Swimming on Dry Land

by Helen Blackhurst

  Vera turns to the back shelves and stacks the glasses. ‘I wish Bill hadn’t told me,’ she says. ‘Can’t stop thinking about the damn thing.’

  I chuck some money on the beer mat, throwing my bottle into the crate on the way out. At least Vera seems to be staying put. There’s a good chance I’m overreacting. That said, I don’t bother giving cheques to the mobile homes. There aren’t many occupied, in any case. Most were vacated when Shena disappeared. I couldn’t afford to pay everyone.

  By the time the plane arrives – an eight-seater the same as last time – I’m almost at the service station. The airstrip, which peters out into a stretch of bush beyond the road’s end, only becomes visible when there’s a plane; the rest of the time it lies submerged in the scrub. As I watch the dust fly up and the wheels scream to a halt, I think of Monica and that hot-air balloon. There’s a lot to be said for floating off into the blue.

  Let me take you back, give you the whole picture. I moved to Australia close to six years ago, the end of 1979, not long after Dad died. Opportunities were ripe, and things in England weren’t going too well. Mike was pretty low at the time, and what with Margaret Thatcher and the recession… I’d made a few contacts, an investment company that dealt mainly with overseas holiday lets. Wrote an impressive bio for myself as a property tycoon. It’s amazing what people can swallow. Words on paper: that’s what I tell Mike, and he’s the wordsmith. I get this call from a mining company: Lansdowne Mining Corporation. All I had to do was reel them in.

  I’ll never forget that drive – the blinding heat, the red-chalk roads, those damn sticky flies. People say Akarula is like parts of Queensland, but it’s not. Half of the cracks in the earth are wide enough to be craters. A moonscape is how my business partner, Willie Johnson, described it.

  Our map took us as far as Wattle Creek. We stopped at a roadhouse, one of those wooden-walled establishments that remind me of the Wild West, stuffed animal heads staring out of the corners. Willie and I got steaks and talked to the local cowboys, who told us about a mine that had closed six months before. ‘Nothing east of here,’ one fella said. By the length of his hair and grey-brown beard, he might have been leaning up against that bar his whole life. ‘This is the end of the road.’

  He was right. From Wattle Creek the bitumen disappeared into dirt tracks. We followed the scant instructions Lansdowne Mining Corporation had sent us. Those tracks were rife with potholes. Where the tracks forked, we guessed at which one to take. Some of them petered out into impassable gullies. The further down those beaten tracks we went, the more geared up I got. I knew, even before we saw the place, that this was something big, the kind of opportunity that comes to you once in a lifetime.

  Willie didn’t share my enthusiasm. All he could see was no-man’s land. Two miles or so before we reached the designated site, the Falcon overheated, blowing a gasket, and we were forced to walk, following a dried-out riverbed, one of the few features listed in our sparse directions.

  It was as if the land had been blown apart and then scrambled back together. The whole place had a prehistoric feel. As we neared the site, we came across remnants of the old mine those cowboys had talked about – a few wooden shelters and derelict shacks, the odd burnt-out car – but nothing that suggested the makings of a town; just miles and miles of uninhabited bush, broken up by monolithic termite mounds, and one wide-armed tree. Willie reckoned the place had been abandoned in a hurry; none of the mineshafts were capped. We walked around the site, taking note of any geographical features that might hinder construction work. Lansdowne Corporation had already tested for water. It struck me as the perfect site.

  Willie couldn’t see it. I can hear him now. Get the feeling we’re in the forbidden zone? He had this theory that anywhere more than fifty miles from civilisation was beyond the point of no return. There are some places we’re not meant to live. This looks like one of them. I ignored him, totting up the countless advantages of establishing a town beyond the contours of the map. It was hard to imagine that there had ever been running water, yet there were gullies all over the place, and the riverbed, cracked and hardened by years of relentless sunshine, was fairly deep.

  My brain was racing; I had a rush of ideas. Willie led the way up the side of a large red rock – the rock my nieces have christened Red Rock Mountain. The view from the top gave me the grand sweep of the place; in one blinding flash, I saw it all. My very own town.Something Dad would have been proud of.

  ‘What shall we call it?’ I asked Willie.

  I knew he was assessing the potential, though he said nothing. What we needed were selling points, features that would attract miners. And Lansdowne Corporation had all that; the results of their initial explorations were impressive.

  ‘There’s my street, right there,’ I said, pointing towards the riverbed. ‘Two rows of houses to start with. Use the riverbed as the main road – plenty of room for expansion.’

  Willie just shook his head. He didn’t realise that what I had in mind was practically a city, a place that would be talked about, recognised on every map in years to come. I caught a glimpse of the infinite possibilities: a railway, a casino, a cinema. Right from the start I planned an eighty-seater cinema, for Mike. Once that was up and running, he wouldn’t have to bother with his writing, which, as far as I could see, was making him pretty miserable.

  I walked the whole site, checked out the old mine; it was perfect. On the way back, I found this boulder with the word Akarula scratched on it like some kind of stone-age graffiti. I wrote it down, even tried to find it in an Australian dictionary. It had a ring about it. That was good enough for me. (I never did find that boulder again.) By the time I got back to the car, Willie had managed to get it started.

  The one-storey houses shot up in no time, leaving me four million in debt. Most of my borrowings were clean. I’d made the odd under-the-table deal, but who doesn’t in this game? I’d built a town, the skin and bones of one, anyway. And I was the landowner, landlord, legal head. Some of them called me the bushmaster; it was more or less a standing joke. I knew there’d been trouble with a group of aborigines laying claims to the land, but I was well out of the line of fire. The mining company who had leased the mining rights before us, Opal Exports, were the ones facing the flak. I explained this to Willie. I wanted him to understand the long-term picture.

  ‘Steer clear,’ he kept saying, in that moralising tone of his. Within a month, he was gone.

  I find Mike and Caroline in the sitting room. They look wrecked. Monica is asleep on the settee, which gives us all a good reason to stay quiet. Although eventually I say: ‘The detectives have arrived.’ I take a step closer to Caroline, who is standing in the middle of the room clutching something orange to her chest. Her eyes are glued to the certificate of land purchase framed on the wall behind me.

  Mike has sunk down onto the arm of a chair and is holding his knees.

  ‘You should rest,’ I say, throwing my comment between them. Neither of them replies. The silence in the room could crush a cow, so I move back.

  Before I reach the door, Mike says, ‘Where have you been?’ coiling his hands into his chest like a child. (It’s the medication. He never used to be like this.)

  ‘You need a drink,’ I tell him. We all need a drink.

  Mike shakes his head. ‘Did you talk to the police?’ He goes on in such a rush, his words bang into each other. And then he stops, glancing over at Monica, whose closed eyes are flickering. Her breath drones like a cat’s purr.

  ‘The detectives will be here any minute,’ I say. ‘What about some coffee?’

  ‘What did you tell them?’ Mike asks.

  ‘They’ve only just landed. I haven’t had a chance…’

  I look back at Caroline, whose fingers are twitching, just her fingers; the rest of her is absolutely still. Her face has paled even more, and those fingers, they keep pawing at whatever she is holding.

  Mike stands abruptly. His shirt flap is hanging out. He tou
ches Caroline’s arm as he goes past her. She grabs hold of his wrist, letting go of the orange knit; it’s the cardigan we fished out from the shaft last night. As she bends to get it back, Mike frees himself from her grip and leaves. Only the questions he has asked take possession of the room like squatters.

  When the door closes, Caroline finally speaks. ‘Maddie says she’s done this before.’

  ‘That’s right,’ I say. It’s hard to think straight; my mind keeps twisting up. I want to hold her, to feel the weight of her against me, only she’s farther than the sea right now. Flat and lifeless in her near grief.

  ‘What did she mean?’ she says, cradling the cardigan in her arms.

  The barking dogs are what wake Monica. I dive over to the settee, glad of something to do.

  Monica wipes her lips with her finger end. ‘The dogs are here,’ she pipes, as if she is expecting them.

  We all watch the door.

  Mike is followed in by one of the detectives – Delaney. She’s put on weight. Her short hair is slicked back, more likely with sweat than any hair product. In jeans and a well-worn shirt, she manages to look like an oversized circus attraction; she’s a good foot taller than the rest of us. The large dark-haired mole on her cheek twitches as she gives me a cautious smile. I introduce her to Caroline.

  The sight of this clownish woman unnerves me; if omens do exist, she must be one.

  Monica gets up. ‘Are those your dogs?’

  Delaney nods, giving my niece a swift handshake before she moves on to Caroline.

  ‘Georgie is trapped,’ Monica says, causing Delaney to give her a perplexed squint of a look. Delaney has this odd way of stretching her lips over her buck teeth so that her mouth looks like a tightened fist.

  ‘Trapped?’

  ‘I gave her my cap. Do you think she’s still wearing it? You’re really tall.’

  Caroline cuts in. ‘Monica has been pretty sick with sunstroke, haven’t you, pet? They were playing hide and seek…’ She suddenly stops dead.

  ‘Hide and seek,’ Delaney repeats in a mechanical way that strips the words of any meaning. Then she turns to me. ‘How long has the child been missing?’

  Mike butts in before I can answer. ‘Yesterday evening. I found Moni about six o’clock.’ He runs on with other details that Delaney picks through. When he is done, she flicks her tongue over her top teeth. ‘Let’s get going while we have the light. We’ll need something with her smell on it, anything she would have worn recently.’

  Caroline holds out the orange cardigan: the same sunburnt orange as the car I used to drive.

  ‘For the dogs,’ Delaney explains, once we are outside. She passes the cardigan to her partner, Walsh, who is waiting beside the tethered Alsatians. Despite Walsh’s vain attempts to fan himself with a sheet of paper, his face is flushed. He is wearing the same dark suit and baseball cap that he wore last time.

  ‘Mr Harvey,’ he says, stowing the paper into his trouser pocket. He offers me his freed hand, which he withdraws before I manage to reach him. The backs of his hands are raw with some kind of eczema. I noticed this the last time, though today the condition seems worse.

  Monica almost bowls Walsh over. ‘Are these yours?’ she asks, petting the dogs furiously, forcing her way in between them. ‘Our dog was called Trim. We buried him under the crab apple tree. What’s this one called?’

  ‘Alice Two. This one is Darwin, and that’s Alice, named after their birthplaces.’

  The dogs’ leads are attached to the outside tap.

  ‘Hello, Alice.’

  Walsh and Monica ramble on like this while Delaney talks us through the procedure. With her usual curtness, she makes no promises, instructing us as if this were a military drill. She would have suited the army. Her voice alone gives me a firearm prod in the stomach. I know that we are on the same road as last time; there’s no escape – even if it does turn out differently.

  It’s decided that once we reach the shaft, we’ll split up. Caroline will follow the detectives westwards; Mike and I will head east. The women are already raking the ground south of the mine. In an hour or two we should be back, and with any luck, can put the whole thing behind us. Somehow I’ll persuade Mike not to leave. The cinema projector should be here in a week or two.

  Caroline orders Monica back inside. ‘Don’t go anywhere.’

  She gives me a fleeting glance as her eyes swing between Monica and the shop door. Those eyes. Caroline is not like any other woman; there is something wild about her – a fire. You should hear her voice: like blue cheese and velvet twisted together. She’s impossible to make sense of, changes all the time. You’d never get bored with a woman like that.

  ‘I know where Georgie is,’ Monica announces.

  ‘Where?’ Walsh likes my niece. He probably has children of his own.

  ‘She’s trapped. Someone locked the door.’

  Caroline interrupts: ‘Do as you’re told.’

  But Walsh keeps asking questions. Monica tips her head sideways as she tells him everything. After a brief consultation with Delaney, Walsh addresses Caroline and Mike. ‘Children often have a better instinct for finding people … if you don’t mind her coming?’

  Since neither of them reacts, Walsh winks at Monica, handing her one of the dog’s leads. The six of us cross the road and strike out towards the old mine. With no wind, our tracks could stay for weeks, months; you can always tell where people have been. Mr M knows whose footprints belong to whom; he has a gift, apparently. He can even tell what mood a person was in: did they stamp, did they skip, that sort of thing. But when there are no footprints…

  Delaney channels her energies into Mike. ‘You said you last saw your daughter around nine or ten yesterday morning.’

  ‘She and Monica were playing behind the caravan.’ Mike searches the backs of his hands before shoving them into his pockets.

  ‘And you don’t know what she was doing after that?’ There is a hint of criticism in Delaney’s tone. She starts whistling some annoying repetitive tune, interrupting herself to say: ‘People go missing all the time. We’ve got a list a mile long. Some people want to disappear: start a new life, shed their old skin. With children it’s obviously different. In most cases they just wander off and get lost. Those dogs should be able to sniff her out pretty quickly. If she’s down there.’ This is Delaney’s idea of small talk. Thankfully she doesn’t mention the other two. Mike should find out from me.

  ‘Where else would she be?’ Caroline asks, although she is not really asking.

  Delaney pauses. ‘It’s always better not to assume too much.’ The moment she cracks her knuckles, the conversation is over.

  We use the service station and Red Rock Mountain as base points to check how far we’ve come. Although it was dark when we found the shaft last night, I can more or less gauge the distance. When we find the spot, Delaney gets down on her hunkers and examines the stones around the opening.

  ‘She hasn’t got her clogs on,’ Caroline says. ‘I can’t get her to wear them. We got them specially made; they’re probably not that comfortable.’ There is a metal coating to her voice which makes her sound like someone else. These situations, the stress of them – people change; I’ve seen it before. God knows, I wish I hadn’t.

  Delaney lets Caroline witter on while she presses her lips tightly together, giving the impression of mild concern. ‘Righto,’ Delaney says, peering into the dust. We all peer into the dust.

  Walsh makes a few notes and then asks Monica, ‘When you talked to your sister, did she say anything?’

  ‘Her leg was crooked, like this.’ She cocks out her own leg, twisting it backwards. ‘There’s not much room down there.’

  ‘It’s important that you try to remember as much as you can,’ Walsh says, squatting down next to Monica. She nods solemnly, but says nothing more, studying her now straightened leg.

  I map the tunnels that lead off the shaft, scratching out dirt lines with my foot. ‘We’ve been down all th
ree,’ I say, redefining the third line. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘What’s Georgina like at climbing?’ Walsh asks.

  ‘She’s four,’ Mike says. ‘That’s a sheer drop.’

  Monica stares fixedly at Walsh. ‘If you were playing hide and seek, where would you hide?’ Before he has a chance to answer, she says, ‘There is nowhere to hide, is there?’

  She’s right. There is nowhere to hide.

  After the detectives have finished their inspection of the shaft and asked me and Mike another few questions, we separate, making a slight adjustment to the plan. Mike and Monica go west, the two detectives and Caroline fan out east with the dogs, and I head north. I walk from shaft to shaft, hauling off the wooden caps and hollering Georgie’s name. The echo fires back at me. GEORGIE! GEORGIE! GEORGIE! Now and again I stop to listen, straining for a trace of her voice. Sometimes I think I hear her amongst the shickering of insects and the rish rish of dry scrub. Georgie is a real charmer; her feathery sparrow voice always makes me smile.

  There must be a nine or ten-mile radius to this old mine. I remember Willie asking, why do you think the last miners left in such a hurry? I don’t think he knew the answer himself, although he made out he had a fair idea. I actually don’t care why they left. People come and go. That’s life. Not everything has to be a damn drama. Willie had his mind set against Akarula from the beginning. He’s one of those characters who believe he’s always right.

  GEORGIE! GEORGIE! GEORGIE!I make sure I secure each cap before pushing on to the next. I could sue the clowns who sold these caps; rotten, every last one of them. Another cut and run company out to make a fast buck. No one seems to care anymore. Mike, on the other hand, would give you his arms and legs if you needed them. He doesn’t deserve this. None of us deserves this.

  The sky flattens into a blue heat as I carry on, slowly; it’s difficult to orientate with everything shimmering. Then Monica’s scream rips through the bush-drone. I don’t think what it might mean at first. It takes me a while to locate the direction of the sound. When I spot her and Mike, I start to run. It’s not easy; the rough ground makes speed impossible. I have to weave between wire tufts of scrub grass and small boulders. As I approach them, it dawns on me that Georgie must be dead. They must have found her body. Maybe they’ve found one of the other bodies. What if all three are in the same place? I’d let go of believing we would actually find them. I thought it was going to be some life-long mystery. But once we have bodies, Delaney and Walsh can nail the culprit. If we have a murderer, the town’s reputation could be saved. Even if we don’t, at least the superstitions and wild ghost rumours can stop. One woman, weeks after Ted Hanson disappeared, swore she saw him walking down the street. I reckon that’s what she wanted to see. Like I said before, this outback sun plays tricks.