The Vale Girl

by Nelika McDonald

  Tommy’s mother had died of heart failure – ‘Congenital,’ said the doctor. Tommy, who was perched on his father’s knee, had instead heard congested. He had thought of the traffic reports he listened to on the radio when his Uncle Jack used to take him out in the tractor on his farm. ‘Backed up for several kilometres on the Prospect Crossing Freeway eastbound, congestion also causing major delays on the M6 in both directions.’ Jack used to laugh out loud at these reports, sweeping his hands around to indicate the wide paddocks with their lines of wheat crops like neatly brushed blonde hair. ‘See any congestion eastbound, boy?’ He would gesture to the distant house and outbuildings and Tommy would follow his pointing arm. No congestion. Just wheat, as far as the eye could see. City suckers. Tommy knew that hearts had pipes and veins leading into them like roads had smaller roads, slip lanes and driveways leading onto them. They were even both called arteries, sometimes. So his mum must have had too much traffic going into her heart. The heart was where all the love was kept. He had loved his mother too hard, and the roads to her heart got clogged with it.

  Before that was the baby, Beth. Then his father and now Sarah. What did all these things have in common, besides being gone? To Tommy, it was clear. He was a man of science. You looked at the facts and drew a conclusion – they were all the people he loved the most. What was it about him, what particular unbearable quality, caused all these people to leave him in any way they could, even if that meant dying? Tommy didn’t know. It didn’t make him feel great that he had this effect on people, but he didn’t see what could be done about it. He had tried to stop or at least slow down his loving of Sarah, but he couldn’t. It hadn’t worked. And now she was gone too.

  He made everyone he loved disappear.

  Crane’s suit was grey too, but pinstriped, and well-fitted. He was a strong man; Tommy could see that from the breadth of his shoulders under his jacket and the thickness of his neck above his collar. The local football team would recruit him as a forward if he stayed long enough. But he wouldn’t need to stay long, Tommy hoped. He just needed to find Sarah, and then he could go. Tommy noted that the detective looked angry as well. That was good. Angry meant he cared. Sergeant Henson stopped next to Tommy and they both watched as Crane went into the office and slammed the door.

  ‘Just went to see Susannah,’ Henson said to Tommy.

  ‘Oh.’ Tommy nodded. That would have been about as useful as tits on a bull. ‘Any developments?’ he asked, trying to make his voice sound low and gruff like the sergeant’s. Not so pleading.

  ‘Developments,’ repeated Henson. He looked hard at Tommy, as though he was trying to decide what to tell him. ‘No.’

  ‘Nothing?’ It came out as high-pitched as a girl’s. Tommy didn’t care.

  ‘Early days.’ It was an empty platitude. For the ones left behind, each day was a decade. This Tommy knew from experience. Still, coming from the sergeant, it made him hopeful.

  ‘So what happens now?’ he asked.

  ‘Detective Crane will be the one to decide that. For my own part, I’m going to interview all Sarah’s classmates. She was on the roll for Friday – you said yourself she was at assembly. The thing to figure out now is when she left.’

  Tommy couldn’t hide his doubt. ‘She didn’t really speak to anyone much at school.’

  ‘So I’ve heard.’

  Tommy looked down at his shoes. He sensed Sergeant Henson’s eyes on the top of his head where the crown spiralled like a knot in timber, and felt like a little kid again, barefoot and scruffy with a ring of grime visible above the neck of his shirt like a tide mark.

  ‘You want to come, then?’

  Tommy looked up at him. ‘Really?’

  ‘Well, yeah. Don’t see why not.’

  Tommy puffed his chest out. ‘Do I need a, ah, badge or something?’

  Henson grinned at him. ‘Nah, I reckon you’ll be right.’

  ‘Yeah. Be right without it.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  chapter thirteen

  Sergeant Henson and Tommy spent the whole of that Monday evening going from house to house, visiting all the students in Sarah’s classes at school. Henson had thought about telling Crane where they were going, but decided against it. He didn’t want to start checking in with the detective like a junior constable or something. He was the sergeant of this town. If he wanted to question its residents then he would.

  Tommy sat next to Sergeant Henson at each of the kitchen tables of Sarah’s classmates, his chin raised against their sniggers, his arms crossed over his chest like the sergeant. Tommy looked around the kitchens with interest. They were snug, homey places, with the kettle always ready on the stove and some biscuits in the tin. More than once, the mothers they spoke to tried to feed him something extra – a corned beef sandwich, a packet of chips, a scone or a cold slice of meatloaf. He accepted it all, but kept one ear on the conversation as he ate. The sergeant watched him, bemused. Hollow legs, he decided.

  Nobody had seen Sarah after that assembly.

  And, despite sitting in classrooms with Sarah for years, none of the kids seemed to actually know her at all. When asked who her friends were, they frowned at the sergeant like it was a complex mathematical algorithm they were being asked to solve.

  ‘Friends? Um . . . Tommy?’ They would point at the boy sitting next to Henson.

  ‘Anyone else?’

  They all shrugged. Shook their heads. Eyes drifted towards the telly.

  ‘Well, what about enemies, then?’

  That one they knew. ‘Cameron Wolfe.’

  They went to the Wolfe house last of all. The Wolfe boys had seen the inside of his cell on many occasions. Handsome boys, hair black as crows, there were four of them in the family. Cameron was the youngest, and the only one still at school. The teachers would kick up their heels the day he left. Their mother was a lovely lady who ran the hairdresser’s on Main Street. She charged a flat rate of $7.50 for the locals – man, woman or child – but shamelessly inflated her prices for the day-trippers. ‘If they have a shiny car then you can bet there’s some shiny coin in those wallets,’ she always said, ‘and better it goes to me than Betsy Sotherton with her sour jam full of pips and frilly coat-hanger covers. She says antique hand-worked lace; I say old doilies from Woolworths soaked in tea.’

  The father was a different story. Gilbert. Useless bastard. Built like a brick shithouse with about the same amount of sense. Men like Gil Wolfe owned this town before the sergeant came. Wolfe by name and by nature, the man was nothing but a brute. The sergeant had no time for men like him – and fortunately, Gil Wolfe and Sergeant Henson had only had to coexist in Banville for about a week. The sergeant went in for a haircut and saw Mrs Wolfe powdering her black eye in the bathroom out the back, crying from the pain but not able to stay off sick because Gilbert had run up a sizeable debt at the bookies in Welonga and the collectors were knocking at her door. The sergeant had a quiet word with Gil at the dumpsters behind the pub that night, and he had seen neither hide nor hair of him since. Sometimes men recognised each other as natural adversaries.

  When they pulled up in the car outside the Wolfe house, Tommy declined to accompany Henson inside.

  ‘What’s your gripe with the Wolfe boy?’ he asked.

  But Tommy just shook his head. ‘I’ll wait in the car.’ Absently, he fingered a scar that ran from his temple up into his hairline. No prizes for guessing where he got that, thought Sergeant Henson.

  ‘Suit yourself.’

  He knocked at the door, and Mrs Wolfe answered. But she didn’t let him in, just stood there with the door only open a crack between them. She shook her head and tried to shut the door, but he put a hand out to stop it closing. Mrs Wolfe’s shoulders slumped and she put a hand up over her eyes, and then stepped aside. Sergeant Henson took off his hat, went inside and closed the door behind him.

  Back in the car later, Henson told Tommy what Mrs Wolfe had told him.

  Cameron was gone. None of her sons
had seen him, and he definitely hadn’t been home since Friday.

  ‘Since the day the girl went missing,’ she had said, pointing out the link to the sergeant, as though he was a bit too dim to make the connection himself. Henson had thought about what it cost her to admit that about her own son. To herself, to him. He gave her hand a squeeze.

  Mrs Wolfe said she had no idea where Cameron might have gone, apart from the obvious – Sydney, where people went to disappear. Those tall grey buildings hid a multitude of sinners. Mrs Wolfe said Cameron’s father was there and Cameron had been complaining that he missed him. She thought he would have told her he was going, though. But, then, she probably would have tried to stop him.

  ‘The less they see of their father, the better,’ she said. She hadn’t been able to raise Gil on the phone. She would keep trying.

  Tommy listened to the sergeant without speaking. It was getting dark now, and streetlights began to flicker on. Insects hovered around them in fuzzy haloes. The sergeant could smell dinners being cooked, and see the ghostly shapes of bicycles left abandoned on front lawns, their wheels still spinning, as the children of Banville ran inside to be fed and bathed and tucked into warm beds. All except for Sarah Vale, Cameron Wolfe, and the boy sitting next to him.

  ‘I knew Cameron would have something to do with Sarah going missing,’ Tommy said after a while, his voice flat and low. ‘It’s my fault. I should have protected her.’

  Henson glanced at him. Tommy was looking straight ahead, his knees drawn up and skinny arms wrapped around his legs. Goosebumps had risen on his flesh and his hands shook against his shins. The sergeant had an overwhelming urge to take him in his arms, but knew the boy would not allow it. Instead, he turned the keys in the ignition and started for home.

  ‘How about some dinner?’ he said.

  Tommy did not reply, just stared out the window, not blinking, as the town slid past him on the other side of the glass.

  chapter fourteen

  Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I lie down on the floor beneath the window and look at the little orb of the moon in the sky, just to remind myself that it’s still there. Outside this room everything is going on as usual, even though in here my life hangs suspended like the thread of a cobweb stretched between twigs. It could be worse. At least I’m still alive. Though that can feel like either a gift or a punishment, depending on the moment

  But it’s the only thing I have to do at the moment – exist. I’m not always scared anymore. I’m learning to float above it so it feels sort of dulled. The best way to get through this is to try not to think about how I came to be here. If I do, I get panicky and the fear comes hurtling in again, I can’t breathe and I get so cold that it feels like my blood is ice in my veins. With each new breath, I erase any memory of the one before. There is no yesterday.

  I read a story once about a man who spontaneously combusted. He was a gardener at a stately home in Surrey, England. The mistress of the house he worked at saw him push a wheelbarrow into the greenhouse at ten o’clock in the morning. At three-thirty she went to find him to give him instructions for the party she was planning and found the greenhouse full of a silvery blue smoke. A pile of ash about the height of a gumboot sat on the floor beneath the wheelbarrow, between the two handles. The severed arm of the gardener laid about a foot away, a shovel blotted with mud clutched in the gloved hand. I knew that’s what would happen to me if I thought too much about that day at the creek. It would burn me up, until all that was left was a pile of ash on the floor. So I think about everything else, instead. I go back, back, back in time, and think about everything that came before me. In all of that there must be an answer. How did it come to this?

  Today must be Tuesday. Tuesday is double sport, straight up in the morning. I would’ve skipped that anyway. I love being outside, love running and swimming, I like to feel strong and fast and feel my blood rush and muscles burn, but I hate team sports. Because of the ‘team’ part, but also because whacking a ball over a net or launching myself over a rope or running only to a painted line on the ground makes me feel stupid. Even so, thinking about PE is making me restless, now. I roam around the room, wishing I could just throw open the door and run outside, feeling the air balloon in my ears, or jump in the creek and feel the shock and slap of the water. Then I would get out and wait until I was so hot that my skin tingled and the tips of my ears felt like they were on fire, and then hop in again. If I concentrate I can almost feel it, the cool water meeting my skin. I always stayed out on the bank as long as I could, until I couldn’t bear it anymore, so the moment when I got back in the water would be even better, but I could never wait as long as Tommy. He is very accomplished at waiting.

  Once, he dared me to climb inside the Salvation Army bin in the car park outside the kindergarten. I was small so I could do it easily, curling on the tray when he lowered it down and then dropping into the pile of clothes on the bottom. I pretended I wasn’t scared but that fraction of a second between leaving the tray and landing on the fabric was terrifying, imagining what might be down there. Then, when my eyes had adjusted to the dark and I had sifted through all the clothes to make sure there was nothing else in among them, I was fine. I actually kind of liked it, the smallness of it: a cosy little nest. I felt safe, like I was wearing a suit of armour like a knight in a fairy tale. The only thing I didn’t like was the darkness. There was a hole in the side of the bin about the size of a pea where the sunlight streamed in like a laser beam, and I could only see that tiny circle of it, glowing. Outside the bin, Tommy put his finger on the hole and covered it, and then moved it off, like a camera lens opening and shutting. ‘It’s night,’ he said as he covered the hole, ‘and now it’s day,’ uncovering it again.

  Even though I knew what was coming, I still dreaded that moment when he covered the hole and the light was gone, and after a while I couldn’t stand it anymore and had to get out. Some people need the light more, I think, and others are quite happy in the dark. I used to be one of the latter, but not so much now. In the light, you can see everything, every secret corner is illuminated. In the dark, commonplace things take on an air of mystery and uncertainty; the shape of a broom leaning against the sink, the billowing flag of a curtain in the breeze, a possum slinking along the roof of a garden shed – they could be anything. Shadow puppets come to life. I guess that’s why my mother prefers the darkness. In the shadows, she is Greta Garbo in Torrent, the sawmill hand is Ricardo Cortez; they embrace in the garden that smells of orange blossoms. They curve towards each other; her dress is white and feels like nothing more than a cloud around her ankles. You can have darkness by turning off the lights, but you can also have darkness if they’re still on and you’ve drunk half a bottle of vodka in the bath.

  At first, I didn’t mind how my mother and I lived. I had no idea there was any other way.

  ‘You’re Mum’s best helper,’ she always used to say to me. ‘The two of us, we’re a team, baby girl.’

  When I brought her coffee and we counted the money in the mornings, I was proud. I thought it was fun. Not many kids could say they operated a business with their mother, except the Li kids at the fish and chip shop, and I wasn’t stuck behind a deep fryer like them. She made it seem like a game, like an accomplishment. Managing, getting by each day. Sometimes clawing at the last shreds of ‘managing’ to claim them for our own, but still. We didn’t ask for help, didn’t take charity, we needed nothing and nobody. No pity, no kindness and, accordingly, no interference. That way, we were free.

  My mother had a customer once who said he was on his way to the Northern Territory to start his own community in the desert. He had heard about other people doing it, buying up blocks of land and bringing all their friends and family to live on them together, like communes but more formal. They were called micronations, he said, tiny little enclaves that existed inside a country but operated as though they were outside of it. They could have their own currencies, laws, leaders and religions. This m
an who told us about micronations had long brown hair and a soft voice, and was the only customer who my mother didn’t charge.

  He couldn’t talk about anything else. ‘In theory, these places are completely sovereign,’ he said, waving his hands around as he spoke. I looked at my mother for an explanation.

  ‘Like an island.’ My mother smiled at the man, and ran her fingers through her hair. ‘A landlocked island.’

  ‘Exactly. The only problem is, the government doesn’t recognise them as independent.’ The man shrugged, and smiled at me. I smiled back. I still wasn’t completely clear on what a micronation was, but this man was very handsome and I certainly hoped that he would get one. My mother got up from the table. It was a hot day and she wore only a cotton dress printed with elephants, and nothing underneath. She pulled the dress off and dropped it on the floor, then went to the sink. She turned the tap on and stuck her head under the faucet, running the cold water through her hair. The man and I both watched her. After a while, she stopped, and twisted her hair up into a topknot. When she put her dress back on, it stuck to her in patches where she was wet.

  ‘If you are completely sovereign,’ she said, ‘and truly independent, you don’t need anybody else to recognise it for it to be true.’

  The man did not look convinced, but he followed her down the hallway anyway. The next day at school, I went to the library and asked the librarian to help me look up some information about micronations.

  ‘Micronations,’ she repeated, frowning. ‘Never heard of them.’

  I shrugged. ‘They’re like tiny countries that live inside bigger ones,’ I told her. ‘But they do things their own way. They’re independent.’