The Rift

by Nina Allan

  Julie was silent for so long Selena was beginning to think she wasn’t going to say anything. Damn you, Julie, she thought. You can’t have everything your own way. If Julie’s intention was to make her feel like a bitch, she was succeeding, though in the matter of the letter at least she was determined to get an answer.

  It had been a simple enough question, after all.

  “I was scared,” Julie said in the end. She drew in her breath, slowly, let it out again. “Dad wrote back. Just a note. He said it didn’t matter where I’d been or what had happened, all he cared about was that I was all right. He asked when he could visit. He said he’d come as soon as I was ready. He was so – Dad, even after all that time. I felt – I don’t know, paralysed. Then I lost my nerve completely. I knew that if I didn’t write back, Dad would probably come and look for me anyway, so I moved house.”

  “You moved house?”

  Julie nodded.

  What do you mean, you lost your nerve? Selena wanted to say. She found she couldn’t bear to think about what it must have been like for Dad, to have come so close to finding Julie and then losing her again.

  Had he died happier, knowing she was alive, at least? Or had he even believed that the person who had written to him was really his daughter?

  His death at the lakeside suggested he hadn’t, or at least not completely, that he was still looking.

  In the weeks since Julie’s return, Selena had grown so used to having her around that she – Julie-now – had more or less expunged her memory of Julie-then. From time to time she thought about how terrible it would be if Julie-now was not the real Julie after all, if her sister was still out there somewhere, suffering or alone, or just dead, as everyone except her father had always believed. In spite of the increasing amount of time they spent together, Selena could not help suspecting that the new intimacy between herself and Julie was a surface thing, a kind of photocopy rather than the original. She was reminded of the summer her parents almost split up, the summer she and Julie had become close again, only not really. Selena always had the feeling that Julie was using her, that she was biding her time.

  Waiting for the summer to end, so she could go back to ignoring her, back to her real life. She had the same feeling now.

  The one question she could never answer was what would anyone have to gain by being Julie, by pretending? People who did that kind of thing in the movies were always after something. Usually it was money, but there were other reasons too: status, acceptance, revenge. Julie-now showed no signs of wanting revenge. Indeed there was something about her – a vulnerability – that sometimes made Selena want to shake her, not from anger but from fear. Fear that whatever had happened to her might happen again. She knows nothing about the world. Perhaps she just wants a family.

  Selena needed someone to talk to, and in the end she confided in Vanja, because there was no one else, she thought at first, only realising later that Vanja also happened to be the person she trusted most. In the old days it would have been Johnny, but contacting Johnny now would just add to the confusion. Speaking to Laurie or Sandra felt out of the question.

  Telling Vanja was a risk, but Vanja knew all about risk. Vanja was the number one master of keeping her mouth shut.

  “You remember I told you about my sister?” Selena said. It was after closing and they were cashing up. The street door was locked. Selena had just switched the phone over to voicemail.

  “Your sister who’s been ill?” Vanja put down the bag of coins she had been counting, immediately attentive. Her instincts were so sharp, like a hawk’s, like a raptor’s. She knew when to wait for information to emerge, rather than trying to rip it out of its hole. Try telling Laurie anything and you’d be waiting half a day for her to shut up before you could do it.

  “Her name’s Julie. She hasn’t been ill exactly, she’s been…” She paused. Missing, she thought, testing the weight of the word in her head before speaking it aloud, the way you might test the weight of a stone in your hand before skimming it across the water.

  “Missing? Like, for real?”

  Selena nodded. “She disappeared when she was seventeen. I was fourteen at the time, almost fifteen. Anyway, she turned up suddenly, completely out of the blue, about three months ago. She doesn’t want anyone to know. That she’s back, I mean. Not even our mother.” She paused. “It all feels really weird.”

  “Are you sure it’s her?”

  The central question, the only question, just like that. For a moment, Selena inwardly debated not answering, pretending she hadn’t heard what Vanja had said. But then wasn’t this what she had wanted of Vanja all along, that she should ask that question?

  “I don’t see how she can’t be,” Selena said at last. “She knows things – about our childhood, stuff only Julie could know. She looks like Julie.” She paused. “I can’t think of any reason why she wouldn’t be.”

  Vanja shrugged, then began tapping figures into a calculator. “I don’t know, but people do all kinds of weird shit. You know about Anna Anderson?”

  Selena shook her head.

  “She’s a woman who climbed out of a river in Berlin just after World War One. Claimed she was the Russian Grand Duchess Anastasia Romanova – you know, the girl that got shot along with the Tsar and the rest of his family. The thing is, Anastasia was just a child when she was murdered, so who knows what she would have been like, later on? Even now there are still people who believe Anna Anderson was telling the truth. She’s dead now,” Vanja added. “They’ve done DNA tests and everything.” She jabbed a final figure into the calculator. “You OK?”

  “I’m all right. I feel bad though, because of Mum. I keep thinking she should know.”

  “Not your decision to make, milaya moya. If she is really your sister, she has the right to decide for herself who she wants to speak to. You can tell her to go to hell if you want to, but telling your mother? That has to come from her.”

  “I know you’re right.”

  “The truth always comes out in the end though, like it did with Anastasia.” Vanja rested her chin on her hand. “I always wanted a sister. But then I hear something like this and it reminds me of all the women I know who do have sisters and wish they didn’t. They can be such bitches.”

  Selena laughed. “Julie isn’t a bitch.”

  “What do you call this, then? Laying all this shit on you?”

  Vanja scooped up the cash bags and took them into the back office. Selena let down the window shutters then went into the office herself to collect her bag and coat. Speaking to Vanja had made her feel better, but she was no further forward.

  “Any time you need to talk more, you let me know,” Vanja said. She was kneeling in front of the cash safe, peering into the dark rectangle of its interior as if she’d forgotten for the moment what it was for. “You owe her some questions, I think.”

  “Maybe.”

  On her walk to the bus stop, Selena found herself remembering the story Laurie had told about her sister-in-law, how Laurie hadn’t recognised her because she’d put on weight. Selena hadn’t had that problem with Julie, because Julie looked the same, only older. But was that really true? Had Selena taken one look at Julie and decided to trust her, because it was easier to believe what she said than to ask awkward questions?

  I’ll never know, Selena thought. It’s already too late.

  * * *

  Two a.m., and the phone started ringing. Selena woke instantaneously from a deep sleep, so convinced the caller was Julie it was as if she could already hear her voice at the other end. I must have been dreaming about her, Selena thought. She grabbed for the bedside extension. She couldn’t remember the last time she had used it. To speak to Johnny, probably, before he went away.

  The sound of Johnny’s voice on the line was like déjà vu.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “It’s OK to call now, isn’t it? It’s not too late?”

  For a second Selena imagined she meant them: their breakup,
his departure, whichever of the two was supposed to have happened first. Then she realised he was talking about the time.

  “It’s twenty past two, Johnny,” she said. “In the morning.”

  “Oh Jesus, Selena, I’m sorry. I’m still crap at working it out. I’ll call back tomorrow.”

  “I’m awake now,” she said. “Don’t worry. How are you, anyway?”

  “Good,” Johnny said. His voice floated out of focus slightly, and Selena knew it was because he was turning his head away from the speaker, glancing back over his shoulder the way he always did, his eyes on the traffic, the street, the storefronts, the women, whatever. “It’s forty degrees here.”

  “Amazing,” Selena said. She tucked the telephone receiver in between her cheek and the pillow, closing her eyes as she listened to Johnny gabble on about his new sponsor and the flat he was sharing with someone called Ryu, one of the track engineers, she thought Johnny said. It didn’t matter, she was never going to meet him, it was just nice to hear Johnny’s voice, the same as before, the same as it had always been, minus the tiny salient detail that he wasn’t here.

  “What’s going on with you, anyway?” he asked at one point.

  “Nothing much,” she said. “Just Vanja, you know, the shop. I’m still thinking about doing that geology course with the Open University.”

  “You should,” Johnny said, and Selena thought yes, she should, if she enrolled within the next six weeks she’d be in time to begin the foundation course next October, although it seemed a long time since the subject had been uppermost in her mind.

  If you had a conversation with someone and they didn’t know about something, could that mean that in a way the thing hadn’t happened? It was an interesting idea. She curled on her side, still listening to Johnny, and at some point she must have fallen asleep, because the next thing she knew she was awake again, with the telephone still pressed to her cheek and the wheezing, high-pitched hum of a dead line keening into her ear.

  It was half-past five, not quite light. Selena replaced the receiver, wondering for a horrified moment if she was going to end up being billed for a three-hour call to Kuala Lumpur, then remembering it had been Johnny who called, not her, that he must have realised what had happened and hung up.

  A Voyage to Arcturus

  [The Return: notes for an essay on Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock by Julie Rouane, Film Studies A/S dissertation portfolio, Priestley College, Warrington, December 1993]

  The story told in the movie is very simple: on St Valentine’s Day, 1900, a group of girls from an exclusive boarding school in southern Australia are taken to visit a famous beauty spot, an area of prominent limestone formations known as the Hanging Rock. They picnic at the base of the rock, and read each other’s valentines. At some point during the afternoon, four of the girls ask permission to examine the rock closer to. While the rest of the group and their teachers fall asleep in the sun, Miranda, Marion, Irma and Edith climb through the tunnels and crevices that make up the rock formation. Some hours later, one of the girls, Edith, runs screaming from the bushes. Her legs are scratched and she is missing her shoes. There is no sign of the three other girls, and one of their teachers, Miss McCraw, is also missing. A week later, Irma is found in a cave, high up on the rock. She is alive and unharmed, but has no memory of what happened to her, or to the others. Miranda, Marion and Miss McCraw are never seen again.

  There are two main subplots, one involving Sara, an orphan who holds a particular attachment to Miranda, the other involving Michael Fitzhubert, a young man staying nearby who develops an obsession with the missing girls. The main focus of the film though is always the mystery: what really happened?

  One of the first things that struck me about the film was the way the people seemed so uncomfortable in the landscape. In spite of the extreme heat, the headmistress of the school, Mrs Appleyard, tells the girls they must not remove their gloves until they are clear of the village – she doesn’t want ‘commoners’ to see them behaving in an unladylike manner. When Irma is found, her corset is missing and everyone is obsessed with whether or not she is still a virgin. “In England, young ladies like that wouldn’t be allowed to go walking in the forest. Not alone, anyway,” says Michael Fitzhubert. Michael Fitzhubert is dressed like Little Lord Fauntleroy in top hat and tails.

  The only character at ease in the outback is Bertie, Fitzhubert’s valet, also an orphan and – unknown to us at first – Sara’s brother.

  The figures of the young women move stiffly like dressed-up dolls against a background of flagrant, uncompromising wilderness. We feel the heat, we hear the squawks of kookaburras, catch the movements of lizards and insects from the corner of our eye. The wilderness Weir shows us does not conceal its dangers, its strangeness. We can see those dangers clearly – more even than seeing, we feel – but for Mrs Appleyard and her pupils there is no danger in red rock and flyblown grassland, only discomfort or, worse still, impropriety.

  They are horribly unprepared for the encounter.

  The rock boulders are like great grey Easter Island faces. They watch without caring as the women climb, the men search. It is as if the women must climb the rock, the men must follow.

  Marion, Irma and Miranda are shown as special, charmed. As Miranda turns away from us for the last time, the sun outlines her head in gold, like a halo. Mademoiselle de Poitiers, the French mistress, refers to Miranda as “a Botticelli angel”. In fact the three missing girls are just normal young women with nothing special about them except the fact that they come from rich families. It is their money that sets them apart from Sara, who is bullied and patronised and finally rejected because of her poverty. Sara is a much more interesting character than Miranda, because of her defiance and her desire for escape – she reminds me of Helen Burns in Jane Eyre. Mrs Appleyard is also an interesting character because the person she pretends to be is so different from the person she really is. In reality, her control is an illusion. She is a depressed alcoholic who longs to escape the life she has made for herself. Her terrible behaviour towards Sara arises out of her despair over the power she once had, and is now losing.

  IRMA – the Irma who returns to the school is a different person. Her apartness is highlighted by the way she is dressed – all in red, in contrast with the rest of the girls in their drab school uniforms. Only a small amount of time has passed, yet Irma suddenly seems a world away: distant, removed, adult. Her former classmates turn on her like a pack of feral children – like the boys who torment Piggy in Lord of the Flies. They resent her separateness from them, even as they reinforce it. They are desperate to know what happened, yet we fear they will not believe a word she says, that the simple act of being set apart by experience has turned them against her forever.

  One of the most interesting things about the film is that many people still believe it is based on true events.

  1

  You won’t remember this – you were too little – but for a while – I was about seven when it started, I think – I was terrified of black holes. I’d seen part of a science programme on TV – Horizon probably, or The World About Us – describing how nothing could ever escape a black hole, not even light. There was an animated diagram, showing what might happen if a planet were to get sucked into a black hole’s event horizon, and a map of our galaxy showing where astronomers believed black holes might be located. Gaping empty spaces, patches of nothing, the lairs of monsters. I kept seeing that planet being dragged towards the point of no return and the idea petrified me so much I couldn’t bear to talk about it. What frightened me most was that no one seemed to care. Thousands of people – millions – would have seen the television programme, and yet life was going on as if nothing had happened.

  For my Christmas present that year, I asked Dad if I could have a book on astronomy. I told him I wanted to learn about the planets in our solar system, but really I wanted to find out as much as I could about black holes. The book I was given – Hutchinson’s Junior En
cyclopaedia of Space – was full of beautiful colour images and photographs: the Earth from the Moon, the rings of Saturn, the Milky Way. There was a pull-out map of the solar system, showing how far each of the planets lay from the sun, and a set of diagrams showing you how to identify the constellations. Towards the end of the book there was a short chapter called ‘Black Holes and Other Unexplained Phenomena’. I read it straight through at top speed, then again more slowly, hoping and not quite daring to feel reassured. The book said astronomers believed that black holes were actually stars, but turned inside out: collapsed suns that had become so magnetically powerful they pulled everything into their force field, including whole planets and other suns.

  The book said the chances of a black hole entering our solar system were a trillion to one.

  A trillion to one was huge, but it could still happen. A couple of days after Christmas I finally plucked up the courage to talk to Dad about it. When I asked him if he thought we were in danger, he laughed and ruffled my hair.

  “The nearest black hole is more than twenty thousand light years away from us,” he said. “Can you imagine how far away that is?”

  I couldn’t, and that was the problem. Twenty thousand was a large number, but it was still finite. In bed at night, I imagined the black hole careering through outer space like a vast typhoon. For a long time – thousands of centuries – it would be too far away to notice, or even to think about. Eventually though, it would come, and we would begin to feel it. Just a minute tug at first, but still a presence.

  Mountains will fall, I thought. All those mountains and wars and centuries, all for nothing.

  It seemed unutterably sad to me. I could not imagine how the world could continue, in the light of it.

  * * *

  I know you won’t believe me, but I’m going to tell you anyway: on Saturday July 16th 1994, I travelled from the area of woodland around Hatchmere Lake, near Warrington, Cheshire, to the shore of the Shuubseet, or Shoe Lake, an elongated, slipper-shaped stretch of water not far from the western outskirts of Fiby, which is the smallest and most southerly of the six great city-states of the planet of Tristane, one of the eight planets of the Suur System, in the Aww Galaxy.