Trick of the Light

by Laura Elvery

  In the mountain cabin, Beth would find peace. From all the regular things, she figured: job stress and fatigue from five a.m. spin classes four times a week and weekends that bulged with weddings/thirtieths/fortieths. She’d find order in paper and pen – there would be no wi-fi. She eased the car around a bend in the road and came up close behind a motorcyclist. She checked her phone. No messages, but no reception either.

  Behind her eyes a headache prowled. Maybe she could eliminate it before it took hold. Her grandmother used to treat headaches by soaking a face washer in vinegar and water and laying it across the patient’s forehead, on a couch, in the dark. But Beth didn’t have vinegar or a face washer, and it never worked as well as when her grandmother had done it.

  She overtook the motorcyclist and turned into the driveway before he caught up with her. Inside, Beth unpacked the groceries. The cabin was only two rooms, really, with a kitchenette in one corner beneath the high beams of the main room, a fold-out couch where she guessed Jeremy and Mel’s daughter slept, and a bedroom with pintuck curtains and an antique chamber pot that collected spiders on the dresser.

  Beth handled the objects on the sideboard beside the kitchenette. A small teak chest held four Durex condoms, including two past their use-by dates. People with children had less sex; Beth knew that for a fact. She replaced the lid. Beside the chest was a wooden mallard, its jade head bristling, orange feet planted on a stack of paperbacks with stickers from the book exchange down in Windham (Morbid Farewell by JT Pratt, Judgment for Strangers by William Orin Knowles, The Amber Demon by Maya Clarence). She missed Danny. She put on a long cardigan, sat on the couch, pulled the folder from her bag and laid a pen on top.

  There was a knock. Beth’s mind rolled out endless hostage-rape-murder scenarios while the red wine breathed.

  ‘Hello?’ She heard the fear in her voice.

  Seconds later, another round of knocking.

  She moved to the window and slid the curtain across a touch. It was a girl, a pretty teenager. Donations, perhaps. Or directions. Not robbery. Beth opened the door and the cold breeze swept in as she looked past the girl to her own black Mazda on the gravel driveway, half a kilometre from the road, and at least ten kilometres from Windham. The girl must be a hitchhiker. Though she wasn’t dressed like one.

  ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘I’m Charlotte.’

  ‘Pardon?’ Beth shook her head.

  ‘I’m Jeremy and Mel’s daughter.’

  Wasn’t their daughter blonde? And not in high school yet, surely. Out for lunch at the beach at the beginning of their friendship – which must have been five years ago – Charlotte was still in a one-piece bathing suit that was pink-and-white floral, with a frilled skirt that trimmed her hips. That little girl had fussed the fish and chips around on her plate, occasionally dipping them into the tomato sauce. She’d pinched the chips and licked off only the sauce, which had sent Mel quite mad, and the group had finished the meal quickly. Beth had seen Charlotte once since then. Maybe twice.

  This girl had light brown hair and small but noticeable breasts and fingernails painted dark purple. She wore a short dress with stripes and a sailor collar. She took off a backpack.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I’m Beth. Danny’s my … he works with Jeremy. Sorry – what are you doing here?’

  Charlotte sighed. Such effort. ‘I caught a train and then a bus and then I hitched a bit. They told me I could come.’

  ‘Ahhh.’ Measured and dreary and adult. ‘No, you see, it was supposed to be me and Danny, and then Danny couldn’t come, so I drove here by myself.’ An odd sensation came to Beth. The feeling of an uneasy mistake, like lateness. The panic of a dream turning up ill-prepared to teach a class, deliver a eulogy, drive a race car.

  Charlotte shrugged. She nudged the doormat with the toe of a black ballet flat. She looked beyond Beth into the lounge room. ‘I guess there was a misunderstanding.’

  No. There wasn’t, Beth was almost certain. Momentarily, her headache blurred her vision. ‘Let me get my phone.’

  The girl waited till Beth returned, and made sympathetic sounds when she said, ‘No reception.’

  ‘It’s freezing.’ Charlotte glanced up at the trees and patted her arms like she was in a play. ‘Are you going to make me stand out here? I’m their daughter.’

  ‘No – yes – of course not.’ Beth figured she had to get reception at some point, even if it meant driving down to Windham to ring Danny, to hiss at Danny, and find out what was going on. Charlotte was looking at her squarely now. Beth couldn’t read her. She recalled herself in high school standing at the door of her Science teacher’s staffroom to ask if there was some way she too could go on the excursion – a scholarship or something? – humiliation torching right through her, leaving her with little else.

  ‘All right, then. Yes, come in.’

  Charlotte walked past Beth’s open arm, popped off her shoes and wrapped herself in a blanket from the back of the couch. She stood in silence, while Beth checked her phone for texts from Jeremy or Mel. Beth wrote messages – polite, breezy, apologetic in case there had been a mix-up – that hung there, impotent.

  ‘I’ll make you a cup of tea?’ Charlotte offered.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Beth said in her best university-corridor voice, ‘but I’m just not that comfortable. If you really are supposed to be here, then it’s my mistake, and I should probably leave.’ A thin ultimatum.

  ‘We could just hang out.’

  ‘Sure. But we should sort this out first.’

  ‘I’ve met you before,’ Charlotte said. ‘With my mum and my dad.’

  ‘Do you remember that?’ Beth undid the straps of her handbag and dug inside for the box of Nurofen.

  Charlotte dropped the blanket onto the floor and turned to the sideboard. ‘Look at this wanker,’ she said. ‘A Buddha and a blue eye and a book by Christopher Hitchens?’

  Beth stared, the headache taking hold. But a cloudy idea had also formed, seeded by the way Charlotte had said, ‘I’m their daughter.’

  ‘Mel’s not your mum. Jeremy’s not your dad.’

  Charlotte held the book and stroked its pages across her palm. ‘Okay, so I lied about him being my dad.’ She giggled. ‘And my name isn’t Charlotte.’

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘It’s … um, Vanessa.’

  ‘Vanessa?’

  The first lie had hardly burdened her, but now the girl was positively playful. She put her hands on her waist and tapped her belly with her fingers. ‘Okay, that’s not true either. It’s Tennille.’ She picked up the Turkish blue eye.

  ‘You lied?’

  ‘The bit about Jeremy. He’s not my dad.’ Tennille pressed the charm between her palms like a pat of dough. ‘You guessed the truth, though, right?’

  Beth was alarmed. She was almost certain she had not.

  Beth perched on the edge of the couch. Jeremy and Danny worked on the road a lot, selling innovative digital marketing solutions to small-to-medium-sized businesses along the east coast. Jeremy was responsible for south of Coffs Harbour; Danny, north of there. Tennille and Jeremy had met at a service station, where Tennille worked, near the border with Victoria.

  ‘We had sex a few days later – at a hotel around the corner from the servo. There was a green bedspread,’ Tennille explained, ‘and packets of biscuits poking out of the cups on the tea tray.’

  Through the starry expansion of her headache, Beth decided on a single fact: she was more appalled about all this than Danny would be. ‘Oh, Jesus.’

  ‘It was pretty average,’ Tennille said. ‘The shit-hole green hotel, I mean. This place is better. Every time I come here I think how great it is.’ She grinned briefly before a blank look paled her face.

  Beth remembered a picnic hamper that Jeremy and Mel had delivered the first time sh
e and Danny visited the cabin. A Jeremy gesture – the cloth-covered fairytale basket in the woods was him through and through. She felt repulsed. She remembered the photo he had shown her, years ago, of the mermaid costume he said he’d stitched for his daughter.

  ‘And why are you here now?’

  ‘I got my weekends mixed up. I thought Jeremy told me the fourth, but he must have said the fourteenth. Or the eighteenth. Something. I didn’t actually hitchhike. My friend Blake from school dropped me off, but he had to go.’ Tennille folded her arms. ‘I bet you’ve already texted Jeremy to tell him I’m here.’

  ‘I haven’t, no.’ That was kind of true. She’d asked him about his daughter – not Tennille.

  ‘What would you say?’

  ‘That a girl who says she’s your girlfriend has turned up looking for you. Sound about right?’

  ‘But you believe me?’

  ‘Do you want to call your friend – Blake, was it? To come back for you?’

  ‘No reception, remember. It’s the most annoying thing about this place.’

  ‘Right.’

  Beth searched around for her wine glass. ‘When I was little,’ she said, ‘my parents never had any money. But this one time they saved for ages to take us on a holiday, and they rented a unit at the beach where we found fish hooks in the carpet.’ She took a sip.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You were talking about hotels. Mum had to pick them out with her fingers,’ Beth said, ‘and we couldn’t take off our shoes. That was a shit-hole. I’d forgotten all about that till now.’

  Tennille came close. ‘We never had much money either.’ She stood at the end of the couch, almost touching Beth’s socked feet.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘And I know the bit, too, about him having a wife and daughter?’ Tennille said it like a question. ‘No one’s perfect, you know? He’s just a big kid himself.’

  ‘He really isn’t, Tennille. You may be a kid, but Jeremy? He has high cholesterol. You don’t need him. You’re young and bright. Guys like Jeremy—’

  Beth had meant to sound wise and kind, but Tennille stuck out her jaw. Her face reddened.

  ‘Christ,’ Beth said. ‘I can’t believe he’s sleeping with a teenager.’

  ‘I’m not going to tell anyone,’ Tennille said. ‘Well, except you.’

  ‘And you’re eighteen?’

  ‘Now I’m eighteen.’

  Beth groaned. She thought of Mel, working on her own career, something in recruitment, while Jeremy stopped for Diet Cokes and sandwiches along the A1. Beth saw Mel at work functions once or twice a year. Mel ran thirty-five kilometres a week and always looked like she needed a drink. Now, Beth felt an affection for her that was sisterly and warm and elastic. This sort of feeling – and these glasses of wine – would get her through this evening and this conversation with Tennille. Something else would have to get her through the confession to Danny and past any suggestion that he already knew what Jeremy had done. Beth typed out two more text messages to Jeremy, knowing they wouldn’t send, but wanting a record of how she felt right then.

  Tennille wandered to the sideboard. She picked up the mallard. ‘What’s this?’

  ‘You said you’ve been here before.’

  Tennille nodded. ‘I have. What about this?’ she asked, patting the teak chest, not waiting for an answer. ‘Whose is this, do you think?’ She lifted the lid.

  Beth watched Tennille’s face for a pulse of what the condoms might mean to her, but she only tipped her head like a tune was rolling around in there. She put the lid back on and held up three pairs of earrings Mel had brought back from a trip to Africa. A pair of gazelles, a pair of leopards, a pair of black-eyed antelopes, all mingling ark-like in a dish with half a dozen mints. Tennille unwrapped one and popped it in her mouth.

  Tennille had a string of questions for Beth.

  Were she and Danny married? Why not? Would they ever have kids?

  Had she ever met anyone famous? Did she believe in God?

  Where did she work? Were she and Danny rich?

  Had she ever imagined what it might be like to have a tumour? Specifically a brain tumour?

  When she was a kid, what sort of food did they eat?

  Beth saw a way out of the seemingly endless questions. She took a slug of the wine. ‘Are you hungry?’

  Tennille said, ‘Yes, please,’ in such a way, softly and immediately, that Beth was sure she’d never had much in her life. Beth motioned for her to sit at the dining table and wait while she made up two plates of food. She set one in front of Tennille, who tugged at a piece of wet-dry prosciutto.

  Beth watched, her head achey. ‘You eat it. Like ham.’

  ‘I don’t like ham,’ Tennille said, letting it fall from her fingers.

  Beth tried to flatten out her annoyance by pressing her tongue against the roof of her mouth. She thought of the mucky fish and chips at the pub by the beach. Charlotte’s precociousness. This girl’s backward snobbery.

  ‘That cost at least a dollar, that strip alone,’ Beth said, like a wanker with a Buddha and a blue eye and a book by Christopher Hitchens.

  Tennille, squinting, said, ‘Fine.’ She poked the whole thing into her mouth. She exaggerated its passage down her oesophagus. ‘See? All gone.’

  ‘I can see.’

  ‘I’m actually a vegetarian.’

  ‘Seems that way.’ Beth kneaded her temples. A smooth moan. She tried to attach a romance to the pain but she hadn’t even been working hard. The red was almost gone and the grant application draft was still in its plastic sleeve.

  Tennille said, ‘Jeremy was a vegetarian.’

  Pain arched between Beth’s eyes. ‘Please don’t talk about him right now.’

  ‘For like a week,’ Tennille continued. ‘But then I caught him eating a whole roast chicken from Coles.’

  Beth laughed. Tennille was delighted and seemed ready to launch into more anecdotes. Beth swallowed her wine in one gulp. She needed air.

  ‘Do you want to go for a walk?’ She hoped the girl would want to stay indoors.

  ‘Yes, please.’

  Outside, the moonlight ghosted the short path behind the cabin that led into the bush. Tennille put on her ballet flats and a jumper and she took the lead. Her hair was tucked into her collar in a smooth brown wave. She really was gorgeous. Slight and open and light. Funny in her own way. A pretty little thing, Beth’s mother would have said.

  ‘And you’re an actual scientist?’ Tennille asked.

  ‘I am.’ Beth stepped over fallen branches. ‘Conservation, wildlife. At the moment: possums.’

  She slipped her mobile phone out of her pocket, held it high. Still nothing. The unsent messages to Jeremy were flagged with red exclamation marks. Beth remembered a creek, not far from there. She breathed deeply, hoping the freezing air might flush out her headache.

  From up ahead Tennille asked, ‘Did you know that people used to think mountains grew like trees?’

  ‘Mountains?’

  ‘Up and out.’ Tennille mimicked the growth with her hands. ‘Over time, which I guess is why nobody stopped to ask why they couldn’t see it happening.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘I read it somewhere, Beth.’ Her name sounded strange coming out of Tennille’s mouth.

  Beth had lectured at university, often students about Tennille’s age. High-achieving kids straight from school who fell apart days before the first exam. Mediocre ones, resilient and cheerful, their notebooks filled with nonsense. She angled her phone skywards.

  As they walked, Beth felt herself being swarmed by a heavy-underwater-drifting, truly drunk feeling, so she made Tennille sit on damp leaf-litter while she delivered a lecture on endangered possums that were once thought to be extinct. She told her about the moths they needed for food. Wild cats – Beth
would later remember forcing a groggy point about wild cats.

  ‘Your possums,’ Tennille asked, ‘will they survive?’

  ‘They’re not my possums, but I hope so.’ Beth watched Tennille massage the earth with her hands. ‘What does your mum think? Your parents, I should say. About Jeremy.’

  ‘Try to imagine, Beth, two people who could give less of a shit what their daughter does.’

  Tennille stood and headed off, quickening on the track, sticks snapping under her shoes. She placed her hands on grey tree trunks, from one to another, like an animal finding her way. Up and out. Over time. The mountain was an impenetrable lump of rock, isolated, alienating, frightening. Suddenly, Beth had great, expansive love for the girl. She even felt an atom of love for Jeremy because maybe he was nice to Tennille in a way that was new for her. Beth felt many atoms of love for true and steadfast Danny, and atoms of love for her own mother and father, who never had two cents to rub together, but who managed to send Beth and her brothers to school with firm-soled shoes, and who still asked their daughter to post them photocopies of all her journal articles.

  The phone in her hand made a swooping sound. The messages to Jeremy had gone from unsent to delivered.

  A sign.

  You can’t insist on signs, her mother used to say. You can’t insist on clean hotel carpet or a holiday every year or Christmas ham that lasts past December or cars that never break down. Or a head clear of pain, or the fat of a bogong moth to sustain a possum through hibernation.

  ‘Tennille, wait!’

  A minute later, although it could have been more, Beth’s phone dinged.

  You taking the piss? I don’t know what you’re talking about.

  By the time Beth caught up, Tennille had taken off her shoes and was standing as straight and pale as a reed in a stream of water that was cold enough to burn. Tennille pointed both hands down at the water, grinning. ‘Whose idea was this? I can’t feel anything. Not just my feet – nothing.’