But Heidi keeps shaking her head, and this is the point, Mim realises, from which nothing will ever be normal again.
* * *
She wakes to a noise. Heidi beside the bed, whispering, lit only by the glow of the moonlight through the curtain. Mim’s hand hurts and she pushes up on to her elbows, trying to protect it. ‘What? What’s wrong?’
‘Time to go.’
‘Shit, Heidi, what time is it?’
‘It’s nearly four. You should be out of town, right up the highway by daybreak.’
She sits up, rubs her face. ‘Thought we could wait till morning, at least.’ She feels heavy with sleep, the whiskey.
‘No. Come on.’
‘Okay. Okay.’ She swings her legs to the edge of the bed. There is nothing else to be said.
* * *
Heidi pushes a wad of cash into her hands. ‘It’s not much, but it’ll last a bit. You get some off your mum?’
Mim nods. She’d taken the maximum, a couple of grand at the ATM. It’s unfamiliar, the flashy colour of it. Like play money when they were kids. ‘Why are you doing this?’
Heidi shrugs. ‘You’d do the same.’
You don’t know that. I don’t know that.
‘Go on, off you go.’ Heidi holds her shoulder, hugs her once, fierce and quick. ‘Get on the road.’
* * *
And then they are going. Heidi is a figure on the driveway, still for a moment in the red lights as they pull out, Mim taking it slow in the ute, the kids amped and tired both, hands feeling out this new space in the dark.
‘Where we going, Mum?’
‘I’ll tell you when we stop for brekkie. You have a bit more of a sleep.’
Their eyes in the rear-vision mirror, wary, but trusting her.
‘We gonna see Dad?’
She smiles, quick. ‘How good will that be, huh? Your screens are there, watch something if you like.’
They put their earbuds in, tune out.
For the first thirty minutes, out through the town, she drives in the quiet. No audio, just the whirr of the car, the intermittent click of her indicator as she passes someone. She concentrates on the feel of the vehicle, where it sits on the road, begins to notice a faint lightening through her window in the east. This is a nowhere space. Left but not yet arrived, where she does not have to make plans, or think, or try to make sense. Just drive. Watch those kilometres click, each one, a tiny space to breathe.
9
At morning tea she allows the kids thirty minutes for a run in a park she has pulled up near. She has already driven three hundred and fifty kilometres. The number feels big, solid enough to mark. She drinks another coffee. Three already, plus the pies for the kids. The cash isn’t going to last.
You’re not thinking about forever though, yet, she thinks. One day at a time. Where will we sleep tonight?
Essie is kicking her ball against a low concrete fence and Sam keeps yelling out to her to come and help him. He can’t climb with his hand, he needs a push. Essie ignores him.
‘Muum!’ he calls.
‘You can do it,’ she says, nodding encouragingly.
She doesn’t want to drive once it gets dark. There’ll be towns, she knows, a caravan park, maybe. They’ll take cash for sure. But what if they need her to swipe in? She fingers the plastic smooth of the glue across her wound.
‘Let’s go, you two, have a wee.’
How many kilometres are enough? Should she head for Brisbane? Hide in plain sight? There must be thousands of people hiding from someone. She hears Heidi’s words, Get as far as you can. Then stop and think.
She pulls out of the parking spot, heads back out to the highway. Checks her rear-vision but no one is behind. She should stop and buy a tent. Imagines hiding out in the forest. Pretending they are waiting for Ben to arrive. Choosing a spot, lighting a fire, setting the camp seats up.
But it’s a fantasy. The Department are not only looking for Ben now. They are looking for her, too. Her and the kids.
* * *
They took Essie camping for the first time when she was six months old. It was spring, and they had travelled south to where the big old mountains rolled straight into the sea. The ground became heavy with dew overnight, but the days were sunny and cloudless. Ben said maybe she needed to get out of the house. They rented a camping cot, low to the ground, completely zipped up when Essie was inside and Mim remembers wishing she could sleep like that always, completely cocooned, where nothing could fall in on her, where she couldn’t fall out.
They’d only had sex a couple of times since Essie’s birth. Mim felt her body was not her own, both shamed by the heavy awkwardness of herself and consumed by Essie’s need for her. She couldn’t distinguish Ben’s advances from Essie’s hunger for her. She could not make her body respond.
But the tent, the beer, Essie zipped up in her own little bubble, the rich darkness of the space so that when Ben reached for her he was not Ben. He might have been anyone. And it was this that kicked and sparkled in her groin so that she let him reach, let him touch. She backed up against his body and covered herself with his hands. Not a child, not her husband, something other. She did not recognise the sounds she made, the sounds he made, as he pushed his hands inside of her. She bit down on his finger as he scrabbled to cup her face and bring it around to his.
They had not spoken of it in the morning. She had felt exposed. Immersed herself in mothering Essie, allowed her daughter to suckle on her far longer than she normally would, as though she were asserting the natural way of things again. Ben did not seem chastised. They had walked, traced the river, and she had relished the ache in her shoulders and her back from carrying the child strapped to her and declined Ben’s offers to carry his daughter. Punishing him in ways both minuscule and powerful for his want, his need.
* * *
She shifts in her seat, aware of the seam of her jeans against her crotch. It is odd to have remembered this of Ben. So long ago. It is not how she thinks of him now.
She drives.
Sammy falls asleep.
Essie digs for her screen between the seats and Mim glances back to see her taking shots of the paddocks, of wind turbines, stretching out over the rounds of the hills into the distance.
‘They’re kind of beautiful, huh?’ Mim says.
Essie makes a non-committal noise. ‘I’d like to see the ones out at sea. They’re more efficient, we learnt about it in Grade Two.’
Mim makes a face to the windscreen.
‘You should have been using the technology earlier,’ Essie goes on, well and truly on her high horse now. ‘That’s what they say. You had the technology and you just didn’t use it.’
Essie has a way of making her feel personally responsible for the failings of the world. ‘Sometimes it’s hard to make people see what they have to do.’
Essie shrugs. ‘Still should have done it sooner.’
She sighs. ‘We were trying, sweetheart,’ she says and even as she speaks, she knows it is bullshit. ‘Your dad and I, the projects we worked on, before you were born, I –’
‘Worked with the EPA testing groundwater. You protected the aquifers. I know, Mum. You’ve told me.’
Mim grinds her teeth. Doesn’t respond.
‘Working on a gold mine in Indonesia isn’t really helping.’ There is a tide of tears behind Essie’s words.
Mim softens. ‘He’s got his reasons, you know that. He’s trying to hold them to account. That’s his job. To make sure they abide by the regulations. To try and make sure they do it the best way there is.’
‘Where are we going, Mum? Where is he?’
Please don’t ask.
She won’t lie. Essie’s too smart for that. But she can’t afford for Essie to bear the same worries, the same nightmares that she is harbouring.
‘Mum?’
‘He’s been held up with work, something went wrong.’ She sees Essie’s face freeze, hurries on. ‘But it’s okay. We are going to sort
it out, that’s what we’re doing.’
‘What do you mean something went wrong? Where is he, why can’t we talk to him, Mum?’
She breathes. Keeps driving. Knows Essie will not jump out of the car, she’s still keeping her voice low so she won’t wake her brother, Mim just needs to wait until she calms.
‘I need you to help me, Ess. I need you to help me look after your brother, and stay away from any Department cars, and to tell anyone, if they ask you, that we are on a holiday.’
‘But –’
‘Essie, I need you to do this. Dad needs you to.’ A new weight in her voice.
Essie is quiet, nods.
‘If you can do that, if you can help me, then I promise we will work this out, okay?’
Essie closes her eyes, leans her head against the window, nods again.
* * *
Mim concentrates on the bitumen. She cannot just keep driving, she knows that, but as the landscape stretches out alongside the highway she feels something forming in her, a velocity that is pushing her forwards. She doesn’t have words for it, not yet, can’t articulate what it is or what it means, but she thinks, and she’s not sure why, she thinks she can trust it.
Heading north. Ticking over the degrees of latitude. At least, she thinks, at least if you are still there, on that island, then I am moving towards you.
She notes each little track that heads off the highway: Stockman’s Track, Little Brown Creek, Heavenly Falls, Cabbage Palm Way. Any one of them, she thinks, we could pull off there, if we had the gear, could just stop and camp. We could do that. Hide. Pull into one of the tiny towns and get supplies. No one would know us. No one would think twice. People must do it all the time.
Running from something. To something.
But that’s not the answer. Up ahead a screen. The list of towns and distances flashes on the sign as she speeds towards it.
Brisbane, still hours away, but there, a name in the fat white font on blue that means a holiday spot: Eagles Nest. Fifty.
She feels it click within her. Can smell the place already, can almost hear her dad – As good a place as any.
She checks on the kids in the rear-view. Tests the feeling in her gut.
And when the turn comes, she takes it.
* * *
It feels the same. The arc and bend of the road as they drive down from the ridge and glide into town. The water rolled out beyond. The roofs clustered then spread out to one headland, all along the bay.
‘What’s this?’
Sammy’s awake, blinking his eyes open to peer out the window. ‘Where are we?’
‘Eagles Nest,’ says Essie, ‘saw the sign back there.’
‘We used to come here on holidays when we were kids.’ Mim smiles, she can’t believe how her body remembers it as they come to the main drag.
‘Why are we here?’ Essie asks.
‘Thought you might like to see it. We can stay at the caravan park.’
‘Can we have fish and chips for lunch, Mum? Can we?’
Essie crosses her arms over her chest. ‘I don’t get why we’re here,’ she says under her breath.
Mim forces brightness into her voice. ‘Some pics of the beach’ll be good for your project, Ess?’
* * *
The beach is not the same. In fact, as she turns to look at the beach road and the line of shops, she can see that all of it is different. The grassy picnic areas and car parks are all gone. There is a new seawall, higher than the last, almost at the road. She frowns, the design is all wrong. She doesn’t need Ben’s engineering degree to see that. Councils had tried beach nourishment for a while, moving sand from one spot to another as the hungry sea continued to devour coastlines. But unforgiving seawalls just made the waves hungrier; more elegant approaches were required.
‘Kick it to me!’ Sam calls out. The stretch of beach and the curl of the waves have mollified Essie, who takes her ball down and kicks it to Sam across the hard sand at the water’s edge.
She’s got them here. She rubs the tender part of her palm and breathes in the briny air. It’s a shortcut to memory. It feels like the intervening thirty years have vanished. She remembers an uncomplicated love of the sea. Now, it is tinged with melancholy. There are no fishermen clustered on the edge of the pier, too highly regulated now. The seagulls are still here, cockroaches of the bird kingdom, but she knows that the plovers are gone, and so many more.
Down the end of the beach, in the curve of the cliff, she can see there is still a block of the old seawall. The rest must be buried under sand and the risen tide. That last year, the summer before her HSC, she sat on the old wall with Nick. It was the summer she had sex for the first time, and she felt pleased with herself. Like she was ticking off important things. It would be the last summer at Eagles Nest because the next she’d be in the city, away from her old life, the town, the farm, getting ready for uni. She didn’t realise she’d never make it back. Until now.
Nick had known. And it’s not like he hadn’t had plans, this summer fling of hers, the local boy. He reckoned he was going to head north, see his dad up in Darwin. He was going to travel. She was too, she was, she just wanted her degree first.
She had fallen for him. In the time that it took to realise the boy she’d shied away from the last couple of summers was interesting. And sexy. She remembers the sound he had made, that first time, into her shoulder, like a giving in, something quiet and intense and secret. She’d wondered then if she’d be able to bring forth that sound from anyone else, from herself even. And she had, of course, but it wasn’t ever the same as that first time.
The kids have kicked off their shoes.
‘I haven’t got a towel!’ she yells after them. It is mild enough for swimming, always is now. She should check the water quality, but realises, suddenly, she no longer has a phone. A tugging anxiety, and also a freedom.
She wonders what happened to Nick. If his mum still lives in town. Helen. She was nice.
‘Mum!’ Sam calls, ‘I’m hungry, can we get chips now?’
* * *
The kids hang off the silver loops of bike racks out the front of the fish and chip shop, while she waits, flipping through the greasy magazines, one eye on the screen in the corner. The news never changes, the same montage of broken people, nations colliding, an exploding planet. They’d stopped some of it in time. But, like the scientists had been telling everyone for decades, the temperature would continue to rise even if they turned the carbon emissions around. And didn’t everyone know what that looked like now. Aerial shots of the mosaiced remnants of the Amazon. Tidal surge refugees from the waterfront suburbs of Florida, Brisbane, Norway, who didn’t look like refugees were supposed to look, too wealthy, too white, too familiar.
International relations was a moveable feast these days: American decline, the rise and rise (and rise) of China – ambassadors and their teams needed to be nimble in the creation of alliances, the signing of memos, the aiming of their SmartDrones. Who really knows what’s going on out there? It’s a curated news feed anyway. The Department regulate media ownership these days, or like to think they do, but perhaps it’s the same as it always was. Fat cats in the pockets of power, mouthpieces spinning Department rhetoric for profit, and immunity if ever the time came. There was some backlash when the Department started censoring the internet, but even that could be spun. Who’s watching? How do you know where the information is coming from? Foreign interference. Cyber hacks. And they purported to be fair and balanced. They even let through some of the articles on the international outrage when a BestLife asylum seeker made it to New Zealand in a kayak. But it was all for show, a chance to place the propaganda right back at them. Glossy stories, made-up mothers talking about finally having time to get back into the workforce, grateful for their kids being housed and cared for, before and after shots of homeless men, addicts (Mim looked for pictures of Michael) who’d been given a second chance at life.
And then they stopped bothering with
the propaganda. No one else got out. And the Department had long arms, and fists that squeezed, that knew no borders at all. Besides, words and diplomacy never meant much before, and they meant even less now.
At the end of the news feed, the Department logo flashes up, and the screen fills with ID photos. Wanted for fraud, for assault, all the anti-social behaviours, a category that has particularly nebulous definitions. The contact numbers for those who want to dob someone in the old-fashioned way.
‘Number 20?’
Mim realises the man is talking to her, repeating the number, and holding the wrapped package across the counter.
‘Sorry!’ she says.
‘You’re right,’ he says, nodding towards the screen. ‘I always keep my eyes peeled for those ones myself. Dodgy bastards. Like to see how many they’ve caught.’
She stares at him, reaches for the package. ‘Yeah, right, thanks,’ she says.
‘You done yourself some damage there, love?’ he says, nodding to her hand.
She smiles quickly, takes the hot paper bundle. ‘Ta.’ She lifts the package in acknowledgement, walks out through the coloured streamers.
Behind her, he calls out, ‘Look after yourself!’
The streamers tangle on her shins, catch her there, but she kicks out and they break apart.
‘Let’s go,’ she says. The kids continue to flip and hang. ‘You two, now!’
‘Geez! We’re coming.’
But she’s strung tight now, can feel eyes on her, the cars slowing as they pass, the man from the chip shop boring holes in her back with his stare.
‘Well, come quicker!’ She waits until they are in step with her and then strides towards the car.
* * *
There are still prayer flags on the porch. The same probably, by the looks of them. She let the kids eat their chips at the end of the back beach and then drove the long way back into town, towards the caravan park. She tells herself she just wants to see if it’s still there.
The Mother Fault Page 9