The Silence

by Susan Allott

  Louisa made a sympathetic face but didn’t reply. She was miles away. Troubles of her own.

  “It’s not an easy job,” Mandy said. “He takes it hard.”

  Louisa walked through to the kitchen with Isla, making for the back door. She didn’t want to meet Steve out front, most likely. It was best avoided, this whole business. Mandy would have avoided it herself, given the chance.

  5

  Sydney, 1967

  Isla jumped from Mandy’s back door into the yard, clearing the gap between the paving stones. She was glad she was going home. Steve’s truck was dirty again because he was a policeman and he had a dirty job. He had told Isla this. A dirty rotten job, but some bugger’s gotta do it. It got him cranky like Isla had never seen.

  Mummy was standing at the rear of the house, talking to Mandy about grown-up stuff. Isla knew they would forget she was there if she stayed quiet. She prodded at the space between the paving stones with the tip of the hose and squatted down to see if any creatures appeared. They hid in the cracks and you had to budge them out. She had disturbed a spider once, which made Mandy scream and say two bad words.

  “Very drastic,” Mandy said.

  Isla liked the sound of drastic. She said the word quietly to herself as she pushed the hose around the edge of the paving stone nearest to Mummy’s feet.

  “Please don’t say anything,” Mummy said.

  Isla kept small and silent, her knees by her ears, until Mandy spoke again. “You don’t do things by halves, Lou.”

  A line of ants emerged from the base of a large plant pot. Isla put the tip of the hose in their path and watched them scatter. A few ants crawled onto the hose and she held it against her bare leg to see if one of them might run over her skin.

  “I thought it was getting easier,” Mandy said.

  Isla looked up to see Mummy shake her head.

  “I thought the job was helping. You were making friends. Out of the house.”

  “But now there’s the baby,” Mummy said. “I can’t go through that again.”

  Isla dropped the hose and stood up. “I’m not a baby,” she said.

  Mummy put her hand on her belly. “I know you’re not,” she said.

  “I’m four.”

  “That’s right.” Mummy nodded. “Silly me. Sorry, darling.”

  Mandy gave Isla a wink. “Four and a half,” she said. “Isn’t that right?”

  Isla winked back. Mandy had taught her to wink. Mandy could do good faces with her eyes crossed and her tongue out. If you did a face, Mandy would give you a score out of ten. Isla’s highest score was a seven. She squatted back down and saw the ants disappear into a gap in the concrete.

  “Listen to me,” Mummy said. “Keeping you talking when you need to see to your husband.”

  “Takes my mind off it,” Mandy said. “Where is he, anyway?”

  Mummy knelt down beside Isla and pushed the straps of her swimsuit up onto her shoulders. She wiped Isla’s face with her thumb. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s get inside before we burn.”

  Isla ran to the side of the house and waited for her mum beside the hedge that grew between their house and Mandy’s. It was hot in the passage between the houses and the bins smelled bad. They didn’t collect the rubbish over New Year’s and the stink got worse every day. Isla leaned into the hedge. The seawater had made her skin tight and she liked the scratch against her back.

  From the other side of the hedge, Isla heard Mandy’s voice. “Come inside. Don’t you want to come in?”

  Isla crouched down to look through the low branches. Steve was sitting on the top step of his veranda and Mandy stood behind him with the front door open. Steve had his hand over his face.

  “Come in,” Mandy said. She stood beside him and touched his arm. “Please, love. Come in.”

  Steve didn’t move. Mandy waited a little while and then she shut the door and went back into the house. Isla listened. Her legs ached from crouching down and she wanted to go inside but she was frozen there in the hedge, waiting for it to start. Steve’s shoulders began to shake and he made a high, thin noise before he broke down and cried.

  “There you are.” Mummy held her hand out and twitched her fingers. “What are you doing?”

  “Look.” Isla pointed through the hedge at Steve. “Look. He’s crying again.”

  Mummy reached for Isla’s hand. She lifted Isla away from the hedge and picked twigs from her hair. Behind them, Steve sobbed and moaned. Mummy seemed not to notice. “You’re getting straight in the bath,” she said.

  “He’s crying,” Isla repeated.

  “Who?”

  “Steve.”

  Mummy stood still. She held Isla tightly by the hand and listened. “So he is.”

  The air was thick with a bad, rotting smell. A cloud of flies hummed around the bins.

  “We shouldn’t snoop,” Mummy said.

  Isla followed Mummy up the steps of their own veranda, stepping over the tiles with the cracks in them so bad things wouldn’t happen. Andrea Walker had told Isla about the cracks. Andrea was nearly ten and she lived across the street in a house with stairs. She was going to be in fifth class at school after the holidays and she knew about all the kings and queens of England. There was practically nothing Andrea did not know.

  Mummy found her keys and put them into the lock. “Poor man,” she said. “He must have had a hard day.”

  “The children don’t want to go in his truck,” Isla said.

  Mummy looked down at Isla. She brushed a fly away from her face. “What did you say?”

  Isla felt less sure this time as she spoke. “The children don’t want to go in his truck.”

  “Where did you get that from?”

  “Steve told me.”

  “Did he?” Mummy pushed the door open. “What a strange thing to say to a child.”

  “It’s true,” Isla said. When there was no reply, she said it again, louder. “It’s true!”

  Her mum’s voice reached her from inside the house. “I didn’t say it wasn’t.”

  Isla sat down on the step. Mrs. Walker opened her front door and threw a bucket of dirty water over her roses. The Walkers had a car and Mr. Walker drove it to work and back every day. The only other car on their street was Steve’s truck. Isla could see it from here, parked up with one wheel on the curb. The windscreen was dirty with red mud.

  “Isla?” Mummy was calling her. “Come in and shut the door.”

  Isla tried not to look at Steve as she turned around. Her greatest fear was that he would try to take her away in his truck. Mandy had explained that Steve only took children from problem families. You don’t need to worry, she’d said. But Isla had not been reassured by this. Not at all. At the edge of her vision, Steve was a dark shape, hunched over, watching her.

  6

  Sydney, 1997

  Isla and her mum sit in traffic at the lights crossing Anzac Parade. The sky is bright blue and the streets are overlit, artificial looking under a strong sun. Telephone poles cast sharp shadows. The buildings are low, the streets are wide, and the schoolkids laugh easily, keeping to the shade in their wide-brimmed hats and cotton dresses. Isla regrets her black jeans and heavy boots. Nobody wears black in Sydney. She feels like a tourist. A sullen, tired, uncomfortable tourist in a city with the brightness turned too high. She’d forgotten it was this hot in May. And she’d forgotten—maybe she’d never faced it before—that she doesn’t fit in here.

  “Tell me honestly. Is it a bit short?” Louisa looks at herself in the rearview mirror and touches the softly layered hair at the back of her head. “I think it suits me. What do you think?”

  Isla smiles because she doesn’t know what to say. She has envied her mother’s long, dark hair her whole life. Without it she is no longer remarkable. She could be any woman in her fifties. You might think, if you caught her eye in the street, that she must have been beautiful once.

  Louisa is waiting for a reply. She fluffs her hair up at the si
des.

  “It must be easier to manage,” Isla says. “With you swimming every day.”

  “Exactly. It’s dry by the time I’m back inside.” Louisa nods at her reflection and inches the car forward. “I like it. I was sick of all the combing and blow-drying.”

  The lights change. Isla watches a man in a suit and tie push himself along the footpath on a shiny, adult-sized two-wheeled scooter. It looks like a monstrous version of the one Isla had when she was six. He weaves through a group of pedestrians, smiling broadly. Isla wonders if she is hallucinating.

  “You look thin,” Louisa says.

  “Do I?”

  “And pale.” Louisa’s eyes move over Isla’s hair and face before she turns back to the road. “Are you taking care of yourself?”

  “I just spent twenty-four hours on a plane.”

  “Don’t be clever. You know what I mean.”

  Isla stares at the road ahead. Her teenage self wants to jump from the car.

  “I’ve been going to the gym,” Isla says. She is thirty-five years old. She has a career and a life and will soon own an overpriced apartment with a Juliet balcony. “I’ve been swimming every morning before work. Getting fit.”

  Louisa nods and frowns, glancing again at Isla as she changes gear. “The sun will do you good,” she says.

  An empty bottle of orange juice rolls back and forth by Louisa’s feet as she drives. Isla’s feet are pushed to one side by the shopping bags, old newspapers, and unpaired shoes in the footwell. She wonders how her dad tolerates the state of the car. He is a man who hates mess, and her mum—contrary to her stylish appearance—is a woman who would happily live in total disorder. They have argued about it their whole marriage.

  “I’m looking forward to Dad’s party,” Isla says.

  Louisa brakes and they both fly forward, slamming against the seat belts. An empty sandwich carton joins the orange juice bottle at Louisa’s feet.

  “Sorry.” Louisa swears quietly at the van driver in front of them, who is sounding his horn at a kid on a skateboard. “Sorry,” she says again. She looks at Isla and blows a strand of hair out of her eyes. “I wish I hadn’t invited half the street to the party.”

  “I’ll help you,” Isla says. “Let me take care of it.”

  “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  “It’ll be fine, Mum.”

  “And now—” She kicks the sandwich carton away from the clutch. “And now there’s all this business with the police.”

  “Couldn’t we forget about that for the day?”

  “Everyone knows, Isla.”

  She swallows. “Knows what?”

  “The whole street knows the police have been to see us.” The car stalls as the traffic moves on. Louisa turns the key in the ignition, cursing. “They know your father’s a suspect.”

  “Suspect?” Isla laughs, and it makes her throat hurt. “I think that’s taking it a bit far.”

  “Let’s hope so.”

  Isla stares at her mum as she checks the mirror, pushes her sunglasses onto her head. “Do the police really think Dad’s behind her disappearance? This Mandy woman?”

  “Yes,” Louisa says. “They really do.”

  “That’s insane.”

  Louisa tries again to start the car and pointedly does not reply. The sun beats hard against the windscreen. A car behind them sounds its horn. Isla thinks she might put her fist through the window in response to her mother’s disloyalty, her coldness, which is at once staggering and entirely familiar. She shuts her eyes and sees her blood pulsing.

  “Mum.” Isla digs her fingernails into her palm. “Surely you don’t think—?”

  Cars pull out from behind and overtake them as Louisa turns the ignition. The car stalls again and she hits the steering wheel with the flat of her hand. A man in a red pickup shouts at them through his open window. Louisa starts the engine and accelerates, gripping the steering wheel, rigidly upright. Isla adjusts the air-conditioning on the dashboard and lifts her T-shirt away from her skin.

  “That would be a big help,” Louisa says, her voice tight. “If you could take care of the party.” She changes gear. “You’re so good at that sort of thing.”

  Isla drags her hand over her face, fighting the tired, grimy feeling and the lingering rage. “Leave it to me. I love a good party.” It’s true; she is good at bringing people together. It’s also true that she hasn’t been sober at a party since she was fifteen. She turns to the window, where the quiet suburban streets of Agnes Bay have replaced the city landscape. There is not a soul in sight. Roller blinds are drawn at the windows; doors are shut. It could be a movie set: row after row of neat, empty shells.

  “Things are still the same around here,” Louisa says, turning onto Bay Street.

  Isla looks out at the street where she grew up. The houses crouch low under a huge sky, each with a tidy lawn at the front, manicured hedges; wide passages between one building and the next. The small, identical bungalows on the ocean side of Bay Street were built in the early sixties when her parents were newlyweds and property along the coast was affordable. Across the street, the houses are newer, bigger, and wider, with smart fences and red brick instead of weatherboard. Some even have a second story over a garage. But the yards at the back of the newer houses are small squares of grass, fenced off on all sides. Isla must have been three years old the first time she visited the Walkers’ house and encountered the fence that stood between their property and the people behind. She had believed until then that everyone had a beach at the end of their yard.

  Louisa parks outside the house, yanks the handbrake. “So,” she says. “What do you think?”

  Isla can’t speak for a moment. She must have lived in this house almost twenty-five years without ever looking at it. She had no idea it was so ugly.

  “It took your father all weekend to paint the woodwork,” Louisa says. “As soon as you said you were coming home, he managed to find time for all the jobs he’s been putting off.”

  Isla can see now that the fencing around the veranda has been freshly painted. The hedge at the front of the house has been trimmed into a sharp oblong and hanging baskets have been suspended on either side of the door, spilling over with something pink and purple. The weatherboard looks old next to the fresh paint and the baskets look foolish. Mutton dressed as lamb. Her throat tightens. “I’d have walked past it.”

  “You’ve been away too long.”

  She manages a murmur of assent.

  “That one,” Louisa says, pointing at the house next door, “was Mandy’s.”

  Isla turns in her seat. Her mum is very still, holding her hands in her lap.

  “Was it?”

  “You don’t remember?”

  Isla looks from her mum to the neighbors’ house and back. She remembers nothing. The sense of Mandy that she felt on the phone with her dad has gone. She only has the present: the exactness of the buildings, the gateposts, the hedges.

  “You never mentioned her,” Isla says. “I don’t remember you ever saying her name before.”

  “Why would I?”

  “Weren’t you friendly with her?”

  “No, not really. I hadn’t thought of her in a long time before the police turned up.”

  Isla suspects this isn’t quite true. The car is hot without the air-conditioning and there’s a smell of melting plastic. She catches her mum’s eye as she unfastens her seat belt and is surprised to see hurt in her face.

  “She might be living quietly, somewhere remote,” Isla says. “Isn’t that the most likely thing?”

  “I don’t think so. People don’t disappear without a trace these days.”

  “But this was thirty years ago.”

  “Thirty years without a trace is suspicious, Isla.”

  “Says who?”

  “Says the police.” She says it sharply. “They seem to think something happened to her. I’d love to think they were wrong.”

  This isn’t quite true eithe
r, Isla thinks. This is a chance for her mum to air her discontent. Decades of it.

  Isla gets out of the car, slams the door shut, and pulls her bag from the boot.

  “Let me take that,” Louisa says, reaching for Isla’s bag. They have a brief, ill-tempered struggle over who will carry it: Isla refuses to let go and the strap starts to rip from the fabric of the case. She drops it and the weight surprises her mother, almost toppling her over.

  “Sorry,” Isla says. She doesn’t like herself in her mum’s company. Ten years have changed nothing: they still bring out the worst in each other. Tiredness hits her and she wishes she were elsewhere. She longs for the dark chill of London, the damp paving slabs, the cool slant of the sun.

  “I thought we might swim later,” Louisa says, swinging the bag onto her shoulder. “Keep you in the right time zone!”

  Isla follows her mother up to the house, stepping over the tiles with the cracks in them, two at a time.

  7

  Sydney, 1967

  Mandy tipped the remains of Louisa’s gin into her own glass, sat down at the table, and waited for her hands to stop shaking. It was quiet; just the waves in the distance and the hum of the fridge. This was her favorite time of day, once the sun had moved around to the front of the house and the yard had cooled down a bit. Sometimes you got a cool breeze coming in off the ocean. Hard to enjoy it but, when her husband was crying out on the veranda, refusing to come inside.

  She was out of her depth with all this. Nothing she said or did could help him when he came home inconsolable, when he cried at the end of the day. Lately it seemed to bring out the hard-hearted bitch in her; the woman she was trying not to be. The woman only the bottom of the gin glass knew about, who was disappointed her husband couldn’t get on with his job and take the knocks like a man. Who was ashamed of his weakness, God help her. There it was.

  Still quiet. She stood and put some fresh ice in her glass. Might as well sit out in the yard for a bit, try to get some pleasure from the afternoon. She put her cigarettes in the pocket of her sundress. A flower had blossomed that morning on the passion fruit vine, and a couple more were opening up. She put her glass down on the paving stones and held the opened flower to her nose, looked into the heart of the blossom, with its gaudy tendrils and its petals flung back. Big, hairy, purple thing it was, when you got close to it. With any luck they’d get fruit this year. They’d had nothing so far, despite a dozen or more flowers on the vine every summer. You don’t get fruit if the flowers don’t pollinate, Louisa had told her. No pollination, no fruit. Which pretty much summed things up around here.