Ghost River by Tony Birch Page A

round them, then.’
    The last delivery of a morning was to Stumpy’s place. Sonny knocked at the door of a house on a dead-end street by the railway line.
    â€˜Put your ear to the door and listen for the noise.’
    Ren heard a low rumble in the distance, a sound that appeared to be coming from miles off. If he didn’t know better he would have said it was a train. The noise grew louder until it came to a halt on the other side of the door.
    â€˜He’s here,’ Sonny whispered.
    â€˜Who?’
    The door opened with a creak. Ren looked down at a man around the same age as his stepdad, Archie. He was kneeling on a wooden trolley and the knuckles on his hands had thick yellow calluses on them. Ren looked closer. He wasn’t kneeling at all. The man had no legs.
    Sonny handed the man the morning newspaper.
    â€˜There you go, Stump. This is my mate, Ren. He’ll be helping me out from now on. You need anything from the shops this morning? I could call by later on.’
    Stumpy didn’t give Ren a second look and never bothered with Sonny’s question.
    â€˜Okay, Stump. Tomorrow then.’
    Stumpy shut the door on them. Ren listened again, to the fading sounds of the cart.
    â€˜What happened to his legs?’ he asked, as they walked the empty pram back to the shop.
    â€˜It’s a long story, that one.’
    â€˜I’ve never seen him up the street. Wouldn’t miss someone getting along on a cart.’
    â€˜He don’t go up the street. Says he don’t want people seeing him that way, without any legs. He does some work in his garden, crawling round on what’s left of his legs. Nobody goes to the house except a woman from the church who drops off his food and does some cleaning and pays his bills.’
    â€˜Why don’t he get some artificial legs so he can get about?’
    â€˜He did have wooden legs one time, when his mother was around. Stumpy liked a drink and would put his legs on and get out to the pub. He’d finish up so pissed he’d fall off them on the way home. Sometimes the cops would give him a ride home. But if no one come across him he’d stay in the gutter until his mum come and found him. In the end she got jack of it. One night, after he went to bed, she threw the legs on the fire and burned them to ash. The next morning she told him he wouldn’t be going up the pub any longer. Laughed at him, Stumpy told me.’
    â€˜Does she live at the house with him?’
    â€˜Nah. She died a few years back.’
    â€˜He could get himself some new legs. From the hospital.’
    â€˜Yeah, I know. But he says he can’t be bothered.’
    â€˜Where’d you hear this?’
    â€˜He told me himself. Stumpy gets lonely and likes to talk. When he gets used to you, you won’t be able to shut him up.’
    The boys reached the intersection a block away from the paper shop. They waited at the red light to cross the street. A car pulled in to the kerb, an old blue Mercedes, highly polished and not a scratch on it. The young driver hit the horn and an older silver-headed man came out from a curtained shop front. He got into the passenger seat of the car. As the car crawled to the intersection, the man wound down his window and called Sonny over to the car.
    â€˜You have paper?’
    Sonny handed him a newspaper. The man offered him a twenty-cent coin, double the price of the paper.
    â€˜Keep the change.’ He smiled, and ordered the young driver to take off.
    The building the man had come out of had originally been a fruit shop. After it had shut down, the blinds were drawn on the windows. Men came and went from the building day and night, although they never seemed to buy anything.
    â€˜What’s that place?’ Ren asked.
    â€˜The Greek club.’
    â€˜What do they do inside?’
    â€˜They run a card game. And the radio’s turned up loud on race days. An SP on the horses, I