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conflict in the Tree family.
    Spit liked Mrs Tree because she was always silently there. She was often alone with Sadie when her husband was away on one of his inspections, and she would sometimes walk by herself, or with Sadie, along the river bank and stop to admire old Fyfe’s garden. But neither she nor Sadie would ever say anything at all to old Fyfe. They left him alone if they passed by when he was in the garden. When Spit, in turn, offered Mrs Tree a fresh cod at her back door on a Friday (they were Catholics) and wriggled it fiercely under her nose, she would smile, almost laugh, and wait without saying anything for Spit to name his price. She would always accept it, pay it, and take the fish without saying a word except to say, ‘Thanks Spit’. If Sadie was around when this was happening Spit hardly noticed her, although he was often faintly aware that she was always inspecting him as she did everybody else. But she would say, ‘Goodbye Spit,’ as he left, and that always startled him because he would shift a little on his bare feet and shout back, ‘G’day, Sade,’ and then forget her a few moments later.
    It was the river that eventually made them friends. Spit’s passion for watching the currents and sending small, flat, pointed ‘boats’ along the river carrying messages to unknown destinations, took him often along the bank downstream to pass by the Trees’ house, which was not right on the river but a little way back from it nearer the railway line. Spit would write his left-handed messages on old newspaper saying, ‘Help. I’m shipwrecked. 20
longtude,
62
latude.
Come quick.’ His grandfather had once given him a hard and shortened version of
Kidnapped
. Tying the message around the mast of his little flat boat he would swim out to the middle of the river, launch it, and then walk along the bank to follow it through the swirls and eddies until it either lost its message, got stuck on the opposite bank where it was too far away to swim to, or finally disappear for ever into the faster mainstream of the big river.
    He loved to guess or calculate the complex twists and turns in the currents and eddies, or puzzle over the reasons for their endless variety, and he was absorbed one day in one of his little boats when a voice behind him said, ‘They always end up under that big tree, near the bridge.’
    Spit, surprised by the sudden and very quiet arrival of someone behind him, swung around and found Sadie Tree standing with her hands behind her back watching him.
    ‘How do you know?’ Spit said.
    ‘Sometimes I follow them when they’re in the big river.’
    ‘Tell us another one,’ he said disbelievingly. He knew that once they were in the big river they either got swamped by the fast current or were lost to view. ‘You can’t see them in the middle.’
    ‘Yes, you can,’ Sadie said. ‘They always come in on the other side near our place. Then they go around and around where the posts are, then they cross to the other side again and come back near the bridge.’
    ‘You can’t see them across the other side,’ Spit insisted.
    ‘Yes you can, with my father’s field glasses.’
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘You can see for miles through them.’
    ‘Tell us another one,’ Spit said.
    ‘Honest, Spit. Wait here and I’ll show you.’
    When she came back with the field glasses – a worn but good pair of military 8 x 30s – she showed Spit how to focus them, and then handed them over.
    ‘You’re right,’ Spit said generously. ‘You can see everything.’
    Sadie blushed and put out her hand for the field glasses. But Spit wasn’t going to part with them so quickly. They were hanging around his neck and he meant them to stay there for a while.
    ‘If we run for it we’ll find the one I just put in,’ he said and set off along the river bank without waiting to see if Sadie was following.
    She followed, and in thus proving the accuracy of her observations, she and Spit established