Surface Tension

by Meg McKinlay

  HF: safety of our children. East side not an option.

  AM: need to consider the recommendation of the report.

  HF: need to consider the opinion of the mayor, who is your boss!

  The discussion went on for several pages. No, several meetings. RW, BT, AM, and every other set of initials wanted the swimming area on the east but HF pushed for the west. And kept pushing, until first RW, and then BT, and finally AM and everyone else either agreed or gave in.

  And finally, the neat and formal, official and serious version of the minutes read simply:

  It was resolved that the new swimming area would be established on the west side of the lake, with ample parking and an access road extending from the highway.

  Moved: AM; Seconded: BT; all in favour.

  I looked down at the table. Hannah had opened the printing proofs to a double-page spread of the lake. There were people swimming and picnicking and floating around on rubber rings. The walls of the dam rose up in the distance and there was a smaller photograph inset of the viewing platform, where a family stood, pointing out across the water.

  The photo didn’t extend east. The edge of the water blurred as it reached the fancy border Hannah had made to look like bubbles flowing around the side of the page. There was no sign of the possibly future-electrified fence, of the padlock and the warning signs, of the uneven edges of what might have once been a road, of the lengths HF would go to, to keep people out.

  But why? There weren’t any snags, not really. The water was lower than it had ever been and we’d never run into anything, at least not accidentally. To find anything, we’d had to dive down and down, holding our breath longer than I had thought humanly possible.

  Even then, what we’d found wasn’t exactly dangerous – a shed, a car, a weird Finkle-head.

  Come to think of it, it was kind of ironic that it was a Finkle-head in the lake, when Finkle was the one who didn’t want anyone swimming there.

  “Hey!” Hannah reached across and pulled the laptop towards her. She snapped the screen shut. “I didn’t say you could look at that stuff.”

  “There were unsaved changes,” I said. “A window popped up. I was–”

  “Oh, dammit,” she said. “I hope I didn’t lose anything. I’ve been so busy I … never mind. I’ll type them up later. I can probably remember everything if it comes to that.” She slid the laptop back into its padded sleeve then leaned out over the table and began rolling up the proofs. “The point is it’s nearly done. I think it’s going to be great!”

  Around the table, everyone nodded and I joined in. But it wasn’t so much that I was agreeing. It was more that I was thinking.

  I was thinking about Hannah making up her minutes from memory, about what she might forget, or misremember – just slightly, just enough to make it GC who cares about the MSG rather than AM and maybe that doesn’t matter right now but who knows? One day it might. Maybe one day a great wave of MSG-related illness would strike New Lower Grange and AM would say, well, you know, I was always concerned about this and use his incredible foresight as a platform to run for mayor and then someone would go back through the records and say well, actually no, that wasn’t you as it turns out and before we knew it Gladys Cropp would be leading our town and no one would be quite sure how it happened.

  I was thinking about the way something can slide in so easily over the top of something else – a cleaner version, a neater account, a smooth glaze over a maze of hairline fractures, a delete key threading silence across incriminating paragraphs, five thousand swimming pools of water pouring onto an inconvenient town.

  And before long no one remembers what was under there to begin with.

  Before long, they have a hard time remembering there was ever anything there at all.

  twenty

  That night, I couldn’t sleep

  I was dreaming about Atlantis. And puzzles. About pieces of wood and mosaic and my clumsy hands trying to click things together, but it was hard to see through the water and what with Finkle being everywhere – at school and the council and the lake and Dad’s studio. And whenever I found a piece I thought might fit, whenever I was giving it just the exact right jiggle it needed to maybe, possibly slot itself into place, he would jump up, waving his hands, saying, No, no, that can’t go there. Look!

  And I would look down and wonder what I had been thinking because that wasn’t the right piece, maybe not even the right puzzle.

  I lay on my back and stared up at the ceiling. Around me, the curtains flapped in the breeze that whispered through the open window. Snatches of moonlight wobbled this way and that, throwing shadows up and down the walls.

  I knew it was silly. But I couldn’t help thinking that maybe it was something. Once I’d had the thought I couldn’t seem to let it go. The Finkle-head, underwater. What was it doing in a shed, in the hills? Was it even in the shed? Or was it maybe just down there in the mud somewhere and we disturbed it, with our diving and rattling of doors and breaking of wood.

  Even if it was just in the mud, how did it get there, all the way outside of town, near a shed, near a car?

  A red car.

  Suddenly, a piece clicked. Red plastic flaking off the mirror. Dad waving goodbye to Finkle. Finkle driving off in his little red car. A little red car with his wife’s head right there in the boot, right there just waiting for the metal to rust and crumble so it could bob freakishly up and out of its watery grave and all the long way to the surface.

  That was Finkle’s car under there?

  That made sense, didn’t it? A kind of sense at least. It didn’t explain why it was there but maybe it was like Liam said. Maybe it was just an old bomb by then. Old bombs were hard to sell. That’s why you saw old cars slowly falling apart in people’s front yards, rusted bodies dumped in pockets of bushland. That’s why there was an abandoned car hotline, a number you could call so someone would come with a tow truck and drag the ugly things away, out of sight, out of mind.

  Maybe Finkle decided it was easier just to leave it in the shed.

  I didn’t ask myself why the head was still there, why he had left it in the boot.

  One look at it and that question answered itself.

  Why would any man give that to his wife?

  That was when it hit me.

  His wife. Finkle’s wife.

  She left him. Twelve years ago. Moved up to the city.

  Dad’s voice was in my head. Anything could have happened, I suppose.

  All of a sudden, I was wide awake.

  Finkle’s car – in a locked shed, drowned, with her head inside it.

  Finkle’s wife – gone.

  I sat bolt upright and snapped on the light.

  There was no way I could sleep now. This was like one of those shows on TV where the dead contact the living, unable to rest until someone uncovers the truth about their untimely death.

  I had to do something.

  But what could I do here, in my room, in the middle of the night?

  I did the only thing I could think of.

  I pulled out my box.

  I leafed through the maps and the drawings and the diagrams.

  How stupid had I been? That shed was nowhere near Finkle’s place, nowhere near anything Finkle had anything to do with. It was out the back of the Porters’ property, where no one went but the sheep. Why would Finkle abandon his bomb there unless he had something to hide?

  Something big.

  Sheet by sheet, I made my way through the history of Old Lower Grange, through A Town on the Move and Greenies Up a Tree and One Big Step for Progress, through the photos of the old town and the new site and the construction work and half the town gathered up at the dam to watch Finkle flip the lever.

  I don’t know what I was looking for. Something. Anything.

  Something that would sit at the still centre of the puzzle and bring all the other pieces into an orderly orbit around it.

  I sat. I read. I read some more. I stretched ou
t my legs. I crossed them again. I got up off the floor and went to my desk, balancing the box on my bed, then reaching down into it to pull out each page in turn.

  The too-many bakeries. The timber mill. The artists’ studio. There was Dad in his beard, Elijah in his tree house.

  I loved this stuff. But would it tell me anything? Anything apart from what it already had?

  It was getting late. Early. There were no more shadows on the walls, only the early morning sun beginning to filter through.

  I leaned back in my chair and stretched my arms up high, lacing my fingers together and cracking my knuckles.

  I put the pages back into the box. When they were all away, I weighted them down the way I always did – with the clay mermaid I had made all those years ago.

  It was packed in newspaper and bubble wrap to keep it safe, but that also meant you couldn’t see inside. That hadn’t bothered me before. I knew what it looked like. But suddenly I wanted to see it. Now that Liam and I were really diving down into the lake, not exactly like mermaids but probably as close as I would ever get, I couldn’t resist the urge to open it up, to take a look at where my four-year-old artistic vision had led me.

  I pulled the bubble wrap off, then started on the newspaper. Dad had wrapped it carefully for me in thick, cushioning layers and now I peeled them off, one by one. Two by …

  What?

  I stared down at the paper I was holding, had been just about to toss on the floor behind me.

  Dad’s patented super-secure wrapping service. Old newspaper.

  Old photos.

  Was that Finkle?

  I set the partially wrapped mermaid to one side and smoothed the sheet of paper out on the desk in front of me.

  It was.

  It was a photo of Finkle shaking some kid’s hand and presenting him with an award.

  Highest Fundraiser, the article said. It was some Jump Rope thing, like we did at school. This kid had raised the most money in the state and Finkle was delighted, absolutely delighted to take this opportunity at the annual Lenton Festival to present him with his prize of a gift certificate and a handsome framed certificate with genuine fake-gold lettering.

  And also to take him for a spin.

  I don’t think it was part of the official prize.

  The kid was just lucky.

  Because Mayor Finkle had that very day taken ownership of his pride and joy – a brand new S-Class Mercedes – in which he was about to take Marcus Scragg, aged 10, on an extremely smooth and luxurious ride.

  There was a photo of it right there behind them.

  It was red and shiny, so shiny it might blind you if you looked directly at it.

  It most definitely was not a bomb.

  I ran my fingers over the photograph.

  A brand-new Mercedes.

  I didn’t know what S-Class meant but the article made it sound like it was something special.

  That was weird. Nobody picks up a new car, the kind of car you boast about and have your photo taken with in the paper, then ditches it in a shed without a good reason.

  I unwrapped my mermaid and set it in front of me on the desk.

  It didn’t look much like a mermaid really. If I was truthful, it looked more like a girl who had been born with a series of unfortunate deformities. But Dad had said it was great.

  He had fired it and glazed it and wrapped it carefully in soft, padding layers.

  It had waited in the box for me all these years to tell me something.

  Something big.

  Now I had to tell someone else.

  twenty-one

  When I got to the fence, I froze.

  The gate was wide open. There was a silver 4WD parked next to it.

  Finkle, back already. Getting a head start on his fence electrification research.

  I looked wildly around me. There was no one in sight.

  I wheeled my bike through the trees to the gap in the fence. When I got there, I froze again.

  Liam’s bike was there. He was here already, in the water maybe.

  Caught?

  I moved quietly through the trees.

  There was someone in the water, but it wasn’t him.

  It was Finkle, grandma-stroking around about fifty metres offshore, pausing every now and then to duck his head under the water.

  Searching for something.

  He wasn’t in the right spot though, not quite.

  And he didn’t have goggles or flippers or an underwater torch that would last him even five seconds.

  “Cassie!”

  Liam was crouched behind a low bush a little way along the shoreline. His knees were grazed and bleeding.

  “Did he see you?”

  He shook his head. “I heard the car. He did a massive skid when he pulled up.”

  I pointed at his legs. “What happened?”

  He reddened. “I fell over, running for the trees. I had the flippers on.”

  I held back a smile at the thought. “What did you–”

  “Shh!” Liam said suddenly. “He’s coming out.”

  Finkle waded out through the shallows.

  I turned to Liam. “The car we found – it’s not a bomb,” I said softly.

  “Yeah, I …” He trailed off.

  Finkle had stopped and bent down towards the ground. When he straightened, he had something in his hand. He held it up and it glinted, bright in the afternoon sun.

  Liam groaned.

  “What is it?” I whispered.

  “I was going to show you. I dropped it when I was running.”

  “So what is it?”

  “A hood ornament. I broke it off the car.”

  As we watched, Finkle closed his hand over the shape. Then he turned and headed back up towards the fence, collecting his towel and bundle of clothes from a grassy patch on the way.

  We heard the clinking of metal as he pulled the gate shut and relocked it. Then we waited for the sound of the engine roaring to life and fading away down the hill before we headed out into the open.

  “It’s a Mercedes,” Liam said. He traced the three-point logo with a stick in the dirt.

  “I know.”

  “It could still be a bomb. Mercedes get old too.”

  “It’s not a bomb,” I repeated.

  I walked over to a spreading gum and sat down in the shade. Liam followed me, the flippers in one hand.

  “It’s an S-Class,” I said. “It was new.”

  Liam stared at me. “An S-Class? How do you even … how do you know that?”

  I took a deep breath.

  I told him about the head and the photo and the car, about Marcus Scragg.

  “But why would he do that?” Liam was shaking his head. “Why would he …?”

  He looked out at the lake.

  And this was it, I thought. This was the moment when I told him. When everything came together – all the tiny pieces of the puzzle slotting into each other perfectly, and him nodding and saying oh my god and wow.

  Then what would we do? Dive down again, probably. We needed to be sure. Absolutely one hundred per cent certain beyond a shadow of a doubt. We needed more evidence. And we needed to get it fast, because Finkle had the hood ornament. He knew the car was right there somewhere. He knew something was happening.

  I stood up. “We have to go out,” I said. “Now.”

  “Cassie.” Liam narrowed his eyes. “What’s going on?”

  “It’s Mrs Finkle,” I said. “I think she’s in the car.”

  Liam exploded with laughter, sending a storm of white cockatoos fleeing from a nearby tree. “What? Are you joking?” He cocked his head to one side. “You’re joking, right?”

  I shook my head. “She left him,” I said, making air quotes with my fingers. “She–”

  Liam laughed again. “She lives in Paterson,” he said. “She calls Mum all the time.”

  “Huh?”

  “She’s not dead, Cassie.”

  “Oh. But then …”


  “What, did you think he killed her? You’ve been watching too much TV or something. And, even if he did, why would he put her in the car? Why not just put her in the shed?”

  He was right. And suddenly I felt like an idiot. All that late-night reading, the mermaid, the newspaper.

  I looked past Liam, out at the water.

  It still didn’t make sense. There was still a car under there. Not a bomb but a new car, the kind of car you want to take some kid for a spin in and get your picture in the paper with.

  Even if your wife was still alive and well and living in Paterson, why would you lock your fancy new car in someone else’s shed and drown it?

  Liam shrugged. “There’s probably some reason.”

  “Yeah.” Some reason. Like the invisible line across the lake saying No Swimming. Swim here but not here. No need to ask questions. It’s better this way.

  “I don’t know.” I reached down beside me to pick up a gumleaf. It was one of those leaves that curls back on itself, like a dog chasing its tail, making a tiny, perfect “o” in its own centre. “It doesn’t make sense.”

  I couldn’t get that picture out of my head. I had thought the newspaper was the key, that it was moving everything into place around it. Had I really imagined it?

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “It was new at the festival, on January 16th and then–”

  Beside me, I felt Liam tense, his whole body stiff, like he was bracing to ward something off.

  “What?”

  Liam shook his head tightly. “It doesn’t matter. It’s just … January 16th, you know?”

  The date. I hadn’t realised at first. Why would I? It wasn’t a date that mattered to me, some random day in January months before I was even born. But it meant something to lots of people. Different things. Second Friday in January, hottest day in three years, first day of the Lenton Festival, day I got an award and a ride in a sports car.

  Day I was a baby in the backseat of a car, my father in the front, my calm, steady brother beside me.

  “Sorry,” I began. “I …”

  “It’s okay. It’s just a day.” He reached for a leaf. “You can stop making that face now.”

  But I couldn’t. I couldn’t stop staring at him and I couldn’t stop my face doing whatever it was doing because all of a sudden I had no control over it. All of a sudden it took everything I had to follow the thoughts that tumbled one after the other through my head.