Wintering

by Krissy Kneen

  ‘We’re continuing the search. Helicopters. We’ve got some help from the local fishermen. Got boats out on the bay. If we find anything, we’ll contact you.’ He looked dubious. He looked as if he didn’t expect Matthew to be found. He looked as if he thought she should give up hope. Grieve, leave, move on.

  ‘I have a boat. I can search.’

  ‘We’ll let you know if we find anything.’

  She resisted the urge to push him back off her front path. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘Stop saying that. You told me that last night.’ Surely it wasn’t just last night. How many days had passed? And was it this policeman or someone else? All the faces blurring into this one here. He seemed sweet, this young officer. His left eye struggling to stick with her face, sliding a little to one side. Lazy eye. She shouldn’t take it out on him. It wasn’t his fault.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I want to search too. Take the boat out.’

  ‘You should contact your people. His people. His family.’

  She felt the blood running away from her face. Maybe she was bleeding out. She’d fall to the ground right here.

  She saw his police car then, parked a little further up the road, keeping a respectful distance. Someone in the driver’s seat, just waiting for his partner to finish up.

  ‘Here.’ Lazy Eye held something out to her. She took it, feeling the cold weight of Matthew’s phone settle in her hand. ‘He left this in the car.’ He would never go anywhere without his phone. The fact that she was holding it in her hand meant something was terribly wrong. ‘We’ll be in touch. You should call someone. Get someone out here.’

  Someone.

  She nodded. Tried to smile. Waited till Lazy Eye found his way to the police car, opened the passenger door and eased himself inside. She watched him indicate and slip onto the road. When the car was out of sight she opened the door of the Pajero, hefted herself up into the cab. She sat behind the wheel.

  He had been sitting here. How many hours ago now? Only last night. He had turned the key that was still in the ignition. He had listened to—what? She turned the key and the CD blared: Björk, Debut. One of her favourites. She was surprised to know he was listening to her music in the car. Perhaps it was a message. She turned the ignition off. She was sounding just like her mother: signs, portents, signals from the grave. All the God stuff.

  She locked the car and climbed the stairs. Inside the cabin it was as cold as outside. She should be wearing a jumper. At the very least she should attend to the fire. She put the phone carefully down at the table in front of the seat he always settled into.

  She knelt at the fireplace.

  I am man! I make fire! The ghost of his voice still joking with her, his caveman routine. Jessica stacked the kindling, tore paper and crumpled it into balls. She lit the little tepee of sticks and watched the flames lick at the wood. When it had taken hold she put a heavier log in. She sat back on her heels, mesmerised by the glow and crackle. The warmth settled on her like a hug.

  There was toast on her plate. She wondered how it had got there. She didn’t remember taking it out of the toaster or spreading the butter. She didn’t remember taking a packet of smoked salmon out of the fridge or cutting the cryovac seal. Matthew was so proud of his cryovac machine. He vacuum-sealed everything he could. She could smell the woody scent of this salmon. A hint of the rosemary that grew beside the back door. Rosemary, chilli, cedarwood; each batch of salmon smoked in a different flavour. He had the same method with his beer, adding just a hint of herb or ginger or changing the amount of hops. He made notes in a set of books he kept on the shelf in the kitchen. Beer tests, smoke tests, marinades, each one carefully notated. It was her job to taste and rate: a sliding scale, one to ten. He trusted her taste implicitly, but refused to let her touch the smoker. This was his business. He took such pride and pleasure in it. Man smoke fish! Woman eat fish!

  Jessica lifted a slice of salmon out of the packet with her knife. The smell of him everywhere. Laid the flesh on her toast. She was far from hungry but she picked it up, put it in her mouth.

  Chewing was harder than she expected.

  She picked up his phone and tapped the message symbol, flicked back through the texts.

  Do we need milk?

  Turn the radio on now

  Salmon breakout

  Get the net out

  Coming home

  Coming home now

  Just heading back

  Be home soon

  x

  She laid more wood on the fire. She put Matthew’s phone down and opened the sliding glass door to the beach. The water and the fish inside it, the currents, the barbed rocks, the oysters clinging sharply to those rocks, the gulls straight as arrows, their beaks like knives. She stepped down onto the short strand and there was the soft sand and the hard sand beyond it and although she was not wearing shoes the winter could not penetrate her flesh.

  Water lapped at her toes. Water sucked at her ankles. Water to her knees. She felt nothing. When the water lapped at her crotch she remembered. A sudden pain in her gut and she felt the heat of it like blood on her thighs. She looked down, expecting to see her stomach torn open.

  She had pissed herself, still warm at her crotch but invisible against the dark stain of salt water slapping up to her waist. If she kept walking the water would be up to her heart. Then she would just need to stand for a few minutes and she would sleep, slipping under, sleeping and sleeping and sleeping for the longest ever time. And she was so tired.

  Jessica turned, with an effort, and walked back to shore, peeling her wet jeans off and letting them trail in the sand.

  She dropped them on the steps. Maybe her neighbours, the few buildings that were still occupied through winter, would see her hauling herself bare-legged up the steps and back into her shack. They would say nothing. Southport was that kind of town.

  I’ll pick up bread on the way home. Just leaving work now. Shall I order for you? Where are you?

  All the questions he had for her. All the answers she had given. They were all still here. She went over and over them. Searching for some clue.

  She picked up her own phone. Where are you? And his phone beeped as if he were still alive somewhere and could answer it. Where are you? She held her own phone in her hand. She closed her eyes. She wanted his answer. Even if it was a terrible thing, an answer plucked from the grave and thrown at her from the horror of her empty future. She wanted God. She wanted the devil. Just like her mother, when the chips were down she wanted a miracle.

  She pulled on some tracksuit pants and sandshoes. Cold to the bone. Unlocked his car. The door was found open. She sat inside behind the wheel. He had hit something. An animal.

  Back inside she warmed her hands on his phone. There were photos of her, photos of them together. His phone could never forget how happy they were. She tapped the camera icon.

  A video. The last thing his phone had stored. She pressed play.

  Headlights, the reflection of light in the straight poles of trees. A thick white stripe down the centre of the road. The picture snapped to black but the camera was still recording. She turned the sound up. She could hear the tyres on the road even under the sound of Björk singing. Light snapping on.

  Bastard! He was playing chicken. She hated that he was playing chicken and filming it and that people would say it served him right that he was gone. She would have said it herself if he’d been here for her to yell at him.

  On the video, trees were passing, passing…black again. The sound of tyres shushing to the rhythm of the music, and a laugh as he snapped the lights back on and him laughing at the sight of something in the road. Something, a shape of fur and the lighter lines broken across its side, ribs exposed to the glare of headlights. A starved dog? But striped? The footage was too blurred, the scale uncertain, but the thing leaping or standing up on its back legs looked like a begging dog or…like a person.

  Surely a person, a man rearing up from a crouch to standing as the car bor
e down on it. A thud and a shiver of blurred image, chaos as the camera slid from where it must have been sitting on the dashboard. Then the filming stopped.

  That was the last thing on the camera.

  She played it again.

  The stupidity of his acceleration through darkness, the danger of it, then the dog. A dog…or then maybe…maybe a thin man? Was that the stretch of a jaw opening? Too wide. Wide like a crocodile. Impossible to tell if these were ribs rubbed raw of flesh or the pale gaps between dark markings on the flank of the animal.

  Jessica was holding her breath as she did every time she hit that stretch of road.

  She breathed in. Listened to the ocean and made herself breathe to the rhythm of its lapping. She played the clip again. It seemed even less clear on the second and then third viewing, as if each time she pressed play a little bit of the resolution was worn away.

  Some animal, some person. It, or he, rose up or reared or stood. It was not an answer but a series of questions. The video fell to blackness. She played it again.

  ‘Hey.’

  He was holding a basket of produce. Baby carrots, honey, chocolate, cheeses, whisky. She noticed with just a tingling of interest a small wooden box stamped with the word truffle. It was only seeing the box and remembering her first taste of Matthew’s fresh truffled risotto that reminded her she was hungry. Glen looked a little like Matthew, but he was thicker around the face, heavier in the shoulders. He was taller, too, and when he hugged her she felt like she was suffocating against his chest. He smelled faintly of diesel with a cloying top note of cheap soap. She tried not to push him away, struggling to delicately free herself from his arms.

  Behind Glen, Matthew’s mother and father (Gina and Matt; it was important that she remember their names this time) stood arm in arm looking tired and sullen. She knew Rhianna would be with them and followed the cloud of smoke to where she was puffing furiously on a cigarette, leaning on a hire car. She was peering angrily at the flat expanse of ocean visible between two of the cottages.

  ‘We thought you might have forgotten to feed yourself,’ said Glen.

  ‘No, that’s not it at all.’ Gina might have been scolding him. Jessica remembered that Gina always sounded like she was scolding someone. ‘It’s just that the markets were on at Salamanca on the way through and we never get down to the city, so we thought…’

  ‘It’s lovely. Thank you.’ Jessica took the basket, which was heavier than she had expected. Fudge, apple paste, spiced cherries. In her first weeks down here she’d eaten so many spiced cherries. ‘You should come in.’

  She shuffled back, holding the door open with her foot until all three of them had squeezed past. She stared out towards Rhianna, who held up the cigarette and shrugged.

  Jessica let the door slap loudly closed behind her. The house was a mess. She wasn’t expecting them. Had they answered her email? She really couldn’t remember. Maybe they had said they were coming. Where would they stay?

  ‘I hadn’t—I didn’t…’

  ‘Hey, we should have called from Huonville. Let you know.’ Glen was looking around the lounge room, the plates piled up on the table, the clothes that she had just dropped to the floor. Jessica noticed a pair of her underwear spread out gusset-up on top of the jeans she had stepped out of last night, crotch gaping towards the ceiling. She kicked at the pile on the way past, covering the underwear with a T-shirt. She rested the basket on the kitchen bench. The gun was lying there on the bench, just where she had left it. She picked it up and slipped it carefully into the cutlery drawer.

  ‘We’re just here to help.’

  Gina’s face collapsed in on itself. The smile turned down, her forehead became a tangle of wrinkles, her eyes leaked water.

  ‘Ginny,’ Matt whispered, ‘don’t start that again. Not helping. Just not helping.’

  Gina pursed her lips and returned to smiling but there was nothing real in it.

  ‘Well, I…’

  Glen rested a hand on Jessica’s shoulder and she noticed the tension in her neck. ‘We’re staying at a rental in Dover.’ They wouldn’t be expecting her to put them up, which was a relief.

  Jessica realised she was still carrying her keys. She’d been about to get in the car. She wanted to drive back there, as she had three times already since sunrise. Two nights in the cold. They burned in her mind like notches scratched into a prison cell wall. How many nights could he survive? She wanted to stand at the place where they’d found the car, listening to the helicopters hovering overhead, watching the police talk purposefully into their handsets, watching the bars on her phone dwindle to nothing and the words SOS only take their place in the corner of the screen.

  Yes, she thought every time she saw the words illuminated there, yes, that was an appropriate assessment of her current situation.

  ‘Anyway, we just thought we would say hello, see how you’re going. You have my number?’

  Jessica nodded, even though she didn’t know. Matthew’s things were all around her. His table, his chairs, his beer kit downstairs, his guitar, his taxidermised salmon above the television, DVDs. Did it all belong to them now? There was nothing of her in the place except her computer and some journals and papers and books.

  ‘We want you to come over for dinner. At the rental place. Here.’ Glen typed something into his phone and in a second her own phone beeped and her heart leapt in her chest. For a moment she thought it was the police, some new development in the search, we have found his body. But when she looked, the message said Glen Masterton. He had sent her his address.

  ‘Don’t bring wine. Don’t bring anything. Just come. Or call. I can pick you up. Will you come?’

  She nodded. She didn’t want to go anywhere. She didn’t want to leave the house unless it was to stand there in the road where he was lost. He would come back to her either here or there. He didn’t know the address in Dover; he would never find her there.

  ‘I’ll pick you up, actually. Don’t drive. I don’t want you driving.’

  Why was she nodding?

  He turned her towards him and pressed her into his chest. There was something wrong with the way he smelled.

  She had met the family twice. Two interminable Christmases. Each time she had smelled this same thing, stale beer, nervous sweat, an underlying unpleasantness working hard against his winning smile. She pulled away as quickly as she could without appearing rude. She looked out past the sliding door, past the porch and out over the ocean. Clear sky, no chance of rain.

  He cupped her chin as Matthew always did. ‘I’ll pick you up. Just be here after sunset. Can you be here?’

  She was nodding, mutely, like an idiot. Nod, nod, nod.

  And then, suddenly it seemed, she was standing at the door, staring out to where Rhianna dropped the butt of her cigarette on the ground and stepped on it with her thick hiking boot. Rhianna held up her hand as if to press it against a window. She didn’t wave, just held it there and Jessica held up her own hand, pressing the air, feeling suddenly more lonely than she had ever felt.

  She watched as Rhianna gathered her thin and gently twitching limbs together and folded herself into the back seat of the car next to her brother. She slammed the door shut. Their father backed out too sharply, skidding the wheels on the loose gravel at the edge of the road. They seemed to belong here. Their great-great-grandparents had joined the killing lines, hunting out the real locals, and killing everyone in their path. She imagined them walking through the same forests now, searching for one of their own, closing ranks. The acidic hug of Matthew’s brother dragging her into their fold.

  She shivered. Closed the door of the shack behind her.

  In the basket she found a jar of anchovy paste, which she hated but Matthew loved. She lifted it and placed it carefully on the shelf, for when he came home. She lifted her hand to her face and covered her eyes.

  Pressing against tears with the palm of her empty hand.

  ‘And how’s your mother, then?’

/>   Jessica had enjoyed the relative silence of the car ride. Glen driving steadily, slowing only once when a wallaby hopped out in front of the car. At the place where Matthew had disappeared Glen reached over and held her thigh as if perhaps to restrain her from leaping out of the car and breaking through the crime-scene tape. It was only after they rounded the bend and Glen put his hand back on the wheel that Jessica wondered if the gesture was vaguely sexual.

  She’d shifted a little towards the passenger side.

  ‘My mother?’ They had never met her mother. Jessica wondered what Matthew might have told them.

  Gina handed her a glass of white wine and Jessica took a big gulp. ‘I think she’s okay.’

  ‘Oh. Don’t you keep in touch?’

  ‘Mother.’ Rhianna rolled her eyes. She was wearing a short-sleeved T-shirt. Must have a fast metabolism. She was always twitching and shifting from foot to foot. Thin as a stick, and her skin looked dry and sallow.

  ‘What?’

  Rhianna rolled her eyes again and pursed her lips. It was easy to imagine her as an old woman, a husk of flesh with those same narrow, angry eyes and smoker’s lines around her disappointed mouth.

  ‘I told her about Matthew, I emailed her.’ Jessica realised she sounded defensive. She took another big sip of wine.

  ‘Here.’ Gina took hold of her coat and Jessica shrugged it off.

  She let Matthew’s mother lead her to the dinner table, an ugly rectangle of opaque glass held up by black metal tubes. Nothing in the rental house matched. There was a print of dolphins in fluorescent blues above an avocado velour couch, and a painting of a ship on a rough sea that seemed like a consolation prize for the view over the RSL carpark. She could still hear the ocean but all she could see through the window was a line of industrial bins.

  They sat nervously across from each other. They had never been in a room together without Matthew mediating. Don’t talk about politics, don’t talk about race, don’t talk about religion. He had counted out the dangerous topics on his thick, callused fingers. Well, what is it safe to talk about? And he said, Weather’s always a goodie.