The Vale Girl

by Nelika McDonald

  chapter thirty-seven

  A few months before I came to be here, I was brushing my hair at the bathroom sink, getting ready to go to school. I had been up late trying to write a geography essay about Antarctica as well as taking the money for Mum, and it had been a busy night for her. As I stood at the mirror, trying not to look at how skinny I had become, I noticed that as I pulled the brush down, my hair was coming out. Not just a few strands, but a lot, falling to lie in coiled threads on the tiles. I dropped the brush and leant in closer. I lifted up a section of my hair and saw my scalp shining through in white patches. I started shaking. I sat down on the edge of the bath and began to cry.

  I wasn’t vain, usually. I didn’t have time. But this was bad. I was going bald. It was the shock more than anything, seeing my naked head peeking out, and I was just so tired. I couldn’t stop crying. I thought about going back to bed, but suddenly my bed seemed impossibly far away. I just wanted to go to sleep on the floor at my feet but I couldn’t stand looking at all my hair lying there. So I pulled a towel off the rail and spread it out in the bathtub, and then lay down on it. I put another towel over me like a blanket, pulled the shower curtain across and went to sleep there, in the bathtub. When I woke up, it was five o’clock in the evening. Someone was rattling the doorknob. I looked at the towel pulled up to my chin and realised it was time to put it out on the railing. And I thought: Here we go again.

  The day before that I had found a photo tucked into an old address book in the drawer of the sideboard. It showed my mother, heavily pregnant, looking into the camera with her hair stringy around her face. There was someone behind her who seemed to be resting their chin on her shoulder, out of focus in the photo, but with a clearly visible hand stretched over the swell of her belly. I looked at that photo constantly. I could be doing anything in the house and then suddenly find myself back there, by the sideboard, looking at that hand on Mum’s belly. It seemed like such an intimate thing to do. Who would put their hands so proprietarily on the body of a pregnant woman? Who would dare? Only the one other person who could lay claim to the baby curled in floating possibility under that stretched skin. I was sure the hand belonged to my father. And I was sure my mother knew exactly who he was.

  The morning after I fell asleep in the bath, I brought coffee into Mum’s room when she woke up, and lay on the bed with her, the mugs steaming between our hands and our toes knotted up in the braid on the bedspread. Mum had a record on, Joni Mitchell. ‘Joni wakes me up gently,’ she said. Later in the day it would become Janis Joplin. Janis sang songs for women alone at night, my mother said. I had planned on telling her that I wasn’t doing so well lately. I had planned to tell her she needed to stop drinking. I’d tried telling her that before. I’d tried asking politely, or crying, or shouting. And sometimes, for a day or two, it worked. She would stop. But then, as sure as morning turns to night and Joni to Janis, she would begin again. Sooner or later, she always began again, but she’d hide it, not wanting me to be angry or disappointed. She’d avoid me – and I didn’t want to be on my own right now.

  ‘Tell me about my father,’ I said instead.

  She groaned and rolled over. ‘I’ve told you. I don’t know who your father is.’

  She didn’t sound angry, just sort of bemused, so I chanced pushing her a bit.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  She sat up and looked at me, raising her eyebrows.

  ‘Why are you asking about your father? You don’t need him. What’s making you think about him all of a sudden? Have you been reading some story again?’

  Last summer holidays I had read a magazine article about a man in Orlando, Florida, who had stopped at a Cheesy Joe’s drive-through for a burger on a cross-country driving holiday and thought there was something strikingly familiar about the young girl at the register who handed him his change. He slept in his car that night and went back to the burger joint for breakfast. The girl was waiting for him. She had a photocopy of her birth certificate with her and she handed it to him on the tray with his coffee. ‘Are you my father?’ she had written across the top. The man read the name of the mother and remembered sand dunes, the smell of sardines cooking on a grill and the spiky crabgrass under his back, the ridged impression of a waistband on a brown hip. ‘Yes,’ he wrote in response. He left the birth certificate under his saucer with a ten-cent tip and exited the restaurant. When the girl found his answer she sat down in his booth. She touched her lips to the rim of the coffee cup he had been drinking from and licked her finger and used it to pick up the crumbs on the saucer, all that remained of the complimentary Chocalicious Cookie her father had been given with his drink. Then her supervisor came past and told her to get back to work.

  At the end of her shift that night, the girl waited in the car park for her boyfriend to pick her up. His name was Rodriguez and he had a tattoo of a scorpion on his left bicep. My enemies feel the sting, he told her. She did not like him very much, nor his crudely inked tattoo, but in her neighbourhood, it was advisable to be the girlfriend of a man like this rather than the girlfriend of a man who might cross his path one day. Rodriguez arrived, tailed by another car. Rodriguez screeched to a stop in the middle of the car park, the thudding music from his car obliterating all other sound with a bass line the girl could feel low down in her belly. Behind him, another car nosed over to the parking space nearest to the girl, the driver dipping his headlights as they swept across her eyes before bringing the car to a gentle shuddering stop. The girl looked at this car. It was very old, a beaten-up grey station wagon, but there was a bright yellow lightning strike painted along the side. She liked the lightning strike. It showed the driver had a sense of humour. Rodriguez leant on his horn. Without looking in his direction, she climbed into the grey car, nestling her bag into the foot well like she had been doing it for years.

  ‘I have some dinner for you at home,’ her father said. And then, ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t tip you more.’

  The girl shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said.

  She smiled at him, and he smiled back, and they noticed at the same time that they both smiled in the same way, with their whole faces splitting open and their dark eyes shining like the surface of a pond at night.

  I liked that story. It did not say that the father was rich, or that the girl was beautiful. It didn’t say they became the best of friends, or that they had met just in time for the girl to give her father the kidney his feeble body required to go on. Probably the dinner he had made her that night was inedible, over-salted fish desiccated to a husk, green beans limp and sodden, I explained to my mother. Probably they fought every day after that, about money, television, taking the rubbish out, feeding the dog. It was none of it miraculous, but like something entirely possible. All that had happened began with that one tiny moment when the girl leant over the counter and placed some coins in a man’s hand. Just a few seconds, a change in the wind – a man got a burger, then a girl liked his shitty car.

  My mother hadn’t seen what was so great about it.

  ‘She should have stayed with Rodriguez,’ she said. ‘Who wants to eat dried-out fish?’

  She had finished her coffee and wriggled further down under the blankets, ready to go to sleep.

  ‘Wait,’ I said. ‘I need to ask you something.’

  I went and got the photo from the address book in the sideboard. She had rolled onto her stomach, her face on its side. I held out the photo. She looked at it for a long time.

  ‘Is that my father?’ I asked her.

  She looked at me and shook her head.

  ‘Are you trying to hurt me?’ she asked, her voice small. She made her eyes go big and wet, like a deer.

  I shook my head, determined. ‘No. Is that my father?’

  ‘No. No, it’s just some john, probably. I don’t remember.’ She turned her face into the pillows.

  I reached out and took hold of her shoulder, shaking her.

  ‘Mum! Look at me. Who is this?’

/>   She swatted me away. ‘I don’t know! I told you, I don’t know!’ She reached for the glass on her bedside table. I slapped at her hand and she drew it back then slapped me across the face.

  I burst into tears. She pulled me down to lie beside her and put the blanket over both of us, stroking my hair out of my eyes and cooing softly. ‘I’m sorry, baby girl, I didn’t mean to hurt you. I love you.’

  I didn’t answer.

  ‘Hey.’ She rubbed my back, circles, squares then triangles. I thought of a toy that I had when I was little, a sort of frame with holes shaped like circles or hexagons or squares, and you had to find the right shaped piece to drop through the hole. What was it called? I couldn’t remember. Did it even have a name? It seemed important to remember this, and that I couldn’t remember made me feel panicky, like I was holding on to something slippery and it was slowly sliding from my grasp.

  ‘Hey. You know what we should do tomorrow? We should go to the beach. Wouldn’t you like that? Bondi. We’ll have fish and chips, maybe do some shopping,’ Mum said.

  The blankets smelt like her, cigarettes and perfume and the must of someone else’s body. She pulled them up over our heads and made a tent with her knees propped up, a cave for just the two of us.

  ‘We’ll get us some new clothes,’ she said. Her hair brushed my cheek. I imagined it, shopping bags swinging from our hands, the tightness of sunburn and salt drying in our hair, the contented weariness on the train home. The last time we’d done that was maybe four years ago. She bought a big straw hat in the city and I got some new books at a bookstore that was so big there was an elevator inside it. One of the books came with a free lockable diary, pink glittery cover and a pen on a shoelace attached to the spiral spine. I thought it was beautiful. I wrote my name on the inside cover in my best handwriting, nursed it like a baby for the whole train trip home, but then left it on the seat when we got out, struggling with our shopping bags and beach towels. Sometimes I still thought about that diary, wondering if another girl had come along and found it. She would have crossed out my name and written hers there instead, Allison or Rebecca. Part of me wanted Allison or Rebecca to find it and part of me wanted it just to get tossed in a bin, covered with orange peel and ticket stubs, so that if I couldn’t have it, nobody could.

  ‘There’s no money,’ I said to my mother.

  ‘No money at all? But, baby, there’s some things I need. How can there be no money?’ Her voice was getting an edge to it. I felt hot then, suffocating under the blankets. I threw them back and climbed over Mum to get out of the bed. She followed me out and began roaming around the room, looking under things and rifling through drawers. I watched her for a moment then turned away.

  ‘Maybe next week,’ she said, as I was leaving the room.

  I didn’t bother to stop. ‘Sure. Next week,’ I said.

  chapter thirty-eight

  Tommy walked at a fast clip to Graham Knight’s house, his chest still aching from his earlier run to the Montepulciano property. In his head he heard again the voice of Mr Montepulciano, ‘Per favore, Maria,’ and he thought how strange it was that had never known Mrs Montepulciano’s first name. In Banville, all the older residents were a Mr or Mrs. In a family, if there were two people with the same name, they would be called Big for the elder name-holder and Young for the junior, like Big Vic and Young Vic Caulfield. Mrs Montepulciano had a smiling sun sticker on her letterbox, faded and curling up at the edges, and four cats that were constantly giving birth to squirming litters of kittens. Those two things and her plump hands, cushiony caramel face and perpetually floury apron were enough to designate her house a pit stop for many of the kids coming down the hill on their way home from school, especially the Italian kids. She would make elderflower cordial and cut thick wedges of panettone for them and the kids would show her their drawings, their spelling tests with gold stars on them, their paddle-pop-stick houses and lumpy handmade Christmas baubles raining glitter. She never spoke much but she beamed, with dimples, and her little brown eyes disappeared in the pleated folds around them with her mirth. Tommy had first loitered at her fence for three consecutive afternoons when he was six, watching through the diamonds of wire as the other kids at the picnic table jostled to show Mrs M their swimming carnival ribbons from that day. Tommy had one himself, pinned proudly to his shirt. Mrs M caught sight of the small face under the passionfruit vines knotted around her front fence and waddled over to him.

  ‘Come,’ she said, and he went.

  She sat him in a chair next to her own and leant down to inspect the ribbon on his chest. The sun was behind her, and she acted as a harbouring sail for Tommy, shadowing him from the strength of the high heat of the afternoon.

  ‘English, eh? What does it say?’ she asked him.

  Tommy blushed. He could not read yet. He lifted his little hunched shoulders in a shrug, eyeing the plate of cannoli on the table, fat pastry tubes filled with cream. Tommy was quite certain the cream was in fact pure cloud that Mrs Montepulciano had harvested from the sky. When his mum had made scones for his dad, cutting the dough into circles with an empty Vegemite jar, his dad made a big fuss. He would spread the scones with jam and then lashings of thick cream like that in the cannoli and close his eyes at the first bite, flour stippling his moustache. He would chew slowly, with his eyes still closed, then call to his wife, ‘Tastes like heaven, love.’

  Tommy had looked up at the sky when his dad said that and saw the clouds, fat and curvaceous drifts, and deduced that they were, in fact, cream. There must be a tank somewhere outside to catch them in.

  Mrs M smiled at him and her nose wrinkled and her cheeks grew mantled with pink. ‘I know what this say.’

  Tommy bit his lower lip.

  ‘It say, the . . . best!’ She poked his chest with her finger twice, once for each word.

  Tommy smiled. She put four cannoli on a plate and placed it in front of him. Jason Ross pushed a Matchbox car across the table to him, and Salvatore D’Angelo gave him a small plastic soldier that he could make drive the car. They stayed until the sun began to go down and Sal’s mother rang to see where he was. It was a wonderful afternoon. Mrs Montepulciano was a wonderful woman. Maria. Per favore, Maria.

  Tommy arrived at the Knight house. He walked briskly around the back and climbed in through the laundry window. A tank of fish hummed in the corner, and a swishing, gurgling cycle was in progress in the washing machine. The smell of burnt toast mingled with the sharp scent of bleach in the hallway. Tommy walked into the kitchen. A mug of tea sat on the table with a half-eaten bowl of muesli. Oat flakes and slivers of coconut dried on the silver spoon discarded on the floor, and a smear of milk marked the path of its skitter under the table. Tommy cupped his hand around the mug. It was still warm. Geraldine had left in a hurry, presumably roused by the siren of the ambulance like everyone else. Tommy didn’t linger. He used his trusty copper wire to jimmy the lock on that internal door he had seen Graham entering, and fumbled on the wall for the light switch. It illuminated a plain wooden staircase, leading down to another room, still dark. Sliding his hand along the wall, Tommy located a second light switch, flicked it, and then inhaled so quickly that he gagged and spluttered on the air.

  The room was a workroom of sorts, with the long wooden bench he had seen from outside against the furthest wall, a board of tools hanging from nails and arranged by size and category in front of it. A corkboard was fixed to the adjoining wall, and on it was pinned various charts, diagrams, scraps of paper with coloured squares on them and a list of phone numbers. A fridge and armchair sat along the far wall next to a door that looked like that of a storage cupboard set into the wall. Tommy tried it, but it was firmly locked. He would have to have a go at it with more than his copper wire. Maybe it was a safe, for weapons or money? The rest of the room was altogether ordinary. But then Tommy looked up.

  From the ceiling, suspended on strings of fishing wire, hung a collection of model planes arranged in different directions o
f flight, noses tilted up to gain altitude, tipped down to land or with wings fully extended, soaring through the air above his head. They were all different colours, different sizes, and all were perfectly, intricately detailed, down to the numbers and logos painted along their sides, the letters sometimes no larger than a pinkie fingernail. There must have been hundreds up there. Tommy reached up and pushed the tail of one of the planes and watched it swing gently. It nudged its neighbour and the two planes hovered together for a few moments and then stilled. He sat down on the floor and then lay down with his hands beneath his head, staring up at the planes. The ceiling beyond them was painted black, with tiny stars speckled in whorled galaxies. It was beautiful.

  Down on the floor there, Tommy felt peaceful and soothed. Like a tiny speck in the scale of the universe, a seed, a dust mote, insubstantial. He could have drifted away like one of those planes, leaving nothing behind but a streaming white contrail to show where he’d been. All he had left behind. Tommy sprung to his feet then, remembering why he was there. In the basement of a murderer.

  He went to the far wall first. There was little there, but a small stool sat next to the recliner, a paint-splattered dusty radio perched atop it. He flicked it on.