At the window, she let her eyes rest on the red brick building across the lane, reassuringly mundane and solid. The horror in the photo was implied, those moments when the bite happened. She imagined small legs thrashing about, small hands. If the child in that photo was dead, how did he or she die? Not from the bite.
A delivery van beeped backwards up the lane and a gust of laughter came from the meeting room. Russell and Monica emerged, folders in their arms, flashing big, energised smiles for the client. Anna returned to her desk, to the sloppy pencil doodles.
‘Coffee, Anna?’ called Monica from the doorway.
‘No, thanks, Mon.’ She glanced at her screen, and it was as if the image of the child was still there, burnt into the gel.
•
That morning she’d been watering her back garden when a dark-haired man called over the fence. ‘Hi there.’
It was the scrawny guy from the night they moved in. He had a high-cheekboned, handsome face, but tight, as if the muscles had been immobilised. He rested his hands on the fence and spoke quietly, like he was taking up a conversation that had been interrupted. ‘So, how are you going?’
‘I’m well, thank you.’ She imagined saying back in the same conversational tone: So, do you bite your daughter?
‘That old bathtub . . .’ he said and lifted his chin towards the back fence and the rusted yellow tub where Anna had planted waterlilies. He smelt of aftershave and had that shiny-skinned look of someone just shaved.
‘Yeah?’
‘Can I have it?’ He looked ready to climb over the fence and pick it up.
‘It belongs to my landlord. And he wants it.’ She had no idea if Jack – who lived in Shanghai – wanted the bath. But Anna wanted it. A green tree frog had moved in recently, and every day she found it perched on a different part of the bath, ridiculously glossy and healthy looking, its little feet suckered to the yellow enamel.
‘Ah.’ He smiled and looked her up and down, theatrically examining her t-shirt and boxer shorts and bare feet. ‘I took you for a homeowner and all.’
‘Maybe I am a homeowner but I don’t happen to live in my own home.’ Who the hell did this guy think he was?
‘Who wouldn’t live in their own home if they had one?’ He smiled at her but it appeared more mocking than friendly. ‘I hear you were good friends with the old lady,’ he said. ‘Some of her stuff is still here, you know.’ The way he looked at her was too confident, too intimate. Charlie had something similar about her.
‘What sort of stuff?’ She moved the hose onto the irises.
‘Papers and books. It’s as if her kids just walked out and left half her gear behind.’
‘Papers?’
‘Old bills . . . medical stuff. I’m going to throw it all out. Unless you want to come and get it.’
Helen’s house had been unrecognisable a few days after her death. Her son, Oliver, left random piles of books and folded linen on the front porch, and told Anna to take anything she wanted. So swiftly he had undone all the small decisions Helen made over the decades, all the subtle ordering of possessions that represented Helen and her sensibilities.
‘You should talk to Oliver about that,’ she said.
The man glanced at her back door. ‘Do you live here by yourself, then?’
She didn’t want to tell him. ‘Yes.’
‘No kids?’ He raised his eyebrows.
None of your damn business, she wanted to say. ‘No.’
He nodded slowly, looking at the back of her house. ‘A lot of room for one person.’ He smiled. ‘I hear you rescued Charlie, came in on your charger.’
She refused to engage. ‘Sorry, but the bath’s not available.’
He nodded. ‘Let me know if you change your mind.’
‘Alright.’ She turned back to the irises.
•
It baffled her that perfect strangers felt entitled to inquire about her reproductive plans and fertility. Do you want kids? Better hurry up, love, if you’re going to do it! The question most often came from people who had children, as if that gave them some special dispensation to pry. Her dad never asked the question, bless him. In her twenties, Anna had simply assumed she’d end up with babies. But she’d had only three relationships that lasted longer than six months and only one of those three men wanted babies. Ben and Anna had even tried to get pregnant for a few months, the sex especially thrilling, and then he came home from a surfing holiday and told her it was over. And so it was.
Dave let her know early on – the first night they slept together – that he’d had a vasectomy. And so Anna was drifting into childlessness, and perhaps that’s how it was always going to be. She didn’t yearn for children like some women, so she would never go out of her way to make it happen. And the one time she was pregnant, at nineteen, she had a termination. If she’d really wanted a kid, she’d have one. A seventeen-year-old.
•
On her way home from the bus stop, Anna walked past Helen’s house, where a glossy black ute was parked in the driveway. The sound of kids’ television drifted out.
Anna let herself into her dark house and shucked off her sneakers. Helen used to joke about them being two single women living side by side, but it seemed to Anna that Helen laughed just a little too heartily about it. Anna liked being part of a couple, but wasn’t afraid of being single; she figured everyone was essentially alone anyway, and simply circling and sashaying around other people as the years passed. She knew others sometimes saw her as aloof but she thought of herself as self-contained.
In the kitchen she poured a chardonnay, and tried not to listen for noises from next door, but it was as if she had a radar sweeping their house and she couldn’t turn the bloody thing off. She remembered something from a university lecture about how proximity to distress is what made people feel obliged to help. If someone saw a child drowning they’d stop to help, but if they knew about a child drowning on the other side of world it was less likely that they would do anything, even if they could help.
Her phone rang as she stood in front of the open fridge, contemplating last night’s wilted, inedible salad. It was Dave.
‘Hey there,’ he said. ‘Are you home?’
She was relieved to hear the warmth in his voice. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘I just got here.’
‘Fancy a visitor?’
‘What? Now?’ She couldn’t help grinning into the fridge.
‘Yeah. I’m out the front.’
She opened the front door. He stood on the footpath, leaning against the telegraph pole, suit jacket hooked on a finger, as if posing in a fashion magazine.
She laughed as he walked up the path. ‘Why didn’t you just knock?’ He never turned up out of the blue like this and always worked late. It was slightly disorienting seeing him on a work night.
‘In case you didn’t feel like a visitor.’ He kissed her – he tasted like he’d been eating something sugary – and dropped his briefcase inside the front door. Dave was tall and lanky and moved unhurriedly, like a Hollywood cowboy. She’d called him snake-hipped once, and he laughed it off, but she thought it captured well the way he glided through life; he carried the ease of privilege but few of the trappings.
She guessed that he was a reluctant lawyer, that he’d done it because his father and grandfather and older brother were all lawyers, and now he was stuck in the job by the need to pay off the mortgage on his apartment and support his kids. On weekends he wore holey t-shirts and board shorts, and the few times Anna had seen him during the week, his shirt and suit were crumpled, his leather suitcase was too worn to be hip, his hair was just a bit too shaggy.
She poured him a glass of wine. ‘I was considering the merits of the toasted cheese sandwich when you called.’
He smiled. ‘Perfect.’ He dropped into a chair at her kitchen table and undid the collar of his shirt.
She sensed his eyes on her as she sliced cheese and buttered bread at the counter. One of them would have to mention last nigh
t and it might as well be her.
‘So, how was dinner with the kids?’ She picked up a piece of cheese that fell to the floor.
‘Good.’ He paused. ‘Sorry if I was a bit short yesterday morning.’ His eyes were tired; she knew he had a difficult case on.
‘No . . .’
He smiled. ‘I began to worry that you were letting me down gently.’
She smiled and shook her head at him. ‘No.’ In truth, she knew too well how fragile relationships were in the first few months and how a careless move could send things teetering the wrong way.
He swallowed a mouthful of wine. ‘My trial was aborted today.’
‘Aborted? Oh, bummer.’
He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. ‘Yeah. Bummer’s one of the milder ways to describe it.’
‘Why?’ He was working on the murder case against a man from Manly, whose girlfriend had been found dead in her car the year before. At the time it had been all over the papers, to the extent that Anna had stopped reading about it.
‘One of the jurors,’ he rolled his eyes, ‘decided to do his own research on the net about the accused, and then told some of the other jurors what he’d discovered. Stupid bloody idiot. Anyway, that’s why I’ve got time to kick up my heels and eat toasted cheese sandwiches. And I’m absolutely starving.’
Anna turned on the griller as he slid his arms around her from behind and rested his chin on her shoulder.
‘I missed you at dinner,’ he said. ‘But it can happen whenever you’re ready.’
They kissed, and the taste of wine on him was exciting. She turned off the griller and let him lead her to the bedroom. On the way up the hall he took her face in his hands and kissed her hard. The first time they went to bed, he’d said a couple of times how much he loved kissing. For Dave, sex was about the preamble, not the climax. Their first time, he didn’t even come and didn’t seem at all troubled.
•
She woke in the dark as he reached over her for his phone.
‘What’s the time?’ she asked. It could be midnight, for all she knew.
‘Eight.’ He flopped back onto the mattress and drew circles on her thigh with gentle fingers. ‘I’ll finish those toasted sandwiches. I’m beyond hungry.’
‘Great.’ She switched on the reading lamp as he climbed out of bed. He had such long, lean flanks, and was faintly freckled all over, even on his bum, which must never see the light of day. He pulled on his undies and disappeared into the kitchen.
She stretched her arms overhead as a plane rumbled in to land at the airport. Relationships seemed so much more straightforward after sex. A deceptive flood of hormones, no doubt.
She knew Dave liked that she was someone who didn’t rush. She had figured out that a certain degree of stillness was the only antidote to the busy-ness of the city. She wondered, though, what he’d think of some of her other peculiarities. The way she said ‘sorry’ to weeds when she pulled them out, for instance, something she’d got from her grandma who – for a staunch Christian – had been very animist in her thinking.
‘You want mustard on yours?’ called Dave from the kitchen.
She swung her legs out of bed. ‘Not for me, thanks.’
She was searching the floor for her undies when a loud bang came from next door. She cocked an ear. Was it a door slamming? There was another bang then a man repeatedly shouting something indecipherable, and a child – Charlie – wailed.
Anna hopped into her undies and a t-shirt and hurried to the kitchen where Dave was sliding the griller tray in.
‘Did you hear that?’ she said.
He looked up. ‘The crying next door?’
‘A new family’s moved in. The little girl turned up at my back door last night. She’d been left on her own and she wandered in . . . she had a bite mark on her leg, like a real bite mark. I was going to tell you but . . .’
‘A human bite?’ He squinted at her.
‘I think so.’
The crying turned into high-pitched screaming, and Anna’s skin prickled. She moved to the window. Lights were on in the girl’s room but the screaming seemed to be coming from the front of the house.
Dave came up close behind her. ‘How old’s the kid?’
‘Five,’ she said.
A light came on in the bathroom and there was a thump, like something slamming into a wall.
The child screamed, ‘No! No! No!’ There was another louder crashing noise.
Anna was paralysed. All she could do was listen to the terrible sounds streaming through the air to her.
Dave grabbed her arm. ‘Come on, let’s go.’
She followed him to the bedroom, blood pounding in her ears. As she dragged on her jeans, the man next door shouted but she couldn’t understand what he said, except ‘Fuck!’ and then ‘Pathetic!’ She heard a soft thump and knew he must be hitting the woman or child and she prayed it was the woman. Oh, what a terrible thought, but the child was too small, too small. She remembered the girl’s little hand in hers.
She made herself follow Dave out the front door and down the steps. The sound of Charlie screaming was loud in the night air. The other neighbours must hear it too. Where were they? The lights were on in all the houses she could see – the neat cottages and the big ugly brick thing over the road – but no one was opening their front door or looking out a window.
Dave vaulted up the steps and banged on the door. Inside, the screaming had subsided to quiet sobbing. Dave lifted his fist to knock again and Anna saw that his hand was shaking. The door opened and Charlie’s father stood there in jeans and t-shirt. He kept one hand on the door, so it was only half open. Anna could just see into the hallway behind him, where light shone from what she knew was the bathroom. The crying had stopped except for some sniffles.
‘Evening. What can I do for you?’ The man’s voice was mild.
‘What’s going on?’ said Dave. ‘We heard a child screaming.’
‘Yeah.’ The guy was so relaxed, not at all defensive. Behind him Gabby appeared in the hallway, holding Charlie, a hand towel draped over the girl’s head. Charlie turned her small, pale face towards the front door and gave a tiny wave as her mother carried her to the back of the house.
The man propped against the doorframe as if he was chatting at the pub.
‘Kids cry,’ he said. ‘You don’t have kids, do you?’ He fished a soft pack of cigarettes from his back pocket.
‘Yeah, I do, actually,’ said Dave.
Anna could smell something familiar beneath the waft of stale cigarette smoke. Piss.
‘And you live alone,’ he said to Anna. He lit the cigarette and blew smoke towards them.
She said, ‘You don’t have to be a parent to know a terrified child when you hear one. We heard a noise like someone being hit.’
‘You got that wrong.’ He looked straight at Anna. ‘It was me slamming my hand on the wall. In frustration.’ He sniffed. ‘And if you don’t have kids, lady, you have no idea what it’s like. No idea. Parents yell, and kids scream. You’ve never lived beside a family before, that’s clear.’
‘I’ve lived in a family,’ said Anna. ‘I know about families. I was a kid too –’
Dave interrupted, ‘Can we see the girl, please?’
Anna thought, Why the hell is he saying please? This is a man who bashes and bites his daughter.
The guy sucked hard on his cigarette. His fingernails were bitten right down.
Dave turned to Anna. ‘What’s the girl’s name?’
The man blew out a cloud of smoke. ‘Her name is Charlie, mate. You saw her just now, going up the hall. She’s fine. Just mind your own business. Go back to whatever it is you were doing.’
He looked straight at Anna and smiled broadly. Oh God, he’d heard them having sex. His eyes trailed down to her breasts; she didn’t have a bra on. She crossed her arms.
Dave’s voice turned conciliatory, as if he were speaking to a child. ‘Just let us see her close up, mate, and reassure
ourselves she’s okay.’
‘She’s fine,’ he spoke slowly, enunciating each word. ‘And it’s none of your business.’ He shut the door in their faces with a quiet click.
‘Come on.’ Dave took Anna’s elbow.
Walking beside him down the path, her knee brushed against Helen’s rosemary bush and its incongruously wholesome scent rose around them. They’d left Anna’s front door wide open. She locked it behind her and drew the front curtains. What could have made that noise that came from the bathroom? Was it really just his hand against the tiles? Why did the girl have a towel on her head?
Dave sat at the kitchen table and picked up his wine glass. ‘We should call FACS. You know, Family and Community Services.’
She sat beside him, her legs suddenly shaky.
‘That’s a big step . . .’
What the hell would the guy next door do when some social worker turned up on his doorstep to ask about child abuse?
He cracked the knuckles one by one on his left hand. ‘It is a big step. So tell me about the bite.’
Anna topped up her wine and took a mouthful. ‘It’s on her leg. Up the top. And it looks like a human bite. I mean, an animal bite would look quite different, I think. It’s a dark bruise . . . the skin’s a bit broken.’
‘We have to report it. The bite and what we heard tonight.’ He rubbed his hands over his face. ‘They won’t do anything about it, though, not unless there have already been lots of reports saying the girl’s at risk.’
‘So they won’t come tonight?’
Dave smiled and shook his head. ‘I’d be deeply surprised. The police might come, though, if we call them.’ He looked up to the ceiling, and nodded. ‘Yeah. I think we should call the cops. They’re mandatory reporters, and . . . the more reports FACS gets, the more likely they’ll actually visit the family.’
Promise Page 3
