by Susan Allott
A call from Sydney. He sat on the bed and cried long and hard like a stupid bastard. William fell asleep on his shoulder, breathing hotly against his neck.
44
Sydney, 1997
The lights are on in every room when Isla gets home at midnight and the house has been turned upside down. She steps over a lamp that lies on the floor in the hall, its shade separated from its base. The table where the telephone stood has been turned over, upended on the carpet, surrounded by family photos, their frames smashed. Alongside them a ceramic jug lies cleaved open, its white belly exposed. She stands among the wreckage and wonders if she did this. It seems possible. She is three days into her relapse and the days are no longer distinct. She doesn’t know where she’s been, what she’s done.
Each room in the house is ruined: broken crockery in the kitchen, the chairs turned over. Ornaments and mementos crushed underfoot. In the lounge room the TV is facedown on the carpet. A bottle of Smirnoff lies empty on the couch. No sign of her dad. She doesn’t know when she last saw him. He will be angry when he sees this. She is alone here, and she sometimes fears him. Everything between them has changed and the trust has gone. She doesn’t remember why.
She picks up the phone and puts the receiver back in place. The answering machine is upturned beside it, flashing red, on and off. She stands beside it as the message plays. A British accent wants her to call him right away, regarding the apartment on Sinclair Road. It’s urgent, he says. His voice is pompous. She hits delete.
There is a call she needs to make, something she needs to say. It fills her head. She lifts the receiver and dials the London number. The phone rings in the small flat in Hackney and she holds the phone tight against her ear, ready to hear Dom’s voice.
“Hi,” the recording says. “This is Dom and Isla’s number. Leave us a message and we’ll get back to you.”
She waits for the beep. “Sorry,” she says. It makes her cry. She thinks of the mornings there was blood on the pillow. She broke his tooth the first time. Cuts and bruises. A broken nose. He never fought back. A good man who tried to help her, and one morning he was gone. She listens to the message twice more and she tells him each time that she’s sorry, she loves him, she hates what she did. What she is.
Pain wakes her in the early hours. She lifts her head and sees the broken jug, the lampshade. Her head pounds. In the bathroom she swallows painkillers, catching her face in the mirror above the basin. Sallow skin and pale eyes, like her dad’s. She looks away, leaving an image in her mind of wild, outgrown hair: dark roots and brittle copper-blond streaks.
Isla leans into the bath and turns the tap for the shower. Pain fills her skull and she retches into the drain. She strips, stands under the hot water, and cries tears of self-pity, coughing and choking, her head pressed against the tiles. The last thing she remembers clearly is standing in Doug’s front yard. The reluctance in his face as he told her what he’d seen. She stays there, replaying the conversation until the water runs cold.
She fills three black bags with broken crockery and crushed ceramics, eases photographs from cracked picture frames. She puts the lamp back together. By midday the house is clean, if damaged. She goes to her dad’s hiding places and finds only empty bottles.
At lunchtime he walks through the door. She waits in the kitchen where she is cooking, drinking coffee, taking the day one minute at a time. He calls her name but she doesn’t reply. He stays where he is. She hears him turning over the coins in his pocket, his cough. The strike of her knife against the chopping board.
“Isla?” He walks toward her. “Isla?”
She wonders if he would hurt her, if he thought he’d lost her loyalty. If she would fight back. She imagines it: scalding coffee against his skin. Pushing him to the ground, her foot on his chest, her hand at his throat. She tenses with the possibility of it.
He pushes open the door. He looks gaunt. Almost sober. “You cleaned the place up,” he says. “I didn’t expect you to do that.”
She stops what she’s doing, holds the knife still. “Did you smash the house up? Was that you?”
He looks down at his feet. “I’m sorry you had to deal with it.”
“I thought it was me.”
He is surprised, confused. He pulls out a chair and sits down. “I had a bad few days,” he says, looking around him at the clean surfaces. “It won’t happen again.”
She turns her back on him and slices through an onion. She sees herself in everything he does and it terrifies her.
“I got a lawyer,” he says. His chair scrapes against the linoleum and he stretches his legs out. “They can’t prove anything.”
45
Victoria, 1967
They’d have to move on today. As soon as the sun was up, he’d get their gear in the truck and get on the road. He’d wanted to wait until William’s fever passed, so he was well enough for the long drive. But it hadn’t passed. Steve knelt by the bed and moved his jacket up to cover the boy’s shoulders. He might be a bit brighter when he woke. And they couldn’t risk another day in this place. That cop could be back anytime. He’d have spoken to Ray by now and Ray might have blown it; he wouldn’t have known what to say. He might have told him Steve had left the force. His stomach turned at the thought of it.
He pulled a box out from under the bed. He was impatient now that he’d made his mind up. They could sleep in the truck until the money came through. They’d done it on the way down here, pulled over and grabbed a few hours, it wasn’t too bad. William was sleeping a lot these past few days. He’d barely woken, barely taken any milk. Maybe he’d take him to a doctor, somewhere they weren’t looking for him. Kids got fevers all the time, he knew this; it was normal. He told himself not to worry. Don’t get yourself worked up, Mandy would say.
It took less than ten minutes to fill the box. He grabbed clothes and nappies and the coffee mug he’d brought from home. He took the dishcloth and towel down from the hooks he’d hammered into the low beam at the back of the cabin, wrapped the cloth around his mug so it didn’t break. He put William’s bottles and his formula milk on top, where he could reach them easily. The last pack of biscuits and the instant coffee next to it. He looked at William, still and silent on the bed. He hoped to Christ he was going to be all right.
Mandy would know what to do. She’d know how to keep his fever down, how to nurse him. She’d know whether they should take the risk and get him to a doctor. He could see her now, giving him one of her scathing looks and picking the boy up, sorting him out with her calm confidence. And he despised himself for missing her, for the part of himself that wanted to forgive her, even now, after this betrayal on top of all the rest.
It was getting light. He lifted the jacket off William, threw it on top of the other things in the box, and stood there looking at him. A thought formed in his head, a terrible thought that made the cabin shrink around him. The boy was too still. Oh sweet Lord, he was too still. Steve dropped to his knees, lifted the sheets away with fumbling, slow hands, and picked him up.
William’s head fell back. His arms were slack at his sides. Steve patted his face, lifted an eyelid to find a blank, sightless eye. He held the boy in his arms and shouted terrified, wordless sounds at the mottled rash across his skin; the floppy, unresponsive limbs; the resting beauty of his face. He was warm, still warm, but his body was limp and he had no strength in him, no muscle, no life.
He must have screamed. He heard a scream that must have come from himself, from his body. He laid the baby down flat, tried to bring him around, breathing into his mouth, pumping at his little chest, stopping only when he could not breathe himself, when his hope had gone and he needed only to hold him. He rocked him side to side, propped his head against his shoulder, but William’s arms did not lift and his body was heavy and he was gone.
At some point Steve heard a sound against the door: a knocking that paused and repeated. He didn’t know what it meant. Nothing held meaning beyond the four walls of the cabi
n. There was no future now. There was nobody else. He walked up and down with William, holding him close, shushing him, making soothing sounds in his ear. He knew the boy was gone, but he could not bear it.
Sun streamed in through the gaps in the timber. The knocking at the door was louder now. Carefully, gently, he lay the child’s body down on the bed and moved toward the sound.
46
Sydney, 1967
Joe let himself into Mandy’s house through the back door. He locked it behind him, put the keys in his pocket, and stood a while on the mat, taking in the room that still had her presence, her things left the way she liked them. Her open-toed gardening shoes by the door, angled the way she stood, with one foot in front of the other. Her apron on the hook, her pots and pans on the drying rack. One cigarette butt in the ashtray, smoked right down to the filter. You could almost convince yourself, standing here, that she’d just gone out to the shops.
He carried on through the house, walking in and out of the rooms, touching her towels in the bathroom, sitting awhile in a chair where he found a newspaper with the crossword half done. He looked at the clues she’d filled in, the way her capitals strayed out of the squares. He’d never seen her handwriting before. There was so much they hadn’t done together.
His head roared with whisky. It took a lot of whisky these days to stop the shakes, to blunt the pain and regret. He longed to be blind drunk. To be oblivious. He’d strayed onto vodka, just once or twice in the mornings before work. There was no pleasure in it, but that wasn’t the point anymore. He felt his dad in him when he drank from the bottle and hid it behind the plumbing in the cupboard under the sink. There was nobody in the house to find the bottle, but it was in his blood to do it this way, to become a furtive, careful, practiced liar: an addict. He had fought it all his life and it had been futile.
In the bedroom he found it harder to forget she was gone. The lack of her was everywhere. He took his shoes off and lay down on the bed, lifting her pillow to his face. On the first inhale he caught the faintest hint of her, the clean smell of the vanilla soap she used. His hands closed around the pillow and he gripped it hard, pulled it close to his face and let out a painful, strangled yelp, the closest he could get to crying for her. All he’d wanted was to put things right, to make up for his mistakes and win her back.
He climbed under the sheets. When he woke the light had changed, the room was full of shadows. He stood and straightened the bedding, plumped the pillows. He pulled a blouse out of the wardrobe, but it was too clean; it held the smell of the iron but nothing else. He picked up a hairbrush from her dresser, took the lid off a lipstick and rubbed its brownish color against his wrist. From a drawer he took a pink scarf, the one she wore in her hair sometimes. He wrapped it around his hand. It was exquisitely painful, the thought of her with her hair pushed back from her face, looking up at him.
He put the scarf back in the drawer. No mementos. Louisa would be back any day and he was going to have to stop this. He couldn’t divorce her, not now. He’d have to try to be the husband she wanted him to be. Some days he thought he could do it. He thought he might take comfort in her loving him. And by trying to love her back, maybe he could atone for all of this. Other days, he thought spending the rest of his life with the wrong woman might kill him.
In the kitchen he stood again at the back door and cast his eyes across the room. He’d reached for the key, turned it in the lock, when he noticed Mandy’s watch on the countertop, circling the salt and pepper. He picked it up, recalling how she’d worn it in the water the day he’d followed her down to the beach. That had been the sweetest time, the best it would be between them, if only he’d known it.
He put the watch in his pocket and locked her back door behind him.
47
Sydney, 1997
The sky is dark and low over Agnes Bay and the beach is deserted. Rain is blowing in from the ocean. Isla walks into the water, glad of the cold violence of it, the insistence of the swell. She swims into the waves as they rise up and they drag her under, turn her body over, throw her out and pull her under again. She is not afraid. She gasps for breath, wrestles with the water, dares it to hurt her. Twice it flushes her onto the shore and twice she wades back in. She stops thinking after a long time. She doesn’t know how long it takes, but finally she knows nothing but the ache in her limbs, the struggle.
She is surprised by the strength of the rip when it takes her. The fear is cold and sharp. The shock. She is farther from the beach than she thought and closer to the rocky headland that separates the bay from the open sea. Her legs are helpless against the deep, relentless tug and it will kill her if she struggles. It will take what’s left of her strength and she will drown. She learned this as a kid: don’t swim against it. Don’t panic. Try to float, if you can. And like every other kid in the class, she’d known that if it happened to her she would panic; she would fight it and she would die. She looks up at the sky and thinks, this is not what I want, after all. Not like this.
Her head goes under. She waits for the pain as her body hits the rocks. She waits for her skull to crack. She surfaces, gulps air into her lungs, goes under again, and thinks she is dead now, she must be. She is so cold. The colors of death are ugly: green and pink, yellow and brown. They move before her eyes, viscous, rolling shapes, heavy and lolling. Fat, leathery petals like tongues.
Isla does not feel it when the rip lets her go. Wave after wave covers her, rotates her, throws her body down and backward. She gives up. Her mind is tired. In the deep water, out beyond the break, she sees a darkened room. Her mother is on the bed, her father standing, the two of them struggling. She sees her mother draw her legs back, position her feet against his chest. She feels the power of the kick. It is a pocket of trapped energy, a dormant force, thirty years in the waiting.
She kicks. At the base of the wave, she kicks with all her strength. She surfaces, rolls onto her back, kicks again. Her mind is tired but her body is young and strong and her legs want her to survive, to kick angrily, repeatedly, until her foot grazes sand. Then her knee, her elbow. She lies in the shallows and the sky clears above her, the rain stops. Her lungs contract and she coughs, retches, opens her eyes.
The beach is wide open before her. She vomits up saltwater, drags herself onto dry sand, and retches again. At the water’s edge, meters away, she sees her canvas shoes, her towel, soaked through but untouched. A gull lands close to her feet and picks at a dead crab. She tries to stand but her legs give way. Her head is heavy against the sand and the sun hurts her eyes. She lies still, shivering, coughing. The gull considers her and struts off.
It takes three attempts to lift the towel. Her hands have no grip. She manages in the end to throw it over her shoulder. She picks her shoes up and drops them again. They are too heavy; her fingers can’t close around them. In the end she leaves them behind on the sand. At the foot of the coastal path she sits and gathers her strength. She watches the ocean for a long time.
The day is bright and calm when she reaches the top of the path, where the tea trees meet the backyards on the ocean side of Bay Street. Carol Taylor is out the back of her house, tipping the water out of her garden furniture. She stops at the sight of Isla and brings her hands to her face.
“Isla, dear God! You didn’t swim in that, did you?”
Isla registers what she says but doesn’t reply. She can’t bear the sight of Carol, in her beige shirt and slacks. She misses Mandy, who was lively and magnetic. The sort of woman you noticed.
“Are you all right, love?” Carol says.
Isla nods at Carol and looks straight through her to the kitchen, where Mandy used to sit at the table eating prawns dipped in vinegar, her nose peeling with sunburn. Isla knows now that Mandy disappeared from her life and nobody ever mentioned her. Her family grew around this need to forget. They worked hard at it, keeping busy, growing selfish, angry, disappointed. And beneath it all was Mandy.
She pushes the back door open and stands on th
e mat. There are voices coming from the lounge room. She goes to the bathroom and picks seaweed from her hair, brushes sand from her skin. She takes a clean towel from the linen cupboard.
“You gave it to the police?” Her dad’s voice. “Did you want me locked up?”
Isla steps back into the hall, pushes the door to the lounge room open, and finds her parents facing each other, her father standing, her mum on the couch. The room is a mess of coffee cups and ashtrays, fogged with smoke. On the coffee table, next to a stack of dirty plates, sits Mandy’s watch.
Isla stands in the doorway. She wraps the towel tightly around herself. “What’s going on?”
Louisa looks up at her. “Are you all right, Isla?”
“I’m fine.”
She stands. “Are you sure? You look awful. Your lips are blue.”
“I’m fine, Mum.” She motions her mum to sit and joins her on the couch. Her dad is thin and drawn in his work shirt, his sleeves undone at the cuffs. He is edgy, twitchy, in the sore place between drunk and hungover. “What happened?” she asks him.
Joe stabs a finger at the watch. “Your mother wanted me in prison,” he says. “She gave this watch to the police—”
“I know.” Isla cuts him off. “Mum wanted the police to have it, in case it was important.”
Joe scratches at his jaw. He nods, slowly. “You were both in on this, were you?”
Isla goes to speak, but the shivers have returned and her jaw is chattering noisily. She gives a small nod.
“The police returned the watch,” Louisa says in her no-nonsense voice, her hands pressed together between her knees. “They did all that DNA business and they can’t prove it was Mandy’s.”
