But it wasn’t as bad as I expected. Dad held Mum’s chair out for her and then mine, and we talked about school and uni courses and Grandma and what was happening in the Middle East.
They were trying really hard, of course, for my sake. In fact, it all could have been really good—we had venison steak in red wine sauce and chocolate orange mousse in a great big leaf made out of chocolate with raspberry sauce, and they put a candle on the mousse and I had to blow it out—except the one thing we all really had in common we didn’t talk about.
CHAPTER 35
Birthdays Again
I had had Dad’s birthday present wrapped up weeks early.
It’s really hard to get a present for Dad. The things he really needs, like tools and stuff, he buys for himself. But this year I’d bought him a book on utes, with pictures and stories and everything about utes, which I knew he’d like.
I had it alongside my bed so I wouldn’t forget it was his birthday in the rush to get ready for the bus, as I did a few years ago (I remembered just as I was grabbing my hat at the last minute). It was the first thing I saw when the phone woke me up in the morning. My eyes shifted from the present to the clock—6.36 a.m. this time.
I walked sleepily into the kitchen.
‘Hello … hello. Hello?’
No answer, of course. I don’t think I really expected one this time.
There wasn’t an answer the next four times it rang either. Each time was ten minutes apart, and after that we left the phone off the hook till Dad drove me up to the bus.
Strangely enough, I didn’t really think about the phone calls again till the same thing happened four days later. On Reenie’s birthday.
The phone had rung on my birthday and no one had answered at the other end.
It had rung on Dad’s birthday.
Now it rang and rang on Reenie’s birthday, too. No other days. Just those.
It didn’t connect till I was on the school bus. I mean, I knew it was Reenie’s birthday but I had somehow managed to hide it in my mind and then it struck me—really struck me …
What if it was Reenie ringing up?
Maybe she HAD run off. Maybe something had happened, something bad, something we simply didn’t know about.
Maybe she felt she had to hide, but on my birthday, Dad’s birthday, her birthday, she wanted to hear my voice or Dad’s.
Had Mum received phone calls?
I drew Di aside when I got to school (her bus gets in five minutes before mine). She listened, then she nodded.
‘You have to tell the police,’ she said.
‘I should tell Dad first. Ask Mum if she’s had any calls … ‘
‘Don’t ask your Mum. Tell the police,’ said Di.
‘But why?’
Di’s perceptive sometimes. ‘Because if you tell them it’ll just make your mum and dad hope, and there might not be anything in it. The police can trace the calls, but you have to tell them NOW.’
‘But …’ Somehow I couldn’t think clearly.
‘Ring up that guy. the policemen who gave you his number. Ask Miss Marlatti if you can use the phone in the office.’
‘I …’ I nodded numbly. It was right … it sounded right … but it was like every thought had to punch through whipped cream.
I don’t think Di took my hand, but it seemed like that.
All at once we were at the staff room door and Di was explaining I had to ring up the detective, it was urgent, private, could we … and Miss Marlatti was nodding and she took us to the headmistress’s office, so we could use the phone where no one could hear, instead of the phone in the office with everyone passing by.
Miss Marlatti explained what I wanted to do and Mrs Watson touched my shoulder as she went out. I suppose she meant to be comforting or something or maybe she just didn’t know what to say.
‘Would you like me to stay with you?’ asked Miss Marlatti. ‘Or is it private?’
Di looked at me and lightly nudged me to answer.
‘Please stay,’ I said, which was a good thing, because when I rang the number Bob Munn wasn’t there, he didn’t come on duty till ten o’clock.
So I explained to someone else, and they said Bob Munn would probably ring me and what was my phone number, so I handed the phone to Miss Marlatti. She told them the school office number and said if they phoned someone would fetch me.
So that was that and the school bell rang and Miss Marlatti gave me a quick hug. And we went back to class.
It was 10.07 a.m. exactly when this Year Four kid came to the door and said I was wanted on the phone in Mrs Watson’s office.
Miss Marlatti was really sweet. She said, ‘Diana, it might be best if you accompany Sara and if the rest of you could pay attention now and look at page 93 …’
I hadn’t realised before how long it took to get to the headmistress’s office. Di and I didn’t speak. We just walked till we got to the office, and Mrs Watson nodded to us and handed me the phone across her desk.
‘Hello?’
‘Bob Munn here,’ said the voice. He sounded quite different on the phone. ‘I hear you’ve been having some phone calls.’
So I explained again (Mrs Watson was pretending to read some report and not listen) and he said, Yes, of course I should have rung him. I had done exactly the right thing. He would get onto it straightaway. No, really, of course I’d done the right thing. He would let me know as soon as they found anything.
I put the receiver down and found I was trembling, so I just sat there and Di put her arms around me and that’s when Miss Marlatti came in.
She didn’t have our class that period so she said, ‘Come on, we all need a milkshake,’ which made me smile at any rate, and Mrs Watson smiled too, and said she wished she could join us but she had a school to run.
So we got into Miss Marlatti’s car, which is a battered old red ute (I have a horse agisted out of town, she explained, the ute’s to cart hay for it), and went down to the café and had chocolate milkshakes and orange walnut cake with caramel sauce.
It was lunchtime by the time we got back to school. Miss Marlatti asked but Bob Munn hadn’t rung or left a message.
He still hadn’t when we got out of school.
CHAPTER 36
No News
I could go on about the waiting, about how I wasn’t going to tell Dad as Di had advised, in case he started to hope too.
But then Miss Marlatti rang to see if I was okay, and Dad answered the phone, so I had to explain, and then I realised I’d better ring Mum because she would have heard about it at school and might be hurt that I had told Miss Marlatti and Mrs Watson and not her …
It turned out Mum had heard about it, of course, but Miss Marlatti had explained that I hadn’t wanted to get Mum’s hopes up, and Mum was sort of teary about my wanting to protect her feelings—as though I didn’t try to do that all the time—and not upset at all.
We waited three days for any news, then Bob Munn finally rang—Dad, not me. I suppose he assumed I would have told Dad about the calls and, anyway, I had by then.
No, it wasn’t Reenie on the phone. I think some ache in my bones had been telling me that all along. It was nothing to do with Reenie at all.
It was some guy in Sydney who had programmed in a wrong Internet provider number, or something like that. The number just happened to be ours. And when his computer didn’t get a connection it just kept trying automatically every ten minutes for a certain amount of time.
The guy didn’t even know it was happening.
It was just a coincidence that it happened on our three birthdays. And if you think coincidences like that aren’t possible, well, all I can tell you is that it happened just like that and, no, it doesn’t seem likely, but nothing about Reenie’s disappearance has been likely.
You only think things like that seem impossible because you haven’t lived through them. Take it from me—impossible things happen.
They happen all the time.
CHAPTE
R 37
Letter to Reenie, August
Dear Reenie,
I just realised, I probably think about you every half hour of every day except when I’m asleep and then I dream. And that’s odd when you think about it because before you disappeared I hardly thought about you at all.
It’s not you I think about so much, though. More about what might have happened to you and why and how, as though if I just add all the pieces up one more time the answer might be different.
Maybe the solution has been staring us in the face all the time, if we’d just looked at things a different way.
But no matter which way we try to put it all together it all comes out the same.
I hate thinking about you so often. I want to live my life, not keep being tangled up in yours. You should have left my life now, or just about. You’d have been off to uni at the end of the year. But instead you’re with me all the time and I HATE IT.
So I don’t know why I’m writing this at all.
Sara
CHAPTER 38
Bodies
Spring came.
The possums yelled up in the ceiling and ate the rosebuds. No one has really looked after the roses since Mum left but they survive just the same.
I had just picked a great bunch of them, all different colours and was trying to work out how to stop them falling out of the vase on the dining room table, when something on TV caught my attention. ‘… Police today announced that a body has been found …’ I let the roses fall on the table and turned the TV up.
They didn’t show the body on TV so I didn’t really know what she was like, except for what the announcer said. They showed the police carrying her on a stretcher, all covered up.
‘The body belongs to a woman in her early twenties,’ said the announcer, with that serious look on his face that announcers get for wars and bodies and stuff like that.
She’d been blonde, with a slight build and hazel eyes, but now she was an unidentified body that had been found by bushwalkers in a gully near the coast, about fifty minutes from here. You just turn onto the highway and keep going.
I gathered the roses up again and shoved them into the vase and sat down. The roses stayed put but my heart was going glump, glump, glump, and I felt I had to sit to slow it down.
Dad was having a shower. He hadn’t heard the report, hadn’t seen the body on TV, didn’t even know it had been found.
I couldn’t decide whether to tell him about it, or whether to wait for the police to ring, if they ever rang, because, of course, the body mightn’t be Reenie at all.
Reenie was only nineteen, of course, not in her early twenties, but she looked older than nineteen—sometimes anyway. I mean, how can they really tell how old a body is? And the hair was right and the build … well, sort of. You wouldn’t call Reenie slight, but she wasn’t fat either.
‘Anything on the news?’ asked Dad. His hair was wet and I could smell his underarm deodorant.
I shook my head. ‘Just war stuff and something about politicians’ travel allowances.’
‘Nothing new then,’ said Dad. He glanced at the TV programme, to see what was on after the news.
No, I wasn’t going to tell Dad about the body.
It wasn’t only to stop it from hurting him. If I told him it meant we would have talked all night about Reenie and what might have happened and I didn’t want to.
I wanted to have dinner and watch TV and be normal, just like it used to be. But I kept seeing the body on the stretcher and wondering if Mum had seen it, and if she was wondering too. But I couldn’t ring her up without Dad noticing.
I rang the police in the morning from the phone box just down the road from school. I didn’t get Bob Munn—I suppose he wasn’t at his desk much of the time—but I talked to a really nice woman who said no, the body definitely wasn’t Reenie.
‘Your sister never had any teeth removed, or any fillings either.’
Of course not, I thought, not Reenie.
‘And the body in question has had two teeth removed on one side and one on the other.’
For a horrible moment, I thought, what if the murderer pulled her teeth out before he killed her, to torture her. But the police would have checked that; they would be able to tell if the wounds had been fresh.
There was more on the news that night.
Dad was sitting with me and we were eating pizza, which isn’t quite hot enough when we bring it back from town. I don’t mind cold pizza, but Dad reheats his.
It didn’t matter that Dad was with me, because they had identified the girl by then. She lived on the coast, just near where she had been found, and she had been missing for ten days. She had been sexually assaulted, which I suppose means raped, and they said the body had been ‘mutilated’, but I didn’t want to think about that too hard.
Or maybe it did matter, because Dad put his pizza back in the box and said he might have the rest of it for breakfast and then he changed the channel, so we didn’t watch the rest of the news, just some comedy stuff instead and he never even reminded me about my homework.
Not that I could have concentrated anyway.
CHAPTER 39
The Clairvoyant
‘Come with me,’ said Mum.
What could I say to her? I didn’t believe in that stuff, not at all, but then sometimes you heard things that made you think there might be something in it. And then I thought, what if we don’t try it—and wonder if it might have led to something? After all, you never know.
‘I don’t want to go by myself,’ said Mum, and I thought how small she was lately, or maybe I’d grown.
‘Okay,’ I said at last.
The clairvoyant lived in Wickenpoole, which is about 50 kilometres north of us, not towards the coast where most of the towns near here are. There are two High Schools there (Wickenpoole East and Wickenpoole West—how imaginative!), instead of one as in our town, and a proper hospital instead of a nursing home in what used to be our hospital until they shut it down.
Mum had the address, but it didn’t do us much good because, of course, there isn’t a map of Wickenpoole—it isn’t THAT big.
So we called in at the garage for petrol and to ask the way to George Street, and we found it after that without any trouble. In fact, we were half an hour early, but then, Mum is early for most things. I think it is part of wanting to do everything just perfectly, like Reenie always did.
The house looked like any other house in the street, small and dark-red brick, and square except for the bow window with roses along the front wall and front fence; red ones, but they didn’t quite match the brick.
It was the sort of house our geography teacher told us was built about 1900, when the trains stopped at Wickenpoole and there were great big wool stores and suchlike, before the railway line closed down.
There were two cars in the drive, so we didn’t go in, thinking that the clairvoyant might have another client with her. And we were right, because about five minutes later a woman came out of the front door and got into one of the cars and drove off.
I tried to read the expression on her face. Was it happy, as though the clairvoyant had told her what she wanted to know? Or did she look as if she thought she’d been cheated? But she moved so fast it was hard to see and her back was to us most of the time and then she was concentrating on backing the car out so it was hard to tell anything at all from her face.
Mum opened the car door.
‘We’re still early,’ I said.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Mum. Her hands were all white, like they were cold, but it was quite a hot day for spring.
So I got out after her and we walked up the path. The roses were pruned as if whoever lived in the house wanted to make them all look exactly alike, and the soil was dug up beneath them, with tiny green seedlings of what I supposed would be flowers later in summer.
We knocked at the door. It had this big old-fashioned smooth, gold doorknocker made in the likeness of a man’s face w
ith a crown of bay leaves or something. One of those Greek gods, I supposed, and I wondered if she believed in all those stories, if it was part of being a clairvoyant, or if she just liked the knocker. Or maybe it had been there when she bought the house.
The door opened.
‘Mrs Marr?’ she said.
Mum nodded. ‘This is my daughter, Sara,’ she said. ‘Do you mind if she listens in?’
‘No, not at all,’ said the woman. She was older than Mum, with really neat, grey hair. She wore jeans and a long-sleeved cotton shirt, and a wedding ring and an engagement ring, and a couple of other rings too. She looked like anyone you might see at the supermarket.
She opened the door further and stood back and we went inside.
The house was a bit like Mum’s house had been when Gran lived in it (most of Gran’s furniture went with her to the nursing home)—too much furniture and carpet and curtains, so you felt the house was choking and just wanted a good cough to spit it all out.
Dark wood chairs, and a china cabinet polished so you could see your reflection flickering in it, and that brocade stuff on the sofa that makes you itch if you sit on it with bare legs (I suppose when Gran was a girl they didn’t wear shorts so it didn’t matter). And a carpet with too many flowers on it and photos everywhere, in silver frames and dark wood frames to match the furniture.
Most of the photos were of kids with that shiny, just-washed look, all somehow draped all over each other and smiling like a crocodile would bite their toes off if they let the grin drop, which meant the photos had been taken by a proper photographer, not just someone snapping away with a disposable.
The woman gestured to the table. It was also of dark and shiny wood with six dining chairs, and one of those lace things in the centre. There was a cut-glass fruit bowl full of plastic fruit. I mean, it looked real enough, but I could see that some kid had bitten into one of the pieces (I bet it was a kid). There were teeth marks in the plastic.
Missing You, Love Sara Page 9
