Swimming on Dry Land

by Helen Blackhurst

  ‘The police will find her.’

  ‘Two detectives with dogs? They’re out twelve hours a day. How long do you think it’s going to take?’

  ‘They know what they’re doing. Come on, eat before it gets cold and then we’ll go.’ She hasn’t eaten properly in days, or slept more than a few hours at a time. You can’t expect to think straight like that.

  She sits again, out of exhaustion by the looks of it, and watches me eat. I cut a chunk of steak and offer it to her on my fork, but she refuses. In the kerosene light, her face glows. I do really love this woman.

  ‘Have some wine.’ I push the glass towards her. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Out.’

  ‘You’ll need some warmer clothes. I’ll get you some. Wait here. Why don’t you take a shower? You’ll feel better. I’ll get you something to wear and then we’ll go.’

  She stops at the door, turning to face me. ‘This is your favourite, not mine,’ she says, gesturing towards the plate.

  ‘Wait,’ I say.

  I think about the tiny blue vein pulsing in Caroline’s neck as I rush out through the shop.

  It’s cool outside. A constant drone of cicadas shivers through the air. There is a stark quarter moon. The wine has made me feel weightless; my feet skate along. When I pass the truck, I get an idea. I open the shed, pull out the gear and load up the boot, just in case.

  The caravan seems to shrink as I approach. Someone has left the door open. I flick on the light and sort through a pile of clothes for some jeans and a long-sleeved blouse. I pick out a few blouses for Caroline to choose from. They smell of her. For a while I forget what I’m doing, even think of lying down and closing my eyes, and then I catch sight of Georgie’s clogs. I abandon the clothes on the bed and bend down to pick one up. It’s so small, it fits in the palm of my hand, engine red, black laces, like a doll’s shoe. My strawberry girl.

  I drop the clog, scoop up the clothes, and head out with the smallness of that clog inside me. When I’m halfway across the tarmac, the darkness seems to close in on me. I can’t see. I start to run head first. I keep running until I reach the shop. Only when I open the door do I realise how terrified I am.

  Caroline is standing by the window in a towel. Her hair is wet. She looks annoyed. ‘What took you so long?’

  I hand over the clothes and sit on the settee. My cine-camera is out of its case. Monica must have been playing with it. I check the controls and wind it back. She has recorded the model, her hand moving buildings around. I press Record to scrub it out.

  ‘Why did you bring so many clothes?’ Caroline asks. That’s when I point the camera at her. She has already put on her jeans, and stretches up her arms to slip into her camisole. Her breasts sing white against the t-shirt tan around her neck as the camisole slides over her head. She scowls at me. I keep the camera rolling.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she says, slowly buttoning up a white blouse that has faint blue lines running through it, until the lace on her camisole disappears. I stop recording. She moves over to me, takes the camera out of my hands and dumps it roughly on the settee. ‘Let’s go,’ she snaps.

  And so we do.

  We drive through Akarula Street, past the moon-lit ghost gum. No sign of Mr M. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him after dark. There are no lights on in the houses – as if they are already abandoned. The bar is lit up, and one of the portacabins, probably the detectives’ quarters. It makes me wish I’d offered more.

  The bush spreads out on either side as we leave the street behind. Caroline leans her head against the window pane.

  ‘Are you still mad with me?’ I ask. Her watery expression is hard to read in this patchy light.

  We drive for a while in silence. When we are two or three miles away from the town, I pull over, go round the back of the truck, and pop the boot. The rifle is loaded. I take out two pairs of gloves to stop our hands from slipping.

  ‘Put these on,’ I tell her, passing her a pair through the window.

  ‘What for? What are you doing with that gun?’

  ‘You drive. Put the gloves on.’

  She refuses the gloves but clambers over to the driver’s seat and starts the ignition. I slide in beside her and hook my arm out of the open window, positioning the rifle so that it points straight ahead.

  ‘What’s going on? You’re scaring me.’ Her arms are shaking.

  ‘Put the headlights on full.’ The adrenalin pumps through me, hardening my muscles, making the underside of my skin feel electrified. Did you ever feel that rush, where your whole body is exploding? Like the second before you peak. It’s the best way to let go, to forget. I stick my head out of the window. The wind batters my face.

  ‘Faster,’ I shout, banging on the side of the door as if I’m whipping a racehorse.

  ‘Are you trying to get us killed?’

  I spot the first kangaroo, bounding out from the right. I let it get to the edge of the road before I fire. Caroline slams on the brakes. I almost drop the rifle as I lunge forward, hanging onto the windscreen from both sides.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’ she screams.

  I hand her the rifle and leap out of the truck to get a look. A big red. Still breathing.

  ‘Need to finish him off,’ I say, turning back for the rifle.

  Caroline gets out of the truck and walks past me. ‘Stand back,’ she says, and then she fires three bullets. The animal flinches once and slackens with the last breath. When she looks at me, her eyes have emptied out. ‘Now you. I’ll give you five minutes to make a run for it.’

  I laugh and walk towards her, but she flips the safety catch off and tenses her finger against the trigger.

  ‘Come on, Caroline. It’s not a toy.’

  ‘No? Then what kind of game is this? You said we were coming out to look for Georgie. What the hell were you thinking?’

  ‘I thought you might enjoy it – take your mind off things.’

  ‘You thought I might enjoy killing kangaroos? Are you out of your mind?’

  ‘They’re only animals.’

  ‘We’re only animals, as you’ve just illustrated so brilliantly.’

  I need to take a leak, so I slowly turn away and unzip my trousers. It’s a while before I manage; not that easy when someone is pointing a gun at your back. When I’m finished, her fury seems to have subsided.

  ‘Since when have you liked killing kangaroos?’ she asks.

  ‘I used to shoot with some of the fellas from town a couple of years ago. We stopped after Ted went missing. Can you point that somewhere else?’ She fastens the safety catch and rests the rifle on the ground. ‘Where did you learn to shoot?’

  ‘Dad taught me.’ Twisting the barrel in the dirt, she says, ‘I used to practise on magpies.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Caroline. I … well, there has to be some way of escaping all this. I know how hard the last two weeks has been for you, and I just thought…I want you to be happy.’

  ‘You want me to be happy? You go blundering on with every half-notion you get in that stupid head of yours, without the slightest idea of what the consequences might be. You’ll eat this. I’ll make sure you eat every last scrap, because otherwise it was killed for nothing. You can’t go killing something for nothing. Do you understand? Everything comes with a price. You can’t carry on as if the real world doesn’t exist.’ She points the gun at the kangaroo and says ‘This is the real world, Eddie.’

  Her eyes shine out of the dark moon wall behind her.

  ‘You’re amazing,’ I say, because in that moment she is everything. She somehow fills the whole sky. ‘Mike has no idea how amazing you are.’

  She looks at me for a second and then her gaze drifts over my shoulder. ‘I’m a bad mother and a worse wife. Maybe – if I hadn’t met Michael, if I hadn’t got pregnant – I would have been a mediocre singer. I was doing alright. But that’s not who I am. I’m sick of being something you dreamed up. I just want Georgie back.’

  She
carries on, but her words melt away until all I can hear is the rhythm of her voice. I clutch her around the waist, lift her off the ground and spin her around and around. I keep spinning, she keeps shouting as she pounds my head and shoulders. For a moment, we’re inseparable.

  I lose the tread of my feet and cling on to her to steady myself, ignoring the whirring thud in my head. Eventually she breaks free of me and dives off into the bush. She starts yelling out Georgie. If you could hear her now: like a whale, like she is calling from the deep. That’s when I know for certain that we will never find Georgie or the others. They are gone, lost, irretrievable.

  I chase Caroline in and out of the moonlight. When I catch her up, we call out George’s name together for a while before I manage to draw her back. We have no torch, only the spotlight on the truck.

  On the road, we crouch down beside the carcass.

  ‘This has to be the worst idea you’ve ever had,’ she says, hugging her knees up to her chest. ‘Promise me you’ll never get an idea like this again.’

  ‘I promise.’

  ‘You’d promise anything, wouldn’t you? Do you remember what you said? A small paradise. That our lives would be transformed. They’ve been transformed alright. Is this your idea of paradise?’

  ‘I thought you’d thank me for taking you away from all that.’

  ‘All that was my life, Eddie. All that was my daughters and my husband.’ She stares at me. ‘You know as well as I do that Georgie’s probably dead by now.’ When she realises what she has said, she stops breathing. I take her shoulders and shake her until she cries, long pitiful cries. We hold hands as if we’re both clinging onto a safety rope, but I can’t feel her. I can’t feel anything.

  ‘Tell me what to do,’ I say. ‘I don’t know what to do.’

  She pulls her hand out of mine, wiping the tears from her face, and then she takes hold of the hind legs of the kangaroo, signalling for me to lift its torso. We drag the thing across the dirt, hoisting it up onto the back seat. It weighs a ton. With the seats pushed forward, we just about fit it in.

  Caroline drives back with the radio on, a reporter talking about the Queen’s visit next month and what will be spent on security. The presenter plays ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’ and some sixties’ tune. By the time we pull into the service station, I am miles away.

  When the engine stops, I turn around to look at the dead roo lying on the back seat, and wonder if it would be so bad, having all the lights turned out.

  As Caroline unfastens her seat belt, she looks at me, her eyes magnified by the dark circles around them. ‘Would it have made any difference if you’d known?’

  ‘Known what?’

  She draws her lips in before she says, ‘Georgie is your daughter.’

  I look up at the roof and see thousands of tiny holes in the brown material. I keep looking at the holes as the truck door opens and she gets out.

  ‘I guess not,’ she says, slamming the door.

  So many holes. You’d never count them all.

  CAROLINE

  Last night I pictured Georgie on a white beach. She was crawling towards the sea. The beach went on for ever, and the tide kept going out. I was hovering above her like one of those awful birds of prey. I tried to swoop down, but I couldn’t. It was impossible to reach her.

  I’m smoking on the caravan steps when Michael’s plane arrives from Wattle Creek. The thought of seeing him and Moni gives me a dull ache in my chest, although I still feel numb. And lonely as hell. I was always afraid of being alone. As a child, I used to stand in front of the sea on one of those slate grey English days and wait for it to swallow me. It almost did, once.

  I grew up by the sea. Whitley Bay. My parents ran a guest house. Well, my mother ran the guest house. Dad spent most of his time pipe-smoking on the porch and shooting magpies. Good old Mum trailed around after him like one of those tin cans that gets tied to the back of a wedding car. I suppose none of us know what kind of ride we’re in for when we say our marriage vows and make those hefty promises. Mum and I tried so hard to please that man. He loved Moni, treated her like a queen – I could never understand that. Poor Georgie missed out altogether. We stopped visiting. I didn’t want him interfering any more, judging Georgie, favouring Moni, making us all feel inadequate. You should have been watching her; it’s more than careless for a mother to lose her child. His voice inside my head is so loud, it nearly deafens me.

  If I concentrate, I can make myself stop thinking for seconds at a time. When my mind empties out, I feel alright. Until I remember.

  A cloud of red dust, turbulence from the plane, blows over the tarmac and covers the pumps, Eddie’s truck, and the back windows of the caravan. There is so much dust. Earlier on I saw three houses being towed away. The removal lorries or road trains or whatever they were, pulled in to fill up with petrol, a house on the back of each. I don’t know whose houses they were – the houses in the street are all identical. I asked one of the drivers where he was taking them.

  ‘Adelaide,’ he said. ‘It’s a good fifteen-hour drive from here.’ The way he scratched the stubble on his chin made me think he knew something about Georgie, that there was some kind of hidden conspiracy. I’ve been thinking that a lot lately. ‘Repossession orders. Some fella named Harvey. What’s a woman like you hiding in the bush for?’ He was a big man: big chest, big legs, crude pushy eyes.

  ‘First time I’ve seen a house moved,’ I said, conscious of my English accent, which made me feel strangely vulnerable.

  ‘These houses are built to be trucked around. People get attached. They want to move, they move the house. Makes sense to me.’ He winked before strolling off to talk to one of the other drivers.

  I’ve got used to the Australian men. They have a different approach to women than in England, something more basic, more real perhaps. (I’m not a feminist like my daughter. Moni didn’t get that from me. Mostly she takes after her dad.)

  Michael appears on the road, carrying Moni, with the overnight bag slung on his back like a rucksack. He looks young from this distance, carefree, the way he walks as if Moni weighs nothing at all. I call over, flinging what’s left of my cigarette on the ground before running towards them. I imagine wrapping my arms around their necks, Georgie standing in the middle of us, her little hands tight over her head like a crash helmet, guarding against our affections. And it hurts; it hurts so much I can’t even cry.

  Moni is barely awake. She brushes her wrist over my ear. I want to hold her, but she clings to her dad. Besides, she’s too heavy for me. Michael doesn’t say a word, so I race ahead into the shop, talking rubbish. I’m afraid of what he’s going to tell me.

  ‘What did they say? Did you see Susan? You must be hungry. We’ve got eggs. I’ll make some eggs.’

  Michael stops in the doorway. His whole body slumps as he lowers Moni to the floor. The distance in his bloodshot eyes makes my heart sink. We go through to the sitting room, the three of us, and Michael helps Moni onto the camp bed. Within seconds she’s asleep.

  ‘Is she alright?’ I whisper, perching on the arm of the settee.

  ‘Seems she was lucky.’

  ‘What did they say … about her talking like Georgie?’

  ‘Shock. We need to keep her busy. Susan said it’s just a matter of time until she comes to terms with what’s happened.’

  I nod, looking past him through the window at the cloudless sky. That dull ache in my chest throbs again. ‘What has happened?’ I blurt out.

  My husband gapes at me while he tries to organise his words. Eventually he says, ‘She’s got to take two of these every night. They’ll help her sleep,’ plucking a box of pills from the overnight bag. ‘Where’s Eddie?’

  ‘Must have got an early start. We went for a drive last night, to see if… He shot a kangaroo.’ I don’t know why I tell Michael this, except that I want him to know everything. Finally. I want it all to be over.

  Michael looks right through me. His breath is paper thin;
I can almost see it. I swat a fly off my sandal and then move Eddie’s cine-camera out of the way so that he can sit. He stretches his legs underneath the table, and I reach out and stroke his forehead. It feels odd, touching him this way after so long. When he looks up at me, I draw back, only my hand stays stretched out for a moment as if it doesn’t know what to do. He says: ‘We’re going to get through this, whatever happens. We’re going to pray for a miracle.’ Then he reaches over and takes my hand, pressing it to his cheek before kissing my palm, softly tracing my life-line with his fingertip. If he knew what I have done….

  ‘Eggs,’ I say, pulling away.

  He stands. ‘I’m going out. Will you watch Moni?’ But he doesn’t go.

  Moni is snoring, little snuffling grunts like puffs of smoke. We listen together for a second, sharing one of those moments that define us as parents, that makes us the Harvey Family. And then I rush through to the kitchen and throw on some eggs and toast, losing myself in the shine of the metal ladle, the click of the toaster, the small pool of water collected on the draining board. Maybe Michael is right: we will find our little girl. Pray for a miracle. My hands lay the table as if they are doing it without me, placing each plate symmetrically on the chequered cloth so that the setting has a clear order and the stains are covered up. The threads of sunlight pushing through the filthy window make the plates glint religiously. Underneath my breath I say a prayer, the same prayer, over and over, while slipping off my flip flops – cool tiles against the soles of my feet – and I am empty.

  Hearing the sitting-room door close, I shout: ‘Take this with you,’ forgetting that Moni is asleep. I quickly stack some toast into a lunch box and go through to the hall, calling again until I see him at the other end. He is holding Eddie’s cine-camera. I can’t read his face properly in the gritty wall-light, but his hands are shaking, and when I get close, I see sweat or tears falling onto the camera. ‘Michael?’ It is a few seconds before I remember, before I see what he has just seen in rapid flashes that pass so quickly they barely have time to form. I have nothing to say. How could you lose your own daughter? What were you doing? That. I was doing that. Eventually I whisper: ‘What’s wrong?’ as if I didn’t know. He drops the camera on the hall floor, waking Moni, and with a glazed expression on his wet face, walks through to the shop. Something indescribable breaks between us.