Wintering

by Krissy Kneen

  Jessica had been fiercely unpretty. She’d made herself so—the hunching of the shoulders, the gluttony that made her flesh pillowy, the shuffling of her feet against the cracked kitchen lino.

  No. Matthew disappearing was not an act of God. This was why she hadn’t called her mother. She had emailed, an old address, knowing that the congregation frowned on private emails. She didn’t want her mother or the congregation to know about this at all, imposing their superstitious bullshit. There was an earthly explanation for this vanishing.

  Jessica took his phone out of her jacket pocket where she had been carrying it since he vanished. She opened the text messages and scrolled through. His phone was full of strangers. Unlike her, Matthew was a social creature, always meeting someone after work or just ducking out to help someone with their splitter or to heft a boat up onto a trailer. Should I come? And of course his answer was the same every time: God, no. You’d hate him.

  She knew a few people to chat with, up at the university. She didn’t mind Gus, the other staff up at the caves. But she didn’t know who Gary Grenhardt was, or EJ or Helmet or Jacker M. The messages themselves told her nothing. See you there. I’m bringing a slab. Golum or cricket? Too much ginger makes it explode—fun.

  She found herself scrolling in earnest, searching for women. This was the kind of girlfriend she never wanted to be; but there was Rhianna, her cold flat stare, her contempt.

  Cindy, Sharon, Carla, Maggie. He seemed to treat them all the same, a pleasant jokey style. Gotta love them organics x. Too many shandys? x. How’s the frostbite today? x. Every text held an echo of his actual voice, his inflection, his easiness with everybody. He seemed to like everyone equally. There was no difference between a text to Cindy and one to her. He signed off with an x every time, but kisses were innocent enough. He always leaned in and kissed a lady on her upturned cheek. Jessica had stood beside him as he did this a hundred times at the food store. Matthew knew everyone. Matthew was friends with everyone.

  Jessica stood and wandered into the kitchen. She opened the fridge. Maybe she was finally hungry. She pulled out instead the bottle of white wine Matthew’s parents had brought. Opened her laptop.

  She had just started a document on pyrosomes, unicorns of the sea. She sat staring at it until her head began to throb. She put her hands over her eyes and pressed hard. Now there were little flecks of light scattered across the dark of her eyelids. Illusions. Her mother used to say these flashes of light in the dark were angels watching over her.

  The men out there searching had to give up eventually. Matthew, the flesh and blood of him, was gone. He had been real, but now he was just a phantom. There was no point hunting for him any longer. She had to believe he was gone. Going through his phone would not bring him back.

  She opened a new Word document and wrote MISSING at the top of the page. She centred it, made the word bigger. A photo of his face, cheeky, handsome, smiling. Centred her name and number at the bottom of the page. Everyone in town knew he was missing. The flyers would be for the tourists. She pressed print. Watched a dozen iterations of Matthew’s smile materialise on the printer.

  She realised suddenly that she was lonely.

  She turned to the fire now, nothing but coals, and fed it twigs and newspaper. Watched it blaze. Without a larger log it would be all light, no heat. A moment of incandescence, then the bone-deep cold of the southern shores.

  She hefted a log onto the blaze and tried to remember who they bought the wood from. One of Matthew’s friends, CJ or Jacker or Gary. She stared into the fire for a long time, then dragged herself to standing and picked up the phone again. Jessica plugged his phone into her laptop. Always trust this computer? Clicked yes. She watched as the images loaded down. When she clicked on the fragment of footage her throat clenched.

  Light. Trees. Black. The sound of the car accelerating. Light again. The sound of his laugh. Dickhead. He was such a dickhead, just like his brother said. So much of his father in him. His brother’s stupidity, the blustering confidence of a fool—her mother’s words. She felt guilty for entertaining them. The lights snapping on to illuminate—she pressed the space bar to pause the image. Was it a dog? There was something around; whatever killed the possum in the caves would be roaming these woods. It had to be a dog. She pressed her finger against the screen, leaned closer. A striped dog? Or a starving, hungry dog, its ribs cruelly catching shadow? Play. Stop.

  The creature’s mouth opening. It was grainy, but that must be what that darkened line was, the glint of teeth. A grin too big for a dog’s mouth. She knew what it looked like. A unicorn, a miracle, an act of God.

  She left the image hanging on the screen and opened a new tab. Dog, Southern Tasmania, striped.

  And the internet chugged through a billion possibilities and brought her some options. Thylacine. Tasmanian tiger. Extinct animals: thylacine.

  She toggled back to the frozen image.

  An imaginary creature, dead but not forgotten, a phantom. She moved the footage forward a little and the creature reared up. Thick, pale thighs like a man and the little smudge of shadow that must be a penis…She shook her head and moved forward to the point of impact, the blur as the phone slammed across the dashboard and perhaps a glimpse of Matthew’s legs as it tumbled to the floor. It was impossible to be sure of anything. This was such a tiny fragment of nothing. This was less than an answer.

  Would you like to delete original footage?

  Sure. She had the information safe on her own laptop. She watched as the footage was moved from his phone into her possession. Photos of her smiling, photos of him laughing.

  She was lonely. She could feel it in her bones, but there was something else. She was edgy, perhaps a little afraid. She didn’t know her neighbours. She saw the man across the road, the one with the beagle, walk the dog along the shore every morning. That was it: a daily nod. It had been years and she knew no one.

  She shut the laptop and tore the end off the loaf they’d brought her, still in the basket. She lifted the truffle box and put the little brown sphere gently on the middle shelf of the fridge. That would have cost them a fortune. They must know how much she loved truffles. Matthew must have told them. In three or four days it would be ripe, and by then she might be hungry enough to cook herself an omelette. She opened a packet of camembert and scooped some of it out with the wedge of bread. It was good sourdough, getting stale now. A few days since it was baked. More days since he had gone.

  She fell into bed, still gnawing on the heel of bread. She would have to get up and clean her teeth. She would have to take off her bra and crawl into her pyjamas. Even these small tasks seemed impossible.

  The sound of the acacia rubbing against the fibro wall, the wind howling against the corrugated roof. The space in the bed beside her, empty but still smelling of his sweat. She had put the gun back in the bedside drawer and she reached for it now. Checked it, and buried it under her pillow. She knew how to shoot a gun. She could hit a target at a distance. She had a good eye. It made her feel safe. Not safe, but safer. Perhaps with the awkward bulk of it under her head she would finally be able to sleep.

  Matthew took her hand. She had put red cellophane over the end of a dolphin torch. He waved it wildly around, and the red light bounced off stalactites, stalagmites. He sang a stripper’s bump-and-grind song, making circles with the red light.

  ‘Shhhh.’

  ‘What? Will I wake them? Are they asleep right now?’

  ‘It’s not—’

  ‘Da!’ he sang. ‘Da-da! Boom Da-da! Boom, Dar-de-dar-da! Boom.’ He turned the torch towards her and made red circles on her chest. She laughed despite herself.

  ‘I’ve never taken anyone here before, Matthew.’

  ‘I’m your first?’

  ‘Stop it.’

  ‘A virgin.’

  ‘Matthew!’

  ‘So why are you taking me to see the cave?’

  She shrugged. ‘Because it’s my cave. I discovered this entranc
e, this network. It’s connected to Exit and Mystery Cave, sure, but for now, until I publish my research, this cave is mine.’

  ‘And…?’

  She cocked her head to one side, a question.

  ‘Because…you…love me! You love me! Admit it!’

  She watched him as he swung the red light of the torch, making a red heart in the air.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I do. I love you.’

  ‘You love me!’

  ‘All right. I said it already.’

  And then they turned a tight corner and the cavern opened up before them and he fell suddenly silent, agape. They were looking up at the universe. Her universe.

  ‘Welcome to Winter Cave.’

  He said nothing. He turned silently towards her and then he held her and they kissed under a million winking lights.

  ‘I love you so much, Jessica,’ he said, when he came up for air.

  She was awake now. She knew that this retelling was just a dream, a moment embedded in her subconscious, dragged up into REM sleep, a cruel reminder of what she had lost. She didn’t want to open her eyes. She didn’t want to remember. She heard a car rattle past the cabin, someone off to work, the early shift. She wanted to plunge into sleep but already the lights were winking out above her.

  I love you, Jessica. But she was forcing it now. She was conjuring up his voice and it felt hollow, fake. It was too late to get the moment back. She was awake now, but she kept her eyes shut tight. She didn’t want another day to dawn. She lay as still as she could while sleep receded like the tide.

  The southernmost pub in Australia. Last watering hole, last convenience store, last petrol stop. The one time her mother came to visit, she called it the end of the earth and Jessica snapped back the earth is round, if you haven’t heard. There is no end to the earth.

  After years living five minutes’ drive from the Southport pub, Jessica had never stepped inside. Of course she had often visited the shop attached to the building. It was the only place close by to get milk and bread and toilet paper, but for wine they would drive all the way to Dover. Half an hour, and a few dollars saved on the trip. Everything cost more at the local pub, even a takeaway bottle of riesling. She parked her car outside the building, in the muddy stretch of carpark. There were other cars here. Not many, but enough to know it was Friday night.

  Three men were perched on high stools at the bar. Flannelette shirts, jeans, workboots. The youngest one was wearing a tan-coloured beanie. There was a woman, too. Jessica noticed her when she stepped up to the bar. She was holding an unlit cigarette between two fingers, as if she were smoking it, and staring up at the television in the corner. The sound was off, or so far down that it couldn’t be heard over the country music coming from the speakers above the bar, but she watched as if she were following every word of the game show. Jessica and Matthew hadn’t watched television much. Sometimes a DVD; mostly they just talked. She had often been out on the water or doing fieldwork in the caves or up in Hobart in the labs.

  Still, she was drawn to the flicker of the screen. She stood in the middle of the room facing it till the woman with the cigarette turned to scowl at her, as if Jessica was reading a magazine over her shoulder.

  She stepped up to the bar. The three men turned to stare at her. She pulled her jumper down over her hips, nodded to the woman at the bar. Jessica had seen her before, working in the convenience store on the other side of the building.

  She leaned towards Jessica now. Grimaced. ‘Sorry for your loss.’

  One of the flannelette men shifted uncomfortably and turned back to his beer. The others continued to stare.

  Jessica shrugged. ‘I was hoping you would put up a flyer?’ She handed the A4 page to the woman. Matthew grinning.

  ‘Of course. Have you got a couple? We’ll put one up in the shop for the campervanners. Grey nomads. There’s a couple down there now.’

  Jessica took another sheet out of her handbag. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Stay for a drink, love.’

  Jessica hesitated. She climbed up onto the barstool. ‘Vodka soda, thanks.’

  The woman poured her drink, waved her money away. ‘I should have dropped a casserole down to you. I’ve been guilty, eh.’

  ‘You know where I live?’

  The woman snorted, smiled for the first time. ‘You’ve got to get out more, darling, meet your neighbours. We all knew Matty.’

  Matty. Jessica tried to fit the nickname to the man she knew. Matty was the kind of bloke who played football and wore a flannie like the men at the bar. Any one of them could be a Matty. Certainly not her Matthew.

  ‘He came in here?’

  ‘He’d pop by sometimes after work. Showed off at the table.’ She nodded to the deep green felt of a pool table, the rack of cues mounted on the wall beside a framed photograph of the Queen.

  ‘I didn’t know he played pool.’

  ‘None of the locals’d play him. Took a bit of cash off any stray tourist that wandered in, though. Candy from babies. Never missed a pocket.’

  Jessica took a gulp of her drink. She rested her elbows on the bar and looked around at the room. Matthew never mentioned the pub. She knew he sometimes stayed back at work for a drink with the boys. The braver ones accepted some of his home brew. They never took his smoked salmon. Sick of the sight of the damn fish, they told him. He laughed with her about it, but she knew he felt disappointed. He was a generous soul, made friends easily.

  Jessica drank the rest of her vodka quickly and accepted another, pushing a ten-dollar bill forcefully across the counter.

  ‘Will you be leaving, then?’

  ‘Leaving?’

  ‘Going back home.’

  ‘This is my home.’

  The woman pursed her lips. ‘I didn’t mean anything by it, love. But you’re alone and everything.’

  Jessica nodded. She stared across at the men, lifting their drinks, eyeing her warily.

  ‘You’re still hunting for him.’

  She shrugged.

  ‘You shouldn’t be. He’s gone, love. You’ve got a lot to think about now.’

  Jessica said nothing.

  ‘I’ll drop that casserole up for you.’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Still. It’s what we do.’

  One of the flannelette men, the young one with the beanie, lifted his chin and the bartender moved away to pull a beer into a frosted glass, setting it in front of him.

  ‘Thanks, Helen.’

  She hadn’t known the woman’s name. She didn’t know anyone’s name. She wondered who Matthew knew, who he had played pool with, which of the locals he knew by name.

  ‘No worries, Kev.’

  Helen and Kev. How would she remember? She could barely remember the day of the week.

  Jessica finished her drink. She shouldered her bag and pushed herself out into the night chill.

  Running the gauntlet. That’s what she was calling the drive up to Dover now. The place where she’d once hit a Tassie devil, the place where his car was found, the place where Rhianna told her not to trust Matthew. All the bad things were now signposted in her memory along this same road. It was a relief to come to the other side, where the road eased out into anonymous housing and she could breathe once more.

  She slowed at Strathblane. The limit dropped to seventy anyway, but Jessica crawled past the township sign at under forty. There were police cars pulled up in a driveway and along the muddy verge, three of them. The cops were talking to a woman.

  Jessica didn’t want to be rude; a quick glance and she had to pick up speed again. A blonde woman, thin; ripped jeans. That was all the information she got as she moved past.

  It was crazy to think that everything had something to do with Matthew, but she was becoming paranoid like that. Those men in the pub back at Southport, did they know anything? The bartender with her casserole—guilty conscience? She felt like everyone knew more about her boyfriend’s disappearance than she did. She glanced in the rear-vi
sion mirror but she couldn’t quite see the woman on the front steps of her house, surrounded by police.

  She pushed the tacks into the corkboard. Matthew smiled out at her. Beside him a photograph of a boat. Above him a kitten. Missing things, unwanted things, equipment, pets, boyfriends.

  The Dover shop used to be well stocked. On Saturdays they’d come here to pick up treats. Local smoked trout, nice cheeses, wine. Matthew would eat a scallop pie from the bakery, sitting in the wan glare of the sun, and nag her to put sunscreen on. Looking up reports about ozone depletion on his iPhone, showing her horror photos of melanoma. He liked to protect her. It was almost like one of his hobbies.

  Jessica let her fingers linger over tubes of sunscreen, cans of soup, dried noodles. Things had gone downhill in Dover. The food store changed hands, the pie shop closed—some awful personal tragedy. Matthew would have known all about it.

  ‘Hey.’

  She turned, startled. A man was towering over her—a giant. His face was hidden behind a full, scraggly beard; a dark knitted beanie was pulled low over severe eyebrows. He didn’t meet her eyes, big hands rubbing nervously together. She noticed a hint of red flannel sticking up between his thick coat and his scarf and wondered if he was in logging. Was instantly ashamed of herself for the old cliché. City girl, judging the locals by their dress. Matthew would have teased her mercilessly on the way home.

  ‘Sorry. I’m William. Will.’

  The hand that he held out was worth three of hers. She felt strangely moved, as if this handshake was really a hug. She sank into it, letting herself relax a little, lingering in the warm embrace of the huge fingers.

  ‘William?’

  ‘Yeah. I used to work with Matty. I recognise you from your photo.’

  ‘Photo?’

  She watched his face fill up with red: a blush. Disarming. Shyness seemed out of place in such an imposing man.