Mary that’s hard as granite, that won’t brook any contradiction. Her mouth is drawn in a thin line, the skin seeming to barely conceal the hardness of the skull beneath. Mary has a look that can frighten me and now she’s used it against Tommo, her dearest Tommo whom she loves with all her heart.

She lowers her eyes again. ‘You know about growing hops, you learned it in England. That will be yours to concern yourself about. The Huon Valley, what we can buy of it, will be yours, Hawk. Tommo can work with me at Strickland Falls and prove himself, prove he may be trusted. He must learn what you already know about brewing. Catch up like, be an apprentice boy.’

I bang my fist on the table so she is forced to look up. ‘Mama, Tommo won’t, he won’t come back, not yet!’

But she’s too quick for me. She doesn’t hear the half of it because her eyes are squinched tight closed and she can’t see my hands speaking to her, though she’s heard the smack of my fist and knows full well what I’m trying to say.

‘The Potato Factory,’ Mary says fiercely, her eyes still closed, like it’s a holy catechism, ‘comes first!’ She opens her eyes and spreads her crippled hands against the white of the cloth, fingers splayed as wide as they’ll go. Then it comes to her what she has just said and she adds, ‘That be after you and Tommo, o’ course.’

‘Mama, we’ve got Ikey’s stolen fortune, you don’t ever need to work again if you don’t wish!’

Mary is silent a moment, then she says, ‘That be the whole problem. We has to make what’s been stolen honest again.’

She can see that I don’t understand her. She shrugs. ‘All Ikey’s money’s been gained on the cross, not one penny comes from honest toil. It all comes from fencing, forging, laundering money, brothel-keeping and having his brats at the Academy of Light Fingers pickpocket for him. As for Hannah Solomon, hers comes from running scams in bawdy houses. All right, I put in me time in such places too, but I never cheated nor used poor kids what can’t defend themselves. We has to put the money to decent use and make it clean.’

‘But, Mama, I stole that fortune! I opened Ikey’s safe using the combination we worked out from Ikey’s riddle. We’ve no more call on that money than the Solomons have.’

‘Hawk!’ Mary shouts in protest. ‘You know it’s not the same. Ikey gave you the riddle that held his three numbers to the safe. He were as good as saying that if you be the clever one to crack the riddle what opens his half of the safe, then providing he could also find out Hannah’s set of numbers, what were in it be ours, his to share with us!’

‘Mama, Ikey didn’t say anything of the sort! He didn’t know you already knew Hannah’s half of the combination! You never did tell him, did you? Ikey always thought it was just a clever riddle he’d given me to test my wits.’

Mary purses her lips. ‘More fool him, then,’ she says, but softly. ‘He were a fool to underestimate the both of us, you in particular.’

‘But even if I’d cracked Ikey’s part of the riddle he knew it would give us only half title to the money.’

She smiles. ‘If Ikey were alive he’d be proud, most proud that we beat the wicked cunning of that bitch, and her miserable brat, David Solomon! They were his natural family, but he saw them for what they were.’