He clowned, bowing deeply and spinning the gipper in one hand, and for a moment the boy was all there was, and the two of us were laughing like nothing could possibly trouble us in this clear, bright moment in South Fremantle in June 1914.

The white flesh of the snapper was thicker than any haddock, and he threaded the two halves, one below the other, with thin wire, old style. As I watched his careful work, the sober face of the man came back.

Letter from Merredin on the bed, he said.

I raced to fetch it and returned with a sealed envelope.

What, ye haven’t read it?

A shadow passed across his eyes and he shook his head. It’s Clementina’s writing an’ your name on the front.

There was something about the way he spoke that made me think he knew already what it was I was about to read.

I scanned the letter quickly. The same story, but now, something new. Desperation. In every line. If the crop failed this time, all would be lost.

Magnus strung up the wire frame in the chimney. Things are bad, he said. A statement, not a question.

Mmm, aye. I put the letter aside, pressing my palm on it for a second.

We discussed what to use in place of fir and oak to smoke the fish as I lit the fire with spindly kindling. The knobbly, nutty banksia cones were the best we could think of.

Soon Magnus was fanning the fire and piling on the cones and we were hoping for the best, hoping for smoked haddock from a fish that looked and felt and tasted nothing like it.

I glanced back at Clementina’s letter. Things were bad, aye, but her worry over the state of the farm was as nothing compared to her fear of what Stivvy might do if they were forced to walk off the land, in debt.

War is coming and you know what he’ll do, he’ll be gone for a soldier, that’s what, the great daftie loon will be gone for the five shillings a day and to make himself a man again.

What had Stivvy told Magnus? They didn’t write, the two of them, but sometimes Paulie Garrioch would bring news from the Wheatbelt after his runs from the ironmonger’s store. He and Magnus would talk for hours down at The Anchor.

I would not ask him outright, would not talk about the war. I didn’t want to hear him say it.

~

The next day Mrs Laskon came to the door, a pinched look on her face.

There’s a … smell, Mrs Tulloch. A distinct odour of … something. Fish?

She looked faint when I told her about the snapper in the chimney. As though we are beyond the pale, I said to Magnus when she’d gone.

It really is too much, Mrs Tulloch, he mimicked.

Barbarians.

April 1974

April 1974