The Slipping Place

by Joanna Baker

  ‘Like lettuce at the back of the fridge,’ said Miriam, not intending to be funny and quickly looking ashamed. ‘Oh.’

  ‘They do take their clothes off.’ Joss had her fingers on her throat, but kept her perpetual calm. ‘I’ve heard that somewhere.’

  When Britta came in, they insisted Veronica tell the story again. It was the sort of thing people needed to hear more than once, and Miriam seemed to have forgotten about her shop. While the story was told, Britta stood up and looked out the windows, as if she’d like to be back in the garden. Then she joined them.

  Miriam said, ‘It’s horrible. Horrible. You poor, poor thing.’ She had her elbows on the table, fists in front of her chest, almost praying. She put a hand out towards Veronica. They all stared at her red nails.

  ‘Not me,’ said Veronica. She looked at her empty plate: cream streaked with yellow-green syrup, three golden crumbs.

  ‘You didn’t know her?’ Britta had her hair cropped short. She wore practical working clothes, jeans and T-shirts and jumpers. She had a knack for getting to the core of things.

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘You just happened to go for a walk up there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘On a kind of whim?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And there she was.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Miriam.

  ‘Well.’ Britta pulled her wrists back into the loose sleeves of her hand-knitted jumper. She was looking closely at Veronica’s face. She said, ‘That’ll teach you to have these ideas.’

  ‘Did it make it into the paper?’ said Miriam.

  Veronica hadn’t thought of the paper. Miriam went to the desk to get the laptop.

  Britta said, ‘In the text you said you had to go somewhere. Where are you going today in such a hurry?’

  ‘I have to ask someone about Roland.’ For a moment Veronica longed to tell them everything. She had an enormous yearning to sink down into the comfort they would offer and the help they could give: Joss’s calm, Britta’s acute mastery of things, Miriam’s energy. But she couldn’t do that until she knew the level of Roland’s involvement.

  ‘Is he still missing?’ said Miriam, coming back to the table. As well as the laptop, she was carrying the wine glass and the plate of cheese. Without commenting, she put them next to the bowl of coagulated tagine. She opened the laptop. ‘Really. That boy.’

  ‘Yes.’ Veronica tried for the sort of annoyed laugh she always gave when Roland was causing trouble. It was all right to talk about this – the fact that Roland was missing was completely unconnected with the dead girl.

  ‘I’m getting a bit sick of the whole thing,’ said Miriam, wobbling the curls again. But she was distracted by the computer. ‘Hang on.’ She touched the mousepad and waited a second. ‘They’ve got a picture.’

  The Mercury had acted quickly. The police must have got hold of Treen’s family overnight and released the name. Now, under a predict-ably sensationalist headline, ‘Mountain tragedy: frozen girl, partially clothed’, there was a short article naming her as Katrina McShane, twenty-four, stating that she lived with a de facto partner, Dane Weinberg. It provided detail of where she was found. She was thought to have spent two nights on the mountain and early indications were that the cause of death was hypothermia. Alcohol and prescription drugs hadn’t been ruled out as complicating factors but it was too early to report an actual cause of death. There wasn’t much more. The police wouldn’t say yet whether they were treating the death as suspicious.

  ‘Treen,’ said Miriam. ‘What sort of name is that?’

  ‘But they have these ugly made-up names, don’t they?’ said Joss. ‘Who?’ said Britta.

  ‘You know …’ Joss waved a hand. ‘I mean, look at her.’

  Somehow, in the middle of the night, reporters had found a friend or family member who was willing to talk and provide a photo of Treen. It showed her sitting on a chair with a small child on her knee.

  ‘Oh yeah. She’s a druggie of some kind,’ said Miriam.

  Treen looked as she had in the bookshop – gaunt and grimy, with lank blonde hair and tattoos on her upper arms. The child’s face was pixelated.

  ‘Still. So young,’ said Veronica.

  ‘Oh.’ Miriam was chastised. ‘Poor you.’ ‘Not me.’

  Treen had strong cheekbones and thick eye make-up. She was laughing but not happy, her mouth forming a word. In one hand there was a cigarette, and she had the other hand around the stomach of the child, but she was turning away. She seemed to be telling the photographer not to take the photo, which made the photo, its existence, its presence on the screen, seem a kind of violation. She was dressed in a sleeveless top, which Veronica found unbearable. She wanted to wrap her up.

  And she wanted to protest. Joss and Miriam were in no position to make judgements about Treen. This was just a photograph. It didn’t give them access to anything. Veronica thought about Treen in the bookshop: Help me, please, the rash at the corner of her mouth, the grip.

  ‘I wonder what will happen to the little boy,’ said Joss, pulling her hair back from her face and leaning forward to peer at the photograph.

  The child on Treen’s knee was identified by the caption as her son, two years old. His name was omitted but Veronica remembered it. Mayson. Paul had said Mayson’s head was badly injured in March. This photograph had been taken in summer, before that. He looked small for his age, plump, babyish, vulnerable. He seemed to be struggling to get down. One of his arms was bandaged, and there was a mark on the other, a dark, crooked line. Even the pixelation of his face looked strangely brutal.

  There was a link to a second article titled ‘A terrible act of cruelty’. That phrase was attributed to a friend of Treen’s, who had already been interviewed. She claimed someone had driven Treen to the mountain and left her there. There was a photo of the friend, a pretty, dark-haired girl called Belle Ahern.

  Veronica took them back to the photograph of Treen and her child. It had been taken outside an old-fashioned shopfront. They were in front of a window and next to the little boy’s legs there was a wall of glossy blue tiles. On two of the tiles a corner had been cracked off, forming a grey V-shaped space. At the sight of it, Veronica straightened in her chair. She had seen this before, but she couldn’t remember where. It might be something she had known as a young girl. V for Veronica, a sense memory, vague as a dream.

  Outside, a gust of wind blew droplets onto the windows. Leaves rained down from the camellias and stuck on the sandstone.

  ‘This winter,’ said Joss.

  ‘The paper will love it if they find you,’ said Miriam. ‘It’s going to be a good angle for them. A girl like that found by a doctor’s wife.’

  ‘Oh, that’s silly.’

  ‘Sandy Bay matron. From one of the old Hobart families.’

  ‘There aren’t any old Hobart families,’ said Veronica. ‘There are only old people. The children have all gone.’

  ‘Haaa,’ Miriam wailed with scorn. ‘You’re tired.’

  Veronica looked at Joss. ‘And there are new people who come chasing something and sometimes they find it and sometimes they go away.’

  ‘All right,’ said Miriam. ‘Old Hobart woman, then. That’s you. Old, lonely Hobart left-behind person. You’re still a big posh contrast to this one.’

  ‘This one?’

  ‘Well, this –’

  ‘She was a person, you know. Not an empty shell. In a way, we could say she now knows something we don’t know.’ They were all staring at her. And she didn’t blame them. That had been nonsense. There was nothing Treen knew. Treen didn’t exist. ‘Sorry.’

  Veronica wanted to go out and look for Roland. She needed to get going. But before she did that there was something she wanted to ask them. ‘What do you know about Silas Marner?’

  They stared at her. She waited.

  Joss swayed gracefully in her chair. ‘It’s a Thomas Hardy novel.’

  ‘George Eliot. Do you know anything
about it?’ Veronica had googled it, but she wanted to hear what her friends said. Maybe there was something she wasn’t seeing.

  ‘There was a movie,’ said Britta. ‘Ben Kingsley.’

  ‘I love him,’ said Miriam.

  Now they were slipping into a kind of unconscious irony, into caricatures of themselves, the way old friends did, out of habit, or boredom, or, in this case, the desire to comfort each other.

  Britta provided information. ‘It’s about an old man who saves a little girl. And then she saves him. You know. Spiritually.’

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ said Veronica.

  There was a silence. Suddenly no-one seemed to know what they were talking about.

  ‘Why?’ said Britta.

  ‘Never mind. Just one of Roland’s silly things.’ Most of what Roland had done over the years defied explanation.

  Miriam allowed herself another small snort.

  Veronica said, ‘I do have to go.’

  Old friends, seeking the comfort of their customary roles – Miriam looking at her fingernails, Joss nodding patiently, Britta silent and sharp. She was doing it too. Veronica the Vague.

  ‘Go where?’ said Britta.

  ‘Just a bookshop where he might or might not be staying.’

  Veronica pushed her chair back and they all stood up.

  ‘Are you sure you’re up to it?’

  ‘The police have my mobile number. And there’s nothing I can do for the poor girl.’ They should use her name. ‘For Treen.’

  ‘That’s not what I asked,’ said Britta. ‘Don’t be silly. I’m perfectly all right.’ ‘You’re not.’

  And of course she wasn’t. She was pale and puffy, and heavy, and stiff. And stupid. ‘But we have to keep moving. That’s what we do, don’t we? The living?’

  They stared at her.

  Joss gave her a hug, which she, Joss, seemed to need. ‘Don’t forget the vow. All for one, any time, because usually the one is me so it’ll be nice if it’s you for a change.’

  ‘I won’t forget.’

  ‘You fed the poddy and you fought that whole foreshore thing for me.’

  ‘Yes, all right.’

  Miriam reached for the old tone. ‘All right. You just swan off, then. We’ll clean up your kitchen for you.’

  ‘I should hope so. And try not to excite Ridley. You know how he gets.’

  They all looked at the dog, drooling on his mat. Veronica had to avoid doing that. For some reason the sight of him made her chest ache.

  Miriam was looking in the fridge. She held up an open tin of tuna. ‘You’re joking.’

  ‘Anyway.’ Veronica took a step towards the door.

  ‘I’m coming back tonight,’ said Miriam. ‘With gnocchi.’

  Chapter 11

  ______

  Veronica pulled the Saori scarf higher around her neck. It was one of those bright days, clear skied and freezing. Macquarie Street was full of black dampness, cut with ice-white sunlight, with a wind coming from Cascade Road, a river of icy air, slipping down from the mountain.

  The door at Newman Noggs was still locked. She banged on it, shouted. There was no sign of the blue Honda. At the window there was nothing to see but books, the edges of pages, a dense wall of paper.

  ‘Roland! Judith!’

  Neither Roland nor Paul were answering their phones.

  She knocked on the window. Futile. It wasn’t just the paper that was dense. It was all those printed words. Words that didn’t rise. Those millions of little black marks, all that knowledge, all those unwanted, impenetrable stories, insulating the inside from her futile noise.

  Lesley had said something about getting lost in pages. She had talked about the way words obscured things. She had said drawings might present truths that words couldn’t hold. Veronica hadn’t realised it at the time, but now she saw – these weren’t Lesley’s ideas. She had got them from Roland.

  Lesley and Roland were close, closer than Lesley liked to admit. Veronica stared at her reflection in the blocked window. Roland told Lesley things that he wouldn’t tell his mother. She didn’t resent that closeness. It had always been like this, and Paul was the same with her. And, in the end, that might be a strength. If there were things Roland knew about Treen’s death, maybe he would talk to Lesley.

  ‘Hopefully he’s found somewhere better to stay.’ Lesley wriggled around in the driver’s seat, turning herself more towards Veronica. ‘That old bookshop is fairly gruesome. I don’t know how he could stand it, even for a few nights.’

  The gallery didn’t open until twelve on Fridays, but Lesley always started work upstairs at nine. Veronica had come here to find her. But as she pulled into a parking space Lesley had come out and gone to her Audi. Veronica had run across and got in with her before she could drive away. Lesley had said she was just ducking out to the coffee roasters, but she had seemed happy to wait long enough to discuss Roland.

  Lesley said, ‘Heaven only knows where he’s gone now. He’s obviously in one of his states, floundering around getting nowhere. That’s what he does, doesn’t he, in a crisis.’

  ‘So you know about what’s happened?’

  ‘The poor girl?’ Lesley grimaced and nodded. ‘It’s in the paper.’ ‘But you’ve talked to Roland? Recently?’

  ‘He rang me just a moment ago. He borrowed someone else’s phone.’ She made a despairing noise. ‘I said he could come back to our place, but he didn’t seem to hear. He was caught up in the terrible story. He told me he had involved you. How ghastly.’

  ‘Why didn’t he use his own phone?’ Veronica thought she knew the answer to this. But she wanted to hear how much Lesley had been told.

  ‘He seems to think the authorities are after him, because he knew the dead girl. And it’s a suspicious death, or whatever they call it. Roland said someone drove her to the mountain and left her there to freeze to death. He said he knew who it was.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Of course, I asked, but he wouldn’t tell me.’

  ‘Oh, Roland.’

  Here among the buildings the air was very still. One side of the alley was in deep shadow. On the other, sunlight fell on brick, fading it to ashy pink.

  Lesley was saying, ‘I told him it wasn’t acceptable. I asked him what had been going on. But it was one of those one-way communications.’

  Veronica knew what she meant. It wasn’t just that Roland never answered a question. Really he never listened at all. Conversations for him were simply an unrolling of his own ideas, interspersed with small bits of noise from the other person.

  Lesley said, ‘I’m not really angry. He was very distressed about the girl’s death. He insisted I find the article in the Mercury and look closely at her photograph.’ Lesley leaned down and picked up an iPad from near Veronica’s feet. ‘He kept saying there was something important in it, something I needed to see.’ She pressed the button, lighting up the article and the photograph of Treen. ‘She’s certainly an unfortunate kind of girl.’

  Lesley might have been referring to the way Treen had died, but Veronica knew she also used the word as a euphemism. It meant unfortunate looking. And now, seeing Treen through Lesley’s eyes, Veronica had to agree. Treen had long pale cheeks. Her shoulders were turned away but she was glaring back at the camera, saying something, bad tempered. The fingers holding the cigarette looked discoloured, dirty. In the bookshop, Veronica had found Treen repellent and even in this photograph, something found on Facebook, or supplied to the paper by a friend or relative, she looked unappealing. Even the child was struggling to get away from her.

  Lesley said, ‘Apparently the boys were friends with her at school. She was called Kattie, then. From Howrah or Rokeby, one of those places. But there was a best friend called Belle who was from Sandy Bay.’

  Lesley classified people according to which suburb they lived in. Veronica knew she did it too. It was an antiquated idea, long past its usefulness, but a habit that was hard to shake.

  Lesle
y said, ‘Belle features in another article. You don’t remember them, do you?’

  ‘There were so many girls.’

  Lesley laughed drily. ‘And all in love with Roland.’

  ‘What did he mean, that there’s something important in the photo?’ Veronica leaned sideways to look more closely. Treen’s heavy eyeliner made her look secretive.

  ‘Oh, the usual nonsense, I would think. He said there’s something I could learn. He was just making a point.’ Lesley lowered the iPad. ‘Treen is the girl he’s been trying to help. I’m sure Paul told you all about that. Roland always did have a fascination for these dreadful types of people, didn’t he? Such a waste of a beautiful boy. He should be back on that beach of his, in the sun and the water. Instead he gets obsessed with these … dark places.’

  These were just words. It wasn’t the way Veronica wanted to receive information about her son. Words obscured things. She had had that thought before. She couldn’t remember where. Her mind kept drifting off on tangents. But there were things she needed to know. She tried to concentrate.

  Lesley said, ‘Really he only rang me to give me a lecture. He said we all need to be understanding and forgive the things that people do.’ She waved the iPad, offering it as evidence. ‘And in Treen’s case I’d say there was a fair bit that needed to be forgiven. She was a terrible mother. Paul has been telling me about her. She took drugs and the child was filthy.’

  ‘Her partner was violent, wasn’t he? That can’t have been easy.’ ‘Oh, well … apparently.’ Lesley had a way of speaking, a slight hesitation before she answered, as if she had taken offence at what had just been said. It was almost imperceptible, but it was frequent, part of the rhythm of her conversation.

  Veronica said, ‘The little boy’s been hospitalised at least once.’ ‘Oh yes, and of course that is terrible. Why do women stay in these situations? I’ll never understand it.’ Lesley rubbed her fingers on the sleeve of her fine wool coat. ‘Then again, you don’t know what to believe, do you? I can testify that the child was perfectly healthy the day he came to my house. Full of youthful vigour. He jumped on my couch with dirty shoes and put a scratch in the wallpaper. In fact, that child was the cause of Roland’s rather ignominious departure.’