The Vale Girl

by Nelika McDonald

  ‘Yeah. Prudes.’ I didn’t know what a prude was; something to do with going to church, I suspected.

  Last year sometime, I found that kimono. I was looking for something to clean the kitchen floor with. I pulled it out of a garbage bag at the bottom of the broom closet, where it was packed away with some greying old bras and a t-shirt that said I love Stradbroke Island. The palm tree on the t-shirt had brown sequins on it that were meant to look like coconuts. But they didn’t. When I let the kimono unfold, a waft of dust hit my nose and the dead shell of a beetle fell to the floor. I put the kimono on over my school uniform and went into the bathroom. I stood on the edge of the bath to get a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I took the hairband from around my ponytail and let my hair fall over my shoulders. The fluoro tube flickered above me and moths flitted towards it. The kimono didn’t look any good. Seeing it now, I noticed how sickly the colour was. The blue bird stitched on the back wasn’t a peacock, as I had always imagined, but some sort of strange lyrebird with dirty gold embroidered spots on it. The stitching was clumsy, and the seams on the shoulders didn’t match. I jumped down from the bath, took the kimono off and balled it up again. I tied my hair back up. I didn’t use the kimono to clean the floor, but stuffed it back in the garbage bag and shoved it right to the back of the broom closet.

  chapter nine

  Tommy led the way down to the creek from the fence at the back of the Millers’ farm. The four scrawny Miller children were watching from their perch on the roof of the shed, their solemn brown eyes tracking the sudden bustle in the bush beyond their boundary. For the third time, Sergeant Henson followed Tommy along the track. A sniffer dog cavorted at his feet, snapping his jaws at the hovering midges, joyful to be in the dirt and the cool shade of the bush.

  On any other day, Tommy would have felt the same.

  ‘Now, mind you show me exactly the way you came in, son,’ Sergeant Henson said to Tommy, taking off his police hat and wiping the sweat from his face with a hairy forearm. Wet patches bloomed under his arms. Tommy set his jaw, and kept walking. He could not see how this was going to help Sarah. She was not on this track.

  Roberts, Henson’s junior officer, crashed through the undergrowth with a roll of police tape and began to secure it to tree trunks and fence posts, delineating a section of land. The crime scene, thought Tommy, and swatted roughly at a hovering mosquito. The careless way Roberts was trampling everything in his path pissed Tommy off. The bush was fragile, his dad had always told him. It might look hardy, with strangler vines and dense canopies of dull green as far as you could see, but it should be handled with care. The bush was here first, so it deserved some respect. Same as the blackfellas. Finders keepers. Tommy carefully released the branch of a young sapling where it was bent into the tape. Under it, he saw the red folds of a Cassia brewsteri bud, and noted the location to come back to later. He kept a record of all the flowers he found, taking cuttings and pressing them, then dissecting the buds and recording what he saw in scaled cross-section perspective drawings. He planned to become a botanist, specialising in the native flowers of this region. Surely there was nowhere else on this continent with specimens so fine.

  A siren split the air and Tommy, Sergeant Henson and Roberts all turned to watch as the Sydney police convoy screeched to a halt in the distance, sending a corona of dust up into the sky in their wake. Heat waves shimmered from the bitumen of the road. Sergeant Henson sighed and put his cap back on. He climbed the fence and began to cross the paddock to meet the new arrivals and Roberts buttoned his shirt to the collar and hurriedly ran a comb through his hair before he followed.

  Tommy watched uniformed men pour out of the cars and felt a little better. Surely these Sydney officers would do a bit more than walk up and down the track. Surely coppers from Sydney would know how to orchestrate a proper search, leave no stone unturned, leave no corner of Banville overlooked in their quest to find out why Sarah Vale, the smartest and most beautiful, strange and complicated person who had ever come into his orbit was missing.

  The last time Tommy had been at the creek with Sarah kept playing on a loop in his mind, over and over again. It had been a day as hot as this one, and after swimming for a bit, Tommy had lain on the bank of the creek and closed his eyes. The compacted dirt was cool under his shoulder blades and too hard in a satisfying way, like it would always be there; always able to hold him up and never giving way, no matter how firmly he curled his spine into it. Sunlight sprinkled over his face and his eyelids flickered as shadows moved across them. He would quite like to stay here forever, he had thought. Alone with Sarah Vale, near the water on a hot day and with the promise of a full belly to come, thanks to three Vegemite sandwiches dampening in their Glad Wrap inside his backpack.

  ‘Watch,’ Sarah called out to him.

  Tommy had pushed himself up onto his elbows and drawn his breath in sharply. Sarah had climbed the biggest eucalypt and was hanging from a limb that arced over the water right across from him. She dangled there looking smug, her wet hair plastered to her neck and her togs clinging to her like snakeskin. Tommy could see her chest move as she breathed.

  She was spectacular.

  ‘Going to make a splash,’ she warned him, and grinned.

  Tommy felt himself move inside his board shorts, nudging the fabric. He pulled his knees up and tented the shorts over his crotch.

  ‘Go on, then,’ he shouted.

  She moved a bit further out along the branch, carefully placing one hand over the other to shift along it in small increments. The branch dipped under her weight.

  ‘What’re you waiting for?’ Tommy yelled.

  ‘Shut up,’ she called, but her voice was soft. Suddenly she looked very small up there.

  Tommy stood up, adjusting his shorts, and walked into the water, testing the depth where she would land. Standing fully, his toes only just grazed the bottom and the water was up to his neck. She would be okay.

  Sarah watched him, frowning, and he raised his eyebrows at her and yawned.

  ‘I’ll be off, then.’

  ‘No, I’m doing it. I told you I would, didn’t I?’

  Tommy shook his head and waded back to the bank. Standing at the edge of the water, he could see the blonde hairs peppered down her brown legs, the buds of her breasts barely visible beneath her togs. A scar curved around her ankle, and though he couldn’t see it, Tommy knew well enough that it ended in an angry welt on the back of her calf.

  His chest tightened at the thought of that scar and how Sarah had got it, and he shook his head to clear it. That was no kind of mother. Leaving a little girl alone, unattended. Untended, girl and garden alike. Sarah had been worried about the grass swaying around people’s knees when they tried to cross the footpath in front of the Vale house. The Bell family had recently been evicted from their cul-de-sac council cottage just down from Sarah’s for failing to maintain the property, and they had un-mown grass stretching from the front door to the road, with the rusted fenders of cars sticking up out of it like rocky headlands in the sea.

  So Sarah decided to mow the lawn at her house. She didn’t understand then that Susannah owned their house outright. Nobody could make them leave. She was seven years old. If he closed his eyes now, Tommy could still see the red of the blood on the green of the grass, so much blood. Christmas colours. He mowed the Vale lawn himself now, every two weeks.

  Tommy looked up at her hands on the eucalypt, the knuckles white now. She swung her legs a bit but he could still tell they were trembling. The movement made her togs ride up a little on her left hip, exposing a new crescent of skin, white and tender like a secret. Tommy thought about how soft her skin would be there, and abruptly sat down. He grabbed a stick and began furiously gouging a line in the dirt next to him.

  ‘You’re not looking,’ Sarah called.

  Oh, but I was, Tommy thought, and blushed. He forced himself to look up at her, and she arched her back and dropped from the branch, knifing into the water with a lou
d splash. The whole creek shuddered with the force of her entry and Tommy grinned and applauded as she rose, spluttering, out of the water. She pushed her hair out of her eyes and treaded water.

  ‘Told you I’d do it,’ she called.

  ‘That you did,’ Tommy acknowledged, nodding.

  She nodded back, unsmiling, and began to swim to the bank. He handed her a towel but she waved it away, lying dripping next to him with her eyes closed and her face tilted up to the sun. Tommy tried to think about other things, anything other than this girl and the brave length and breadth of her right there beside him, but he wasn’t made of stone. Although some parts of him felt like they were. Tommy pushed his head down into the gap between his chest and his arms folded over his knees, and looked at the triangle of dirt between his feet. A reddish seam of clay ran through the soil, and he traced it with his finger.

  ‘What’re you looking at?’ Sarah said. He heard her moving.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said, and glanced up, and she was right there, leaning over, her face angled to peer between his legs. Then she kissed him.

  With her lips on his, Tommy had thought of peeling open a seed pod, being the only person who had ever seen that clean and true green inside it, or gently pulling off the outer petals of a flower to reveal the pure, untarnished and hidden ones underneath. The thrill of it, the privilege. That was how he felt now. Nobody could ever take this from him. She put a hand up, slid it around the back of his neck, and kissed him a little harder. When he opened his eyes for a moment, he could see the darker hollow between her clavicles and the shadow between her breasts disappearing into her togs. Between any parts of Sarah, that was land Tommy wanted to visit. He couldn’t quite believe it. How many times had he imagined this very thing happening? Sarah paused in her kissing for a moment and he moaned accidentally. She laughed, just softly, and he didn’t mind. But then she put her hand on his thigh. Just above his knee, but it was her hand, on his thigh, and Tommy felt it like the iron they used to brand sheep. He closed his eyes, and told himself no.

  No.

  You cannot. If you keep kissing her now then you will never be able to kiss her again. It would be the beginning of the end. If you keep on kissing her, there will be no containing these things you feel. They would bubble up out of you, this love for her, like lava spewing forth from the mouth of a volcano, and then what? She would disappear. Because that was what happened.

  He made everyone he loved disappear.

  And so he had pushed Sarah away and got up and ran, and the branches whipped his face and rocks ripped at the fleshiest part of the arch of his foot, and he didn’t stop running.

  chapter ten

  On Monday morning, Graham looked at his face in the mirror. He held his comb under the running tap and then slicked it through his hair. It ignored the comb and stayed resolutely wayward, especially the cowlick at his forehead. ‘Dittybopping hair,’ Graham said to himself. Dittybopping was an air force term that meant a soldier who was marching out of time with his unit. Graham watched a lot of movies with pilots in them. Pilots, planes, airports. Flight. He tried one last time to smooth his hair, and then gave up, tossing the comb back into the top drawer, helpfully labelled GRAHAM by Geraldine. He gazed into the mirror. With his big, bright blue eyes and slight overbite and that hair, Graham looked bewildered most of the time. As though what he saw when he looked about him was contrary to his expectations. As it was. That Banville still existed, day after day, perplexed him. People kept having babies, his sisters more than anyone – the Knight girls had always been breeders. People married, cattle was bought and sold, men clutched at handfuls of lanolin-moist wool with the ewe braced between their legs and shore off the tangle to bare the squirming white body underneath. Crops grew in promising shoots and then the rain didn’t come, and didn’t come, and still didn’t come, so the earth cracked in crooked schisms and the shoots disappeared back into the ground. A thousand cups of tea were over-brewed and stewed and drunk nonetheless. Watery beef casserole was ladled onto plates and people ate it, dragging hunks of bread through it to mop up the sauce and wash it down with briny tank water. There were first kisses, sweet whispers in the musty paper-scented shelves of the library, and there were last kisses, wrinkled hands laid across wrinkled brows in the iodine-scented dusk of the sick room. And more babies were born, and it started again. The whole mess of it just kept happening, over and over again. For the life of him, Graham couldn’t see what made them keep at it so. It was like there was a magnetic field in the soil here that drew people to it. A virus that infected people and made them want to stay. For the farmers, he guessed it was the weight of tradition. Tradition and bequests. Graham was not a farmer and had not come from farming stock. His father had managed the bank in the main street for thirty years. Graham did not stay for the land; he would not inherit a thousand head of cattle or forty acres of shimmering wheat. For him it was just happenstance. He was here because a lazy flick from the hand of fate had thwarted his route to somewhere else. Like an Australian Bermuda Triangle, Banville was just the patch of the earth that sucked him to it.

  ‘A bit slow,’ the people of Banville said of Graham, tapping their fingers on their temples and grimacing.

  Not nearly slow enough, thought Graham when he overheard them. But really, it suited him for them to think that. Then he could behave how he liked. And often that meant completely ignoring all but a handful of Banville residents. Helpfully, his sisters perpetuated the rumours of his inherent stupidity. They were not numbered in that handful.

  He brushed his teeth, waiting until enough foam had accumulated in his mouth to cover the sinkhole when he spat it out. He liked that. Cover it on up and the sink was an endless curve of white porcelain. Like eternity, pure and clean, even if just for a moment. He rinsed his mouth and straightened up for one last look in the mirror. He smiled at himself and buttoned the last button on his shirt so it was tightly fastened all the way up to his neck.

  ‘Just going out for a bit, Geraldine,’ he called.

  He paused by the door, but she didn’t respond.

  As Graham walked, he noticed something in the streetscape. There were hundreds, possibly even thousands of different shades of green. From one blade of grass to the next, one leaf to its neighbour, this one colour came in so many varieties it seems impossible that they could all coexist. Certainly trees and shrubs differed in hue, but it was more than that. Looking closely, it really seemed probable that no two leaves on a tree were exactly the same. Even though he found the plethora of green shades beautiful, Graham felt a little bit panicky at this thought, that the colour green may in fact be infinite. How could you know, then, when something could no longer be called green? And if a colour could be infinite, then what else could be infinite? Where were the edges of things, or did everything just bleed and merge into everything else?

  On the other hand, it did present a whole new spectrum of possibilities. There could be no end to the manifestations of this one tone of beauty. It was funny how you could look at things over and over again, until one day you looked and you really saw them. Whatever the thing was. A person sometimes, who had always been there but one day was brought into focus, sharp and magnified. Full, glorious colour. And then there were others, and as soon as their particular arrangement of atoms met the lens of your eye and were imprinted on the retina, you saw them with your whole self, completely and utterly: you recognised them in some fundamental way. There had only ever been one person who Graham had seen like that.

  He turned right at the corner and walked into Crossley Street. Mrs Montepulciano’s vegetables were looking quite impressive. She stood at the edge of her garden, hands on hips, her black hair pulled up in a tight bun below her triangular peasant-style gardening hat. When Graham stopped at the gate she beamed at him. He smiled back and pointed to the basket at her feet, crowded with her harvest. ‘Hello, again. Quite a bounty you have there.’

  Mrs Montepulciano gestured at her tomato vine. ‘Tomorrow I can
,’ she declared.

  ‘Can what?’

  ‘No, no, I can.’ She held up an invisible cylinder in her palm and shook it at Graham.

  ‘Ah.’ Graham raised his eyebrows but nodded, respectful. It was early for canning, but Mrs Montepulciano was never wrong about gardening matters. This was her domain; she was the matriarch reigning over her flourishing territory in bright purple gardening gloves. And she was one of that handful of people in Banville whom Graham liked.

  He gestured to a pumpkin the size of his head slumbering on the ground near the compost bin.

  ‘Looks ripe,’ he offered.

  Mrs Montepulciano scoffed. ‘Tursday, Friday. Maybe Satoday I pick.’

  Graham nodded again. From her apron she withdrew two eggs, one white and one brown.

  ‘From Bella,’ she said, handing him the brown one, ‘and Stella,’ closing his hand over the white. She beamed again. ‘For you. Every day!’ She mimed laying an egg and Graham laughed and nodded at her before walking on. One minute later, he climbed the steps of the Vale house with an egg cloistered in each hand. He set them on the cane table next to the front door to free up his hands and, from his pocket, withdrew a key and slid it into the lock. He felt the unbending of his body that came with this action – pure relief. He took off his hat and opened the door.

  ‘Susannah?’ he called, and closed it behind him.

  chapter eleven

  Later that day, Sergeant Henson rang home.

  ‘Gertie, love, the Sydney coppers are in town. Yep, for the Vale girl. No, they’ll stay at the pub, but we should probably have them round for dinner. Tomorra, I thought. Yep. Yep. Alright, then. Bye.’

  Thank goodness for Gertie. She knew how to play nice with others. She’d be hospitable, warm and welcoming, give the Sydney men a good feed, ask them about their children and wives and mothers, all the things Henson couldn’t be bothered pretending to give two hoots about. It had only been a matter of hours and already they were getting under his skin. City policing was all about the three Ps: Procedure, Protocol and Paperwork. Henson could have composed an entire alphabet of the things that he gave more credence to than those Ps. I, for example, for Instinct, Intuition and Initiative. E for Experience, which Henson believed an officer gained on the streets, not behind a desk. And yet, here they were. He’d already given up his office so they’d have space to spread out their files and forms, but what was worse was that they expected him to dive headfirst into a mound of bullshit reports too. They had agreed to reconvene at two pm. Henson had shuffled some papers around for twenty minutes then come to the lunchroom to wait. He waited about as well as he did paperwork.