Deeper Water by Jessie Cole Page A

with?’
    Even though I knew everyone hates cane toads, I still felt myself suck in a breath.
    ‘We don’t ever kill them,’ I said. ‘But I’ll get the broom and move them if they bother you.’
    He shifted on his feet and I could tell he was disturbed.
    ‘Mema, they’re cane toads. You have to kill them.’ In the closeness of the bathroom I could see his jaw clenching. ‘Don’t you have a plastic bag? I’ll put them in the freezer. They won’t feel a thing.’
    ‘No.’
    I’d been showering with those toads for years. They weren’t going in the freezer.
    ‘Cats are bad, Mema, but cane toads are the worst.’ I could feel his frustration. ‘Anyway, you can’t just leave them in the shower.’
    ‘They’ll keep out of your way.’
    We stood there locked in an awful silence, staring into the shower. The cane toads seemed to know they were under scrutiny, ’cause they pressed further into the corner, flattening themselves on the tiles.
    ‘Look,’ I broke the silence, ‘I know cane toads are bad and everyone kills them. It’s a sport around here—cane-toad hockey, cane-toad golf, cane-toad musters—but they’re still animals, Hamish. It’s not like they introduced themselves.’
    ‘You can’t argue for a cane toad’s life,’ Hamish said. ‘They eat everything, and then the things that eat them die from their poison. They are wiping out whole species at an incredible rate.’
    I knew all that. There was no way you could grow up around here and not know all about the history of cane toads, home-schooled or not.
    ‘You’re not putting them in the freezer.’
    Anja’s dad kept a piece of old pipe handy at all times especially for eradicating toads. They were exceptionally hard to kill. I’d seen him bludgeon them for ten minutes at a time and then watched them try to hop away. Something about the violence of it always made me feel ill.
    When I was small Anja and I used to catch tadpoles in the creek and watch them grow their legs and drop their tails. Sometimes they turned into little brown frogs, and other times they turned into little brown toads, but the thing was—you couldn’t tell the difference when they were tadpoles. We’d spend weeks tending them and watching them grow only to find we’d raised the enemy. And then we’d be left with the sticky question of what to do with our babies once they’d grown. We couldn’t toss them onto the road to get squashed, or put them in the freezer to die slowly. We’d grown attached. So in the end we’d sneak off quietly and let them go. Before anyone could stop us.
    Looking at Hamish I could tell none of that was going to make sense to him. His face was closed, stern. The bathroom felt small, like there wasn’t room for both of us.
    ‘I came across a woman standing on the bridge once, leaning over the rail,’ I said, feeling that sudden helplessness of misunderstanding rising up inside me. ‘She was weeping. She used to live in a caravan under one of the big trees. I stopped and asked her what was wrong, and she pointed down at the water.’
    Hamish didn’t speak.
    ‘She’d found a rat’s nest filled with little pink babies and she’d thrown them into the water. But she couldn’t leave. She just stood there crying. You could see their little bodies in the shallows, drowned and still.’
    Staring at the cane toads, Hamish lifted his arm and ran his hand across the top of his head. His elbow bumped against my arm, and he stepped a little away from me.
    ‘She was probably just having a shit day.’
    ‘Maybe,’ I answered, but I didn’t really think so.
    Hamish pressed his hand against the back of his neck and then ran it forward, over his head and down across his eyes. He wouldn’t look at me. I watched his hands, admiring their shape. If you looked too long at something it was hard not to ponder its uses. I started thinking about what it might feel like if he swept his hands across my head and down against my eyes. I’d never