Riptides

by Kirsten Alexander

  While Mark sleeps, I play out in my head the most likely chain of events if I told the truth. Dad would disown me. Charlie and I would be involved in a legal case in which our best outcome would be a short jail term for a hit and run. The fact the victim was pregnant would make our crime seem all the worse, though the fact we stopped, took her out of the car and at least checked if she was alive might go in our favour. That shows good character, surely? Perhaps our lawyer would argue we’d tried to move the woman’s body up to the car, but that Charlie had . . . an arm injury? But we didn’t ask anyone in Chinchilla to drive out and get her, or fess up the next day. How could we explain that?

  Mark would rail at my stupidity in staying silent and then lying to the police, and for effectively choosing my brother over my husband. He might divorce me. He loves me, no question, but his job means the world to him. How could he continue working as a journalist with a wife who’d committed such a serious crime, a wife in jail? People would assume I’d told him and he’d helped cover it up. How, then, would he care for our children, with no job and a wife in jail? And once I was out of jail, what would my life be?

  I turn my head to the other side and stare out the window. Telling the truth is a terrible idea.

  I forgot to close the curtains last night and I can see the sky is still black. The fuzzy red numbers on the clock radio say it’s 3.40 am. The birds are still asleep.

  Once my eyes fine-tune I can make out the elegant shapes of branches against the sky. In the dark they look flat, like rivers drawn onto a map. I watch a possum walk gingerly along the power line. I hear the wind swishing the leaves.

  At five o’clock I’m still awake. I could get up, but the days are long as it is. I lie in bed and listen to the warbling magpies and admire the sight of my books and stationery piled along the wall near the door. I scan the pile, as I have a hundred times before, to see if there’s anything I’ve missed, but there isn’t. It’s perfect. I’ve bought my textbooks, ring-bound folders, notepads, packets of loose paper inserts, dividers, pencil case and Bic pens – black, blue and red – a stapler, hole puncher and a sticky-tape dispenser.

  I want to put these things on the desk in the spare bedroom, which will be my study area. I picture the desk with my belongings on it, books upright, held in place at one end by the statue of Nefertiti that Mark gave me on our last anniversary and at the other by a glazed vase I made in the pottery class Lou and I took in August. In front of the vase, I’ll put the mug I bought to use as a pen holder.

  Yesterday morning, when I went into the spare room to collect Dad’s and Charlie’s laundry, the only thing on my desk was Dad’s watch. His dirty clothes were in a turtle-sized lump next to the bedside table. Meanwhile, Charlie’s jocks, socks and shirts were draped across every surface except the light fitting and my desk – after two nights. Dad carries himself like the soldier he was, and there’s a symmetry to him; Charlie wears his clothes like they’ve been flung onto a twisted wire frame.

  Not knowing how long my book pile will be in limbo is unsettling. In bed, I pull the sheet up to my chin, close my eyes, and imagine I’m lying on a cloud. I’m wearing a blue dress, cinched at the waist by a satin bow, one end of which is held in the beak of a robin. I’m surrounded by clouds on which sit porcelain-skinned children with twinkling eyes – girls and boys dressed by loving mothers who turn their minds to nothing more than joyful domesticity. This is not an image I’ve fashioned myself but the cover of a book of poems I treasured when I was little, a gift from my mother. The book is gone, lost in the confusion of a house move, but the cover is locked in my memory.

  After Mum died I wanted to climb inside that book and live there. I could almost smell her perfume, see the touch of her fingertip where she’d turned the pages the first time we’d looked through the book together. We’d admired the prettiness of the drawings. She’d read to me.

  Then she got sick. Then she was gone. I didn’t want to make my own school lunch, wipe my brother’s wee off the toilet seat or spend my nights in a bleak house. I wanted to walk in a meadow of wildflowers, play with button-nosed kittens, and wake to the smell of hairspray, not burned toast and Brut. I wanted my mother to come back. She would’ve known that the box of supersize tampons, asked for in a humiliated quaver, having been left unopened for six months, might’ve indicated some other product was required to address this new and frightening problem. She would’ve noticed when my shorts pulled uncomfortably across my hips. She would have taken me to a hairdresser rather than Mrs Robinson’s down the road when my fringe grew shaggy. She would’ve noticed how I tried to make life normal, how abruptly my childhood came to a stop.

  Mark has added porky snorts to his snores, and I can hear Dad clattering about in the kitchen. I get up. It will make my life worse, and possibly destroy the lives of everyone around me, if I tell the truth. Better to hold it in and manage the pain.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Friday 13 December 1974

  Charlie

  When the doorbell rings I’m thinking about lunch. Mark is at work, Abby is out the back, and Dad is walking with Woof. That dog’s never had it so good. The cricket’s on the radio, and I’m glad I’ve heard enough to have a conversation with Mark about it tonight. I feel good for the first time in a week. I roll off the couch and drop my copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance to the floor.

  I open the door to Sergeant Doyle. He’s bigger than I remember. Seeing him here makes my stomach clench.

  ‘Hey, hello. Didn’t know you were coming. Is Abby expecting you?’ As if she wouldn’t have mentioned that or rushed to the door instead of me.

  ‘I need to ask you and your sister a few more questions. Mind if I come inside?’

  ‘Sure, yeah.’ I move so he can come into the house. ‘The living room’s upstairs.’ He waits for me to start up the stairs then follows.

  ‘Take a seat,’ I say, pointing to the couch. ‘I’ll get her.’ I walk through the kitchen out to the backyard, trying to keep a steady gait, but speeding up the closer I get to Abby.

  ‘Now? Here?’ she asks. She places the wooden peg she’s holding onto Mark’s shirt, straightens it so it hangs right and, seeming reluctant to do so, turns away from the clothesline.

  When we come into the living room Doyle is still standing, examining the framed photograph on top of the television.

  He greets Abby with a nod. ‘Nice-looking family. Twins?’

  ‘Yes, they’re quite a handful. Please.’ She sweeps her arm towards the couch like a game-show host showing off a prize.

  He sits, and the couch I’d thought of as large and long appears doll-sized.

  Abby asks Doyle in an unnecessarily loud voice if he’d like a cold drink. He does not, so she perches on the edge of her armchair seat. I sit on the corner of the coffee table and reach for the packet of Marlboros I’d left there earlier, before the door rang, which already feels like hours ago.

  ‘You’re a long way off your beat,’ I say.

  He smirks at me. But he’s hours away from Chinchilla and I know that’s where he works. Could be that beat is a word they only use on TV shows.

  ‘I hope you didn’t drive all this way for us,’ Abby says.

  ‘I have business down here.’ He looks from Abby to me and back again. ‘And we have a problem we’re hoping you can help us with.’

  At that moment Dad enters the room.

  ‘Sergeant,’ he says, stopping on the spot when he sees Doyle. ‘Didn’t expect to see you in Brisbane.’

  ‘Duty calls, sir.’

  ‘Carry on then.’ Dad speaks to the cop as if he’s still in the army, sits in the one empty chair. He has no idea he’s regarded as a suspect.

  Doyle turns to Abby. ‘We’ve been informed that on the night of the accident you and your brother stayed at the Chinchilla Hotel.’ My heart skips a beat. I’m guessing Abby’s does, too. ‘Now, given you said you left Brisbane at approximately two in the afternoon –’

  ‘You stay
ed in the pub?’ Dad interrupts.

  I strike a match too hard against the box. The wood snaps. I hold my cigarette between dry lips.

  ‘It was raining,’ Abby says. ‘There was a storm so we stopped at the pub. I didn’t want to trouble you with the details, Dad. It didn’t seem important. We stayed there and came to yours after breakfast. It’s nothing.’

  ‘Why didn’t you drive through to the farm? The rain wasn’t that bad,’ Dad says.

  ‘Yes it was.’ I manage to light my cigarette. Small victories. ‘Totally was. The guy at the pub said we were lucky to even make it over the bridge. We were worried it’d be underwater by morning.’

  Doyle furrows his brow. ‘You don’t cross the bridge coming into Chinchilla from Brisbane. You’d only cross it heading north out of town.’

  ‘That’s right, yeah.’ I don’t look at Abby, hope to God she’s not reacting. ‘We were going to drive over the bridge and they said it was good we didn’t.’

  ‘Because it might flood later on?’ Dad says. ‘You’re talking rubbish.’

  ‘Did you drive across the bridge that night, Mrs Campbell?’ Doyle asks.

  ‘No,’ says Abby. ‘We came into town off the main road and I decided we’d stop for the night. Charlie was asleep. He didn’t properly see where we were. He doesn’t know the roads around there anyway.’

  ‘And you do?’ Doyle stares at Abby. ‘What time did you arrive at the hotel, ma’am?’

  Abby knows this is a trap and I can see she’s stalling. Numbers aren’t her strong point so I quickly work back in my head. I can’t get it to add up in any convincing way: whatever we say, there will be hours unaccounted for.

  ‘I was sick,’ I blurt out. ‘Chucking up. We stopped, someplace. I’d come into Brisbane that day, on the early morning flight from Denpasar, and I was rooted. Flight takes, like, eight hours and I’d hardly slept in days so –’

  ‘What time did you arrive at the hotel?’ Doyle doesn’t acknowledge I’ve spoken. He’s locked on Abby.

  ‘I guess it was nine or ten? Would that be about right, Charlie?’

  ‘Yep, I reckon.’ I sit back with one hand on the coffee table in an effort to seem relaxed, hoping she’ll register the need to do this herself.

  Out of the corner of my eye I watch Dad. He’s figuring it out.

  ‘So to be clear,’ Doyle says, ‘you left Brisbane Airport around two after collecting the luggage from a flight that arrived on time at one o’clock, having changed planes after an hour’s wait at Darwin Airport, according to TAA staff.’

  ‘Yes, that’s about when we left,’ Abby says.

  ‘You drove till you got to . . .? You’d know where you stopped for your brother.’

  ‘Outside Dalby, maybe? I didn’t pay a lot of attention. I mostly didn’t want him to vomit in my car.’

  ‘You stopped there for an unspecified time before driving on to Chinchilla, where you arrived at approximately ten at night according to the publican.’ He pauses. ‘Is there anything you’d like to tell me, ma’am? Because those numbers don’t work for me. That would mean a four-and-a-half-hour drive to Chinchilla, five at worst, took you eight.’

  She bites her lip as if thinking. ‘Well, I’m afraid the publican is wrong. We arrived in town at about seven o’clock, had a walk around, Charlie was sick again and then we decided he was too ill to keep going. So we went to the pub for the rest of the night. It was definitely before ten.’

  ‘It was after ten o’clock when you called me,’ Dad says.

  ‘Yes, Dad, but calling you wasn’t the first thing I did when we got there.’ Weirdly, her sharp annoyance feels useful and right this time. It makes her seem more solid, and her voice has lost any trace of a shake.

  ‘I see,’ Doyle says, obviously unconvinced by what he’s heard. He turns to me. ‘When did you first learn your father was engaged?’

  The out-of-nowhere question seems to be his preferred tactic for throwing us off-guard. ‘Same time Abby did, the morning we showed up at the farm.’

  ‘And had you met his fiancée? Socially? She’s about your age.’

  ‘No. There’s a lot of people my age. And I’ve never lived in the country.’

  ‘She didn’t always live there,’ Doyle says, then he turns to Dad. ‘How was it you met her, Mr Scott?’

  ‘I don’t see how that’s important,’ Dad says.

  ‘It’s important if I say it is. As important as searching your house.’

  They stare at one another in silence. Dad wants to be top dog, but everyone knows better than to mess with a Queensland cop. Even if you’re drunk or stoned or in a rage, that awareness is something we have in our state DNA. You don’t swim against a rip or drive in a hailstorm or play chicken with a pig.

  ‘At the chemist,’ Dad says finally. ‘She was working there.’

  ‘I see. Ever make any day trips with her? Sunday drives up Eumundi way?’

  ‘Eumundi?’ Abby exclaims. I catch her eye and see she’s as confused as I am. Doyle notices this, too.

  ‘Not familiar with that area, no,’ Dad says.

  None of these questions seems to surprise Dad, or if they do he’s doing a good job of hiding that.

  Doyle slaps his thighs and stands up. ‘I’ll show myself out.’

  When Dad hears the front door closing, he rises from his chair and glowers at Abby and me as he did when we were children.

  ‘What are you two playing at? Charlie’s never been carsick in his life.’

  ‘The jet lag –’ I begin.

  ‘Bullshit. What’s going on? You didn’t stop near Dalby and you –’ he points at Abby – ‘you told me you drove through floodwaters in January to stock up on food, so don’t tell me rain put you off. What happened that night?’

  Abby leaps in to answer, having regained her confidence now Doyle is gone. ‘Charlie and I had a fight and I left him in some tinpot town. For hours. I didn’t want to tell the police. It’s embarrassing.’

  Dad regards Abby, deciding whether to buy her explanation.

  ‘You’re bloody right it’s embarrassing,’ he says at last. ‘When are you going to learn to get on?’ Then he walks out of the room.

  When we’re alone, I swivel around on the coffee table to face Abby. ‘What now?’

  ‘We stick to our story,’ she says.

  ‘Our story? You mean the one we made up on the spot? It doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘It will if I add in what I told Dad about us having an argument. That fills the gap. I don’t want to talk about this anymore, Charlie. My head is about to explode.’

  ‘Abby, we should’ve told the cops before now that we stayed at the pub. We don’t want them to think we’re keeping secrets.’

  ‘Is that a joke?’

  I look away to think, out through the open sliding doors towards Mt Coot-Tha. When I turn back to ask her why Doyle would’ve mentioned Eumundi, she’s gone.

  Early afternoon, before she collects the kids, while Mark takes their car to the mechanic, and Dad is catching up with a mate who runs a fishing tackle shop, Abby and I commemorate our mother’s death. We have about an hour, and that’s plenty.

  We do this each year on December thirteenth. Mum died on December twentieth, but Abby decided early on that we shouldn’t mark her death too close to that festive time of year. The thirteenth is a Friday this year, but Abby reckons it makes no difference. Given the amount of bad stuff that’s happened to her she’s strangely unsuperstitious, unlike me; I’m all in with that shit – tarot, palms, witchcraft, you name it. Ignoring my reservations, Abby begins setting up the table with our mother’s things.

  When we were kids, Dad would take us to Toowong Cemetery on the morning of the real date, even if it was a school day, and we would put flowers on Mum’s grave. At some point, when Abby and I were both in our late teens, after one too many ferocious family arguments, we stopped going to the cemetery with Dad. He went alone. Abby and I would go together.

  And then Abby created the
memorial day ritual. As adults, when we were in the same city, we’d go to Mum’s grave and then back to wherever Abby lived at the time – the share house in Paddington, the flat in Highgate Hill, the house in Kenmore. We kept up our ritual when we were both at uni, and when she dropped out to have Sarah. Neither Mark nor the kids have ever joined us.

  Today, Abby and I sit in front of the shrine she’s creating on her dining table: photographs (Mum, Abby and me with Nan and Pop and their mangy dog at the farm, Mum and Dad’s wedding photo, a hand-coloured photo of Mum a few years into her marriage, painted so her cheeks are rosy circles and her teeth freakishly white), a vase of flowers, three candles, Mum’s copy of Amy Vanderbilt’s Complete Book of Etiquette and a silk scarf with line drawings of roses, leering Italians and skinny vamps. Abby has, as usual, arranged the objects around Mum’s sewing machine, which seems weird to me since I don’t remember her using the thing.

  At the front of the shrine is the Memory Box, to which, every year, we each add a handwritten memory about our mother. After we’ve put our memory inside, Abby pulls out a selection of memories from previous years and reads them aloud. Sometimes we have a drink. Not always. Not today.

  ‘Where’s her ring?’ I ask. ‘Should we put that out, too? Since nobody else is around.’

  She shakes her head. ‘I’ve hidden it in my jewellery box. Mark never opens that. But I think it should stay put.’

  I think about this. ‘Abby, it’s evidence. I reckon we should bury it or throw it in the river.’

  ‘No. It should’ve been with me years ago. Don’t worry – I’ll keep it hidden. The only other person who’d recognise it is Dad.’

  ‘Who’s living in your house,’ I say.

  ‘Not for long.’

  I change tack. ‘So what did you write?’

  She turns over the piece of paper in front of her. ‘I wrote: I remember the bruise spreading on Mum’s arm where the drip went in. It got so large the bandage couldn’t cover it. I waited for Dad to tell a nurse but he didn’t. So when my mother died from cancer she also had a sore arm.’