The Vale Girl

by Nelika McDonald

  ‘I had to stop him,’ I said, ‘he was going to –’

  What? What was he going to do? Live a little longer? Too bad.

  Graham closed his eyes and sank down onto his haunches on the bank of the creek.

  ‘I had to stop him,’ I said again, and he nodded. ‘But I didn’t mean to do that.’ I pointed at Cameron and my outstretched hand shook. ‘I never meant for that to happen.’

  ‘Of course you didn’t,’ Graham said, ‘of course you didn’t. You were just protecting yourself.’

  I nodded. But looking at Cameron’s body now, it looked like just that, a body. Harmless bones in a suit made of skin. What had I done? Graham was looking at the body too, his hand over his mouth.

  ‘You can’t call the police,’ I said. ‘Please don’t call the police.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to.’

  ‘Marjorie Wilkinson knows that he came here after me,’ I said, ‘and she will tell everyone, and then I’ll go to jail, but I can’t go to jail, it was just an accident.’

  ‘I wouldn’t do that,’ he said, his hands up: stop. ‘I’m not going to call the police. It was just an accident. I can help you – let me help you.’

  I didn’t say anything to that. Can you raise the dead, Graham Knight?

  He was quiet for a long time. I swayed in the water, watching my reflection loom and recede. If the police found out what I had done, I would go to jail. It wouldn’t matter what I said. It wouldn’t matter what Cameron might have done to me if I hadn’t killed him. Who would believe that I did it because I had to? Who would believe that of the Vale girl? She probably lured him there, they would say. You know she’s a slut like her mother. Well, she’s never known any different. Now she’s trying to ruin the poor boy’s name. You know, the mother was a slanderous liar, too. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

  If I went to jail, who would look after my mother? I sliced my hand through my reflection but the water Sarah only wobbled in place. You killed him, I said to her, and she gazed back at me blankly.

  ‘I’m going to take care of this,’ Graham said from the bank, and I turned around. He took off his shirt and held it out to me, and I came out of the water and put it on.

  ‘Sit down,’ he said, and I did.

  Graham squatted by Cameron with his back to me, and looked from the body to the water, considering. Then he heaved Cameron onto his back, then over onto his stomach, and again. He did this until he had rolled him all the way down into the water, where he floated on his stomach, his face down beneath the surface. For a second on the bank, I thought I saw a pulse at his neck, but Graham said it was just his breath coming out. All that air he didn’t need anymore, whistling out the holes I had poked in him. Geraldine started calling the dog then, so we moved quickly, in case she came looking for him too. We dragged the bloodied dirt and leaves down into the water, and I pushed my uniform and shoes under a rock near the shore. When I looked back at the water, Cameron was gone. Sucked down into the darkness, like a magic trick – he’d been disappeared. For a moment, I was weightless. But then I remembered my legs dangling over the bridge, the sun on the top of my head, watching a Coke bottle come floating down this same creek, the red lid bobbing up and down a like a victory flag.

  ‘The tides.’ I sagged down onto the bank of creek. ‘This is useless. He’s going to wash up. In five days. Someone will find him, and then I’ll go to jail.’

  Nothing was lost, no matter how much you might have liked it to be. It was too good to be true, him vanishing like that. It was just a magic trick. An optical illusion.

  Graham looked downstream and rubbed the back of his neck. ‘He will wash up,’ he said, ‘but when that happens, you won’t be in Banville anymore.’

  I looked at him, and he looked back steadily. ‘What? Where will I be?’

  He shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter. You can be anywhere but here.’

  ‘But where would I go? How could I just . . . go like that?’

  ‘You won’t be alone. I’ll come with you. And your mother will too. We’ll all go.’

  I laughed, hollow. Ah. So that was it. He thought he was going to elope with my mother and I could go too; maybe hold their bags for them. He was crazy. The only person who could help me here and he was crazy.

  ‘What are you even talking about? Please, I thought you wanted to help me. We can’t just leave, that’s stupid! It doesn’t work like that.’ I thought I might be sick again. What was I going to do?

  ‘Why not?’

  I stared at him, speechless. I couldn’t believe how simple he seemed to think it all was. I had always said that one day I would just leave, but I never really thought I could, just like that. This wasn’t the movies; things like that didn’t work in reality. In reality people had whole big messy lives in a place, lives that were tangled up in other lives and houses and jobs and things, lives that you couldn’t just pack into a bag with your underwear. It just wasn’t that easy. Where would we go? What would we do for money? How would we get food? How would he get my mother to leave? I’d been asking her for years and she’d never said yes yet. Besides, so what if we left? I would still have done what I did. This day on the creek wouldn’t just be erased if we left, just as Cameron wasn’t suddenly erased when Graham pushed him into the water. In real life, you didn’t get to leave the bad things behind. In real life, they followed you like a shadow, and you just waited for the day when they caught up to you and stopped you in your tracks.

  ‘Sarah, this wasn’t your fault,’ Graham said, shouting now. ‘You didn’t mean to kill him, it was just an accident. You think you should be punished for that? You think one little mistake should decide the rest of your life for you? You think I’m stupid. Well maybe I am, but this one I know. Staying here and facing the music would be the stupidest thing you could do. Far stupider than trying to leave.’

  He walked down to the edge of the creek and stared into the water. I watched him clamp his hands around himself, trying to make himself still. The dog followed him down there and pushed his nose into Graham’s palm. He patted him on the head absently, and the dog let out a grumble of appreciation and lay down at his feet.

  ‘Why are you helping me?’ I asked, and he shrugged without turning around.

  ‘Because you need help.’

  I looked up at the drifts of clouds churning softly across the sky. The dog barked at something and a flock of birds erupted from the trees above us, scattering apart and then blending together again into a V formation before they circled out of sight beyond the ridge to the far west of the town. Gone as quickly as they came. I did need help. I wondered what my mother would say. ‘You don’t need anyone. You can do this yourself.’ But I couldn’t. I wasn’t as strong or brave, not as independent as she thought. Then again, should I really be listening to Graham Knight’s advice? Wasn’t he as much of a creep as Cameron? No, I answered my own question. Nobody was as much of a creep as Cameron. Graham might have paid me more attention than I would have liked, but had he never laid a hand on me. And what other option did I have? There was nobody else I could ask for help. I would have to be careful. But I’d spent a lifetime being careful.

  ‘Okay,’ I said to Graham. ‘So what do we do now?’

  chapter forty-seven

  Graham’s basement was divided into two rooms; the smaller had wine racks against all the walls, and Graham had made the larger one his workspace. That smaller room became mine. There was a bed – a mattress on packing crates – and Graham hung some planes from the ceiling and picked some flowers and put them in a jar on the windowsill. A pile of aviation magazines was fanned out on the table. It was small and hot, but I was safe there, and hidden.

  Graham’s plan was that I would stay there for a few nights, where nobody could find me. He would bring me food and books and I could rest while he made the arrangements. Graham said he knew I didn’t get much rest at home. He would go to my mother’s and tell her that something had happened but that I was safe for now,
with him. But only for now. And that was the most important part of the plan – we would need to leave Banville as soon as possible. In about five days’ time, Cameron Wolfe’s body would wash up. It might take more time than that, or it might take a little less. Without Tommy and his notebook I couldn’t be sure. But in any case, I had to stay hidden, so when Cameron was found dead and Marjorie pointed the finger at me, the police wouldn’t be able to find me. And what would make it even harder to find me? If I was no longer in Banville at all. Graham just needed to convince my mother to come with us. It would be a new beginning for us all, he said.

  On the first night, he only visited to bring me some food and clean clothes. On the second, he brought more things from my house, things that I would be taking with me when we left. He brought some chocolate, too. I’d been having trouble eating, but by the third night I was feeling not better exactly, but hungry at least, which was something.

  ‘How did you know this was my favourite type?’ I asked him, tearing off the silver foil and cramming three squares into my mouth at once. Cadbury.

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘This is my favourite type of chocolate. And that is my favourite book.’

  Graham was facing away from me, unpacking the contents of his backpack onto the floor. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn sat on top of the pile, along with some magazines and some food. He’d packed my favourite old t-shirt for sleeping in, and had even brought my pillow.

  ‘Graham?’ I stopped chewing for a moment. ‘How do you know so much about me?’

  He opened one of the cans of lemonade he had brought me and took a long drink before answering.

  ‘Well, I know your mother, don’t I? She tells me things about you.’

  ‘She does?’

  ‘Sure. Lots of things. In fact, I know your mother really well. Since we were kids. And she probably knows me better than anyone in the world. Sarah, you know I love your mother, don’t you?’

  I frowned. ‘I guess.’ I hadn’t really thought about it. He cared about her, I could see that, and he always came to see her a lot. But so did plenty of other men. I knew Mum and Graham watched old movies together, sometimes she would tell me about them afterwards, evaluating the performance of the female actresses. That was when she was at her most animated, sitting at the kitchen table and smoking while I cooked, her face roused from its usual catatonic blankness, laughing and rocking back in her chair. She liked Katharine Hepburn; she said she was strong, and clever. The way she entered a room, that was grace. My mother showed me the glide of it, how to change the temperature of a room, the pulse of a conversation, just with your presence. But I never learnt. I would try coming into the room like that, imagining I was moving with elegance, and my mother would laugh so hard she fell on the floor.

  ‘You have the grace of an elephant, Sarah.’

  I would go back out and try again.

  ‘My God, you’re stomping! The way you walk now is like shouting with your feet. Now try and whisper with them, instead.’

  So I would mince in, limp-wristed and scowling. She would sigh and shake her head.

  Katharine Hepburn was beautiful too, my mother said, so people would always say she wasn’t talented. They were wrong. She was a wonderful actress but people liked to cut pretty women down. They didn’t like it if someone had the looks and the brains as well; it confused them and made them angry. I should trust her on that, she said. Men especially never knew how to take a woman with both. Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo were very good too. Then there were the pretty women who were supremely lacking in talent, like Mae West and Jayne Mansfield. They gave all pretty women a bad name.

  Graham swatted at a moth that skimmed the tips of his hair. I thought of my mother after he had visited her, my mother at the kitchen table. My mother, alight. She loved him back, I thought. He wasn’t just one of her customers. She really actually loved him, and probably always had. It settled in me like sediment. Graham and my mother. Graham, my father?

  I could have asked him then. I could have made him tell me the truth. But I just couldn’t summon up the words. And part of me, strangely, after all this time, just didn’t want to know. Graham did all the things a father should. In fact, he always had. He’d watched over me for my whole life, a bumbling, eager, irritating guardian angel. Maybe he’d done that because he was my father. Maybe he’d done it because I was Susannah’s daughter, or maybe he just thought someone had to and nobody else stepped up. Or maybe, he just thought I needed it and deserved it, a second pair of attentive eyes for when the first pair clouded over. But he had done it. He was doing it right now–giving a shit about me. That was all that mattered.

  ‘I wanted to marry her,’ Graham said, then. He toyed with the ring pull of the lemonade can, twisting it until it snapped off. He stuck his ring finger through it and held it out to me.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Always. I wanted to take her to Paris. London, Rome. Everywhere.’

  ‘So why didn’t you?’

  ‘Well.’ He told me about Geraldine then. His one little mistake.

  ‘We made the best of what we had here,’ he finished.

  I nodded. ‘What did Mum say tonight? When you asked her about leaving now, what did she say?’

  Graham looked away.

  I lay back on the bed and hugged a pillow to my chest. ‘She said, “Pass me my drink,” didn’t she?’

  Choose the left hand or the right. Your daughter or your drink. I already knew the answer.

  He pressed his lips together. ‘If she knew what had happened, there’d be no question of it. We’d be gone already. But I can’t tell her everything, because she might let something slip, especially if the police question her when she’s . . . under the influence. We can’t take that risk.’

  I closed my eyes for a moment. I wondered what Cameron could see underwater. Mermaids? Treasure chests? The gold that had brought his ancestors to this town in the first place? Or just the brackish brown of water washed with the silt made from centuries of falling leaves? Or nothing. Nothing at all.

  ‘She will agree,’ Graham said. ‘I will make her see there’s no other way. I’m still working on it, Sarah. But I’ll get you out of here. I promise.’

  I nodded again, and closed my eyes. I couldn’t talk anymore. We were running out of time.

  chapter forty-eight

  Graham pressed the buzzer next to his bed and a nurse appeared in the doorway. She had red hair like Lucille Ball in Forever, Darling and was probably only in her thirties, but her maternal-looking face reminded Graham of his eldest sister Pamela. He had never liked Pamela.

  ‘And how are we feeling this evening?’ The nurse picked up the clipboard from the tray at the end of his bed and thumbed through his chart.

  ‘We? I can only speak for myself and I’m fine. In fact, I’m ready to go,’ Graham said.

  She licked her index finger and turned the page. ‘You’re not going anywhere.’

  Graham thumped his pillow in frustration. ‘But I feel fine! I’ve been lying here for hours!’

  ‘You’ve had a head injury, Mr Knight. Don’t be silly, now. Symptoms can manifest a long time after the injury occurs, and we need to be sure that –’

  ‘Can I at least have visitors?’

  The nurse let the clipboard fall back into the tray with a clatter. She wagged her finger at him as though he was a disobedient child. ‘No, you may not. Visiting hours are over.’

  ‘Okay, then. I need to use the bathroom.’

  ‘Down the hallway, second door to your right.’

  Graham waited until she had left the room and then swung his legs over the side of the bed. He put his jacket on to cover his hospital bracelet and kicked off the paper slippers his feet were clad in. He marched out of his room, past the nurses’ station to the bathroom, which he entered. After a few moments he exited again, but instead of returning to his bed, Graham followed the signs to the visitors’ waiting room. Nobody stopped him. For the hundredth time in the last wee
k, Graham marvelled at how easy it was to break rules. He cursed himself for not having discovered the joy in rebellion earlier. With each step he took, he said a name to himself. Left, right, Sarah, Susannah. Sarah, Susannah. Sarah, Susannah.

  In the doorway to the waiting room he paused. They were there, but so was the sergeant. Shit. And his wife. And the Johns boy. They all turned to stare at him but Graham could only look at Sarah and Susannah. Casting a sideways glance at Henson, he went and sat down between them. Susannah ran her fingers over the plaster on his forehead and he caught her hand in his.

  ‘You okay?’ she asked.

  He nodded. His head did still ache, but only when he remembered it. He looked at Sarah’s wrists, but saw no handcuffs. He tried to see in her face what had passed in this room tonight. She looked drained and dazed, as though awaking from a nightmare-plagued sleep, or long hibernation. As indeed she had. Sergeant Henson pulled a chair across the room and sat down in front of him. He held a notebook and pencil.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ he asked. Polite, but with an edge.

  ‘Fine, thanks.’ Autopilot.

  ‘Right. Well, if you’re up for it, I need to hear, in your own words, what has been happening over this last week.’

  Graham nodded.

  ‘At some stage I’ll require a full statement from you, but for now, you can just tell me about the events of tonight.’

  Graham nodded again.

  The events of tonight. What had Sarah told them? What had the sergeant said in return? And how had she told them? How had she lined those words up in her throat and not choked on them? It must have been awful for her. Graham felt a surge of the protectiveness that had germinated inside him at the very moment his gaze landed on the crumply, kicking, squalling infant Sarah, and only intensified over time. Nobody should make her do anything she didn’t want to do. Nobody should make her speak of that day. If he had his way, they never would.

  But if they already had, surely Henson would see that she’d only done what she had to. Cameron was the criminal, not Sarah. Please, not Sarah. Graham’s eyes met Susannah’s and she tried for a smile but came up short. She brushed her hair from her eyes and Graham saw that she had bitten her nails down to the quick. Belatedly, it occurred to him that charges might await him too. Harbouring a criminal? Obstruction of justice? Well, fuck it, he thought. That didn’t even matter. Let Henson cuff him; let him lock him up in a cell. He was still freer than he’d ever been before.