The Vale Girl

by Nelika McDonald

  ‘It’s alright, Sarah,’ Graham had said, extending a hand to help her up. Sarah had complained before that Graham Knight seemed always to be popping up wherever she was, coming around a corner, from between shelves in the library or the supermarket, his life intersecting uncannily with hers. But Tommy figured that in a town as small as theirs, everyone was always popping up.

  The next day, when Sarah told him about this latest meeting, he felt a surge of jealousy. Graham was a knight on a bicycle. Literally. That thought would usually make him smile – Tommy loved a good pun – but not today. Tommy would have given his right arm to be the one to rescue Sarah instead of Graham. A steady stream of rage seeped through his bloodstream, curled around his muscles and lodged in his bones. He left the spot under the oak tree where he was sitting with Sarah and walked through the school grounds, looking for Cameron. He found him in the toilets, sitting with his back against the wall, smoking a cigarette and flicking through a Playboy. Tommy moved to stand in front of him, their feet almost touching. The cigarette smoke blurred around Cameron’s head.

  ‘Stay away from Sarah,’ Tommy said to him. He was not quite able to keep still, he was twitching, feeling like he was teetering on the edge of something terrible and he might not be able to stop himself from going over.

  Cameron cackled. ‘Someone’s got to break her in, mate. And if you don’t got the balls yourself . . .’

  The smoke made Tommy’s eyes water. He closed them for a moment, and then when he opened them he started to kick out without even knowing it, like his feet were working independently of him. His arms flew out from his sides to swing punches at the figure on the ground. He could hear someone roaring and swearing, and belatedly he realised it was himself. He watched his oscillating limbs with pride. He felt full of energy and euphoric, landing blow after blow. He started to laugh when he saw blood on his knuckles as he drew them back. He had never been so strong. People were gathering at the door to the toilets but Tommy never even saw them, he just kept kicking and punching, and kicking some more. Cameron’s face was getting bloody. He didn’t make a sound.

  Tommy registered somewhere in his mind the change in the sounds of the onlookers then, a collective intake of breath, and he glanced over to the door. He didn’t seen anyone approaching, but then his knees buckled and he felt his head hit the concrete floor, his face cracking against the side of an enamel washbasin on the way down. Salvatore D’Angelo, crouching like he was in a scrum, (Good Eye-talian boy, champion centre) had used his muscled footballer’s shoulder to barrel right into Tommy’s stomach, effectively winding him and knocking him down at once. Tommy immediately passed out, but other boys told him later that Sal and Cameron had bashed him for a further few minutes while he lay there unconscious, until a teacher finally entered and pulled them off. It was a blessing, Tommy supposed, because Cameron had just pulled the lid off one of the toilets and fished the brick out from the cistern. Sal had rammed the sodden blue sanitation puck from the urinal trough between Tommy’s teeth, and bubbles were starting to foam at his lips.

  Cameron was bruised and battered after their fight, and had a fat lip and split eyebrow. Sal did not have a scratch on him. Tommy had a couple of broken ribs, a suspected punctured lung, and a cut rippling in a jagged scar up from his temple that required twenty-four stitches. He let the nurses finish their work then pulled the IV from his arm and climbed out the window of his hospital room, hitching a ride home with a postal truck. He didn’t like hospitals. He was laid up at home for a bit after that. His dad was away, but it was okay because Sarah visited him every day.

  Just looking at the Wolfe house now made his blood boil. And his ribs ache. Tommy surveyed the house. It looked empty. There were no cars in the driveway. Tommy folded up one of his Missing posters and tucked it into the letterbox. Then he taped one to the wooden post of the letterbox. Then he walked up the path towards the steps of the porch, taping a poster to the path about halfway along. There were five steps, and Tommy taped a poster to the top of each one, so Sarah was gazing directly up at whoever walked over her. He now had two posters left. He taped one to the door at eye level, using the last yards of sticky tape so it would be hard to get off, and then slipped the final missing poster under the front door.

  As he left the Wolfe property, Tommy spotted a bush of orange urchin, Diplolaena angustifolia, back near the letterbox. He didn’t have a sample of this one. He plucked off one flower with a complete stem and leaf. An ant crawled out of the bud, and Tommy caught him on a fingertip and then lowered him back to the plant, releasing him onto another flower. He put the bloom in his pocket, wrote down the location and date in his notepad, and then walked back into town, whistling to himself. He felt better than he had for days.

  chapter twenty-three

  Early on Thursday, Sergeant Henson filled a paper sack with the items he had purchased in Welonga. A man couldn’t stop at the convenience store in Banville without people asking questions. ‘That’s not the soap Gertie likes, are you sure that’s the one you want? Palmolive’s on sale. She usually buys Campbell’s soup, not the Wentham’s stuff, Sarge. Is she sick in bed then? I’ll nip round with a casserole later.’ Best avoid it altogether. He surveyed the contents of his sack, frowning. He wasn’t sure if he had got the right things.

  ‘Bugger it,’ he said, and scrunched the top of the bag together. He flung it in the passenger seat of the car and sat for a moment, letting the engine warm up in the sharp chill of the morning. In his rear-view mirror, he saw a light come on in the room above the pub. Crane was up. Well, no matter, he had the business of breakfast to attend to before he started the working day. Which would take some time. Roberts rounded the corner, and Henson sighed. His junior officer was supposed to shadow him, learning all aspects of the job. But unfortunately, Henson found his company insufferable. The fellow was not a born police officer. Henson could not think what he might have been born for, but Roberts clearly thought his role was to beautify the world. Never had a lad spent longer mooning over his own face in the mirror, combing his hair and trying out different smiles. His lifetime ambition was to be a model, and he’d even included a head shot on the front of his resume when he applied for the job at the station. Normally, that would have been enough for Henson to scratch him from the list. But Roberts was the list. Nobody else had applied. Henson had got into the habit of steering Roberts away from reflective surfaces at the station, because even the back of a spoon could detain him for ten minutes at a time. And when he wasn’t looking at himself, Roberts was talking about himself and his assorted talents. It would be funny if only the fellow didn’t genuinely think he was God’s gift to them all, especially women. People who thought their presence alone was something everyone should be grateful for did not tend to be the hardest workers.

  Henson nosed into a side street before Roberts could reach him. When he got to his destination, he left the motor running while he climbed the stairs and deposited the sack on the doormat. A pair of eggs sat on the table next to the door. So he wasn’t the only one who had had this thought. He considered the eggs. Where did they come from? Obviously a chicken, but how did they get here? Sergeant Henson looked over at the trees that bordered the Vale property and the park like sentry guards. Good view of the house from there. Whoever was with Sarah at the creek when she disappeared, chances were it was someone she knew. That’s usually how it worked. The biggest threat was not the stranger, but the one who was already close by. And if you trusted them, even worse – half their work was already done. He pondered a big surveillance op, like back in his old Sydney days, to monitor who was coming and going at the house. Given the nature of the business conducted within, nobody would be volunteering their visiting schedule to him. Maybe he could organise for detectives dressed as electricians to scale the power poles and mount cameras on the cables. Plant recording devices in fake bird’s nests in trees. Or, his old favourite, the Telecom man coming to ‘check the line’ inside, leaving his doctored business card
on the hall table and an electronic bug the size of a breadcrumb in the handset to monitor all incoming and outgoing calls. But he’d never get the go-ahead from Crane; the costs required to pull off that sort of operation were probably about equal to Roberts’ annual salary. It would not happen, not until he had further solid proof of foul play.

  The sergeant walked back down the stairs. As he closed the gate behind him, he saw the curtains twitching at the window of Ethel Fetteridge’s lounge room across the road. The biggest busybody this side of the border. She would have copped an eyeful over the years, living across from Susannah’s. He picked up his pace, heading to his car. He had his hand just centimetres from the door handle, fingers poised to slide underneath it, when he heard a voice behind him.

  ‘Sergeant?’

  He sighed, then turned around. ‘Mrs Fetteridge. Good morning to you.’ He smiled without his eyes.

  Ethel Fetteridge sniffed, and peered at him through the bottom of her bifocals. She stood at her front gate with her Chihuahua, Penny, in her arms and curlers so tightly pinned to her scalp that her eyebrows were raised.

  ‘Mmmphh. I see you were checking up on the Vale woman.’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘She’s not had many visitors these past few days.’

  The sergeant paused. ‘A difficult time,’ he said finally. Did Ethel really want to discuss the business ramifications for Susannah of having her daughter go missing?

  ‘I suppose that’s why you stopped in. Bring her some food, did you? Young Sarah always did the shopping for the two of them. Upside down, that household.’

  ‘Yes,’ Sergeant Henson said, glancing at his watch. He half turned towards his car.

  ‘Well, you needn’t bother.’

  The sergeant turned back to Ethel.

  ‘Graham Knight is bringing her food and groceries. I saw him just yesterday. Brought some fresh eggs for her breakfast, probably cooked them up while Lady Muck lay in bed.’

  ‘We can’t all subsist on gossip alone,’ the sergeant muttered.

  ‘What’s that you say?’ Ethel called.

  ‘I said I think I hear the phone.’ The sergeant pointed over her shoulder.

  Ethel hurried back up her garden path and Henson hightailed it to his car.

  ‘He had a key, he did, Sergeant,’ called Ethel.

  Henson paused but didn’t turn around. He heard her door shut, and continued walking. A key. That was odd. He had heard rumours that Graham Knight carried a torch for Susannah, flame still burning from their teenage years, but he had assumed it was a one-way street. Apparently the man was a few peas short of a casserole. In any case, he would have to be interviewed now. Anyone who had been eyeballed at the Vale residence in living memory made the list next, Henson decided. But that list itself would be a problem. Giving their collective reticence about Sarah, he didn’t really expect people to line up and tell him about their excursions outside the marital bed with Susannah. He was also pretty sure that Susannah would not breach their confidence. There was no surer way to lose customers, and she was a businesswoman, after all. Even if her daughter’s bed was empty, Susannah wouldn’t risk the same fate for her own – no customers meant no payment, no payment meant no sauce. She had already made her priorities clear.

  Henson sat in his car, twiddling with the dial of his radio. Static bubbled on the line and then lapsed into silence. He tossed the unit on the passenger seat in disgust. He couldn’t even pick up a signal. He hated feeling so powerless. He gave himself a mental slap. No point in feeling sorry for himself, either; that didn’t help anyone. The first seventy-two hours of a missing person’s case were critical, and they had very nearly passed before anyone had even reported Sarah gone. He was scrabbling for clues at this stage, so any lead, no matter how spurious, would be followed. Especially with Crane looking over his shoulder and reporting back to the Sydney bosses. Henson swung the car around the corner to Main Street.

  Speak of the devil, he would pick him up now and keep going, he thought. Work: that was the only way to make himself feel better. Get an early start on things, show that hand on the clock who was boss. Henson flicked the siren on for a moment to clear the stragglers from the pub. He didn’t have the time or the inclination to process a bunch of drunk and disorderlies today. The divers from Sydney were arriving at ten, and he didn’t plan on resting until then. Henson found himself hoping they would bring him a body from the water. As strange as it seemed to want such a thing, the sergeant knew from experience that worse things could happen to a missing girl when she was alive.

  chapter twenty-four

  In the city, my mother told me, you can be anyone you want.

  Nobody knows your father or your mother; they don’t know where you came from or where you’re going. You make it up, every day. Excellent training for an actress, she said. I thought it sounded perfect. I asked her over and over again if we could move to the city, but she always said no. She said that here we always had a roof over our heads, and it was safer. Banville was a known quantity, she explained. In the city, there was no telling what was coming your way – maybe the bank teller was a burglar, maybe the newspaper delivery boy would come back at night and slide your pillow over your face so gently that you never even woke when your life slipped out of you. In Banville, there were no surprises, she said. But that didn’t mean there wasn’t any danger. My current circumstances are evidence of that. Anyway, it was easy for her to say we should stay in Banville. Attention, drink and a video player to watch movies on: she had everything she needed. Besides, I knew the real reason. Infamous still has the word famous in it. Susannah Vale, the prostitute and drunk was better to her than Susannah Vale, nobody in particular. But what about me? The difference between her life and mine was that, for my mother, Banville was a choice. It wasn’t mine.

  Some of the things that happened when I was growing up in this town were no different to what happened to many other kids. Hair-pulling, name-calling, practical jokes. Led by Cameron Wolfe and Marjorie Wilkinson, among others. I don’t need to go into that. Everybody has seen what that looks like from one end or the other. But there were other things, things that I didn’t understand for a long time. Once, when I was little, I was waiting for my mother on the footpath outside the post office on Main Street. Melinda Marshall was waiting for her mother outside the drycleaner’s next door, and we started playing. It was raining so we sailed leaves along the currents in the gutter, pretending they were mermaids swimming through the ocean. But when Mrs Marshall came out of the drycleaner’s, she pulled Melinda away by the wrist, her face screwed up like she had tasted something nasty.

  ‘You shouldn’t play with that little girl,’ she told her daughter.

  Melinda wasn’t really listening, her attention still on the leaves, pooling now on the grille over the drain.

  ‘Mermaid party,’ she said, pointing. Her mother pinched her hard on the flesh inside her upper arm.

  ‘Owwww!’ Melinda started wailing.

  ‘Mindy, listen to Mummy. I said you’re not to play with that little girl, do you hear me?’

  ‘I heard you,’ Melinda said, indignant. ‘Why not?’

  Her mother looked at her, perplexed.

  ‘Because she’s dirty,’ she answered.

  She pulled Melinda away down the street, and I sat down on the edge of the gutter. I bent and put both my hands beneath the water, looking at my little white palms in the gushing flow, starfish in the gutter sea. They looked perfectly clean to me. Even more so than usual, actually.

  Worlds can exist within other worlds, like Babushka dolls, nestled inside each other. All inside the same shell, but different. In our house, Nolan Trifford showed me how to pull an ace of spades out of my sleeve and a coin from behind my ear. Gerry Coombes helped me with my maths homework, and Andrew Baillett painted a forest on my bedroom ceiling, the trees so three-dimensional I felt like the canopy would sway in the wind. Then, the next day, Nolan looked blank, like he didn’t eve
n recognise me, and crossed the street when I waved at him. Gerry’s daughter Evelyn had a fairy party at the swimming pool and that night at our house Gerry told me how great it was, and how Evelyn had had a wonderful day. He looked surprised when I told him I knew that, because I had been there the whole time, watching from the other end of the pool. Waiting in line at the bakery, Andrew Baillett stepped in front of me in the queue and his wife looked at me as though she was trying to see right inside me to the raw mess of my guts, so hard and for so long that I felt like my skin was burning.

  When I told my mother what happened with Melinda or the men who visited, she shrugged. ‘What did you expect?’ she said. But then she hugged me and said that I didn’t need them. It was stupid to worry about what anyone in this town thought. I was smarter and faster and prettier and stronger than the lot of them. Graham Knight bought me a pair of fairy wings and a wand with flashing lights, but I left them in the bag on the table. It was too late.

  My mother hated the people in this town, I knew that. And maybe they hated her too, because they thought what she did for a living was dirty and immoral and disgusting. And maybe what they felt towards me was contempt, because that is what I was born to. But there were other people that were hated in Banville. People like Cameron Wolfe’s dad, who did bad things. He’d even been in jail. Or Eliza Partridge’s mother, who stole loads of handbags and shoes and jewellery from the shops in Welonga until she got caught. And people said mean things about them and they said mean things to them. Mrs Wolfe got so upset that she went to stay with her sister in Mitcham and Eliza even stopped coming to school for a while because she was so embarrassed. The way they were hated was loud. It was like a dog barking and snarling, right in your face. But the way they hated my mother and I was quieter, though constant, like the low drone of a mosquito following you everywhere you went.