Sign

by Colin Dray

  Pausing a moment, Sam looked up at Samantha’s face as she smiled back down. He thought of Dettie, being held somewhere else in the building, dishevelled and suddenly aged. He thought of Katie, quieter, more insular than she had ever been before. And Jon—who knew where?

  ‘Are you good, buddy?’

  His father clearly wanted the lie. But Sam was done with lies. He tapped the receiver with his knuckle, but before he could tap a second time, his father let out a lengthy sigh that filled up the line like static.

  ‘Oh, that’s fantastic, mate. That’s just great. That’s good to hear.’

  Sam didn’t bother correcting him. There was no point. He wasn’t listening anyway. And there was nothing left to say.

  68

  It was six months before Sam and Katie saw their aunt again. There had been no need for long court proceedings or investigations. Dettie pleaded guilty and never changed her story. She had taken the children to be reunited with their father. She had done it without permission, and had misled Katie and Sam and their parents. But she was trying to save her family, she said, and she would never apologise for that. As part of her agreement she was placed in a hospital facility for rehabilitation.

  Sam and Katie’s mother made sure to explain to them exactly where Dettie was and all that was going on throughout the whole process. At Sam’s insistence she didn’t lie or dumb anything down. There had been enough lying, she agreed. Dettie was sick. She had been sick for a long time—since before Ted had left. She suffered from a form of mental illness that gave her mood swings, but she had never done anything like this before. It was called a ‘manic episode’, their mother said. Because she wasn’t taking her medication properly, because she was agitated and stressed, she’d done a very stupid, very dangerous, very frightening thing. And she was going to stay in a safe place until she was back to her old self. If, Sam thought, she ever came back to herself.

  ‘But the thing to also remember,’ their mother said, ‘is that your aunt Bernadette does love you.’ She did not call her ‘Dettie’ anymore. ‘What she did was inexcusable. Unforgivable. But in her own very, very misguided way, she did it because she loves you both very much.’

  To Sam’s surprise, it was only a few weeks before Katie softened towards their aunt again. Based on what their mother had described, Katie seemed to feel sorry for her, and was soon sending letters and photographs in care packages, wishing her well and keeping her informed about school or what was happening around the house. In return, Dettie would send letters that Katie would read aloud to Sam, after struggling with their mother to disentangle the uncharacteristically sloppy script.

  Sam’s feelings were more complicated. He was never sure which image of his aunt was going to surface from the complex tangle of memories in his mind. The stuffy, sombre oracle, warning him not to give in to death after his operation? The kindly guardian, plying them with lollies and ice cream, trying to keep their spirits up? The dishevelled, rambling creature clinging to a past already faded? Eventually he came to accept that she was all of them, and none, at once. This was just the way people were. Messier and more complicated and self-deluded than they themselves ever realised.

  He’d thought much the same thing when they’d briefly met up with their father. It was for just an hour, immediately before flying back to Sydney. He’d met them for a short lunch at the airport cafe. Their parents were quiet and stiff with one another, and his father looked thinner than Sam expected. He had a moustache. He talked about how busy he was at work. He couldn’t believe how much the two of them had grown. He was friendly and smiled and marvelled at how brave they had been. But at the same time Sam could feel his father staring at his throat, could sense the discomfort in his posture as he tried not to look like he was turning away from him. When they said goodbye, and he promised to all meet up again soon, Sam knew it was just another story, more comforting words that he was telling himself as much as them.

  The same was true of the news media and everyone at school. The week after they returned home, a television reporter had interviewed Sam, Katie and their mother for the news. But when they saw the report broadcast, they had edited out all mention of Jon, kept showing footage of their mother crying, and claimed that Katie and Sam had been afraid the entire time, continually cutting to some weird black-and-white slow-motion footage of a car driving through the woods. Their classmates had found it all fascinating, and were soon happy to make up their own stories about Sam driving the car to safety himself, or Dettie getting into a shoot-out with the police.

  As the weeks passed, Katie and Sam would occasionally speak to Dettie on the phone. The conversations were always short, and their mother would make sure to stand beside them, letting them lean against her for support if they needed to, listening in on a second handset, and reading aloud whatever Sam wrote down to say. Sometimes it would take Dettie a long time to respond. Katie would ask her something—what the weather was like where she was; what did she have for dinner—and it would take a moment for their aunt to take the sentence in, think it over, sometimes repeating a few words in a slow moan, and then reply. She’d occasionally even forget the question, or repeat something she’d already told them. Their mother explained it was because of all the medications she was taking. They helped her stay calm, she said, but they also made her tired. Made it hard for her to concentrate. Mostly Dettie just talked about the other patients, many of whom, she said, complained too much.

  Sam’s questions were almost always about Jon. What had happened to him. Where he had gone. But the few times Dettie seemed to hear what his mother was asking for him, her story remained the same. Exactly what she’d told the police officers, the doctors and the judge. Jon had decided to travel on his own. He’d taken his bags and hitchhiked the rest of the way alone. She would get confused and upset if they pressed her further.

  For Sam, Dettie’s voice now was somehow even more unsettling than all the murmuring and frantic twitching he had seen overtake her in the car. At least then she had focus. Even in the last, crazed moments when they ran off the road, her snarling and clawing at him, the desperate, terrified look in her eyes. Now it was hard to tell what she believed. What she knew, what she had told herself or couldn’t recall. The truth had become even more slippery and unsalvageable.

  He realised, finally, the true horror of the zombies that had lurked beneath the campy schlock in his comic book. Under the lumbering and the sharp teeth and the gore, what was so haunting wasn’t the threat of death, but the unhealthy clinging to life. To what had passed. He’d been afraid that it somehow represented him. Silent. Angry. That he, like the zombies, had been changed into something unfamiliar, something strange. But it wasn’t the changing that was so frightening—it was being unable to let go. He was now no longer clinging to some lost image of himself. Dettie, however, was lost. Wilfully detached from the truth. Hungry to be believed. Empty and thoughtlessly wheezing over the phone. She was still trapped, cold and haunted on the other end of the line.

  Their mother was eventually able to contact Ted and fill him in on everything that had happened. He visited one afternoon for a cup of tea, to catch up and talk things through. Even he seemed surprised about what was happening to Dettie. Things were bad in the old days, he said, but she had never strayed so far from herself. He did laugh, however, when their mother said Dettie was telling people that he had fallen to his death from a skyscraper window.

  ‘Wishful thinking,’ he said.

  69

  No one else was ever able to explain what had happened to Jon. Nothing was ever found and no one seemed to have heard or seen anything the night Dettie left him behind. Sam had his mother call the police to check up every week. He wrote letters to different stations at every town along the roads they had driven on—even to places in and around Perth itself, but he received few replies. A bulletin had been circulated along with a sketch a police artist had made from Sam’s description, but no one ever came forward and no new information app
eared.

  Jon had just vanished.

  It was like that with tourists from overseas, one officer told him in a letter, two months after Sam had returned home. Often a traveller will just get on a plane and fly home without telling anyone, not thinking anyone will miss them. Most of the time there’s no one to tell. The police kept assuring Sam that they would make some inquiries in London, but nothing seemed to come of it. He was just gone. Somewhere. And to Sam it seemed that nobody else was that concerned. Jon returning home—being fine—was all just another comfortable fiction everyone was constructing to avoid dealing with whatever was real. Strangely, even Katie started to believe that nothing was wrong. Sam wondered whether anyone would have believed Jon existed at all if they hadn’t found his shirt and sign in the car.

  Sam had kept the paddle-pop sticks from the boomerang Jon had given him. He made sure to remember the way they had slid together, fixed in place, bending into each other. And once he was home he had wound them together again himself and fixed them with glue. The boomerang hung from his ceiling now, and he would watch its shadow turn slowly above him each night as he lay in bed. He still remembered watching those sticks shudder above him as the car tore along those endless patchy asphalt roads, spinning in the sunlight. Sometimes he wondered if he would always feel that vibration running through his skin.

  It was a surprise to Sam to consider that his mother had never known Jon. In a few days he had become such an indelible part of his life, and yet she’d never even seen his face. Perhaps never would. Ironically, after all of Dettie’s panic about him, Roger and Sam’s mother had drifted apart over the following months, and when Sam let his imagination loose he couldn’t help but wonder what might have happened between Jon and his mother if they had met.

  In many ways it was because of Jon that Sam asked to work with Tracey again. Because Batman doesn’t have superpowers, he had wanted to tell Jon. He has to work for it.

  Although he tried them both for a time, he discovered that he didn’t like either oesophageal speech or the electrolarynx that Tracey lent him to try. Trying to swallow air made his stomach feel sick and sore, and the electrolarynx’s unnerving sizzling sound still made him uncomfortable. But more than that, he felt like they were both just attempts to keep using old words—the same feeble words that the people around him kept using. Filled with soothing lies and misleading euphemisms.

  Instead he wanted to learn sign language. To take on a new language, one that was fresh to him, while he got by, for the time being, with the old. His mother didn’t quite understand, but she was completely supportive, and even learnt along with him as best she could. He worked with Tracey after school, and his mother bought him a few books for home.

  Over many weeks, practising every day, he slowly became quite good. He even started signing in his dreams. It turned out that most of the signs Jon had shown him were at least a little bit different. In Australia they taught Auslan. Some of the signs were similar—thank you was much the same, as was mother, and scared was just one hand tapping the chest, not two—but even when they were different, Sam tried to remember what Jon had taught him as well, as best he could.

  The more he practised, the more he liked the way it felt to sign. The rhythm of it running through his body. The muscles in his arms tightening or easing depending on how expressive he wanted to be. Sharing simple conversations with other members of Tracey’s Auslan class. Recognising expressions. Pressing his meaning into the world with action.

  Sam’s mother announced that she was going to visit Dettie a week before she went. It was winter, half a year since their aunt had been hospitalised, and Katie had been asking, more and more frequently, to see her. There was no obligation for Sam to go, if he didn’t want to. His mother said that she would absolutely understand.

  Except Sam wanted to go. Because he still wanted to know. Needed to know. For himself. For her. So that it could end, whatever the answer.

  He would ask her, this time in person. She had never told anyone else—but somehow Sam knew that she would tell him. He wasn’t sure why, but he knew that if he asked her, if it was him, if he was right in front of her—not on the phone—she would say it. He would look her in the eyes, and she would look back. For once he wouldn’t break her gaze, and he would ask her.

  And he would see the truth in her face.

  He practised his question for the entire week. As he showered and dressed and had breakfast, he practised it through. He wanted it to be automatic. Clear. Even if she didn’t understand him at first. He wanted to sign it properly.

  What happened to Jon?

  He’d also written it down on a piece of paper, so that his mother could read it aloud for him too—but he was going to ask it. He would feel it through his chest and up the back of his neck. He would ask and she would tell him.

  By the end of the day he would know.

  When they arrived at the hospital, Dettie was sitting by a window, her shoulders slumped, the blanket over her lap sliding halfway onto the floor. She seemed smaller than ever. Thin, and slumped, and pale. Her hair was cut short and her eyes were watery as she peered through the television screen and the game show flickering on its surface. A small plate of colourful boiled lollies lay on a plate beside her chair. Beside it, a cup of tea waited. None of it appeared to have been touched. For the first time that morning Katie hesitated, her excitement choked. They stood for a moment, watching their aunt’s slow, deliberate blinking, the slight lolling of her head. Sam could feel his mother squeeze his shoulder. She didn’t need to say anything. Together they stepped forward, and Sam raised his hands.

  And then he spoke.

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you to my wife, Laura, for being so encouraging about this project in the beginning, and to my family—all of my families—for being a source of inspiration and support every day. Thanks to my sister Beth for riding with me.

  To Alan Wearne, Tony Macri and Christine Howe, my thanks for providing invaluable feedback in the early days that gave the narrative shape. For their incredibly kind words and support, thank you to Stephen Romei, Jenny Barry and Rohan Wilson. And to Julie and Gaynor at the Mildura Visitors Information Centre, thank you for answering a torrent of baffling questions with grace.

  To everyone at Allen & Unwin, there are no words. Thank you for being the most generous, supportive and creative team that anyone could have hoped to collaborate with. My thanks to Christa Munns, Jennifer Thurgate and Genevieve Buzo; my endless gratitude to Ali Lavau, for her thorough, thoughtful reading and suggestions; to Hilary Reynolds for sharpening the tone and catching my mistakes; to Sarah Baker for revealing my overuse of the word ‘sharpening’; and to Annette Barlow for everything—simply everything.