The Vale Girl

by Nelika McDonald

  He took his shirt off and slung it over a branch, then walked to the edge of the creek and stuck a toe in. It was creepy how murky it was, how you couldn’t see the bottom. One day, Tommy vowed, he would be so rich that he would have a pool of his very own, sparkling pure and so clear you could see the hair sprouting on your toes under the water. There would be no kids allowed, whether they could control their bladders or not. But there would be gum trees planted around it, eucalypts, just like here.

  Tommy stretched and turned around to see if Sarah was coming down the track yet, her long brown hair swinging like a curtain, her eyes the green of leaves wet in the rain, the corners creasing when she saw him and smiled a greeting. But there was nobody there. He didn’t let in the possibility that she would not forgive him. How long could your right foot stay angry at your left after a stumble? He just needed to explain. As he turned back to the creek, something glinting in the sun from a nearby tree caught Tommy’s eye, and he walked closer. Something silver, metallic, like . . . a zipper. On a backpack, tucked in the fork of two branches with a spray of leaves spread over it. Tommy pulled it out, and felt the tug of recognition. It was Sarah’s. But Sarah wasn’t here. A book fell out of the bag and thumped to the ground, bouncing to rest a few metres away at the lip of the creek. Tommy knelt down and retrieved it. The Catcher in the Rye it said on the battered red cover. J.D. Salinger. He let the book fall open in his hands, and a loose page slipped out of the binding and sifted down into the water. All the books at Sarah’s house were old and falling apart, but, as she said, a book was a book. Beggars, choosers. Tommy stepped down towards the waterside to fish out the loose page. A few metres from the edge, he saw something else. In the way that minds make pairs, find and catalogue similarities and matching things, Tommy saw the red of the book cover repeated more brightly somewhere in the muddled green of the creek and bank and he clocked it without quite understanding it: a cluster of small smudges near the base of a paperbark tree on the bank. After a second, his eyes flicked back to it. Only one thing was that vibrant shade of red, that certain round and unsettling scarlet. Tommy stared at the smudges on the tree, but did not go any closer. Paint, he told himself firmly. There is just some paint on that tree. Still, a prickling began under his skin.

  He looked around again, still waiting, wanting with his whole self to see her coming towards him, telling him to get his filthy mitts off her gear, but the track was empty. He replaced the backpack and walked as far back down the path as the fence to the Millers’ farm, putting distance between him and those red smudges, and craned his neck over it, searching the paddock and the road beyond. Not a soul was about. Tommy started back to the creek and this time walked right down to the edge. He didn’t look at the paperbark tree again, but something inside him that he wouldn’t quite acknowledge made him scan the water carefully. And then he saw it, floating like a sail, fabric speckled with twigs and leaves caught in an eddy where the creek started to head down to the bridge. Chequered fabric. Tommy crashed through the water and snatched up the material, shaking it out. A dress, a uniform from his school. He turned it over and over, looking, looking, and then ripped open the collar to see the tag at the back of the neck. SV.

  Sarah Vale.

  A brown school shoe floated by, passed along the surface of the water like a rubber duck in a baby’s bath, looking harmless, looking like not much more than a shoe. Tommy’s stomach rose and fell and he lurched back through the water. He pulled the backpack out of the tree and stood there on the bank of the creek with it dangling from his hands. As he looked at it he thought about what the backpack without the girl might mean, especially on a Sunday, two days after she would have last used it. And then he thought about the blood, because that was what it was, on the tree. The blood plus the backpack.

  He sank to his knees on the dirt and held her bag right up to his face, breathing it in, then hugged it to his chest and rocked, back and forth, back and forth.

  chapter seven

  Sergeant Henson leant back in his chair and put his feet up on the desk. His black shoes shone. Gertie, his wife, polished them for him every night and lined them up at the foot of the bed with a clean pressed uniform hanging on the door of his closet, ready for the next day. She was a good sort, Gertie, always took care of things around the house so he could concentrate on his work. Head of the Banville and Districts Police Service, or so said the badge that Gertie polished too, and clipped to his blazer.

  Not a bad job, he supposed. Certainly a change of pace for him and Gert after the last stint in the western suburbs of Sydney. Two years ago he had asked for his own station to run so he could do it properly, without the red tape and magnifying glasses of the city bosses. They had jumped at the chance to get him out of their hair. In the city, Henson had been well-respected but also had a reputation for doing things his own way, and not taking too kindly to suggestions to the contrary. It was a fair summation of his character, and he didn’t give a toss. Fortunately, Sergeant Geoffrey Aramore, his predecessor in Banville, had been kind enough to cark it at a convenient time, so here he was. Eighteen months and counting. What he had to contend with here was certainly different to Sydney. Less gang warfare and drug busts, more surreptitious cattle theft and drunk and disorderly after the footy finals, pissing on each others' rose bushes and leering at each others’ wives. The worst it got in public was usually the accusations of cheating and bribery that were hurled around after the livestock awards had been announced at the Grevillea Festival. But behind closed doors, trouble lay dormant like a brown snake behind the water tank.

  In Sergeant Henson’s opinion, the see-no-evil policy of the residents didn’t help matters. Misery met violence down dead-end streets on hot nights and despair festered like an open gunshot wound. But nobody called the doctor – they said they never even heard the shot. And so on it went. Perhaps naively, Sergeant Henson had expected that there would be less crime in general in Banville. And maybe there was. Certainly judging by the stats there was. And yet he could almost smell the menace simmering away on the backburner in some of the houses he visited; he could feel it pinch the scruff of his neck and see it in the big eyes of the kids peering out from behind their mother’s legs, anxiety and fatigue pummelling the colour out of their cheeks and the smiles from their lips. Some of the children wore shorts with the seat worn through; others wore boat shoes and ironed trousers. Their eyes all looked the same.

  He had also had a few surprising files land on his desk since arriving in Banville. It seemed that some of those criminal dregs washed up out here in their twilight years, and old habits died hard.

  He smiled to himself, remembering the disbelief on the face of Mick O’Brien when he saw who turned up to cuff him after a half-hearted attempted robbery at a Banville corner store. Sergeant Henson had put him away for his first stretch behind bars a good ten years ago now, a somewhat larger-scale armed robbery, that one, in Sydney’s inner east.

  A seventeen-year-old girl was caught in the crossfire, filling the tank of her Ford Falcon when O’Brien and his cronies busted into the service station. She went in to pay, and never came out. Sometimes Henson still thought about her, and how the radio had been on in the car when they got there, a beagle puppy with a red collar asleep on the passenger seat. A crystal dangled from the rear-view mirror, swinging a little. A half-eaten pack of gum was on the dashboard. Henson often wondered what happened to that dog. He should have taken it home. Gertie could have used the company. They hadn’t been able to have children.

  This time, Mick O’Brien had been too pissed to be really threatening and Dulcie Adams had let him get as far away as the back fence with a lukewarm Four’N Twenty pie and a carton of Winfield Blues before she clocked him with a bag of chook feed. She knocked him to the ground and sat on him, her wide floral-shrouded arse pinning him to the ground until Sergeant Henson got there.

  ‘Fuckin’ hell, am I havin’ a nightmare?’ slurred Mick, gazing up at Sergeant Henson as the police officer
hauled him to his feet. ‘Some sort of fuckin’ flashback? I coulda sworn you arrested me already.’ He squinted through one eye and then the other.

  ‘Yep, you’re havin’ a nightmare, Paddy,’ Henson sneered. ‘And it’s only just begun.’

  He had let Mick sleep it off in the cells, then had shaken him awake and given him a cup of strong, sweet tea. When O’Brien had drained the last drop, Henson went into the cell, closed the door behind him and leant over the bed where O’Brien lay.

  ‘Feeling better?’

  O’Brien looked at him, wary, and shrugged. ‘S’pose.’

  ‘Right, then. If I ever see your face again, I’ll ruin it. You hear me? I don’t like to resort to violence, but for you, O’Brien, I would make an exception.’

  O’Brien didn’t say anything, so Henson grabbed his collar with one hand, and a greasy handful of his hair with the other. He pulled it up so hard that the man’s eyebrows rose.

  ‘I said, do you hear me?’

  O’Brien heard him that time. Sergeant Henson bundled him into the wagon, drove to the bus terminal in Welonga and put him on a Greyhound express back to Sydney. That was one way to eliminate crime in Banville. Worked a treat. Sergeant Henson, city copper but he’s a good bloke.

  The door to the police station swung open and young Tommy Johns stood in the doorway, his hunched shoulders and thin frame silhouetted against the sun behind him. Sergeant Henson sighed and heaved himself up to stand behind the counter.

  ‘What can I do for you, boy? Close the door, would ya? I’ve got the air-con on.’

  Tommy Johns stepped forward and Sergeant Henson noted the clean stripes down his face where tears had coursed over the grubby skin, leaving glistening tracks like snail trails on his cheeks. He was shivering despite the heat, and holding something in his hands. When he reached the counter, he dumped it down and coins spilled out of the pocket. A backpack.

  ‘This is Sarah Vale’s.’ Tommy sniffed and wiped his nose on his sleeve. He exhaled through his nose and closed his eyes for a moment, and then opened them and looked at the sergeant.

  ‘I’m here to report her missing.’

  chapter eight

  Where I am now, it is dark and dank. Usually I can’t stand the darkness, but in here I’m grateful for it. I don’t want to see my hands, my body under the sheet; I don’t want to see anything. The darkness is a small mercy, and with mercy I will take what I can get. Strangely, I start to think of the dark as something like another person. I feel like I’m sharing my space with it, cohabitating. It’s an uneasy relationship. Just when I think I will be okay with it, the dark folds in on itself again and I’m drowning. Maybe I’m going mad. I never had an imaginary friend when I was younger; this is the closest I’ve got. Maybe I wasn’t desperate enough, before.

  In the dimness of this space, it could be night or day, three in the morning or three in the afternoon, and I wouldn’t know. I try not to put too much weight on the imaginary things brushing my ankles and tapping at the windows. It is quiet for an hour, then another and another. I sleep, or don’t sleep, and often cannot tell the difference. When I’m awake, I am scared, when I sleep, I am scared.

  Sometimes I do things just to see if I will do them, and that is what happened down at the creek. Maybe that doesn’t make sense. I don’t think everyone can do it. But it’s as though I can perch on my own shoulder and whisper in my own ear if I want to. I’ve got the balance worked out now, of being inside and outside myself at the same time. It’s like science, a sort of alchemy, mixing the chemicals just right so they bubble and fizz but don’t explode right out of their test tubes. I have to be aware of what I’m doing but not so aware that I could stop it immediately. The challenge is to really give in to it, just surrender to the forward momentum of things. Like when you’re about to fall asleep and you are sliding down into it, and you don’t fight it but let it come and envelop you. Imagine holding a glass and just letting it slip from your hand. There’s a part of you that knows what will happen when it meets the ground, but you have to keep that bit squashed down inside, and just let it happen anyway. Let it smash. So I do. And I find out that each minute will propel you into the next if you let it. Just give in and time will pass. It has to.

  Sometimes I think about Mum and wonder if this is how she has been living all these years. I think about how it might have started. I don’t remember things any other way. But at one time, I know, she was my age and thinking about the sort of life she might have. I bet she never imagined this. But things don’t always happen in big dramatic changes of scene, like in a play. Even what is happening to me now, if I really think about it, has been happening for years. I’ve been on my way here for a long time.

  In year two we put on a play, and we all got to help with the sets. We painted trees on sheets of wood, brown stripy trunks and blobs of green at the top. Half the little girls danced around in a circle, dressed like fairies in the woods. And then the curtain came down, they tiptoed offstage, and the boys pushed on the beach set. A big yellow cellophane sun dropped from the ceiling and they held streams of blue crepe paper across the stage, pulling them back and forth to look like waves moving over the floor. The rest of the girls were dressed as mermaids, tinfoil tails tied around their waists. When the curtain came up again, they lay on their stomachs on the stage and wriggled around like they were swimming. I was supposed to be a mermaid with a shining silver tail, but Mum never paid the $3.50 costume fee. So I stood in the dimness at the edge of the stage watching the beaming faces of the parents who had come, and when Michael Fitzgerald pulled back his side of the crepe paper wave I brought my foot down on it and ripped it apart. He stood up, his mouth hanging open, eyes wide and only a small tattered piece of blue in his hand, and the rest of the crepe paper went skittering back onto stage. I nodded, satisfied. Everyone in the audience would know it was not a wave. It was only a stupid bit of crepe paper. It was important to me that they see this. Things don’t happen this way; a forest does not suddenly give way to a beach. Things happen slowly, sometimes so slowly that you don’t even see them coming.

  Maybe one man came to her bed, and she was so tired. There was no food in the pantry and she liked that he had washed his hair before he came. She liked the cheap shampoo scent of it and the way he had combed it with a part running straight up one side, each strand falling away from it in tidy raked lines. Then another man came and, well, the sheets were dirty anyway. He poured whisky into a grubby glass and set it on the bedside table and she just lay back and watched it trembling with the banging of the headboard against the wall. She waited for him to finish so she could drink it. And eventually he did finish, and she did drink it. And then it was gone, and somehow she needed to get more. Another man came. His jeans were scuffed and reddened with dirt that drifted off him in powdery rainfalls as he undressed, and that was almost more than she could stand, someone bringing the dust of Banville into her bed. That and the way he bunched her hair in his meaty fist when he was on top of her, but then. He had a hip flask. A skirt hitched up around the waist is just a skirt on the bedroom floor twenty-three seconds earlier. Like the course of water, the way some things happen is just inevitable. She was hardly even there. My father was one of those men. She says she doesn’t know which one.

  Now that I am not with her I think about her more, in a different way to the everyday thinking of someone you live with. I remember brushing her dirty blonde hair when I was younger, while she sat smoking in the cane chair on the verandah, wrapped in a tatty kimono of peach-coloured silky material. She drank the instant coffee I made her, with milk if there was any and sugar if there was any. Sometimes I had my cornflakes dry from the packet so there would be milk available if she wanted a coffee. But sometimes there hadn’t been milk for days. I thought that kimono was the most beautiful thing in the world. I thought she was beautiful in it. She would let me paint her toenails, and my own too. She only liked dark shades, bruised-looking colours. And when I was doing this she would gossi
p about the neighbours, laughing at the fat old women as they trundled past in their polyester smocks and straw hats perched atop their bad perms, lugging vinyl shopping trolleys behind them on the way to church. If she was feeling particularly mischievous, she would let her kimono fall open so that one pale, heavy globe of a breast was exposed, the nipple the same bruised colour as the nail polish. The women would gasp and hurry on through the park to town. I swear they even held their breath as they passed, as if the air around our house would infect them. Mum would cackle at them and wink, and then nudge me, and I would laugh too.

  ‘Shrivelled old prudes,’ she would say.