Islands

by Peggy Frew

  Annas in the Garden at Our House

  A garden, not the same as the one in the other paintings. Vegetables planted in rows, a shed. No flowers. The young mother from Anna at Esther’s Birth and a young man sit on the grass. The man holds the arms of a toddler, who is trying to walk. Both the man and the woman gaze happily at the child. The woman is kneeling on a suitcase, as if holding it closed. Flowers and their broken stems stick out through the opening of the suitcase. Above, in the sky, float a blue school dress, a girl’s swimming costume, a long white cloth with bloodstains, a paperback book, a plum or peach with a bite out of it, a lit cigarette with smoke. Standing behind the toddler is a teenaged girl, the same blonde girl as in the other paintings. She wears black, long sleeves and long pants. She is calm, smiling, healthy-looking. Standing behind the toddler’s mother is another blonde girl, like a twin, also in black. This girl is gaunt, with dark-shadowed eyes and bruises on her face. Her posture is stooped and crooked. She is reaching towards the mother’s head and has taken hold of a lock of the mother’s hair. She is also smiling.

  JOHN

  It was Kathy’s idea that I come here.

  Oh, Kathy’s my new … my new … a new person in my life.

  I suppose I should give you some background. And also, I’ve never done this before, even when my marriage was, and when my—my daughter …

  I’m sorry.

  Thanks, it’s okay, I’ve got a handkerchief somewhere.

  All right, sorry about that, I’m sure you see this a lot, ha ha.

  Okay then. Bit of background. So I was married; Helen and I got married when we were in our early twenties. We met at university, at college, we were both from the country, and we got married, well, because in those days you had to, if you wanted to—you know.

  Well, sleep together is what I mean. So we got married and, God, now that I think about it we were so young. Anyway, we finished our studies and I’ve had a very steady career, I’m an accountant, I’m from a long line of accountants, and Helen works for these pharmaceutical companies. She’s done very well, actually—better than I have, if you’re talking about pay. So we had a normal life, and we were quite happy; well, at least I was happy.

  Two children. June, she’s twenty now. And Anna … Anna. Sorry.

  Sorry. Okay, so Anna. Well that’s what I’m here to talk about, what happened with Anna.

  We never thought there was anything really wrong. She was a funny kid—funny peculiar, I mean. She had a very active imagination, so, you know, she’d read a book that was a bit scary and she’d have nightmares for weeks. And say she was going to a birthday party, she’d be waiting by the door all ready two hours before it was time to go, and all the way there she’d be talking about what was going to happen, what the kid was going to say to her when she gave them the present, and what games they would play and what was going to be inside the pass-the-parcel and how she would win it this time because she hadn’t won at the last three parties, and so on. And she would’ve been talking like this for days, you know … And then when I picked her up afterwards she’d get in the car and burst into tears because none of it had worked out the way she, well, not just wanted—I mean she had convinced herself that this was how it was going to be.

  It probably started pretty young. Three or four, but it was still happening at nine or ten, past the age where you’d expect a kid to do that kind of thing.

  Fantasies, yes, that’s a good word. And when they were, I suppose, revealed to be fantasies, she just couldn’t cope. I mean, she’d be upset for ages, and you couldn’t do anything. We’d just send her off to her room, you know, send her off to cool down. It sounds terrible, but it got to the point of, here we go, another one of Anna’s tantrums. We got … desensitised, perhaps you’d say. But you just couldn’t, I mean, if every time she went like that you sat with her and cuddled her and … Sorry.

  What am I thinking about? Well, I’m thinking that maybe that’s what we did wrong, that we didn’t comfort her more, back then. Or even just that we let her be like that, and we acted like that was normal life. To have this kid who … She did other things too, she had these tics, and she sort of picked at her hair, pulled bits out. I think she also had trouble sleeping; I’d go in to check on her before I went to bed and half the time she’d still be awake.

  Oh, you know, just lying there.

  The tics? It’s hard to remember. They changed, too. Blinking. Tapping on things. One was a cough, she did that for a while …

  Look, I have to be honest and tell you that I didn’t give any of this much thought at the time. It was just, that’s Anna, that’s what she’s like. These things she did, well, I suppose they seem significant now because of what happened. But we weren’t to know what was going to happen. And all kids have their strange little habits and things. And almost all of them turn out okay.

  No, her teachers never said anything about the tics. She did well at school, when she was younger. Primary school, I mean.

  Okay, so Helen and I broke up. Junie would’ve been about twelve, so Anna was about ten. It was Helen who ended things, and I, look, I didn’t cope very well. I was pretty much destroyed, to be honest. I mean, I just couldn’t believe she’d throw it all away, everything we had. At first that was all I could think about. I felt like I still loved her. I did still love her, I wasn’t even angry about the affair, I just thought, look, what we have, we’re so lucky, come back, don’t—

  Yes, she had an affair. Didn’t last. Well, it lasted for a while, but, you know, long term it didn’t last, and now she seems to have a different bloke every month. From what I hear. Anyway, for a while there I would’ve forgiven her, I reckon. I would’ve given it another go, anyway. But she didn’t want to.

  No, I wasn’t angry. Not then. I’ve been angry with her since, but not then, not for that. Funny, isn’t it? I was just very sad and, well, depressed, I suppose. It sounds hard to believe, I know, but I always felt really lucky with Helen, like she was too good for me. I just couldn’t believe my luck, to be honest. And when she left me, well, it was terrible, just terrible, but at the same time there was this feeling of, yeah, that I was lucky to have got what I did. Of her.

  Well, I think it was probably really hard for the kids. Confusing. Especially because Helen, well, she moved that bloke straight in. And when that failed, then she had another one. I mean she had a lot of blokes, as far as I can tell, and I don’t know how much she hid it from the girls.

  I didn’t think it was great. But I didn’t want to fight with her. To be honest, I think deep down I still had that hope that she might want to get back together, especially since it hadn’t worked out with that first bloke. And also maybe I’d just got into the habit of not saying anything. I mean it was her business, I couldn’t ask her to stop.

  Look, maybe when I say a lot of blokes I’m exaggerating. All my information’s based on what the girls said. A bit from what Helen might mention to me, but we weren’t that friendly, we only talked about the girls really. I mean, maybe they weren’t all boyfriends, but from what I could tell she became very socially active after we broke up. So some of these blokes I’d hear about, maybe they were just friends. Some were definitely boyfriends though.

  No, none of them lived with her—not after the first one, anyway. But I don’t think she’d keep them quiet; I think they all met the girls pretty much as soon as they were on the scene.

  Yeah, so anyway, Anna seemed just the same to me, but over the next couple of years she started getting into trouble at school. Helen and I, we always communicated about the kids, we made an effort to do that. So we talked about Anna, what was going on. She was getting in trouble. Smoking, wagging school, that kind of thing. We didn’t like it, but we just thought she was going through a phase. Funny, the tics had stopped.

  Yeah, by secondary school they’d stopped. It was like they were replaced by this other stuff, this bad behaviour.

  So I’d get these calls, from the teachers, from the principal.
And, look, this was a private school. I mean it cost a bomb. I wasn’t all that impressed actually. It’s their job, you know, to discipline her while she’s at school, that’s what we were paying them for. So I’d tell them that. You know: Do your job.

  Well, to Anna I’d just say, Behave yourself. Stop being a smart-arse.

  Yes, I saw it as being inside her control.

  No, not like the tics. She was older now, she was choosing what she did. So yeah, I just told her to stop it. Pull up her socks.

  Well, Helen thought differently. And this became a problem. As things got worse with Anna, Helen and I started to fight about how to deal with it. Helen, well, she just gave Anna whatever she wanted. If Anna didn’t want to go to school, Anna didn’t have to go to school. If Anna wanted to stay up all hours of the night watching TV and then sleep all day, that was fine with Helen. But I thought she needed discipline. I would’ve been dragging her to school in her bloody pyjamas. I would’ve been switching off the TV at nine pm and saying, Bedtime.

  Well, the thing is, I had no chance to do things my way, because she stopped coming to my place. Junie still came. In fact, when she was in year twelve Junie asked if she could come and live with me. I think things at home were just too disruptive for her to focus on her studies.

  Yes, she did, she lived with me that whole year. And Anna didn’t even visit, not once. And that was the year it really went bad. I mean, I haven’t told you how bad this got. Anna was a law unto herself. I found all this out later, but apparently she just came and went as she pleased, and she’d stay out overnight. Helen didn’t know where she was. This was a young girl, you know, fourteen, fifteen, and she looked younger, she was small, and she didn’t mature physically till quite late. This was a child, sleeping God knows where. She wouldn’t tell Helen where she went, or who she was with.

  And the school said they were concerned about drugs. That she was using drugs. But obviously they didn’t have any evidence.

  Shit, I don’t know. I have no idea. How can you tell? She wasn’t, you know, shooting up in front of us or anything. She was always skinny and pale, and all that sleeping all day and watching TV all night, well, she didn’t look great. But I hardly saw her, for that whole time. I only saw her if I went round there, to the house. Which I did, as much as I could, but that didn’t end up being very often.

  It just seemed like every time I went over there was some sort of drama. Anna would throw a tantrum about something. And it was also Helen. She’d be quite welcoming at times, but at other times I think she got worried that I’d scare Anna off. It was ridiculous—I mean, this girl was holding us to ransom.

  Well I’m not. Not with Anna, anyway. I have been angry with Helen. Very angry. I think she stuffed it up. I think the situation was worse than she let on, and she should have … we should have got help.

  I mean, I was completely on the outer. Helen had all the power. You know, because Anna still had some connection with her. Helen was the one Anna would come home to, when she did come home.

  And what happened … I’m sorry, I’m going to get emotional. What happened was that one time Anna went off and days passed, and then weeks passed, and she just didn’t come back.

  No, nothing. No contact whatsoever. She’s just gone.

  It’s been three years.

  There was a police investigation. And they found nothing, they were fucking useless, pardon me. And they just seemed to give up really fast. They were saying things like, If someone doesn’t want to be found there’s not a lot we can do.

  This is a child we’re talking about!

  She was fifteen. I said that; didn’t you scribble it down there in your secret little notes?

  Okay, maybe I didn’t say it. Sorry.

  Sorry about that. I just get fired up when I think about the cops.

  Phew, okay, sorry.

  Useless, yes. Well, that’s the truth—I’m sorry, but it is. In a matter of weeks they were saying, We’ve done all we can. And I’m not even sure what they did.

  I’m being sarcastic. I know what they did. I know this stuff backwards. They ticked all the boxes. Not that there were many to tick in Anna’s case. They check the hospitals, of course. They usually check with DEET and Medicare and places like that, but Anna wasn’t old enough to have her own dealings with any of them. She did have a bank account, I opened the girls one each so they could put their savings in, when Anna would’ve been twelve or so. But she’d hardly made any deposits over the years, and it hadn’t had anything in it since before she disappeared.

  Look, I’m not saying they didn’t tick all the boxes. I know we’re not the only family in the world to have had something like this happen. I know all the statistics; I’ve had them quoted at me several thousand times.

  Well, the cops reckon they get an average of fourteen people reported missing per day, in Victoria. But ninety per cent of these people are found within twenty-four hours. Generally speaking, if someone doesn’t turn up in the first few days, well, they’re unlikely to ever turn up at all.

  So, you know, when Anna didn’t show up straight away they more or less stopped looking for her. They’d ring up once a week and give me these bullshit reports, which were always just them basically saying they had no news.

  Yeah, they rang me, because I was the one who’d reported her missing. That was once Helen finally told me. Anna had been gone for three days by then.

  No, she hadn’t done anything about it. She said this had happened before, but then Anna had come back, so she’d just assumed this time would be the same.

  I mean, this is just unthinkable to me, that you’d let a fifteen-year-old girl go out like that without saying where she was going or for how long, or who she was with. In my day, you asked your parents’ permission to do things.

  Anyway. That was Helen.

  Oh, right, okay. That was quick.

  I’m okay. Sorry for losing my cool.

  Yes, right. I’ll see you then. Do you take Mastercard?

  American Express then?

  Oh, okay, I’ll have to send you a cheque.

  G’day. Ah, do we just continue from last time? From where we were up to?

  Right, the police. Yes, you could put it that way: I was unsatisfied with their investigation. What they did, well, that wasn’t enough for me. I kept thinking there’d be some sort of next stage, you know. But it was like they’d given up. It was just these stupid phone calls. Sorry, Mr Worth. No activity on her bank account. No sightings reported.

  Then, after maybe six months, Helen said she had to move out. Of Avoca Street, the family home. She said she couldn’t stay there, it made her too upset. But one of us had to be there, you know, for if Anna came back. So she moved out and I moved in again.

  And then. Well, I went a bit …

  Okay, so what happened was that I decided to do my own investigation. I started at the school. I spoke with all the teachers, the school counsellor. I tried to talk with some of the kids but the school didn’t like that, said I had to go via the parents. So I did that, got some phone numbers, visited some families. It was awful, I have to say. You can see that when it comes to this stuff I’m an emotional person, well, I tend to cry, and, you know, I’d turn up at someone’s house to talk with their kid and usually it’d be the mum who’d let me in, and often she’d get upset, you know, commiserating with me. I mean it’s every parent’s worst nightmare. But I’d have to hold it together because I couldn’t be this blubbering mess in front of the kids.

  That did lead somewhere. To this kid—Grimmo, they called him. He wasn’t at the same school, but some kids knew him, said he’d been hanging around with Anna. I got hold of him. He was a real shit, pardon my language. Rude, wouldn’t look at me, answered every question with a grunt. Anyway, all he’d say was that he and Anna had caught the train a couple of times to Belgrave. When I asked why, he just shrugged. When I got right in his face and asked why, he said, To look at the forest.

  Don’t know. To get dru
nk? Or take drugs, out in the forest? I don’t think they were practising their boy scout skills, let’s put it that way. But he had an alibi. Completely solid. He was on a school camp the whole week that Anna went missing.

  Anyway, yeah, so I went through the school. And I didn’t get much. But a few kids said they’d seen her in the city, hanging around with, you know, undesirables. So that was the next stop, the city. And at first I thought I might be getting somewhere. I mean, ninety-nine per cent of people would just look at the photo and say, Nup, don’t know her, never seen her. But then there were a few leads. They never went anywhere, though. It was always this second-hand information, you know, someone would say, Yes, I know her, I saw her last year and she was hanging around with this guy. So then I’d try to find that guy. But then, when I did, he’d say it wasn’t Anna, it was a different girl. Or someone would say they heard she caught a train to Sydney, but then someone else would say they heard it was Geelong.

  Yeah, I went to Sydney, I went to Geelong. I went to Ballarat and bloody Broken Hill and Moe and every place anyone mentioned. I’d do it on the weekends, take the Friday off work, or the Monday. Hang around scungy train stations and bus depots, talking to these people who are … well, I used to think they were another species, most of them. Not like us. I mean, these people, they’re rough as bags, out of it on drugs or booze or bloody soda bombs or whatever, anything they can get basically, and they’ve got missing teeth and they’re filthy, and half of them can’t even use the English language properly; they’ll say things like, I done this and I done that, instead of I did, you know?