by Susan Allott
“Does your mum know Scott’s coming today?” Her dad stands at the trestle table, toying with the wineglasses. He picks up a champagne flute and returns it.
Isla is still in Mandy’s backyard with a handful of clothes pegs and grass beneath her bare feet. She had been safe with Mandy. She had breathed easily in her company. She is flooded with loss, inexplicably, for this woman she barely remembers.
“Does she know?” her dad repeats.
“Yes.” She smiles at him. “Yes, Mum’s excited to see Scott.”
He turns from her. They hear laughter and voices in the kitchen. Someone squeals in excitement. “Looks like we’ll have to share the grog, after all,” he says.
A small boy in a cowboy outfit runs out the back door, followed by tall, athletic Andrea Walker and her short, stocky husband in his loud Hawaiian shirt.
“What’s his name?” Joe asks, in a low voice. “Andrea’s husband?”
“Ben,” Isla says. “He does something with computers.”
Joe strides across the grass in Ben’s direction. “Ben!” He claps his back like an old friend. “How’s the world wide web?”
Isla pours a glass of wine for Andrea. “Thanks for coming.”
“Wouldn’t have missed it.” Andrea smiles, exposing straight white teeth. “Ben and I moved back to Agnes Bay. We’re a ten-minute drive from here.”
“So I heard! My mum gives me all your news.”
Andrea raises her glass. “Aren’t you joining me?”
“I don’t drink these days.”
“Since when?”
“Not long.”
“You’re not pregnant?” Andrea mouths the words, nudging her.
“No!” Isla laughs loudly, and across the yard her mother turns her head. “Maybe one day,” she says, smiling at the little cowboy as he runs past. She wonders, in a panic, if she’s going to cry.
The weather holds. The day heats up and everyone spills out into the yard. Isla runs in and out of the kitchen with plates and glasses, refilling the ice bucket, greeting people she hasn’t seen in a decade, repeating herself. Yes, she’s been in London ten years now. She works in television, in post-production, editing programs. No, she’s not married. No, there’s nobody waiting at home for her. She makes her excuses when their faces look dismayed: she needs to fetch the mustard; she thinks she can hear the door.
There’s a lull once everyone has eaten. It’s quiet in the kitchen and Isla decides to let the tap run over the greasy plates so she can stop a while and watch from the window. It’s not a bad turnout. Her mum’s swimming club friends are all here, laughing at one another’s anecdotes in a huddle on the patio. Most of the neighbors have shown up. The men are grouped around the barbecue, supervising the sausages, which is all that’s left of the food. The atmosphere feels strained, she thinks, but that could be in her head. Her parents are keeping to separate sides of the yard, separate conversations. Her dad has that apologetic look to him, and her mum looks like she wants him out of her hair. Once or twice Isla has caught people talking in low voices, glancing in her dad’s direction. They stop talking when they see her. It’s hard to relax and ignore it. She is too alert, too watchful. She wouldn’t invite herself to a party.
“There you are!” Carol Taylor from next door taps Isla on the shoulder, smiling tipsily.
“Thanks for coming,” Isla says, crouching down to let Carol hug her. She gets a waft of sunscreen and lipstick. In all the years Carol has lived next door, Isla has never seen her without lipstick, often a vibrant pink. She still has the same shade of hair, despite the passage of time: a pale brown, the same color as her skin. Even her eyes are the color of milky tea. If it weren’t for the lipstick, she would be entirely beige.
“I love what you did to your hair. Kind of punky,” Carol says, reaching up to touch a strand and thinking better of it.
Isla wishes her sober self could return the compliment. “Thanks,” she says, stiffly.
“I can’t believe you’re really single. Are you?”
“I broke up with someone. A few months back.”
“Did he mess you around?”
“He wasn’t good for me.” The lie is like metal against her teeth. “I wanted kids and he didn’t,” she says, which is at least partly true. He didn’t want kids with me would have been closer to the whole truth. He didn’t want kids with me because I was a train wreck.
Carol is pouting at her sympathetically. “Time to come home?”
“I don’t think so.”
“I know your mum and dad would love to have you closer.”
“I don’t think so, Carol.”
A glass breaks on the patio outside and someone swears and then apologizes. Farther away, a woman laughs a high, shrieking laugh. “You are awful,” the woman says. Isla moves to get the dustpan and brush from the cupboard, but Carol is holding her hands.
“You got a dustpan and brush?” Douglas Blunt joins them in the kitchen, holding the fractured stem of a wineglass. “We had a breakage.”
Isla leaves Carol and Doug in the kitchen as she sweeps up the glass. She takes her time over it, brushing every last shard into the pan, along with some cigarette ash and a few stray pine nuts from the salad. In the kitchen she hears Doug telling Carol that Isla sounds like a stuck-up Pom with a rod up her arse. He has the sort of voice that carries.
“I didn’t go much on the lamb,” Doug says. “Some sort of fancy marinade.”
When she looks up from the dustpan, Isla sees her brother standing by the barbecue with the other men. She didn’t notice him arrive. He’s holding a bottle of beer, talking to Roger Walker. Their dad is standing next to Roger, at the edge of the conversation, looking down at his feet. Scott looks older today without his suit and tie. The weekend wear hugs his belly. Somehow she thought he would have aged better, what with the money he makes, the size of his house in Bellevue Hill. He earns a living buying up land and building houses bigger than the one he grew up in, with pools in their yards and open-plan kitchen-diners. He was one of the first to predict that people would start moving back into the city from the western suburbs; that the harbor and the coast would skyrocket. Still better value than London, he’d insisted yesterday, over coffee. The apartment on Sinclair Road had shrunk in her mind as she’d described it to him.
She nods at Scott as she stands and he raises a hand. Ruby, his wife, is holding court over at the drinks table, pouring champagne. Isla wonders again if one drink would be such a big deal. Just to go and join in the toast, to celebrate her dad’s birthday.
But then, what is the point of one drink?
In the kitchen Doug is standing at the table with Carol, recalling the early years living on Bay Street, back when the houses were newly built, when Agnes Bay was still being settled out of bushland and you could get all the way across Sydney by tram. Isla listens as she empties the broken glass into the bin.
“Joe and Louisa took the last house on the coastal side,” Doug says, gesturing out at the yard. “The rest of the suburb was developed a few years later. They didn’t pave the streets until 1964. I remember the bulldozers.”
Carol drains her glass of wine. “I had no idea you’d lived here so long.”
“First couple to buy a house on Bay Street,” Doug says. “For a few months it was just us, until the Mallorys moved in.” He trails off. “Lovely grub, Isla,” he says, turning red under his sun hat.
Isla returns the dustpan to the cupboard. The kitchen is quiet. Carol clears her throat and presses her thumb against the crumbs on the cake board.
“Did you say the Mallorys?” Isla steps closer to Doug. She has a familiar feeling, that her heart is too big for her chest. “Did I hear you right?”
Carol licks her thumb and shakes her head, looking at Doug for help.
“The Mallorys lived in Carol and Dave’s house before them,” Doug says, offsetting awkwardness with volume. “Nice people. A policeman and his wife.”
“They lived next door?”
<
br /> “That’s right.”
“What were their names?” She raises her voice. “I might remember them.”
“I doubt you’d remember,” Doug says. “You were only—”
“Try me.”
Doug hitches his shorts up. “Steve and Mandy,” he says. “The Mallorys.”
Carol takes a bottle of wine from the table and tips the dregs into her glass.
“Mandy. Isn’t that the woman who’s gone missing?” Isla looks from Carol to Doug.
“That’s right.” Doug is perspiring though his shirt. “Her brother was asking around, looking for her. She inherited their father’s estate.”
“No record of her death,” Isla says. “I’m sure I heard that.”
“That’s right,” Doug says. “No record of her at all. She disappeared.”
“Sounds suspicious to me.”
Doug is silent. He shrugs and blows air from his cheeks.
“She might have been killed. Murdered.” She gets a heady thrill from the word. “What do you think?”
“I wouldn’t like to say.”
“Wouldn’t you?” She is high on anger, outside of herself at last. “I think you would, but you don’t have the guts to say it in front of me.”
“Isla, look. I don’t want to spoil a nice afternoon.” Doug nods toward the door. “Maybe it’s about time I was off.”
“What about you, Carol? What’s it like living in the house of a woman who’s missing, presumed dead?”
Carol runs her tongue over her teeth. “I didn’t know her, darl’.”
“Do you think my dad might have buried her under your paving stones?”
Carol shakes her head, signaling her to stop.
“Is that what you think?” She turns to Doug. “Is that what you’ve been telling people?”
“Give it a rest, Isla,” he booms. “I don’t have to take this.”
Isla laughs, shocked at herself but still high, not yet sorry. Doug pushes past her, meeting Scott at the back door, holding a stack of dirty dishes. Isla notices that Doug makes his way to the back of the yard. She thinks she sees him talking to Andrea’s husband, Ben. Gesturing and pointing.
“I think I’ll get going,” Carol says. She puts her glass down on the kitchen table. “It’s been a lovely party.”
“Sorry, Carol.”
“It must be difficult.” Carol gives Isla’s arm a squeeze. “Maybe she doesn’t want to be found, this Mandy. Maybe she’s happy where she is.”
“Maybe,” Isla says as Carol makes her exit.
The kitchen is cluttered and airless, reeking of warm wine and cigarette ends. Isla thinks of Dom, shaking his head at her, reproachful, unforgiving. She’d thought it was drink that made her this way. She wants to crawl into a hole.
“What was that about?” Scott puts the plates down on the counter.
“How much did you catch?”
“Most of it.” He turns to the door, checking if they are alone. “Who the hell is Mandy?”
“A neighbor from years back. Before Dave and Carol moved in.”
“And what was that about Dad?”
“I lost my rag. I shouldn’t have said that to Carol.”
He opens the door into the hallway, pulling her along by the hand. In the lounge room he holds her by the shoulders, scrutinizing her face. “What’s he done?” he says.
She breaks free of his grip and sits down on the couch. “The police have been asking around, that’s all. They seem to think Dad was the last person to see Mandy before she went missing.”
He shakes his head at her. “When did she go missing?”
“Thirty years ago, they think.”
“Thirty years?”
She nods. “Must have been the year you were born.”
“Was Dad questioned at the time?”
“Nobody reported her missing at the time.”
He pinches his temples. “Why not?”
“I guess nobody missed her till now. Her brother started trying to trace her when their dad died. He’s the one who contacted the police.”
Scott sits down in the armchair across from her. The sun is going down behind the houses across the street, giving the room a pink glow. He leans forward with his elbows on his knees, his hands in his hair.
“What does Dad say about it?”
“Not much. It’s kind of a touchy subject.”
“Do they think she’s dead, this Mandy?”
“Seems that way.” She stares out at the street. “This neighborhood certainly thinks so.”
“Christ, Isla. You should have told me.”
“I know. I meant to.”
“Did it slip your mind?”
She stares back at him. “I thought you’d assume the worst of him, like you always do. I thought you wouldn’t come to the party.”
“You’d have been right.”
She thumps the couch. “Don’t do this, Scott.”
“I’m not doing anything.”
“You think he’s capable of—” She can’t say it. “Don’t you?”
“I think you should come back with me and Ruby, is what I think.”
“I can’t do that.”
“I don’t want you here, with him.”
“He needs me.”
“And what if it turns into a murder case? What then?”
“Then he’ll need me even more.”
He groans at her. They are back in their trenches: Scott firing shots at their dad, Isla taking the bullets for him. It’s been this way since she can remember. She has always known, without it ever being spoken, that her father had no one if he didn’t have her.
“He doesn’t deserve your loyalty,” Scott says.
“Yes, he does.”
“You’re being naive.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Wake up, Isla.”
She looks past him. In this light, the patch of plaster on the wall next to the dresser stands out, although it’s been painted over. She can see the brushstrokes.
“Thanks for the offer,” she says.
There are voices in the kitchen, too quiet to make out. Isla listens as they move into the hallway. A child’s voice, footsteps running ahead. Ben and Andrea, she thinks, with the little cowboy. Ben is still talking, saying something about databases, computer searches.
“She’d be on the electoral roll if she was alive,” Ben says. “The police have access to all that data.”
They let themselves out onto the street, shutting the door behind them. The sun drops behind the houses opposite and the room falls into darkness. Scott stands and pulls her to her feet. Her head meets his shoulder and he rocks her side to side a few times, gripping her tight against him. It throws her. She returns the hug hesitantly, scared she might sob into his polo shirt.
“Call me,” he says, “if you don’t feel safe. I can be here in half an hour.”
12
Sydney, 1967
Joe put his keys down on the kitchen table, which was exactly as he’d left it that morning. The ashtray was full. The toast he hadn’t eaten was still on the plate. The note Louisa had left—if you could call it that—was folded, facedown, under a dirty coffee cup.
He sat, pushed the toast away. Tried to think straight. She’d been gone around twenty-four hours, he figured; she couldn’t have gone far. He’d checked her wardrobe; she’d barely taken anything. Isla’s Digby bear was still in her room, and so were most of her clothes. She must have gone to stay with some friend he didn’t know about, someone from work who could put her up for a bit. She was sulking, waiting long enough to scare him. He wasn’t going to play her games. But he had to admit, he was getting worried. The thing he hadn’t done, that he would have to do now, was call Hordern & Sons to see if she’d gone in to work. And if she wasn’t there, if they didn’t know where she was, he’d have to call the police. A sweat crept up his back at the thought of it.
The note was what worried him. Just one word—sorry—written neatly, at
the top of the page. There was no anger in it, nothing to suggest she’d written it hastily. Sorry was a considered word. Nobody apologized in advance unless they were going to do something serious, something permanent.
He’d had too much to drink last Friday while Louisa was out at Mandy’s. He’d found the empty bottle of whisky in the bin the next day, but he didn’t remember putting it there. He remembered leaning over Louisa in bed, the two of them struggling, her face close to his in the dark. Nothing after that. She’d said nothing about it the next day. He’d woken on the couch, but that was nothing new. He’d wondered if he’d dreamt it, but it felt real, and he had a guilty feeling in his gut, like he’d crossed a line. But blackouts always left him feeling like a monster. Surely she’d have said something if he’d hurt her. She’d have given him hell for it.
It made him want a drink, the thought of it. He stood and looked out the back door, tried to distract himself. Mandy’s laundry was hanging across the length of her yard, propped in the center with a wooden post. Sheets and towels strung out like bunting in the sun. She was out there; he could see her, over by the eucalyptus where the grass was longer. The pale pink of the scarf she wore around her head and the yellow-blond of her hair. She was gathering flowers to bring inside, by the look of it. He watched her for a minute or two, snipping flowers at the base of the stem and draping them over the crook of her arm.
Mandy knew where Louisa was. The thought brought the blood back to his head, stopped his heart racing. He’d seen her skipping back inside when he went out into the yard this morning; it made perfect sense now. She’d promised Louisa not to tell him, most likely.
He waited for Mandy to turn back toward the house before he walked out onto the deck. She looked straight at him, nodded, and put the flowers down on the garden chair in the shade of the vine.
“Mandy!” he called out, as loud as he dared without sounding rude.
She straightened up, wiped her hands on the apron around her waist. It was roasting hot. She looked flushed in the face, reluctant. For a moment he thought she might turn away. He raised his hand: a hesitant half-wave. He tried to smile and found he couldn’t.