by Leanne Hall
Even though it’s not that cold today, Albert and Nelson have so many layers on they look like round puff balls on sticks, robins before the winter. Stephen hands them knobbly supermarket bags and they heft them onto their shoulders with seriousness. They give me a solemn squeeze each, even though it’s been years since they’ve seen me.
We all look so grim we could be in one of those Polish arthouse movies Nanna used to watch before she got dementia and switched to game shows.
Chunjuan holds out her hand and I take it. Her face is unmovable, her hand firm and strong.
We march off into the park, followed by Albert and Nelson. I look behind and realise that it’s just us; by some prior arrangement or discussion Stephen and Mum are waiting with the cars. We walk along a green corridor and into a piece of nothing bush, the most desolate place you’ve ever seen.
A police officer shows us a barely-there track, and we shuffle through waist-high grass until we’re in a clearing of sorts.
My legs don’t want to move, but I drag each foot forwards.
‘I’ll show you what to do, it’s not difficult,’ reassures Chunjuan as we reach the edge of a taped-off area.
My head spins, everything goes black for the longest blink of an eye, there are stars, and then the clouds and the swaying grass right themselves.
This is where Yin’s body was found.
I take a deep breath, look down at the clods of dirt and tell myself I have to do this. I try not to think too much about Yin lying on this cold, sodden ground. When I posed for Chloe I think I was trying to understand what it might have felt like.
Together Chunjuan, Albert, Nelson and I unpack the plastic bags.
Chunjuan lights a small fire in an old cooking oil tin with the top cut off. She shows me how to fold up sheets of red-and-gold paper and we start burning them.
Albert and Nelson, solemn as priests, lay out paper plates with a pile of mandarins and a packet of biscuits. I wonder how much they understand about what happened to Yin.
We light thick sticks of incense and then push the ends deep into the dirt where they stand up like miniature trees.
Chunjuan, Albert and Nelson kneel on the earth, press their hands together, bow their heads. I get down and copy them.
Smoke spirals, minuscule pieces of black ash fly about, sticking to my face. My knees are damp almost immediately, my fingertips are hot from burning the paper. Wind shushes through the grass, rippling across us.
A thin animal sound comes from Chunjuan, the barest trickle. She cries softly. She cries louder.
And then the wailing starts.
Chunjuan wails like an animal in pain, a baby keening in a cot, like someone facing a black, dark void.
Her face is a tortured mask. I’ve never seen anyone in so much pain, and still she wails.
Albert and Nelson shift next to me.
I look down and they’re holding hands. Their faces crumple, they stare at their mum and they look so confused and scared.
Chunjuan needs me. She wanted me here and she trusts me to know the right thing to do.
I help Albert and Nelson to their feet, brush them down and take their hands, one twin on each side, and we retreat to a safe distance and we wait and we wait and we wait. I gather them close around me, being the safe grownup for them, their arms circling my waist and my hands stroking their baby-fine hair.
Back in the car, I shake my head when Mum asks if I want to talk about it.
Stephen practically lifts Chunjuan into the passenger seat. Albert and Nelson seem to be doing better.
I’m chilled to the bone. Numb. I watch the boring grey nothingness of the suburbs race by and think about how Yin’s story ended in the most depressing place ever.
Mum gets us takeaway tacos and the sweet tang of cola rushes through my body.
When we’re getting close to home I finally reply to Chloe’s message.
I write more than I usually do. I say thank you for thinking of me and sorry it took me so long to reply and how shit and strange my day was. I ask her if she’s coming to the memorial service and tell her that I’m not sure if I will be able to get any words out. I say sorry for fighting with her the other day and say I wasn’t myself.
I write so much in this one text I don’t know who I am anymore and for sure she’s going to wonder too.
DAY 68
My hands shake with nerves, but I let the edge of the scalpel bite into the paper and then drag it downwards. Angling the blade this way and that, I carefully cut Natalia’s body out of Someone’s Watching. It’s painstaking work, trying to get close to every line and detail. A few times I flinch, thinking I’ve cut off her finger or a curl of hair, but my blade stays true.
I’ve taken over the entire lounge room floor.
I lift paper Natalia out of the scene, exhaling with relief, and lay her down on a fresh canvas prepped with white gesso. An old nail-polish brush is exactly the right size to carefully apply glue to her back and stick her down in her new home.
I turn over the original photo and paste white construction paper over the hole. I pick off half of my collaged frame, leaving the remnants to speak louder.
After that awful conversation in Ms Nouri’s office I thought I would give up art for good. But then Yin’s body was found and it was like the earth fell out from under everyone. Death is the worst kind of silence, and I don’t want to be silent.
I can’t explain it, but my gut tells me this is the right thing to do.
The result is two companion artworks with identical dimensions.
One an empty room with a white silhouette of a missing person at the centre. The other a large white expanse interrupted only by the black-and-white image of a floating girl.
As if she knows I was thinking about her, my phone vibrates, and it’s Natalia. She only messaged me back yesterday, after a week’s silence, so I wasn’t expecting a call this soon. I turn down my music before I answer.
‘You sound surprised,’ she says.
‘No, not surprised.’ I am surprised.
‘Okay, nervous then. Like you don’t know what to say to me.’
If I thought tragedy was going to bring a new, softer Natalia, I was wrong. ‘How about pleased? Pleased you called me.’
I hear her snort.
‘No, it’s weird. I’m the one being weird,’ she says. ‘I woke up this morning and realised I’d sent you an essay yesterday.’
It takes me a moment to realise that she means her text message. ‘It’s not weird at all. First the—the—’ my throat practically closes up, it’s impossible to say ‘gravesite’ and I don’t even know if that’s the right phrase for a place where a body isn’t placed respectfully and intentionally. ‘The park sounded intense. And now you’ve got to get through the memorial tomorrow. It’s a lot.’
There’s a public vigil for Yin tonight, on the steps of Parliament. It might have even already started. I overheard a few Balmoral girls say they were going, even though there’s no official school presence, it’s more for the city itself. I never thought about how a whole city might need to grieve. The memorial tomorrow is going to be enough for me; I can’t imagine mourning among thousands of people.
‘Thanks. I called Ally too much in the first few days when I couldn’t do anything but lock myself in my room and cry. That poor girl had to listen to me ugly-crying for hours.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ is all I can think to say.
It’s not enough, but I have no idea how to behave. Talking openly about our emotions is not something I thought I’d find myself doing with Natalia, but I make myself do it.
‘And I’m sorry I didn’t appreciate your petition enough. And your protest, too.’
‘You heard about that?’
‘I did…Bochen sent me a photo.’
Natalia standing in the school lobby, all dressed in black and holding a sign, with a fierce look on her face. I guess any gossip about her protest got lost quickly among the awful news.
�
�What are you doing, Cardell?’
‘Right now?’
I look at my work spread across the floor. Mum has taken Sam out for dinner so I can have some peace and quiet. I’ve commandeered every spare surface in our kitchen and living areas. I wasn’t in the mood to trek across town to the studio at Dad’s house. Streets, train stations, bus stops, parkland—ever since Yin’s body was found they all seem like they could be hiding bad men, all over again.
‘Don’t get worried, but I did something to our picture.’
I hope this doesn’t seem callous to her, that I’m making art while she’s been visiting the place where Yin was found. ‘I had a revelation. Or I think I did. I’ve pulled it apart.’
In bed last night I was thinking about something Lisbeth said—that it was horrific to find out what had happened to Yin, but it was a relief that the wondering was over. It made me think more about the limbo that we’ve been in, everyone at Balmoral, but especially our year level.
I remembered something Natalia said when she first saw my folio, about how the girls on crime novel covers always look like they are in-between places. That’s exactly where we’ve all been for the last few months. In-between hope and despair.
I try to explain my new angle, but Natalia gets impatient. ‘You’re making no sense. Send a pic.’
I do that, and then she’s quiet for way too long.
‘Are you mad that I cut it up?’
‘No,’ Natalia replies immediately. ‘It’s good. I don’t have any words at the moment, Chloe, but it’s good.’
‘It’s about the in-between places,’ I tell her, ‘and the girls in them. I remembered what you’d said. The real world, and other places too.’
The white canvas with the floating girl used to mean a place we couldn’t imagine. Doctor Calm’s house as it appeared in the police sketches, or another dimension we couldn’t fathom. And now we know the white expanse means the end; peace, we hope, or rest.
‘Cut out of life,’ says Natalia flatly, and then she’s quiet. I stay on the line and we breathe in unison for a while, letting stillness hold us together.
‘Please come tomorrow, I need your face in the crowd,’ she says after a while, and then she hangs up.
DAY 69
I’ve already been awake a few hours or maybe I never even went to sleep at all when Liv knocks on the wall adjoining my room and the spare bedroom that she’s been methodically transforming into a messy hovel.
She knocks and knocks and you bet she won’t stop knocking until I knock back: I’m alive, I’m okay, I’m here. We knock good night and we knock good morning and you can say a lot with a knock apparently. I’m already dreading when she goes back to her own apartment and things supposedly return to normal.
My eyes close again but then my bedroom door clicks and Liv is there with her woolly blanket clutched around her like a couture cape.
‘You still want to do it?’ she says. ‘Let’s do it early before Mum can stop us.’
We creep downstairs, avoiding the two creaky steps and it would be like midnight feasts or Christmas morning except that today is Yin’s memorial service and the whole of Balmoral will be there and I have to speak.
There’s no point to our stealth because when we get downstairs Mum is already in the kitchen drinking carrot juice in her pilates gear and Dad is pan-frying mattress-sized slabs of French toast which is basically their entire relationship summed up in one neat scene.
Mum is silent while Liv swirls an old sheet around me and fastens it with a butterfly clip but I can see her starting to twitch when Liv runs an extension cord from the kitchen and plugs her clippers in. I sit at the table and push aside the thick orange envelopes they’ve been sending my schoolwork in, which I have been studiously ignoring.
Liv buzzes the clippers once, twice, to check they’re working properly and both times the sound makes me jump.
‘You know you can’t change your mind once she starts, darling?’ Mum says.
It’s early in the morning and I’m grumpy and my eyeballs are dry and what I need to do is something extreme.
‘You are aware that hair grows back, aren’t you, Mother?’
‘There’s no need to be snide!’ she says in an overly wounded tone but then Dad swaps out her carrot juice for a steaming cup of coffee and it miraculously shuts her up.
Without further ado, Liv gathers my hair into a ponytail, the whole honey-blonde enviable lot that everyone is always complimenting me on including uninvited strangers, and shears it off with Mum’s sewing scissors.
‘Ta-da!’ She holds it up and blonde wisps drift over the parquetry floor.
Mum yelps as if her arm has been cut off and Dad moves in to cuddle her. They’ve been unusually lovey-dovey the last few days and it has been the cause of much retching between Liv and I.
I have zero regrets when I look at the blonde clump in Liv’s hand. I am colourless, expressionless, drained of spark or fire or anything normal.
‘Your beautiful hair,’ Mum whimpers from the kitchen.
‘Enough of that patriarchal crap!’ I say loudly. ‘You make me sound like Jo in Little Women.’
‘YOUR ONE BEAUTY!’ Liv says melodramatically as she starts buzzing. The clippers bite at my nape and they are oh so hungry. Mum’s sneakers pad out of the room.
I fix my eyes on the back window, focussing on our wattle tree, which is starting to bloom, and the grey sky that might bring a storm big enough to cancel the memorial service and strand our car on flooded streets so it’s a pity but we won’t make it after all.
Buzz buzz buzz. The blade is firm against my skin. I imagine harvesters driving over fields of wheat leaving clean stubble in their wake.
‘Do you want to practise your speech?’ Liv asks over the drone.
I don’t dare shake my head. ‘No. I got it.’
I try to forget the fact that my sometimes-unreliable sister is wielding a blade centimetres and in some cases millimetres away from so many things I need, like ears, eyes, scalp. She mows behind my ears, temples, right over the top, around my crown.
I close my eyes and the ticklish drift of hair eddies around me, but there are black things behind my eyelids, toothed monsters and dark deeds.
The clippering goes on and on and then Liv stops, all is quiet, her hands come away from my dome and she walks around me.
‘I think I’m done.’ She goes to find a mirror.
‘Yes,’ I say when she holds it up in front of me.
I have one centimetre of dark blonde fuzz covering my round head. My ears protrude slightly. My face leaps out, and every blue vein and dark shadow on it. I look tired and washed out and younger than before.
I look stripped bare. Finally my outsides match my insides.
DAY 69
I shuffle into the bluestone building with everyone from my form room. It’s the first time I’ve visited the church in the city where Balmoral holds its most pious events. They shipped us in on buses, like we’re on an excursion.
The church is forbiddingly gothic, circles and arches and ironwork everywhere, and it’s not difficult to imagine medieval murders and monks and intrigue in its walls.
It’s strange to remember Yin here, when this wasn’t what she believed in, if her refusal to pray during school assembly was any indication.
Yesterday the newspapers printed a photo of Mrs Mitchell at the State Park with Albert and Nelson. Yin’s mum’s face is contorted with grief, her hair flies in the wind. You can’t see the kids’ faces because their heads are bowed over incense and offerings. There’s no sign of Natalia; you wouldn’t know she’d been there at all.
The photo is crisp, moving, beautiful, the perfect capture of a fleeting moment. You could even call it art. But is it right to take a photo of a mother in her private grief? Did Mrs Mitchell want to be seen in that state? Why is it so easy to override what girls and women want, what they might decide if they were given any control?
Inside the church everything is shadowy
and stale and hushed. Dark. Not glorious at all.
A huge photo of Yin dominates the lobby.
It’s a better photo than the ones they used in the newspapers and on the TV. She’s standing outside among trees, maybe on school camp, laughing and looking off camera. The sun hits her face; she looks relaxed and happy.
I never knew her properly. Not like that.
There are piles of tributes at the foot of the photo. Flowers, cards, more photos, soft toys.
Milla stands next to the photo and easel, holding a massive basket of lilies. Claire stands nearby with an identical load.
I take my flower and lay it down among the many, and have one quiet moment with Yin, concentrating on her memory.
I hope you understand my photo was for you, I think. You and other girls like you, and all of us for having to live in this shitty world where people don’t value our lives.
DAY 69
The thing about churches is that they’re designed to give you religious vibes, with those high ceilings and stained-glass windows and hard benches. If the light hits the windows just right and sends shards of light beaming into the church then you can’t blame people for thinking about stairways to heaven and all the other stuff.
But churches do none of this for me, ever, and definitely not today.
I am full of terror and it is very hard to hide that amount of scared with my usual tricks.
There are hundreds of Balmoral girls crammed into the pews, and any other spare spaces they can find to stand, and the air is cold against my hands and bare neck. The cross hanging up high looks judgey; the priest or father or whatever he’s called is a dinosaur in a black robe.
I turn around in my front-row pew and sneak a look across to the standing-room-only section at the back, thinking of all the times in history you could find big groups of girls gathered. Witch hunts, denouncements, concerts. I see Sarah and Ally and half of Marley’s obscured head, but I don’t see Chloe. I try to take everyone back in time, put them in tartan pinafores and hats with ribbons but my trick doesn’t work today.