The Fourth Season

by Dorothy Johnston

  ‘Had you seen him here before?’

  ‘Why should I tell you if I had? The cops took my button. It was just a button, but it was all I had of her. I’ll never get it back.’

  I said I was sorry.

  Jake glared at me and walked away.

  Twenty-seven

  This time we made a proper weekend of it, perhaps the last one for the year when it would be warm enough to swim in the sea.

  Kat jumped on the bunk beds. Peter pretended he was six again and joined her.

  I half wished I’d signed up for a diving course—that way I would have had the whole weekend to chat to the instructors—but when I saw how much fun the kids were having, I was glad I’d brought them.

  Peter’s cheeks were red with jumping. I hadn’t told him why I wanted to go to Merimbula, simply saying that a cheque had been more generous than we’d expected, their soccer teams both had byes, and we all deserved a weekend away. Peter was so used to living from cheque to cheque that he accepted my lie without a murmur. I hoped I’d be able to get away on my own without arousing his suspicion.

  As for Ivan, he was still, after twenty years in Australia, so unaccustomed to the Pacific Ocean, so wary of it even in its mildest presentations, that he couldn’t comprehend how any sane person would want to swim there, let alone explore its depths. When I put forward the idea of enrolling in a dive course he reacted with horror, sure that I would drown. When I pointed out that there’d be instructors whose job it was to prevent this happening, and that one or more of them might have known Laila, my argument hardly made a dent. It wasn’t hard to settle for a compromise. There was the money to consider too. The price of a weekend course was beyond our means, which made me wonder how Laila had been able to afford it.

  I smiled at my monkey of a daughter jumping from the top bunk to the floor. Laila had been impatient, I guessed, unwilling to wait, determined to get what she wanted. Practically all of my impressions of her had been filtered through the emotions and attitudes of men who’d been blinded by their own attraction, seeing only a reflection of this, rather than the person underneath. Jeremy Pascal was an exception. I was suddenly sure Cameron Fletcher had been an exception too.

  I would never take my first breath, in memory of Laila, underwater. I would never learn to scuba dive. Since I hadn’t grasped the opportunity this weekend offered, I would never grasp it. Small matter. I would never learn to ski either, or dance on my toes. I smiled again, this time privately, turning away from the antics of my children, released after three hours cooped up in a car. I asked myself if the picture of me, their mother, in a wetsuit with oxygen strapped to her back, was as ludicrous as a tutu, say, or a pair of skis. I loved swimming. I could have learnt to dive.

  Sadness overtook me unexpectedly, for a young woman whose strength and abilities, whose youth and beauty, had been powerless to save her.

  ‘Maybe it’s too cold for sharks,’ Ivan was saying glumly.

  ‘Mum, you’re coming in, aren’t you?’ Katya cried.

  ‘In a little while. There’s something I have to do first.’

  Careful not to catch Peter’s eye, I left them running down a sandy path to the water, taking a moment to stand and admire the lovely curved lines of the bay, national park on one side, houses stopping short of the headland on the other.

  I’d noticed the dive lodge as we’d driven in. It was part of a converted house.

  The young woman who answered my knock smiled a greeting as she led me down a corridor to a room furnished with two tables pushed together, surrounded by half a dozen chairs. The walls were lined with photographs. A white board stood in one corner, and a TV and DVD player in another.

  On the phone, I’d spoken briefly of my interest in Laila, but had not gone into details. The young woman, who’d introduced herself as Angie, had sounded willing to help, but unsure how she might do this.

  ‘I checked back through our records after you called,’ she said after inviting me to take a seat. ‘Laila enrolled for a weekend course in October last year.’ Angie’s voice was mild and uninflected. It was impossible to tell what she felt about Laila, or her death.

  We spoke in generalities for a few minutes, about the courses, the shipwreck dives which were very popular, then moved on to the instructors.

  ‘Ben was a lovely guy,’ Angie said, colouring deeply and not looking at me. ‘A good teacher. We miss him.’

  I waited, then when Angie didn’t volunteer anything more, I asked gently if she knew whether Laila and Ben might have met before that weekend.

  Angie bit her lip, then raised her head with what seemed an unusual effort. Her grey-green eyes held an expression that was hard to read.

  ‘After you rang, I tried to think back. It could be important, couldn’t it? A policeman came down here and took statements from all of us, but he didn’t ask me that.’

  ‘It is important,’ I said. ‘Please try and remember.’

  ‘We all ate dinner together on the Saturday night,’ Angie said. ‘Ben was—I guess you could call it paying attention to Laila over dinner. Later on, when I went into the kitchen, they were stacking the dishwasher and talking.’

  Angie blushed again. I guessed she was the kind of person who often blushed when she was nervous. Laila and Ben’s conversation had been about shipwrecks. Laila had been telling Ben how she’d become interested in diving. Ben had been on wreck dives all over the world.

  ‘There was nothing she could tell him that he didn’t already know.’

  They hadn’t been acting as though they were friends from Canberra, and Laila hadn’t spoken about any wreck dives in particular, or not in Angie’s hearing. She sounded wistful as she recalled the domestic scene, the obvious pleasure the two had taken in each other’s company.

  ‘Ben told her about the Yongala. It went down in a cyclone off Townsville, and lay undiscovered for over fifty years. It’s right inside the Barrier Reef Marine Park, you know. It was Ben’s favourite dive.’

  I nodded, waiting, guessing that Angie was working her way up to telling me something that puzzled, or perhaps annoyed her.

  ‘I do remember one thing about that weekend. A friend of Ben’s dropped in to see him. I didn’t think anything of it at the time.’

  Angie hadn’t been introduced to Ben’s friend, and didn’t know his name. People had been coming and going all weekend and the house had been full. A group, including Laila, had sat around the lounge on Saturday evening. They’d talked about going to Queensland to dive the Yongala, what a cool thing it would be to do.

  ‘Ben was telling them about it, I mean about what happened. The bodies and the cargo were never found, or just one body, actually—a racehorse. It was washed to shore.’ Laila had seemed keen to go.

  ‘But she couldn’t have done it. The sea floor’s thirty metres. It would have been too hard for her.’

  ‘Ben’s friend was a diver too?’

  ‘Oh yes. He used to take groups out to the homestead at Lake Jindabyne. I mean, before the water got too low.’

  ‘How did he get on with Laila?’

  Angie blushed again and looked as though she wasn’t going to answer. Finally she said, ‘Laila was beautiful, wasn’t she? She had men wrapped around her little finger. It was child’s play to her.’

  Ben had driven the Canberra group down in the dive shop’s Toyota. Angie looked up the records for me, but no names apart from Laila’s were familiar. When I asked about sleeping arrangements, she explained that there was a girls’ dorm and a boys’. She added that the instructors were in a separate, three bedroomed cottage behind the main building. She’d gone to bed before Ben on that Saturday night and had not heard him come in.

  ‘But something woke you up,’ I said, acting on a hunch.

  ‘I heard voices, Ben’s and another man’s.’

  ‘Ben’s guest?’

  Angie said it could have been; she wasn’t sure. She hadn’t liked to eavesdrop. She’d lain awake for a while and then gone back t
o sleep. Next morning, everything was normal. Ben was bleary-eyed, and the cook was late. They’d gone off on their wreck dive.

  ‘How did Laila seem that morning?’

  Angie raised her head. She’d been staring at her hands while she spoke about Ben’s late-night visitor.

  ‘There was a bit of an incident, as a matter of fact. Laila went inside the hull after she’d been warned not to.’

  Angie described the buddy system and the safety rules, including stopping at a bar ten metres from the surface, even though the Tasman Hauler wasn’t so deep as to make this obligatory. The dive master, that morning Angie, had waited at the bar while her group explored the huge propeller and looked at the fish who’d made the wreck their home.

  ‘I sometimes stay on the boat, but at that time of year I like listening to the whales.’

  Angie digressed for a moment to describe the joy of hanging off the bar and listening to the Humpbacks singing as they swam along the coast. I’d almost forgotten that Merimbula was famous for whale-watching expeditions, as it had been famous in the nineteenth century for hunting whales and killing them.

  ‘It’s just as well I did, because Laila’s buddy swam up in a flap. It saved both of us those few extra metres.’

  Angie explained how much air they carried, how long it was safe to stay under, and how easy to was to become disoriented in a confined space, where kicking up silt could reduce visibility to zero.

  ‘We go through it all with them beforehand of course, and it’s nearly always fine, but now and then you get the odd one who thinks she knows better.’

  ‘So you saved Laila’s life,’ I said, guessing what came next.

  ‘Part of our training is to do the dive blindfold. I know every centimetre of that boat. If you don’t, you can miss a ladder that’s less than a metre away.’

  When I asked how Laila had reacted to being rescued, Angie gave me a half smile, head on one side. ‘She wasn’t exactly grateful. I gave her a good talking-to. Her buddy was furious. He said she indicated to him that she was going inside, and then just gave a kick and went. He had two choices—go after her, or return to the surface and get me.’

  ‘I bet he’s glad he chose the latter.’

  ‘Yes, well, like I said, every now and then you get one. I told Laila she wouldn’t be diving with us again. I might have been softer on her if she hadn’t—’

  ‘Been so arrogant about it?’

  Angie nodded. Or so attractive to Ben, I added silently.

  When I asked if Ben had changed over the summer, Angie said, ‘He was different.’ She threw me a glance that indicated she’d been thinking about this, but might not have raised it if I hadn’t.

  ‘He became more and more irritable, which was really unlike him. I asked if he was worried about something, but he wouldn’t tell me.’ Angie bit her lip and blinked. ‘There was one other time I remember when Ben had a visitor, but he didn’t come into the main house and I never met him. I only heard his voice. The group we had that weekend weren’t exactly into cleaning up after themselves. I’d stacked the dishwasher by myself, and tidied up the kitchen and the living room, wondering why Ben didn’t come and help me. He was usually good about stuff like that. I got things ready for the morning, then went up to the cottage. That’s when I heard their voices.’

  Angie paused. I waited, telling myself to let her take her own time.

  ‘They were having some sort of disagreement. Not a full-on argument, but the other guy—he was doing most of the talking—was trying to persuade Ben to do something, I think. And Ben didn’t want to.’

  When I asked if Angie had recognised the other man’s voice, she shook her head. She hadn’t been able to hear what they were saying.

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I—I went out the front.’

  ‘To see if you could find a car?’

  Angie swallowed as though the movement was painful and admitted that this had been her reason.

  ‘There weren’t any extra vehicles, just the van, my car, and a station wagon some people from Sydney had driven down in. I walked a little way along the road and then I—well, I started to feel embarrassed, I guess. It wasn’t any of my business who Ben’s visitor was. I went to bed.’

  There’d been no more voices coming from Ben’s room, nor had Angie heard the sound of a car starting up. The next morning, Ben had got up late. ‘And really bad tempered.’ Angie hadn’t asked him what the matter was. ‘He was a bit better after he’d had some food and about four cups of coffee.’

  ‘When you walked along the road, how far did you go?’

  ‘Just to the corner of Market Street and back.’

  I thanked Angie for taking the trouble to answer my questions. I sensed that she’d kept her feelings for Ben and her jealousy of Laila bottled up, perhaps out of guilt. She’d let me see them because I was a stranger, someone who didn’t count. I would disappear and she need never bother about me again.

  On my way out, I asked if she’d mind showing me the storeroom.

  Sturdy shelves covered an entire wall. There were piles of sheets and towels. Four weight belts sat on a bottom shelf. I only needed to glance at them to see that they were an older type. In any case, Angie confirmed that none had gone missing. I picked one up and felt the tug at my shoulder, the pull in my wrist and forearm. Unless I was used to handling one, I doubted very much if I could have use it as a weapon. I asked Angie what kind of weight belt Ben had used.

  ‘One like that,’ she said.

  . . .

  By now, Ivan would have forced Pete and Katya to come out of the water. The three of them would be building a sand castle. Tempers would be fraying, and hunger would be beginning to make itself felt.

  After lunch and a dip—Pete came in with me a little way but Katya pronounced the sea ‘bitey’ and stayed with her father, who said, ‘My sentiments exactly’—we drove along the coast to Eden.

  The wind picked up as we approached the headland overlooking Twofold Bay, and the sea turned grey and choppy. We pulled up at an old whaling tower, which Peter pronounced ‘cool’.

  ‘Did they shoot arrows out of there?’ his sister wanted to know.

  There was an oil rig up for repairs from Bass Strait. From the headland, it resembled nothing so much as a gigantic orange spider that had contrived to make the whole of the bay its web.

  I’d read about how, when Bass Strait oil rigs snapped an anchor chain, they were towed up to Eden to be fitted with a new one. Nine million dollars a day it cost for the rigs to be off-line, but Eden was the closest safe, deep water port. It was forbidden to tow them through the narrow shipping lane to Melbourne. I pictured Ben Sanderson welding broken chains, working underwater in danger and discomfort, and wondered again why he’d ended up in Canberra.

  I sat in the car and phoned Angie, hoping she’d still be at the lodge.

  ‘Do you ever get to meet divers from the oil rigs?’ I asked when she came on the line.

  Angie said yes, as a matter of fact she had. One had booked himself in for a wreck dive and she’d been in charge of his group. She couldn’t recall his name.

  ‘I know this is asking a big favour, but would it be possible for you to look it up, and the date as well?’

  Angie returned to the phone in a few moments, and told me the diver’s name was Phil Gregorio, and the dive had taken place on 28 January.

  I thanked her again, then asked if Ben Sanderson had been working that weekend.

  Without pausing for reflection, or to look it up, Angie confirmed that he had.

  . . .

  After dinner, I left my family playing cards with the promise that I wouldn’t be long.

  I spent half an hour knocking on doors up and down Market Street, quickly realising that the task I’d set myself was hopeless. Who would recall a Saturday night six months ago, let alone an unfamiliar car parked in the street?

  The woman at the end, where Market Street turned into Merimbula Drive, said that her so
n might be able to help me. Grateful for this small amount of encouragement, I gave her my card, even though, when I questioned her politely, she couldn’t say what form the help might take. Her son was out fishing for the weekend, and expected back on Sunday night.

  . . .

  Ivan was sitting outside on the cabin’s small veranda when I got back. Pete and Katya were asleep.

  I felt dazed from talk that went in circles, and would have liked nothing so much as to sit in silence for a while before falling into bed, but Ivan had spent hours entertaining children and was ready for some adult conversation.

  He stared up at clouds moving across a quarter moon and said, ‘You know I can see her diving down here now. I couldn’t when we first arrived.’

  I let Ivan talk about Laila until he’d talked himself out, swallowing the old, familiar hurt.

  . . .

  Though I spent the best part of next morning inquiring after divers who might be working on the rig in Twofold Bay, I was no closer, by the end of it, to finding out if Phil Gregorio was one of them. I tried ringing Angie again, but was told she’d left.

  By the time we set off on the three hour drive to Canberra, Katya was ready for an afternoon nap, and Peter quietly elated that, left to his own devices, he’d practised and practised until he’d won a game of snooker.

  . . .

  The phone rang late on Sunday evening. It was the fisherman whose mother had said he might have something for me. I explained that I was trying to trace a visitor to the dive school, and named the date. Had he been aware of any unfamiliar vehicles?

  There was a car, he told me. He would never have remembered, except for the fact that the idiot had parked half way across his drive. When he’d gone to back out at four-thirty in the morning, it had been touch and go as to whether he’d be able to get around.

  ‘What kind of car was it?’

  ‘A red Hyundai.’

  ‘Did you take the number?’

  ‘No. I had half a mind to complain, but I let it go.’

  . . .

  Tired, but unable to sleep, I set out the Lightning photos on my desk, five of them altogether. At first glance, it was hard to see why anyone would take five such similar pictures. The yacht’s name was only visible in one, but there was no doubt that it was the same yacht, and that she was beautiful to look at. The light suggested that the time of day was the same as well. The only differences I could see were in the angles of the shots, but these were slight. I wondered what else the pictures had to tell me. I wondered where the Lightning was right now.