A Small Madness

by Dianne Touchell

  Liv was worried that at any moment the bubble may burst. Just enough morning-after horror might be awakened by Michael’s coffee to cause him to bolt, so she abandoned all subtlety and said, ‘You buried it.’

  Michael felt a sudden shift in the room. It was more than the hectic quiver of things in his line of vision which he knew to be motionless – he had been experiencing that since he first opened his eyes. It was the realisation that he was in the bedroom of someone he despised while not being able to remember why he despised her. It was the realisation that at some time last night he had told Liv what they had done. Liv had brought him here rather than leave him in a stranger’s backyard. Liv who had never told what she knew even though he had called her a slag. Liv sat cross-legged up against her pillows drinking the coffee her mum had made.

  ‘Thank you,’ Michael said.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For letting me sleep on your floor.’

  Liv struggled with her next question. She had been combating Rose’s denial, fearing it, submitting to it, for over a week. Liv had watched Rose slide down the rabbit hole, fearing her own perceptions were being dragged along for the ride. Someone had to ask the question. Someone had to slap this denial upside the head. With her mother’s stay out of it clinging like teeth to her reason, Liv asked, ‘Was it a boy or a girl?’

  Michael felt the smack of reality through his crawling nausea. It was too much. Until this moment he had coped in the way that people cope with big things: he had diminished it, justified it, avoided it, and buried it. He had stayed away from Rose, watched her from a distance, watched her being diminished and buried herself.

  He was still fighting the swarm of his own thoughts when Liv added, ‘Rose isn’t dealing with this. I’m frightened for her.’

  Michael shimmied to the edge of the bed, sloshing his coffee onto his jeans and Liv’s sheets. He skidded on a skin of his own vomit as he hit the hallway, then ran from the house, shirtless. When he hit the pavement he realised he was still carrying the coffee cup. He threw it into someone’s yard and kept running.

  Rose’s mother was hanging Christmas decorations when she said, ‘I think they found that woman.’

  Rose looked up and asked, ‘What woman?’

  ‘You know – that woman,’ Rose’s mother continued. ‘The one who went missing a couple of years ago. They suspected the husband, I think. Remember all that digging in the bush? I certainly do.’

  ‘Oh yeah, I remember that.’

  ‘Well, they’re back down there again and this time there’s crime-scene tape up. Guess I’ll have to start using the other petrol station again.’

  Rose went to her room. She called Michael but he didn’t answer. She didn’t leave a message. She looked at the time. Michael would be at dinner right now and he wasn’t allowed to have his phone on him at the dinner table. After dinner he’d see the missed call and call her back. She was sure of it.

  Rose waited. She felt peculiarly calm. Someone must have found it. Ludicrously, she hadn’t even considered that a possibility. He had. He had fought her at every turn until after the deed was done. He hadn’t wanted to bury it. He had cried doing it. He wanted to put it in the dumpster with the towel. But Rose had insisted it needed a burial. His hands had tugged at the dirt, pulling fistfuls of the black stuff aside in a deformed breaststroke while his body shook with hiccupy moans. He had watched her watching him, holding it. The deeper he dug, the further away the hole looked. She had passed a large clot while he dug and had to lean against a tree to stop from fainting. She had smiled down at him and said, ‘This is the right thing to do,’ and in that moment she had believed it.

  Rose lay down on her bed, pulling her pillow up under her chin, and waited. Maybe she was worrying for nothing. Maybe they really had found that woman. That woman who walked out of her house and never returned. She would be just bones by now, Rose imagined. Rose’s mother had a cutlery set with bone handles. Rose wondered where someone would get the bones to make those handles and other bone things. She imagined there was a committee of bone collectors who went about scavenging dead things, waiting for the flesh to fall off so they could harvest the bones. Should be able to make a whole cutlery set out of this missing woman. Rose’s mother was particularly fond of her bone-handled cutlery set. It had once belonged to her own mother. She said they were well-balanced and felt good in the hand. Rose had been told that she would be given that cutlery set one day. It had great sentimental value and real bone was rare. Everything was plastic or stainless steel nowadays. Rose could pass those bone handles down to her own children. The thought soothed her.

  Rose was nodding off to sleep when her mother stuck her head in the bedroom door and said, ‘Rosie. They found a baby in the bush.’

  Rose pushed herself up onto one elbow and asked, ‘Are there any pieces missing in that cutlery set? You know, the one that was Grandma’s with the bone handles?’

  Her mother didn’t respond.

  Rose waited a moment. ‘Mum? Why are you crying?’

  Michael wasn’t at the dinner table. He had been sitting in his room holding his phone when it rang. He had almost answered it. He had just heard the evening news and was considering calling Rose when she called him. Dinner being late tonight, his father had the news on while Michael was setting the table. That’s when Michael heard it.

  Police tonight are searching an area of bushland in the southern suburbs after discovering the remains of what appears to be a near-to-term female infant. The discovery was made this morning by a local man walking the area with his dogs. The man’s attention was drawn to what has been described by police as a shallow grave, when his dogs began digging in the vicinity. A police spokesperson said no further information was available at this time; however, an autopsy is being performed. The death is being treated as suspicious.

  So Michael had sat in his bedroom considering calling Rose and then ignoring her call to him. He didn’t know what he would say to her anyway. The truth was, Michael couldn’t think about her or look at her without seeing the blood. He would drag her into focus with an effort that sprained his retinas and just when he thought her face would stay before him, the way it used to, the edges of her would bleed out and darken until she was as crusted and virulent as the bloodied towel now festering in the dumpster behind the market. Except the towel wouldn’t be there anymore, would it? It would be long since buried under tonnes of other refuse at the landfill. They should have thrown it away with the towel. People don’t walk their dogs through the landfill. And even if they did, no one is interested in what a dog sniffs in a landfill. People dump dead cats in there after all.

  It didn’t matter now. It had been found and there was nothing they could do about it. Nor did they have to. There was no way, Michael thought, that they could connect it with him.

  Tim walked into Michael’s bedroom and shut the door. Of all the things competing for cognitive brain space in that moment, the shutting of his bedroom door screamed the loudest.

  ‘Open the door!’ he hissed at Tim.

  ‘I don’t think so!’ Tim riposted. He stood with his back pressed against the closed door. The hard, cool surface sent a kind of current into his muscle tissue as if he were leaning against their father’s tangible displeasure. Pressing up against all the possible repercussions of having a door closed against his father gave Tim a shot of perspective more piercing than a bullet. He said, ‘You can’t wait for them to come to you.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The police!’

  ‘Why would they come to me?’ Michael asked.

  Tim couldn’t decide whether Michael was genuinely confused or diabolically stupid. ‘They’ll come to you because they’ll work it out. You can’t risk them tracking you down. The bigger this thing gets, the worse it’s going to be when they do find you. Don’t you get it? Now’s the time – get in first and tell your side. You have to protect yourself.’

  Protect yourself. The words had talons.

 
‘Rose just called me,’ Michael said.

  ‘Well, don’t answer!’ Tim felt more and more frustrated. This wasn’t just about protecting Michael anymore. This was about protecting himself. Could he trust Michael not to reveal that he had told him everything that had happened that very night? Could he even ask Michael to do that?

  ‘Listen,’ Tim said, trying to keep the desperation out of his voice, ‘we work out exactly what you’re going to say. You are remorseful, upset. You tried all along to get this girl to do the right thing but she wouldn’t. You know you did the wrong thing by not coming forward sooner. But all you did, Michael, was dispose of the evidence of her crime. Okay?’

  Michael watched his brother talking, heard the words, his burgeoning panic turning into a fat, wet cud. He said, ‘Let me think, let me think.’

  Tim let his head drop back against the door and groaned. Then he turned away and opened the bedroom door. Standing on the threshold was their father, one hand on each doorjamb.

  ‘Dinner’s ready,’ was all he said.

  ‘The Baby in the Bush’ was front-page news, first in their immediate community and then further and further afield. Professionals from all kinds of medical and legal fields were weighing in on the discovery, and the commentary took on the grave, agenda-laden authority of people so excited by the horror of it that soon the infant itself was hardly mentioned. This small, abandoned thing was fast becoming a symbol for the collapse of societal standards and the degradation of the value of human life. Ministers and politicians seethed about the influence of violent video games, movies and music on the vulnerable youth of today. Assumptions were made that fast became printed copy and therefore recognised fact. A wound-up public would have something to rage about in bank and supermarket queues for weeks.

  The crime-scene tape stayed up for three days. Small crowds gathered to watch the police in white jumpsuits moving like wraiths in and out of sight, at once hidden then starkly exposed against the dark underbrush and conch-pale trees. There was a reverential solemnity to it all. There was talk of seasoned officers needing counselling, and locals began leaving flowers up against the street light on the corner.

  Rose read and listened to the diatribe with curiosity and incredulity. She felt as disconnected from these events as she had felt before the crime-scene tape went up. But the longer lasting and more virulent the public outrage became, the more detached and confused Rose became. The virus had gone away. She was a good person. And she was as genuinely appalled as everyone else by speculative descriptions of the monster who must have done this dreadful thing in the bush. Because it wasn’t her.

  Strangers began demanding answers and action. There were neither. A police psychologist was interviewed in an air-conditioned studio and even in the crisp heat of the bush fringe, trying and failing to offer something other than a tabloid sound bite to the fray. An appeal for the mother to come forward. There were grave concerns for her mental and physical health. The mother needed help and compassion. She shouldn’t be afraid to reach out for support. Rose’s eyes grew leaden with sadness as she watched the psychologist squinting into the camera so she squinted back, narrowing her eyes until their furrowed aperture was wet and foggy. ‘Isn’t it so sad, Mother,’ she said.

  Violet scoured the newspapers and watched every news bulletin. She became snappy and non-communicative. She cried throughout a church sermon for the Baby in the Bush, as if her own heart were buried with it. Rose sat beside her mother and watched a thick stalactite of mucous crawl unnoticed from Violet’s nostril to her upper lip. Rose was fascinated by it. She had never seen her mother cry in church before. So Rose reached across and took her mother’s hand and gave it a small squeeze of support. Violet turned and looked at her daughter, looked at the small smile of sympathy on Rose’s face, felt the gentle press of Rose’s fingers around her own, and cried even harder.

  Michael’s family was in church too, but Rose noticed that Michael wasn’t. His family sat, a slightly smaller but nonetheless cohesive group, moving in unison with the rest of the congregation: sit, stand, kneel, stand, sit. Rose couldn’t help but think they were like a school of fish, ducking and weaving with a fluid and practised unanimity. The image made her smile. She didn’t realise she was the only one in the church not moving in accord.

  Michael hadn’t returned any of Rose’s calls or texts so Rose stopped sending them. That urgent need she had initially felt to speak to him had dissipated. She existed now behind a thick pane of glass, present but unnoticeably separate from everyone around her. She knew she could exist in this state forever. Her insides were finally quiet. She wondered if it showed.

  It showed to Liv. Liv saw Rose sinking into a hole with a ghost in her arms and there was absolutely nothing she could do about it.

  Liv was walking through the mall one afternoon when she first heard it. She was accustomed to hearing things muttered by one particular group of girls whenever she walked by. Liv would muster up something equally cutting and witty with which to engage them, not because she cared what they thought, but because it gave her genuine pleasure.

  Liv was unprepared, however, for what she heard this day. And her lack of preparation disarmed her completely. She was almost adjacent to the group when she heard Louise Wright say, ‘Baby killer.’

  At first Liv thought she had misheard. She slowed her stride just enough to catch the second hiss of it, from two girls this time, slightly out of synch so the words bit into each other in a murmured counterpoint.

  ‘Filthy baby killer.’

  Liv stopped and turned to face the group. Small smiles and solid stances told her they knew they had her. She felt her feet shifting slightly beneath her, willed herself not to shuffle them about. Felt a tingle in her extremities. Said, ‘What did you say?’

  ‘You heard,’ Louise said. Murmurs of solidarity. The group moved and responded like a military unit. They even had a uniform, all labels and lip gloss. They were as relaxed and confident in this moment as Liv was restless. Liv hated Louise Wright, had laughed in her face many times with the knowledge that being high school royalty did not translate in the real world. Two months out of school, when this girl was first slapped down by a real-life situation, she would probably crumble in confusion that she was not respected for no other reason than she simply existed.

  Louise continued, ‘Everyone knows. Everyone’s talking about it.’ Two steps closer to Liv. Flank following. ‘It was only a matter of time before you squeezed one out, slut. And what were you going to do? Live happily ever after with the baby-daddy? Oh, wait. It’d be impossible to figure out who that is, wouldn’t it, bike?’

  Giggles of camaraderie from the pack followed by perfectly timed support.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Right.’

  Louise moved in close and whispered, ‘Did you kill it before you buried it? Or did it die inside you out of sickness at having to share a body with you?’

  Liv put months of staying-out-of-it into the slap that followed. She smacked Louise with such force and speed that there was a moment of shocked silence before the bawling began. Liv’s hand was stinging. Louise squatted on the floor howling, tears burning the perfectly forming impression of Liv’s open palm. The knot of supporters with the collapsed princess dropped to their knees around her in unison, easing her into a sitting position as strangers began to gather. Liv walked away, legs shaking, as a horrified shopper began talking about finding the security personnel.

  Liv sat on her bed hugging her knees, head down, while her mother lay on the end of the bed, elbow crooked, head resting on one hand.

  ‘You’re going to tell me to stay out it,’ Liv said matter-of-factly.

  ‘Yes,’ her mum replied. ‘Yes, I am.’

  Liv had come home crying, a large bruise beginning to swell on the heel of her hand. Her mother had made her a cup of tea and listened, and just when Liv thought they had reached the same impasse of denial and non-involvement her mum said, ‘I do want you to stay out of it. Bu
t I’m not.’

  Liv looked up then. Her mother gave a small smile and continued, ‘The police called.’

  ‘Why would they call you?’

  ‘I gave my details at the hospital when I took Rose in. The hospital must have contacted them. Put two and two together. I knew it was only a matter of time.’

  ‘Will you get in trouble?’ Liv asked. She felt strangely relieved, even with the dread of her mother getting into trouble making her feel sick with guilt. She closed her eyes against a sudden dry stinging – the air in the room was giving her a headache. She hadn’t realised how tired she was.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ her mother continued. ‘Plausible deniability, isn’t that what they call it? Oh, and we did save that stupid girl’s life.’ She rolled onto her back then and started talking at the ceiling. ‘They would have talked to Violet by now. Did I tell you Violet called me before I had a chance to call her? She was all over this. Thanked me for taking her daughter to the hospital when she fell ill. Fell ill. Poor Violet.’

  ‘Poor Violet?’ Liv said doubtfully.

  Liv’s mum rolled onto her stomach and shimmied around to face her daughter. She reached out a hand and rested it on Liv’s foot before continuing.

  ‘I’m going to go in and talk to the police. They haven’t asked me to yet but they will. And I don’t want you to take the blame. I really don’t want some group of acrylic-nailed, push-up bra vigilantes waiting for you in a car park somewhere.’

  Liv closed her hand into a fist then slowly released each finger, feeling the throb of the developing bruise deep in the plump pad of tissue at the base of her thumb. It felt good to manipulate it. ‘When will you go to the police?’

  Liv’s mother didn’t answer immediately and when she did she caught Liv by surprise by saying, ‘It’s a sort of madness, you know.’ Then, ‘I’ll go tomorrow.’ ‘What?’ Liv asked.