The Slipping Place

by Joanna Baker

  I’m so sorry.

  Veronica had to eat. She had to keep herself functioning because she was crucial to this. She put some almonds in the microwave, mostly for the warm smell, then went to the fridge and shovelled some of yesterday’s tagine into a pan. She fed Ridley, pulled his mat back into its corner and returned to the stove.

  Roland had seen the dead girl on the mountain. He had seen her black mouth, the blotchy waxiness of her skin. He might have felt her too. Yes. Roland would have touched Treen. Veronica knew it. He would have done that.

  A wave of cinnamon-scented steam. The tagine was dotted with vibrating points of colour, scarlet and yellow and orange, and little dots of glossy black.

  Roland had seen the dead girl on the rock at the Slipping Place. He hadn’t felt he could call the police. Instead he had called the only person he could. And then he had run and hidden. Why? Could he be guilty in some way? Guilty of what?

  Start again. What about Treen? What had happened to her? She had died of hypothermia, surely. She was nowhere near the tree the boys had slipped on, all those years ago. The rocks above her sloped away, so she couldn’t have fallen from above and landed where she was. And if she had fallen, or stumbled and hit her head, there would have been visible injuries, blood. All the signs, at least from Veronica’s limited and long-past experience, seemed to point to hypothermia. But how had she got to the rock? The police hadn’t talked to Veronica about that. But they would be talking about it now, running through the possibilities. And she must do that too.

  From Tuesday lunchtime to early Thursday, the mountain had been blasted with snow and south-westerlies, the road closed. Treen must have got up there before that had begun. Veronica had seen her on Monday at lunchtime. So she went to the mountain on Monday afternoon or Tuesday morning. But how had she got up there? There had been no other car at the Chalet, and Veronica hadn’t seen one at the Springs, or at any of the other parking spots. But Treen must have come from one of those places. The alternatives were to scramble over rocks and through bushes, down from the Pinnacle or up from the road, or to walk up the Fingerpost Track; all virtually impossible, especially in those shoes. But if she had driven there by herself there would have been a car. So no. Someone had brought her in a car and then driven it away. Someone had taken that poor girl to the mountain. It would have been impossible even for a strong person to carry her to the rock. The path was too difficult. So they must have persuaded her to walk there, persuaded her to stumble along the uneven, treacherous path. And then, either deliberately or accidentally, they had left her there, either lost her on the mountain or left her sitting on the rock. And then they had driven away.

  Roland wouldn’t do that. If he had lost Treen on the mountain he would have called for help and he would not have given up searching. It was inconceivable. This wasn’t the kind of knowledge the police would accept. It was the sort of thing all indulgent mothers said about wayward sons. But in Roland’s case it was true. She did know it. He would not have left a girl there if she had been alive.

  Alive. Treen, once alive. Roland said you’d help us. Treen had been sick, poorly nourished, not very clean. But she had a child. And she was young. Roland’s age. Not ready for death. Not … timed for it. Beneath all Veronica’s thoughts there was something still and flat and cold, something like nausea. It might be there forever, she thought, a new knowledge that young people – hard-limbed, fool-ish, angry, desperate young people – can die.

  All of us.

  Help us. Please.

  Move on. Or rather, move back, to Treen lost and abandoned on the mountain. Why had she stayed? Why not get back to the road and walk home? Was she hurt in some way that wasn’t visible? Had she died of something other than hypothermia? Or had she been asked to wait, or simply been so tired that she had gone to sleep and had frozen? Could she have decided to stay there? Had she wanted to die?

  Surely, Veronica thought, that isn’t how these things happen. Even people who believe themselves to be miserable would have trouble simply waiting to die. They couldn’t stand the suffering. It was human instinct. To fight for life.

  So had she been hurt in some way? Drugged unconscious? Had she drugged herself?

  There was no way of knowing.

  One more question, something Veronica had put aside because the implications of it were large enough to push away all other thought.

  The Slipping Place.

  She turned off the burner under the tagine, took a bottle of chardonnay from the fridge, poured a large glass and drank. The wine left a chilled trail in her throat and chest, and set an ache in the corners of her jaw.

  Treen, dead at the Slipping Place – a place that was invisible from the path and difficult to get to, a place that the Cruikshanks felt was their secret.

  She remembered the day they had first sat there: Lesley and Veronica, Tom, Libby and Georgie, Roland and Paul, flushed with exertion and fresh air. She remembered the view, the curves of land receding into ocean, blue-grey water blending with blue-white sky. And Hobart, flat and pastel, pinkish brown, pressed along the sides of the river and back against the hills. Everyone had been squabbling over the custard creams. Lesley had sorted it out, let everyone have two. Oh, Veronica, what harm can it do? This was something that needed to be explained. Treen had died within Cruikshank family space.

  Veronica picked up a tea towel, pulled out the almonds, dished up her food and turned to the table. And here there was a surprise. All the stuff had been pushed back, leaving a space on her Irish linen mat and here, amid a scatter of salt, there was a book. A paperback. She put the plate down beside it.

  Silas Marner by George Eliot. She put a hand on the book, rubbed it, pressed it, as if to confirm it was real. It was one of Roland’s, she was almost sure. It had been with his others on the shelves in the family room.

  ‘Roland?’

  She had said it too quietly. She went to the corridor and tried again, ‘Roland?’

  No answer. She stood looking past all the stacked furniture, to the staircase, the stained glass of the front door, backlit by the porch light. The doors to the study, the dining room and the guest room were all closed. She looked back to the white door that led to the laundry. She peered into the TV room, once called the Snug, and later renamed the Stuffy. Nothing. When she had arrived home, the back door had been locked, the alarm system on. Apart from the family, the only person with the alarm code and keys was Veronica’s friend Miriam, and she wouldn’t move things around, and she certainly wouldn’t dig out a book. Alan and Tom were on the mainland, Libby was in the Netherlands and as far as she knew Georgie wasn’t even aware the bookshelf existed. So it had to have been Roland.

  The house had to be checked. She wasn’t going to be able to think clearly until she’d done it. She went around the rooms, turning on lights before her as she went, calling for him. Upstairs she made herself check every cold bedroom, every bathroom, the junk-filled TV room.

  In the family room there were boxes stacked against the bookshelves. She edged them back and looked at the books. In his later school years, the height of his reading obsession, Roland had filled the bottom three shelves and arranged his books according to era. George Eliot would have been on the shelf at thigh height. There was a space there. Not a large one – another book had tipped slightly to fill it – but the books used to be tight and now they were loose. Roland had taken the book from here.

  She went back to the kitchen and looked at Silas Marner. Roland had asked her to go to the mountain. She had found a dead girl. And while she was up there he had come into the house and put this book on her table where she would see it. He hadn’t eaten anything. There would be signs. So he had come here specifically to get this book and place it where she was bound to find it. This was a message.

  She picked it up. It was very slim. The front cover had a painting of greeting-card gaudiness, showing an old man and a little girl in a room filled with pelargoniums and something that was almost, but not quit
e, vincas.

  There were no notes attached, nothing written on the flyleaf. The message was the book itself. She turned it over again. George Eliot. Silas Marner. She had a vague feeling there had been a movie. She found her glasses and read the blurb. ‘… the linen weaver of Raveloe restored to life by the orphan Eppie …’

  There was nothing significant she could make of this. And the effort just seemed too great. Suddenly she felt exhausted, aware of the house hanging heavily around her. She stood for a while, looking at Ridley on his mat, then leaned down to put a hand on him. The warm, slightly tacky, feeling of ancient dog. If they were both younger, if her knees were more cooperative and he was more willing to stand up, she would have hugged him. Now best to let him sleep. She straightened, put the book back on the table and washed the sticky-old-dog smell off her hand, then went to her corner of the family room. She grabbed the chair with the flaking arms that Alan called psoriasis and dragged it over in front of the French window. She dug out Britta’s handspun, hand-knitted rug, scratchy and hot and coming apart in the stitching. She put a side table next to the chair and turned on the garden lights, then made several trips back to the kitchen to collect the tagine, quince and polenta tart, King Island cream, the wine and some cheddar and water, and arranged it all within reach. Then she sat in her chair with the rug on her knees.

  It was still windy outside. One of those southerlies that roared across the river and slapped around Sandy Bay before scattering against the bypass and the foothills. Somehow, despite the big stone walls, pockets of it were getting into the garden, making the bushes jump around.

  She didn’t feel like any of the food. Its purpose had been to provide soothing activity, the ritual of gathering and preparing. She gulped at the wine. This was one of Alan’s best, Giaconda. Wasted on her tonight. What was it she was supposed to taste? Toast? Grass? And what was the other one? The ludicrous … gooseberry.

  I ask you.

  There was something she should be seeing. Something in a half-light. Just out of sight, at the edge of her thoughts, something that vanished as she turned towards it.

  Roland … and a book.

  During his late teens Roland seemed to do nothing but read. It became a family joke. Apparently there were only twenty million books that had ever been written. Roland must have read them all by now.

  The wind was rising again, the pines swinging wildly against a silver streetlight. Over near the driveway the rhododendron, caught in a pocket of gusts and whirls, thrashed around in a kind of mad euphoria, as if it was trying to twist itself free of the earth and heli-copter away.

  For some reason, at the sight, she got up from the chair and went to the nearest pile of boxes. She took out a doll that Tom had made at school, an ugly painted wooden thing, two feet high, with uneven eyes and a wonky hat. It had been christened Gargoyle, which had then become Gargle. She sat down and put the horrible hard thing on her lap and hugged it.

  She had no way of knowing what Roland knew or what the book meant. All that remained was to worry about how he was. He would be stunned, sickened, as she was.

  She tried his phone one more time. He didn’t answer.

  Then there was nothing more that could be done. She pulled the rug higher on her chest and put the wooden monster on top of it. Tomorrow she would tell her friends and her children what had happened to her. This was necessary. They would find out eventually and not to have said anything would be suspicious. But she would not mention Roland. Instead she would look for him. She would go to the bookshop. If she couldn’t find him there she would go back to Paul.

  The thought of tomorrow reminded her, she had agreed to go to Joss Dourif’s house at seven thirty in the morning, to meet her three gardening friends. They were meant to be organising a barbecue for a Landcare group, over breakfast. She sent another text, saying she couldn’t come.

  And then she stopped thinking. She stared out at her terrace, at the cracked blue pot with the echeveria, its one ungainly stalk of a flower. She could make out the pale buds of camellias, fleshy white against the black garden. Behind them, faintly lit, clematis leaves shivering on the sandstone wall.

  She closed her eyes.

  And now, just as Veronica had known she would, the dead girl came back. She began to imagine what it had been like for Treen, minute by minute – the rock and the wind and the drop at the edge of the platform, the immeasurable emptiness, the cold. It was beyond bearing, but to brush this aside didn’t seem fair, or right. She had to acknowledge what Treen had suffered. This was owed. To the dead. By the living, the not-yet-dead.

  Cold shrinks away from you, but it also clamps. It strips flesh and squeezes at bone. To die of cold would be to have all that emptiness press right in to the centre of you, to feel yourself dissipate … But was it like that?

  She had heard that people dying of hypothermia became confused, ceased to understand what was happening. They became warm. That’s why they undressed. She hoped that had come quickly.

  Or was that worse than cold? Was it like burning? She could picture Treen uncurling, pulling off the jacket, crawling, thrashing in fury at the rock, scraping at the thin, unrelenting earth. And what happened after all that? After suffering? Dying. She had no way of imagining what it is like to die. It was an experience she herself would have one day, but at that point she, Veronica, would have ceased to exist. She had been thinking about that this morning. Or was it yesterday? Death was always coming, to everyone. It was always coming but could never arrive.

  Veronica wiped at her face. She rubbed at the rough wool of the blanket. She tried to empty her mind, to forget about the mountain and the dark bedrooms above her. She put her hand on the hard doll, the silly round wooden head, and tried to think about her family – Tom in Melbourne, Alan cycling, Georgina with her corporate nonsense, Libby in Rotterdam with the ambitious academic. All alive. All temporarily alive.

  She pushed back into the mouldy, feathery smell of the cushion, trying to picture their faces, their shapes, trying to imagine them here, wondering what they would say about this. And wishing that one of them, that just one of them, any one, would come home.

  Chapter 10

  ______

  ‘What do you mean, “difficult experience”?’ said Miriam. ‘You’re showing your age, you know. No-one texts words like that.’ Miriam, Britta and Joss were at the door, panting slightly from running through the drizzle.

  Veronica’s head felt swollen, liquid at the back, a swimming feeling when she moved. She dredged up a smile. ‘Hello, Snarks.’

  The kids had called them that. The Snarks. The Rule of Three. It wasn’t a friendly name. But the Snarks seemed to like it. ‘You should’ve done it without me.’

  ‘We need you to draw up menus.’ Miriam’s lips were freshly painted. ‘You know what volunteers are like about their salads.’ She pushed past Veronica, edged into the crowded hall and rested her basket on the carver chair. ‘Besides, we can’t let you say stupid things and not explain. Living alone in this catastrophe, with no husband to speak of. If you go gaga people will say it was our fault. They’ll say, “Where were her friends?”’

  Britta and Joss were looking apologetic. This visit had been Miriam’s idea. Now she hoicked up the basket again and said, ‘We haven’t had breakfast.’

  ‘I have to go out.’

  ‘That’s all right.’ Miriam wobbled her head, making the black curls bob around. ‘We’ll be quick. Madam Mussolini’s coming to the shop at nine to complain about an evening jacket.’ For a second she was distracted by whatever it was she saw in Veronica’s face, but all she did was make an anxious little sucking sound and a pained grimace. ‘And I’ve got Drippy Liz on this morning, so if I don’t get there it’ll be a bloodbath.’

  Veronica stood back for Joss to get through the crowded hall. Britta showed her a tray of herb seedlings, and turned away towards the vegie garden.

  In the kitchen, Miriam picked up the bowl of half-eaten tagine and dumped it on the dr
aining board. ‘What have you done to yourself? You look like the Hunchback of Notre Dame. And not in a good way.’ She pulled a jar out of her bag. She had brought green-gages. Precious. Only four bottles left and summer was months away. ‘You’ve only had toast, haven’t you? I can always tell.’ She wiggled the jar of plums.

  ‘If we must,’ said Veronica. It was a game they played, to force food on each other, to pretend to be reluctant. But she couldn’t help a smile.

  Jocelyn swept her long, fair hair over a shoulder and began making pikelets. She knew where everything was. Veronica watched her, a womanly woman, with a way of bending her spine and settling down into her hips, graceful to watch.

  Miriam swept up the mess on the table and dumped it all on a chair. The white stone that Veronica had found on her back steps fell to the floor, making Ridley jump and shuffle closer to the wall. Miriam gave it a curious look but left it there. Somewhere in the pile of papers was the newspaper report about the ‘barn grave baby’, but it wasn’t visible. Veronica put out four placemats. Miriam joined Joss at the bench, and they all began talking about coffee and the old electric frypan and then about the food for the barbecue.

  When the food was ready they sat at the table in front of the kitchen window. Far off at the side of the garden, they could see Britta engrossed in her plants. She would be in in her own time and never expected them to wait. Pikelets and plums, butter, vanilla, demerara sugar: a rich golden taste. They scraped out what was left of the cream. Miriam and Joss ate for a while and then looked at Veronica expectantly. They knew she was holding something back.

  So she told them about the girl on the mountain. At first they gasped and groaned, and then they asked questions and Miriam made several conventional exclamations of horror, but by the end of the story they had both gone quiet.

  ‘Black lips,’ said Joss.

  ‘That happens, does it?’ said Miriam.

  ‘Something to do with cells freezing.’ Veronica kept her voice steady. She was used to thinking about this now, or possibly too tired to let it worry her. Numb. And she had to keep her wits about her, not mention Roland. She had met Miriam, Joss and Britta twelve years ago, in a permaculture workshop. They were friends from a world that was separate from her children. Unlike Lesley, they did not understand Roland. They would judge and leap to conclusions.