After the Ferry

by C. A. Larmer

  “No,” Millie said, stopping him again. “Please. I’d prefer the dormitory.” She had an authoritative way of talking, but it was laced with anxiety as she added, “If you don’t mind, Kostas.”

  He blinked at her like she was nuts, then shrugged, returned to the stairwell and continued up another flight to a sweeping dormitory with multiple bunk beds, small side tables between them, and a pile of variously coloured plastic beanbags in one corner. He walked to the far end of the room and swept a thick, red velvet curtain across, letting the sun pour in from two glass doors that led out to a small Juliet balcony.

  “Any bed you want. Just one, please.”

  Millie was not listening to him; she was too busy pummelling through time. From the moment she had crossed the threshold to the second floor, she saw and tasted blood. Lots and lots of blood.

  It was extraordinary, she thought, even now, how much blood one man could cause, one bad choice could create.

  Her eyes went straight to the farthest wall, to another man, this one as bloodied as her but with none of the guilt and recriminations. He wasn’t there anymore, the enormous crucifix had been removed, but she could still see him clearly, his arms out, his head dropped to one side, his eyes somehow more accusatory because they would not meet her own.

  She reached for his eyes so many times; so many times he never looked her way.

  Millie turned and glanced from bed to bed, but hers, too, was gone, replaced by a sturdy metal bunk with thick foam mattresses covered in plastic.

  Fresh, clean, bloodless.

  Kostas seemed oblivious to her time travel and sang out, “Okay, I bring clean sheets later. And what you call… blanket. Yes, I bring blanket too.”

  She dropped her bag and stepped across the room to where her bed once stood, the window above it now half-blocked by the top of a bunk. She placed her hand on the wall beside the window and remembered how often she had looked out that very window, how often she had thought and dreamed and imagined.

  “Miss?” Kostas said and she turned, fabricating a smile.

  God knows she’d had enough experience of that.

  “Please,” he said awkwardly. “I show you washroom and common room.”

  Millie followed him along a narrow corridor to the bathroom, also freshly renovated, the stench of new paint more powerful here than anywhere, and Kostas flipped the naked light bulb on. There was no toilet paper, he noticed, and a collection of dead beetles on the floor would need to be swept up.

  “It’s too early!” he hissed in Greek under his breath before striding down the corridor and throwing open another door. It led to a separate staircase, which he took, drawing her back to the main level. “Down here, common room and kitchen, but no food,” he said as they walked. “You buy food in town, yes?”

  She didn’t appear to be listening, and again he hissed. “Is too early!” This time his English was loud and clear.

  While Kostas strode off to fetch the linen, Millie took the opportunity to look around properly. The downstairs common room was unfamiliar, and she wondered if she had blanked it out or if it was the result of the makeover. New, brightly upholstered sofas sat sociably around the room, and one wall was lined with computers, four in all, and unheard of in her day. There was a giant-screen TV and a box of computer games. And every wall had been painted a particularly gaudy shade of something. Lime green. Candy pink. Baby blue. Thankfully there was no red, the only colour she associated with her past.

  Kostas returned with a set of striped sheets, faded from one too many bleach jobs, and a towel, clean but ratty, and thrust them into her hands.

  “And now I go,” he said. “You have car? Bike?”

  “No.”

  “You want lift to town, get food, wine?”

  “Do you have Wi-Fi?”

  “No, Miss. No connect, not yet. Casa Delfino has Wi-Fi. You talk to Effie.”

  Again, Millie appeared not to hear him. She was staring at a small arched doorway that was latched shut.

  “This lead to cemetery. You no want. Come,” he said, “I show you balcony. Is good, yes?”

  Kostas strode across the common room and swept open two glass doors to the cobbled courtyard out the back, which offered a stunning view of the craggy coastline below.

  “Gloomy today,” he said, and he wasn’t just referring to the weather.

  At the end of the bridge, right before the road veered sharply left, the hostel manager slowed his motorbike for a final look back at the castle. And her. No amount of cajoling could dissuade the crazy tourist from staying. Not even the fact that Kostas would be gone for hours, that she would be there all alone. That usually scared the strays to their senses, but not this one. He had scribbled down the telephone number for the Delfy and hoped she’d soon use it.

  “Any problem, you call Effie,” he insisted, and the woman had stared at the number as if in a daze. And so Kostas had left, driven away earlier than intended. He cursed her aloud now. Had meant to finish going through the books to start compiling a list of supplies for the upcoming season. But there was something about the newcomer that didn’t invite company.

  After another minute, he revved up his bike and turned towards town, feeling, for the first time in four years, that he was no longer the king of his old stone castle.

  He had a niggling feeling he had just been overthrown.

  EVE

  Tuesday stretched on. The phones kept ringing. Amelia never showed.

  The deputy editor tried hard to mask her delight as she returned from her lunch break and noticed the editor’s chair still vacant. She slipped behind her own desk, tapped her keyboard, then slid her eyes sideways and swivelled her chair around.

  Why not? Alex thought. Why not indeed!

  She stood up, pulled her shoulders back and made her way into Amelia’s office.

  It was absurdly oversized, really, with an enormous L-shaped wooden desk and a classic 1950s Eames high-back, leather office chair. One side of the room contained a small round conference table that sat four staffers, and behind that a metal bookshelf lined with every conceivable woman’s title—from Italian Vogue and UK Marie Claire to The Australian Women’s Weekly and US Vanity Fair. These were Amelia’s personal copies, and in case you were thinking of sneaking in and pinching one, they were each plastered with a white sticker that read Editor’s copy, hands off!

  Alex stepped up to the shelf and began leafing through them, selecting the latest issues to take home and retain. Behind her, glass windows opened the office up to a sparkly Sydney harbour view, the kind of view that was wasted on a busy editor. The blinds had been let down halfway to avoid the glare, but she lifted them all the way up now, ignoring the sun that came screaming in. She wanted to drink in that view. She was almost giddy with delight.

  “Alex?”

  The deputy swung around to find the art director staring at her. “Oh, Monty! Goodness, you gave me a fright. You’re back from Hamilton Island.”

  “Just got in. What’s going on?”

  Monty glanced deliberately at the magazines in the deputy’s hands. The look on her face spoke volumes, and Alex tried to regain her composure. The two women had never been friends. They were from different sides of the tracks. Alex was a middle-class suburban mum trying her hardest not to be, while Monty was the single career woman’s pinup girl—painfully thin and smartly dressed in a shiny Stella McCartney suit and Pucci pumps. She was one of Amelia’s elite, part of the select posse who got to stay back each month and work on the illustrious cover. As though they were creating the next Mona bloody Lisa. And then, when it was finally complete—and God knows it could take days—they would celebrate at the latest swanky eatery, courtesy of Gerry, while the rest of them stayed back, eating soggy sandwiches or last night’s leftovers like they’d been twiddling their thumbs all month. Like they were inconsequential.

  Yet Alex was the deputy editor for goodness’ sake! She once stayed back longer than anyone, neglecting her kids, ignoring her
husband, pretending to fit in. But that was sometime ago…

  She brushed her discounted Country Road suit down with one hand and tightened her grip around the precious magazines.

  Monty frowned. “Where is Amelia?”

  Your best friend’s deserted you, Alex wanted to say. “She’s vanished. Haven’t you heard?”

  “What do you mean vanished?”

  “Nobody knows where she is.”

  “Don’t be so melodramatic, Alex,” Monty scoffed as she began to turn away. “She’s probably in a meeting with Gerry or someone from advertising.”

  “No, Monty. I mean, we haven’t seen Amelia in days.”

  She turned back. “Days?”

  “Not since last Friday.”

  “Friday? Seriously?” She blew air through her lips. She did not believe Alex. “She must have called in.”

  Alex nudged her chin towards Brianna, who was watching them through the glass wall, and she shook her head no.

  Monty frowned and reached for her mobile phone, stabbing at a few buttons, her tone still light when eventually she spoke. “Hey, lovely, it’s me. I’m back. Just checking where you’re at.” Her eyes darted away from them both, her voice dropped. “Alex seems to have some crazy notion that you’ve vanished but, well, um… Just give us a bell. Okay?”

  Clicking off, she began trawling through her messages. Nothing. Not so much as a bubble. Monty had been relieved by this earlier, now it made her feel nauseated.

  “Why didn’t anyone call me?”

  “You were on holidays so—”

  “I wasn’t on holidays, Alex. I was on a fashion shoot. I was working.”

  Sure you were. Working on a tan more like. “Either way, she hasn’t shown up all week; we’ve checked her house, it looks like she’s cleared off. Gerry’s in a flap, as you can imagine.”

  “She hasn’t even called Gerry?”

  “Nope. Pretty damn rude, if you ask me.”

  “Pretty out of character, more like.” She frowned. “Okay, leave it with me. I’ll make a few calls. I’m sure her folks will know where she’s at. She goes nowhere without them knowing.”

  Alex shrugged. Monty didn’t get it. She really didn’t care. Actually, that wasn’t quite true. She did care. Just not about Amelia’s whereabouts. She hoped the editor not only stayed away, she never came back. It’s not that Alex hated Amelia, as such. She despised her, and that was a different kind of loathing. She glanced at the big chair behind the desk and thought about it for a moment, but nerves got the better of her, so she simply swept past Monty, out the editor’s office and back to her own desk, still clutching Amelia’s magazines tight to her chest, like she was holding on to a life vest.

  Monty, meanwhile, glared at her mobile phone like it was an emergency beacon that refused to work. She strode back to the designers’ section of the office, greeting various staffers along the way, the phone still in one hand, silently begging it to vibrate.

  When she got to her desk, she placed it beside the keyboard and kept darting glances at it, knowing she should be working—God, she had so much to catch up on—yet unable to focus.

  Where, oh where was Amelia?

  Monty knew she should call the parents immediately. Perhaps Beryl had the answer. But that was like tapping a sleeping grizzly on the shoulder and asking where her cub had got to. There had to be someone friendlier.

  She scoffed to herself. Who was she kidding? She was Amelia’s only friend or at least the only one she caught up with outside of publishing headquarters, and that was largely due to their history. They went back.

  Monty’s stomach tightened just thinking of it. Of the ferry. Of wanting to reach out, of wanting to grab her by her ponytail and keep her on board.

  Why didn’t she do that? Why did she let her get off?

  “You’ve got PTSD,” someone told her a few years ago. A boyfriend who couldn’t compete with the guilt he made love to every night.

  “You’re being ridiculous,” she had told him, but that was old news. She had already diagnosed herself.

  She would never forget the anxious phone calls.

  “What do you mean she got off the ferry early?”

  “What do you mean you didn’t get off with her?”

  “Where on God’s earth is my daughter?”

  That was the mother. The father was much, much worse.

  “Your best mate heads to some strange island you go there with her. What kind of friend are you?”

  A bad one, she decided, a very bad one in fact. One with an ulterior motive.

  She’d had a massive crush on Angus, see, even though he only had eyes for Millie, as they called her then. Monty suspected she’d make a better match so was quietly elated by her friend’s sudden desertion. Now it was her chance to dazzle the better-looking one, to score the top prize.

  It was as simple and as pathetic and as horrifying as that.

  She wanted the hotter one to pick her for a change, and if both boys fought over her, all the better. Except they didn’t, not really. They just used her up and spat her out, and when she returned to Sydney two months later, fully expecting Millie to be waiting in the wings, ready to giggle over her silly Greek love affair, she was nowhere to be found. Her parents hadn’t heard from her. There was no gushing text or dull travel blog or reassuring call on Skype. This was before all of that.

  There wasn’t even a postcard.

  “Must still be in the arms of her Greek god,” she’d told everyone, still feeling envy then, still thinking typical Millie!

  Oh how wrong she was.

  When Millie finally returned almost a year later, Monty’s envy had morphed from concern to horror to utter remorse. She knew something terrible had happened, could tell from her friend’s stiff mannerisms and stony smile. Millie was back, but not really. The new Millie was different somehow, and it wasn’t just the fact that she now insisted on using her full name, the name her teachers used to scold her with.

  Amelia.

  “I hate Millie now,” she said, and Monty wasn’t sure if she was referring to the name or to herself.

  It took another year for the horror of what had happened to come out, and two more before Monty worked out what was missing. It was Amelia’s soul. It had been snatched from her, along with her dignity, her ID and all her personal effects.

  She groaned and reached for the phone. She could put it off no longer. It was time to wake the sleeping bear.

  TOM

  Tom groaned as he surveyed the open fridge, one callused hand holding the door wide. That’s right, there was bugger all to eat. The final insult before she took off. He’d managed to cobble some meals together for the past few days, but there was little he could do with some mangy veggies and slimy ham, and how was he supposed to do the shop? It was bad enough he had to steal away from work to get his kid to school and back—the school bus had been on the blink for weeks—he could hardly ask for time off to go to the supermarket. In this hick rural town it’d make him a laughingstock.

  He slammed the door shut with so much ferocity he could hear his beer bottles clinking inside.

  “Dad?”

  That was Phil, eyes wide, a tiny crinkle cutting into his perfect little forehead. He’d had that expression for two days now, ever since Monday morning when he’d woken Tom with the news that his mum had vanished.

  “Go back to sleep,” Tom had told him, croakily, grumpily. “She’s just up.”

  Well, she was usually up at that time, making Phil’s school lunch. She always did it at the crack of dawn, didn’t need to of course. Didn’t need to be up for hours, but it was like she was bursting to get out of bed. Away from him. It made his heart wrench each and every time, her absence like a black hole in the bed.

  An hour later, when he’d pulled himself from the covers and shuffled into the kitchen, one hand scratching the stubble on his face, he had to concede his son was right. Amy was nowhere to be seen. Together they checked every nook and cranny in and arou
nd the house, the yard, the top shed.

  “Shouldn’t you call the cops?” his brother, Harry, had suggested later when they conferred over the back fence.

  It wasn’t so much a fence as a couple of scraggly bushes that Tom had planted some years earlier, a demarcation line of sorts. The property was Harry’s, bequeathed to him by their father, and he’d chosen the better of the two houses as his own. Harry’s was the newer, four-bedroom brick place, the one their parents had built back in the eighties, unable to stand the creaky, draughty old timber house they’d inherited from their own parents. That one was offered to Tom and Amy, who seemed genuinely delighted. She reckoned it had “stacks more character,” but to Tom that was like admiring an ugly woman for her personality.

  He wasn’t buying it, but he couldn’t afford anything else, so he’d graciously accepted and moved his then-pregnant wife in, even though it was where the bad memories were first forged, but what choice did he have? Beggars couldn’t be choosers, and homeless couples had to take what they could get.

  They moved in a week before Phil was born, and it was another three years before he erected the bushy barrier, as much to protect his own privacy as to keep Harry’s brood out. And there were a lot of ’em to keep out.

  His older brother and his wife of twenty years, Scarlett, had six children, all under the age of fourteen. They were a chaotic mob. A disaster zone if you asked Tom. Amy never envied their better house with its insulated brick walls and indoor toilet, but she did envy that snotty-nosed mob, and he could never fathom why.

  “She’s obviously taking some time out, mate; she hasn’t been kidnapped,” Tom explained to his brother over the fence that morning.

  “And you know this how?”

  “I know this. That’s all.”

  “Did you have a fight?”

  “What? No, course not.”

  “Did you call her folks? She might’ve gone there.”

  He scowled, wasn’t ready for that, but he acknowledged the point. She had run there before when things had been tougher. Lately everything was good. At least he thought it was.