The Vale Girl

by Nelika McDonald

  ‘It’s not mean if it’s true.’

  ‘Good point.’

  Giggles again.

  Assembly began. The principal got up on the low stage at the front of the hall and started to speak. Mr MacLachlan was tall and thin with a prominent chest and a fuzz of curly silver hair. He wore tortoiseshell glasses pushed down low on his nose and tilted his head back to look down at us through them. When he was angry, which was most of the time, his voice broke in the middle of sentences. He carried a black briefcase everywhere he went and rumours were rife about its contents. A whip? A guinea pig? All the girlie magazines that were confiscated from the boys? Ten thousand dollars in clean, crisp banknotes?

  Mr MacLachlan roamed around the stage like an animal staking the borders of its territory.

  ‘Students, as you are aware, the Grevillea Festival is on the horizon. Accordingly, we have been asked to nominate a group of you to represent our school on the day. We will be selecting a boy and a girl from each grade. Only the most shining beacons of scholarly dedication will be chosen. Students who reflect the academic excellence and community spirit of our fine educational institution. Of course, these students will have to balance their Grevillea Festival commitments with their curricular demands at school. This will require great discipline.’

  I stopped listening. He wasn’t talking to me, and now he had got on to his favourite subject. He’d be there for a while. The annual festival was Banville’s chance to make the Sydney news. It was billed as a celebration of the Banville and districts ‘community’, if that is what you call a collection of people who are geographically close, but would push each other in front of a train over the Under-8s footy results. Mainly, it was a chance to lure the tourists out from the city. And Banville had grevilleas planted all along the main street. I guess they had to call it something.

  Mr MacLachlan must have realised his audience was drifting, because he raised his voice.

  ‘Discipline,’ he said, pointing at the rows of students before him, ‘will get you everywhere.’ His voice broke and squeaked out the last syllable. His eyebrows drew together and he twitched his head like a mosquito was nibbling at his ear.

  ‘Discipline!’ he shouted again, and the PA screeched, ‘is the mark of a strong and worthy person. A person who will achieve their goals and aims in life.’ He went back to his lectern and everyone shifted in their seats. His secretary, Ms Steph Bay, was at the side of the stage, nodding and smiling with her hands clasped in front of her bosom. Death Ray, the kids called her. She looked sweet with her golden curls and floral blouses but she had cold, empty eyes. She could spot a forged signature on a permission slip from ten metres away, and was the most unsympathetic sick room attendant imaginable. If you came to her bleeding profusely from a knife wound to the head she would grudgingly give you a Panadol and then send you back to class. She had a massive crush on Mr MacLachlan. Not reciprocated.

  ‘Discipline will lead to success of the mind. And of the body.’ Laughter trickled through the room like a draught from an open window. I scanned the rows until I found Tommy Johns, a few rows in front of me and to the right. He was leaning down and writing something in a notebook. He was close enough that I could see the curls of brown hair at the nape of his neck and his long skinny arms bent into the space around him. He was so tall, now. I made myself look away. I’d messed everything up.

  When I turned back to the stage Mr MacLachlan was staring right at me. But I didn’t flinch. I stared right back at him until he turned away. What a hypocrite, actually getting up on stage and talking about discipline of the body in front of the whole school, in front of me, like he was a model of it, a paragon of bloody virtue. I had seen inside his briefcase just a few nights ago. He had left it on my kitchen table, so I felt perfectly justified in looking. And it wasn’t even locked. But all that was in there was a pack of chewing gum and a few stray paperclips. That would be fucking right. There was no mystery in this town for me anymore. I had seen every last secret laid bare in my own house, every briefcase in Banville gaping open. But I had missed one.

  chapter two

  After assembly, I waited out the rush to class in the girls’ toilets. I pulled my feet up on the closed lid and got out my book. When ten minutes had passed, I came out of the cubicle. Marjorie was standing before the mirrors, brushing her hair. She was at the second sink in a row of four, and the fourth sink was clogged, a pool of scummy water lapping at the rim. I had no choice but to go to one of the sinks next to her. My fingers couldn’t get a grip on the dried-up cake of soap and it seemed to take ages for the water to rise up through the ancient pipes when I turned the tap on. Neither of us spoke. When I looked up for a moment our eyes met in the mirror and the expression on her face made me shiver despite myself. That girl hated me from somewhere inside her that was as deep as a well.

  I dried my shaking hands on my skirt and turned to leave, trying to walk at a regular speed. Marjorie’s brush rasped as she drew it down the length of her hair in slow, measured pulls. Outside the toilets I had to stop myself from running as I cut behind the sports block and around the side of the admin block. At the front gate I stopped and pretended to tie my shoelace, then strolled out of the grounds and down the hill.

  When I went past the Montepulcianos’, Mrs M was out the front again, talking to someone at the gate. It was Graham Knight. Of all the people I had to see today, him. This day was a joke. That was the problem with living in such a small town – there was no avoiding the other residents. I quickly put my head down, feigning interest in the footpath, but still he waved, flapping his hand from the wrist like it was coming loose. I didn’t look up. He stopped waving but I could still feel his eyes on me so I picked up my pace until I rounded the corner at the bottom of the hill, then slowed, dragging my feet on the dirt road. The dust around them rose in puffs like the ground was breathing it out. Watching. Graham Knight was always watching.

  Nine-thirty in the morning and it was pushing 35 degrees. Sweat slithered down my back. A swim, that’s what I wanted more than anything. Alone. I could wash Cameron’s fingerprints off me; wash off the smut left behind when people talked about me like I was something they had wiped off their shoes. And then I would put them all out of my mind, and spend the morning reading and sunning myself on the bank of the creek. Alone. Even if I still had nothing else to my name, the day I turned eighteen I was leaving this town, and I planned on leaving with a tan. Three years to go. It would be 1990 then. A new decade. A blank slate.

  I cut across the back paddock of the Millers’ farm and jumped over the gate. I was already unbuttoning my dress as I headed down to the creek. I had my togs underneath. Crows cawed from the power lines crisscrossed like cobwebs over the town, and the wind whistled a little as it slipped through the bush, knitting streams of cooler air between the gum trees. Beyond that, the only sound came from a nearby helicopter, cleaving a path through the sky with a low rumble. I took a deep breath, and my stomach simmered and grumbled a little as I exhaled. No breakfast this morning. I pushed that thought down. It was pointless dwelling on things. You could spend hours turning things over in your mind, and at the end of it they would still be there, no less a burden for all your consideration. You could not think away hunger.

  I pulled my shoes off and left them next to each other on the bank and then folded my dress in half and hung it from a tree branch. I have always been neat. When you live with a mother who cannot walk from one end of the house to the other without leaving a trail of crap behind her like breadcrumbs, you see the point of neatness. If you leave no trace, nobody could say later whether you were even there at all. I put my backpack in the fork of a tree and pulled some leaves over it. I didn’t want anyone getting into my cash stash. Not that anyone was likely to pass by; I had chosen this spot for that exact reason, and had been coming here for years. Nobody lived nearby, except the people in the houses that backed on to the land high up above the opposite bank, and they rarely strayed beyond the borders of
their manicured lawns. Tommy would often join me for a swim but, apart from him, nobody else knew about this place.

  I walked down to the edge of the creek, feeling the mud burp and fart between my toes and the temperature drop as I reached the shaded glen where the water was deepest. Sunlight skimmed the surface of the water. I waded in up to my knees and then to my hips. I felt my shoulders relax and my chest loosen a little as the water rose up to my stomach. I closed my eyes, and then heard a sound, a loud rustling. I turned around. A brindle mutt sat on the bank of the creek, eyes as dark as molasses.

  ‘Hey, pup,’ I said. I had never seen a dog down here before. I waded over to a tree that had low branches dipping into the water, looking for a stick to throw for him. I found a good shoot, snapped it off and threw it onto the bank. The dog caught it in his mouth and sat by the edge of the water with the stick between his teeth, chewing at the bark. I made my way back to the bank and held my hand out, but he wouldn’t let go of his toy. I sat down and petted him and he dropped the stick and pushed his wet nose into my neck. I ran my hands through his coat, picking out prickles that had snagged in his fur, and he rolled onto his back, obedient and placid. This dog was used to being groomed. I had only been sitting with him for a minute or two when I felt him suddenly stiffen, then flip back over onto his feet and sink down onto his haunches. He began to bark in the direction of the bush track back to the farm, then growled low in his stomach and darted into the undergrowth. I looked down the track but could see nothing. A bird, I decided, or some small animal scuffling in the bush, detectable only to the canine senses. Somewhere in the bush, the dog barked again. I headed back into the water. As I reached the deeper centre of the creek, I heard footsteps, and turned towards them. As I turned, I caught a glimpse of the figure on the bank and felt the sickening lurch of seeing something familiar in someplace it didn’t belong.

  ‘Sarah,’ said a voice.

  chapter three

  Graham Knight was always waiting at the post office when it opened on the third Friday of each month. As well as being a post office, it was a newsagent and a sort of gift store as well, though as far as Graham knew, the china figurines of shepherds and milkmaids and the money boxes shaped like hay bales had never left their shelves. The post office did a roaring trade, though.

  Elspeth Mackey, the postmistress, drove past him and around the building to park out the back. Graham didn’t wave, but watched her as she coasted past and then looked at his watch. When Elspeth appeared though the windows of the shop, Graham shot up from his spot on the step and moved to stand next to the front door. Elspeth shook her head. In her own sweet time, she moved around, turning on lights, putting her lunch in the fridge, starting the ceiling fan whirring away. Graham watched as she touched up her coral lipstick in her compact mirror and unwrapped a Werther’s Original toffee, popping it in her mouth and sucking with her lips screwed up like a cat’s bottom. She then stood behind the counter for a further four solid minutes with her hands folded in front of her, until the clock flicked over to exactly ten o’clock. And then she let Graham in.

  ‘Is my parcel here?’ Graham said, as he followed her back to the counter. There were no preliminaries on the third Friday of the month, no niceties. Graham knew that Elspeth found it galling. She was fond of niceties. In her view, they were the axis upon which small towns revolved. One at least commented upon the weather before getting to one’s business. Unless one was Graham Knight.

  Elspeth adopted a mask of confusion. ‘A parcel for you? Don’t think so.’

  Graham tried not to get alarmed. It was rarely late.

  ‘Could you check?’ he asked her.

  ‘Surname?’

  ‘Knight.’

  Elspeth had seen him the day after he was born, thirty-nine years ago, and barely a week had gone by that she hadn’t crossed paths with him since. It wasn’t as if she’d have trouble recognising him. All the Knight children were born with a shock of pale blond hair sticking straight up like the crest of a cockatoo, though his hair was thinning now, and a mousy brown colour.

  ‘Knight,’ she repeated, as she turned to scan the shelves behind her, where the few meagre parcels for the Banville populace were filed alphabetically. Presently, there were four packages on the shelves.

  ‘Kniiiiighttt,’ she said again, and reached down to scratch what Graham knew was an imaginary itch on her calf.

  Over the rasp of Elspeth’s fingernails on her dry skin, Graham exhaled. She straightened up, and in a swift movement plucked his parcel off the shelf and placed it in front of him on the counter, next to the receipt clipboard. She held a pen under his nose.

  ‘Sign, please.’

  He signed. Elspeth kept one hand proprietarily on the parcel.

  ‘Identification?’

  Graham looked at her for a long moment. His eyes moved from hers down to the parcel. He took his wallet from his pocket, and slid his driver’s licence across the counter to Elspeth. She inspected it, handed it back, and initialled and wrote the date next to his signature, then replaced the cap on her pen and put it in the jar next to the till before releasing the parcel.

  Graham swept it up and hurtled out of the post office, almost colliding with Monica Wilkinson, who was on her way in to drop off some more brochures for the pre-Grevillea Festival working bee.

  ‘Over and out,’ he said as he passed her.

  Elspeth and Monica clucked their tongues at each other and shook their heads.

  ‘That man,’ Monica said. Elspeth nodded, and got out her knitting.

  Graham took a slight detour via the car park when he left. On his key ring, he had a miniature Swiss Army knife with a small but very sharp blade. He checked to see that nobody was watching and then used the knife to puncture two of Elspeth Mackey’s four tyres. It took him seven minutes to then walk back down Main Street and across the park. He stopped to talk to Maria Montepulciano at her front fence, but he didn’t linger. He was eager to get home. When he arrived, he passed through the kitchen where his wife Geraldine sat at the table, a bowl of muesli in front of her. They didn’t speak. Graham continued down the stairs to the basement, closing the door firmly behind him. When the lock clicked into place, he smiled to himself. He kicked off his shoes and placed the parcel on the long wooden workbench that lined one wall. He sat in the brown leather armchair and took his socks off, flexing and wriggling his toes, then stood up and turned on the radio. The Beach Boys crooned, ‘Barbara A-a-annn, ta-ake my ha-a-and.’ He stuck out his hand to an imaginary dance partner and jigged over towards the air-conditioner. He switched it on, pulled a can of lemonade from the fridge and moved to stand in front of his workbench. He turned the radio down a bit. Meditatively, he ran his hand over the parcel. It was bigger than last month’s. He took his knife from the shelf in front of him, slit open the package, and pulled out the contents. He smiled again, a genuine smile that creased his face up, a smile that may even have made his wife smile back, and began to work.

  After a few minutes, he set the knife down again. It wasn’t working. He just couldn’t relax. He had slept poorly, that must be the problem. Plagued by nightmares and the stuffy closeness of the hot night air, he had wrestled with his bedclothes as if they were enemies on the battlefield. There was no point pursuing his task now; he needed all his faculties working at their highest capacity, senses finely tuned like a perfectly pitched violin, to achieve the results he needed. He would have to take a nap and recommence later. Graham switched off the radio and walked up the stairs. At the top, he paused, flicked off the lights, shut the door behind him and locked it, making sure the deadbolt slid into place with a reassuring thwock. He put the key in his pocket and headed off to bed.

  chapter four

  At lunchtime, Tommy Johns stood under the oak tree on the parade ground waiting for Sarah. A group of boys played football on the oval in the distance, and in front of him on the bitumen a shrieking tangle of girls played netball. No boys played netball, or girls football. Tommy wo
ndered idly what would happen if they did. Would a giant crater open up in the middle of the oval, and swallow them into its gaping black mouth? He pictured his classmates sucked into the earth, leaving everything behind. He would wander around the orange-peel-and pencil-shaving-scented halls of the school alone, and he would not mind their absence in the slightest. Some of them were okay, and a few of them were fine to go rabbiting with or for a game of marbles on the parade ground after school. But the only one he would really miss was Sarah, and she wasn’t here anyway.

  Tommy thought about joining the boys in their game, but he couldn’t seem to draw his eyes from the girls. Marjorie Wilkinson darted in front of him, her pleated skirt fanning out around her thighs. Her breasts bounced under her shirt, and Tommy swallowed hard. Marjorie noticed him watching her and smiled, but Tommy turned away.

  He got out his book – Cronin’s Guide to Australian Wildflowers – opened it on his lap and sat down at the base of the tree, leaning against the trunk. He had a tropical Popper for lunch, filched from a backpack that had been open on the floor in front of him at assembly. The juice was deliciously cold and sweet as it trickled down his gullet and he sucked every last drop from it. Magpies croaked and warbled in the branches above him and the slap of the ball and the thud of the feet on the bitumen reverberated under his bottom and ricocheted along the canals of his ears. Tommy shook his head to clear the thoughts of bouncing breasts and tried to concentrate on the page in front of him. It showed a map of Australia with the distribution of the varieties of banksia shrubs shadowed on it in coloured dots. He put his face further into the book and aimed his finger where he estimated Banville to be on the map. The dot beneath it was brown. ‘Salicinae,’ Tommy said to himself. He looked at the key. Brown: Eastern states: Salicinae, it read. He nodded.

  Nobody really bothered to tease him about what he read, or said, or did, anymore. He was old news in this town. Tommy Johns, the boy with the dead mother. Everyone in Banville had a little tag like that at the end of their name, trailing after it like the tail of a kite – the thing that the other residents considered most noteworthy. Usually, it was something to do with a person’s family. Son of the crooked banker. Jones the carpenter’s daughter. Or just their family name. The O’Farrell girl. The Harkway boy. People distilled down to their essence – in Banville, you are who you come from. Tommy would have preferred that his own tag did not remind him so plainly of what was lost each time he heard it, but you didn’t get to choose how other people talked about you. He fingered the photograph that bookmarked his page. It was of him, his mother and his father. His mother was smiling, her head almost swallowed by the pillow behind it and her arms resting by her sides. Her skin was the colour of milk gone off. His father was looking at his mother, and Tommy was looking straight into the camera and frowning. Only if you looked very closely could you see that the bed they were all sitting on was in a hospital room, and behind them loomed the apparatus of serious illness: heart-rate monitors and oxygen tanks and drips and clipboards and charts.