The Gaps

by Leanne Hall

  At the top of the hill, I pause to catch my breath. Arnold lifts a leg to pee and scratches in the dust.

  I practise looking and seeing, like I always do. Across the valley, past the vacant lots and teeming highway, to lit-up construction sites topped with cranes. I make a square-ish frame with my hands and hold it in front of my face. I’ve been wondering if I have the skills to do something photographic for my major project.

  The truth of this scene is beer bottles mixed in with weeds, a wire fence falling down, fluoro traffic cones, the word CONPLEX painted along the boom of a crane.

  The truth is cars scuttling like beetles, neon-painted streaks, a mysterious glowing civilisation across the highway, a hushed park where lovers meet under pooling lights. It’s all in my power to make this ugly or beautiful, gritty and real, or not.

  But I can’t stop my mind turning towards the ways you could trap someone in a park. You could use people’s kindness against them and pretend to be hurt, setting up a fake bike accident. You could blend into the environment, dress up as one of the council rangers or rail workers. Or you could carry a tricycle or a children’s backpack, pretending you were a dad. Fathers appear more trustworthy than childless men, even though I know that’s not the case.

  At my back, there’s a rumble and a rush of wind as a train screams past. A streak of light in the dusk, people flashing by, all of them strangers.

  Mr Mitchell’s face looks like a sunken cake. Yin’s mum keeps her face turned away. The reporter says Mr Mitchell is a ‘prominent Melbourne lawyer’.

  I was going to have a shower and change out of my sweaty running gear straight after dinner, but the police are finally having another press conference after being silent for days. Yin’s parents and two detectives sit in front of a crowd of journalists. I sip on my custom blend of Milo and instant coffee.

  ‘That’s Yin’s mother?’ Mum says. ‘She was the one that was nice to me at that Mother’s Day thing. Did you know she’s a neurosurgeon?’

  Mum has the night off work and I’m secretly relieved. Her hands travel over my woollen school tights, darning the holes. Sam is safely in his bedroom playing games on Mum’s phone. We’ve had to ban him from watching any more news reports about the abduction.

  ‘Remember, Chlo? She was the only one that would talk to me. Oh, that’s even more awful now.’

  I remember. Mum said that she’d felt like a fish out of water at the Balmoral Mother’s Day breakfast. Apparently the rich blondes huddled on one side of the room and the rich Asians on the other side, and she hadn’t fit into either group. It sounded scarily similar to my own experiences.

  Sometimes I want to launch myself at the international students and beg to be adopted into their group, even if I can only speak English. The boarders from East Asia hang together, but they overlap a lot with the East Asian day girls. There are hardly any South Asian boarders, but there are lots of South Asian students and they seem to form their own friendship groups.

  There are so many exceptions to the rules though, and I can’t help wondering if it’s only me that’s hung-up. Melody is biracial too, but she grew up in Hong Kong and can speak Cantonese. Anjali is swim-squad royalty and hangs out exclusively with jocks, and Anusha and Sunita form a four with Bridie and Ming-Zhu and I couldn’t draw a Venn diagram of all of it if I tried.

  Maybe I’m making up divisions in my head that don’t really exist. But then Jody carries on about there being too many Asians at the school, and I know I’m not making all of it up.

  ‘I consider Yin to be my own daughter,’ Mr Mitchell says on the telly. ‘I have been very lucky to find myself with this family, long after I thought my time for it had passed.’

  Even though he must be used to speaking in front of people, his voice during the press conference is tissue-paper thin. His white hair and wrinkled skin explains why Yin copped so much at school about how old her dad is. It’s good that Mum doesn’t want to get involved in anything at Balmoral. It’s best not to provide the ammunition.

  ‘Our house is very quiet without Yin, too quiet,’ Mr Mitchell continues. ‘Usually I have to tell her to turn her music down every night. Yin, if you are listening to this, when you come home you can play your music as loud as you want. Your mum and brothers miss you very much.’

  Mum kicks her legs, as if she’s trying to get rid of pins and needles. ‘The worst thing is, I’m sure he’s the first suspect on the police’s list. And look at him. He’s devastated.’

  Mr Mitchell looks straight down the lens of the camera. ‘This is a plea from our family to everyone in the community. Please think carefully and consider if you know anything that could be related to my daughter’s disappearance. Cast your minds back to the weekend. You might have seen something that you thought unimportant at the time. Nothing is too small to report.’

  A police hotline number sits at the bottom of the screen.

  I still have the sourness in my gut that’s been there since I saw the very first news report. It’s a queasy, guilty feeling because I’m not sure if I’m genuinely worried about Yin, or if I’m more worried about myself. I can’t remember the reasons why I thought it was a good idea to transfer to Balmoral, and now the universe has presented me with a great big reason to not be there.

  Mum knots the thread and breaks it between her teeth. She moves onto the second hole in my tights. ‘By the way, your dad called.’

  I raise one eyebrow. When I was twelve I spent a whole summer practising this new expression for my new cynicism. Mum and Dad separated when I was eight and divorced when I was ten, but when I was twelve Dad went to Western Australia to work on the mines and didn’t come back for three years. He said he was doing it for Sam and me, to save for our futures, but instead he bought a house on the other side of town with his mate Jarrod, and I don’t see how that benefits us. The house has been the source of a lot of fights between Mum and Dad, but Mum seems to have let it go now.

  ‘Don’t give me that look, Chloe. Call him and have a quick chat. It won’t cost you a thing.’

  ‘Okay. Ma, okay.’ I wave Mum’s fussing away. Dad and I spoke on my birthday, which wasn’t that long ago. The senior detective is being questioned onscreen and I don’t want to miss it.

  ‘Are the police treating this case as linked to the Karolina Bauer abduction?’ asks a journalist.

  ‘That’s the exchange student who was taken a few years ago,’ I say.

  The lead detective looks like the kind of man you’d see in a department store catalogue modelling clothes for older men, not a hunter of psychopaths. ‘At this early stage we’re examining all angles, including looking at previous cases.’

  ‘Early?’ says Mum. ‘It’s been four days—that’s way too long. The first 48 hours are crucial.’

  Mum consumes a solid and unvaried diet of crime fiction—it’s her main hobby. She could probably have a decent stab at heading up a police investigation based on that alone.

  A different journalist speaks up. ‘So you admit there are startling similarities between the two abductions. Is the investigation focussing on people with a connection to Balmoral Ladies College?’

  The detective doesn’t take the bait. ‘We’re conducting a methodical and thorough investigation, as we always do. We’ll be able to bring you more information in the next few days.’

  I think back to my conversation earlier with strange, intense Petra. ‘The police don’t tell the public all of the details, did you know that, Mum? They keep the important stuff to themselves.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s classic methodology, hon. The police use the unreleased information to eliminate suspects.’

  I want to ask her how that can be fair—what if there’s information that could keep more girls safe, if only they knew it? But I swallow the question, because the last thing I want to be, or look to be, is scared.

  ‘I’ve got a bad feeling,’ Mum admits. ‘It reminds me of those Bayer kids. Before you were born. They got taken from their beach house. Never
seen again. Vanished into thin air.’

  They’re showing Yin’s photo again on the TV screen while the newsreader talks.

  ‘She doesn’t look like that now, you know,’ I tell Mum. ‘That photo is from Junior School, grade six or something. Why would they use an old photo?’

  ‘I don’t know…maybe it was the first one they could find? Her parents probably weren’t thinking straight.’

  ‘But if a witness sees her in the back of a car, or in a window, they might not recognise her.’

  ‘Maybe the public will be more sympathetic if she looks young and cute. If she looks older or closer to being a woman, then it’s too easy to say: oh, she was talking to guys online. Or dating older men, or going out and being a bad girl. You know…’

  ‘That shouldn’t matter.’

  ‘It shouldn’t, but—hon, it’s bleak, but she’s Chinese and already some people might not care as much. The more the public relates to a victim the better. And some people in our community don’t get as much attention when they go missing, from the media or the public or the police. If you’re homeless, or a sex worker, then you can forget about…’

  My face must paint a picture, because Mum trails off. The world never ceases to surprise me with how messed up it is.

  Mum crawls closer to put her arm around me. ‘I shouldn’t say things like that to you. I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s okay.’ I rest my head against hers and sigh. ‘You can’t protect me from the bullshit, Mum. I’m gonna find out anyway.’

  That makes her laugh a little. She drapes the mended tights over my legs.

  ‘I should warn you, your dad wants you to transfer back to Morrison. He always overreacts.’

  Even though I’ve been thinking a similar thing, I can’t help being annoyed. ‘Dad never wanted me to go to Balmoral in the first place.’

  He said it was a school for the elite and he complains every time he has to pay his half for field trips or uniforms. Mum thinks if she has those phone conversations in the laundry I won’t hear them, but I do.

  ‘Well, your dad wasn’t exactly supportive of my desire to have an education either.’ Mum picks up my sketchbook from the side table.

  I want to ask her whether she thinks I should switch back, but the words stick in my throat.

  ‘You know there’s no reason to think that you’re in real danger, don’t you, Chlo? This kind of thing is so rare, even though it probably doesn’t seem like that right now.’

  ‘I know.’

  And I do know. At least the rational part of me does. I wish someone would tell my body though, because I keep catching myself with my hands curled tightly, my shoulders tensed for no good reason.

  I watch as Mum leafs through my carefully drawn cityscapes, the botched life drawings, my first linocut attempts that didn’t turn out too badly at all. My sketchbook is more of a work of art than my actual finished pieces, even though it’s messy and confused. It’s my precious baby, the closest thing I have to a journal or diary.

  ‘Have you finished your homework yet?’

  Her casual tone doesn’t fool me.

  ‘I’ve done all of my homework, and I’m up-to-date with my reading,’ I say, even though this technically isn’t true. There is no such thing as being up-to-date at Balmoral—that falls into the realms of impossible. ‘And I take Art, so this is homework too.’

  I chose all my electives at the start of the year, under the strict eye of Mrs Benjamin. I got the distinct impression that academic scholarship recipients were expected to focus on STEM subjects, instead of pursuing anything creative, so I had to dig my heels in to get my two units of Art.

  Mum kisses me on the forehead and stands up. I know she’s far from being a tiger mum, but she might have finished her landscape architecture degree, might have had a completely different career, a different life, if she hadn’t had babies, or had babies with a different man, or hadn’t gotten divorced. I know my life is supposed to turn out differently to hers.

  ‘I see how hard you work, hon.’ Mum frowns at my mug. ‘But please don’t drink that crap so late in the day.’

  DAY 6

  Enter the dungeons and you’ll find that the lockers and the doors and the rubbish bins are small, even the toilets are made for dolls. Tinytown, infantville, the basement corridor where we can observe the lowest of the low in their natural habitat, the Year Sevens and Eights.

  I’m a giant of course, metres taller than the rest—I’ve been almost twice my usual size for six days now. Walking on stilts, walking the corridors like I have army boots on, not scuffed school shoes, stomp stomp stomping on the cack green carpet with my loyal supporters trailing behind. New headphones clamped on, shiny gold ridiculous, but what no one knows is that there’s no music trickling through them. The corridor sounds muffle down to almost nothing and I move to an imaginary beat and that’s how I keep fooling everyone.

  Sarah is with me, and Marley too, but Ally is in sick bay with monster period pain under the care of patchouli-reeking Nurse Lee and Nurofen Plus, but only two every four hours because dependency on legal drugs is almost as serious as dependency on the fun ones.

  The Year Sevens cling to their lockers like scared little baby dolls, with round faces and big eyes and squidgy mouths and spiky eyelashes. They hobbit about doing babyish things with their lunch hour, building forts with the tables, swapping worthless plastic bracelets, trying to figure out what they can afford at the tuckshop with their last $2.30.

  ‘That’s Natalia,’ I see one mouth to another. ‘Year Ten.’

  Let them see my summer uniform hitched high, hair unbrushed for days, Sharpie tattoos on my thighs. Let them know they don’t have to care about the rules despite what everyone says. Disobey, but don’t get caught.

  I ignore the lapping at my ankles, the still-rising tide of if it happened to her it could happen to me, the swishing I need to be ready and what if I’m next. Put your gumboots on because, they haven’t caught him he’s still out there and it’s not going away, how long will it be before he gets the urge again.

  I’m high and dry because I gave up at 36 hours, along with the police. Because you can choose to be hopeless, that’s what I’ve learnt.

  After six days it’s almost as if she never existed at all.

  I wave at Posy, this year’s favourite baby doll, and Posy waves back. Even at twelve you can tell that Posy is going to grow up to rule her year level and be a mega-babe, the sort that isn’t the prettiest, but is the most interesting, the most magnetic. Posy is sweet now, but she’s only months away from realising her superiority and then she’s gonna turn from a sugary little lollipop into a sour lemon nightmare and her parents and teachers will be disappointed because she used to be such a nice girl.

  I turn the corner out of Tinytown right as the end-of-lunch bell rings. This next part of the dungeons smells of unwashed PE uniforms and forgotten sandwiches. The Year Eights are smack-bang in the middle of their awkward phase, labouring under their oversized backpacks like beetles.

  ‘You are no longer cute!’ I yell in celebration because I’ve decided that my Friday afternoon gift to myself is that I’ll stop working at lunchtime. I’ll spend periods five and six snipping off my split ends and planning my weekend with my phone hidden inside my inside blazer pocket because they make secret agents out of us with their nonsense rules and they make liars out of us with their lies.

  I stop.

  I survey the emptying dungeon with an odd metallic taste in my mouth. Something is askew, like in those puzzles I loved when I was a kid: find five things wrong with this picture.

  ‘Where’s Amanda?’ I ask the closest beetle.

  ‘Her parents took her out of school.’

  ‘Why?’ I ask, even though I already know the reason. Amanda’s older sister Ruby wasn’t in Biology this morning. Cowards run away, and Amanda and Ruby’s parents clearly have no grasp on the statistical probability of teen abductions.

  Why is everyone thinking about the
mselves, when they should be thinking about Yin?

  ‘I don’t know.’ The Year Eight girl quails, looking away. ‘I’m gonna be late for Maths. Mr Scrutton will give me detention.’

  ‘Please,’ I say. ‘Scrotum is way too nice for that.’ The Year Eight looks confused so I have to explain. ‘Mr Scrutton. Scrutton, Scrotum—remember it.’

  I let her go. She’ll run to her friends and report on what I’ve told her and they’ll say Scrotum for the rest of eternity.

  ‘What are we going to do with our spare?’

  Sarah hasn’t spoken in five minutes and I wouldn’t be able to tell you the last time that happened, hallelujah it’s a miracle. I’d almost forgotten she was there.

  I flip my headphones off.

  ‘Oh, I have detention. I got busted wagging RE this morning.’ The lie slips out beautifully—the best sort of lie, the one you don’t know you’re going to tell until it’s half-said. A good lie gives me a warm tingle. ‘I said I couldn’t stay after school so Mrs Preshill said I had to do it in my free period.’

  Sarah pouts. ‘We have a theory. We need to tell you.’

  I should be relieved, I suppose, that Sarah is talking about something other than herself. But if she says one more thing about Yin’s parents, I don’t know what I’ll do.

  Marley nods furiously behind her. ‘But we shouldn’t discuss it here.’

  Sarah ignores that. ‘It’s Mr Martell. You know, Tyrone.’

  I do know. Mr Martell is the school’s official photographer and he’s not ancient and he’s rumoured to have had sex with a handful of Year Twelves, or at least copped a handful of almost-legal Balmoral boob.

  Mr Martell is supposedly hot, but his legs are bandy and he’s going to go bald early, you can already tell. He’s a bagel in a shop full of sliced wholemeal bread: not that exciting, especially if there are donuts available right around the corner.

  ‘Did I tell you about the time during theatre sports when I caught him pointing his camera right at my tits? Right at them! I should probably tell the police that.’