Sheerwater

by Leah Swann

  The car turned another corner, moving more slowly now. Max stared out. He hadn’t been to many places and he’d never been anywhere new without one of his parents. Sometimes his mother would tell them a little story about a new place so that it didn’t feel so strange anymore.

  ‘Excuse me, Kirsty,’ he said. ‘Are we in Sheerwater now?’

  Kirsty didn’t answer for a moment and then she said, ‘Yes, yes, we’re in Sheerwater. We’ll meet up with your mum soon.’

  His mother had said it was colder in Sheerwater because it was close to the bottom of the world. The plants were tougher. The beach shrubs squatted low, Mum had said, with roots digging in like little clawed feet and foliage that sprang back at you, spiky and bouncy to touch. Blossoms were blown off the plum trees as soon as they bloomed, Mum said, by sea winds stronger than any Max or Teddy had ever felt.

  Mum. He couldn’t wait to see her and for everything to be normal. He hated staring into the red mess of a stranger’s hair, he hated this car, the smell, the look of the balled-up tissues under the seats, the bobby pins and pen lids and crusty socks. He swallowed, and looked out.

  There were no concrete footpaths in this neighbourhood. Long nature strips stretched to the kerb covered with bushy grass, the kind that would be wiry under your bare feet, not green but sort of whitish brownish at the edges, different from the grass at home.

  There was no home anymore.

  Hadn’t he seen his own yellow truck alone in the sandpit under the gum tree, late last night before he went to bed? The truck would be lonely with no-one there to play with it anymore, unless some new child came to play with it. Max didn’t much like that idea, either.

  He had known there was no room in his mother’s car for the toy truck that morning: the car was full. Full as a goog, as Grandma Bainsie would say. Max had no idea what a goog was, except that it got so full there wasn’t room for one more thing.

  He’d known he couldn’t ask Mum for the truck, though he wanted to, very much. He wanted to ask her but he held it in. The truck was his favourite toy in all the world. He’d had it since he was two years old and he didn’t mind that it was peely with rust: it looked tough. It was a tough truck. He knew, though, that if he’d asked for it when the car was so full already, his mother would get that awful frown between her eyebrows.

  Much better to find something that would make her smile the smile that lit his heart, the lovely smile that made her cheeks into soft, round balls, so he was almost pleased to discover she’d left the red feather earrings on the windowsill. That meant he could return them to her.

  He was so proud of those earrings! He’d made them in Craft for Mother’s Day, and they were, by far, the best thing anyone made – so, so, so much better than a tissue box covered in ripped crepe paper and clag!

  Kirsty turned the car into a driveway, and pulled up in front of a house of boards caked with lumpy paint under the eaves. Max undid his seatbelt and Teddy’s and got out of the car and breathed the fresh air to ease his carsick stomach. He smelled salt. The sea was near.

  He and Teddy followed Kirsty up to the porch. One by one, she turned over a row of flowerpots. He guessed she was hunting for a key.

  On the left side of the porch was some kind of net, maybe a fishing net, hanging from a few nails like a curtain; on it were seashells and dried seaweed pods and a dead starfish. The starfish was a dull, dark red, the same colour that a scab on your knee goes after a few days. Max knew it was a dead starfish and not a plastic one by the texture and patterns on its skin, which were curling, tiny and intricate, and by the dullness of its colour.

  A dead thing! Why hang up a dead thing like a Christmas decoration? It was too weird. It should be buried! He pictured digging a little hole and laying the starfish inside and covering it with handfuls of dry dirt. Or maybe it should be buried in sand, because it was a sea creature?

  He took hold of Teddy’s hand and pulled him closer. Max was as thirsty as anything. When would it be polite to ask for a drink of water?

  While Kirsty was unlocking the front door, Teddy let go of Max’s hand and reached over to the net and squeezed one of the seaweed pods. It made a pleasing pop. He squeezed another.

  Kirsty spun around and said: ‘Hey!’

  That ‘hey’ was very loud, like a slap.

  ‘Don’t touch!’ she said, in a quieter voice. ‘Don’t touch things that aren’t yours.’

  She led them inside. Max asked if he could use the bathroom. She sighed loudly as first Max and then Teddy went into a toilet which had an orange plastic seat and lid. He’d never seen an orange toilet. It looked yucky, he thought.

  After they’d washed their hands, Kirsty showed them to a bedroom with two single beds in it, and on one bed was a board game box. The doona covers were pilly and so faded you couldn’t see the patterns anymore, and they smelled sour, like clothes left too long in the washing machine. Muddy light came through the windows. In the corners were cobwebs but Max couldn’t see any spiders, not even a daddy-long-legs.

  ‘That’s Snakes and Ladders,’ Kirsty said, nodding at the box on the bed. ‘That’s my old game. Ever played?’

  ‘No,’ said Max. And then: ‘But I have heard of that game.’

  Teddy’s eyes were too shiny and the little pouches underneath were getting fatter. Max knew this look: it meant Teds was tired. He hoped there wouldn’t be a tantrum before Mum got there. She was the only one who knew what to do with Teddy’s tantrums.

  ‘Well, you just stay here,’ said Kirsty, turning to leave.

  ‘Excuse me, Kirsty, could we have some water?’

  ‘Yeah, okay. You wait here and I’ll bring it. Have a look at the Snakes and Ladders and see if you can work it out. It’s easy. You can go up the ladders and when you get to the snake you slide down. I can’t believe you haven’t played it!’

  Max forced himself to give a polite smile.

  ‘I’m going to ring your parents and see what time they’re coming to pick you up.’

  Max felt his tummy go softer when she said that. He must have been holding it in, like holding his breath or something. Maybe everything was okay! It might be. It probably was. They were just staying with this lady for a short time. Then Mum or maybe Dad would arrive. It would be strange if Dad picked them up, but then with the plane crash and everything maybe things had changed.

  He thought about his dad. He hadn’t seen him this week or even last week. He missed him.

  Max climbed onto the bed and opened the Snakes and Ladders box. He pulled out the folded board and two boxes with flat plastic counters and dice. The board was green and divided into squares and each square was numbered. He guessed you had to roll the dice to start. And then roll again to see how many squares you could go along.

  Teddy put a yellow plastic counter in his mouth.

  ‘It’s not a lolly,’ said Max, though he wanted to put one in his mouth too. He was so, so, so thirsty! His mouth felt as dry as when you crunch up a Weet-Bix without milk. He guessed Kirsty had forgotten they needed water.

  Teddy was rubbing his eyes roughly and Max felt nervous. When Teddy got tired he got mad. But all his little brother said was: ‘I’m hungry.’

  ‘We’ll have dinner soon,’ said Max in the calm voice his mother often used with Ted. He would like some spaghetti with cheese or a bowl of cereal. It wasn’t time for dinner yet. He’d had that cheese roll. Was that for lunch? He couldn’t remember.

  Would Kirsty give them dinner? Did she know children needed dinner? He wasn’t sure.

  He was trying hard to believe that everything was okay but underneath it didn’t feel like that. It felt like someone had tipped up the world, and all the bits were falling out.

  LAWRENCE

  1

  Lawrence watched the red tail-lights of the police car glimmer then vanish. He waited until the engine could no longer be heard. All was quiet until a magpie sang several notes into air that was clear and cold and transparent. Moments later his mother’s car pu
lled up and she got out, a small woman with a mop of grey curls. She opened the boot.

  Lawrence closed the front door. In the hallway, he lifted two framed photographs off the walls. He walked into his bedroom to see if Hawkins had visited it along with the bathroom. All seemed undisturbed, but he couldn’t be sure. His backpack was still on the floor where he’d left it. Had Hawkins looked inside? Lawrence took out the neatly folded clothes, compass, knife and waterbottle and repacked them with care, adding a foil blanket and energy bars. He put a jacket to one side and made room for the framed photographs. One was a portrait of himself with Max, the other of himself with Teddy. The boys were younger, their faces rounder, sweeter looking. Photographs catalogue mortality, he thought, laying them side by side. Max’s face was so like his own. Teddy’s face was wilder and stronger. Like his wife, Lawrence loved photo albums but for different reasons. He loved the chronology that gave order to his investigations into the past. He also liked the ease with which images, like statistics, could be repurposed; they told stories one way and another way and then another way.

  He went out to the driveway where his mother was still unloading groceries and told her he needed the car for a short time. He was thinking of visiting Vanessa and finding out what the police had said to her. He told his mother he was upset. He didn’t know what to do. The police had said there was nothing he could do.

  ‘I’m terrified, Mum,’ he said. He wiped his eyes on his forearm and held out his visibly trembling hands to show her. ‘I think maybe I should go and search for them. Tonight, or maybe tomorrow. What has Ava done with my sons, Mum? I don’t trust the police will find them. I might have to do something. Look for them myself. I think she’s hidden them. Don’t you think? She must have. Otherwise how could this have happened? How could she let this happen?’

  ‘We become evil when we hide the truth from ourselves,’ his mother replied, loading each of her arms with three bags of groceries. She didn’t ask Lawrence for help.

  Lawrence drove off so sealed in the cocoon of his thoughts that it was a while before he noticed the road jammed with cars, traffic lights blinking from green to amber to red, night falling over shops, trams, and pedestrians with Munch-like ghost masks for faces. He opened the window and in swarmed the smells and sounds of the street along with the cool air glittering with tiny dots; he closed it against the sound of a jackhammer. They’d started works on Glenferrie Road, as if it wasn’t already congested enough.

  A council worker in a hi-vis vest swivelled his sign to STOP. Lawrence sank back in his seat and turned up the music. Blocked again. The vaguely dirty penumbra of the dull job seemed to surround that council worker. Melbourne traffic had got steadily worse in the past ten years. It was crazy, cities twice the size functioned better – think of the undergrounds of Paris and London. Melbourne was the fastest-growing city in the developed world, with bulging blocked roads and still no rail link to Tullamarine airport.

  And he too was blocked. Like roads with traffic, ears with wax, drains with hair, valves with oil, waterways with plastic, arteries with fat, and sewage pipes – anything, in short, that was supposed to flow. His own thoughts and feelings were supposed to flow. It was time to act. He saw it clearly, as though new light swept through him, scorching everything. Up till now he’d been sleepwalking, putting things in place somnolently, not letting his right hand know what his left hand was doing, when actually things needed smashing to smithereens. He imagined himself bringing down a mallet in one swift and powerful motion. Voomf. All reduced to a luminous dust. Chaos. You won’t know what’s hit you.

  Right now Ballard and Hawkins were probably with Vanessa. In a few hours they would be with Ava. He imagined Ballard, who seemed to be in charge, talking with Ava. Nothing is all sweetness, no matter how it seems. Her years on the force would have taught Ballard that much. Oh, but Ava could turn it on, with those bleating eyes and that sharp whiff of sincerity.

  The council worker swivelled the sign to SLOW.

  Lawrence accelerated. He’d like to see Vanessa, with whom he enjoyed a kind of unconsummated erotic friendship; her husband was often away, and Lawrence anticipated seeing her as one might anticipate an evening at a favourite restaurant where your tastes are known, the lights low, the wine rich and good. Lounging on one of Vanessa’s velvet couches, he could relax. He could talk to her about his problems with Ava. They always pretended it was about Ava when so much of it was to do with what Vanessa enjoyed withholding. She loved the attention. Devotion was not one of her qualities. The only thing Vanessa could be described as being devoted to was the preservation of her considerable charms – a tiny injection of filler in her lovely lips, a fillip of botox between her lovely brows, some process sanding away the sun-damaged skin of her lovely décolletage.

  It was a perpetual source of interest to Lawrence that the mother and the daughter were so different, and not very surprising that Ava preferred to keep some distance. She was two-thirds through her pregnancy with Max before Lawrence even met Vanessa.

  ‘I should know your mother,’ he’d told Ava, his curiosity piqued by her silence on the subject. There was some tricky dynamic there that he’d like to expose. ‘If we’re really going through with this – this whole baby thing.’

  At that time he still couldn’t believe he was going to be a father. He wasn’t used to having to change his plans. To his mind nothing derails you like a baby. They were standing outside the front door of the apartment block in St Kilda. The air smelled of ash and the sky was the borrowed grey of the sea and he’d had some vague thought about the ashes of his freedom. In response to his questions, Ava said she had a friendly yet distant relationship with her mother and that it wasn’t necessary for him to meet Vanessa. The more she said that, the more he insisted. It was a long argument that he’d won in the end.

  They’d met up at a bar called The Polly – Vanessa’s suggestion – a chic, bohemian place in Fitzroy, low-lit with large gilt mirrors, lamps bearing crystal drops, satin wingback chairs; a glamorous setting from which – as she must have known – Vanessa seemed an organic extension. She had the same lean body as Ava, except for the round breasts grafted on, the tops of which flashed like lightbulbs above her jade silk camisole. Ivory skin. Rose lips flecked with glitter. Pale hair swung below her shoulder blades, blow-dried to a straight sheen. Not quite forty-three. He was fascinated. On that unseasonably hot evening, Ava wouldn’t drink anything from the exotic menu of cocktails. Lawrence and Vanessa got plastered on espresso martinis and then left her alone with her melon belly and a glass of orange juice while they went outside to share a cigarette.

  Standing on Brunswick Street he’d looked at Vanessa with a sense of discovery. He perceived her sizing him up and making calculations, her mind not equal to his own capacities perhaps but familiar and so interesting and hard to resist when coupled with that palpable invitation, pulling at him hard like an undertow. He wanted to be caught by that undertow, dragged under and away and into her, and it was all he could do not to put his hands on her at that very moment, to lean forward and taste the luscious mouth glazed with the sparkly lip-gloss worn by teenagers.

  Almost a decade had passed since then and Lawrence’s fantasy of giving in to that attraction had remained drenched in the delicious social wrongness and moral subterfuge that such a liaison would entail. In the jungle of his delectable fantasies about all sorts of women, Vanessa was the only one he never tired of. She was erotically inexhaustible.

  Lawrence waited till he was sure the officers would have left her house, and called her from the car.

  ‘Oh my God, Lawrence! The police have been here! I can’t believe this is happening! Those poor little boys, my God. Ava should not have left them on the side of the road like that! There are so many weirdoes out there just waiting to do weird things. Then they grab their chance. They grab it, the bastards. Children getting dropped from buildings and driven into lakes. There is something wrong with a society that lets that happen. Not that po
or Ava meant it to happen. But she shouldn’t have let them out of her sight for a second. Not a second. I just can’t stop thinking about them!’

  ‘Did you tell the police that you thought Ava was sometimes a bit delusional about me? You’ve said that before. It’s just – I’m in a bit of a spot here, Vanessa. They always suspect the father.’

  ‘Yes, I did say that. I said—’

  ‘Did they ask you about Ava’s breakdown?’

  ‘You mean when I looked after the kids after your fight? Yes.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said Ava was very upset. And that I didn’t know why, because no-one told me why.’

  ‘Did you say it went on for a while? That she wouldn’t see a doctor?’

  ‘I said I didn’t remember how long it went on for.’

  ‘Do you think they’ll see what she’s capable of? How she’s made me suffer? That she might even be behind this?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Are you saying she’d lie to the police? Ava? She’s so honest it’s painful.’

  ‘You don’t know her like I do.’

  ‘No, it’s you that doesn’t know her. Sometimes it seems like you don’t really see people, Lawrence; you just look for your own reflection in them.’

  ‘That’s Ava’s view of me. Has she said that to you?’

  ‘We never discuss you. And for some reason she’s not answering my calls or texts.’

  ‘She’ll be losing it, Vanessa. She’s not stable . . .’

  He decided he did not want to see Vanessa. He said goodbye and terminated the call and turned the car around. He stopped off for a Raspberry Split at a local milk bar and sucked it joylessly.

  In his bedroom he threw his antidepressant medication into the metal waste basket. It was dulling his wits when he needed them most. He slipped between smooth, ironed sheets and lay still as a stuffed doll and waited for sleep. Eight minutes passed as unconnected moments without memory or emotion before he entered the deep twelve-hour sleep that does not let go.