The Curlew's Eye

by Karen Manton

  The girl snatched up the string of mirrors.

  ‘We steal from each other,’ she said, and made her way back to the hut’s track.

  Sunlight darted from the mirrors as she walked. She kept close to the creek, as if her feet and her ears were listening to its sound.

  The hut seemed smaller this time. The girl went straight to the kitchen trough with the fish. Greta glanced around for her father’s lantern. The curtain was pulled back. She could see everything. The bed and the rabbit and the bracelets above them. The newspapers on the opposite wall.

  ‘Here, sit down.’ The girl pointed to a chair with her knife.

  Greta did as she was told and put her basket on the other chair. ‘I brought you some food.’

  The girl smiled at it. ‘You are very kind.’

  Greta rested her camera on the table, near a small brass bowl filled with coloured beads, screws, hooks and snippets of wire. A pair of pliers rested across it. She tried not to stare at the beads, but her peripheral vision recognised four as her own.

  ‘I’ve been wondering what your name is. Mine’s Greta.’

  The girl turned away to sharpen her knife on a stone by the trough.

  ‘Elena,’ she said at last, with a quick glance at Greta. ‘Call me Elena.’

  Maria Elena—Greta remembered the name carved on the memorial rock for Joel’s mother. No doubt the girl had seen it and was stealing the name for cover. A blowfly buzzed through the doorway to find the fish, the cobwebbed window. The girl had her back to Greta. The knife made a song on the stone.

  ‘I saw you earlier today at the swimming carnival. I was talking to Eileen, the police lady, while I was there and I wondered if … if you need anything.’

  The girl quickened her rhythm with the knife. It looked homemade to Greta, the handle was bound with leather.

  ‘Elena?’

  ‘Don’t tell them I’m here!’ The girl spun around so fast Greta jumped. Her knife was pointed at Greta’s chest.

  ‘Only you can know. Only you can see me. No one else!’

  The girl’s hand was shaking. Her eyes were a vibrant blue. ‘If you tell them, I’ll go. I’ll leave and you’ll never find me.’ Her voice was urgent. She flicked the hair from her face and said more quietly, ‘You have to keep my secret.’

  ‘I understand.’ Greta lifted her hands in surrender.

  ‘Promise!’ The knife lunged forward.

  ‘I promise. I won’t say a thing.’

  The girl’s hand relaxed. The fly buzzed in the sink.

  ‘You took things,’ she said. ‘You took them from the shelf above my bed. They’re gone.’

  Greta felt she was inside a reversed tale of the three bears, with the girl an angry Goldilocks and herself a befuddled intruder bear under interrogation.

  ‘That was Griffin. I can bring them back if you like.’

  ‘Perhaps that little boy should bring them himself.’ She leaned against the trough, arms crossed.

  Greta blinked. There was an edge to the girl’s voice. She remembered that night on the verandah, the girl’s fixed gaze on Joel and Griffin. What had it been? Jealousy? Retribution? A grudge?

  ‘Joel said the tape and jewellery box belonged to his sister.’

  The girl’s gaze intensified.

  ‘You shouldn’t take what isn’t yours,’ she said. ‘There’s consequences.’ She spoke each word carefully. ‘Punishments.’

  Her crossed arms flexed nervously. Greta was uncertain if this was an adolescent pose or a real threat. She was tempted to point out the girl had taken Griffin’s amethyst, beads from Greta’s work boxes, trinkets from the bowerbird. And her father’s lantern.

  ‘Where is your family?’ she tried.

  ‘Gone. I left.’

  Greta shifted in her chair. She wished she could record the conversation. ‘That night on the verandah, when you were looking in, I thought maybe you wanted something. From Joel.’

  The girl ignored that suggestion and said, ‘Your son. He was there also.’ There was a bitterness in her tone. She unfolded her arms and steadied her right hand on the edge of the trough. ‘He likes to hide.’

  So she had been watching them. Especially Griffin.

  Why? Greta wondered. Because a curiosity about Joel had switched to his son? Or because Griffin was a wanderer, like this girl? Her fingers picked at the trinkets in the bowl and found a metal button, tiny glass balls, a silver feather earring. She tried to pretend she wasn’t searching for pilfered beads. She hooked out a wire bracelet, similar to the ones on the hut wall but smaller, for a toddler. It had a single charm attached, a miniature stick figure made from little bones bound with red cotton.

  ‘The bracelets—do you make them? And the chimes outside?’

  ‘I didn’t make those.’ The girl looked up to the wall and then moved the basket to sit opposite Greta. Her hands wrapped around the bowl. ‘I add to the chimes. My charms.’

  An almost imperceptible breeze wafted around the hut. The chimes murmured and the news clippings breathed out from the wall. As if someone had called her, the girl went outside.

  Greta found her leaning against the hut wall, eyes closed. Her whole body was listening to the soft ringing of the chimes. The fury of before was gone. The exquisite sounds of the chimes had altered her.

  Greta lifted the camera. Click.

  The girl’s eyes snapped open. ‘You ask a lot of questions.’

  The breeze gathered, teasing loose flaps of corrugated iron on the roof. Dead leaves whirled into spirals and skittered across the ground.

  ‘Hear that?’ asked the girl, her head tilted slightly. ‘It’s the wind, from the lake.’

  She was still holding the knife, gently pressing the blade to her fingertips. Greta waited for her to speak about the poison water. It took her by surprise when the girl said, ‘You should go now. Your children will be home. From school.’

  Greta took out her watch to see the time. It was much later than she’d expected. She went inside for her hat and unpacked the food from the basket onto the table.

  ‘Wait,’ said Elena.

  She came and dragged a chair to the trough, and stood on it to reach inside a cupboard above the window. ‘I want to give you this.’

  The chair wobbled under her. She handed Greta a postal cylinder. Greta prised off the red plastic lid. Inside was a roll of paper, A3 size. She spread it out on the table to see a detailed sketch of the boy with a swan wing. The intense, questioning face took hold of her. And the wing with its painstakingly intricate feathers. He wore a singlet and shorts with the letter J on the pocket. He was standing on a cliff edge, toes curled over the rock as if he might leap forward and fly.

  ‘Joel did this?’

  ‘You know his drawings.’

  Greta didn’t answer, her eyes still on the boy, the wing.

  ‘Thank you, Elena. The children will be excited to see it.’

  Especially Raffy, Greta thought, who had sticky-taped the smaller sketch on the window above his bed. She returned the drawing to the cylinder.

  ‘And Joel. Joel will be pleased.’ The girl’s smile was strained.

  ‘How do you know him?’ Greta asked softly.

  The blue eyes darkened. ‘I don’t.’ The words slipped from her mouth like two pebbles, one to hold in each hand.

  Greta picked up the cylinder. ‘I’ll be going then.’

  ‘Visit me again if you like.’

  Greta smiled. ‘I might do that.’

  She had started to walk away when the girl called from the doorway. ‘Greta!’

  Her voice was so clear. She was standing at the edge of the verandah. Her blue eyes shone. Behind her the chimes gently moved.

  ‘I trust you,’ she said.

  21

  Greta set her camera down on the green table and looked at each boy with his handful of cards. She waited. Not a word.

  ‘Which one of you has fiddled with my camera?’

  Toby was first in. ‘Not me!’
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br />   ‘Not me,’ echoed Raffy. He wouldn’t look at her.

  Griffin was insulted, betrayed by his brothers’ swift thinking. ‘What are you looking at me for?’

  Even the boy with the swan wing watched him, set inside his new frame and hanging from a nail in the verandah post by the table.

  ‘Someone wound back the film without telling me, and now I’ve taken photos over the top of other ones.’

  She placed three prints on the table. They leaned in to look. Wherever Greta had expected to see Elena, the girl was obscured by her sons. Toby’s legs, Griffin’s torchlit horror face and Raffy’s cheeks pulled wider than a wide-mouthed frog were superimposed over ghostly impressions of boulders in the creek, fish on the sand, the hut and its chimes, the bowerbird’s arch. The girl had disappeared.

  ‘Double exposure. All my careful photographs overlaid with yours.’

  Griffin slid the playing cards to himself and shuffled them around the table.

  ‘Maybe that fairy did it,’ Raffy suggested. ‘The one that leaves the chimes and the bones.’

  ‘There’re no fairies here, Raffy,’ Greta sighed.

  ‘We’re not in your storybook,’ added Toby.

  Greta could swear she saw the swan boy’s feathers ruffle in the corner of her eye.

  The familiar toot, toot of Tori’s troopy saved her children. Griffin and Toby bolted, Raffy smiled sadly at his mother before sliding away.

  ‘What’s with you?’ Tori was impressed with her friend’s scowl.

  ‘Nothing. I should get over it.’ Greta pushed the photos towards her.

  Tori looked through them. ‘Creepy! You could sell ’em.’

  Axel marched past wielding a pair of mango pickers. The handles were long, with a mean beak at the end.

  ‘We’re going to raid the old mango farm next door,’ Tori said. ‘Save the fruit from pigs and cows. Bring a bucket.’

  They had to drive out to the road to access a track on the other side of the orchard. It went down to the creek, where Tori parked. The children slipped through the fence to the trees. Tori held the barbed wires apart for Greta.

  ‘Aren’t we trespassing?’ Greta pulled her bucket after her.

  ‘Of course, but no one’s here, so no one’s to know.’

  It was a dark cathedral under the mass of evergreen leaves, with the trunks as close-standing pillars. Greta climbed barefoot up a tree. Tori passed her pickers and a bucket, and climbed a neighbouring tree. Greta had expected the orchard to be cooler, a relief from the sweltering heat. Instead she felt closed in.

  Tori exclaimed there were too many green mangoes in her tree. Greta found the same and climbed higher. She was tired, after interrupted sleep—Griffin had woken her a few times saying he could hear a dog yelping. She’d heard nothing.

  ‘Must be Ronnie’s bus, givin’ him strange dreams,’ Tori said.

  ‘That reminds me, Ronnie said Joel came back here with Danny about fifteen years ago.’ Greta tried to sound indifferent. ‘I was wondering where they stayed.’

  She pulled a ripe mango from its stem. The milky sap stung her fingers.

  ‘They’d’ve been in the shack with the wild pigs and horses,’ said Tori. ‘They weren’t here for long. Went travellin’ around, you know, chasin’ work. Does it matter?’

  ‘Not really. Just something Erin said at Halloween.’

  Questions she wanted to ask needled Greta, but Axel and Skye came screaming to the base of Tori’s tree in a fight.

  ‘Outta here, you lot!’ their mother commanded. ‘Or it’s all over an’ we’re goin’!’

  The children made themselves scarce. Tori chattered on, while Greta moved to another tree. They’d climbed a few by the time the buckets were full. Tori picked up a golden one with a rosy blush and smiled at its perfection, then called to the children.

  Only Raffy, Barney and Skye drifted in from the shadows. The other boys were missing.

  ‘They went through the fallen fence to our place,’ said Raffy. ‘They wanted to play at the creek.’

  ‘I’ll find them,’ said Greta. ‘You help Tori with the buckets.’

  She spotted Toby and Axel near the boundary fence. They’d discovered a burnt-out car twisted around a dead tree.

  Toby hurried to speak. ‘Trapper said this is the car Magdalen died in.’

  ‘Trapper?’

  ‘He said Dad and his brothers took her for a joy ride and crashed into the tree. And then it burst into flames.’

  ‘When did he tell you this?’

  ‘Just now. He was here with his gold detector.’

  Greta scanned the spaces between the trees. The bushland gawked back at her. Trapper had vanished.

  ‘I don’t want you talking with him.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I don’t like what he puts in your head.’

  ‘But it’s true. This is the car. He said.’

  ‘Yes, but he’s wrong, Toby. Magdalen died in a car accident on the highway.’

  ‘I told him that. He just looked at me and said real slow, “Is that right?”’

  Three long car beeps sounded from Tori.

  ‘Go on,’ she told the boys. ‘Everyone’s waiting for you. Where’s Griffin?’

  ‘He walked home ages ago,’ said Toby.

  They pulled up at the shack with a blare of the horn for Griffin, but there was no sign of him. The other children divided the mangoes into two piles, one for each family. They lined up the green ones along the verandah to ripen. Greta sliced a few ripe ones for everyone and made tea for herself and Tori. She kept expecting Griffin to appear, boasting that he’d beaten them home, but half an hour passed and he still hadn’t turned up.

  ‘When did you say he set off home?’ she asked Toby.

  ‘Ages ago. He was bored at the mango farm.’ He added, ‘Maybe he’s run off.’

  ‘What for?’ asked Axel.

  ‘Because of the camera. Wrecking mum’s shots.’ He looked sideways at Greta.

  She stared back at him.

  ‘Well, it wasn’t me!’ he protested.

  ‘And it wasn’t me,’ chipped in Raffy.

  ‘So you’ve said.’

  She sent them off to look in the usual places. The darkroom, the tree house, the bus, the cabin, the shed, the four-wheel drive. She crawled under the verandah. Bare feet thumped overhead. She could smell the mangoes. Their shadows interrupted cracks of light. She moved further in under the house.

  ‘Griffin,’ she whispered, as if she wouldn’t give him away to the others.

  Remnants of life above dug into her knees—beer bottle tops, walnut shells cracked open by Raffy’s brick. Griffin’s knapsack was slumped against a foundation post. Inside she found a pocket guide to snakes, an ant-eaten muesli bar and her head torch. She heard the scuttle of a lizard but nothing more. She retreated back into daylight. Above the homestead a dark band of cloud loomed. A streak of white curled along the front.

  ‘Storm on its way,’ said Tori.

  Greta pulled her father’s watch from her pocket and tried to remember when she’d last seen him. ‘He’s been gone an hour—more maybe …’ Her words petered out.

  ‘I’ll go back to the mango farm and the creek. Maybe we missed him.’

  ‘Let’s check the homestead first,’ said Greta. ‘And ring Brynn.’

  Toby strode alongside his mother. ‘He’ll come back. He always does.’

  She didn’t look at him. She felt sick. As well as the lake, the hut and the creek, there was the bushland up behind the homestead and out to the road. There was Trapper’s forbidden property and the wasted paddocks his cattle roamed. The possibilities kept expanding.

  The old house creaked its usual welcome. Tori checked inside while Greta and Toby wove between car wrecks calling for him. Above them the cloud drift intensified. Greta walked away with her rising panic. Near Magdalen’s birth car she found a boulder to stand on for a better view down to the lake. Maria’s fear bloomed through her like an exotic flower.
There was a strange vine, a pulsing cord between the two mothers. She had a terrible misgiving that the lake might have taken her child.

  Raffy ran over to her carrying Griffin’s bird book.

  ‘What is it?’ She took it from him. It was open at the hooded parrot page.

  ‘I found it in the bus. He said he saw one’—he pointed at the picture of the bird—‘down near the lake.’

  ‘How near?’

  ‘In a log on the edge.’

  The ground tipped under Greta, the clouds and the sky spun.

  ‘Go to the shack, Raffy.’ She gave him the book. ‘Wait for me there. You mustn’t leave until I come home.’

  She watched him head across and then started down the firebreak. The sound of the quad bike chased her. Toby pulled up next to her.

  ‘Have you seen his binoculars?’ she asked.

  He shook his head and climbed off the bike.

  ‘Stay with Raffy. Don’t let him wander anywhere.’

  Toby nodded. He seemed older in this moment. A rumble of thunder came from over the homestead. She glanced to the ruin and hated it all of a sudden, the curse of it, the souls lost to it. Lightning crackled across the sky.

  Greta drove down the track, fingers vibrating on the throttle. The smell of fuel smarted in her nostrils.

  ‘You’ll see him,’ she told herself. ‘You’ll see him if he’s there.’

  The lake was a silent glass.

  ‘Griffin,’ she called, edging her way around the banks, where new grass was sprouting fire debris.

  There was no sign of him in the water. The half-submerged tree lay in its skeleton pose. The ghost car was a drowned song. Still, she believed he might be here, unseen, made invisible by the malicious dam.

  ‘Where is he?’ she screamed at the water.

  She threw in a stone to provoke an answer. The reflections of clouds moved across the speechless mirror.

  There was no boy. The place was a vacuum, a vanishing.

  Fear gripped her and with it the terrible accusation. You did this! You did it!