The Way It Is Now

by Garry Disher

  He realised, too late, what he’d done, for Fiske said, ‘Anna. The juror?’

  Charlie shifted in his chair.

  ‘Would you care to talk about her?’

  The things he couldn’t talk about. The way her hair flamed in sunlight. Her eyes half-closed after lovemaking.

  ‘We’ve become involved.’

  Charlie didn’t say that Anna had appeared at a point in his life when he’d been waiting in lonely hope for his future to begin. He’d been in the squad room when the call came in from Kessler’s ex-girlfriend complaining that a juror was harassing her—but so had several of his colleagues, and it was pure chance that Sergeant Mead had assigned him to check it out. He’d left the station feeling fired up that a juror should risk jeopardising the trial; was ready to throw the book at her, in fact. But he’d arrived at the ex-girlfriend’s house in Hampton to find other police already in attendance: two uniforms from the local cop shop, arguing with the juror—Anna—on the front veranda while Kessler’s ex-girlfriend stood behind the screen door screaming abuse.

  So Charlie had stood back, waiting for them to finish—and found himself staring at her, feeling a jolt, a little leap, inside. She was tall, with reddish-brown hair in a tight bun, freckles across her nose. Tears in her eyes—indignation or fear. Then she felt his scrutiny and her eyes locked on to his and she gave him the briefest of hopeful, uncertain, hesitant half-smiles.

  He looked away. She continued to wrangle with the two uniforms, one moment angry, the next jumpy with nerves that she should be under arrest.

  And Kessler’s ex-girlfriend continued to scream. Charlie acted: shouldering his way into the house, he shut her down.

  When he stepped outside again, the juror was being bundled into the police car. ‘I’ll follow,’ Charlie said. ‘I’ll need to ask her some questions.’

  ‘Knock yourself out,’ the driver said.

  Anna was processed at the Bayside police station, then showed into an interview room. She talked, Charlie listened—and in between times they looked at each other.

  Thus their origin myth, their foundation myth. ‘I couldn’t take my eyes off you,’ Anna would say now. ‘As if I’d been searching high and low and had found you at last.’ And Charlie would say, ‘You smiled at me, and I was lost.’ It would make anyone puke, listening in. But no one was. It was bedroom talk, her hair spread across the pillow, her eyes drowsy when not lit by a playful intelligence.

  Fiske brought him back to the present. ‘You’ve become involved…’

  She was inviting him to elaborate. He could have gone on to describe the events of that first day, his feelings, how he’d persuaded Anna to alert the court that she was being pressured and threatened, but he merely nodded.

  After a beat, Fiske sighed. ‘For another time.’

  His session was up. Telling Fiske that he’d call to set up an appointment in the new year, Charlie said goodbye and went hunting.

  9

  THE YEARS HAD been crowded for Charlie—marriage, a child, uniform duties, the move to plain-clothes investigations, including suburban CIU squads, fraud, homicide and sex crimes—and so he’d investigated his mother’s disappearance in his spare time. An evening snatched here, a Sunday afternoon there, with the inevitable marriage fallout. The trail went cold from the very start: none of his mother’s friends knew anything and Lambert had quit working at the timber yard soon after her disappearance. According to Kevin Maberly, the workmate who’d given him a lift home that day, Lambert was close-mouthed, a bit scary. No one knew who his friends were. He didn’t speak about family, or where he’d worked before the timber yard, or where he’d intended to go next. ‘Like a ghost,’ Maberly told Charlie all those years ago, an expression of surprise on his face, as if something had just dawned on him.

  Not entirely a ghost. From his digging, Charlie learned that Lambert had grown up in Hastings, been educated at the secondary college and received training as a locksmith and security-system technician. He’d worked in the security field for a few years until a couple of minor theft and dishonesty offences saw him jailed for a three-month stretch in minimum security. After that it had been labouring jobs. The timber supply yard, thought Charlie. No known criminal associates, though, and no family left but a second cousin and two sets of foster-parents he rarely saw.

  ‘Suits us fine,’ one foster-father told Charlie.

  ‘Why?’

  The man had looked both ways along the street before murmuring, ‘A bit off, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘Off.’

  ‘Yeah, off. A bit empty.’

  Charlie kept searching and the years passed, and his marriage failed. Or, as Jess had urged him to see it, their marriage had run its course. She was being kind: he’d been inattentive. He loved her, but his thoughts were always elsewhere. During the fading months she’d said, ‘You spend more time trying to find Shane Lambert than me and Emma.’

  What she meant was, marriages, relationships, require a kind of ongoing maintenance. Charlie understood that now, too late.

  Meanwhile, he’d become better at running down leads. All that on-the-job experience had shown him that you didn’t necessarily always look for a man named Shane Lambert, for example, but for people Shane Lambert had worked with, befriended, lived with, fallen out with, gone to school with. And if one of these contacts had meanwhile died, gone to jail, changed jobs, moved interstate or married, how did the ever-widening ripples involve Lambert? Charlie patiently made calls, watched houses from the back seat of his car, ran plate numbers, knocked on doors and listened in pub corners, hoping that someone’s workmate, acquaintance or friend might mention a name or a location.

  Some of these people he found through Facebook and Instagram. Lambert had no social media presence, but his confirmed and possible acquaintances did, and they all liked to post photos: birthday parties, catch-ups, holidays. But only once had Charlie found Lambert in a posted photograph, and that was on the Facebook page of a man with whom he’d been in foster care years earlier. Lambert was seated at a dining table with others, looking solitary, wary, ready to bolt. Using his police ID, Charlie had gone doorknocking. The result was his contact list widened but he grew no closer to finding Lambert. According to the foster-care contact, the dinner had been a reunion and it was held before Lambert ever moved into Longstaff Street. And everyone at the table, painstakingly identified by Charlie, told the same story: Lambert was an enigma.

  ‘First time I’d seen him in years,’ one woman said. ‘Never learned if he had a wife and kids or a girlfriend or even a boyfriend, nothing,’ another said.

  Lambert was indeed a ghost. No recent paper trail: he didn’t own a car, house or land; his name didn’t appear on lease agreements. The addresses he’d given employers before January 2000 were either false, long out of date or post office boxes. And his last arrest—and overnight detention in the Rosebud lockup—had been twenty years ago, on the day Rose Deravin disappeared.

  Today, Christmas Eve, on his way home from the therapist, Charlie’s target was a house in Dromana, further down the coast. A part of him thought, Give it a rest, Charlie, it’s Christmas, but the spoor was in his nose. He might lose Lambert if he didn’t move now.

  Making his way through to the Nepean Highway, he found that the world was on the move. Last-minute shopping, last-minute parties to go to or drive home from. No booze buses, but a highway patrol car had pulled over a 4WD near Beleura Hospital and Charlie sensed heightened emotion in the air, a need for people to eat, drink, argue, carouse. He turned off the Nepean and down to the quieter coast road, following it through Mount Martha and Safety Beach, glimpsing the sea now and then, flat and silvery. He wished he were freestyling through it.

  At the Dromana shops, Google Maps took him left—the upslope of Arthurs Seat looming above him—and then right, into a region of small houses on unpaved streets. The house at 26 Grace Avenue was small, red brick, with a deck above a carport and a view over gum trees and rooftops. A C
hristmas tree draped in blinking lights sat in the main window; tinsel winked around the mailbox; three cars were parked on the lawn.

  Taking binoculars from the glovebox, Charlie focused on the cars, writing down the numberplates. Then the deck: five people slouched around a table, bottles and glasses on a white cloth. Catching up today because they couldn’t tomorrow? A hand negligently waved a cigarette, and Charlie recognised the woman holding it from her Facebook profile: Maeve Frome, Shane Lambert’s second cousin. He’d found her years earlier, but back then she never posted—no comments, photographs, list of friends. He’d continued to monitor the page, hoping for a pay-off, and suddenly last week there was a flurry of activity: dozens of photos going back decades and requests for friends and family to get in touch. She was arranging a family reunion. It was as if she needed to define or locate herself before she was left behind by life.

  He recognised the two young men as her sons, and presumably the young women were their partners…Frome stiffened and rose to her feet. She’d spotted him.

  Charlie started the car. He didn’t know what he was doing here, or what he’d do next. He’d never been sure what he’d do if he found Lambert. All he’d thought was, why did Lambert stay so completely off the grid? What was he hiding? Where was he hiding? If there was any validity to geographical profiling theory, Lambert, a Peninsula boy, hadn’t strayed far. But he wasn’t one of the men up there on Maeve Frome’s deck.

  Charlie pulled away from the kerb as Frome reached the bottom of the steps. He saw her flick her cigarette onto the lawn as he accelerated. Christmas Eve: what the fuck was he doing here, spoiling it for someone? He glanced in the rear-view mirror: Frome was labouring up her steps again, shaking her head as if the world continued to let her down.

  10

  CHRISTMAS MORNING.

  Charlie was on the beach at 6.15. So was everyone else, the older locals anyway, many of whom he hadn’t seen since he was a kid. All were carrying themselves with a kind of benign, slow-moving grace as they blessed the day and each other. The murmurs and the stillness; the hazy colours along the horizon and the perfect glass-like water. Charlie hated to breach it, so he didn’t go in, just stood there on the sand with his towel. The beach as a cathedral, he thought. Morning prayers and benedictions. Usually the beach was implicit with loss: lost coins, lost jewellery, lost virginity, lost lives. Sandcastles, footprints and hopscotch ladders lost to the clawing tidewater.

  Then the old woman from Spray Street waded in and the world rippled, and Charlie woke up. He dropped his towel and followed her, swam his one kilometre until his muscles burned. When he got out, he saw that the beach had emptied, everyone had gone up for breakfast and kids and grandkids and presents. He rued the past strongly just then: Jess and Emma on Christmas mornings…

  Home at Tidepool Street, he sluiced the sand from his feet and ate at the gnarly garden table, listening to the news. At dead on 7.10, after the weather forecast, Anna called. She knew his routine.

  ‘Merry Christmas. Or season’s greetings if you prefer.’

  ‘General happiness,’ Charlie said. ‘How’s the family?’

  ‘Fine. Not at each other’s throats yet.’

  The family in question was her parents, and her siblings and their families; she’d been married briefly a long time ago and had no kids of her own. She’d told him a lot about her nieces and nephews and about the various fault lines along which family gatherings tended to fracture, but he was yet to meet any of them, so he couldn’t visualise what her day would be like later, or what it had been like in the past. And this year they were all in Sydney, where her grandparents lived, which put the whole thing at a further remove.

  Chatting helped, and they did that until he heard the clamouring of small voices at her end.

  ‘Got to go, love you, bye!’ she said.

  She’d said, ‘love you’ and hung up before he could echo it. Before he could process it. The words sat there in his head: ‘Love you’. Not ‘I love you’ or ‘I am in love with you.’ Was this something you said on the way to love? Sometimes Charlie could feel her retreat even as she advanced. Right now he felt like a teenager, heightened feelings fluttering inside him. Grabbing at straws and hoping he could build a mansion with them.

  He went inside. The only cure for what he was feeling was a shower and a shave. Tart himself up for Christmas lunch.

  Anna would be gone until mid-January and god he hoped she didn’t intend to drive back through bushfire country. When she’d called yesterday to say she’d arrived, she sounded teary, shaken by what she’d seen on the trip up, the ash and the blackened stumps. She said it was the world running down, and that’s what Charlie had been thinking for weeks, as he watched the evening news with a kind of dread. The fires were catastrophic. Bigger than anything he’d known before. And, even as he felt powerless, he felt angry. Climate-change deniers in control; the fires a photo opportunity for politicians.

  A couple of hours later, wearing chinos and a sleeves-rolled linen shirt, the Skoda laden with presents, Charlie drove up to the city. When it all fell apart twenty years ago, Liam had taken their mother’s surname, Chivell. Now he lived with his partner in a Northcote weatherboard on a leafy street near the Westgarth Cinema. Ryan answered when Charlie knocked. He was a few years older than Liam, stockier, with the gleaming vigour of a wrestler. They’d met at Melbourne High, where Liam taught English, Ryan phys. ed. ‘We never bring the job home with us,’ they liked to say.

  A hug and a kiss at the door, then through to the kitchen, a region of deep porcelain sinks and whispering white drawers and cupboard doors. Depositing a Montalto pinot grigio, mince pies, irises and a scrappily wrapped vase on the table, Charlie crossed to Liam, who was shelling prawns at the sink, his smooth cheek tilted. Charlie pecked. ‘Happy day,’ he said.

  ‘Happy day, happy year,’ Liam said.

  He was slender in shorts, a T-shirt and bare feet—a flexing tautness in him as he worked. ‘Finished in a tick,’ he said.

  ‘Take your time.’

  ‘Bubbly?’ said Ryan, a man of supple smiles.

  ‘A small one, I’m driving,’ Charlie said.

  Registering the minute stiffening in Liam—Charlie’s driving to see Dad—he sat at the table. Liam might have said, ‘Pass on my best wishes,’ but he didn’t. He placed the shelled prawns in a large bowl, covered it with a tea towel and stowed it in the fridge, then washed his hands and slipped onto the third kitchen chair—the signal for Ryan to heave from the table in his forceful way, disappear from the kitchen and reappear with a parcel wrapped in thick, silvery grey paper crisscrossed with twine. ‘The great unveiling begins,’ he said, plonking it in front of Charlie.

  ‘Almost hate to unwrap it.’

  Liam touched his forearm briefly. ‘Speaking of which, if we could recycle the paper…’

  ‘Sure,’ Charlie said. He eased off the wrapping paper, revealing a food mixer. ‘Actually, this will be really useful.’

  Ryan and Liam had rarely visited any of the houses Charlie had lived in. They wouldn’t have a clue what he did and didn’t own. But they’d hit the spot here.

  Meanwhile Ryan had unwrapped the vase. ‘And this is not too ugly.’

  ‘Yeah, thanks for that. When have I ever given you ugly?’

  ‘Come to think of it, never,’ Liam said.

  The to-and-fro of our Christmas mornings since Mum died—disappeared—thought Charlie. He cocked his head at the vase. He thought he’d done well. It was a slim half-metre in height, the glaze pearly white. He watched Liam fill it with water and nudge the irises into shape.

  ‘Forgot the bubbly!’ Ryan said, pushing back his chair, poking his head into the fridge and rattling out a bottle while Liam took the irises through to the sitting room sideboard.

  Charlie could see a Christmas tree in a corner of the sitting room, carefully wrapped presents arranged beneath it, a simple run of tinsel along the gas fire mantelpiece. He felt that he didn’t fit. There was a ne
at choreography to the lives of the men. They had been together for nine years. They took trips, went to concerts, and, for all Charlie knew, were actively a part of the gay scene. Scenes? Or they were just a suburban couple at the younger end of middle-age. He rarely saw them. He called them sometimes, they called him. Ryan called him.

  Two minutes later, as they sipped small glasses of Moët & Chandon and munched on Liam’s rumballs, Ryan said, ‘How’s your dad doing? And Fay?’

  Liam didn’t flinch. He probably wouldn’t even have words with Ryan later. Everyone knew that Ryan was the peacemaker. One day he might even succeed in securing peace between the Deravin men.

  11

  BY LATE MORNING Charlie was in Warrandyte, a hill town as different from Menlo Beach as you could get. Steep woodland slopes with no bodies of water, apart from the Yarra and some boutique dams tucked into the ever-duplicating gullies. No run-down shacks or weekender mansions. No patched or stained boardshorts, salty T-shirts or worn-down Crocs; no sea-air rust pitting; garden centres every five hundred metres.

  Retired Detective Senior Sergeant Rhys Deravin and his second wife lived in a house perched on a slope overlooking hairpin roads. ‘So I can see what’s coming for me,’ Rhys liked to say.

  The couple had moved around a fair bit in the past twenty years. Fay’s house in Prahran first, then East Bentleigh, Williamstown and even Portland, in the far west of the state—wherever Rhys’s job had taken him. Admin duties rather than crime-fighting, mostly. To keep an eye on him, given the circumstances surrounding his wife’s disappearance. Charlie had visited them whenever an occasion called for a get-together: Christmas, Easter, a birthday. Sometimes Emma accompanied him; mostly not. Liam hadn’t been to a single one of those houses, those reunions.

  Charlie walked in with a ham, beer, bubbly and badly wrapped presents—a Nigella Lawson for Fay, a Gideon Haigh for his father and Belgian chocolate for Fay’s sisters and their partners. By now it was noon and Rhys wanted everyone out of his kitchen. ‘Ready in an hour,’ he said.