by Leanne Hall
‘It had crossed my mind,’ she admits. ‘But they can’t investigate every man associated with the school. How many girls are there? Two thousand? How many dads, stepdads, boyfriends could that add up to? I don’t think they have the resources.’
Mum has never held anything back about Dad’s past, or hers either, at least as far as I know. I know she was a wild-child in the nineties, first a grunge groupie in her teens, then a raver at university. I know about her fighting with her family and the fallout over Dad.
I know Dad was more enthusiastic about drugs than her, and that his enthusiasm led to two charges of possession. Mum has always said that as soon as she got pregnant Dad cleaned his act up, but I don’t remember what it was like when I was a toddler. I’m not sure if it was that simple. But being into drugs when you were young has nothing to do with abducting teenage girls.
‘Are you glad you went tonight?’ I ask.
‘Those parents were intense.’
I laugh. ‘I know! I was terrified!’
‘I guess they pay through their nose for the fees so they think they have the right. They expect so much.’ She puts her indicator on. ‘Are you sure you’re good for tomorrow night?’
Mum had to change shifts so she could come tonight; she wouldn’t normally work Friday nights.
‘It’s fine.’
‘I can ask Pearl again.’
‘Not two nights in a row,’ I say. ‘Me and Sam will have bonding time, it’ll be good.’
‘You should be out with your friends,’ she murmurs, taking the exit ramp. We’re almost home. ‘Who was that nice-looking girl you were talking to up the back? Is she a Balmoral buddy?’
I snort at her casual tone. I know she’s concerned that I haven’t adjusted to Balmoral as well as I might have. In all the thinking about whether to take up the scholarship offer, I didn’t think about whether I would fit in, or what it meant to trick your way into somewhere you don’t belong.
‘I can’t comment at this point in the investigation,’ I say.
DAY 13
Sam pokes his BBQ pork with disposable chopsticks.
‘I don’t think it should be this colour.’ The sauce has stained the mound of rice pink around the edges. ‘Chlo. Chlo. Look.’
‘You chose it, so eat it and don’t waste my money.’
I was supposed to cook dinner for Sam and me tonight, but the better scenario is lazy times at Meridian Shopping Centre. And this way we’re not alone at home, bouncing off the walls and twitching at every innocent noise. The shopping centre is always packed on Friday nights and I’ve brought Mum’s camera with me. I’ve been trying to develop the habit of seeing the boring, everyday things around me with fresh eyes, but it’s not easy.
In our corner of the food court the canned music is loud; the flat screen on the wall opposite us is huge. Normally it’s showing music videos or football, but at the moment the evening news is playing soundlessly. Someone accidentally showed a nipple at an awards ceremony. And that’s called news.
Most of my year level will be getting ready for Grace’s party right now. Bochen told me they were providing minibuses for the boarders. Even I’d been invited. Granted, it was only because I’d been standing at the lockers next to Petra, and Grace is nice enough that she couldn’t help but hand me an invite too. Apparently her parents insisted on paper invitations, to stop gatecrashers finding out about the party online and arriving in the hundreds. Good luck with that, Chapmans.
I watch Sam herd the peas from his fried rice to one side of his plate, mumbling to himself. My own lemon chicken is a suspect shade of yellow, but tastes as MSG-good as ever. Maybe we can watch a movie when we get home. I let Sam watch MA-rated movies and stay up past 9 p.m. when Mum’s not around. I told him about our self-defence class and now he wants to do a Bruce Lee marathon.
I should feel like a loser for preferring to hang out with my ten-year-old brother than go to a party, but I don’t.
I switch Mum’s camera on and fill the viewfinder with my radioactive yellow dinner, Sam’s plate lurking in the background as red, white and green blotches. Snap. I try again, turning the wheel to macro and getting up real close. Mum’s camera does not cope well with low light. There’s no way I’ll be able to hold it steady enough.
When I look up at the flat screen again the grainy CCTV footage of Yin is playing, both bits. This morning the news sites started showing the same convenience store incident, but from a different camera. From the new angle you can see the flannel shirt guy a little bit better.
I can’t look away from it, as if somehow this time the video might be different.
The newsreader comes back on, but it’s impossible to know what she’s saying. Maybe she’s saying this is definitely the guy we’re looking for. Maybe someone will call the police tonight and say they recognise him. Maybe that will lead them to a house in a far-out suburb, and we’ll wake up tomorrow and find out that it’s over; they’ve found the creep and rescued Yin. Maybe then I can stop checking doors and windows and running through my dwindling list of reasons to stay at Balmoral.
‘I talked to Dad today,’ says Sam, out of nowhere.
‘Good for you.’ I push my plate away. A layer of congealed skin has formed over the lemon sauce. ‘Are you done?’
Sam skids in his slippery shoes all the way to the bargain games shop. I give him twenty minutes and twenty dollars of my own money. That kid has no idea how much I do for him.
The shopping centre is swarming: teenagers cruising each other, security cameras, security guards. Peace descends for the first time this week. I’m a bee in a swarm, a particle, part of a larger pattern. I have no separate thoughts or significant problems. I wander the corridors with Mum’s camera held in front of me, looking around for colours and patterns.
The tubs of jelly cups and coconut water at the Asian grocer become abstract and psychedelic if you get close enough, the reflections in the window of the brow bar fragment the customers inside, the aisles of the discount chemist warehouse are stark and artificial. I take photos of hair-netted women speed-folding dumplings in a restaurant window and old men gathered in the Greek coffee shop with their walking sticks hooked onto the table.
I swing past to check on Sam, and see him sitting on the shop floor with rows of games fanned in front of him. I snap a photo of him through the window and he doesn’t even look up. If I turn it black and white, if I tweak it to make it look pixellated and gritty, it would look exactly like a surveillance photo.
At the camera store I look at digital SLRs I’ll never be able to afford, not even if I take off a hypothetical $500 won hypothetically in the non-hypothetical art prize and then add all the pocket money I can save this year. Mum’s old camera is a dinosaur compared to these muscly black models. I wish I’d thought to sign out one of the school’s fancy cameras for the weekend, so I could have practised with it. Brooke and Audrey take all their photos on film and use the darkroom to develop and print them, but we didn’t have a darkroom at Morrison, and I don’t have time to learn how to do it well enough for my project.
When I’ve looked at every camera in the shop, I retrace my steps to the games store to collect Sam.
The corner where he was sitting is empty now. I scan the store, looking in front of each shelf and bargain bin. Everywhere I look there are rows of browsing backs. Sam’s not at the info counter, or hiding behind a cardboard cut-out display.
I go to the front counter.
‘Have you seen a little kid? He’s ten, about this tall?’ My voice sounds normal even though my insides don’t. The sales assistant stops pricing games with a sticker gun.
‘Oh, hey,’ he says, as if he knows me. ‘Who are you looking for?’
‘My brother. He’s wearing a purple jumper and jeans, maybe?’
‘Sorry, no. Nick, you haven’t seen a kid on the loose have you?’
His work colleague shakes his head.
The assistant puts down his gun. ‘Do you want some help l
ooking for him?’
‘No, no thanks.’
I exit the store and look both ways up the aisle, a frantic feeling already coming on. I look at waist level among the crowds of shoppers. No Sam.
I turn to ice. My fingers, toes, all the way to the ends of my hair, and especially my heart.
I walk to the end of one aisle, look up and down the next row of shops, then go back to the other end and robotically repeat the action.
Sam is gone.
The next obvious place to check is the large entrance to the shopping centre. To the right is the food court where we ate dinner, to the left the gates to the subway.
I consider the sliding doors to the underground platforms. I picture a man holding Sam’s hand and leading him down the escalators, onto a train, and away. Forever. In my chest is a cold fist.
‘Chlo? Chlo?’
I turn so quickly I get vertigo.
Sam stands five metres away, holding a plastic bag with his precious games inside. He’s wearing his orange hoodie, not a purple jumper, and cargo shorts, not jeans.
‘There you are!’ I swoop, and in the time it takes me to reach my brother, I melt into fury. ‘Where were you? I told you not to move from there. You know to stay put! It’s the first rule.’
‘I was looking for you! I was trying to find you!’
Sam keeps repeating these meaningless words over and over as I grab his wrist and drag him towards the doors. I’m hot all over; something flutters around my body, something has been let loose. I keep moving to disguise it.
‘Chloe!’ Sam pulls away until I stop. He pulls his hand free and rubs his wrist. ‘You’re hurting me.’ His lower lip is suspiciously trembly. Then—whispering—‘I couldn’t find you.’
I look back at him, and he looks so confused and indignant, and little, really. A little kid. And I haven’t been thinking clearly, because the guy doesn’t snatch boys from shopping centres, he goes for girls in their homes.
I remember the quad last week—which already seems eons ago—and Milla repeating the police’s questions: Was she scared of anything?
Yes. I can almost hear the thoughts of every single girl in my year level. We’re all scared, of almost everything.
DAY 18
The library doors are so heavy it’s no wonder that I only go in there when I’m forced to. There’s a schunk as the doors come apart, as if I’m stepping into an airlock, shortly to be sprayed with disinfectant and handed a Hazmat suit. Our school librarians give off the very strong vibe that they would prefer students to stay out of their facility.
I shoulder in like the brave pioneer I am, keeping my head down, and I swear there’s a pause in the beep-beep of the barcode scanner when I walk past the loans counter. The library smells different, a foreign country that I barely realised existed. There’s a row of girls along the far wall, glued to computers, and a cushion pit full of people reading.
‘What is this mystical language?’ I ask the neat laminated signs taped to the end of each row of shelves. I tap the Dewey Devil number 666 and abandon the non-fiction section, prowling up the alphabet in fiction until I find my prey.
Eight identical brown spines line up next to each other on the shelf, which I guess is because we were supposed to be studying this book in English. Supposed to be, because the teachers have changed their minds: as of this morning it is off our reading list. Of course I asked why, and of course Ms Clarke was super vague. So here I am, in uncharted lands, looking for a verboten book.
‘Hello, my forbidden fruit that tastes all the more sweet,’ I whisper to the paperback as I remove it from the shelf.
Picnic at Hanging Rock looks boring and historical, with a pretty blonde girl on the cover in a ye olde white flowing dress.
‘Hi, Natalia.’ A tiny mousy voice.
Grace Chapman hovers nearby, cradling a stack of books. She always has her head in a book, usually a novel featuring a supernatural love triangle, although in a change of scenery I accidentally saw her with her head in Andrew Taylor’s crotch behind the pool house last Friday night. Which is a bit weird, because it was her birthday party, so whose head should have been in whose lap, I ask you.
As much as I try to act normal, the fact remains that I can’t meet Grace’s eye. And it’s not because she’s caught me talking out loud to a book, or because I spotted her with Andrew, it’s because of what else happened on Friday night.
Let me paint the scene:
It is the aforementioned birthday party, a massively exaggerated affair attended by almost the entire year level, including the boarders who were bussed in and kept on a huge leash made from hundreds of school ties knotted together. No one has stopped talking about it all week: who hooked up with who, who spewed on one of the family cars, who was rejected by which Grammar boy and who smoked pot in the laneway out the back.
Is it abnormal to obsess over a party while someone you know is imprisoned in a house somewhere far from home? I think we all know the answer to that question.
We, by which I mean my lady squad and I, arrived fashionably late. Despite the fairy lights and the gazebo and the waiters with bow ties and the sparkling turquoise pool, the Chapmans’ backyard did not so much resemble a sophisticated soiree as a scene from a zombie film where the zombies can’t decide whether to eat brains or hump each other on the dance floor. As one of the few responsible non-zombies present, it was I who went to inform the adults that the bathrooms were fresh out of toilet paper.
It was I who followed Mr Chapman upstairs to fetch the paper, and it was I who was diverted into the study so Chapman could fetch more whisky, which he’d clearly had quite a bit of already. This was sketchy but ideal because I may or may not have remembered from my Balmoral brain catalogue that Grace’s dad is a detective and this may or may not have encouraged my very attendance at the soiree that evening. Do not underestimate my ability to focus on my goals.
Me: Is it true you’re a detective?
Chapman: Have you girls been talking about me behind my back?
Me: (Vomits a little bit inside my own mouth but carries on.) Haha, yeah of course. You’re all we talk about.
Chapman: I used to be, I’m in security consulting now. I was in the force for twenty years. The drug squad, then the homicide squad.
Me: So, do you still get access to inside information then?
Chapman: (Vagues out slightly while pouring whisky before snapping to.) You mean about the Mitchell case? You two were—
Me: Yes, of course, about Yin. Have you heard anything?
Chapman: I’ve heard they’ve sought advice from the FBI, so they’re taking it very seriously. (Leans sloppily on desk.) They’ll make another announcement soon, I think.
Me: What kind of announcement? Tell me.
Chapman: Be patient, it’ll come. It’s normal to be concerned. You’re very mature for your age, aren’t you Natalia? (LITERALLY X-RAYS MY TOP WITH HIS EYES.)
Me: Can we get the damn toilet paper, sir?
Or something like that. Maybe I didn’t say the last bit. But think about it—Grace has to live with that slimebag every day of her life. And I didn’t learn anything useful. Everyone else might be moving on, or pretending they’re not still counting the days Yin has been missing, but not me. Under the surface I’m not just paddling, but kicking anything in sight.
‘Great party last week, Grace.’ I back away fast, clutching my book.
If I needed further proof that the library is a nightmare if you don’t want to run into people, around the very next corner Art Class Chloe is practically living in the stacks, confirming several of my suspicions about her. She is kneeling on the ground, surrounded by folders and pencils and looking at several million art books.
‘Please save me from an awkward situation,’ I say, with maybe too much desperation. I’m too weird for my own good sometimes. Too weird for even the official weirdos. I sit near her on the floor.
Chloe looks startled and more than a little wary. I decide right her
e and now, looking at her geeky glasses and her high ponytail, that she’s so uncool she has come out the other side as very cool.
‘What awkward situation?’ She cranes her head, trying to see who’s nearby.
‘Never mind. It’s not important.’
I take a look at the scatter of books she’s pulled off the shelf.
‘Ms Nouri recommended these,’ she says. ‘I’m struggling with our self-portrait. And our main assessment too. All of it really.’
I have no reason at all to talk to her. I clutch for what we have in common. I’d better not mention accidentally blinding Petra in PE and how Chloe swept in like Mother Teresa and nursed her back to health.
‘Art prize. Are you doing it?’ I say.
‘I don’t know. No. I don’t think so. Why does everyone keep asking that? Are you?’
I snort. I took Art because it’s easier than taking politics or another language. I clock Chloe’s list of artists, written neatly in her exercise book, and the ripped up pieces of scrap paper she’s using as bookmarks, and her bulging sketchbook and the photocopies she’s made. For someone who isn’t entering the prize and says she’s struggling, she sure is doing a lot of work.
There are people like Sarah, who think they have something amazing to offer the world, and who do not in fact have anything to offer, and simply want to be internet famous. And then there are people like Chloe. She has plenty of interesting things to say, and yet she persists in acting like a creature lying at the bottom of a lagoon covered in mud, like a mythical mega-slug. Am I the only one who notices these things?
‘You should enter,’ I tell her. ‘I can tell you love that class and you love Ms Nouri. God knows why, but you like that sad, hairy lady. And you’re actually talented, so you should. I’d go for it myself if I wasn’t completely hopeless and lazy, and I’ll drop out of school if Audrey wins again.’
She looks at me with surprised hazel eyes and doesn’t seem to have anything to say to that, and then my cheeks start to go pink.