The Gaps

by Leanne Hall

  Two detectives, a man and a woman, stand by their car in the early hours of the morning, eating sausage rolls. Senior Detective Hillary Burns wears a woollen jumper, a no-nonsense parka, and has unbrushed hair and no makeup. By contrast, Senior Detective Pokerface McUptight is in an immaculate grey suit. He crumples his sausage roll packet and wipes his mouth.

  ‘You’ve got sauce on your face,’ he tells the woman, but she gives no fucks because all she cares about are the victims and she’s crushing patriarchal standards on a daily basis.

  Together they cross the car park and head up the stairs of the huge glass-and-concrete building. McUptight, real name McManus—way too close to anus—tries to wave her through the door first but Burns won’t have a bar of it.

  You’d think that the makers of Devil Creek would run out of reasons to show Emily Blake’s corpse, but you would be wrong. They keep sliding her out of her drawer in the morgue to do different things to her body or pan the camera over it one more time. When they’re not showing the body, the police detectives are flapping the crime scene photos of her wounded, half-naked corpse in front of every single person they interview, trying to shock them into a reaction.

  This episode, the quirky forensic pathologist with purple hair is fizzed-up over something she’s pulled out from underneath Emily Blake’s toenails and also what she describes as ‘tiny ritualised marks’ she’s found on the body. She says her ‘intuition’ tells her that the murderer is someone very close to the young woman, which is a weird thing for a scientist to say.

  ‘I don’t think Yin knew the person who took her,’ I say without taking my eyes off the screen. ‘I don’t think it’s anyone we know.’

  ‘Me neither,’ says Liv.

  When the pathologist folds down the sheet covering Emily, Liv shuts the lid of the laptop completely, with a snap. ‘I don’t care if you can take this, I can’t.’

  ‘Don’t you know it’s make believe?’ I ask her, but she won’t be moved.

  ‘Do you want to talk about it?’ she asks, but she already knows I don’t.

  Liv squishes into bed with me and won’t leave me alone. She makes me draw on her back with a finger, as if we’re still little kids. I hold one of Mum’s old orange paperbacks in my free hand, trying to read and draw at the same time. Liv’s back ribs poke through her pyjama top.

  ‘You reading that for school?’ Liv throws her head backwards. You can still see the puckered scar at her hairline, from when a German shepherd bit into her ten-year-old head.

  I grunt. I can read and back-scratch at the same time, no problem, but talking is too much.

  Half of me is in my lamplit bedroom, but the rest of me is hanging out in the English countryside with this posh family called the Mitfords who have a bazillion daughters, each of them more bizarre than the last. Every time my finger stops, my sister twitches to remind me to keep drawing.

  ‘Tal, you know I’m always here to help you,’ Liv says, out of nowhere. She flips over to face me. ‘I’m crap at keeping in touch, I know, but if you ever want to come over to my flat and hang, or just talk. You can call me any time of night, for any reason. I know what Mum and Dad are like.’

  I close the book. Liv’s face is currently twenty centimetres away from mine.

  ‘I’m okay,’ I tell her and I’m not lying and it’s not the truth either.

  No one at school has asked me how I’m doing since it happened. Mum and Dad have, but they don’t count. Maybe no one remembers who I used to be, and I did work hard to make it that way. Junior School is distant enough to seem like a dream.

  Liv looks younger close up, all her tattoos and piercings and spikiness blur out at the edges. We’ve got identical eyes, and would have the same colour hair if she didn’t dye hers black.

  ‘Why do you have to make yourself look so bad, Liv? You could be so pretty.’

  A wheezing laugh escapes from her, that turns into a racking cough. ‘Crap. I’ve gotta give up the smokes.’

  She flips on her back and thumps herself in the chest, which actually makes it worse. ‘You sound like Mum.’

  ‘Don’t you dare—’ I start, and bash her with my pillow.

  When I wake it takes me a few seconds to remember that I’m on the downstairs couch after Liv hogged my bed and snored too loud.

  My book is steepled on my chest and something is scraping at the front door.

  I sit up. The lounge is awash with moonlight from the back windows. The lawn is empty, peaceful. It sounds like a possum is trying to get into the house, but possums don’t normally use doors.

  I shuffle towards the front of the house and nearly walk into the corner of the hall table. There’s a heavy vase on it that I could smash over someone’s head. A person-shaped blob hovers behind the glass panels on the front door. The security door has been opened. A pink hand slaps against the frosted glass, fingers spread.

  I hold my breath and wait. My senses are so alert I could hear a mouse’s footstep. A key scrapes in the lock, the door clicks and swings open. Dad sways on the doormat. He straightens as soon as he sees me, but forgets to stop the screen door banging when he enters. You can tell how messy he is by how far his tie has wandered around his neck.

  ‘Thought I’d lost my keys.’ He holds them up, then drops them. I can smell the booze vapours from three metres away.

  ‘Where have you been, Dad?’ He pushes past me. It was only a few days ago that he and Mum had a massive fight about him coming home at all hours, every day of the week. It’s always work, or mates, or work mates.

  ‘Gary,’ he mumbles.

  Figures.

  Big Man About Town Gary, Head of the School Board Gary, Golf Gary. Sarah’s dad, Gary.

  ‘Gary—not too good,’ Dad says and continues unevenly through the house. He’s not looking crash hot himself. He stopped drinking for years, but now he’s back on it, and I don’t know what that means.

  After he’s gone upstairs I do a full circuit, checking the locks on all the doors and windows.

  DAY 7

  The house feels empty when Liv finally leaves on Saturday afternoon. She’s good at leaving spaces emptier than they were. The pantry hangs open, its contents ravaged, and there are dirty dishes piled up in the sink that no one can be bothered putting in the dishwasher.

  Dad is playing golf, leaving Mum bored and desperate to interact, so I duck upstairs, saying I’ve got homework to do. It’s not a lie, I do have homework, but I’ve got no intention of doing it.

  I lock my bedroom door and light my candles. My phone is going off, everyone trying to get me to say what we’re doing tonight. I put it on silent. The smell of liquefying wax relaxes me.

  Standing on tiptoes, I can barely reach the storage shelf at the top of my wardrobe. A garbage bag of shoes I’ve grown out of falls first. My fingers latch onto a handle.

  The green leather suitcase is a time machine.

  I almost threw it out when I moved from my old bedroom to this one, but something made me keep it. I slide both clasps to the side, and the case springs open.

  There’s a lot of junk inside, photos and badges and broken necklaces, my old school diary and bits of paper that contain a forgotten world. Forgotten people. Notes passed in class, invitations to birthday parties.

  Here’s a photo of me and Yin, in matching t-shirts with our arms linked, goofy grins. Ten years old, major dorks and joined at the hip, as we had been every year of Junior School. Yin’s thick black hair kicks up at the ends and I’m in the first year of braces. We’re on a summer camping trip with the Mitchells; I remember Yin still wasn’t sure about her new stepdad.

  It hurts to see her baby face. All the breath leaves my body.

  You know who I could always rely on to tell me the truth, to warn me before I went too far? Yin.

  She’d tell me to stop eating cupcakes or I’d spew, she’d turn the volume down before I got in trouble, yelled at me to stop climbing that tree, told me when I needed to apologise.

  I try
to see something ominous in the photo, dark shadows or figures in the trees or mysterious streaks of light, something to show that things were going to go very wrong for one of these girls, but there’s nothing. We might be the happiest kids in the world. Dirt smudges on our cheeks and twigs in our hair.

  I dump the contents of the case onto the bed.

  A photo of our graduating Grade Six class, ribbons from school athletics days, a certificate to say I’m allowed to write in ink. And then there are other things.

  Plastic ‘gemstones’ imbued with magic powers. Silk flowers in colours that show which clan we belong to. A rubber rabbit from a farm animal set that travelled to earth from the moon. Yin’s mum used to tell her stories about the moon rabbit coming down to earth so we wrote it into our stories. The exercise book we scribbled our secret language in, and the written history of our lands, our spells.

  At the bottom, the greatest treasure, the worn piece of paper that we’d spent hours on. We always fought over who got to keep it at their house. I had the stronger will, even then.

  A map of our home kingdom and the rival kingdoms surrounding it. Drawn lovingly in gel pens and Derwent pencils.

  Wingdonia.

  Oh, so childish.

  I haven’t seen it for years, and it’s surprisingly detailed. The mountain ranges come back, the waterfalls and valleys, villages and ports. Wingdonia was shaped like a boot; it kicked the neighbouring kingdom of Plentificent off into the Aerie Ocean.

  Yin had the best ideas about the geography, because of the dozens of fantasy novels she’d read, but I had the best ideas about the people, the families and the politics.

  There were four clans, each with their own back story and special powers.

  Have I been homesick all these years for a place that doesn’t exist?

  Yin and I were travelling warrior queens of the Opal clan, fairy immortals imbued with magic, but masquerading as flesh-and-blood humans. We’d built our world from scratch, painstakingly, over the years. Etching the lines deep and adding sprinkles of glitter. There’d been times when Wingdonia had seemed more real than reality.

  But the kingdom crashed, war broke out and the game ended. It didn’t make it through the transition to high school, and neither did our friendship.

  Everything goes back into the suitcase again, except for the map, which I fold up into a small rectangle and slide into the hidden compartment in my purse, wedging it up against a condom that Liv gave me.

  I go to the mirror and look at my dry eyes, trying to see beyond myself, underneath to where the ten-year-old might still live, but there’s nothing there. I try to picture Yin standing behind my shoulder, but I can’t conjure her.

  Why did I push her away? I can’t remember now.

  I have a huge red pimple welling up on my chin and a few suspect bumps on my cheek, and it’s typical that I had good skin all week but now I’m breaking out for the weekend.

  I unscrew the jar of expensive clay mask that Mum’s allergic to and paint thick lines across my face with the plastic spatula, tough battle lines like a rugby player, and then I don’t stop, I paint my whole face out until it’s nothing but crackly pink mud and I erase all my thoughts with it until I have a blank blank brain.

  DAY 10

  As soon as school ends I join the trail of girls walking across the main oval to the tram stop. The parklands adjoining the school are visible through the wire fence. Police in navy and hi-vis yellow walk up and down the U-shaped trough of the creek, sweeping across the park in rough lines. They weren’t there last week, so I wonder what’s happened to bring them out now.

  ‘Let’s see if any of them are hot.’

  A gaggle of Year Nines peel off and plaster themselves to the fence. I slow so much that someone behind me treads on the back of my shoe.

  More police, in orange overalls and waterproof waders, push through the water. One of the closest police officers—a normal navy-and-yellow—looks up and sees us staring. For a moment it seems she might come over and talk to us, but then one of her colleagues calls her away.

  ‘I don’t like it. It’s scary.’ A tiny Year Seven looks close to tears. One of her friends hooks her arm and comforts her.

  The teacher manning the gate gets impatient.

  ‘Come on girls! Pick up the pace!’

  There are more cars than usual on the side street, a long queue from the gate almost to the highway. Some parents or drivers are paranoid enough to congregate around the gate, scrolling on their phones.

  I cram on the tram with the mass of Balmoral students, my face right up against a Year Twelve’s armpit. Three separate groups of Year Tens dominate the rear of the tram; talking too loud and checking their phones and oversharing. More than a few of them hold the letter we’d been given at final roll call, the one marked strictly for parents or guardians. I guess what it contains is too sensitive for an email.

  Eventually, inevitably, someone cracks and rips the envelope open.

  I hang onto an overhead handle and eavesdrop.

  ‘It’s an emergency parent info night.’ The girl scans the letter. ‘This Thursday night. That’s not much notice.’

  ‘Something must have happened.’

  ‘What is there to say? Don’t be scared even though there’s a Hannibal Lecter on the loose?’

  ‘Please don’t take your daughter out of school because we need your money to build a new theatre?’

  ‘Shit, do you think Grace’s party is going to get cancelled?’

  This causes a wave of panic through most of the Year Tens. Grace Chapman’s sixteenth has dominated conversations this week. It’s amazing how people can switch from gossiping about our teachers providing DNA samples to what they’re going to wear on Friday night in one breath.

  Teaghan sits behind Brooke, braiding her hair. ‘Can’t they see we want to have one night where we don’t have to think about anything?’

  I jump off at the Junction with dozens of other Balmoral girls, feeling as if I’ve collected strands of everyone else’s hair on my blazer and need to shower.

  After acquiring my usual can of lemonade and apple scroll from the bakery, I move on to the bus stop. I could do this trip in my sleep, if I had to. It takes me forty-five minutes to get home: a tram and a bus. The first three years of high school I could walk for ten minutes and be at the entrance to Morrison High.

  A handful of army-green All Saints boys are at the bus stop, along with two pensioners and a tired mum with a stroller containing a sleeping toddler. The bus is late. I haven’t called Dad yet, and I haven’t spoken to Liana since last week or answered any of Katie’s messages.

  I’d thought I could show up at school and do the work, then catch up with my real friends on the weekend. I’d make some friends at Balmoral, not close ones, and not heaps. Maybe a trio, like the one Claire, Milla and Yin formed, a loose bond with girls that are in a few of my classes. That would have been enough.

  The thing is, I don’t think I can reverse my decision now.

  I’ve seen what it’s like.

  Balmoral girls get more homework, extra reading, extension exercises. The world is expected of us. Our teachers are available at lunch, after school and even on holidays, to go over our assignments and tests in detail. They’re paid to push us hard, we have to deliver, and I’m doing things that I wouldn’t be able to achieve at Morrison. I’ve got to pedal hard just to keep up with the pack.

  I can’t go back to my old school.

  If Liana could see the brand-new science labs we get to use, the shiny state-of-the-art equipment, she’d be amazed, and maybe furious. Sitting the scholarship exam wasn’t even my idea, it was hers.

  She wanted to get into McGowan, a selective state school with a good netball team and specialist STEM program. We did practice exams together, then sat in the same massive room at the Showgrounds, along with hundreds of other hopeful teenagers vying for spots at independent schools around the state. But when the results came in, it was me that got t
he offers: a full scholarship to Balmoral, or a half-scholarship to Sheltower Girls Grammar.

  I jam the rest of the scroll into my mouth and crumple the paper bag. Natalia and her gang are hanging out the front of the juice bar, right next to the bus stop. They must have been on the tram before mine. Apparently there’s a secret shortcut through the grounds that gets you to the tram stop early, but no one’s ever shown me. The boys they’re with, some spoilt guys from Norton Grammar, are making a big show of flexing their muscles and pushing each other around, even while they’re sucking on hot-pink takeaway cups.

  Sarah has taken off her blazer and rolled her winter skirt up so it barely covers her butt. She’s sitting on one boy’s lap, but the rest of the girls are more interested in their phones than the Grammar boys.

  Natalia stands apart from the rest, eyes on her phone, with Ally looking over her shoulder. They don’t care that they’re blocking the footpath, forcing shoppers to flow around them.

  I pretend to read my Biology textbook while I eavesdrop.

  ‘I can’t believe she’d go out in those pants,’ Ally says. ‘Again. I’ve got chills.’

  The two girls watch the screen quietly, and at one point Ally squeals.

  When whatever they’re watching finishes, Natalia looks up and catches my eye. I can tell that she’s pissed off with Ally by the way she’s angled away from her. Her eyes are hollow.

  ‘What are you looking at?’ Natalia calls out, but I know it’s just a reflex. There’s no fire in her words. She seems blank, empty as a lost sock, especially compared to how she was last week. She was so jumped up in self-defence class that she was lucky she didn’t take Petra’s eye out.

  Behind her I can see the Grammar boys checking her out, and I don’t blame them. Perfect tanned skin, skinny legs and boobs the exact right size, those supermodel eyes, blue-green, set far apart and a bit alien.

  I hold her gaze and shrug. I can read your mind, a bit, I think. Something’s wrong with you. I can tell you’re wearing a mask.

  Natalia eyeballs me for a few more seconds before turning back to her friends.