The Gaps

by Leanne Hall

  My parents didn’t tell me the police were in my room.

  I remember what Marley said about the slippers and pyjamas. I try to stop my brain right there but it slides on, fast. I mostly don’t wear slippers, just really fluffy socks, and my pyjamas are under my pillow, as usual.

  I try to make sense of something that makes no sense.

  I take my glass and plate downstairs and put them in the dishwasher. Faith is still clunking around in the front rooms so I race to the study and power up Dad’s computer. I’ve tried plenty of times to break his email password and failed, but I can still access his calendar.

  I click to the week Yin disappeared. The grid is chock full of appointments but they’re all work things. I bring up his internet history, but there’s hardly anything on there, as if it’s been cleared recently.

  My skin tingles with the thrill of snooping, but there’s also a new and sickly undercurrent. Doubting my parents has never bothered me before.

  The funny feeling propels me out of the study. I bump into Faith starting on the skirting board, and she points at my schoolbag, hockey stick and blazer sprawling across the hallway.

  ‘Nutella, you’re killing me,’ she says with her hands on her hips, a favourite joke of ours.

  I smile sweetly like nothing is going on and of course I move my stuff because Faith’s trying to do her job, not like Mum who is plain old petty about clutter. I pile everything on the side table.

  Faith isn’t done yet though.

  ‘Your friend is still missing,’ she says.

  ‘Yes.’ We stand still and look at each other. Faith has only worked for us for three years, so not long enough to remember Yin, but she must have seen and heard a lot around here in the last month.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she says and I nod and then skid away in my socks, galloping up the back stairs to my parents’ bedroom. I know Faith never found out what happened to everyone in her family during the war. I wonder how she copes.

  Wardrobe and drawer inspection.

  The only moderately interesting thing is the impressive cache of prescription and supplement bottles in the bathroom cabinet. Mum’s are all hormone-related and Dad’s are all mood stabilisers. I read the fine print on those ones and they’re years out of date. So Dad probably doesn’t take them anymore. I don’t know if that worries me more, or less.

  And finally, there is something. Not a secret exposé of a serial killer, but something useful nonetheless.

  A long, see-through white dress on Mum’s side of the wardrobe, simple enough to be a nightie or a slip, but not really either of those things. It has expensive written all over it.

  I sincerely hope it’s not a kinky sex thing, because retch, and I must have it. I jam it under my jumper. There’s no way Chloe can say I look like an evil pixie in something so virginal.

  DAY 42

  The day of the photo shoot arrives and I’m more organised than I’ve been for anything else this year. I wait at the designated tram stop like a total dick with my bag of costumes and the beginnings of an over-the-top hairstyle and a million layers of clothing, wondering why I bossed Chloe into using me in the first place.

  I scroll on my phone while I wait and see that Sarah has already posted pics of her and Ally in Heathrow airport wearing matching outfits, en route to Italy. I don’t see the huge green vintage car until Chloe yells out the window. I cross the road, swimming in deep regret. I have set myself up for an afternoon of pure awkward.

  Chloe’s dad turns down the stereo as I get in and Chloe introduces us. I’m supposed to call him Jeremy. I see a set of piercing eyes in the rear-view mirror. He has his window rolled down, like we’re not in the middle of a cold snap, and blue tattoos on his forearms. He’s surprisingly pale and freckly compared to Chloe, you’d never guess they were father and daughter.

  ‘Right,’ he says, once we’ve pulled out into the Sunday traffic. ‘It’s time to discuss some ground rules with you girls.’

  It’s a relief to hear some classic dad-speak.

  ‘I’ve cleared this with my immediate manager, but not the big boss, does that make sense?’

  A layer of physical power hangs around Jeremy and an inappropriate bubble of laughter rises in my throat, something that happens when people are too serious around me. It makes school speech night and exams hell.

  I grip my bag tighter and pay a whole lot of attention to the green-and-brown leather seat, the shiny chrome trim, Jeremy’s massively pointy shirt collar. When I look up, Chloe is watching me out of the side of her eyes. Out of school she wears jeans and a black hoodie.

  ‘We’ve got an hour, an hour fifteen max. You go in, do your thing, leave everything as you found it.’

  ‘Yes, Dad. You’ve already said this a million times.’

  ‘I’m sticking my neck out for you, Chlo-Chlo. I want to make sure we’re on the same page.’

  ‘Yes, Jeremy!’ I sing out. ‘We are most definitely on the same page.’

  Jeremy gives me a look in the rear-view mirror that makes me wish I’d kept my mouth shut. He pumps the clutch and spins the steering wheel like a race-car driver. I wonder if the police have interviewed him too. When I glance at Chloe I can see it was worth it. Her mouth twists sideways and I know she’s having the inappropriate laughing problem too.

  ‘I’m trusting you girls.’

  ‘Oui, Papa.’ Chloe starts singing under her breath, leaning forward to turn the stereo up. Someone is mid-guitar solo, shredding hard. Her dad starts tapping his fingers on the steering wheel, bobbing his head. Chloe copies him, shrugging her shoulders and bobbing her head. She turns around to smile at me with mock enthusiasm on her face. ‘Yeah!’ She clicks her fingers and points. ‘Yeah, man!’

  I look out the window but a half-laugh escapes me. If we drive fast enough, we’ll drive ourselves right into a time warp and pop out in the seventies.

  ‘Your dad’s cool,’ I admit, after we pull into the scariest place I’ve ever seen. It’s at the end of a nothing road with no one around for kilometres. A padlocked gate, cold wind whistling around large abandoned buildings that look like old factories or warehouses. Jeremy’s Valiant is the only car in the patchy gravel car park. I couldn’t even tell you what suburb we’re in.

  ‘I don’t think I’d go that far, but he’s okay,’ says Chloe. ‘Actually he owes me this, because he’s not around much.’

  ‘Sounds like my dad.’ I realise too late that Chloe means her father doesn’t live with them at all. To cover up, I kick a beer can lying in the dust and squint at the empty desolate horizon. Real smooth Natalia, you’re such a nice girl from a nice nuclear family.

  Jeremy saunters back from smoking a rollie cigarette and looking up into a gum tree.

  ‘What did you have there, Dad?’ Chloe asks.

  ‘That’d be the Yellow-Breasted Warbling Tooter,’ Jeremy replies, and a pleased look passes between them. Those two freaks don’t even smile when they crack jokes.

  Jeremy helps us drag Chloe’s stuff out of the boot and it’s when they’re side by side that I can finally see that they’re related. They look like the type to go camping and chop wood and fix cars with their bare hands. I can barely lift some of the bags, but Jeremy hoists them as if they’re nothing.

  ‘What is this place?’ I ask. After relaxing—sort of—during the drive, my nerves rise again, a bird trapped in my chest beating its wings faster and faster.

  ‘It’s an industrial park used by craftspeople and small businesses,’ Jeremy answers with a black canvas bag balanced on each shoulder. ‘I work in the furniture workshop on the other side.’

  We drag the whole heap of junk into a low brick building and dump it inside a reception area. Chloe waves her dad away.

  ‘This way.’

  I follow Chloe into a darker section of the building, where my eyes are slow to adjust. I lose track of my own feet as we shuffle further into the gloom. Chloe pops a door, a big metal thing with rubber seals that suck and pull apart. She flicks a
switch and fluorescent lights blink into existence. I look inside with her. It smells unusual.

  ‘Here?’

  ‘Yep. Amazing that the power’s still on, isn’t it?’

  We step through and the heavy door clunks shut behind us, only making me jump about a kilometre high. There are tiles on the walls and a concrete floor and the dot-dot-dash of the fluoro lights glare above.

  ‘What is this?’

  ‘A meat locker.’

  ‘A whatsy?’ A chill races through me, above and beyond the chill already in the air.

  ‘You know, a really big fridge. They could have kept meat here, or maybe it was cheese or veggies. Who knows.’

  Chloe’s voice echoes slightly. She lays down the bags she’s been carrying.

  Rows and rows of ghostly pig corpses fill my mind, sides of cow, dead flesh laid out and waiting to be eaten. It’s airless in here, cloying. Something rises up inside me.

  ‘Are you alright? You don’t get claustrophobic, do you?’ Chloe looks concerned.

  ‘No, I’m fine.’ I pull on the door handle with the least amount of urgency possible, but I do a bad job of it. Eventually I figure out I have to pull the lever towards me. Air whooshes into the box, the locker, whatever. I stick my head into the gap, breathe in.

  ‘You and Jeremy aren’t Australia’s first daddy-daughter serial killing team, are you?’

  I try to joke but she sees straight through me.

  ‘We’ll try and be in here as little as possible. Let me show you where to get dressed.’ She herds me out, using the same voice you would on a doddery old person or a cat cowering under a car. ‘It’s going to take me a while to set up.’

  A crow caws somewhere nearby as I let myself back into the meat locker. Now that my eyes can cope I see that it’s just a freestanding metal box in a bigger warehouse space, nothing more sinister than that.

  We’d discussed how I was supposed to look in the shot, but I’d kind of run with my ideas a bit. I tried to keep my mind on Chloe’s folio and all the visual references she’d collected, I really thought carefully about it.

  Chloe stops what she’s doing to look, a set of leads in her hands, gaffer tape bangles around her wrists. I stand, one bare numb foot on top of the other, horribly, unfamiliarly awkward.

  ‘It’s good,’ she says after a few seconds.

  ‘Really?’

  A cold draft blows up the see-through white dress I pinched from Mum’s wardrobe. I’ve got my floral bathers on underneath, and I’ve blanked out my face with white powder, blending blue eye shadow here and there for that half-dead look. Most of my effort has gone into my hair, which I’d started at home, tangling and plaiting bits of it up, pinning it into place. On top is the crown that took me a week to make. It’s a crown fit for a travelling Opal warrior queen, made from twigs and feathers and plastic magical stones from my secret suitcase. A relic from Wingdonia, a re-creation of the fantasy.

  No one but me needs to know what it means, not even Chloe.

  ‘Nah, it’s better than good, you look great. I’m nearly done.’

  Chloe seems different here, out of school. More grown up, more herself. She finishes taping the cords down and checks all the connections.

  One corner of the room has been turned into a set. There are two of those umbrella flash things, a crumpled sheet on the ground, fairy lights taped up, battery packs and cords hidden away to the side. The lights bring out the mottled patterns and stains on the concrete. I can see the ideas from her folio coming together.

  ‘How do you know so much about this?’

  ‘I don’t really. I read a lot of Wikihows.’ Her long black hair hangs over her shoulder as she checks the spidery tripod and camera for stability. ‘All of this belongs to school. If we break anything, we’re screwed.’

  She straightens. ‘Right. Can you lie here? I put a little cross on the spot, see that masking tape?’

  I lie down slowly, arranging my nightie around me. The cold of the concrete floor shocks my skin.

  You wanted dark, Natalia, I tell myself, you wanted real, so lie down already.

  Chloe takes some test pics, murmuring to herself. She rearranges my feet and arms and holds a little white-balance meter near my face.

  ‘I have no idea if I’m doing this right,’ she says.

  With my eyes closed, the clicking of the SLR sounds like insects chirping.

  ‘I don’t know what the hell you’ve got on your head,’ says Click-Click-Chloe, ‘but it works.’

  Damp seeps into my muscles and joints and I let it. I wanted everyone to stop lying to themselves and each other and look at what’s really happening, to all of us.

  I’m dead, I tell myself. My heart has stopped, my blood is sludge, the electricity in my brain is gone.

  When you’re dead everything stops, the activity in your cells creaks to a halt. Your brain powers down, the sparks that leap from neuron to neuron cease, all your thoughts and memories and what you think of as your personality is gone because your brain machine has stopped. You don’t have a soul, because what you thought of as your soul was just electricity in your brain. You only exist while the machine thinks you do.

  Afterwards, where do you go? What happens to all these thoughts?

  I start to shiver, the smallest possible tremors all over.

  ‘Are you cold? Can you handle a few more minutes?’

  Chloe speaks to me from a thousand kilometres away. I manage to lift my head.

  ‘How does it look?’ My mouth barely moves.

  ‘It’s hard to tell on the display, it’s so small. I want to try one more thing, if you can hack it?’

  She leans over me and shakes a ziplock bag full of feathers. ‘It needs more colour. I’m trying to do this black, white and red thing.’

  The scarlet feathers drift over my goose-bumped arms like light-falling snow. I close my eyes and hear the camera beep and click.

  But too soon the shivering, the leaf-fluttering shakes return. I shake from head to toe, I couldn’t stop it if I tried, I’m a girl possessed.

  Maybe this was what happened to Yin, or is still happening now: the cold, the bare skin, the helplessness. When we were little girls we would go everywhere holding hands, take baths together, sleep in the same bed. How could she be going through this alone? How did we end up so far apart?

  ‘Only a few more,’ Chloe murmurs.

  I retreat further into my own head which is bare and calm, as empty as the meat locker. When the tears come, they’re silent. They come without announcement. Plain salt water, trickling down my nose and running over my cheeks.

  I think I have it in check but then the stream flows stronger, the water rises and threatens to flood. I have to push against it. Enough. Let out just enough.

  ‘Sorry,’ I say with my eyes still shut. The shivers take over my body, becoming bigger and bigger, like I’m having a fit. The more I tense my muscles the more they misbehave, my body has a mind of its own.

  Chloe’s feet shuffle on the concrete. I will my body to stop convulsing, ashamed for her to see me like this, but her hand comes down on my shoulder, heavy and reassuring and warm and she keeps it there, squatting by my side until the tremors have run through me and away.

  If my mother were truly psychic about my bad behaviour as she claims to be then she would be able to sense that Chloe and I are currently eating our body weight in trans-fat-laden French fries and gluten-soaked burger buns and almost one inch of definitely non-organic meat slathered in corn-syrup-laced ketchup. Jeremy has gone to the enormous alcohol-barn across the road and left us to feed the empty hole that artistic genius has created inside of us. I might officially be a muse.

  The restaurant is super-heated and I’m wearing every bit of clothing I brought and some of Chloe’s as well, but I still can’t stop the shaking that springs from somewhere in the middle of my body.

  Chloe pulls the patty out of her burger and eats it first, and then eats the salad and then eats the soggy bun and it
’s a really gross way to eat. I try not to look at what she’s doing but the upside is that she doesn’t mention how shaky I am, and we pretend like nothing out of the ordinary happened. I like that about her.

  ‘I want to eat these fries for the rest of my life.’ I demonstrate by putting five in my mouth at once. ‘What else are you doing for the hols?’

  ‘Pretty sure it’s going to be nothing but homework and this project,’ Chloe replies. ‘Dad’s letting me use the spare room at his house.’

  ‘Will you send me updates?’

  Chloe’s phone beeps. She checks it with one hand.

  ‘Is that your secret lover?’

  ‘Ha! Nice try.’ She puts her pillaged burger down and wipes her fingers. ‘Actually, it’s my friend Katie. She’s worried that she’s pregnant. I have to go over to hers and watch her pee on a stick tonight.’

  Her face doesn’t even change expression as she says this. If one of my group got preggers, you’d better believe there’d be an instant world summit. The disturbing image of Sarah, Ally, Marley and I wearing those dorky baby carriers on our fronts flashes at me, uninvited. It’s horrific.

  Chloe laughs at my appalled face. ‘It’s a false alarm. She’s on the pill, but she’s a stress-head. Sometimes I think she wants it to be true, because then she wouldn’t have to finish school.’ Chloe finally lets one half of her burger bun rest in peace. ‘What would you do if you got pregnant?’

  The question takes me by surprise so much I answer truthfully. ‘Well, I think I’d have to have sex for that to be an issue.’

  ‘What do you—oh. Oh, right.’ Chloe looks embarrassed. She suddenly pays enormous attention to her thickshake.

  ‘Yes,’ I confirm. ‘You may say it out loud. I am the sluttiest-looking virgin in town.’

  ‘No! I wasn’t thinking that.’ Chloe has flushed adorably red.

  ‘I’m joking,’ I say. ‘It’s not a precious gift I’m saving. My sister says I shouldn’t be so heteronormative and that I’ve done enough stuff with enough people to consider myself not a virgin. I’ve done everything but it—what about you?’