The Slipping Place

by Joanna Baker

  As the books burned, the pages blackened and curled. New pages arched up to join the burning ones, sucked up, she supposed, by the heat. The paper turned silver, then white, then crumbled to powder.

  She had read somewhere about a man burning holy books. When he threw the books on the fire the paper burned away, but the letters, protected by some property of ink maybe, survived for a second. Instead of shrivelling they glowed, and then, swirling in the hot current, they rose into the air.

  The letters in Alan’s books darkened, then became shadows on the silver, then they disappeared. Nothing rose.

  But as she looked at the letters, changing and not floating, she heard some words again, and dies while it recoils. She remembered where she had heard them. They were from ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’. The old woman. The old witch. She was quoting the poem Roland thought of as his own. He had been talking to her. Instead of his mother, or even Lesley, Roland was talking to that nasty old drunk. Heaven only knew what kind of help she was providing, what kind of influence she had over him.

  Veronica decided to try the bookshop one more time.

  There was less traffic today. In Macquarie Street a station wagon slowed and turned into a driveway. Wind blew a fine spray of rain at her, but the weather was clearing, the snow mostly gone. Today the mountain was partly covered by ragged streaks of cloud, with one corner of the Organ Pipes showing, hard and straight.

  The Honda was still visible over the fence and the door of the bookshop was still locked. There was no sign of movement.

  A car door slammed, causing her instinctively to turn. Across the road was Sutton’s Hotel. There was a ute in the drive-in bottle shop and two people standing at the cash register. The ute came down the driveway and went past, the driver looking at her. She stepped back, glared again at the shop’s upstairs windows.

  Her phone beeped. A text message. Roland.

  Thu, 21 Jul 2.34 pm

  I need you to go to the slipping place

  Chapter 8

  ______

  You can see the cold, she thought. It was there in the blackness of rock, the tightness of heath, in curls of silent mist. Veronica was a thousand metres up, on the path across the front of the mountain, and the icy air was cutting into her, despite her coat and gloves. She was well above the forests, in a field of broken rocks, spotted with lichen. Further up, the Organ Pipes loomed forward, heavy and wet, their tops streaked with moving cloud. The slope was almost vertical, with the road out of sight a long way below. It was difficult to believe you could make it down safely.

  She put a hand on a silver log to steady herself and looked outwards. Up here the sky appeared not as a lid but as a great violet space. Somewhere in the south, a break in the cloud allowed through a trail of pure light which, before it reached the land, dissolved into mist. And all that emptiness, for some reason, made her more aware of the mountain, the immense unforgiving weight of it, the feeling it always gave her, that there was something she was supposed to know.

  After the first message Roland had sent another:

  Thu, 21 Jul 2.37 pm

  Right now. Please. Mum please go to the slipping place now.

  She had already been on the way up the mountain and had had to stop the car to read this, sitting dangerously on the narrow edge of Strickland Avenue.

  Right now. She sat in the car, brooding. She should be angry with Roland, should have been burning his books, not Alan’s. Roland had abandoned her in the same way Alan had, except that he wouldn’t let her be. It wasn’t in his nature simply to stay away. As a child he had operated in a constant state of conflict between rejecting her and running to her for help. This time, true to form, he had staged only a partial disappearance from which he was managing to haunt her. His latest catastrophe was being revealed to her in terrible stories and glimpses and second-hand reports.

  And now, finally, as he always did, he had brought the mess right up to her. He was mixed up with an alcoholic and a mother who took drugs. A child had been hurt, dreadfully hurt. Roland had been trying to fix things. That had proved impossible. Now he needed help. And what had he done about that? He had sent a text.

  The message was vintage Roland too – bizarre, operatic in tone, and nonsensical. But it also conveyed, as far as anything could be conveyed on these tiny screens, genuine distress. So no, she wasn’t angry or even indignant. She was sick with apprehension.

  Then, before she had started the car, there had been another message:

  Thu, 21 Jul 2.50 pm

  I’m so sorry.

  Apology as afterthought. Another of Roland’s specialties. But then there had been a fourth text, sent unfinished, possibly by mistake:

  Thu, 21 Jul 2.54 pm

  Mum I need

  A tiny phrase and a huge one. Universal. A timeless imperative. At this point, faced with his irrationality, she had realised that it was important for her to stay calm, to think and not to rush. The mountain would be freezing. She turned the car in a driveway and drove home for walking shoes and warm clothes before heading back up to Pinnacle Road.

  Despite the wind and the remnant snow, she had found the gate at the Springs open. There had been nobody else on the road. She had parked at the Chalet and climbed past the stone picnic shelter and walked up, under the prehistoric banksias and through snow gums, grey, streaked with peachy orange. Then, for the first time in years, she had started out towards the Slipping Place.

  She couldn’t think what might be behind the message. It was hard to see how it could relate to his friend and her child. Treen. Mayson. He wouldn’t have brought them up here in this weather, with the snow only just cleared. The most likely thing she could think of was that there was going to be a message he had left here, some theatrical gesture. Maybe Roland himself would be here, wanting to talk to her in this beautiful place with its happy memories.

  As it was, she almost missed the entrance. The little cairn the boys had built, all those years ago, had been knocked down, the smooth rocks scattered along the edges of the path. She didn’t notice them at first, maybe because of the eye-watering cold. But when she was almost past them, she stopped and went back. This was a place only her family knew, a gap between two boulders, edged now, but not then, with a mountain pinkberry and a tiny candle heath. Roland used to chant from the fairy tale when he got here, and the door did open and he went in and he was in darkness. But instead of darkness the gap led to a mossy cleft, then a climb up to a flat rock, surrounded by bushes and open to the view. This was the place where Lesley had handed out the custard creams. And just beyond that, still there, glowing white in the icy afternoon, was the fallen tree where the boys had played their sliding game.

  Veronica found the gap narrower than before. Her hips brushed the sides and when she heaved herself up the large steps there were complaints in knees and ankles. She braced herself before the last one, stood waist high to the rock, gloved hands lumped before her, and then she stopped. Someone was there, in front of her, on the rock.

  In her early days Veronica had spent years managing a GPs’ surgery and after that she had raised four kids. She knew what to do with surprises, especially unpleasant ones. Slow down. Stop. Focus inwards. This time she had two reactions very quickly. First a startle, a catch of breath, a sting of nerve endings, then, instinctively realising the person on the rock presented no danger, she had a social response. Her mouth opened. It was possible she made a noise, but that was torn away by wind before she could hear it. And after that, as it became clear what it was she was seeing, both of those responses fell away and she was aware only of the growing, soaking cold.

  On the rock in front of her, lying immobile in the frozen wind, was a girl, a young woman. Nearest Veronica was a boot, plastic heeled with a platform sole, cheap and cracked from the walk here. The other foot was bare. The girl’s arms were half bare too, and yellowish. Her face was hard, mottled. Her eyes were open.

  Veronica pushed herself up onto the rock. She took thr
ee small steps to stand above the dead girl, feet apart, looking down. There was a moan now, a high, sad wail, echoing somewhere in her head. Very clear. It was almost a sound.

  Long, straight hair: blonde, darkened by moisture. Treen from the bookshop. Treen from Paul’s story. Treen with the injured child. Roland said you’d help me.

  And at the same time, it wasn’t her, not Treen at all, but an object, something made to look like her, more a shop dummy than a version of the living girl. The legs looked hard and thin. The boot looked fake, solid, like a block of wood. And the one bare foot was greyish blue, plastic, with long, curled, inhuman toes – animal claws.

  For a moment Veronica could not feel her own feet, her connection with the rock. She was aware only of the air around her, the immeasurable space. She put a hand out, into nothing. The wind here was treacherous. It felt solid. You thought it would hold you up, but snatch at it and it would vanish. If you leaned on the wind you would fall to the rock. Lie there. Like the girl. The body, the not-girl.

  Somewhere a thought was trying to intrude. Roland. Roland had known about this. He had sent her here to sort it out. Oh, Roland, what is this? What have you …? But she couldn’t afford this now. She pushed all thoughts away.

  She had found something terrible, and very large. She formed the word again in her mind. Large.

  Words could hold the mind. They could be clung to.

  She gathered sensory details, placed them deliberately into her consciousness – vibrating bushes, the coarse grain of the rock, the mossy tree trunk and, behind her, the sudden edge.

  Treen … the body … Treen had jeans that were cut low at the top, revealing some inches of hip flesh. Above that there was only a striped T-shirt. She was lying on her side facing the mountain, knees bent at different angles, as if she had been crawling somewhere and had toppled sideways. On one wrist there was a silver bracelet with chain links and a big clunky clasp. The other arm was above her head, the three-quarter sleeve exposing a stretch of bloodless skin. Near that hand there was a jacket, a puffy synthetic thing. Treen’s face was tipped up towards the jacket, almost as if she was trying to catch it. Her hands were waxen and blotched, no sign of a vein. The finger ends looked torn. They were stained with black dirt and with a lighter brown, blood maybe.

  Not far from her hands, on the wall behind the rock, some stones had been dislodged. Most of the stones were grey, but there was one that was smooth and white. And there was a patch of moss that had been scraped away, exposing hard black mud.

  Hypothermia. People did this, when they were dying of cold. They undressed themselves. And they dug in the ground. Some kind of burrowing reflex. It didn’t bear thinking about. As she was dying, this girl, this poor young thing, had scratched at the earth until her fingers bled.

  There was a sudden space in the wind, a momentary stillness. A pool of mist thickened beside her, circled for a second, softly bright, then rushed past.

  Please go to the slipping place right now. Roland knew this girl was here. Had he seen her before she died? Had he been here?

  The skin of Treen’s face was colourless, but not yellow. Not bluish either, no hint of marble. It was more a blighted grey, tinged, if anything, with orange. A kind of oyster. The silly word made Veronica want to laugh. She lifted a hand to her mouth and found that the other hand was already there. Now she was remembering mountaineering stories, some man who had been taken for dead but had come to life again and crawled into camp kilometres away. Veronica had to touch her. More than this, if she was alive, Veronica had to hold her, take off her own coat, lie down, share her warmth. She pressed her hands into her mouth, gave herself another second, then pulled off a glove and knelt down.

  There was no snow on the girl’s face. No frost. No iced-up eyelids, as in films. Treen was just wet. Her face was threaded with tiny red lines. At the corners, the cracked lips were the same colour as the rest of the face, but in the centre they were black.

  Help me. Please.

  Veronica herself felt stiff. She felt that it would be impossible to move her own arm forward. But it did move.

  The cheek was hard – not like marble, like rubber – swollen with water. But the membrane was delicate as if, at too much pressure, it would shatter.

  She pulled her hand back. Her knees were hurting on the frozen rock, but before she allowed herself to stand, she reached out again, put a finger to the pulse in the neck. Softer here, but no movement. She looked again at the eyes, lids smeared with black make-up, the rims a dark, dark red.

  No hope, then. No need to do more. There was a flood of relief – immoral, unpardonable relief – and with it a full awareness of the horror of what she was seeing, what she had touched. This time she heard the noise she made, an ugly sobbing, sucking sound. This would have to be controlled. She pulled her hand away quickly and reached for her phone.

  Chapter 9

  ______

  Three years ago, Veronica had framed one of her early drawings and hung it on her kitchen wall. It was a waratah, done in a forest near the Meander. Now she was standing in front of it, mesmerised – by the fine filaments, the Fibonacci curls. She couldn’t understand it, that mathematical precision, the impossible delicacy, the stillness. She couldn’t remember drawing it, ever being that … It seemed a long time ago.

  She tried to think about all the time between the drawing and this night in her kitchen, but somehow she had lost the ability to imagine time, lost the ability to divide it, to track things. Here, standing at her bench in one little pool of light, with the dark house around her, looking at this picture, it didn’t seem to mean anything to say that something had happened a long time ago.

  According to the oven clock it was eleven thirty. Had she spent hours at the police station, or hours here, looking at this drawing? She remembered coming home. The poor policewoman who had been roped in to drive her here had been sombre and diligent and so tenderly young that Veronica found herself wanting to protect her from the knowledge of what was on the mountain. The policewoman had opened Veronica’s iron gate, driven the car into the garage, then walked back out to a police car waiting in the street. She had closed the gate carefully behind her.

  But when had that been?

  The downstairs heaters had come on at four but the cold of the mountain had stayed with her. She put a palm on her iron clay uten-sil pot, the brown-grey earthenware. Hard. Gritty. She drew on its strength.

  She had to act – to think first, and then to act.

  First she needed to remember what she had said to the policeman, Detective Sergeant … No, the name had gone. She pictured him: late thirties, clear skinned, muscular, voice and movements carefully modulated, podgy around the middle. He had creases ironed carefully into his shirtsleeves. She kept wondering if he had just arrived at work or if he kept a clean shirt in the building for important interviews.

  There had been a woman detective, who helped take her statement, but it had been the man who had led the interview. He had asked her what she had been doing on the mountain. She told them a preposterous story – that she had gone for a walk to visit an old favourite picnic spot. She tried to persuade them that she had been moved by some kind of misplaced nostalgia to drive up the Pinnacle Road into a gale and sit on a wet rock.

  ‘On the mountain,’ said the policeman. ‘In a blizzard.’

  She didn’t correct the meteorology, just shrugged and claimed that she was a keen bushwalker. This caused a movement of the policeman’s eyebrows. She no longer looked like a hardy outdoor type.

  She had tried to think clearly. Above all, she didn’t want to connect Roland with Treen’s body. He had to be picked carefully out of the story. As a defence she had tried affecting a degree of middleaged befuddlement.

  It was plain that she was under suspicion herself. Before they let her come home, they had left her alone in a room for a long time. And now they would surely watch her house. That meant she couldn’t go to look for Roland tonight. Going out in the morning
would appear more normal. Possibly they would follow her, but that couldn’t be helped. But for now she would have to stay put. She tried ringing Roland, and Paul, but neither answered.

  Several times during the course of the interviews, the police had offered to contact someone for her but she had declined. She still didn’t want to ring anyone. No friends or neighbours, not Alan, none of the three children whose whereabouts she did know. She couldn’t drag any of them into this. She had been evasive with the police, and at some point she had probably lied to them. She couldn’t now remember precisely what she had said. They would be following up on everything. She would have to talk to them again. But she was certain about one thing. This was something only for Roland and her.

  From here on she had to make sure she acted carefully and didn’t make matters worse. What was required was clear thinking.

  She walked around the table, turned on some more lights, touched the fridge door, then went past it and ended up back at the bench again.

  Roland.

  Roland and a dead girl.

  Mum, please go to the slipping place. Right now.

  He had known. It was there in the urgency. Roland knew there was something important (an awful, inadequate word for it) on that rock on the mountain. Someone had told him … or no, if someone had told him such a fantastic story, that there was a dead girl lying on his childhood picnic site, he would have gone to see for himself. He had seen it, then. He had found Treen. And she must have been already dead. If not, he would have called an ambulance, waited, or carried her. He would not have left her there.

  So why had he run? Why had he sent his mother to the mountain? There was something she wasn’t seeing.

  Roland. Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came. Where was he now? What was he thinking? What did he know?