Tommo & Hawk Read Free Page B

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

     

    Hobart Town

    July 1856

     

    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