Golden Deeds

by Chidgey, Catherine

  Then, a few days later, when the house was full of police, reporters, acquaintances who wanted to help, when the phone kept ringing and ringing, he realised he’d never have another chance to see a total solar eclipse, not without leaving New Zealand.

  Malcolm had helped the police look for Laura by day, and by night he had tried to think of new places to search. He had stayed up late while Ruth slept without dreaming, her eyelids stilled by a white pill. The house changed at night time; it shifted on its haunches, settled into the dark. Malcolm jumped at every creak. His teeth chattered, although it was the end of summer and still warm. In the lounge he kept the fire blazing, aware of the waste, and tried to remember every piece of lonely country he knew, every dense gully, every isolated beach. He went over and over different landscapes in his mind, recalling scenes he’d photographed on bush walks, family holidays, long drives.

  ‘Have you tried here?’ he asked the police, indicating on the map a new pocket of bush, a fresh stretch of coast, each time moving further away from the wind turbine.

  ‘We think your daughter was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time,’ the detective inspector told him, but he wouldn’t say where that wrong place was.

  ‘She liked it here,’ said Malcolm, his finger covering valleys, national parks, miles of ocean.

  Ruth’s pills wore off early, before the sun was up, and she rose and made coffee and brought it to Malcolm. Then she bathed and dressed, and waited for news.

  ‘The library told me to take as much time off as I need,’ she said. ‘Jan’s rostered some more students on, isn’t that kind?’

  Malcolm’s boss had also told him not to come into the office, but he still went to work for a couple of hours each day. It was important, he decided, to try and maintain a routine, and accounting was comforting work; there was always a right answer. At home, there was no routine. He was never asleep at the same time as Ruth. Since the day Laura went missing, their bodies understood different schedules; it was as if they were living in opposite time zones, foreigners to each other.

  At the office, nobody knew what to say to him, so they didn’t say much.

  ‘We weren’t expecting to see you here,’ they mumbled. ‘You mustn’t come in till you’re ready’

  At morning tea they talked about the weather, the traffic, the new photocopier. All newspapers were stuffed into briefcases, desk drawers. Laura’s name was never mentioned, and the fact that she’d been missing for a week, a fortnight, almost a month was only obliquely acknowledged.

  ‘How’s Ruth?’ they asked. ‘Poor Ruth, such a difficult time for her. Do give Ruth our love, won’t you?’

  The receptionist, whom Malcolm had never liked, was especially cheerful.

  ‘Nick’s decided to buy the Alfa,’ she said one morning, dropping a leaky teabag into the sink. ‘We did another test drive last night. It’s silver.’ And everyone looked up from their mugs as if they were interested, because everyone had seen that morning’s headline: Hopes Fade of Finding Laura Alive. The receptionist began describing the car, glancing over at Malcolm now and then. ‘It’s got power steering,’ she said, ‘and Nick said the colour went with my eyes, but I’m not sure what he meant because my eyes aren’t silver, are they, they’re amber.’

  Even Phil was distant, avoiding Malcolm’s office, rushing past him with his head down, his arms full of papers.

  ‘You should stay at home,’ he said. ‘You should be with Ruth.’

  There were many unconfirmed sightings. Dozens of people had seen girls resembling Laura, girls with her jersey or her hair. The police would investigate all of them, of course, but Malcolm and Ruth should know that most information from the public was useless.

  ‘You’d be amazed at the calls we get,’ said the detective inspector. All sorts. A lot of the time people just want to talk to someone, but they’ve no idea how difficult they make our job,’ Malcolm and Ruth must try to keep things in perspective, he said, not get too excited.

  Malcolm wasn’t excited. He remained completely calm. He understood that every call counted, that any one of them might be vital. And he understood, too, that people wanted to feel useful in the face of calamity.

  ‘Busybodies,’ said Ruth. ‘Don’t they realise they’re slowing everything down? Do they think the police have time for their false information?’

  Malcolm still remained calm. He did not take Ruth by the shoulders and shake her, he did not raise his voice. There is no such thing, he said quietly, as false information. There is just information, and some of it is helpful and some of it is not.

  The girls, though. The ones like Laura but not Laura. Malcolm tried not to think about them. He refused to imagine them safe at home with their families, going to school, going to the pictures. How dare they, he thought. How dare this group of imposters muddy the water, walk around as if they hadn’t a care in the world, walk home alone at night if they wanted to, all the while looking like his daughter?

  ‘We’ll let you know if there’s any news,’ said the detective inspector, ‘just as soon as there’s any news at all. We’re still following up a lot of the sightings.’

  And Ruth said what Malcolm had been trying not to think: ‘Does every girl look like Laura?’

  On the train, on the way home from work a month after Laura had gone, or maybe six weeks, someone stroked Malcolm’s hair. Just as they were pulling into a station, and passengers were buttoning coats and folding away newspapers and snapping shut the brassy clasps on briefcases, someone placed a hand on his head. He spun around in his seat but there was nobody behind him. People were filing out one by one, politely making their way to the overbridge that spanned the tracks like an insect. Some were already hurrying along its high metal back, striding towards crisp news tucked in the letterbox, casseroles in the oven. He recognised nobody.

  Malcolm stared at the window as the train slid away from the station. Not at the platform, not at the grim track-side houses, but the window itself. It was a trick he used in order to keep his head clear; if he watched the view outside he felt the world was slipping away. He concentrated on the logo at the bottom of the pane: two fish, curled into one another in a cool embrace. Eventually, though, his eye picked out the space between them, and they were no longer two bowed fish, but a capital S, a trademark. Pilkington’s Safety Glass, said a tiny inscription. S for Safety. Like the pair of silhouette faces that suddenly become a white vase, the fish were defined by emptiness, by the clear ocean between them. They would never touch.

  The train crossed the river, the sound of the wheels amplified by the space beneath, thrown back by the water. Dozing commuters jolted awake at the noise. Whoever had touched his hair had done so by accident, Malcolm decided. Perhaps the train had jarred a little, perhaps there were too many passengers jostling to get out. Perhaps it wasn’t even a hand that stroked his hair. Perhaps it was an elbow, or a shoulder, or maybe a wrist, the soft, blue-etched inside of a wrist.

  Despite the discomfort it caused Ruth, Malcolm read the newspaper every day, and the habit continued even when it was obvious that Laura was never coming back. Most of the local news wasn’t so bad. It was only every now and then that violent crime occupied the headlines, but those stories stayed with him.

  One June night in 1994, a little boy went missing. Malcolm read about it in bed. He scanned the top section of the front page, sensed his skin shrinking at the words: foul play suspected, parents distraught, a community waits. He felt very cold and small all of a sudden, too small to be up so late and reading such dreadful things. He shifted his weight from hip to hip but couldn’t get comfortable against the pillows; his body no longer fitted into the hollow it had created. Cold air rushed under the covers and Ruth stirred, pulled the sheet to her face. Malcolm saw it then, on the bottom half of the page: a picture of Laura. One he’d taken on a bush walk, just before it had started to pour with rain. And he thought, how strange, a little boy disappears and they print Laura’s picture. It was a trick he would com
e to recognise over the years, a way of filling space, selling news. It wasn’t just Laura they used; every time a child disappeared the ghosts of others were invoked. That was how Malcolm came to think of them, the whole gallery of lost children: ghosts. He studied the picture of the missing boy, the new ghost. He brought the page closer and closer to his face until the child was a mass of dots, grey, black, charcoal, his smile lost in the spaces, all meaning gone. He’d done the same thing with pictures of Laura, six years earlier, when she’d been the lead story. He’d held her too close, lost focus.

  He put the paper away then. He didn’t want to read any more that night, didn’t want to keep folding and refolding Laura as he scanned stories about rugby and the road toll and heroic pets. All the while he’d been reading about the boy, he thought, Laura had been folded against his knees, rubbing off on the bedclothes, his every movement blurring her. He switched out his light. Ruth slept on, and he was glad. She’d been mentioning having a child, and although Malcolm had told her no, although he’d pointed out that she was forty-one years old and that no child could replace Laura, she continued to raise the matter. He climbed from the bed, backing out like a toddler, feeling for the far-away floor with his toes.

  It was cold in the lounge, and every now and then the old sash windows shuddered. Ruth had wedged paper around them, but the panes still moved when it was windy enough. Malcolm put his hand to the glass. He hadn’t been up at night like this for years. The garden was grey, blue, the moon a tusk. He contemplated writing to the family of the missing boy. He could tell them, for instance, to give themselves time, not to return to work too soon, not to put on a brave face for the sake of family, neighbours, colleagues.

  When Malcolm took his hand away from the lounge window, there was a faint image of his palm against the glass, his fingers in bony sections just like an X-ray. In the kitchen he rinsed the newspaper ink from his hands and imagined he was washing away bruises. When he woke in the early morning, Ruth told him there had been an accident. She was pregnant. She thought it was a boy, and she liked the name Daniel.

  The man knew they’d had another child. He saw an article in the paper when he was visiting his mother. The funny thing was, it didn’t show the new baby at all. Instead, there was a half-page picture of the girl. It was quite a nice shot; she was wearing tennis gear, her little white skirt resting just at the tops of her thighs.

  The night before Ruth returned to the library full-time, just after her son began school, she laid out her work clothes. She was exhausted; Daniel had taken a long time to fall asleep.

  ‘I can play with you every day when I get home,’ she’d told him. ‘And Colette has all sorts of ideas for games, doesn’t she? You have fun with her, don’t you?’

  She could feel Malcolm watching from the bed as she draped jackets over skirts, matched blouses to belts.

  ‘You’ll look fine whatever you wear,’ he said. ‘Anyway, you’re only increasing your hours. It’s not as if it’s a new job.’ And he went back to his newspaper.

  Ruth hadn’t read a paper in twelve years. She couldn’t understand why Malcolm wasted so much time poring over the news; he read enough for two. Sometimes, in bed, he’d rap the newsprint like the skin of a drum, saying, ‘Listen to this.’ And Ruth would say, ‘Not now, I really don’t want to hear about it now. If the world ends, we’ll know.’ She had learned to fall asleep with the light on.

  Once, in the middle of the night, she woke to find Malcolm still reading.

  ‘You can’t just bury your head in the sand,’ he said, without lifting his eyes from the page. ‘What do you do at the library? Doesn’t Jan think it’s strange?’

  ‘They get things wrong,’ said Ruth, ‘or they make it up.’

  It’s hard to believe you could have a fifteen-year-old daughter, Mrs Pearse.

  I was quite young when I had her.

  Early twenties?

  I was nineteen.

  You’re close in age—are you also close emotionally?

  We discuss most things—clothes, school-work, movies, boys.

  Boys?

  She’s a popular girl. She always had some boy or other ringing her.

  Was there anyone special?

  Laura goes out with lots of people. Like I said, she’s a popular girl.

  Popular.

  Yes, very sociable.

  Would you say she was mature for her age?

  She reads a lot. She always did well at school.

  And what about on weekends? Does she like getting dressed up, going to parties? Putting on a bit of make-up?

  At the library, the news was treated with care. It was a fragile thing, something that could crumble to dust at the touch of human hands. It deteriorated in sunlight, needed protection from silverfish and moths and acidic fingertips. It was stored underground, tied into months, stacked into years. If an old issue was requested, Ruth would have to go down to the newspaper basement where, she knew, Laura was also stored. The papers towered well above her head, and she moved between the aisles with care. One false move, she imagined, and she would be buried.

  She was far more at ease with the microfilm collection; there was something reassuring about the rows of white boxes. To Ruth they suggested order: pharmaceuticals, perhaps, or neat botanical specimens, or butterflies mounted on pins. Inside the boxes, each page of news was preserved, reduced to the size of a postage stamp. Illegible to the naked eye, but if necessary it could be reconstituted. And then it could be viewed like a movie, like something made up.

  In the library staffroom there was usually a copy of the morning paper. Jan never offered it to Ruth, and never commented on its contents. When the new bindery assistant started work, though, she kept asking Ruth if she wanted a section.

  ‘I thought you of all people would be interested in the news,’ said Nicole. She peeled open a yoghurt and licked the foil like a child.

  ‘What does that mean?’ said Ruth.

  Nicole frowned, glanced at Jan. ‘Well,’ she said slowly, ‘your job. Periodicals.’

  And Jan said, ‘Oh, I’m sure Ruth has enough to do with newspapers without reading one at lunchtime.’

  Some lies are not discovered. In 1994, after Laura had been missing for six years, Ruth lay in bed one weekend morning and said, ‘I want another child.’

  Malcolm opened his eyes, stroked her hair. After a moment he said, ‘We’ve been through this, love.’

  ‘I know. But I’ve changed my mind. I want another one.’

  Malcolm’s hand kept moving over her hair; long, even movements that might be used to calm a frightened animal. ‘I’m not able to go through that again,’ he said. ‘I don’t want a replacement.’

  When she got up, Ruth took a long bath. She wet her hair and washed it, working the shampoo into a thick lather. As a little girl, Laura had loved bath time. She’d make shampoo horns with her fringe and squirm from Ruth’s reach when it was time to get out, a slippery, soapy devil. Every now and then Ruth would let her use one of the bath pearls which sat in a cut-crystal dish on the windowsill: small soft globes filled with scented gel that melted in water. After they had dissolved and Laura had climbed from the bath, her hair hanging in rats’ tails, her skin pimpling in the cold air, Ruth would pull the plug. Sometimes, as the water disappeared, she’d see the empty bath pearl as it floated to the drain. She caught one in her fingers once, and it felt soft and warm, like skin, and it smelled like oranges.

  From the bath, Ruth could hear Malcolm making breakfast. Pancakes were his Sunday-morning speciality and sometimes, if he felt like it, he made soft brown bread for lunch. All her friends told her how lucky she was. Their husbands couldn’t boil an egg, they said, not if their lives depended on it. When he made pancakes, Malcolm cracked eggs with one hand. It’s all in the thumb, he’d say, tapping them on the side of the bowl and flicking them open, but Ruth had never been able to master it. She always crushed the egg, ruined the batter with shards of shell.

  She didn’t feel l
ike pancakes that morning. She didn’t feel like anything at all. The water around her had cooled to the temperature of blood. When you bake bread, Malcolm had told her, the water has to be at blood temperature, otherwise you kill the yeast. He’d shown her the test: you had to shut your eyes and lower your fingers into the bowl, and if you couldn’t feel the difference between the air and the water, you were safe. Ruth closed her eyes and sank to rinse her hair, and it was true, she didn’t notice the point at which her skin left the air. The water rushed into her ears and that was all she could hear, just the hush, hush of the water, and Malcolm was gone, he was miles away across the ocean.

  She checked the day on the sheet of pills. Sun. They circled right around until they met their own beginning, a month of pills, a bracelet of days, and some days were real and some of them were only sugar. She shouldn’t worry if she skipped a sugar day, the leaflet said, but taking them would help her maintain a routine. And Ruth did take the sugar pills, had done so for years, because she knew that it was useful to trick herself like this; it was safer. It also helped, the leaflet said, to tie the pill-taking to something she did every day, so Ruth took her pill, either real or fake, after she’d cleaned her teeth each morning. It was easy.

  She pushed the Sun pill from the foil—it was a real one—and held it between her thumb and forefinger. It was tiny, no bigger than a cluster of cells. She listened. Malcolm was still busy in the kitchen. She dropped the pill down the toilet, where it floated for a moment then sank, a small pink pebble. Every morning from then on, after she’d cleaned her teeth, she flushed one pill away. She imagined them travelling through underground pipes and finally washing into the sea. Perhaps, she thought once, she was rendering certain sea-dwelling creatures infertile, but when she considered the sheer volume of water, and the smallness of the pills, she realised this was unlikely. So she kept flushing them, disposing of a lie a day, and Malcolm had no idea, none at all.