The Kingdom Where Nobody Dies

by Kimberley Starr

  I nodded, not quite sure where this was going.

  Grandma looked at me more closely. “He’s … alarmed by the news reports he’s reading. The missing children …”

  I nodded again. There was an expression on her face that was at once curious and a little bit sad, regretful. What could that mean?

  “It must be a bit scary,” I agreed.

  “More than that, Maddy. Your father has had a tough time, you know. But he’s coming back to Australia, at least for a while. He’s been offered a post in Rockhampton and he’s coming back to get you.”

  I was winded for a moment. I’d been told I’d stay here for at least a year and that Dad would look for a house close by. It seemed ages since I’d thought of leaving.

  Suddenly Grandma stood up and held her arms out. “Maddy!” she said. “I’ll miss you!”

  And I hugged her, because I didn’t have much choice. She was tiny and frail, like a bird in my arms. My grandmother. My mother’s mother. And she loved me. Even though this summer I had done plenty of things to show that I didn’t deserve it.

  I hugged her again, this time because I wanted to.

  Then I walked through the house to the room that still wasn’t mine, that might not even contain my things for much longer, and sat on the bed, deep in thought. More than anything, I hoped Andrew would be home before I had to leave. It seemed that none of us were in control of our fates any more than Cameron Seymour had been. I opened the wardrobe door and took out the pile of letters I’d stored there. Messages from my father. I took them back to my bed and began to read …

  In the bright afternoon, Brigid and I strode along the riverbank waiting for Kevin Mathers to leave. Brigid carried a bag of Andrew’s belongings on her back: a pair of thick white socks he’d worn to school on sports days, an old exercise book, the stub of a pencil that would be covered in his fingerprints. She’d combed hairs out of his brush and collected them into a plastic sandwich bag. Altogether, we thought we were pretty well prepared. Once we were finished, police looking for forensic evidence would find plenty.

  “Ready?” I asked as we neared the steps.

  Brigid nodded and we began to climb.

  The kitchen door was locked. River Pocket was changing. People worried about security now, even the weird ones. I gave the handle a bit of a shake, but apart from rattling, nothing happened.

  Brigid slumped beside me, but only for a moment. Then she bent over to feel beneath the worn doormat, and pulled out a key. “His mother must have left it there.”

  I grinned at her. The key fitted the lock. We stepped into the kitchen.

  It was even dirtier than during our earlier visit. Piles of garbage lined two of the walls. Bags and bags of it, with bits and pieces of rotting food escaping from gaps around the edges. Empty chip packets and milk bottles had been dumped on top of everything else. For a moment, noticing this, I felt a bit weird. It must have been about the time that we first barged in here that Kevin Mathers started collecting all this rubbish. He had been taking it out the night we appeared at his back door. Perhaps he’d been too scared to take things out since then.

  “Where do we start?” Brigid asked. “I mean, even if he knows where Andrew is, he might not have him here.”

  “He probably doesn’t,” I agreed. “Not with the police all around and everything. We’d better hurry. There could still be a clue. He may only have gone out for a minute.”

  “I’ll look through this stuff,” Brigid said. “You take the living room.”

  Brigid was suddenly very bossy. I gave the bags a look more filthy than they were. A lot of prowling through garbage goes on in television detective shows. It must help, sometimes. However, the skin on my nose wrinkling, I decided to be a cleaner sort of detective. I would rely on my wits instead of my tolerance for disgusting smells.

  There must be a way to help Andrew that didn’t involve vomiting. For example, the living room was just as likely to be useful. That was where Kevin Mathers kept his magazines and scrapbooks.

  But I soon discovered that the room was in the same state as before. Maybe the Andrew Coleman book was more dog-eared, as if Kevin Mathers had been looking at it more often. That didn’t have to mean anything. The whole country was more interested in Andrew Coleman these days.

  I flicked through the book half-heartedly. Kevin Mathers had added to it recently, I saw. Front-page articles from several recent papers featured photographs I’d seen before. The articles were about Andrew being missing. I closed the book with a sigh and gazed around the room. There were drawers and cupboards to inspect.

  They were full of crockery and cutlery, grimy with old grease and a fine layer of dust. The rose patterns on the cups and saucers and the filigree work on the handles of the knives and forks were far too fancy for a man like Kevin Mathers. Easy to guess they had belonged to his dead mother.

  My own mother’s stuff was probably around somewhere, I thought suddenly. Crockery and cutlery and whatever, things she would have bought when she married my dad. Things that would, or should, be mine. Some of them might be nice to have. I wondered where they were.

  “How’re you going?” Brigid asked, near the door.

  “I’m just going up to the bedrooms,” I told her.

  Brigid raised the cushions on two of the armchairs, feeling behind them, then looked up at me and sneezed. “You be careful back there.”

  The hall was a dim, damp place with dark carpet that was probably once brown. I could actually smell the dust as I walked, but I couldn’t see much. So when I reached the first doorway, I felt around the corner for the light switch, flicking it on as I entered the room.

  Kevin Mathers was in there, lying in bed, looking up at me through sleep-dazed eyes.

  I screamed. I couldn’t help myself. The sound escaped my throat before I even knew it was there. Kevin Mathers leapt to his feet and sprang for me. Before I could turn, he had seized my arm and was hauling me out of the bedroom, down the hall back to the living room.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he demanded.

  What I was doing was panicking. Blindly. Cameron Seymour was dead and Andrew had been missing for days — and this was the man responsible. He was a murderer.

  What evil spirit had made us imagine we’d be safe here?

  Brigid had frozen behind the sofa. Beneath her red hair, she looked white, as though she was about to faint. Blue veins were etched into her skin like lines in a school exercise book. Kevin Mathers looked at her and clenched his jaw.

  Strength in numbers, strength in numbers, I thought.

  Suddenly what I had to do became clear. I had brought Brigid here. I was responsible for her. First, I had to fight off the terrified paralysis that had seized me with Kevin Mathers’ grip. I shifted my gaze. Away from the piles of magazines, away from the coffee table with its pattern of stains, away from the splayed, stretched leather of Kevin Mathers’ shoes against the soiled carpet.

  Upwards and into Kevin Mathers’ face.

  “What do you want with us?” I demanded, kicking out at him rapidly, aiming at his crotch.

  The ploy worked even better than I expected. Kevin Mathers dropped my arm and doubled over in pain, and Brigid and I gave each other a quick look before racing to the front door.

  “You can’t get us that easily!” I cried, as we opened it.

  Freedom was only metres away.

  And then for some reason I stopped. Perhaps it was because we’d failed; even though we were escaping, we hadn’t done what we came for. Perhaps it was because our escape seemed too easy. Could this pathetic man possibly have overpowered athletic Andrew Coleman?

  Because Kevin Mathers was pathetic. He cried out in pain as we fled, and fell to the filthy floor. As Brigid was about to slam the door shut, I held my hand out and kept it open.

  Then I stepped back into the room.

  “Maddy?” Brigid asked, watching me as if I was going mad.

  “Shhh … I’ll be all righ
t,” I said. “Keep the door open.” There was no harm in being careful. “Mr Mathers … Kevin?”

  He looked up. His eyes were red around the rims. He was tired and maybe a bit hung-over, not diabolical. He hadn’t shaved and his face was as rough as his grim smile. He looked up at me, still on the ground as I stood over him. It was quite clear that Brigid and I had never been in danger. This grown man was far more scared than we were.

  “I don’t want you to take my things,” he said. “They were my mother’s.”

  “Mr Mathers,” I said, “we didn’t come here to steal anything. We came here because we want to find Andrew.”

  He looked from me to Brigid while he dragged himself into a semi-upright position. There was a distrustful expression on his face as he shuffled over to one of the chairs.

  “Andrew?” he asked in a winded, high-pitched voice.

  Maybe I really had hurt him. I decided I could wait until later to feel guilty about that.

  “My brother, Mr Mathers.” Brigid took a step forward to look at him more closely. I noticed that she still kept one foot against the open door.

  “We think you had him here,” I added.

  “Andrew?” asked Kevin Mathers, as if Brigid had another brother.

  “You know him!” I insisted.

  “Yes! Yes, I do!” Kevin Mathers put one hand over his crotch, and held the other towards me as I made a menacing step forwards. “I haven’t seen Andrew since that day you were all here …”

  He was pathetic, and he was telling the truth. I didn’t know how I knew this, but he was, and I did.

  He was drunk enough to sob and say, “You mean Cameron — you mean the other boy, you mean Cameron Seymour?” And that was the way I found out more than I had ever really wanted to know.

  “Yes,” I said, anyway. “Cameron.” I thought of Mrs Seymour’s face, tear-stained, reflecting patterns that insects made trawling across my grandma’s television screen.

  “And Andrew!” Brigid insisted, behind me. Her voice had a firm tone that I recognised from the times she’d refused a cigarette.

  I raised my hand for her to be quiet.

  Kevin Mathers looked down and looked up, and his shoulders began to shake. “I killed Cameron Seymour.”

  He shook his head like a big, awkward horse. “I didn’t mean to hurt him. I loved him. I offered him a home but I couldn’t make him stay. I thought he would. At first, he said he would. But they found out, I don’t know how. They want to make me suffer. They could arrest me and end it. Instead, they just leave me here …”

  I gripped Brigid’s hand, feeling ill. We were actually here, he was actually confessing to us.

  “Do you know what they did?” he asked. “They came and threw stones on my roof and Cameron said he didn’t want to stay any more. So he ran off and I grabbed him and pushed and he fell out and … and you know. Everyone knows.”

  Brigid pushed past me and leant against the door, breathing heavily. I couldn’t meet her eye. The floor beneath seemed to sway, no longer real, as if it was dissolving along with the rest of the universe. For one moment of crystalline clarity, before my defences set in and began to deny it, I thought I knew the truth. Kevin Mathers had killed Cameron Seymour because of those stones thrown onto his roof. Because of me.

  “What should I do?” he asked.

  Andrew wrote me a letter. I still have it.

  Dear Maddy,

  I’m on my way home. Before I arrive, I want to thank you for teaching me that sport isn’t everything. Most of the time I’ve known you I’ve been over-training and exhausted. I felt vulnerable after Dad died. He was the strongest person I ever knew and I always wanted to be just like him. I thought nothing could ever hurt either of us.

  But Maddy, I was stupid to run away like I did. I had no idea it would be linked to Cameron Seymour. I just wanted to be where Jackie couldn’t reach me. I saw Sylvia on TV the other night, and realised you people might be suffering. I’m very sorry.

  I’ve been in Sydney. I came here because you told me about it, Maddy, and I knew I had to go somewhere far from home. A few days ago I was at a beach. There was this kid in the water, really struggling, and I pulled him out. People made a big fuss about it, like I was this great hero or something. I left before they found out who I was.

  I don’t know what you think of me any more. But I hope I’ll see you when I get home.

  Your friend,

  Andrew.

  Lots of people weren’t who I thought they were. Over the four weeks that began with Cameron Seymour’s disappearance and ended with Andrew Coleman’s homecoming, that was one thing I learned. My grandma loved me, for instance. When I told Mrs White we’d talked, she smiled at me and said she knew we would. At least I’d been right about her. She was a great teacher. And Riverside Phantasy was probably the best painting I ever painted, even if its eerie sort of prophecy freaked me out for a while. By the time my father came to take me home, I realised that in searching for Cameron Seymour I’d also been searching for part of myself. On that day when Kevin Mathers finally confessed, I realised that I had found more of myself than I knew was missing.

  Andrew caught the McCafferty’s bus back along the Pacific Highway to Brisbane. He had an apology for his sister and stepmother, and, after a long-distance phone call to California, Jackie’s grudging agreement that he could stay with Rebecca. But I didn’t know any of this until I walked over to tell them the news that my father was arriving that night.

  “Maddy!” Brigid cried, when she saw me. “Maddy, Andrew’s home! He just went to Sydney!”

  I felt the floor freeze under me, but only for a moment. Then I sprinted past Brigid, through the Colemans’ house, that was at once so much like my grandma’s and so different, to their converted sleep-out at the end.

  Andrew sat on one of the sofas, in his usual position, unshaven and a little thinner than before, drinking lemonade. Relief sucked all the air out of my chest. “Andrew! You’re back!”

  “Maddy.” His voice was as deep and warm as I remembered.

  Rebecca, seated opposite him, looked from one of us to the other and grinned.

  “You went to Sydney?” I demanded. “Don’t you know no one is safe there?” I felt like the town mouse warning her country cousin.

  Then he laughed, and I was so pleased to hear that sound again that I forgot to be offended. “I didn’t have you to show me around and defend me, did I, Maddy?”

  I recognised the fond tone in his voice and grinned at him, wishing I could be sucked up through his straw like the lemonade. Rebecca smiled at us. She’d been a teenager once, too. Maybe she guessed how I felt.

  Brigid fiddled with the controls to a television games system as we sat there. We looked at each other and grinned. I tried to forget about Kevin Mathers and his weird confession.

  I killed Cameron Seymour.

  He hadn’t, of course. That is, he hadn’t physically pushed Cameron out the window. The whole story was soon known. Cameron had been trapped in his house and frightened enough to think that the window offered a chance at escape. Maybe Kevin Mathers had frightened him to death. The dreadful guilt that forced him to confess to us that day must have been tormenting him for weeks. Perhaps that suffering was punishment of a kind. Kevin Mathers never knew a good way to handle loneliness and grief.

  “You want to go for a swim?” Brigid asked after a while.

  It was nice to think of doing something normal.

  “I’ll come too.” Andrew stood, a grin on his face. Whatever demons had driven him away were gone now.

  Rebecca stood again, smiling. “If you’re hungry, be sure you make yourselves something to eat. I’ve got to get ready for work.” At the door, she turned and smiled. “It’s nice to have you here, Madeleine.”

  Seven

  At first, Ken Richardson asks me out for dinner. When I say I won’t be in town he changes his request to one for a phone number. I hand him a business card. He offers me a lift to the airport whi
ch I refuse.

  “It’s not a very auspicious way to meet,” he says.

  I have my folder back beneath my arm, my suitcase beside me at the taxi rank. I’m about to put the city of Brisbane back in my past, where it belongs, and return to my real life — where Lachlan waits and Nicole lurks. And I am about to embark on rounds of chemo and radiation therapy. I like Ken Richardson, but have neither the time for him nor the energy to explain.

  “It’s not any way to meet,” I tell him. “Ken, we’re both adults, we both have children. We live in different cities and well … you know how things work.”

  “Whoa,” he says, hands and eyebrows raised. “I wasn’t asking for a commitment!”

  “I know.” I look down and straighten my skirt. The footpath is black-spotted with old gum. Where is that taxi? “I’m not explaining myself well. What I mean is that I’m going where I do have commitments. My family is there. My father. My son.”

  “Okay, okay.” His hands are in his pockets. For a few minutes we stand there like that, staring in the direction of oncoming traffic. “You really knew Andrew Coleman?” he asks.

  I smile. He imagines this is neutral ground. “I was good friends with his sister and I know the girl he married.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You’re looking at her.”

  He turns to face me. “But your surname is —”

  “I kept my own name. That’s not exactly rare, you know. Anyway, we’re getting divorced.”

  Somehow this conversation is comforting. Ken is still virtually a stranger; the burden of his past is as unfamiliar to me as mine is to him. I suppose that distance is one of the reasons other people go to psychologists. I raise my eyes to meet his and force another smile.

  “The psychologist and the sportsman,” he muses.

  “We lived in the same street when we were kids and met again a few years later.” I explain. “Anyway, it’s over now.” The taxi still hasn’t come. “He met someone else. His career ended. That was difficult for him. He started coaching, you know. She was one of his swimmers.”