The Vale Girl

by Nelika McDonald

  In here, I dream of the same thing: Banville becoming extinct.

  chapter fifteen

  When Geraldine’s parents finally left after their usual Tuesday morning tea, Graham had to go and change his shirt. It was soaked through with sweat. Sitting in the formal lounge with them, he had been acutely aware of every sound in the house, including the strange high pitch of his own unsteady voice. Geraldine had watched him like a hawk, and her father regarded him with a glare that was even more contemptuous than usual. Crosby kept sniffing at the air and pawing at the rug, then turning in manic circles, wired and unsettled. It was not the most comfortable of morning teas.

  When he finally escaped to his refuge, Graham closed the door to the basement and stood at his worktable, his heart beating fit to burst. He placed his hands flat on the wood until his pulse had slowed, then went and checked the lock before undressing and placing his folded shirt and slacks over the arm of the recliner. He didn’t want to get his clothes dirty – it would make Geraldine cross – so he always worked in his boxer shorts and singlet. He took an open can of lemonade from the fridge and drank it in two gulps. His mother had always given him flat lemonade when he was anxious about something as a boy, and Graham still drank it to soothe a rolling stomach. His hand shook on the can and he closed his eyes for a moment, feeling the nibble of a headache at the edges of his skull. He didn’t know how much longer he could do this. He never had been very good at keeping secrets. Or rather, he had never been good at realising when something was a secret. But this time, it was very clear. This time, nobody had to tell him to keep his mouth shut, or mind his own business. Because this time, it was his business. The secret was his. Graham Knight was on his dollar ride – his first flight. And if anyone found out about it, life as he knew it would be over.

  From the box on the shelf above the table, Graham got out his knife. He still kept it in the original packaging, the red box feathered at the edges now, VICTORINOX printed on it in white. Original Schweizer Offiziersmesser. Le véritable couteau Suisse. Graham always whispered these words to himself when he got out his knife. He thought about the countries where people said these words, about how far away they were from Banville. Germany he pictured as grey, all grey. Bombed-out husks of buildings crumpling into the river. France, though, France! How he would love to take Susannah to France. He would buy her a dress, silk, and she would hold his hand and lean into him as they walked. If it was cold, he would give her his jacket. If it was not cold, he would give it to her anyway. They would sit in cafes and eat croissants, drink coffee, smoke long, thin cigarettes.

  When Graham went to Sydney as a teenager for the air-force entry exams, he had seen a patisserie. Right in the middle of the city, with all the Sydney folk strolling past it like it was just as commonplace as a newsstand. He had stood outside it for a long minute before walking in. He worried he would have to speak in French to order something. But the girl behind the counter moaned, ‘Wipe your flamin’ shoes,’ at him as he crossed the threshold and he relaxed. Her vowel sounds were just as long and flat as any to be found in Banville. Graham stood in front of the trays of pastries, stiff in his Duncan’s Hire suit, and turned his pennies over and over in his hand, gazing at the towers of pains au chocolat, almond croissants and baguettes with raspberry jam oozing out. The girl muttered something to herself about country bumpkins passing time warming their arses at her ovens, but Graham didn’t hear her. Eventually, he chose a plain croissant, the pastry as curved and delicate as a shell. He sat in the gutter right outside the shop to eat it, oblivious to the stares of passers-by, and closed his eyes as each buttery crescent melted on his tongue. He almost missed his train home. Still dreamy on the walk from Banville station over to the Vale house to boast to the sixteen-year-old Susannah about everything he had seen in Sydney, Graham tripped over a coil of fencing wire and a pile of rotting railway sleepers partly obscured by the lantana blossoming in a thick twisted mesh between the train tracks and the road heading west. As he fell to the ground, Graham heard a sound like gears grinding and felt the unmistakeable shifting of vital components of his back into slightly off-kilter positions. His teeth bit into the dirt and his left canine was wrenched free of its place in his gum, and the blood and saliva mingled with the dirt in a foul puddle in his mouth. That tooth never grew back, and Graham never stood up straight again.

  He did get to tell Susannah about the patisserie later, when she visited his home and sat by his bed. His mother pointedly left the bedroom door open after she had shown Susannah in. Graham told Susannah about the hordes of people on Pitt Street, the gleaming speed and weave of the cars, Chinatown with its red and gold dragons perched snarling under the colonnades at the entry and baskets of strange-looking vegetables set right out on the footpath. He described the smartly dressed women swishing along with their little hats and high heels, crocodile-skin handbags clutched to their sides, the music he heard trickling from the shadowed, dank staircases of bars, the debonair fellow he had seen talking to a reporter outside a movie theatre, crowds pressed against the barricades. The way the man had thrown his head back and laughed so Graham could see right into his mouth and then thrown his cigarette into the gutter, and how all the girls screamed and rushed for the burning butt to souvenir something that this man’s lips had touched. From under his white boyhood bedspread printed with faded blue rockets where he lay flat on his back in a neck-to-knee brace, Graham mimed the tossing of the cigarette and the smirk of the man as he watched the women scramble; he pantomimed it all for Susannah, the cacophony of smells and noise. The pace of the city that he still carried under his skin, making him restless, so restless, lying here in his bedroom in Banville. Susannah listened to it all without interrupting. She had not gotten a lot of sleep – her father had made her kneel on rice for scorching the collar of his second-best shirt – but she still looked beautiful. He told her everything he had seen, gave his memories to her in polished links of words like a golden chain he pulled from his throat, a gift.

  Two weeks after his accident, the long brown envelope arrived in the post with his air-force exam results. FAIL was stamped at the top of each page in red. And then Geraldine Spencer turned up on the doorstep with her father glowering on the stoop behind her. She was already beginning to show, a slight curve pushing out the fabric of her dress in a gentle mound that reminded Graham of the puff of the croissant he had eaten in Sydney. He had slept with Geraldine out of boredom one night when their parents were playing cards in the kitchen.

  When Graham told Susannah about the baby she called him a stupid fool and beat her fists against his chest. Graham had nothing to say to that. They both cried. Graham’s father told him that he would have to marry Geraldine because they needed to keep her family’s account at the bank. Her father was a real estate agent, and bought his little princess a house on the same street as her parents. Nobody even suggested that Graham had a choice. His consolation prize was the basement. Old Gerry Coombes had fancied himself a bit of a wine buff, so he’d had the house built with a two-roomed wine cellar in its bowels. A small room for whites, and a bigger one for reds, his preference.

  ‘Wine’s for fags,’ Geraldine’s father sniffed, when he showed them around the house. ‘But I suppose you can use it for storage.’

  Geraldine never set foot down there after they moved in. Graham claimed it so surely that, even before the lock on the door, she did not feel welcome. Her mother said to her, ‘There should be no room in a woman’s house she cannot enter,’ but her father said, ‘Every man needs his own space.’ That was the last charitable thing he said about Graham.

  Geraldine and Graham were married within two weeks and Susannah left on the six o’clock train to Sydney the same night as the ceremony. She told Graham there was nothing left for her in Banville. She did not attend the wedding. Geraldine miscarried their child on the eve of their honeymoon, and none ever followed. Graham taught himself to walk again but never without pain. He received his first disability pe
nsion cheque, and Geraldine’s father opened a private bank account for his daughter. Everything else was finished. People said it was then that Graham began to look so confused. Nothing had turned out how he had planned.

  On one side of the knife, a corkscrew could be pulled out. On the other, with some force, a small but very sharp blade could be withdrawn from the casing, and another shorter piece of metal, multi-purpose, for opening bottles, cracking nuts, opening or cracking most anything. Today, he was putting the blade through its paces. As he worked, Graham’s mind grew peaceful. He thought of the kinetic energy he possessed, the movement of his hands, the yielding substance under the blade of the knife. You had to concentrate when working with materials such as these. The smallest error could be discernible to the trained eye, and Graham was nothing if not exacting in his work. Down here in his basement, he could find perfection, hold it in his hands. He could produce something to be proud of, something that was his. Nobody else in Banville had ever even been down here before. Hopefully, they never would. Original Schweizer Offiziersmesser. Le véritable couteau Suisse.

  chapter sixteen

  Something woke me in the night last night, a sound from outside that sounded like scraping, then some brushing, then a little more scraping. I lay there in the dark, holding myself as still as I could, my heart heaving. And for while there I was starting to think I was getting used to this. It stopped after a bit, but I couldn’t get back to sleep. What I would have done for another warm body, someone to stroke the hair back behind my ears and tell me to breathe slower. I thought about my mother. This was what it must have been like for her when she was a girl. Every night when she went to bed, lying there with her fingers latticed over her face and nervous sweat dampening the sheets underneath her. Which was worse, the anticipation of what was coming, or the event itself? The doorknob turns, a footstep on the floorboards just metres away. Those most mundane of sounds. No wonder she left as soon as she could.

  When my mother was sixteen, she sold her favourite ivory cameo brooch at the pawn shop in Welonga to buy her train fare to Sydney, and got on the six o’clock Sunday night service with the weekending tourists. She closed her eyes and leant her forehead against the glass to try to stop herself from picturing her mother in the backyard that morning, hanging out sheets and tablecloths, humming, her white ankles and bare feet in the grass. Her shoulder blades like wings, her face lifted up to the sun, a baptism. In Sydney, Susannah caught a taxi to the first boarding house she found in the phone book. That night, she slept better than she had in years; the sirens and shouts and traffic of the city were like a lullaby to her. But the peace she felt was fleeting.

  The next day, her father found out she had left. He got straight into the car to follow her and drag her back to his doorstep by the hair, and he brought her mother because that was what you did to a young girl: you showed her mother to her, broken ribs and black eyes blooming under the old-fashioned navy cloche she wore to church, and you said: This is because of you.

  But he didn’t, in the end. Susannah was spared that final meeting. The police were never sure what happened. The car had swerved suddenly and crashed into the barrier on the highway. Both passengers died instantly. When the ambulance arrived, they found that Mrs Vale’s neck was broken, her rag doll head hanging limp, but her hand was still clamped firmly on the steering wheel, stretched over her husband’s lap from the passenger side.

  ‘She must have been trying to correct the swerve,’ the policeman told Susannah at the door of her boarding house in Sydney. My mother smiled, a little.

  ‘Yes, I’m sure that’s what she was doing.’

  There were no witnesses.

  The Vale house was shut up tight. Dust grew like moss on the grand piano in the drawing room. Vines snaked up the sides of the house and put out their shoots like tentacles reaching over the windows. In Sydney, Susannah was trying to be an actress. She waitressed part-time, and wore a badge that said Collette clipped to her pink striped apron. The girl before her had been called Collette and the owner of the cafe decided it was too expensive to keep getting new name badges made. Susannah liked the pink striped apron and special notepad and pen that clipped into the pocket. She liked the bustle of a busy service, balancing coffees on her tray and swinging her hips as she wove between the tables. She didn’t like it when the men tried to grab her arse as she leant over to place their coffee in front of them, but she just went out the back and spat in their soup. The other waitresses thought she was posh – years of elocution lessons had given her speech a formal tone – and enigmatic, because she never spoke about her family or her life before Sydney. She didn’t care what they thought. All she cared about was becoming a famous actress.

  My mother told me that she stayed at that same boarding house for her whole four years in Sydney, waking each night to her landlady dancing the Charleston in the living room below with the ghost of her husband, who had died in the war. The seagulls, drunks, the stink of the bins and the salt waft of the harbour – Susannah Vale had never been happier.

  She didn’t have much luck with her acting, but she tried to stay positive. And then she met Clyde Watson. People like Clyde Watson usually told girls like Susannah Vale that they were going to be stars. But despite the cliché, that didn’t happen. What he did say was, ‘Have you thought about secretarial school? Or teaching?’ He was supposed to be her agent. Susannah would show him, she decided. She would get an acting job, whatever it took. Another cliché about acting is the casting couch. And that one did happen. But when you have lain on that couch, you are supposed to get the job. She met a director at the cafe one day, he wore nice suits and when he spoke to her he leant in close and frowned in concentration like everything she said was important. He told her that he thought he might have a part for her; she could come to his office that weekend and audition. She thought this would be her big break. That’s how you got parts, she told her girlfriends. You lived like you were on stage all the time, just waiting for the right audience. The jobs would come to you. The movie the man from the cafe was directing was about a group of con artists terrorising Sydney’s eastern suburbs, and my mother read for the part of a bank teller whom they swindled. She thought it went well, but the director shook his head like he was disappointed and told her he didn’t think she was right for it. He said she wasn’t sweet enough. She didn’t act like someone who could be swindled by anyone. Then he forced himself on her, not on the couch, but on the floor of his office. The carpet in the office was brown, but my mother said there were other colours mixed in with the brown that you could only see if you looked closely. Specks of red, blue, green. It was nice that there were colours there, my mother said, and good to know. In brown there is blue. But she could have done without that vantage point.

  I knew what she meant.

  chapter seventeen

  Sergeant Henson sat at his desk, scribbling on a notepad. This sort of paperwork he could abide. He often worked in mind maps, questions and ideas sprouting into others across the page like the root system of a giant tree. He found it gave him clarity to see his thoughts literally spelt out on paper, and allowed him to see the patterns that emerged, names cropping up again and again, links between people or events or times. Nothing was forthcoming from his maps today, so he decided to do something else and come back to them later. The right and left sides of his brain had to work in tandem to do his job properly; police work required creativity as well as intellect. People often didn’t realise that. More than anything, though, it required plain hard work.

  Through the glass window into the other room, Henson could see the Sydney officers seated around the table, drinking cups of coffee and listening to the cricket on the radio. They seemed to have abandoned their reports for now. Crane was back over at the pub for a tea break. He had a lot of those. The day was overcast but still warm, and the weak light that filtered through the window looked dull, sieved through the clouds and stripped of any strength. On the faded Formica table lay Sara
h’s school photo. As Henson watched, one of the junior officers finished his drink with an obnoxious slurp and deposited his coffee cup onto the table, right on top of the photo. Another flipped through a pornographic magazine, whistling to himself. The third appeared to be close to sleep. Roberts sat at a desk off to one side of the room, responsible for manning the telephone line that had been set up to take calls from anyone who might have information about Sarah. It had not yet rung. In any case, he was absorbed in the task of polishing his shoes with a toothbrush and a handkerchief.

  The sergeant wandered in and cleared his throat loudly, and the dozing officer roused himself enough to glance at him.

  ‘Perhaps you fellas could go out and do some door-to-doors,’ he suggested, gesturing to the other men at the table. ‘If you’re not too busy.’

  The officer shrugged. ‘We already did that.’

  Sergeant Henson’s eyebrows came together. ‘And?’

  ‘And nothing. Came up empty. Nobody saw nothing.’

  ‘Nothing?’ Henson shook his head in disbelief. ‘This is a small town. Your neighbours know it if you stub your toe in the dark. When Gertie broke her arm last year there were four pies, two casseroles and a sling made out of a flannelette sheet waiting on the doorstop when we got home from the doctor’s.’

  The officer shrugged. ‘See for yourself.’

  Henson shook his head. Fucking useless. He picked up his hat and made for the door. The Sydney officers watched him go, but didn’t get up. Roberts swivelled around in his chair.

  ‘Sarge,’ he started, but Henson cut him off. ‘I don’t care if it doesn’t ring until next year. Stay where you are.’ He pushed the coffee cup on the table aside and picked up Sarah’s photo, tucking it inside his clipboard and letting the screen door screech open and bang shut on his way out.