The Way Back

by Kylie Ladd

  ‘Girly? I got you somethin’ to eat.’

  Girly. She hated that. There was the dull thud of a dish against the dirt floor and then the man straightened up and stood there as if waiting, breathing heavily through his mouth. Charlie watched him from the darkness at the rear of the stall, her heart pounding in her throat, every muscle tensed. After a minute or so he turned away, pushing his hands into his pockets. This was her chance. Charlie sprang to her feet and bolted towards the light, weaving around the man. He made a grab for her but she managed to evade him, leaping over the dish of food and ducking beneath the top half of the stable door. Sunshine hit her, fresh air, the chatter of birds, and though her legs buckled with the effort and her whole body shook she ran and ran and ran until something grey and hard struck her in the chest and knocked her to the ground.

  For a second she thought she’d been hit by a boulder or had run into a tree. She lay on her back, twigs tangled in her hair, slowly realising as the world spun around her that there was an animal on top of her, pinning her to the earth. Charlie screamed and tried to push it away. In return she heard it sniffing at her face, felt a long wet tongue slather her from chin to cheekbone. She screamed again, certain she was about to be eaten, and suddenly the man was beside her, his dirty boots inches from her head.

  ‘Blue!’ he cried, ‘Blue! Get down. Come here.’

  Before she could even think about escaping again the man was looming over her, one knee on her stomach, his hand across her mouth. ‘Shut up!’ he hissed, leaning in so closely she could see the dog hair clinging to his coat, a raised mole on the side of his face. It was the first time she had looked at him properly, in the light, and they stared at each other while a flock of galahs flew squawking overhead. His eyes, she noticed, were brown, like Dan’s. ‘Just be quiet,’ he said, and this time his tone was beseeching rather than angry. Then he picked her up and threw her over his shoulder, depositing her seconds later back in the stable. Before he padlocked it shut he retrieved the sandwich he’d left her earlier and tossed it to the cattle dog. Charlie lay on her side, knees curled to her stomach. Her hip was throbbing where he’d dropped her to the straw; there were leaves and dirt in her ears, in her hair. She thought he would go straight back to the house, but his voice came wheedling through the splintery walls.

  ‘What’s your name, girly?’

  She refused to answer. He asked again, and she stuck out her tongue, though of course he couldn’t see her.

  ‘I just want to be friends,’ he entreated. ‘I just want to talk to you. I won’t hurt you. Tell me your name.’

  Something in his voice brought tears to her eyes and she jammed her fist in her mouth, determined not to cry. The man waited a minute, two, three, then the whole stable shook.

  ‘Tell me!’ he screamed, fists raining on the wood. ‘Tell me, or you’ll get nothing. Nothing! No food, no water. I’ll put the dog back on you.’

  Charlie rolled onto her knees, sobbing openly now, and crossed her hands over her head to block out the sound. She closed her eyes and rocked back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, until eventually the stable went quiet once more and all she could hear outside were the birds.

  She lasted three days. At first the man came back hourly, it seemed, to mutter at her through the walls, demanding her name, then stumping away when she remained silent. Sometimes she could hear the dog with him, nosing at the door; at other times he was alone. For the first week or so that she’d been in the stable he’d brought her fruit, crackers and breakfast cereal, though without the milk. There’d been sandwiches made of the soft white bread that her mother always refused to buy, and on one day a packet of salt and vinegar chips. She was always hungry and had scoffed them down, then had had to ask for water when they made her thirsty. He’d delivered that too, but now, as he’d threatened, all deliveries had stopped. He’d also stopped emptying her bucket. Charlie kept it as far away from her as she could, but was uncomfortably aware of its mounting smell. After the first day without food or water her stomach cramped and gurgled, her tongue felt thick; after the second she was lightheaded and beginning to lose track of time. It was warm enough when chinks of light showed through the cracked timber walls, but once it grew dark the temperature dropped and small draughts plucked at her neck and bare arms. Charlie lay on her back with straw pulled over her and tried not to think. Tried not to think of home, that is. Where were her parents and Dan? What were they doing? Were they looking for her? At times the doubts circled like vultures, and she found herself, furious, hands clenched and jaw set, hating them for not finding her, for abandoning her, for not being there. At others, though, when she could think more rationally, she knew they must be frantic, must be beside themselves with worry and fear, and somehow that thought was worse than the first.

  So she forced her mind elsewhere. She tried to remember everything she had ever been taught: her times tables, all the square roots, her French verbs, the first twenty elements of the periodic table. After that she went over the thirty or so points of the horse, then visualised each item in her grooming kit. When that made her fret for Tic Tac, she shifted to lyrics: Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, every One Direction tune she had sung along to in primary school. But by day three she had run out. Run out of lyrics, run out of elements, run right out of resolve. Her lips were cracked, her throat was too dry to swallow, and as she got up to use the bucket she felt she might pass out. When the man came that night and asked for her name, she croaked, ‘Charlie.’

  Dan trudged up the hill towards home, staring at his feet. His shoulder felt as if it was about to fall off, the webbing of his bag biting into his flesh. It was stupidly heavy. That was what happened when you didn’t go to school for two weeks—there was a shit-load of work waiting for you when you got back. He stopped and set the bag down, then heaved it onto his other shoulder. It was crazy to be bringing it all home. How could he concentrate on surds and indices with Charlie still gone? Surds. Turds. He smiled grimly to himself and set off again. As soon as he got through the door he’d dump it all on his desk, and it could just stay there for all he cared. What teacher would dare punish him if he didn’t hand it in?

  He shouldn’t even be going to school, anyway. He should be out searching with his dad and the SES, but yesterday his dad had suddenly stopped him and asked, ‘What are you doing here?’ Dan had started to reply, though it was pretty obvious, but his father had just shook his head and told him that he’d already missed too much school. His mum, the homework Nazi, hadn’t even noticed, which just showed the sort of head space she was in. Dan had contemplated wagging, but he’d never done it before and wasn’t sure how. God knows he’d wanted to, but he’d always been too scared. Story of his life. And he’d be too afraid to start now, he realised. His dad had called the principal last night to alert him to Dan’s return. If Dan hadn’t shown up, the principal would have rung back, and that was the last thing his parents needed to hear—that both their kids were missing.

  Tears welled in his eyes. Dan brushed them away with the side of his hand, but more threatened immediately. Charlie. Fuck. Where are you? he pleaded to himself. He couldn’t bear it. It didn’t make sense. How could she just disappear like that, evaporate like a puddle? One day she’d been in the backyard feeding Tikka scraps of cheese and prattling on about something that had happened in class; the next she was gone. Vanished. Lost. Disappeared. Every day when he was out in the bush with Hannah and his father, he had expected to find her, to come over a ridge or through a stand of gums and there she’d be, sitting whole and safe with a small smile on her face that almost asked them what had taken so long. He’d expected to sense her, to hear her—Charlie was always talking—but the only sound was the wind through the trees and his father’s muttered curses, and all he could sense was Hannah growing steadily tenser and sadder beside him in the truck.

  Hannah had stuck with them, Dan thought, showing up to help search every morning, until her own parents had sent her back to school earlier
in the week. In the first few days after Charlie went missing, he hadn’t noticed her—there were so many people and so much noise, there were helicopters and dogs and the constant thud of his own panicked heart in his ears. After a while the searchers dwindled, the helicopters flew away, but Hannah stayed on. He hadn’t known her before all this—she was part of Charlie’s world—but now the fact that she had belonged to that world, that she’d known his sister and liked her and rode with her made Hannah special, even precious. She was a link; she was proof that Charlie existed. One day, when they’d stopped briefly to eat some sandwiches his mum had made, Hannah told him and his dad how she’d been having lunch with Charlie and some other pony club girls one day, when Tic Tac, who was tethered just behind Charlie, pushed his head into their circle and snaffled the apple she was eating right out of her hand. Anyone else would have scolded the pony or even smacked him over the nose, but Charlie had just patted him and apologised for not offering it sooner. Hannah had laughed at that, her face momentarily lit up, and Dan had suddenly realised how pretty she was. ‘That’s just like Charlie,’ she’d said. ‘She’s such a softy.’ He could have hugged her for using the present tense.

  He reached the gate, deep in thought. Hannah had told him she was in Year Ten, same as him, but she was so different from the girls at his school. They were always shrieking and carrying on, always fixing their makeup and taking selfies. You never saw one without her phone in her hand. They texted each other right through class, even when they were sitting at adjacent desks. He supposed Hannah had a phone—everyone did, except him—but he’d never seen her use it. When she spoke, she looked directly at him and his dad, not at a screen. He wished she went to his school—but then maybe, if she did, he’d be invisible to her too, like he was to everyone else.

  No one talked to him, no one asked to borrow a pencil or even if they could copy his homework. Like a river rushing around a rock, everyone simply went about their day as if he didn’t exist. And not just his class, but the whole school, teachers too. He was rarely called upon, even when he had his hand up; his name was never read out at assemblies or shouted across the playground. It was as if some sort of screen had descended between him and the rest of the world, shutting him off. Admittedly, today two people had asked him about Charlie, their eyes wide, their faces solicitous, but he had felt like spitting on them. They were such fakes. They hadn’t spoken to him in three years—what did they care how he was now?

  As Dan came up the path to his house, he was horrified to find ten or fifteen people standing around the porch under the light his mother never turned off, loitering on the front steps, chatting to each other as they fiddled with notebooks and microphones. In the time it took him to realise they were the press, they had turned towards him, faces alight. One man dropped his cigarette and ground it into the lawn; another hoisted a camera to his shoulder. Dan thought stupidly of his skin. He’d had another breakout. He didn’t want them filming him. They were advancing like a zombie army, pens poised. ‘That’s her brother!’ one shouted. ‘He’s in the picture on the press release.’ ‘Mate, hey, can you tell us what’s happened to your sister?’ another called, while a woman raised her Nikon, snapped, and asked him, ‘Where’s Charlie, do you think? Are you worried about her? Do you know anyone who might have done this?’

  Dan dropped his school bag, preparing to flee, but then saw that there were others he hadn’t noticed before, getting out of the cars parked along his street. Instead, he put his head down and pushed through the pack up the stairs to the front door. The cameras were right in his face now; the microphones dipped and loomed around his head like giant insects. His keys were in his bag so he pounded on the door calling for his parents, the leadlight inserts shaking with each blow. It was his dad who answered, taking in the scene at a glance. He pulled Dan into the house, then strode onto the porch.

  ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourselves!’ he yelled at the scrum, and for a minute they were. No one spoke, the microphones were lowered. Then a voice called from the bottom of the stairs.

  ‘Who do you think has your daughter, Matt?’

  Dan saw his father rush down the steps to the side of the porch, where the hose was coiled, point it at the journalist who had asked the question, then turn on the tap. The man was soaked immediately, as was the woman standing next to him, who shrieked and dropped her notebook.

  ‘Fuck off, all of you! Just fuck off out of my house!’ His dad slammed the door behind him and stood panting in the hallway, shoulders heaving. They stared at each other across the floorboards.

  Matt watched the numbers on the photocopier tick over, silently urging them on. Two hundred copies ought to do it. He’d already made three hundred during a quiet spell in his last shift, and about one-fifty the day before that. That would be enough to be getting started with as soon as he was next rostered off. Maybe even before that; maybe he and Dan could go out tonight and do the blocks around their home. Rachael too, if she was up to it. She wasn’t up to much at the moment. She’d barely even left the house in the past few days, just sat at her desk with her laptop in front of her, her email open, but her fingers still. One morning he’d placed a cup of coffee beside her before he left for work and when he got back ten hours later it was still there, untouched, and so was she. Matt shivered. Her passivity frightened him. She was withdrawing from him, from Dan, from the entire world. He reached for a flyer, still warm from the copier, to distract himself.

  MISSING, it screamed in bold block letters, then in a smaller font: Have you seen Charlie? She is 13 and was last seen riding her pony in the Kinglake National Park on March 28. Charlie is wearing tan jodhpurs and a navy polo shirt, and has light brown hair and blue eyes. PLEASE call with any information. REWARD.

  Below the text was the same picture of Charlie they’d used in the press release, a bit grainier now it was in black and white, but the fire department didn’t run to a colour printer. Matt studied it with grim satisfaction. He wasn’t much good with computers—that was Rachael’s area—but it looked OK. It got your attention, that was for sure, and hopefully it would elicit something once he and Dan began delivering them. Matt placed it on the pile with the others, then picked it up again, studying it more carefully. Oh, no. His stomach balled. Oh, fuck. He hadn’t put a phone number on it. Behind him, the copier began to beep, and he turned around and slammed his fist down on top of it.

  ‘Mate, mate.’ Richo was beside him almost immediately, one hand on his shoulder. Matt shrugged it off, fighting the urge to punch him too. ‘Mate, what’s the problem?’

  Matt screwed up the flyer and threw it at the bin.

  ‘I left the phone number off. I’ve made about five hundred, and I’ve left the fucking phone number off.’

  Richo glanced at the pile. ‘Shouldn’t the cops be doing this?’

  Matt fought the urge to scream. He picked up the flyers and began to shred them, one after the other, letting the pieces fall at his feet.

  ‘Of course they should. There’s a lot they should be doing. They should have found her by now, for a start.’

  ‘Hey, hey, hey.’ Richo wrested the paper out of Matt’s hands. ‘Don’t do that. Don’t waste them. You can still write the number on. I’ll do it.’ He hugged the flyers to his chest. The machine continued to beep between them. ‘That needs more paper,’ he said.

  Matt took a deep breath, bent down and reloaded it. The silence that followed swept over him like a balm.

  ‘Sorry,’ he mumbled to Richo. ‘I couldn’t think straight with it making that noise.’

  ‘Mate, you shouldn’t be here,’ Richo said. ‘Why don’t you go home?’

  Matt turned away from him, jabbing at the copier’s buttons. Might as well do fifty more now, he thought. ‘Nah. I was going mad there. Just Rachael and me staring at each other, nothing to say.’ He gave a hollow laugh. ‘We’re not used to being at home alone together. She was always at work before. And at least here I can keep busy, do stuff like this.’ He ges
tured at the flyers. ‘Plus I didn’t want to take the time off. I’m going to need it when they find Charlie, so I can be at home then, stay with her.’

  The look of pity that passed across Richo’s face made Matt want to cry, made him want to hurt the bastard. Richo thought Matt was kidding himself.

  ‘I reckon Dobbsy would give you as much time as you wanted, regardless.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Matt kept his head down. Their boss had practically pleaded with him to take leave when Matt showed up for work three weeks after Charlie went missing, but Matt had ignored him. If he didn’t go to work he was going to go nuts. The cops had made it clear that they didn’t want him hanging around all the time, that he needed to leave them to get on with it without peering over their shoulders; the search parties had been scaled down then wrapped up altogether. He’d continued to go out to the national park with Dan and Hannah, but after a while it became clear that it was pointless. They were just going over the same ground with the same result. So he’d stayed at home with Rachael, waiting for news. But while the police called every day, they never had anything to report, and each time the phone rang Rachael would leap up, her face expectant, then he’d have to watch it close over once more as she explained to yet another well-meaning friend that no, there were no leads yet. It made him so angry. Matt had always been a placid man, had never had a temper, yet most days now anger roiled in his gut, hot and viscous: at the empty phone calls, at Rachael’s silence, that Charlie was still missing. One day he found himself staring at his wife, suddenly furious, thinking to himself I told you, I told you, I told you we should have had the baby, just in case, you know, just in case Charlie never returned.