Second Sight

by Aoife Clifford

  ‘The bushfire was almost two years ago,’ I interrupt. ‘You can’t use that as an excuse to go crazy.’

  ‘Tell that to my waiting room,’ she answers. ‘It was his girlfriend who got trapped in her car. He lost his property and I hear he was underinsured. Luke’s been working odd jobs on other people’s farms trying to earn money to start rebuilding. He’s part of the class action against you.’

  ‘It’s not against me,’ I correct her. ‘It’s against Colcart.’

  ‘You’re their lawyer,’ she says. Her tone is gentle but it stings a little. Amy is the only person in Kinsale I have told. Not even my family know.

  ‘You really had to take this case?’ she asks. ‘There wasn’t a choice?’

  Amy is looking for reasons to defend my decision because she always has.

  ‘It would have been really hard to say no, career-wise,’ I explain. ‘I’m a partner at the firm, I need to bring work in. Most solicitors would think this case was a gift.’

  ‘Most solicitors didn’t grow up in the town that Colcart almost burnt down.’

  ‘I think you’re missing an “allegedly” there,’ I say. ‘If the evidence shows that Colcart caused the fire, they’ll be found responsible, but if they didn’t, they shouldn’t have to pay. That’s how the justice system works. It’s not right to target them just because they have the deepest pockets.’

  ‘People here won’t understand,’ Amy says.

  ‘I thought people here blamed Tony Bayless for the fire,’ I reply. Amy opens her mouth to argue but I keep speaking. ‘The reason I’m in Kinsale is to meet with our expert. It’s his job to work out what happened. He calls it “reading the ashes”.’

  ‘Very poetic.’

  ‘If he says the fire was Colcart’s fault then I’ll be the first to suggest that they should settle, and do it quickly, but if he doesn’t, the case goes on.’

  ‘It’s not a “case” to these people,’ Amy says quietly. ‘It’s their lives and the deaths of those they loved. Luke’s girlfriend and all the others.’

  An image of a burnt-out car comes into my mind. The smoke had been so thick she’d driven it off the road and lurched into a ditch, unable to move, like a boat stuck on a reef. The fire had done the rest. The first day I started working on the case, I looked at the list of the dead, eight of them. I read their names and traced my one degree of separation from each of them – school, family friends, vaguely remembered faces from the beach or shops – and then put the paper in my filing cabinet. Sometimes the only way to cope is to separate out bits of your life and keep them in solitary confinement.

  I try to remember her name. ‘Alison?’

  ‘Alice, Alice Newbury. She was the year behind us at school.’ The name conjures up braided hair, a wide mouth and freckles, but not much more.

  Amy pats my arm and then heads to the fridge. ‘So, how’s the love life?’

  Swapping one quagmire for another.

  ‘I’ve been too busy.’

  ‘What happened to the architect guy?’ she asks.

  ‘That finished over a year ago.’

  ‘He was cute. I liked him.’

  ‘You like all of them,’ I say. ‘Face it, Amy, not all of us are lucky enough to marry our childhood sweethearts.’

  ‘You just need more wine and then we can update your profile after dinner.’ She comes back to the table brandishing cheese.

  I laugh. ‘So, when are you finishing work?’

  ‘Replacement starts in three weeks,’ she says, grating curls of Parmesan onto the pasta. ‘A tired, overworked city GP looking for a relaxing sea change.’ A cynical half smile accompanies this because we both know that country doctors work even longer hours than litigation lawyers.

  ‘Promise me they’ll last long enough that you get a few days with the baby.’

  ‘I’m telling the sick of Kinsale to have a holiday for at least a month, so as not to scare him. Even Dad promises to go easy – if my replacement likes it in Kinsale then perhaps Dad can think about retiring from the practice when I come back from maternity leave.’

  I can’t imagine Kinsale without Amy’s dad, the original Dr Liu, hard at work.

  Amy brings the plates to the table, steam snaking upwards. I put down my phone and twirl a fork into the pasta.

  ‘Jesus, it’s hot,’ I say, stirring the sauce.

  ‘Have to nuke everything to avoid listeria,’ she says, sitting down next to me. Her belly is even bigger up close. ‘Every time I stop moving, the little rascal starts. Feel this.’ She grabs my reluctant hand and presses it firmly against her.

  At first there’s nothing and then thump. ‘Did you . . . ?’ she asks, but I’m already saying, ‘Yes, yes,’ as another watery punch pushes upward.

  There’s the sound of keys jingling and then a creak as the front door opens. ‘Amy, you here?’ The voice comes down the hall towards us.

  ‘Kitchen,’ calls Amy.

  Gus appears in the doorway and I stand up to greet him. He was a perpetually smiling boy who has grown into the type of man I never meet when internet dating. I’m enveloped in a giant hug and then he pulls back to assess me, scanning for damage. Amy must have sent him a message.

  ‘I’m OK.’

  He gives me another quick hug before swooping down on Amy. She arches her head back and he kisses her softly with upside-down lips.

  ‘How’s the bump?’ he asks.

  ‘Active,’ she answers.

  Gus kicks off his boots and pads into the kitchen in his footy socks. ‘Trivia night cancelled,’ he calls out. ‘Janey Bayless was very upset about Paul.’

  Amy explains that Paul worked behind the bar at The Royal.

  As I check my phone for messages, the news site I have open refreshes, and video footage begins playing. There are shaky images of Luke’s pure rage in action, him kicking the SUV door and then throwing himself onto the bonnet. Then it cuts to black and white footage of Paul walking down the street and Luke running after him. They move out of the frame until suddenly Paul is back, falling. In a blink, he is lying there. A shadowy pixelated figure comes running towards him. It’s me, but only because I recognise the shirt. Kneeling next to Paul, my mouth is stretched open but there is no sound. There’s a momentary flicker and then the video starts again. It has been looped, programmed to play over and over.

  I can’t look away.

  One moment Paul is walking along the street and then he’s down, but in the next second, magically, he is up again and if only I could turn the video off now, perhaps he could continue walking.

  Amy grabs it from me.

  ‘Enough of that,’ she says. ‘Doctor’s orders.’

  I touch the back of my hand to my cheek to dash away the tears that have appeared from nowhere.

  ‘Since when did Kinsale have security cameras?’

  ‘Couple of ice addicts rampaged through the bait shop a while back, so they’ve got some now,’ answers Gus. He retreats into the kitchen. I hear the clatter of bowls.

  ‘Can you find out if Paul is going to be OK?’ I ask Amy.

  ‘He’s probably been taken to Southern Cross in the city like your dad was,’ she says, picking up her phone. ‘Anything Kinsale Community Hospital can’t handle usually ends up there. I’ll start with Tristan.’ There are quite a few cousins on the Liu side and they all studied medicine. Tristan is an intensive care specialist and Amy’s least favourite relative, but he promises to find out the prognosis and ring back. The lawyer in me has a momentary quibble about patient confidentiality, but I appreciate the gesture enough to shut up and be grateful.

  ‘The stuff you find online,’ sighs Amy. She flips the phone over to me, showing me the Hat Man’s Facebook page.

  ‘You’re going to have to get it back to him,’ she says, pointing at the hat on the couch. There are pictures of him wearing it in front of the Eiffel Tower and at Machu Picchu. There’s even one of him grinning in front of the Opera House in torrential rain, a smart-arse comment abou
t sunny Australia beneath it. The last picture wasn’t of him but is a sturdy-looking toddler frowning at the camera.

  Amy stands up and starts clearing plates.

  ‘I can do that,’ I begin.

  ‘Leave it,’ says Gus. ‘It’s my turn.’

  ‘Back’s sore. I’ve got to walk about anyway.’

  Gus reaches out to her, a worried expression on his face, but Amy pushes his hand away. ‘Don’t fuss.’

  There’s an unexpected sharpness to her words, followed by a spiky silence. Finally, Gus turns and picks up the bottle of wine and pours himself a glass.

  ‘Enjoying it?’ His voice is overly hearty.

  ‘Yes,’ but I shake my head when he waves the bottle in my direction.

  ‘First vintage from a friend’s vineyard,’ he says, and begins explaining how good merlot grapes are harvested earlier, giving it a balance of savoury and a suggestion of sweetness, but I’m watching Amy. There is tension in the way she moves, as if everything is at right angles.

  ‘So what else has been happening?’ I ask her, when Gus finally pauses.

  ‘Demolition order has come through for The Castle,’ she says, leaning over the open dishwasher.

  ‘Oh, no.’

  ‘I guess it was inevitable once Janey sold to developers,’ continues Amy. ‘But all that history being destroyed.’

  ‘It was badly damaged,’ says Gus. ‘Would have cost a fortune to restore. Janey’s been looking for any excuse to get rid of it.’

  Janey is the lead complainant for the class action, as the bushfire started near The Castle and almost gutted it. There has been plenty of public speculation and a long investigation into whether the fire was deliberately lit. Tony Bayless, Janey’s son, was interviewed by the police several times, something that will have to be explored in the case.

  ‘Remember when we waitressed there?’ I ask Amy. ‘Just after Janey and Wes bought it.’

  ‘Only the once,’ laughs Amy, ‘because you spent the night flirting with Tony instead of working.’

  ‘I did not.’ But we both know this is a lie.

  ‘And you spilt dessert all down the back of Jim Keaveney’s tux,’ she continues.

  ‘You smashed a full dinner plate on the kitchen floor,’ I protest.

  ‘And then Wes refused to pay us, saying after all the breakages we probably owed him.’ She is helpless with laughter now, holding her sides as if she might burst. Gus warns her not to laugh too hard, which only makes Amy double up even further. It’s a seismic event and takes a while to settle.

  ‘Time for bed, I think,’ says Gus. ‘C’mon, Eliza, I’ll sort you out.’

  He leads me down the hall to a small room.

  ‘This is going to be the baby’s,’ he says. The walls are bare, there’s clutter on the mantelpiece, and the queen-sized bed in the corner is camouflaged by cardboard boxes. There’s not one fluffy bunny or oversized teddy bear anywhere.

  ‘Minimalist approach to nursery decorating,’ I say. ‘Industrial. I like it.’

  ‘Amy’s banned decorating until the baby arrives.’

  ‘Everything’s OK, isn’t it?’

  Gus doesn’t quite say yes but he doesn’t say no either.

  ‘Gus!’

  ‘Her blood pressure’s high so there is extra monitoring,’ he says. ‘I’m sure it will be all right, just there’s some increased risks. She should really have finished up work early but you know what she’s like.’

  Amy comes in with sheets, a towel and some spare pyjamas. She gives us a narrowed look, as if guessing what we’ve been talking about. Gus shifts the boxes to the floor and then, seeing his chance to escape further interrogation, slips out.

  ‘When are you meeting your expert?’ Amy asks me, after we finish making up the bed.

  I check my phone. Finally there is a reply from Rob. ‘Midday,’ I say. ‘Time for me to drive back home afterwards.’

  ‘Good,’ she says. ‘I’m on morning rounds at the nursing home. I’ll give you a lift to see your father.’

  ‘Please no, Amy.’

  ‘Eliza, you owe it to him.’

  ‘He won’t even know I’m there,’ I say.

  My mother died when I was four and is only the haziest of memories now. After that, Dad brought up my sister and me by himself. It seemed to work until I was sixteen, but after that not so much.

  Amy can sense vulnerability and presses, ‘You can’t be certain of that.’

  I pick up some photos from the bedside table to avoid giving her an answer. To my surprise, there’s one of us when we were kids, dressed as angels for a nativity concert, not the lead role but better than being a sheep. A tiny Amy is looking straight at the camera, tinsel braided through her hair, eyes squinting. I’m at the end of the row, staring at the lens, my right eye almost covered by my fringe. That’s deliberate. I have been self-conscious about my eyes for as long as I can remember. Before digital cameras and Photoshop, most of my childhood snaps feature me with one eye glowing red from the flash. I still spend a fortune on sunglasses.

  Standing between the two of us is Grace Hedland, half smiling, half biting her bottom lip, so she looks a little like a chipmunk. Turning away from the camera, her black eyes gaze beyond it.

  Amy rests her head on my shoulder, looking at the photo with me.

  ‘Remember the wings?’ she says.

  They were yellowed with age, scratchy and moulting. Each year they were pulled out of storage with more feathery gaps but we loved them, flitting around our classroom in them.

  ‘Grace kept squawking like a cockatoo,’ I say.

  ‘Drove the teacher crazy,’ Amy agrees. ‘She was always a bird nut.’

  A hazy memory is coming back to me. ‘Her file was in Dad’s car.’

  Amy straightens up.

  ‘When he had the accident, that first night at hospital someone told me. Gavin, I think. There were a couple of files in the car and Grace’s was one of them. Weird.’

  Flicking through the rest of the photos, I see that the three of us are in every one, growing older until we reach sixteen and then Grace is gone, a runaway who never came back.

  ‘Gus likes the name “Grace”. It was his grandma’s,’ Amy says. ‘I’m still trying to work out if I would be OK with that.’

  I breathe out slowly.

  ‘That night on the beach,’ I say. ‘Luke Tyrell was there as well.’

  Amy raises a slender eyebrow. ‘I’m not likely to forget that.’

  ‘I was such an idiot but I didn’t know she liked him.’

  ‘Back then we were all idiots,’ says Amy. ‘We probably still are.’

  ‘I never asked what you and Gus got up to that night.’

  ‘What, after you left with Luke?’

  I nod.

  ‘We looked for Grace for ages and eventually decided she had walked home, and then afterwards . . .’ There is the smallest of smiles on her face.

  ‘You didn’t,’ I say, in mock disbelief.

  ‘It was cold and he did deserve some attention after the night had been such a disaster. Of course, I felt incredibly guilty afterwards.’

  ‘At least something good came of it,’ I say.

  Amy reaches her arms and tries to give me a hug, but it’s mostly belly.

  ‘Is everything OK?’ I ask. ‘With the both of you?’

  ‘All good,’ she says in a flat voice that puts a stop to that line of questioning. ‘Trust me.’

  ‘Good,’ I echo. Amy is the person I trust most.

  ‘You need to see your dad,’ she says. ‘You’ll regret it if you don’t.’

  ‘OK,’ because I don’t want to argue with a very pregnant woman.

  ‘Get some sleep,’ she says. ‘It’s been quite a day. Don’t worry if you hear noises in the night. Just me and my squashed bladder.’

  She closes the door behind her.

  I sit on the bed. There’s something special about your childhood friends that can’t be replicated later in life. Looking at t
hese photos, being back with Amy in Kinsale, it feels like part of me never left.

  My father used to drum the words ‘every contact leaves a trace’ into all the junior cops he trained. Mostly he meant don’t screw up a crime scene, but it could also be taken as a philosophical statement. With the exception of Amy, I thought I’d put everything in Kinsale behind me twenty years ago. Watching the bushfire on television, I saw black snowflakes falling from a red sky and flames creeping across roads, turning power poles into burning crosses, and felt sorry for my old town. I worried about my father, who was caught up in it, but I thought I was insulated. Pretended I could switch off the footage and walk away.

  Perhaps that was a mistake and the wind is changing direction.

  3

  New Year’s Eve 1996

  Amy

  Amy lay on her back nestled beside Eliza. Grace sat staring at the teepee of sticks.

  ‘There,’ said Grace. ‘Your seagull is back, Eliza.’

  Lifting her head, Amy saw the bird watching them, its mismatched eyes looking hopeful.

  Eliza chucked a cold chip towards it. In a flash it darted forward, pecked at the sand greedily and the chip vanished.

  ‘No more,’ said Grace. ‘Chips aren’t good for gulls.’

  ‘Chips aren’t particularly good for anyone,’ said Amy.

  ‘My gull loves them,’ said Eliza, but she stopped all the same.

  The seagull turned its beak skyward, gave a quick wing-shake, hopped and then flew away, its wings a steady metronome flap until it got high enough to glide into the darkening sky. The day had disappeared into dusk.

  ‘Poor thing is probably trying to find somewhere to go to sleep,’ said Grace.

  ‘Wait until the fireworks,’ said Eliza. ‘Dad will spend most of tomorrow rounding up lost pets.’ She hitched up her sundress to scratch a mosquito bite. The rain had left stagnant pools, excellent breeding grounds.

  ‘Quick girls, the light’s almost gone.’ Janey Bayless came bustling up clutching a camera, bossily insisting they all get into the photo. Eliza was the first to agree. ‘Thanks, Mrs Bayless, that would be great,’ and she pulled Amy to standing before dragging the sunglasses perched on top of her head over her eyes in case the flash went off. Grace draped her arms around the others, grabbing them close. Amy smiled her no-teeth smile that she had perfected after two years of wearing braces. Behind them, Jim Keaveney poured more petrol on the wood.