Read Online Ghost River by Tony Birch - Free Book Online

too. I could tell by looking at her face.’
    â€˜How?’
    â€˜Because I seen that look before.’
    â€˜Where?’
    Sonny ignored the question, picked up his T-shirt and scrambled up the steps where his bike lay. He looked up at a winding narrow pathway that led to a cliff-top high above the river.
    â€˜Hey, Ren, you ever been up there?’
    â€˜A few times. It’s a good spot for watching birds. They come downriver from the mountains and fly along the valley on their way to the bay, chasing fish, I reckon.’
    â€˜You and your birds.’
    â€˜You and your dick, Sonny. The diver. He’s up there too.’
    â€˜The diver?’
    â€˜Yeah, the diver. I bet you’d like to meet him. Come on.’ He skipped ahead of Sonny, who was picking up his bike. ‘You can leave it here. There’s only the one way up and down. We can fetch it on the way back.’
    â€˜I’m not leaving this behind. Someone might knock it off.’
    â€˜Nobody would steal that bike, Sonny. Not in a million years. And there’s no one round anyway.’
    â€˜Maybe not. I’m not taking any chances.’
    â€˜Please yourself. You’re lugging it, not me.’
    It was an old railway bike and weighed a ton. The railyards captain rode it around at night, turfing drunks out of empty carriages. The frame was made of cast iron and the tyres would fit a tractor. Sonny had stolen it, hand-painted it red and put new transfers on it. His attempt at disguising the bike was not a success. It looked exactly like what it was, a stolen railway bike that had been painted red. If the yard captain came across Sonny riding it through the streets he’d kick his arse and maybe have him charged. Ren had warned him about it, but Sonny being Sonny, he shrugged and said he didn’t give a half a fuck about the yard captain, which was true.
    By the time they reached the cliff-top Sonny was exhausted. He rested the bike against the trunk of a tree and lay on the hard ground. Ren walked on ahead, to where the path ended.
    â€˜Come take a look at this.’
    â€˜At what? I’m fucked.’
    â€˜I told you. The diver.’
    Sonny dragged himself to his feet and walked across to where Ren was standing, in front of a pile of rocks, crudely cemented together. A brass plate screwed into the rocks was engraved with a picture of a young man gliding through the air high above the river. Down below, boats filled with people waited in the water. The riverbanks were lined with faces looking up at the diver.
    â€˜Let me read this,’ Ren said, running a finger across an inscription below the image. ‘… as the crowd gathered, numbered in their many thousands, the diver fell through the sky, plunged into the water completing the world record dive. The feat has not been attempted since.’
    Ren brushed a cobweb from the plate. ‘In the library, next to the town hall, they have a photo in a frame that this drawing was taken from. And a news story. The diver come here from some island in the Pacific Ocean where they dive from cliffs into the sea with ropes tied to their legs. Twenty thousand people were watching him when he dived here, screaming and crying after he took off, then cheering like crazy when he hit the surface. He was in the nude when he come up, cause his bathers were torn off him when he hit the water.’
    Sonny walked a little closer to the edge of the cliff.
    â€˜No one could dive from this high and live.’
    â€˜Well, he did it.’
    â€˜Have you looked over the edge?’
    â€˜Yep. We got to lie down, to be safe.’
    Ren got down on his stomach and Sonny lay alongside of him. They slowly crawled to the edge of the cliff. Sonny rested his chin against the rock and looked down to the water and across to the far bank, to the remains of an ancient swimming pool that had been carved into the river decades earlier. Strips of bark, newspapers and rubbish