Second Sight

by Aoife Clifford

  He shut his eyes as his world turned blood-red and when he opened them again, it was Eliza’s face that he saw, standing above him, her mouth round with surprise. He had forgotten all about her. She was supposed to have been home hours ago. In an instant he realised that she knew nothing of what had happened, that she still lived in a world where the worst thing that could happen was getting grounded by your father for getting home after curfew. Suddenly he was furious at her, livid that he had wasted his time keeping tabs on her earlier in the night, when Tess was the one in trouble.

  ‘Out, Eliza.’ He needed to get her away from him and the rage that was threatening to explode.

  ‘But what happened?’ she asked, and moved towards the car, putting out a hand to touch the damage.

  ‘Out,’ he said, and he could hear his voice straining not to say more. ‘Out now.’

  29

  ‘That’s not funny,’ I say to Tess.

  She leans against the doorway, her face unreadable.

  ‘Please, Tess,’ Gavin says. ‘Don’t do this.’

  She doesn’t look at him.

  ‘There was no evidence,’ he says. The words are like falling pebbles, stones about to start an avalanche.

  ‘Eliza’s a lawyer. She can make up her own mind,’ says Tess.

  In a rush, Gavin gathers her up, gripping her tightly.

  ‘I’m telling you not to do it,’ he demands.

  ‘It isn’t up to you,’ she answers.

  ‘Are you happy now?’ Gavin turns to me, red-faced. ‘You need to leave.’

  Before I can argue, Tess says, ‘This is Eliza’s home. She doesn’t need anyone’s permission to be here.’

  I expect him to start shouting but his resolve breaks.

  ‘Don’t expect me to pick up the pieces this time,’ he says and then walks out, leaving Tess and I staring at one another. A moment later the front door slams.

  I sit down, knowing that if I remain standing I will be tempted to follow his example and run away from what Tess wants to tell me.

  ‘Not in here,’ she answers. ‘Let’s go outside.’

  We sit on the concrete steps leading into the backyard, the cold from the ground seeping through my jeans. Out here is unrecognisable as well. The grass has been mown, garden beds turned over and mulched. The lemon tree has been savagely clipped back. Unlike in his study, I can’t feel my father out here. It’s just the two of us.

  Tess sits completely still next to me. She doesn’t turn her face in my direction.

  ‘My first mistake,’ she tells me, ‘was taking the Mustang,’ and she begins her story at the beach, letting me see all the ways that night could have been so different, how many choices she was given and how she kept picking the wrong ones again and again until she found herself in a situation where no choice was offered to her. Her words are factual and dry. There is no asking for sympathy or railing against the unfairness of it. She doesn’t even use the word ‘rape’. When she tells me how people watched and did nothing, I think of what Dave told me. Was this what he meant? My own sister and he couldn’t even say her name. Maybe he thought I already knew. And then I think about sitting in a car watching Luke Tyrell terrorise that woman, being stunned, wanting to do something but not knowing what, and as a result doing nothing helpful at all.

  There was no green hat to save Tess.

  She pauses as if temporarily all her words have been used up.

  ‘I’ve sat on his bench,’ I say, horrified at myself. ‘Sat there and looked out at the view.’

  ‘That’s OK,’ she replies. ‘I’ve gone there myself sometimes. It helps me think. Funny how what you find useful can be so different to what other people think will help. Dad thought by keeping my room the same we could pretend that I was still the same. Gavin thought if we left town it would get better and when it didn’t, decided we should come back and face it directly.’

  ‘But why wasn’t Travis charged?’

  Tess’s mouth twists sharp like barbed wire. ‘Dad came up with a different solution. A more direct one.’

  I scramble to put together everything I know about Travis Young.

  ‘There was a car accident. Wasn’t he drink driving?’ But Mary’s version of events is already echoing in my head.

  ‘That’s what was put in the official police report.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘Gavin would tell you there’s no evidence that Dad killed him,’ she says.

  I want to grab her and shake the truth out of her but I try to keep calm.

  ‘Are you saying Dad did it?’

  She doesn’t answer me directly. ‘He woke me up in the middle of the night, sat me down at the table and told me Travis was dead. And I felt something close to triumph, that he had felt pain, that he wouldn’t hurt another girl. But then I realised that Dad was wearing the same clothes as the day before and knew he hadn’t gone to bed at all.’

  ‘That’s not enough,’ I begin, but Tess keeps talking.

  ‘I asked him and he couldn’t look me in the eye and deny it. He thought killing Travis would make me better. In the following days there were more details. Dad had been first on the scene. He just happened to be driving up that road and radioed it in, but by the time the ambulance arrived it was too late.’

  None of this is concrete proof, I tell myself. Dad could have been so horrified by her accusation that he didn’t answer. The rest could be a coincidence.

  ‘He thought Travis would disappear and we’d never have to think about him again. Instead he was everywhere. There were memorial football matches, perpetual trophies in his name, his picture in shop windows with candles and flowers. We attended his funeral because what would people think if we didn’t. I had to stand there and watch the entire town say what a wonderful person he was and know it was my fault he was dead.’

  ‘No. It wasn’t your fault.’ In all this mess, I am sure of that. Tess wasn’t responsible for whatever had happened.

  ‘You think I’m completely blameless?’ she asks. ‘I knew that sex was part of the deal. Wore my prettiest dress, best knickers, packed condoms. I’d heard the stories about him, seen the way he treated other girls, analysed the whispers, tried to fill in the blanks. I’d been warned and yet was arrogant enough to think that he would treat me differently. That he would hold my hand first, tell me I was beautiful. How pathetic to set the bar that low, to want so very little and in the end not even get that.’

  ‘It’s sexual assault,’ I tell her. ‘Even if he’d lit candles and bought you chocolates. He got what he deserved, Tess.’

  ‘Then maybe I got what I deserved as well,’ says Tess.

  ‘No.’ I shake my head.

  ‘What, only people you dislike get what they deserve?’

  ‘Is this why you don’t visit Dad?’ I ask.

  She angles her head, looking at me for the first time.

  ‘I told him that night I’d never forgive him for what he did. That he was a terrible father and I hated him. That I was damaged and he was damaged but you weren’t and he needed to keep it that way. That’s why you were sent to boarding school.’

  ‘That’s the reason I was sent away?’

  ‘You always thought it was a punishment but I was trying to protect you. I had ruined everything. I didn’t want you to get caught up in it.’

  ‘Oh, Tess.’

  ‘It was years before I regretted what I said to Dad that night but I could never find the words to tell him. Then he had his accident.’

  ‘It’s not too late,’ I say. ‘We could go to the nursing home together.’

  She shakes her head. ‘I tried once, drove down there, but then I saw Travis’s grandmother out the front and knew I couldn’t go in. The problem is, if I stop thinking Dad isn’t the one to blame for Travis’s death, then the only one left is me and I can’t cope with that on my conscience. Not two people’s deaths.’

  I put my head in my hands.

  ‘Do you remember,’ she says, ‘when yo
u accused me of hitting the kangaroo, what I said?’

  My throat is constricting so the words come out in a thin whisper. ‘That you never hit a kangaroo in your life.’

  ‘You were so sure of yourself that I almost told you then, that it was Grace I hit coming back from the party.’

  The force of this nearly knocks me over. I have been driving around in the car that killed Grace.

  I curl into a small ball, my arms wrapped tight around my knees. Tess reaches out to touch me but I pull away from her. When I do lift my head, all I can see is the sixteen-year-old version of myself creeping up the driveway all those years ago.

  It was so early in the morning that the sun was a flat line on the horizon. My mission was to try and get into the house without any awkward questions being asked. Tess’s scuffed sandals were in my hand, one strap broken, and I knew she’d be furious with me. Almost at the back door, I noticed the light was on in the garage and the side door was open. Someone hadn’t locked up properly. I stuck my head through the doorway and there was my father, kneeling down next to his damaged car. Suddenly the picture disappears and I’m back in the present.

  ‘Tell me what happened,’ I say to my sister.

  ‘I was too busy looking in the rear-view mirror checking if anyone was following me,’ Tess says. The words come fast, falling out of her mouth as if she has stored them in there all this time just waiting for the vow of silence to end. ‘No headlights on, probably still drunk, going too fast. There was a thump from the front of the car, an enormous jolt as the wheels went over, knocking me and the car sideways. It was something big but I didn’t see anything clearly, a flash of movement beforehand perhaps.’

  I can’t take it all in. It is too big, too nightmarish, so I try to focus on the small details.

  ‘What time was it?’

  ‘A quarter to two.’

  ‘How can you be so precise?’

  I’m trying to resist the urge to challenge her, to dispute every word, to pick holes in her story.

  ‘I watched the clock the whole way home, telling myself all I had to do was drive for fifteen minutes and I would be safe.’

  ‘What road was it?’

  ‘Ophir Road.’

  ‘And you were driving away from the party back into town?’

  She nods.

  ‘Did you stop?’ I breathe hard, trying to fill up my lungs before she plunges me under.

  ‘I wouldn’t have stopped for anything. No-one came to help me. I wasn’t going to help anyone else. By the time I got home I knew it was the wrong thing. I told Dad about it but he just dismissed it, so I tried to do the same, to push it away because I was the victim here.’

  Each word she says knocks shards off the flinty exterior she has created for herself over the years, the splinters in the smooth facade exposing the damage underneath.

  ‘When did you realise it was Grace?’ The thought makes me sick to the bone. Did Grace die straight away or did Tess leave her to bleed to death on the side of the road?

  ‘Dad thought I’d hit a kangaroo. He told me that I was lucky it wasn’t a wombat. Because he didn’t want me focusing on it, he got the Mustang repaired straight away. I think he was trying to show me that anything can be fixed. He took it to the city rather than wait for his usual repairer to come back from holidays, wanting to hide it so people didn’t bother me with questions. Don’t you remember? He yelled at you at breakfast a few days later when you brought it up.’

  That event had completely fallen out of my head.

  ‘It wasn’t until the next week that Alan Sharp told him about Grace, how she hadn’t been seen since New Year’s Eve, and Dad asked me if I had seen her that night. Straight away I said she had been at the party and had asked me for a lift and then talked about walking home and that’s when I realised.’

  ‘How can you be sure?’ It hovers between a question and an accusation.

  ‘She had wanted to leave and the quickest way was along that road. When I told Dad, he immediately took over the case.’

  ‘He wanted to cover it up?’

  ‘No, he wanted to prove me wrong. The Mustang had already been mended so instead we drove up and down Ophir Road to help me remember where the accident occurred, but it didn’t look the same in the daylight and Dad refused to take me at night because he was already worried about my mental health. Instead, he chased up every possible lead, annoyed people up and down the coast for potential sightings of her because just one would mean that I didn’t hit her. But there were never any. She had disappeared.’

  ‘But if there was no body, how can you be sure?’

  ‘There was no dead kangaroo either.’

  ‘What about Jim’s statement?’ I ask. ‘He said he took her to the train.’

  ‘Dad wanted to believe that but he knew the trains weren’t running. Still, he investigated it just in case she had left town some other way. Went up to the city to see if she made it there but found nothing. In the end, he thought it was Jim making mischief, especially seeing he included you in his statement, saying you were the reason why Grace wanted to leave town. Dad figured Jim was deliberately tying up police resources with this investigation as payback for Gavin annoying him.’

  Tess’s story is like a labyrinth that confuses me at every turn.

  ‘In the end, he knew I was right,’ said Tess. ‘That’s why he got Aaron that job. He was trying to make up for what I’d done.’

  ‘No, you’re wrong,’ I say. ‘You must be. About Dad, about Grace, about everything.’

  She’s tear-stained and I didn’t even notice that she’d started crying. I know I should feel empathy or at least pity, but I can’t. All I can be is angry, because if I stay angry then I don’t have to deal with any of this.

  ‘What are you expecting me to do, Tess?’ I grab her face with my hand and turn it so she is forced to look directly at me.

  ‘You wanted to know who killed Grace,’ she says. ‘And now you do.’

  ‘What if I go down to the police station and report you?’

  ‘I tried to do that once,’ she says. ‘Went down when Dad wasn’t on duty and got Gavin to take my statement. But Dad told him what happened with Travis and how I was so mixed up that he shouldn’t believe me, that really I hit a big Eastern grey. So Gavin told me he couldn’t accept my statement. He could see how close to the edge I was and started dropping round to check up on me. He was kind.’

  I can’t stay here a second longer. Turning away, I leave her sitting on the back step and walk out of the house to the car. I stand next to the Mustang, not sure I can even get back in it again, but steeling myself, I unlock it and get behind the steering wheel. The past clambers in beside me.

  What I want more than anything is to be able to talk to Dad, ask him what he really thinks happened. Tess was dismissive about him needing evidence but he was right. Where was Grace’s body? Tess has given me her version of events but there are only fragments of answers here, part-guesses filling in the blanks. One eyewitness report isn’t enough. She has told me a story. Just because she thinks that it’s true doesn’t necessarily make it so.

  I’m not a police officer but I can treat this as if I’m writing an advice with logically ordered paragraphs, cases cited, clarifying footnotes. This is someone else’s knot that has been presented for me to untie. Fishing out paper and a pen from my bag, I sit in the front seat of the car and begin to write, setting out all the facts, but my brain is dull. I keep trying to make it fit all together but it’s like crazy paving with massive holes in between.

  Because the one question I come back to again and again is the one that started everything off.

  Tess says Grace was walking back into town along Ophir Road, but The Castle is in the opposite direction so I still don’t understand how her necklace ended up there.

  30

  I ask the woman drying glasses behind the bar where Tony is. She tells me to try his room on the first floor. I take the stairs two at a time and then slam m
y hand repeatedly on the door. Eventually, Tony opens it, his eyes sleepy and unfocused as he stands there wearing only a pair of boxers. He stretches, combs his fingers through his hair and tries to wake up.

  ‘Sorry, didn’t realise you were sleeping,’ I say, turning my gaze to the floor.

  ‘Day off,’ he says. ‘Got up early to go surfing. Everything OK?’

  ‘Can I talk to you?’

  A yawn. ‘Give me five minutes. I’ll get some clothes on.’

  When he opens the door again he’s dressed in an old T-shirt and board shorts.

  ‘You want a coffee?’ he asks.

  ‘Anything stronger?’

  His smile shows even, white teeth. ‘I own a pub, should have something tucked away somewhere.’ Then he looks closer at me. ‘Everything all right?’

  The adrenaline that I had felt rushing over in the car is disappearing, my urgency replaced by despair. The reality of what Tess told me is slowly sinking in, dissolving my defences.

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘The restaurant isn’t open yet,’ he says. ‘Let’s head down there.’

  The room is in shadow with all the lights switched off. Tony winds his way through tables covered in white cloths and leads me to the first wooden nook against the wall.

  ‘Grab a seat,’ he says. ‘I’ll get the drinks.’

  Muted triangles of sun illuminate the dust swirling in the air.

  ‘I can turn on the lights if you like,’ he calls from somewhere in the gloom.

  ‘It’s good,’ I say, and it is, perfect for talking about the ghosts of the past. ‘We won’t be interrupted?’

  ‘Shouldn’t be,’ he says. ‘Mum’s been a maniac the last few days, I’ve barely seen her. Thank god the election’s tomorrow.’