The Gaps

by Leanne Hall

  Petra was right.

  One of the reporters asks a question, but it’s hard to hear what she’s saying.

  ‘I can’t comment on any other cases,’ replies Zambesi.

  ‘How many abductions or assaults do you think Doctor Calm may be responsible for?’ another reporter asks.

  ‘That’s your name, not mine.’ Zambesi’s mouth tightens with annoyance. The reporters clamour for attention but he holds up his hand.

  ‘Our main objective today is to tell you what we know about this man. He is between the ages of thirty and fifty, with medium skin tone. He is of average height, or tall with a slight stoop, and of average build. He is highly educated and well spoken. He may be in a prominent or respected position in the community, and it’s possible he has a job in which he travels frequently. Friends or family will know him to be a gentle and reserved person, and would be shocked to learn he is capable of violence.’

  ‘Make no mistake, we are looking for an extremely dangerous criminal. His methods are thorough and he may have some knowledge of police procedure. We are looking for an unusually intelligent individual who will not stop until he is caught.’

  He calls an end to the press conference, even though the reporters are still wetting their jocks and yelling out questions.

  I sit on my bed and let it sink in. I wasn’t expecting them to describe someone so completely bland. Beige beige unusually intelligent beige. A forgettable man with an unforgettable name.

  I shut the computer. I try hard not to be sick.

  It’s pointless even thinking about any of this police stuff. What can we do with the profile anyway? They don’t want us to discuss the case online. The teachers won’t tell us anything, and our parents don’t seem to know. Would they even listen to us if we went to them with information? I picture telling a teacher or police officer about Mr Chapman staring at my tits and emitting sleazy vibes and even I can acknowledge how tenuous it sounds.

  The Hanging Rock cover girl stares at me from my bedside table, ethereal, blonde and disappeared. Miranda. She acted strange right before she went missing.

  I saw Yin in the hallway on the Friday before she was taken. Normally we ignore each other—so studiously, so completely I’m surprised no one notices—but this time we stood and looked at each other, eye to eye, for a few seconds. It was odd. Had she been trying to tell me something? Did she have a premonition that something was about to go wrong?

  If Yin had been trying to send me a message that day, I didn’t receive it. Sarah came up behind me and leapt on my shoulders, and we both turned away slowly, Yin and I, like ships trying not to collide.

  DAY 20

  Ally stands on Marley’s bed and reads from a phone.

  ‘Number one: reach ten thousand followers. Number two: make out with someone famous. Number three: take Luca Henning-Smith to the formal. Number four: win Regatta.’

  As per usual we are getting ready at Marley’s house because her parents are the slackest and her room hangs right off the back of the warehouse, almost like she has her own apartment.

  We’re not being quiet enough, because Ally gets pissy, or as pissy as Ally gets, which is not very. ‘Shh, you guys! Listen.’

  ‘You’re not going to do any of those things,’ I say from my position at the mirror. Ally has a floppy headband on that definitely has to come off before we leave the house. Her legs are still covered in bruises from self-defence class. Ally has tissue-paper skin, she’s as delicate as the princess lying on the pea.

  Even though I’m here in the room with my friends, my mind keeps wandering back to Wednesday in the library and wondering what Chloe thinks of me. Few people can make me that off-kilter.

  Why did I even go up to her in the first place? She likes it at the bottom of her lagoon and I came along and disturbed her moss, her leaf litter, her driftwood, her algae.

  ‘Tal, are you even listening?’ Ally puts her hands on her hips. ‘It’s not my list, it’s Sarah’s.’

  On cue, Sarah yells, ‘Someone proper famous! I want you to know that. Not D-list famous. And I’ve got to get this done this year, or by the end of summer, at the latest.’

  Both have started early on the vodka, way too early in my humble opinion.

  Ally loses steam and slumps to her knees, burying her face in the covers. ‘We shouldn’t have to make bucket lists at our age. It’s depressing.’

  She pauses then adds, because Marley has been on antidepressants all year, ‘Sorry Marls, I didn’t mean that.’

  ‘No probs.’ Nothing much touches Marley. She keeps scrolling on her iPad. In between scrolls she grabs a Tim Tam from an open pack. Ally and Sarah ignore the biscuits, because they’re in a yearlong competition to see who can eat the least.

  ‘If you want to try pot, I think I know someone who can get some,’ Marley offers.

  I feign surprise. ‘Your parents make you pay?’

  ‘Ha ha.’ Marley throws a Tim Tam at my head, and misses.

  Marley’s parents are rock-and-roll royalty without actually being musicians. They own practically this whole factory block—the warehouse, the rehearsal rooms and the recording studios—and for all we know maybe they do deal pot on the side.

  I smooth on more BB cream to cover the red marks on my chin. Too much of my brain is taken up with wondering why the media is calling him Doctor Calm. It’s a messed-up name—it makes me think of surgery masks and bright lights and big syringes.

  ‘Why’ve you got so much eyeliner on? You look like that goth from Art.’ Sarah tries to hand me the vodka bottle but I wave it away.

  Marley’s makeup is spread all over the vanity. Her mum buys the expensive stuff, the kind that comes with toiletry bags full of free gifts. Usually Sarah is in charge of eyes, because she’s got the steadiest hand, but she’s already too smashed. Her lipstick is wonky, but I don’t plan on pointing that out to her.

  Sarah pushes Ally’s feet away from her. ‘When are you going to change those?’

  ‘They’re my good-luck socks,’ Ally protests. ‘I can’t take them off, they could be the only thing keeping me alive.’

  ‘Well, just so you know, you’re killing me with the smell.’

  My makeup inspiration for the evening is: Teen Crystal Warrior Queen. I’ve used about five different types of highlighter to achieve the Opal clan’s updated look. ‘I don’t expect you to understand,’ I say mildly. It’s embarassing to go around looking the same as your friends anyway. I leave the zip on my stolen satin jacket at half-mast to maximise my boobs. Nice.

  ‘Have you seen this Report Card thing? People rate their teachers. Balmoral’s on it, there are twenty-three teachers listed.’ Marley reads from the screen. ‘Mrs Wang, Ms Baker, Ms Nouri…Ms Nouri needs to get some waxing strips immediately—ha! Interesting fashion sense because she dresses like a medieval peasant. That’s accurate. Mr Purdy, Mr Scrutton.’

  ‘Read about Purdy.’ I had him last year and it’s fair to say we had a major personality clash.

  ‘Mr Purdy blocks every website on the internet when we’re in the labs, plus he’s moody—oh, that’s an old comment, he’s been at the school forever. Hang on. Mr Purdy is creepy, he sits with his legs wide open to show off his family jewels.’

  ‘More.’ Sarah is agog. She feeds off the comments section.

  Marley continues. ‘At first I really liked having him as my teacher but then he started creeping me out…people like him because he’s slack and tells us what’s on the test but sometimes he says inappropriate things. Um, then there’s: This one time when he was handing back my exam he deliberately brushed my hand and I’d bet anything that he’s Doctor Calm.’

  Sarah is enraged by this.

  ‘What? Noooo! It’s Tyrone, the hot serial killer photographer. Gimme that.’

  She grabs the iPad. ‘I’m making an entry for him. Tyrone Martell is the school photographer and he’s a sex manic and perv and if anyone should be the main suspect of being Doctor Calm, it’s him. If you search h
is house you’ll find photos of the students with the most developed breasts. There. You should all put comments too.’

  ‘Maniac,’ contributes Ally, ‘Not manic.’

  ‘He doesn’t fit the police profile.’ I’m gripping the mascara wand so hard it might snap. ‘No one we know does.’

  ‘Is Mrs Mancini on there?’ Ally asks. ‘She promised that we could watch a movie on the last day of term, then she wouldn’t let us and I complained, and she goes, “Don’t put lies in my mouth, Allison.”’

  Marley swings her fancy Bao Bao bag. ‘Tal, shouldn’t we get going soon? Mark and Ben and the others said they’d meet us there.’

  For a second I can’t take how immature it all is, and then I imagine the girls from Picnic at Hanging Rock superimposed over my friends, imagine that they’re excited about a wholesome picnic in the bush rather than getting groped by Grammar boys at Shelter.

  The illusion doesn’t even hold for a second. Sarah is splotchy from booze, Marley’s under the impression that she’s wearing pants when in fact she’s not, and Ally looks like an adorable little girl. I hug her. She smells of Marc Jacobs Daisy and fierce liquor and arranges her thin arms around my neck like a toy monkey.

  I whisper in her ear. ‘I saw you sniff Marley’s pillow. Pervert.’

  Ally squeals and pushes me away. ‘Taaalll! I did not!’

  She’s traffic-light red, burning up with guilt, even though I made the whole thing up. I’m full of a bursting mean, poking feeling. I want someone to ask me about Yin so I can tell them to shut their faces. I’ve been waiting for someone to finally inevitably actually be brave enough to say something to me about her out loud.

  ‘We’ll go to the park for a bit,’ I announce, ‘then Shelter.’

  They don’t dispute the schedule, they never do.

  ‘I’m cold,’ complains Ally. ‘And bored.’

  Her whining is irritating, even though I agree with her assessment. There’s fog hanging low on the grass, and clouds billow from our mouths.

  Sarah is flat-out on the merry-go-round, kicking at the ground to spin herself around and checking her phone at the same time. ‘What are we still doing here?’

  ‘No one gets there that early.’ I sit at the top of the slide and can’t imagine why I was ever scared of sliding down it.

  ‘I hope tonight’s better than Grace’s,’ says Ally.

  ‘That won’t be hard,’ Sarah says, even though all the pics she posted of Grace’s party online made it look like she was having the time of her life.

  The park perches at the top of Bleecker’s Hill, and the whole city is visible as a glowing strip along the horizon. I still haven’t had a drink, but no one has noticed. I’m tilted sideways as it is, a couple of degrees off, followed around by shadows and reflections.

  Mum and Dad didn’t want me ‘prowling the streets’ tonight so I lied and said that Marley’s parents were dropping us off and picking us up too. We’re too many to attack, but someone could easily be watching us, waiting for a sheep to drift from the pack. All our parents made us switch on location services and Find My Phone before we were allowed out, like a thin slice of electronics can protect anyone from anything.

  Marley totters back from the nearby bushes, trying to straighten her tights. Her bracelets shine in the dark.

  ‘I remembered something I have to tell you,’ she says. ‘Mum gave me a Zen book. It says that an individual life is a wave in the ocean. The wave rises up and exists, and then it disappears back into the ocean. The wave is gone, but the ocean continues.’

  ‘That’s amazing.’ Ally looks at me. She’s sitting on a wobbly seat shaped like a chicken. ‘Don’t you think?’

  I turn my eyes to the darkest corners of the park and say nothing because that is the dippiest thing I’ve ever heard. Who wants to be a fucking wave when you could be the ocean?

  I examine the line of trees at the edges of the oval, the bit where the ground dips steeply, and the barely lit football club building near the car park. There are houses not too far away, but the eucalypts and ti-trees form a thick barricade around the reserve. Every few minutes there’s the faint growl of a car driving along the crescent.

  A memory crawls out of the shadows, as thin and insubstantial as a ghost. When I open my mouth, steam clouds spill out, and words too.

  ‘When I was eleven we went camping in a national park,’ I say, ‘and got lost out in the trees. I went for a walk and stomped around until I couldn’t recognise anything. When I realised, I tried to go back the way I’d come, but the campsite wasn’t there. I walked around and around in circles until all the trees and tracks looked exactly the same.’

  Yin had been there as well, of course, but I don’t say that. After two hours of walking we’d both started to cry, tears and snot and dust mixing on our faces. It got dark early, and it wasn’t until the first stars were visible that we’d heard Mr Mitchell cooee in the distance.

  I erase Yin from my story, snipping her out neatly. It’s not difficult to do; I’ve been doing it ever since we started high school, when I realised that she wasn’t going to keep up. Even in the first weeks of Year Seven I could tell which girls I should make friends with, which older girls I should emulate.

  Yin couldn’t be part of the project, and so I cast her off. She went quietly, that was always her problem. You have to fight in life to get what you deserve. She should have fought harder.

  Shelter is only just beginning to fill up when we arrive. If we’d got here at nine, like Sarah wanted to, we’d have been dweebs sitting around on the couches, waiting for things to get started. It’s not rocket science, but I’m the only one who seems to understand these things.

  I hang in the shadows near the pool table while Sarah and Ally talk to Bill and Ben the Private-School Chinos Men. Sarah and Ally both acted more sober than they actually are for the bouncers, and now they’re pretending to be drunker than they actually are for the boys. Thanks to my impeccable planning skills, the boys were excited to see them arrive, rather than the other way around. Sarah is leaning up against Bill/Ben’s shoulder, faux-laughing. He flicks his floppy blonde angel curls, looking like he keeps Rohypnol in his pocket.

  I already need to pee, but I don’t want to go through ‘the carwash’—the narrow corridor to the bathrooms where boys congregate on either side and try to grab parts of your body.

  Shelter is almost over, let’s be honest. There are some kids who look barely thirteen and we’re definitely the oldest ones here. If you turned on the lights and turned off the smoke machine and the music, all you’d have is a bunch of loser teenagers sitting around drinking coke.

  Liv has offered to get me a fake ID so I can go to real clubs. But when I think about hauling everyone around town with me, pantless and tipsy and way-too-excited, it exhausts me. Maybe all my friendships are dissolving right before my eyes, maybe the group is too hard to keep together, maybe I can’t be bothered anymore.

  The dance floor is aquatic, with purple-tinged arms waving in the air like seaweed. I keep my eyes on Marley in the middle, happily drowning, and I smile a little. The girl can dance, I’ll give her that much.

  In Picnic at Hanging Rock you never find out exactly what happens to the girls, but there are hints. That’s probably why it was on the English list in the first place, so the teachers could wring the joy out of it with endless theories.

  I don’t need to theorise; I know what happened to those girls.

  They followed vixeny Miranda through a crack in the rock, through an almost-invisible tear in the fabric of the universe.

  I imagine the cracks that might exist in our daily lives, in ordinary places. Secret doors at school, jagged edges of air that don’t match up at the train station. Fractures leading to another world. Where do they go, those girls that accidentally fall through a gap in the universe? What’s on the other side?

  I blink. The lasers sweep across the dance floor and I can’t see Marley. It takes me a few seconds to locate her again. M
y heart keeps beating.

  There’s a boy standing at the edges of the dance floor, watching me. He’s tall, with a shaved head.

  His friends orbit around him in a way that suggests he’s the male version of me. You can tell they’re not private school boys, because they don’t look like their mothers have dressed them.

  I pull the V of my bomber jacket down until it sits in a better place.

  Their tall leader pushes off the wall and saunters towards me. I do the same and meet him in the middle.

  In unspoken agreement, we make our way to the multistorey car park next door.

  The car park is open at the sides, the concrete floors and pillars recycling the cold, whipping it down ramps and slaloming it through rows of parked cars. I’m forced to zip up my jacket.

  His name is Marcel and he goes to a performing arts high school I’ve never heard of. When I tell him about Balmoral, he shrugs. He stops next to the fire escape door and I get a chance to look at him properly. He’s beautiful, I’ll admit it, with perfect skin and huge eyes.

  Now that we’re here, who’s going to make the first move? Things are a small step away from getting awkward.

  ‘So, um, what year are you in?’ Marcel says eventually.

  ‘Ten,’ I answer. ‘How about you?’

  He dips his head, smiles. When he raises his eyes again, he looks defiant. ‘Year Nine.’

  I can’t keep the shock out of my voice. ‘How old are you?’ He towers over me.

  ‘Fifteen.’

  ‘I’m sixteen.’ I shake my head. If this gets out, I’ll never live it down.

  Marcel smiles. ‘Well…I like older women?’

  I smile back.

  He reaches out and traces a finger around the outside curve of my breast, making me draw breath. ‘You’re really hot,’ he says.

  He stoops and kisses my collarbone, then lower, pushing my tits up with both hands. He moves back up to my neck, the space below my ear lobes, then finally, my mouth. His lips and tongue are hot and wet, he kisses like he has plenty of experience. When he pushes me through the doorway and into the stairwell, I relax and let him. My back rests against the cold concrete wall.