‘Just passin’ through,’ he said, and continued on.
‘Young man,’ Albert called to his retreating back.
Tommy calculated for a second what the chances were of his being in trouble. He couldn’t remember the last time he had raided the dining car while it waited on the tracks. They locked the door now. He turned around.
‘Yessir?’
‘The missus,’ Albert said, from the doorway. He looked over Tommy’s shoulder down the platform.
Tommy frowned. The stationmaster’s wife, Beatrice, was a skinny, pale wisp of a woman, with a sharp nose and dull brown hair bobbed around her pointed chin and pinned back each day with a bobby pin above each temple. Her face was arranged in a perpetual grimace. ‘Looks like she’s just drunk a mug of vinegar,’ Sarah always said of her. Beatrice wore thick glasses, and her eyes underneath them were small and close. She had the watchful drabness of the most ordinary of birds, like a common garden thornbill, thought Tommy. The only time he had really spoken to her was when he and Sarah had climbed on the roof of her greenhouse to watch their television through the dining room window, and had fallen right through it. Nobody was hurt, but the stationmaster’s wife had been cultivating trays of tiny seedlings of her prized orchids for the Grevillea Festival, and Tommy’s arse had landed right on top of them. Sarah had laughed until she cried at Tommy trying in vain to resurrect the pulped shoots while Beatrice poked at his ribs with a trowel. Albert never even left his armchair. That had been months ago, though. Surely he wasn’t going to have a go after all this time?
Tommy stepped back a few paces. ‘Um, yeah?’
‘She’s trying to kill me with the amount of bloody food she packs for my smoko,’ Albert said. Tommy said nothing. They both watched an empty can bounce along the gutter and clang loudly as it ricocheted off a drain covering.
‘Don’t suppose you could put away a banana or two, maybe a sandwich? Just make a dent in the pile? She’ll be on my case if I don’t finish it all. Starving children in Africa and all that.’ He spoke gruffly, tugging at his beard.
Tommy scuffed his feet back and forth over the ground. He drew a B for banana with the toe of his sneaker in the dirt, and then an S next to it, for sandwich. Then he scrubbed them out.
‘Alright then,’ he said, trying to look bored. His stomach let out a loud rumble in anticipation, but the stationmaster was polite enough – or deaf enough – to ignore it. He passed the lunch bag through the ticket window, and raised a hand in farewell as Tommy loped off around the corner with the bag tucked under his arm. He leant down to collect the can from the gutter and tossed it in a bin before crossing the street to the police station, and sat down on the steps to eat and wait for the sergeant. He was hoping there might be some good news this morning. Scratch that, he was really just hoping for any news today.
Tommy took the sandwich from the bag, unwrapped it and crammed it in his mouth. Ham, cheese and salad, with peppery mustard slathered among the layers. It was excellent. Along the street, the shopkeepers were putting out sandwich boards with the week’s specials written on them, wheeling sale racks out, hanging plants under the awnings, wind chimes and bird feeders from the guttering. The baker swept the footpath out the front of his shop in wide, arcing swathes, rhythmic and lulling. Shoppers were parking their cars and locking up their bicycles. Another ordinary day in Banville was beginning. But it wasn’t ordinary, Tommy thought, and he wanted to shake them all, yell at them – Sarah was missing! How could they just go about their lives like this, shopping for milk and WD-40 and lamb chops and dishwashing detergent as though there was nothing wrong? How could they think about the milk for their tea and the oil to hush the creak in their laundry window and their dinner of charred chops drowned in a mud slick of gravy and the soap to wash their dishes with when Sarah was out there somewhere, lost?
The sins of our fathers will be passed to the next generation; he remembered that from Sunday school. He used to go when he was little, for the morning tea. And because Sarah went. Whatever her father did, or was, seemed like nothing now. All he had done was plant his seed and then move on. It was the sins of her mother that Sarah carried so heavily on her shoulders in this town.
Where was the sergeant, anyway? Tommy shifted sideways to peer through the window of the police reception. He could see through it to the office behind, where a photo of Sarah had been blown up and tacked to a noticeboard behind the desk. She scowled out, and when he met her eyes, Tommy’s sandwich became a gluey mess in his mouth, hard to swallow. He dropped the rest of the sandwich back in the bag, wondering when Sarah had last eaten.
The police divers from Sydney were coming to dredge the creek today, and Tommy planned on going. They couldn’t stop him being there, it was public land. He just wanted to know. He didn’t feel like she was dead, or maybe he just refused to consider that possibility, but he thought he would know somehow. Sarah had been his only real friend in Banville for years now. Surely he would be able to tell if she wasn’t in the world anymore; there would be some way of knowing, like how the Aboriginals knew when it was going to rain. In his very cells he would feel her absence. She was too big for him not to notice the space she left behind. He knew when she was angry, how she would start speaking faster and her hands would move around her like she was batting away a swarm of wasps. She would flick her hair back out of her eyes and push her chin out, glaring at him. He knew when she was sad or tired, how she would start to look worn out, thinned and bleached; even her eyes grew muddier and flatter. When she was worried about something she became full of bravado and combative; she did stupid, rash things: lit fires, took on dares, walked the rim of the water tower in the dark, wanted to race him and fight him, anything. When she was happy . . . Tommy could not think how Sarah was when she was happy. Maybe she never really was. Maybe there were just hours, even sometimes whole days, strung together like fairy lights, when she was just not sad.
Sergeant Henson’s car pulled over to the side of the road, out the front of the pub. Crane came lumbering out, still patting at his mouth with a serviette. Henson leant on the horn and motioned the detective over. In no hurry, Crane made his way to the car. Tommy waited for the sergeant to see him, but he didn’t. Crane got in the car and they drove off down the street.
‘That’s okay,’ said Tommy, to nobody in particular. He stretched his bony legs out on the verandah of the police station. His knobbly knees, scarred and rough like boot leather from a childhood of roughhousing and fossicking, pointed up at the sun. ‘I’ll wait right here.’ He looked back at the picture of Sarah. He wanted to see her face all over town; he wanted to shove her in the faces of everyone in town. He pictured the word MISSING emblazoned across the top of the photo in thick red letters. He turned out his pockets and sifted through the contents. He found a twist of copper wire that he had liberated from a busted fridge down at the junkyard, and used it to jimmy the lock on the police station door. He removed the poster, and rolled it up under his arm. He started to leave, but then thought better of it. He took a piece of the lined note paper and pencil from his pocket.
‘Borrowed this picture to make missing posters,’ he printed neatly. ‘Because nobody else seems to have bothered to do that yet. Sincerely, Thomas Johns.’
He pinned his note up where the picture of Sarah had been, closed and locked the door behind him, and then headed down to the post office to try to squeeze some free photocopies out of Elspeth Mackey. He would nick some roses from the pub’s back garden for her first, sweeten the old bag up. Everybody loved roses, common as muck though they were.
chapter nineteen
Yesterday, a lamp and some books. More books today.
Should I be grateful, or worried about how long I’m going to be here if I’m to get through all these books? I never thought I’d get sick of reading, but I’m getting a headache from it now. The words are moving and blurring as I look at them, as though they’re lines of ants marching off the page. But at least when I’m reading, I�
�m in someone else’s world, not my own. I’m getting pale, too, and probably fat. There’s no shortage of food here. I suppose that is good, but it’s hard to think that anything about this is good. But in truth, I don’t have much of an appetite. When I’m reading, I forget where I am for a while, but then the eggbeaters start up again in my belly, and I have to grip the side of the bed to stop myself falling off it. At first, I sometimes pretended this was all a dream, and I was going to wake up soon. And for that fraction of a second, I believed it and I wasn’t scared anymore. But I’ve stopped doing that now. Because in the following fractions of that same second and the ones after, when I remembered this was all real, I wanted to go to sleep and not wake up.
With this deathly pallor, I reminded myself of someone when I caught sight of my reflection in the chipped shaving mirror hanging on the wall, and at first I couldn’t think who. Then I noticed it again when I looked at my hands under the water as I washed them, and I realised – it was my mother. Away from her, I see her in me, in the slope of my brow, the webbed skin between my long thumb and forefinger, the bony jut of my hips and the small ears curling out of my skull like the Pleurotus australis mushrooms that Tommy showed me growing on a tree near the railway tracks.
I think about what my mother might have looked like when she was my age, already in Sydney and living in the boarding house with the pale green concrete fence and the mouldy stone fountain in the front garden. The fountain had two doves sitting atop pillars, kissing arcs of water up into the air. My mother said when she looked at it she always thought how nice it would have been if the doves were turned around and kissing each other instead. One day, she thought, she would climb up on that fountain and drag the pillars around so the doves faced each other. But she never did. Every time my mother told me about that fountain, she looked so sad. As though that was the thing she regretted the most about that time – not giving the boarding-house doves the chance to be together. Of all the things that happened to her in Sydney, two birds made of stone is what makes her heart the heaviest.
She had been living there for a few years when her agent Clyde sent his wife Sylvie to the boarding house on a bright and sunny Tuesday afternoon to pick my mother up and take her for her first abortion in a red-brick terrace house in Surry Hills. In the waiting room, the fan hummed a noisy rotation overhead and Susannah picked at the stuffing billowing out of the gash in the vinyl of her chair. Sylvie put down the magazine she was reading and turned to her young charge.
‘You seem like a nice girl. Do you really want to keep going on like this?’
Susannah’s fingers paused, hovering above the dull yellow foam. Particles of it clung to her skin. She wiped her hands on her skirt and the foam transferred to the fabric. She asked herself, do I really want to keep going on like this? No, she answered.
‘I’m not going to,’ she told Sylvie. She stared straight ahead. Across the room another two women sat, looking blankly at the carpet beneath their feet. One of them held a Bible in her lap, finger slipped in to mark her page. That galvanised Susannah. Stupid girl. You could not expect God to give you a hand up. Where was He for the girl with the Bible now? Where had He been all Susannah’s life? She turned to Sylvie and lifted her chin.
‘I’m going to be successful.’
Sylvie looked at her for a long moment and then went back to her magazine.
My mother kept trying for four years after that. No one thing broke her resolve, but a series of small failures accumulated, like a tumbleweed skipping through the desert, gathering dust and debris as it spun. She wrote a warning to other actresses about the director who had attacked her and had it published in the gossip column of the Reel Deal, the film industry newsletter, but the director claimed she was in love with him, obsessed, and had made it all up. It was an effective tactic. Her allegations were dismissed as those of a woman scorned. In the cafes and bars where the actors went, Susannah overheard people talking about her claims. ‘I suppose it could be true, but I doubt it – he’s such a charming man,’ they said. Susannah was reminded of her father. She had never really thought charming was a compliment.
She got a reputation as a firebrand and troublemaker, and was blacklisted among the main casting agents in the city. Because of this notoriety, she had to work even harder, travelling hours just to audition for bit parts in obscure radio plays, desperate to continue working. She dropped her shifts too many times to go to these auditions, and lost her job at the cafe. As a result, she fell behind on her rent and her landlady kicked her out. For the want of a nail, the shoe was lost. A story as old as time itself. She had nothing to her name but some clothes, her curling wand, movie posters and a collection of beer coasters from Sydney landmarks. And a house in Banville.
When my mother’s train from Sydney dragged itself along the final stretch of the track and groaned to a halt at Banville station, she remained in her seat. It wasn’t until the ticket conductor came through the carriages with his dustpan and brush that she reached up to retrieve her bulging plaid suitcase and hat from the luggage rack above her seat. At some point in the journey, her suitcase had fallen onto its side, crushing her hat beneath it. The brim was concertinaed and dusty now, the crown dented like a cake that had sunk in the centre. Susannah tried to straighten it out but it was useless. The hat was ruined. She left it on the seat behind her and heaved her bag out onto the platform. She dragged it along the ground by the handle, and watched as the rough concrete scored and furred the fabric. A film of dust formed on her tongue.
Outside the station, Brian Baillett sat in his taxi reading the paper. Susannah tapped on the window.
‘I need a lift, Brian.’
‘Hop in, love.’ Brian put out his cigarette in the ashtray on the dashboard.
‘I’ve got no money.’
Brian looked at her, her head bare and hair frizzing in the humidity. He laughed, a chortle that gurgled up from his belly like a boiling kettle, and reached back to unlock the door.
‘You don’t need money, love.’
Susannah looked down the street. Her feet sweated in her Sydney-smart kitten heels. In Sydney, she would have known what this man wanted from her, but in Banville she wasn’t sure.
‘No daughter of Winston Vale’s is getting blisters on my account,’ Brian said. ‘Your father is sorely missed in this town. He was a good man.’
Susannah looked back down the street. A weathervane spun on the roof of the pub, an iron rooster twirling drunkenly on a stake. A good man, she thought. Does he really think that? She stared hard at Brian and he twitched nervously under her gaze, folding and refolding his newspaper. No, Susannah decided. He knows that is not true, he knows what my father was. They all do. She remembered the looks on their faces when her mother had passed out on the town hall stage at that first Grevillea Festival. They were not surprised. How many times can two women walk into doors, fall down stairs, come a cropper just walking the halls of their own house? But they want me to lie. All of them do. The people of Banville want to be deceived, and they want me to be complicit. Because the truth is painful, a splinter in their side. Susannah thought of her mother. Complicit until the day she died.
At that moment, she gave voice to the thought that had been rattling around in her head since the day the policeman knocked at her door and told her that her mother was dead: The citizens of this town were as much to blame for her death as her father was. They killed her before she even got into that car. They killed her by not saying anything about how she was being treated. They killed her by pretending that everything was fine. If someone had spoken up, if someone had admitted that Winston Vale was a monster, then maybe she would not be dead. And Susannah would not be here, on a pilgrimage back to her empty childhood home. And so she made a choice. Maybe she knew what her choice would come to mean at that stage, maybe she didn’t. It doesn’t make any difference now.
Susannah leant in the window and put her face right up next to Brian’s.
‘Do you think so?’
she whispered. ‘You think he was a good man?’
Brian laughed a little, weakly, and pulled his head in like a turtle. Susannah stayed at the window. ‘My father beat my mother and me until we bled from our ears,’ she said. ‘While the good people of Banville bought him drinks and made him the godfather of their children.’
Brian did not say anything, but looked into his lap, and Susannah smiled. ‘I will walk,’ she said, and picked up her suitcase.
When she got home, the first thing she did was throw out all of her father’s personal belongings, ridding the house of any remaining trace of him. His clothes, shoes, collection of snuff boxes and African tribal masks and gold cigarette case, his reading glasses and driving gloves and toothbrush and shoehorn, all of it went into a bonfire in the backyard. The only things of his she kept, after much prevaricating, were his books. She could not bring herself to burn books. That was censorship, and what a hypocrite she would have been then. The smoke of the fire smelt like leather.
The rest of the house she left exactly the same. Each piece of furniture remained in the position her mother had left it. She slept in her parents’ bed, on her mother’s side, and never let me change anything, except in my room, that one that had been hers.
The Vale Girl Page 11