The Slipping Place

by Joanna Baker

  Treen didn’t tell him about the pregnancy. She was already in a de facto relationship and she passed the child off as belonging to Dane, and they raised him, if it could be called that. Roland had returned to Kandina and continued his bumbling existence, happily oblivious to the consequences of his actions and choosing not to reflect too hard on any of them.

  Treen and Dane were neglectful and erratic parents. They were living in Mornington at the time. Dane was violent and over the years Mayson and his mother had suffered repeated bashings.

  Mayson. Her grandson. Had been hit. And burned. No amount of abstraction or redefinition was going to make this tolerable.

  At some point Treen’s friend from school, Belle Ahern, had joined the household, but this hadn’t helped. The girls started making hand and face creams. Then, in March, Mayson was seriously hurt. Treen had called Paul to the house and he and John had called an ambulance, but they hadn’t known what else they could do. They hadn’t wanted to get involved.

  Paul said, ‘She realised I wasn’t … the right sort of person to deal with it. So some time after that Treen tried to get Roland to come and help. I think she’d been trying for a while to get hold of him. It would be a way out for her, the fact that Roland was the father.’

  ‘It’s true then?’

  ‘Roland seems to think so. And Treen says she knows, because of the timing.’ Paul moved uncomfortably. ‘I can’t see a likeness but Roland said he could. In the eyes or something.’

  A sudden painful picture of Roland at preschool. Blonde curls, eyes light hazel, almost yellow, already with Alan’s heavy lids. An odd-looking child. Heartbreaking.

  She hadn’t seen a likeness either. But then, she hadn’t been looking for one and she had only seen the child in dim light. She would look again, next time she saw him.

  ‘Anyway, Treen finally managed to convince Roland, and he came to help. He wanted to meet the boy and talk to Treen before he told you. So he stayed with Mum and visited them and tried to spend some time with Mayson and get to know him. Treen wanted him to take them to the mainland but I don’t know if that was going to happen.’ Paul was in difficult territory here. ‘I mean, not Treen. He didn’t … He might have been going to take the boy.’

  Take the boy? Take on a son? He might have been going to bring her a grandson? The thought brought Veronica a rush of emotion, a visceral, biological need to hold him, to hold them both.

  ‘But then Dane found Roland at the house and punched him and scared him off.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure he wasn’t scared …’ Veronica stopped herself. She had rushed to Roland’s defence, when really that is exactly what had happened. Roland was scared of physical injury. People were afraid of that in the normal world.

  ‘He made a strategic retreat. He stayed away for a few days, but he was still planning something, trying to work out a way to get the little boy away from Dane. But you know … how do you do that?’ Paul’s chin was raised. He was pressing his lips together, holding her gaze, the way he used to look when Roland had done something wrong.

  ‘Treen used to give Mayson adult sleeping pills. Just to keep him quiet, to keep him from upsetting Dane, you know, but what did that do to him? Anyway, he had to be awake sometimes, and when he is awake he’s pretty much out of control, so it was only a matter of time before he got hurt again.’ Paul visibly paled at some horrific thought.

  ‘Then on Monday or Tuesday Treen disappeared. And on Thursday she turned up on the mountain.’ He paused, as if he thought something should be said about that, but then he went on. ‘Belle started texting me, telling me what was going on. Anyway … at some stage Roland had given Treen and Belle your name and address and told them that in a genuine emergency, if they couldn’t find him, they should contact his mother. So when Treen disappeared and she didn’t hear from Roland, Belle wanted to look for you. She got as far as the gate, but she … was put off by the …’ He waved a hand, indicating the house and garden, ‘… size or something. But she ran into Lissa in Centrepoint and asked her to talk to you. She thought Lissa would have more chance of being heard in your world. Which is probably pretty accurate.’

  ‘So when I arrived at the shop, she wasn’t able to talk and she knew Lissa was about to contact me.’

  ‘I suppose so. She wants you to take Mayson away.’

  ‘She wants to clear the decks for a fresh start with Dane.’

  He grunted.

  Veronica went to the sink, drank water, put some in front of Paul, found there were already two glasses there, and sat down again. It was after eight o’clock. They must have been sitting here for some time. She felt swollen in the eyes and neck. Under the table she rotated her ankles, curled and uncurled her toes. There was food on the table, too – sourdough rye, nut butter, apples, shortbread – but they hadn’t eaten anything.

  A grandson.

  ‘So we’ll go there. Mornington, did you say?’

  ‘They moved, months ago. All of them, Treen and Belle and Mayson and Dane. Before Roland came. He was visiting them in their new place. In South Hobart.’ He waved a hand vaguely, as if he was pointing to Treen’s house.

  South Hobart. Close to here.

  Paul said, ‘They’re just across the road from the bookshop.’

  Yes, only a few blocks away. So that must be why Roland was staying at the bookshop. Not because he liked the company of that old alcoholic, because he could be near to Treen and his son.

  She said, ‘We have to go and get him.’

  Now that the burden of telling his story had left him, Paul looked not relieved but miserable. ‘It’s not going to be that simple. Belle wants you to take Mayson, but Dane won’t allow it. He still thinks he’s the father. I don’t know if Treen told him. She was pretty sure about the dates. But he’s angry about Roland hanging around. And now Treen’s dead.’

  ‘We really need to get Mayson away. We need to prove paternity, but the first thing is to get him into our world, surround him with family.’ As she said it Veronica felt a stab of doubt. She thought of her big empty house. ‘Family and friends. We make a plan. I don’t know. But we need to get him out of that house.’

  ‘We can’t go when Dane’s there. But Belle says he’s working tomorrow.’

  ‘So soon? After Treen’s death?’

  ‘Belle says he is. They can’t have a funeral until the police release the body. And her family are organising all that. Dane is apparently sidelined or something. And someone offered him a job delivering firewood.’

  ‘So we go then. Tomorrow.’

  ‘Belle wants us to go at nine. By then he’ll be well gone.’

  ‘All right.’

  When Paul left, Veronica let Ridley in, fed him and straightened his mat and the blankets in his basket. Then she made herself go upstairs and shower. She put on yoga pants and an old cashmere jumper. Then she went back downstairs and stood at the French window in the kitchen, looking out across the terrace to the dark garden. Her head was full of pictures of the little boy. Her grandson. Bashed, burned. Bones cracked. She turned her back to the glass and sat on the floor. Somewhere in her thoughts there was a large weight – or no, it felt more like a space, a vast, dark absence, poisoning and freezing her normal functioning.

  It wasn’t guilt. She was logical enough to see that. She hadn’t known of Mayson’s existence. There was no moral dimension to it. Or no, that was preposterous. A child had been tortured. Of course, there was a moral dimension. But it wasn’t as simple as guilt. It was larger than that. What she felt was more like fear, repugnance, a deep gaping horror that life could deliver such things. A sense that she would never understand the world, that she had been wrong about everything. And, lurking under all that, waiting to be released, there was rage. A deep, deep anger against the world and its injustices, against the unfeeling, evil callousness of the universe.

  She thought of the boy: podgy, lumpish, sleeping squashed in a pram. She had only seen him twice. And in Lissa’s photographs. And in a n
ewspaper photograph, with a pixelated face.

  There was no question of going upstairs to bed. She went to the back door of the family room and pushed into the great mass of stuff they had piled there. She pulled out a single mattress and dragged it down the corridor and through the kitchen. She laid it down beside her chair and found sheets and a doona.

  As the night wore on, her mind softened. Thoughts of Mayson pooled with others, memories of her own children, the accidents and falls, felt by her as physical sensations – Roland slipping on that log, hitting his forehead on a rock, blood in his eyes; Tom going backwards off a wall onto a concrete floor; Libby kneeling on glass hidden in the sand; and Tom again, a hockey accident, ten stitches in his chin. Hers. All of them hers. In the moments when she did drift briefly into sleep, and memories met with the stretch and twist of dreams, the injuries became worse, lurid with red. There were screams, high voices shouting, images of suffering children, small bright moments from hell.

  ‘All right,’ she said into the darkness.

  It was three o’clock. She climbed back into her chair and faced the window, looking at the garden. There was a tiny patch of frost in the middle of the lawn. The pear tree, whitish under some invisible moon, was eerily still.

  There was no mystery about what was required. It was simple. Tomorrow she would go and get him. And tomorrow was today, only a few hours away. It was time to shake off night thoughts, time for daytime thinking.

  Up until now she had been worried about Treen, her death, Roland’s involvement. But now that story was of secondary importance. Paul had said it would be. He had said there was something worse. He had said she’d already known about it, implied that she had looked away. He had been right.

  And now Belle had summoned Veronica to help her. She had threatened to accuse Roland of killing Treen but that might have been an act for Dane. She certainly seemed afraid of him.

  This was complicated. Tomorrow she would sort it out. She turned on the Indonesian lamp, a brownish paper shade patterned with black arcs. She stared at the arcs and then, for a moment, she was simply seeing things, spaces, air, colours. She looked down at her own soft shapes under the blanket; thought, this is how a child is. Normally you don’t have time for this sort of thing, what a hand looks like.

  And then there was a space. Not a sinking into darkness, simply a space in time, the way there is after surgery, because when she opened her eyes, the garden was light and there was a metallic sheen on the top of the escallonia, which meant it was after seven.

  Ridley was sleeping beside her chair. She stepped over him, went to the kitchen, made porridge and poached an egg, ate it all. Then she returned to the chair and watched as the frost melted, the sky became lighter, and cold light soaked evenly across her garden.

  Chapter 18

  ______

  Belle’s place was really only a few blocks away from Veronica’s, down Weld Street and a short way up Macquarie. But Paul picked her up in John’s Subaru, just before nine, and drove her there. He pushed past the Saturday morning bustle at the newsagent and coffee shop and parked outside the new fish restaurant. In front of them the mountain was close and very large – not just high, but thick, massive, black. Veronica felt its weight pressing on her, was reluctant to get out of the car, to face what the day would bring.

  There was nothing in this homely neighbourhood to give her any idea of what she might be about to encounter. She looked around, at a pretty homewares shop, a sloping telegraph pole, a cream brick-veneer place housing a wellness centre, and two weatherboard cottages with carefully pruned shrubs behind picket fences. Across the road a driveway led down to a workshop, set up somewhere near the rivulet, and beyond that the ground rose sharply to a hill, where houses looked down on them from among trees. The light was soft here, the road uneven, the footpaths crooked and the lines, the edges of buildings, were all faintly blurred. It was a comfortable place, not a place for those photographs, not a place to hurt a child.

  On the next corner she could see Newman Noggs, its low roof, storybook windows, pink brick. A bookshop. You couldn’t get much more innocent than that.

  ‘Which house is Belle’s?’

  ‘That place.’

  It was just ahead of them on the left, a brick cottage, small and low, raised above the footpath on a cement wall trailed with woody rosemary. Tacked onto the near end of it there was a slumping box of weatherboard with a rusted tin roof and a glassed-in verandah. The verandah window was blocked at one end by some large piece of furniture. At the other end there were curtains, closed, but caught back at the bottom edge, leaving a greyish triangle. There was no smoke coming from the chimney, but that was probably bricked up.

  ‘Are you sure they’re home?’

  ‘She texted me.’

  Paul swallowed. He was apprehensive, she guessed, sick with memories of finding Mayson hurt, afraid that it would happen again. She should be strong, offer to go in alone. But she couldn’t find the courage.

  ‘She’s sure Dane …’ The name felt harsh in her mouth. ‘He’s definitely got work? On a Saturday morning?’

  ‘She thinks so.’

  Up ahead, a girl came out of Newman Noggs. She had on a blue rayon dress, shiny and full, gathered into a leather belt, and a funny little pink cardigan, and heavy boots. She walked with an exaggerated swagger, partly the result of the boots, and partly to show how clever the outfit was. And she was puffing mist into the frozen morning. The innocence of it, the skinny legs, the self-conscious grooviness, the simple concern with fashion and statements of identity, so young and silly and lovely, made Veronica deeply sad.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘We’d better go and see.’

  There was no door on the front of Belle’s house. What had been a verandah was now closed in by glass with scraggly shrubs growing across the old path. At the side, the driveway was almost blocked by the bare canes of a briar rose. There was a small frosted window here, but it allowed no view of the inside.

  The backyard was in shadow and it was very cold, a place of damp concrete and bright green moss, with an overlarge blue gum, a washing machine with no lid, a mildewed pusher, and a pile of black rubber pipes, tangled in weeds. Near the door they could hear running water in the slimy, uncovered drain. There was a faint smell of detergent. The step held an impatiens in a plastic pot, the kind of thing sold in trays in supermarkets. Potted colour. Just one pot, three crimson flowers.

  Veronica knocked and a woman’s voice called from inside the window, startlingly close, ‘Come in.’

  The door handle was an old round one, brass, faded to dull brown, dented, hollow. Veronica turned it, felt it grind past an obstacle and then give. The door led directly into a kitchen, tiny but spotless, eerily so, with the kind of absolute cleanliness you notice immediately, as if it is in the air. The detergent fumes were stronger here and mixed with a hint of disinfectant. There was also a fruity smell, something spicy that Veronica recognised from the shop, the table of creams.

  Belle was sitting at a small table under the window, watching them with a sleepy blankness. In front of her on a plastic cloth were a brown paper bag and a mobile phone. Nothing else. No sign of the child. In the back wall there was a door painted blue. It was closed.

  ‘Hello.’ Veronica’s voice was too high. She sounded nervous. She left a space for an answer, then came closer. ‘How are you, Belle?’

  ‘Not good.’

  Belle’s black hair was combed back today, tied in a ponytail and pressed under an Alice band. On the band there was a pink bow with black polka dots. She wore a white jacket with a star marked out in sequins and a necklace made of white rope, with one end threaded through a silver eyelet, held there with a silver bar. Her eyelids were painted bright blue with no attempt at contouring, the eyebrows too heavy to carry it off. In the pale sidelight coming from the window, her face had the spongy quality of people recovering from a long illness.

  Veronica waited but the girl didn’t elaborate. She se
emed to have none of the usual repertoire of welcoming gestures, didn’t sit straighter, or wave to a chair. But the blankness was not necessarily hostile. She might be nervous, or genuinely feeling unwell. In fact, from her appearance, that seemed likely. Impatient as she was to get to the child, to sweep this strange girl aside as an irrelevance, Veronica knew that wasn’t going to be helpful. To be too forceful or impatient would only generate resistance.

  The window beside Belle had a curtain of brilliantly white netting with a frilled edge, pulled back storybook style and tied with ribbon. All the appliances were pushed back against the wall, not a crumb or a fingermark on anything. There was nothing at all on the sink, not a plug, not a wiper or a tea towel. Certainly no sign that a child lived here.

  Veronica came forwards and put her handbag on the table, beside the paper bag and the phone. She touched the top of the second chair but wasn’t invited to sit down. She said, ‘You’re a good housewife.’ That was banal, which probably didn’t matter. And patronising, which probably did. ‘This is a very clean room.’

  Belle scratched her top lip. Her eyes went to the phone and then to the paper bag. She gave it a small smile, simple, ingratiating, and, without lifting her gaze, reached into a pocket and pulled out a pot of lip gloss.

  Like her kitchen, Belle was supernaturally clean. Her skin had a damp, swollen look, as if every speck of dirt, every trace of the outer world, had been soaked gently away. But the silence, the studied blankness, was becoming belligerent. And somewhere there was the boy. The little boy. Veronica stepped forwards.

  ‘Come on, Belle,’ Paul said from behind her. ‘Stop pissing around. You wanted us to come.’

  Veronica looked at the paper bag on the table. She had seen bags like this before: brown paper, with handles of twisted green and a logo hand stamped, a spray of feathery leaves.

  ‘That’s one of Roland’s favourite shops. Did he bring this?’ She spoke lightly, then, getting no response, picked the bag up, breaking into the girl’s meditation.