Sheerwater

by Leah Swann

  ‘It seems kind of, I don’t know, a long shot,’ Ava muttered, watching Simon peel up the plastic to remove the photograph and snap it with his phone before slipping it into the inner pocket of his jacket.

  Ava’s phone rang loudly in the quiet room where, finally, the heater was generating warmth. It was Vanessa.

  Ava walked outside to take the call. She tried to swallow the stone in her throat where the fear had lodged. She listened to her mother’s voice and watched white rain thread the silvery air. From the direction of the manse, a couple was approaching under an umbrella: Grace and the Reverend. Grace had Winks on a lead and above them a suspended gull flew madly at the wet wind.

  Her mother was telling her not to worry about the boys, and some drivel about how Ava should win a medal for saving the pilot, that Vanessa had always known that one day her daughter would do something great, with her bravery, her physical courage, her skills, her quick thinking under pressure, her impulse to serve; Vanessa was so proud, her daughter was amazing, her daughter was a hero . . . On and on, a silly quicksand Ava refused to enter. It was meant to comfort her, perhaps. It was meant to distract her from the horror. Her mother’s intentions were sometimes good and her execution almost always inept. And she was deluded about Lawrence – even when Ava had described the events that led up to her decision to take out the intervention order, her mother had made excuses for him.

  ‘Stop, Mum,’ she said now, as Grace and Caleb turned in at the gate. She fought off an urge to grab Grace’s arm as one might grasp a passing tree root while being swept downriver. She bent down and patted Winks. ‘I have to go. I’ll let you know if I hear anything about the boys.’ She ended the call without waiting to hear her mother’s response.

  ‘Are you okay?’ said Grace. Caleb’s guiding hand was on the small of her back, and he smiled kindly at Ava from under the rain-speckled umbrella.

  ‘My mother,’ Ava replied. ‘She just went on and on about me rescuing the pilot. She barely mentioned the boys. She kept telling me not to worry. It’s just a ridiculous thing to say.’

  ‘She’s probably trying to help,’ said Caleb.

  ‘Nothing matters more than the boys,’ said Grace, and put her arm around Ava.

  Grace’s restorative stillness was in sharp contrast to her mother’s claptrap. Ava bit down the weird sense of bewilderment her mother so often inspired. Vanessa was like Lawrence in one key respect: she was predictably disappointing in unpredictable ways. Ava had always assumed this was due to her own shortcomings – she was too thin-skinned, too easily let down. There’d be some reason that she’d ended up with a man who was not unlike her mother. Seeking love from the unloving to vindicate some inner belief in her lack of lovableness: something as crazy and as obvious as that. Though it wasn’t fair to say that her mother was unloving, exactly. Selfish, yes. Vain, yes.

  ‘If anyone hurt my two I’d be after them with an axe,’ said Grace.

  Caleb shook his head slightly, as though shocked by Grace’s words. She gave him a stern look. ‘Some stuff is primal,’ she said. ‘It runs deeper than the rules. It’s what we have the rules for.’

  Simon was leaning in the doorway, concentrating on his phone. Ava swallowed again.

  ‘Texted that photo to Ballard,’ he told her. ‘They’re running the image through their system. We’ve got to meet her at the station.’

  ‘What photo?’ asked Caleb.

  ‘It was in one of my photo albums – it shows a friend of Lawrence’s,’ Ava heard herself say. ‘Simon thinks she might have something to do with it.’

  ‘I saw her. Or something,’ Simon added.

  Ava noticed the glance between Grace and Caleb.

  ‘Well, let’s go,’ Caleb said.

  ‘What am I missing?’ Ava asked. Her shoulders were rigid. In fact, her whole body was so tense, so crumpled and compacted, it seemed she was only upright because she was suspended by her head, awake in a new and intense and bizarre way, powered by some ancient instinct to keep seeking her children.

  The men set out under a patch of blue pushing the clouds apart; Simon was showing the image on his phone to Caleb.

  ‘Simon gets . . . intuitions, you could call them. He’s had them since childhood,’ Grace replied. She took Ava’s arm and they walked down the path, Winks at their heels. ‘Watch out for snakes,’ Grace added. ‘We had sunny weather last week and the local paper says the warm days have brought them out of hibernation early.’

  Ava gazed out at the sea between the houses as they walked the short track to the township. Sheerwater. The sea was never sheer in this place. It was opaque, inky: a set of wild indigo whirlpools from some brutal myth of creation. Everything here was extreme: the light and the dark and the savage wind that made you shiver and wore you away. Her eyes ran, and she blinked. Why had she thought this a beautiful place to bring her boys? It was a hateful place! Her nostrils flared at the stench of seaweed rising as rotten as carcasses and she saw birds flap out of the dunes as though disturbed by those snakes: tiger snakes and eastern browns and lowland copperheads, their skulls glinting like coins.

  She could not remember that woman being at her wedding, and only a vague recollection of her otherwise. This disturbed her. She prided herself on her sharp recall of people and events. Her essential idea of herself, and her aims in life, were nourished by memory.

  Aims in life. What a joke. What aims? As a child she’d colluded in Wes’s vision for her to become a champion swimmer; later she’d hoped to write a doctoral thesis on Blake and become a poetry lecturer at Melbourne University. Pipe dreams, as it turned out. All these widening gaps: from the moment she met Lawrence, when another life was still imaginable, to the moment yesterday when she chose to stop at the accident. The widening gyre . . . from Yeats’s poem ‘The Second Coming’ – that was it! This is what time does with its fierce trickery, making you believe all is possible, and then taking you away from what’s possible. Since Max’s birth she’d been so caught up in raising him and then Teddy, and dealing with the shocks of her marriage, that her ‘aims’ were dissipating like dust. She’d sustained herself with the idea that she would remember whenever there came a time she could pick up her studies again and become a different sort of person, leading a different sort of life. That her memory was unreliable, that it might even contain blank spaces like those she’d observed in Lawrence, made her anxious, uncertain, unmoored.

  4

  ‘Have you seen the news?’ asked Ballard when they arrived. She was chewing gum. ‘Watch this.’

  Only Ava, Simon and Grace followed her into the small room, as Caleb had offered to stay outside with Winks. Ballard muted the volume on a wall TV and gestured them to gather round a laptop. On the screen in a freeze frame was Lawrence. He was sitting on a couch in his white shirt with his hair combed, gazing into the camera, and Ava’s lungs constricted. What was he doing?

  Out of nowhere came another shred, a proverb. No-one is my friend, no-one is my enemy, everyone is my teacher. Lawrence was her teacher. But this was not a proverb. This was real. It seemed unreal. Or maybe more than real. What was real? Her mind was babbling. For God’s sake, Ava, get a grip.

  ‘It was shot in a TV studio in Geelong a couple of hours ago,’ Ballard said. ‘Some journo got hold of him. Every news station now has it.’

  She pressed play. Lawrence held up two framed photographs, each one showing him with one of his sons. Ava had taken those photographs with the intention of creating happy memories, even though things between her and Lawrence were not happy when she took them. She saw the lie. They were more than simply obsolete, she thought. Something obsolete was once relevant. These images documented the pointlessness at the heart of her family project.

  ‘Look at my boys. They are my reason for living,’ Lawrence was saying.

  How open his face was! How much light was in his eyes and how much delicate pain in his lips, as though even to speak hurt him! No, she was wrong, she must be wrong, there was love there, a
nd no-one could fake that, no-one! Something had gone mysteriously wrong between them, she couldn’t see it, she’d been somehow unanchored from the truth and she didn’t know how to get back to it. Maybe Lawrence was right about her.

  ‘Every one of you who has loved a child knows how I am feeling.’

  ‘Yes,’ murmured Grace.

  Lawrence was looking into the lens and it seemed he was looking straight at Ava. You are my beautiful domain, he’d once told her. I travel you like the gleaming rose sands of Raak Plains or the dark mystery of Sherbrooke Forest.

  ‘Love brings out the best in us,’ he continued, gazing out of the screen.

  His voice was so low and rasping and resonant! Ava heard the emotion and felt the answering tightness in her throat and moisture in her eyes. She was astonished to find herself yearning to be by Lawrence’s side, holding his hand, facing this hardship together. How could she doubt his sincerity? No-one could doubt his sincerity!

  ‘I call on the public to help me. I am launching a private search because I don’t believe anyone loves a child as much as a parent does. I won’t let anyone take my beautiful sons from me. Look at them!’

  The frame closed on the two small faces once more and the clip ended. Ballard turned up the volume on the wall TV, which was tuned to ABC News 24.

  Ava clasped her hands together, needing to hold on to something, to stop this weird Escher-like descent from one reality to another. ‘So he’s in Geelong. Will you stop him for questioning?’

  ‘We don’t know where he is. He’s not answering calls,’ Ballard replied. ‘And he’s ditched the car. A parking inspector had it towed from a ten-minute parking spot – Mrs Bain was notified.’

  But why? Where was he? What the hell was he doing?

  ‘Max and Teddy don’t look like that now,’ Ava said. ‘Those photos won’t help anyone find them.’

  ‘Interesting,’ said Ballard, grinding her gum like gristle and staring at the frozen laptop screen. ‘Those photos he’s chosen create such a powerful sense of how much Lawrence loves them. Because they’re little. A loving young father holding his baby sons.’

  ‘What’s he doing?’ said Ava. ‘Is he saying he can do better at finding them than the police? Is he trying to distract us?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ said Ballard. ‘I was hoping you could tell me.’

  There must be something Ava didn’t yet know, something to do with the green balloons, the red hair, someone else, something else. Lawrence had his faults but he was the father of those beautiful boys. His genes ran through them and surely only goodness could author a moral character like Max’s? Or did each person arrive with their own tiny seed of morality that was unique and utterly discrete?

  Ballard’s phone was ringing. She picked up and listened for a moment.

  ‘Okay. Righto. I see. She instigated it. Hold on to her then, I want to have a chat,’ Ballard said and ended the call.

  She turned to Ava. ‘So that was more information about the journalist who approached Lawrence to interview him. She’s saying she persuaded him that he’d add another dimension to the story and make people sympathetic to him.’

  ‘But whose side is she on?’

  ‘No-one’s. She’s just looking for a fresh angle to keep the story going.’

  Ava looked out the window at soft clouds racing across the sky and remembered running with Lawrence under similar clouds at the botanic gardens. The two of them were running so fast they were almost tripping, panting, holding hands under that laughing sky, and Ava had never felt so happy, so loved, so known . . . and yet she was not known, and she was not loved, not even then, she could not have been, because love is not fleeting, love does not curdle like milk, surely love’s mark – whether the love of a mother, child, friend or lover – is that it lasts. Love is steadfast. Back then no new thought had come with the dusk creeping over the grasses and the breeze brought no premonition – their sons were not yet born and she was still contained. She still trusted Lawrence. She had not yet brought that uncontainable vulnerability into the world.

  ‘Ava?’

  Ava was suddenly aware that the detective – with one hand on her hip and smelling of spearmint – occupied a universe where people were cases, details were puzzle pieces, and no-one could be trusted for a second. ‘So – is Lawrence considered to be missing now that he’s not in the car and not answering his phone?’ Ava asked. ‘Does it mean he has something to do with it?’

  ‘It could be that he’s just made a bad decision. People do strange things under pressure. He’s not answering calls, which is not a good sign. Maybe he forgot a charger and his phone’s flat. We think he might be using public transport. Again, odd. He did say he’s not himself right now. He’s stressed. We’ll find him, don’t worry.’ Ballard moved closer to Ava and said, ‘We need a word alone.’

  Hearing this, Simon and Grace quietly left the room.

  ‘Were you aware that Lawrence was at your house a few nights ago? The police doorknocking on your street told me yesterday that someone who knew about the IVO had seen him leave in the early morning.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We asked him about it yesterday. He says he ended up lying down in the sandpit that he made for them,’ Ballard flipped open her notepad. ‘He claims he just wanted to look at them – and that the IVO was breaking his “lovely links with humanity”.’

  Ava narrowed her eyes. Something in what the detective was saying bothered her. She tried to identify it. ‘What else – did he say anything else?’

  ‘He claims he wants to rebuild his relationship with you. That the only thing left to him is “absolute humility”.’

  ‘Oh!’ Ava dropped her head into her hand and gave a small, grim laugh. ‘Oh my God. He’s spinning you a line. Lovely links with humanity. Absolute humility.’

  Ballard frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Those phrases are from De Profundis, by Oscar Wilde. He was reading it to me just before I asked him to move out. He knows that he has to come off looking a certain way. He looks for someone to model himself on. Now, for the first time, I’ve succeeded in defending myself – getting him out of the house, getting the IVO. He feels like he’s trapped, as you say. So what does he draw on? The last thing we were reading together. Wilde’s letter to his ex-lover Bosie, written from jail. Oh my God, he’s a genius. He’ll have taken his whole posture, his whole tone, from that.’

  It was a relief to put it into words. She’d found something true, she’d caught it, the ephemeral, ever-disappearing thing – the pose. Even the most authentic-sounding pose is still a pose. But did the detective get what she meant?

  Ballard was looking at her, chewing more slowly. ‘He says you’re the one who’s the master of detail. Who creates convincing narratives.’

  ‘Well, he would say that. And he didn’t make the sandpit, the lying fucker. It was me and a guy called Dwayne from Hire a Hubby.’ She was starting to panic again. She raised her hands in the air as though to dismiss this distraction. ‘But we must get to the boys before he does. They’re the innocent ones and now—’

  Ballard’s phone rang again. She answered it, said a few words and ended the call, not taking her eyes from Ava.

  ‘Ava, we’ve got a name. That red-haired woman in the photo is called Kirsty Collins.’

  Ava registered the name with a mental click. That was it. With the name came other memories: a damp hand pressed over hers, inane compliments that left Ava sleeved in social discomfort – what lovely wavy hair you have, not like my rat’s tails – and a horrid sideways glance as Lawrence kissed her goodbye.

  ‘Yes, yes, Kirsty. I remember now. She was once Lawrence’s PA.’

  ‘She lives in Parkville. We’ve sent a car. What more can you tell me?’

  ‘I haven’t heard her mentioned for years.’

  ‘Anyone else we can contact? Who might know her?’

  ‘He’s got friends at work. But he’s at a different workplace now,’ said Ava. ‘I do
n’t know them.’

  ‘A best mate?’

  ‘Not really. There’s a guy he plays chess with, another he goes to concerts with sometimes.’

  Ava gave the detective a few names.

  ‘Nothing much here.’ Ballard’s voice was so neutral that Ava worried at what it concealed. The detective’s calm seemed intended to distract Ava from a deepening sense of something malign. Anxiety, blue and cold, crackled through her veins.

  ‘Is it true that when people go missing, if they’re not found in the first twenty-four hours then it’s unlikely they will ever be found?’

  The detective’s gaze snapped to attention. There it was. She’d forced the personality into a tiny space but in each eye was a point of energy in all that blandness, energy so concentrated, so potent, that Ava felt both reassured and frightened.

  ‘We don’t pay attention to statistics. We investigate the case,’ Ballard said. ‘Let’s focus on this Kirsty. Was she keen on Lawrence?’

  ‘Probably. He did sometimes bring women friends home from the office, young and gorgeous and looking me up and down; I tried not to let it upset me. He’s good-looking, he’s charming; he makes you feel as though there’s nothing and no-one in the world but you.’

  ‘Put these on,’ Ballard said, handing Ava a pair of cotton gloves. ‘Take a look at these.’ She placed a bundle of letters on the table. ‘Your forwarded mail. Arrived Friday. Someone from the post office dropped it to us.’

  ‘Why would they do that?’

  ‘You’ll see.’

  Ava put on the gloves and slipped the elastic band off the stiff stack of paper. An electricity bill, a superannuation statement and a Flybuys flyer. Last was a ‘naughty’ postcard with an image from the 1930s, a kitsch illustration of an attractive woman sitting on a picnic rug beside a bottle of wine, two wineglasses, and a basket with a giant baguette stuck suggestively upright. The woman was holding up her skirt to reveal a lace triangle. Ava flipped over the card and read her own name and the Wallace Street address, printed in capitals over a red smear that looked like blood.