It had always been this way. There had always been Daddy. He called and she came.
She rolled over in bed and flexed her legs. She felt stiff all over. Her body ached from digging and she groaned. She hurt, but it wouldn’t do to complain.
‘Us Clements women don’t complain.’ Grandmother had told her that. She’d lost her husband and she didn’t complain. She had pain, but pain didn’t matter. No point talking about it. That wouldn’t help. Ellie sat up. She could be like Grandmother. She’d be tough. Besides, she had to look after Daddy. A delay in attending to him could result in a blow, a slap. It hurt him to hurt her, he had told her that. Sometimes he almost looked sorry. A flash of regret after the words, ‘You made me do that.’
‘Ellie!’
His voice seemed louder, angry. She’d neglected him, spent too long thinking of herself, not of him. Of course he was still with her; there wasn’t a world without him. She started to walk down the corridor to his room but stopped, her skin prickling. The very air felt wrong. The house should have been still, silent, waiting for the living to make it a home. But she felt…something. As if someone had intruded while she had slept the better part of the morning away, something that had spied into the hidden corners of her world.
‘Not alone,’ she whispered. Ellie scratched at her arm, scratched until the skin was red and weeping. Perhaps these walls that had borne silent witness were now releasing their secrets. If not the walls, if not someone, then…
‘Daddy?’ She pushed open the door to his room and shivered. There was something in there, but it wasn’t Daddy. Her Daddy didn’t have those sunken eyes. Her father who art in…where? Ellie pulled the door shut and placed a hand on it, wanting something solid beneath her touch, something real. Rules, routines, these were real. Things to do. Breakfast.
‘A cup of tea and toast.’ That would make everything better.
Ellie filled the kettle with water and smiled. The shell she had gathered on her first night out was sitting on the windowsill. It was hers. Proof. She’d been to the ocean, all by herself. She’d been brave. Her fingertips traced the swirls and whorls of the shell, its silky lustre inside and the rough scaling outside. It had been warmed slightly on the sill and grew warmer still in her hand. Closing her eyes, she let her finger circle the lumpy exterior.
‘I found you,’ she whispered ‘You’re mine.’
The clock in the living room chimed. She jumped. Daddy’s clock. Shouldn’t it have wound down by now? It was Daddy’s job. Daily he would set the clock, check it, and polish its wooden surface. The only other thing she had ever seen him polish was his gun. Ellie placed her shell down on the mantelpiece next to the clock and picked and scratched at the raw skin on her arms. Why was the clock still chiming? Was it going to mark time forever? Or was this eternity—Ellie and Daddy, together in this house, without end? She glared at the hand on the clock that ticked its spiteful way around the numbers. She had no need of wound time. Perhaps when Daddy was buried, the clock would stop and grow dusty. She only needed the sky. When it was light, she could dig; when the sun disappeared, she could go back to the beach, back to the waves, the sand, the shells… for Daddy, and for her. Her treasures.
‘All mine.’ Ellie ran to the bedroom and grabbed her tin from the wardrobe. She tipped it over onto the carpet and surveyed the motley pile. Her collection had grown over the years—the heel of a shoe, a cracked picture frame, a small piece of coal, black and porous. A broken plastic hair clip caught her attention. She remembered the slap, Mummy’s tears, and the hair clip falling to the kitchen tiles. Daddy angry, accusing, ‘Who are you dressing up for?’ Ellie had snatched the broken clasp to give back to Mummy, but Mummy hadn’t wanted it.
She grabbed these once-discarded items that only she treasured and took them into the lounge room. She lined them up carefully along the mantelpiece, next to Daddy’s precious clock.
‘All for Ellie. All mine.’ She moved the globe out of the corner and spun it. ‘My world.’ With a twisted smile, she ran back into her room for her sewing tin and returned. She stuck a pin in the south coast of New South Wales. Eleanor Clements lives here.
‘My home.’ As she spoke the words, she wondered if they were true. It wasn’t her house; it was his. The sensation of not being alone, of being watched, returned.
‘Daddy?’ She couldn’t see him, but knew that if he’d seen her move his things, place her things on the mantelpiece, he’d be furious. Ellie knew the posture he’d take—his hands restless and menacing. She braced herself for angry words, for a fist, but nothing came. He was here and not here. She looked at her shell. She didn’t want to take her treasures down. They were hers and they were here, they were real. The sense of being observed faded. Daddy hadn’t appeared. This time. Should she have prayed for him? What would Grandmother have said? What would the Bible say?
Grandmother Clements had taught her about the Bible. About the apocryphal demons and stories, told her how to discover the devil. Ellie knew the voice of the devil. It was Daddy’s voice in the night, singing Cash’s ‘Rusty Cage’.
Ellie thought of her life, all of those years, shrunk to the size of this house. Her cage, with nowhere to run. She remembered blustery summer days when she thought she would suffocate indoors, baking away under the corrugated iron roof. Daddy had made a little awning for the living room window, the one that could be seen from the road. It wasn’t to keep the sun out so much—the trees took care of that—as it was to provide extra privacy. Another block to the world outside.
Ellie pictured the hole she had begun in the dogs’ enclosure.
‘Dig. It’s time to dig.’ She would put him under the ground. Her arms and back were sore, her hands red and blistered. Digging yesterday had been harder and more monotonous than she’d ever thought possible. But there was more to be dug today. She had to create a bigger space, a greater space to swallow him. Once his body was out of the house for good, she’d be free. She would be rid of this sense of being watched, of another presence in the house. She would dig.
She dressed herself in his overalls, taking his brown knitted beanie, the one he had always worn out in the garden or shed when the weather had turned colder. The pilling threads reeked of tobacco and earth. His scent surrounded her. She plucked off a dried, cobwebbed leaf that was curled on the top and let it drift to the ground. She grabbed the keys and headed out to the shed. She had locked it yesterday. Daddy had always said you had to lock things up, keep them safe from the people ‘out there’. There were bad people in the world, he’d told her, people who would steal, and worse. She’d secretly wondered if the outside world truly was worse than her inside world, but took him at his word. Daddy always knew the right thing to do.
The padlock gave way after a grunting effort and her eyes travelled down to the newspaper that had fallen to the floor yesterday. She picked it up and unfolded it. A picture of Maisie caught her eye.
‘Maisie Jayne.’
Local Girl Still Missing. The black words on yellowed paper were bold and confronting despite the passage of so many years. Ellie read the narrow columns, her lips moving silently as she slowly scanned each word.
Thursday 19 April 1979
Local child Maisie Tillett, age 7 years, remains missing despite dedicated search efforts by police and volunteers this week. A shoe, identified as belonging to the missing girl, was found near the rock pools at Coalcliff Beach. It is suspected the young girl may have been swept off the rocks and into the sea. Due to inclement weather, police have scaled back their search.
‘My friend. I’ve missed you.’ She didn’t know what inclement meant. Grandmother’s reading lessons had never progressed that far. She mouthed the word twice and reread the article. The shoe. A memory came cascading back. The article was wrong. Maisie didn’t like wearing boring shoes; she liked sandals. Her favourites were red with a black sole and a silver buckle. She’d seen Maisie wearing those sandals; they
were pretty.
‘Oh, Maisie, where did you go?’ Ellie dropped the newspaper on the bench and knelt down to see what else she could uncover in this cupboard.
There were two more yellowed newspaper articles about Maisie and her mysterious disappearance, one saying she must have drowned, the other suggesting she had been abducted. There was something about other missing children, Beaumont children, from another beach, another state some thirteen years earlier, and Ellie put the paper down. They, like Maisie, had never returned.
Her hands plunged through the cupboards, knocking objects aside and stirring up a wave of dust until she reached another aged and filthy cardboard box that had been shoved to the back of the shelf. Within it, Ellie found more photos, photographs of people she didn’t know, people she supposed must have been relatives of Daddy and Grandmother Clements. Why else would he have kept them? There was nothing of Mummy’s and nothing else that mentioned Maisie.
‘Later.’ Once she had finished her day’s digging she could take the box inside and examine its contents more carefully. Ellie grabbed the shovel. She pictured Maisie, safe and well, shiny red sandals on her feet, smiling at her from behind the fence. ‘See you later, alligator.’
In the dogs’ enclosure, she stared at the hole she’d started the day before. For all the effort she had put in, it still wasn’t big enough. As the blade ploughed into the soil, her foot pressing heavily on the shovel, she felt the muscles in her lower back spasm. She swung the shovel-load of fresh earth to the mound that she had piled up in the corner yesterday and felt the burgeoning ache across her shoulders, arms, and legs. The digging was going to hurt.
‘I’m doing this for you, Daddy, you’ll see.’ Perhaps in the earth he would find peace; maybe they both would. Ellie dug and listened to the earth breathe. It was giving up its secrets.
She uncovered bones. Tiny, birdlike bones. She had known he’d buried the dogs in here, but thought they were buried further towards the back of the enclosure, far away from the door, not in the centre where she was digging. These bones were smooth and delicate. They were dirtier, darker than the little bleached twigs of surf-smoothed driftwood she had seen on the beach. She told herself they were from the dogs, but when she uncovered one tiny human skull, and then another, and then a third, larger, with teeth attached along the jaw, she couldn’t deceive herself anymore. These weren’t the dogs’. These were the babies, her babies. It wasn’t until she saw the tiny fingernails that had sloughed off the fingertips that she realised she was crying.
Ellie stooped, collected the bones, and made a small pile. She tried to wipe off as much dirt as she could, then cradled them in her arms and carried them to the laundry. She took out the small plastic basin, filled it with lukewarm water and a little detergent, and gently placed the bones in. The water discoloured and darkened throughout the afternoon as Ellie returned again and again to deposit more of the tiny skeletal remains she uncovered.
One of the miniature skulls had a crack in it, a long fracture that travelled down the rear of the skull. The image of her beloved Ever’s head, the one Daddy had shoved into a jar and mockingly given her to play with, flashed before her. Just a detached, dead specimen in a jar to be examined and discarded.
‘My babies.’
Ellie stopped for a late lunch when she thought she could take no more. Her back and neck felt so stiff and sore from all the bending and digging that she was afraid her spine would be permanently bent and crooked. She took off her father’s beanie and dropped it on the overgrown grass in the middle of the yard. The heat, combined with the smell of her father, was too much. She started to scrub the encrusted dirt and death from under her fingernails, but stopped. It was futile. She would have to return after lunch to dig more of his grave. Besides, she would never be clean, truly clean, no matter how much she scrubbed. She didn’t need stains on the outside of her body to remind her of that.
She’d eaten and re-entered the enclosure, surprised to see Percival inside.
‘No. Scat cat!’ The cat ignored her. He had dug himself a hole in her pile of upturned dirt, scraggly roots, and loose rocks, and was going to the toilet. She gestured with the shovel. Percival sauntered away, tail held high. She never hit him and he knew it.
It seemed wrong for him to use the enclosure now. It was no longer a cage; it was a crypt. A home for bodies and bones.
‘Oh, Daddy,’ she whispered, ‘our babies. My babies.’
After thirty more minutes, Ellie walked into the shed in search of gloves. Her hands were blistered and broken, her once-soft palms now masked in dirt and weeping red skin. Her flesh was raw. She cursed herself for not thinking of her father’s leather gardening gloves sooner.
‘Stupid girl.’ She heard his voice, followed by that of her grandmother, ‘Hopeless, just like your mother.’ Daddy had worker’s hands, miner’s hands, rough, calloused, and hard. She had never thought he had needed the gloves. What could possibly pierce his reptilian skin?
She forced herself to work through the agony in her muscles and her torn, bleeding hands. Her flesh grated against the stiffened fabric of the gloves. Pain branded her palms, but she did not want to stop. She couldn’t waste these daylight hours. His grave had to be dug. Ellie returned to her methodical, repetitive movements—dig, lift, throw. One, two, three. Her arms and back burned and the shallow pit had grown, though more slowly than she liked. The ground was so hard. Would it be big enough? Deep enough? He had to stay down. She had to be sure.
Her hair, dark and lank with sweat, stuck to her face. She thought briefly about putting it up under the beanie, but couldn’t be bothered retrieving it from the grass. A flash of red in a shovelful of dark, pained earth caught her eye.
‘Ha!’ A ladybird, a real ladybird, buried in the dirt. Ellie pushed down on the shovel, her weight on her right foot to cut through the wiry roots, when she saw another dulled spot of red. On its side, the little plastic loop holding a dirty magenta strand of thread bleeding behind it. It was a button. She left the shovel leaning awkwardly in the compacted dirt and bent over, her gloved hands scrabbling and digging, until she had released them all. Four little red ladybirds. Four little plastic buttons to match the button she had discovered by the shed. Ladybirds, just like Maisie had had on her red cardigan. Old envy struck Ellie anew. She had never owned anything as cute or pretty as that cardigan with those little ladybird buttons.
‘Pretty.’ The word slipped out of adult Ellie’s mouth as easily as it had as a child. She tore off the gloves and tried to rub the ingrained dirt from the surface of the buttons. Her broken nails picked at the plastic domes. Tendrils of wool trailed between her fingers, fragile and filthy. That skull, the teeth…
‘Maisie, no!’ Ellie screamed out her friend’s name again and again, her fingers scrabbling and scratching at the soil, hoping against all reason that she would uncover Maisie herself, alive and well.
‘Want to play?’ Ellie imagined Maisie’s voice, her smile, and called out, ‘I’m here, Maise. I found you, I found you.’ Her fingernails tore and snapped as she scraped away at the hard soil, accomplishing nothing. Her vision swamped by tears, Ellie bent double and vomited on the ground.
‘Oh, Maisie, I’m so sorry.’
It was late afternoon when her exhausted body conceded defeat. She was spent, but she hadn’t been able to stop digging, to stop searching. Covered in a gritty sweat, her hair was plastered to her neck and she stank. It was an effort now to peel the gloves from her raw weeping hands. She felt as if she were tearing off layers of skin. She contemplated leaving the shovel in the enclosure.
‘Everything in its rightful place, Ellie. You know the rules.’ She could hear Daddy’s voice. Everything and everyone had their place. She started to cross the backyard, dragging the shovel behind her, her arms too tired to carry it properly.
‘Fuck you, Daddy.’ Ellie let the shovel drop to the ground. She didn’t want to foll
ow his rules anymore. She didn’t want to hear his voice anymore. She wanted… She stood stock still in the middle of the yard. What did she want? She wanted to confront him, yell at him, wanted to know what else he’d hidden from her. Ellie looked towards the shed. ‘Yes.’
Inside the shed, she eyed the suspended shelf and the cases. The suitcase. Mummy had had a suitcase like that. Ellie reached upwards, her fingertips barely scraping the base of the shelf. It swung slightly at her touch.
‘Damn it.’
She looked around for something to stand on and decided to clear a footing on the cluttered workbench. Tired as she was, it was a struggle to maintain her balance. Her legs were shaking after the exertions of the day. She extended her arms with a gasp of pain and a fervent wish that the bench would hold her weight.
As her fingertips made contact with the suitcase, the shelf swung with an aged creak. Ellie stretched further, ignoring the aches in her shoulders and ominous groans of the bench and curled her fingers around the handle, tugging it towards her.
‘Come on.’ She jerked the case and pulled it closer, causing the suspended shelf to sway violently and years of dust, cobwebs, and dried possum-droppings to fall onto her upturned face. Ellie lost her balance and landed heavily on the floor of the shed, sneezing and trying to shield her eyes from the still-falling debris. The dirt and stirred dust motes were thick and ethereal in the dancing shafts of light that entered through the clouded window above his workbench. Her sneezing subsided and she tentatively moved her body, hands touching tender spots that would, no doubt, sport ugly bruises tomorrow. The long, wooden case had fallen next to her legs and Ellie flipped the small metal clasps. A dull, flinty smell invaded her nostrils: his gun. It was clean, as if he’d tended to it recently. He cared for this. Ellie ran a finger down the barrel of the rifle before flicking the lid closed and pushing it aside. She was more interested in the suitcase at her feet. Its lid had been dislodged by the fall, the twin locks old and tarnished. She knelt forward, opened the lid, and stared down. Her filthy hands slid into a jumbled mess of clothes, leaving dirty smears upon the faded fabrics. One of the patterns caught her eye. She plucked it out, insensible of anything but this pattern. She remembered this dress. Mummy’s dress. The large, vivid floral print. She fingered it delicately before placing it on her lap, eager to uncover more. There were a couple of musty blouses, some pants, and a skirt, and, tucked in the side of the suitcase, a swimming costume.
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