Where Have You Been?

by Wendy James

  Her parents separate in late 1976, not long after the new divorce laws are enacted, just after Susan turns nine. Karen has been missing for more than a year.

  Her father tries hard to explain. ‘It’s not just because of what happened to Karen. It’s nobody’s fault. Things have been going wrong for a long time now. Your mother and I haven’t really been good friends for a while, Susy. It would have happened eventually. And it’s for the best, sweetheart. We’ll all be happier, believe me. Even your mother. One day you’ll understand. It’s all for the best.’

  Her dad moves into a flat in Manly, and Susan goes with him. She isn’t given a choice: her mother can’t cope with her, can’t cope with anything, spends most of her days in a grief-fuelled drunken oblivion. The flat is big, new, and up ten storeys. There’s a buzzer – an intercom – at the front entrance, and she has to learn to use the elevator – the stairs say EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY, and anyway it would take forever to climb all ten flights. There is no backyard, but there’s a view of the harbour as well as the beach from the wraparound balcony. Susan is disappointed to discover that wall-to-wall carpeting doesn’t actually mean carpet all the way up to the ceiling, but is thrilled with her mirrored built-in wardrobe, and the double bunk bed with its detachable wooden ladder.

  Her mum stays in the house in Harbord.

  ‘You’re not selling it, James. That’s all I have left. And what if she comes back? How will she find us?’

  ‘She’s not coming back, Helen.’ Wearily. ‘I wish you’d get it out of your mind. She’s dead. Or better off. She’s not coming back.’

  For the first few months Susan spends a night or two each week, as well as every second weekend, with her mother, while her father’s away working. But visits to her mother become increasingly difficult, distressing for everyone, and it isn’t long before her father is forced to organise an alternative. A babysitter. Gillian. Gillian is youngish – younger than Susan’s parents anyway. She teaches art at the local tech, but it’s only casual work, and she needs the extra money. She has wavy red hair that’s almost down to her bum and the most enormous boobs that Susan has ever seen. She wears no make-up and, when she whirls here and there in her colourful Indian skirts, fine orange hairs glint along her shins.

  On the nights that Susan’s father is away, Gillian sleeps in a fold-out bed in the lounge room, though Susan offers her the top bunk.

  While nobody actually tells her, it isn’t long before Susan realises that Gillian is keeping her father company on the weekends when she’s away visiting her mother (small signs – the particular way Gillian stacks the crockery; folds the dishcloth; her underwear, still damp, left draped over the shower-curtain rod). After a while, when her father’s away, the fold-out bed stays folded up, and Gillian moves out of the lounge and into his bed. And in a few more months she’s sleeping there even when he’s at home.

  A Friday night – her mother’s access weekend. Susan is alone at the small dining table – it’s a card table really; her father claimed their old table, and her mother has yet to replace it – eating the meal that she has prepared herself. Cheese on toast and tinned tomato soup. Her mother sits slumped in front of the muted television with a tumbler of wine and her cigarettes. She does not eat with her daughter. Susan thinks perhaps she does not eat at all.

  ‘You know that we might never find out what’s happened to your sister?’ Her mother speaks quietly, her eyes not moving from the silent screen.

  ‘Yes.’ Susan knows the questions, knows the answers, doesn’t really have to listen. It’s always the same conversation.

  ‘You know that she might be dead.’

  ‘Yes, Mum.’

  A long pause, then: ‘You know that this has destroyed me.’

  Susan makes no response; what response can she make?

  ‘I was a good mother, Susan. I was young and it was hard for me, but I was always a good mother to her.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘They can’t take that away from me. Even if she’s alive somewhere, even if she never comes home, they can never tell me I was a bad mother. I was hard, sometimes, but you can’t always let your children have their own way, can you? You can’t let them make their own decisions. Sometimes they’re wrong, your kids. Wrong. Sometimes you have to be hard. But it’s never for yourself. You do it all for them. Look at you. You take notice of me don’t you? You listen to what I say, don’t you Susy? You take notice. You’re a good girl.’

  She pauses, lights another cigarette, her hands tremble. Susan breaks the toast into small pieces, drops them one by one into the soup.

  ‘I’m a good mother to you, Susy. Say I am. A good mother?’ She still hasn’t turned her head towards her daughter.

  Susan follows the script. ‘You’re a good mother,’ she speaks with difficulty, her mouth crammed with sodden toast. ‘A great mother. The best.’

  ***

  It has been more than five years since her father’s death, but Susan still finds it hard to believe that he’s gone. He was only in his early sixties; fit and healthy – a non-smoker, a jogger. He’d suffered a massive heart attack while walking along the beach – had literally dropped dead. Gillian (who was ten years younger and with all sorts of opportunities still ahead of her) had almost immediately moved back to Adelaide, where she’d grown up. By then they’d been living together nearly fifteen years, and though Gillian had always been good to Susan, and had taken on the role of stepmother and then step-grandmother with good cheer and considerable enthusiasm, without the connection of Susan’s father they’d lost contact. There’s been the odd phone call, the occasional letter, photographs, an exchange of presents at Christmas, but somehow they’ve never made plans to visit, to meet up. Still, it’s Gillian that Susan contacts now, the morning after the reading of the will. She wants to tell her about Karen: to see what she thinks; to find out what she knows.

  Gillian is, as always, pleased to hear from her. Susan explains, gives a lengthy and somewhat confused account. But Gillian seems undisturbed, unsurprised by the terms of her mother’s will – it seems she has known all along.

  ‘Why did Dad let her do it?’ Susan asks, ‘What was the point? It’s ridiculous. A complete waste of time and money. Karen’s dead. I can understand there was no way Mum would believe it, but why did Dad let her write the will that way? He had power of...’

  Gillian cuts into the shrillness of Susan’s misdirected indignation. ‘Hey Suse, it’s not my fault. There’s no point yelling at me.’ Her voice is as it always was in times of conflict – impossibly calm, generously soothing.

  Susan apologises.

  ‘It’s okay. I understand, but listen for a minute, Susan. I’m sorry I have to be the one to tell you this – I told your father that it wasn’t fair, that you should have been told. But he – he didn’t want it hanging over your head for the rest of your life. On top of the thing with your mother. He wanted to keep things ... clear for you. To give you some certainty.’

  ‘Dad told me she was dead. I remember that. He told me she was dead.’

  ‘It seemed the easiest way, the best way. And he ... well I guess at that stage he probably thought she was dead too.’

  Susan’s throat is dry and words are difficult. ‘At that stage? What d’you mean? Did something happen after she left? What do you mean? What happened?’

  ‘Jesus,’ Susan hears Gillian’s sharp intake of breath. ‘This is bloody hard over the phone.’

  ‘What’s hard, Gillian?’ Susan doesn’t want to ask and doesn’t want to hear the answer. It would be so much easier to just hang up.

  ‘There was some proof that Karen may have been alive, Suse. Some family friend, in Melbourne, I think, swore she’d seen her, and told your mother. Your mother hired someone, didn’t tell James.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘There was nothing definite. Some people who knew someone who
met someone who just might have been Karen. But this was years after she left. Most people change such a lot at that age. No one was certain.’

  ‘When was this? How long after she disappeared?’

  ‘Oh, it was years ago – just before your mother ... before she got really ill, maybe ten years after Karen disappeared. She hired this person, this private detective and of course she couldn’t pay. The bill and the reports ended up coming to us.’

  ‘But why would she have been alive? Didn’t the police...?’

  ‘The police file was never closed, Suse. You know that. There was no body, no evidence. Nothing conclusive either way.’

  ‘And the reports, you say there was no positive sighting...?’

  ‘No absolute positives. Look, Suse,’ Gillian sounds a little impatient, as if she wants to end this conversation, or move it elsewhere. ‘I’ve still got those reports. I’ll put them in the post in the next few days if you like. Now, tell me, how’re those children of yours?’

  ***

  It is not until Susan is twelve, has just started high school, that she stops believing that Karen is out there somewhere, that she will come back for her one day.

  ‘She’s dead, isn’t she?’ Susan asks, out of the blue, one Saturday morning. ‘Karen’s dead.’

  Her father looks up, startled, from his weekend newspapers. ‘We can’t ever know, sweetheart,’ he says slowly, ‘not for certain – when there’s ... no body. But it’s probably best that we start thinking that way. No matter what your mother says.’ Susan can tell that her dad is unsure about what to say, knows from experience that he is out of his depth, that such conversations make him uncomfortable, uneasy. But she needs some answers, some certainty, and she still has a naive faith in her father’s assurances.

  ‘She would have come back if she was alive, wouldn’t she? She wouldn’t have stayed away all these years, would she, Dad?’ Susan doesn’t understand her father’s agonised look at Gillian, and her stepmother’s slight shake of the head in response.

  ‘She would have come back if she could,’ he says finally, and with what seems to be complete conviction. ‘I’m sure of it.’

  Susan stops wondering about Karen. She stops dreaming about her.

  Stops remembering her.

  ***

  In the end it takes her almost an entire day, countless drafts and redrafts, but finally she has a file on the computer labelled KAREN, containing a single document. She makes it as official looking as possible: headings in bold, double spaced, title in capitals, centred:

  KAREN MICHELLE BROWN

  Date of birth: 12/6/57

  Last known address: 24 Koolaroo Ave, Harbord, NSW

  Appearance: Dark blonde hair, blue eyes, fair skin, some freckles. Medium build. Height when last measured: 161cm. Please see enclosed photograph.

  Family details:

  Mother: Helen Mary Carter. Nee McGregor. Born Adelaide: 1936. Died 1996. Married Paul Brown in

  Melbourne in 1956. Married James Carter in Manly 1963.

  Father: Paul Brown. Navy Midshipman? Born? Died 1959.

  Sister: Susan Louise Middleton. Nee Carter. Born 1967. Married Edward Middleton 1987.

  Extended family:

  Maternal – Helen Carter’s parents both died before she married and she had no siblings. Some elderly aunts in Adelaide, but they’re long gone.

  Paternal – none known.

  James Carter – born 1929, died 1991. Family all English. Parents visited sometime in the early seventies. One sister, lives in the United Kingdom.

  History:

  Karen Michelle Brown was born in Melbourne in 1957. Her father died in a shipping accident soon after. Her mother trained as a nurse but worked in Myer when Karen was a baby. Met James Carter, a salesman, in 1962. Moved to Sydney soon after to marry him. Karen and Helen moved into Carter’s Harbord residence.

  Karen attended Harbord Primary School, then Manly Girls High. Worked Saturdays and school holidays at the local newsagent. She was offered – and accepted – a cashier’s job at the ANZ Bank, Brookvale, a few days before her disappearance. Disappeared the night of her high school formal, 10/11/75.

  School history:

  Unknown. All reports and awards and other documents destroyed by mother.

  Friends:

  Best friend: Julie Walker. Julie moved to Brisbane with her family just before Karen disappeared. Other close female friends: Judy Carmichael, Amanda Hastings, Joanne Simpson.

  No known boyfriends. Though rumour of her being seen with a man in a red car a few days before her disappearance.

  Hobbies and interests: Netball. Swimming.

  Personal qualities: According to others: quiet, well-mannered, hard working.

  When she reads over what she’s written, Susan is disturbed by the brevity, the starkness of the information. She could have been writing about anyone. A stranger, not a sister. She prints out the page and slips it into an envelope. She has the photograph ready – a school portrait, taken the year of Karen’s disappearance. She seems so very young; an ordinary teenage girl – gleaming hair, bright eyes, a wide untroubled smile – waiting for life to begin. She slides it in, seals the envelope.

  Later, she goes back to the computer, reopens the file. Scrolls to the bottom of the page, adds another category, another subheading: ‘What I remember about my sister’. She types slowly, a single sentence:

  ‘I remember that I thought my sister was wonderful, but I don’t – I can’t – remember why.’

  She realises that it’s not all that unusual, has spoken to others who’ve admitted that similarly, they have very few memories of their young lives, of actually being themselves before they were four, five, six, whatever. But Susan’s amnesia seems to be more substantial. Sometimes it feels as if she slept until she was eight. That she didn’t really come to consciousness until Karen’s disappearance and that her very existence is only a bizarre consequence of her sister’s absence: her first conscious memory, her first real memory, she’s certain, is of waving her sister goodbye on that particular night, of watching Karen’s elegant figure receding in the distance, and then disappearing altogether as she turned the corner at the end of the street. After that night, after Karen left, Susan’s memories are sharp, clear, focused; they come thick and fast and more or less chronologically. But before that it’s almost a blank. Oh, there are a few random recollections – brief and unrelated, almost like snapshots, or dreams. And she can never be sure that they truly are memories, that they aren’t constructions, reconstructions based on stories told to her by her parents, or made up collage-like from family photographs.

  And it isn’t just her sister. No matter how hard she tries, Susan can’t really recall the woman who was her mother before Karen’s disappearance. Her only enduring memory of her mother is of the woman she became – a woman to be feared and then, as her anger and grief became madness, to be guiltily avoided. Oh, the texture of certain fabrics, a whiff of hairspray, lipstick, a particular tune on the radio, all these can pull her back – but it’s to a feeling, an indefinable sense of her mother as she was once – loving, humorous, interested – rather than a concrete memory or even an image. And with it comes always an associated sensation of loss and grief, of her mother, that mother, being lost.

  Susan’s memory of her father before that time is hazy, too. It’s difficult to connect the smiling youthful man who, according to the photographs anyway, was physically demonstrative (in so many snaps he stands close, arm slung round shoulders; he hugs – unconsciously, easily) with the irritable and emotionally contained man she knew. In photographs there’s an unselfconscious, irrepressible energy about him. He looks like he might be good fun. And that’s the sense she has of him from that time: recalls, she’s certain, being thrown up in the air; or tickled, tortured in that af
fectionate fatherly way. But after Karen’s disappearance – though he was only in his late thirties – he became someone else. Someone unbearably burdened, not someone fun.

  And Karen – the big sister who, they assured her, she worshipped – Karen has for years existed only in two dimensions, six by four, framed, and under glass. Karen she barely remembers at all. She has a handful of memories in which her sister features, but these are incoherent, without context. All meaningless. If not for the photographs, the few stories provided by her father, family friends, it would be easy to assume that she’d never even known her.

  She wonders endlessly about those final months before her sister’s disappearance. Did something happen, something she’s repressed or denied or perhaps dissociated from? (Oh, she knows the jargon – she’s read the books, done her homework, spoken to experts. Ed would be impressed.) Or is there something – some moment, some event that she just can’t remember because she was too young?

  It eats away at her, this blank. She scours her memory, but there’s nothing there: no gleaming moment of truth just waiting to be to discovered beneath the burnt-on layers of the past. There’s nothing – an absence.

  ***