by Anna George
Her instinct was to make him leave. To punish him, banish him. But . . . She ran her fingers along the granite wall, its protrusions like steps. Scalable. She sighed. Banishment, she realised, wouldn’t work. She needed to start over. Be fair and strong, kind and brave. Today, she was old enough to set her own boundaries.
With a satisfying swing of her wrist, she hurled ‘his’ mug at the stone wall and watched it ricochet and smash. Kris gaped, as if she’d grown a third arm. She had, she realised, been thinking aloud.
She shook herself all over, like a wet dog, resetting itself.
‘Okay, yes. I was caring for her. Well,’ she smiled, ‘we were caring for each other. But, last night, I sent her back to her mum,’ she said. ‘She might not have made it, though. I thought I saw her earlier on the other side of the house . . . and on the beach.’
Kris’s startle intensified. Even to her own ears, her story sounded outlandish.
‘Unless I dreamt her, of course,’ she said. ‘Let’s go in.’
Kris looked so frightened and so worried that Neve laughed. She felt more resolute than she had in days, if not years.
39
In the kitchen, Sal was moving around her as if she was sparking; outside, Kris was returning to his car before coming in. ‘Cliff is asleep in your room,’ said Sal. ‘And I reckon his ears are shrinking. Or his head is growing.’
She smiled, wanly. ‘Thanks.’
From her perch on a stool, she considered him. Now she understood his earlier wariness, his concern – for her. But how she felt about him was complicated. He’d discussed her. He’d contacted her ex. Though yes she had been stressed, she didn’t understand the need. In the silence, she heard his mobile telephone beep with a text. When he excused himself to read and answer it, she noticed Cliff’s monitor flashing steadily on the bench. It was the portable component, which detected the signal from Cliff’s crib in the other room. Sal was certainly conscientious – to a fault.
She tried to gather her thoughts. Her relationship with Sal, like her relationship with Kris, and his with Cliff, while important to varying degrees, was not pressing. Together, they would all feel their way and quite possibly create new shapes. Or not. What was pressing was Jessie. She couldn’t explain the girl’s presence; and it made her uneasy. When Sal returned his phone to his pocket, a moment later, Kris reappeared.
Sal and Kris exchanged a glace. Their collusion, she realised, was not over. To Sal, she said, ‘Have you seen her, this morning?’
Kris ran his palm across the top of his head.
‘No,’ said Sal. ‘And she’s not in the house. I’ve already looked.’
‘Oh.’ Like a child herself, Neve sat, her back straight, her expression mystified. Why had he already looked?
Kris nodded once to Sal. Some sort of code.
‘Neve,’ said Sal carefully, ‘I’ve asked your neighbours and no one has seen a girl. The police asked some of them on Friday morning too. They haven’t seen a thing.’
Neve replayed the words in her head. Of course no one else had seen Jessie: she’d hidden.
‘I don’t understand. Why did you ask . . .’
Kris took a levelling sigh. ‘At best, a teenager from number 15 can corroborate your rock pool story.’
Sal nodded.
‘Are you saying you don’t believe me? Truly?’
‘Neve, this business about the girl staying with you . . . it doesn’t add up,’ said Kris.
She almost laughed at the absurdity. But her head shook as if to ward off doubt. ‘We need to be searching for her, not arguing.’
Neither men spoke. They shuffled yet another look between them.
‘For god’s sake . . . She slept in the guest bedroom. Didn’t you see? Her clothes . . .’
Neve sprang off her stool and was halfway down the hall, when Sal said, ‘They don’t look worn to me.’
‘What?’
‘I couldn’t find a hair on a pillow.’
As if she’d taken a hit, Neve staggered into Jessie’s room; there, she eyed the girl’s assembled things – jacket, Anatole, and those Mary Janes. She fingered their soles, as if not knowing what they were. But they were unmarked. Then she hurled herself at the flat stacks of perfectly folded jeans and jumpers. The singlets and undies. Many with cardboard inserts and tags attached. She flung t-shirts and socks until she was certain. It was all there. Everything. Even her decades old clothes smelling of mothballs . . .
A shudder of incomprehension quaked through her.
It couldn’t be.
With a smooth, silent whoosh, Neve’s thoughts broke into fragments and floated about her mind. Silently, Sal and Kris watched her as they sat, cross-legged on the carpet. Kris steepled his slender fingers and bounced them against his chin.
‘I don’t understand . . .’ she said.
‘I’m thinking the trauma around this girl on Thursday . . . may have stirred up stuff about your mum.’
On the bed, she hugged herself. Her mum? True, Charm was coming up a lot lately . . . but what did she have to do with Jessie? Neve could only see one parallel: her mum had drowned at this beach but Jessie hadn’t. Neve had saved her. In the rock pool; they’d both had a scare but they were safe.
‘Why didn’t you tell me you saw your mum after she passed?’ asked Kris.
Neve looked at Sal then and shook her head. How much had he told Kris? Everything? The expression on his face was bashful but unapologetic.
‘Only in dreams,’ she said. ‘Dreams!’ Tears began to form at the back of her throat.
‘I see,’ said Kris.
The two of them were misconstruing her. Yes, her father had called her dreams ‘episodes’. And yes, an appointment with a psychiatrist friend was made. But it wasn’t kept.
She felt like a child who was not believed. A child with an overactive imagination. Kris coiled his arms around himself, mirroring her. Perhaps she was both. She had been. As he stared into her, she wondered if he was thinking of her appendix.
Once at boarding school, late one night, she’d pretended to have a pain in her belly – out of boredom or, if she was honest, a craving for attention. Teachers and students had encircled her. She’d wailed and writhed. An ambulance was called. Her dad was called. Before she could reverse the juggernaut, she was booked into Geelong Hospital for an appendectomy. There was nothing for it by then. She had the thing out.
Kris knew that story. But that was nothing, nothing, like this.
‘Have you had any other odd thoughts?’ said Kris.
‘Jessie isn’t an odd thought.’
‘Jessie? Is that her name?’ said Kris.
‘No, it’s the name I gave her.’
‘You named her . . .’
It wasn’t a question so she didn’t answer it. But she felt as though they were talking about her invisible friend.
‘Why “Jessie”?’ said Kris.
‘I like it.’ Neve shrugged but they each heard the growing doubt in her voice; Kris leant in with that probing stare. ‘Well . . . Mum had wanted to call me Jessica, or Jessie. But Dad had the final say.’
‘Oh,’ said Kris.
This time, he didn’t need to glance to Sal.
The longer Neve sat with Kris and Sal in front of her, the more she understood what was being implied. That her mind had become soup, opaque and watery. Certainly now it was sloshing with part-formed questions. Obvious and less obvious. Questions for Kris. Questions for her father. For herself.
Slumping onto the bed, she sensed, in the sediment collecting at the base of her skull, two fundamental questions. Too big to overlook. Were they right to doubt her? Was she actually sick? It was possible, of course. All that sleepless thinking . . . feeling . . . longing.
40
Two minutes later, in a frenzy, Neve searched every bedroom and every wardrobe, hunting not only for Jessie but for herself. Room by room, she raced. She counted eight wardrobes, if you included the two linen closets. Under every bed and every couch,
behind blinds. With each abandoned space, her panic grew. Why couldn’t she find any evidence? Handprints, fingerprints, smears of pasta sauce?
She descended at a run to the lower level. Dust coated the floorboards. The silhouettes of long gone rain speckled the windows. She switched lights on and off, like a wayward lighthouse keeper, even though Jessie hadn’t been downstairs, hadn’t strayed so far. In the lower guest wing, Neve was on the cusp of abandoning her search, when she heard the voices. She slid to a stop. Yes! With her hand clasping the doorframe, she swung into the sitting room. ‘Jessie!’ In the corner, on an oversized bookshelf, the television was murmuring.
But how?
Jessie had shown scant interest in television or technology. Neve surveyed the two mocha couches; each chocolate cushion had been disturbed. The recycled Blackbutt coffee table was askew and on it magazines were strewn. The black blind was drawn but puckered. Discomforted, Neve bent to retrieve the remote. She was about to turn off the set, when a news banner ran beneath fresh images.
She yelped.
Kris and Sal burst into the room as she stood, with her arm outstretched, pointing like a broken toy soldier at the television. The men were staring at her, agog. Ignoring them both, she listened and read. And tried to take it in.
A child. Missing.
The news she’d been anticipating. But not like this. Not from a unit in Hastings. She was conscious of nothing now but that screen. The listless face filling it. So big.
The image changed and she recognised a pinched face. The mother. Neve’s body was reacting to the news before her brain could absorb it. She felt shot through with ice. She stared at the woman, that drawn, slight woman: Leah Chalmers. She was speaking softly, wearing oversized sunglasses, a clump of tissue at her nose. Her endless hair, strawberry-blonde once, was wet beige carpet now. A man, perhaps a boyfriend, was standing behind her and watching, with a quiet ferocity. An image of a unit, a screen door. Ugly brown bricks. An abandoned shopping trolley in the background. And then the snapshot of the child again. And a caption. ‘Tayla Chalmers feared abducted’. Taken from this Hastings unit. Overnight.
Overnight?
The information was bouncing in and out of Neve’s brain, like a signal programmed to persist. She folded onto the couch as Kris sat beside her. She stared at the photograph of Jessie, of Tayla, of Tayla Chalmers. Her face was grey and her eyes ringed, her hair longer and wet at the ends. She was wearing purple pyjamas and was smiling, with those motley teeth. Smiling, yet there was sadness in her. Neve could feel it, pulsing through the screen.
She recognised the face, of course; it was the girl she’d plucked from the sea. But not the flourishing girl who’d been with her these last two days.
‘That’s her?’ said Sal, though he knew it was.
‘She is missing,’ whispered Kris.
Neve nodded but, too shocked to be vindicated, remained hunched before the television.
As the news was recapped, Kris stirred. ‘I’m not buying that mother,’ he said. ‘What has she done?’
A week ago, Neve would have assumed the worst of this woman. Today, although Leah Chalmers was almost certainly lying, Neve was prepared to give her the benefit of the doubt. That Jessie ran away again. Or they didn’t meet on the beach; perhaps Jessie couldn’t find her mum in the dark. Surely the Leah Chalmers Neve had overheard wouldn’t have hurt her daughter, last night? It didn’t seem possible.
‘It’s more complicated than that . . .’ said Neve.
Sal’s face lit up with surprise. Then the news moved on to the president of the USA waving his fist at his Mexican counterpart; and a thick red line snaking across a map. The men’s mouths opened and closed but Neve didn’t hear a word they said. She levered her body to its feet, using her elbow as a hinge. Images of Jessie cluttered her thoughts. Jessie in the bath. Jessie reading Snowy. Jessie in those musty old jeans. Her thoughts accelerated and looped. Made bizarre connections and backtracked.
Sal stood before her, solid as a tree. ‘What happened, last night, after I left?’
41
Leah sat staring at a box of tissues on the tabletop. It was like a dare: go on, take one. She sucked in a breath. There was no air in the room; no windows; only a wall of mirrored glass. It was like a too-small classroom and she’d been kept in. Same heavy-duty carpet as her high school. Same plain tables, but without the graffiti. Same, but worse, guilty feeling. The tissues were waiting. Everyone was waiting; she knew it’d be better if she cried. But she couldn’t. She’d run clean out of tears.
Two cops had been sitting with her the whole day. Having a go this way, having a go that way. Maybe it wasn’t the whole day. But it’d felt like it. ‘Why don’t you tell us how it happened? What did Phil do on Friday? What did you do? Were you angry, Leah?’ She was sticking to her guns but it wasn’t easy. Everyone was looking at her. In her whole life, she’d never had this much attention.
One of the cops was reading from a file. He had big hands, like oven mitts. He curled his top lip when he spoke to her. Like she was one of those single mums, the ones that everyone bags. Like it was her fault Mitch went north. Because she was a bad wife and a shitty mother. Like there weren’t plenty of other reasons for him to drop his bundle. The other cop, the younger one, seemed shy, like her. He was fidgeting with the recording machine, trying to get it to work and not looking at the giant. She focused on the younger one’s right shoulder.
If only she could show them what was going on inside her. That she had a big hole in her. Not only a Tayla-sized hole, not where her heart was. It was bigger than that, bigger than a house. It had Mitch in it; and now Tayla; and soon, if she wasn’t careful, Cyndi would be sucked in too. Soon nothing and no one would be left. It was a sinkhole, like the ones that appear out of nowhere and swallow buildings and cars. The longer the cops took, the more her sadness grew and the more people were sucked in to it, like Mitch’s workmates and hers, old folks like Gran and the residents, and other kids like Tayla. Folks left behind, as Mitch used to say. Folks shut out from lives like the ones on TV.
The cop turned a page of the file he was reading and she tore off her last decent nail. She wondered if it was the Department’s file. How come it was thick? They’d only visited once, a few weeks back. When she and the girls had hidden in the wardrobe, until the knocking stopped. No one had come again. But the cops seemed to know about Mitch doing a runner and the sheriff kicking them out; about Tayla being a bolter and not going to kindy. They knew she’d been stressed. Got angry. A bit physical. She bet Kelly’s sleazy neighbour had been dobbing. It sounded worse than it was.
The giant cop asked, ‘You love your daughter?’
What sort of question was that?
When she shut her eyes, she saw Tayla back on Thursday. Coming up from the water. Shivery and dripping. Leah’s heart flipped like a pikelet. She imagined crouching to look into the darling, worried face. She imagined wrapping Tayla in her arms, then carrying her back up the hill. She imagined whispering to her, ‘No more mean Mummy, I promise.’ And never letting her go.
Leah swallowed and opened her eyes. The cop was waiting for an answer to his stupid question.
‘More than anything.’
Though her eyes were dry, her heart was in pieces now. But he couldn’t see that. And what he couldn’t see he didn’t believe.
Both cops stared at her. She plucked out a tissue and scrunched it up. They weren’t buying it. None of it. No one had seen Tayla since Thursday. No one else could back them up, confirm that someone had taken her last night from that unit in Hastings. Which was good, she supposed, and bad. The cops were watching as she thought in circles, watching as more of her was sucked into that hole. They’d be watching until she was sitting at the bottom – with everyone else. Forgotten. Another speck.
Leah picked at the ball of tissue. Flecks dropped onto the carpet. She had one daughter left. If she lost her too, what would she be? Phil was right. Not even a mother.
After
finding that windcheater, they’d taken more than an hour to leave the beach. The trip to Hastings had felt never-ending though it was only twenty-odd kilometres. Leah had shaken the whole way. Her feet were wet. Her jeans were wet. Her nose was rubbed raw. She didn’t know where they were. What towns they’d passed, when they’d arrive. She’d entered a numb twilight zone. When they finally hit Hastings, Kelly drove the long way round, past the marina and its closed-up cafe, past the distant Esso chimneys. Leah stared at the two orange flames, licking the lightening sky. Watching the fire, she felt her blood slowly freezing.
Phil had taken the kids to his mother’s to avoid the sticky-beak hairdresser next to their place – the slimy dobber. Phil’s mother was away. Her unit was one block from the marshy foreshore, a brown brick number in a group of six. Each unit was the size of a garage. Kelly turned off the car and let it roll down the drive. They passed an old bomb, a caravan and supermarket trolley. The unit next door to Phil’s mum’s was covered in black graffiti, its venetian blinds drawn but bent. It took forever for the car to stop.
Leah got out like her legs were made of concrete. Inside, under blankets, the kids were asleep, while Air Crash Investigation played on a telly. In the sink were plates of half-eaten chicken nuggets and an empty bag of frozen chips. Not the best tea but it would’ve filled them up. Phil was nursing a Milo and sitting on the kitchen bench. His eyes were bloodshot and his hair stuck up like a kid’s in the morning. The room contained a kitchenette and a couch, a recliner and a coffee table. Oil heaters but they were off. The air was as icy inside as out. Everything was brown – the lino, the furniture, the walls. In a daze, Leah kept her head down. No one said anything. Without making a fuss, Kelly locked the door behind them.
Phil was staring at Kelly and slurping from his mug. Kelly’s jeans were soaked at the bottom too and covered in dirt up to her thighs. She had seaweed in her hair and her face was grey. Leah didn’t need a mirror to know she looked as bad. She walked behind her nieces and nephew spread out on the couch. She was glad they were asleep; she wasn’t up to facing them.
