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The swamp monster

Tracy and I made friends through the fence when I was nine and she was ten. My name is Clare. When I was five, I got hit by a car and I sort of walk funny. People sometimes picked on me but Tracy wasn't like that, I think she saw my vulnerabilities and decided to take me under her wing.

We were new to the area, just having moved into this housing estate called Forest Glen. Just as I was making friends so was my dad, He joined the neighbourhood watch. They had meetings in our house sometimes. In school they taught us about stranger danger but within the housing estate it was hard to imagine anything like that ever happening.

Every afternoon after school I would go and chat to Tracy through the fence. Eventually she started coming round to our house and into my backyard. We did things like pretending to camp and building a tree-house. Gradually we ventured out and started to go on larger expeditions around the neighbourhood.

With my dad we sometimes went to this place called the pit, it was a sinkhole and you could throw anything into it and it would disappear. My dad warned us to stay away from the edge. I used to have nightmares about being eaten by the earth and after that we stopped going so often.

After that Tracy and I found a new area to explore. Like all children we gravitate towards the wild places where adults feared to tread. The whole estate had this weird wooden fencing around it. We were close to it and one day Tracy came over all excited because she had found a way through. Behind the fence we found our own magical world, there were scrubby trees and a little creek. If you went one way you'd eventually reach the highway, but if you went in the other direction you came to mangroves. There were these wooden platforms that you could walk along so that you didn't get stuck in the mud. At the end of them was this wooden shack. That's where we found Mudskipper Jack. I don't know if that's his real name but it's what he called himself. He looked a bit different from most people he had very large reflective eyes that took in the light and greenish skin. He had a shaggy beard and he smelled of salt and tobacco.

I guess we forgot about stranger danger because we made friends with him. He said he didn't like people much but he liked us. Jack was an artist and he was always painting, He even painted ups once. We would chat to him and he would nod and listen. He taught us about the plants and animals all around us. Sometimes we would go there and there and he would turn us away saying he needed time to think.

I don't really know how Jack made a living. Maybe he sold the art. He seemed to live mostly on fish. Sometimes he would throw one into the water and say it was for Mother Crocodile. He forbade us to go swimming in that place.

I suppose to adult eyes he was living in poverty but he seemed rich to us because he had freedom. We didn't mean to keep seeing him secret from our parents. It just never really occurred to us to tell them. Outside the fence was a different world from inside the fence.

Then one day Tracy disappeared. I don't mean she left I mean she vanished totally from the face of the earth. They put up flyers on the power poles with her face on them. A policeman came to talk to us in school saying if we had seen anything we needed to tell an adult. My parents kept me close and they questioned me as to whether I knew anything. I said I didn't.

I thought about it though and I concluded that perhaps Tracy was hiding out in Jack's place. Feeling brave for going on my own I headed out to talk to him. When I told him about Tracy he looked concerned.

"Maybe Mother Crocodile got her"

He sighed and looked at the sky.

"I think it's time I packed up and headed home, don't come back here Clare"

I started to cry at that I didn't want to lose both my friends. I was so upset that I couldn't sleep that night. When my mother saw me crying she asked me what was wrong and I slowly told her about visiting Jack and not finding Tracy.

My dad got very stirred up when my mother told him, he gathered the neighbourhood watch and they got me to show them the path to Jacks house but when we got there it was all locked up and he had gone.

Tracy never did turn up. Many years later some small bones that might have been hers washed up with the tide. I never saw Jack again either but I did see his art hanging in the New Arden gallery.