Friday Brown

by Vikki Wakefield

  Teeth chattering, I looked around. Nobody. Malik had gone.

  I waded unsteadily out into the open. Overhead, the moon was past its highest point and starting to fall.

  ‘God, don’t you ever die?’

  At first, I didn’t see her.

  She was so still, lying in the water underneath the tank, hidden by the stack of wood. Her profile was half in shadow, half illuminated, her chin tilted at an awkward angle. Her black box was held in the crook of her arm like a baby.

  I waited for fear, but it didn’t come.

  Arden tried to turn her head. Her knife hung loosely from her other hand. She lifted her arm and I flinched.

  ‘Come closer,’ she said dully, waving the knife around.

  ‘Where’s Malik?’ I looked over my shoulder.

  ‘Gone after them.’ She laughed. ‘I’m at a slight disadvantage here.’ The movement sent a wave of water into her open mouth and she sputtered. She raised her chin. ‘I’m st…uck.’

  She was caught up in my trap, snagged on the maze of barbed wire strung underneath.

  I paddled closer and watched her, still wary. ‘Did you think it was Silence? Did you come to save him this time?’ I asked.

  She looked confused.

  ‘No. You came to see if I was dead,’ I said flatly. ‘Curiosity killed the rat.’

  ‘Help me,’ she said.

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘Malik will help me.’

  I picked up the axe I’d hidden earlier and whacked it onto my open palm. ‘No.’

  She kicked one leg in anger and sent a spray of water into my face.

  I stepped closer, darted forwards and yanked the box out of her grasp.

  She swiped with her knife but her efforts were sluggish, like she was drunk. She was caught by her hair. The more she struggled, the more the barbs worked their way into the dreadlocks to pull her under. She tried to hack at her hair with the blade but the angle was too acute.Her nostrils were flared, her lips pressed tight to keep the water out.

  ‘It’s no use,’ I told her. ‘The water’s still rising. Now, where’s the key?’

  ‘Come and get it,’ she dared.

  ‘Give it to me and I’ll cut you free,’ I lied. I raised the axe and rested it on my shoulder.

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘That’s probably wise. Doesn’t matter anyway.’ I tucked the box under my arm and waded off, swinging the axe.

  ‘Wait!’

  I stopped.

  ‘It’s in my back pocket.’

  I shrugged and kept walking.

  Arden screamed. She sobbed. She called for help until her voice cracked. In between, she gasped for breath.

  Her fear was like a drug to me. I walked slowly; I wanted more.

  Arden screamed for Malik. For her mother. Her sobs were desperate when she finally called for me. ‘Please!’

  I let her cry for an eternity before I turned around and went back.

  When I was close, she called, ‘Catch!’ and threw something at me.

  I lunged, but my hands were full. I watched the object land and dance on the rippled surface—but it wasn’t the key. It was a small, blue canister.

  Silence’s inhaler.

  I waded back, set the box safe up high on the corner of the tank base and embedded the axe into the wood. I reached down, prised the knife from her stiff fingers and placed it on top of the box.

  Arden waited, as if she’d asked me a question. The tip of her nose was pink, peeling, and a tic pulled at the corner of her mouth.

  I focused hard on that imperfection and the balance of power shifted irrevocably. We weren’t so different, she and I.

  I pushed her under. I put my hands around her throat, and I squeezed.

  She had no chance to take a breath. Her hands clawed at my face, clutched at my hair, fluttered and fell. She ran out of fight quickly.

  Two minutes. Two minutes was long enough for an ordinary person. I held her under, felt her struggles weaken and watched her last gasp leave her in a series of burst bubbles on the surface.

  I didn’t bother to count. I waited until the rage was fed, then let her go.

  There was quiet. Stillness. The shape of her underneath. Sighing wind and the plink-plink of droplets leaving my chin, marking circles on her grave.

  Oh, God.

  The rage was gone but there was deadness in its place. Wherever she was now, she’d taken a piece of me with her. This was my drowning. This was how the water would take me.

  I used her knife. I cut through the rope of her hair, hacking, sawing, until her body drifted free. I cupped the back of her head in my hand and gave her my breath. The water took the weight of her. With my knee in her back, I punched her chest.

  It took so long.

  Breathe.

  ‘Breathe!’

  When Arden came to, her lips were blue. The river inside her came up and out. She gagged and flailed as I pulled her clear of the barbed wire, then she clung to me. I prised her arms from my neck and wrapped them around the trunk of a tree.

  ‘What happened?’ she stammered.

  She was shaking. In death, her eyes had changed colour—the irises were muddy, blurred around the edges. She sat up and rubbed her chest where I’d hit her, touched the raw patch where I’d scalped her skin.

  ‘I saved you,’ I said.

  She blinked. ‘Why would you do that?’

  To save myself.

  ‘How did it feel?’ I asked. ‘How did it feel when you screamed and begged and no one came?’ I picked up the box and slogged through floodwater in the direction of the road.

  Arden didn’t try to stop me.

  I didn’t look back.

  Just outside the edge of the town, I passed Malik, floundering and bellowing, making his way back to Arden. He was alone. He hadn’t found the others. I melted into shadow and waited. Malik froze. A shudder ran through him, as if someone had walked over his grave.

  I slipped past him, unseen, concealed by trees.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  I wish I could say that everything that happened after was a blur—but it wasn’t. I remember every detail. The painful progress, rolling along doing forty for so many hours—it felt like we were passing through the same patch of landscape, over and over. The quiet. Nobody spoke for so long it was as if we were all mute. Like Silence. I watched Arden’s necklace swing hypnotically from the rear-view mirror until I couldn’t stand it anymore. I ripped it away, wound down the window and tossed it out.

  Joe drove, if you could call it that. He sat rigid in the driver’s seat and looked at the speedometer more often than he watched the road ahead.

  We slept and woke and slept again. I felt like I could sleep for a hundred years.

  The first country police station we came to was unmanned. It was morning by then. I had decided only one of us would walk into that station, and that it would be me.

  ‘Hey, Joe,’ I said, as he went to pull away. ‘You need to pump up those tyres.’

  He nodded.

  Carrie pushed AiAi aside and stuck her head through the window. ‘You’ll find us when you get back to the city, won’t you?’

  ‘Sure,’ I lied.

  ‘Promise,’ she said.

  Darcy turned away.

  ‘Hey, Joe,’ I called out again, dragging out the leaving. I didn’t want to be alone. ‘What day is it?’

  He took his foot off the accelerator. ‘It’s…’ He stopped to think.

  ‘Never mind,’ I cut him off. ‘I don’t need to know.’

  They drove away with Bree looking through the rear window, tears rolling down her face.

  I very nearly ran after them.

  In the hour before an officer arrived, I sat on the front steps with Arden’s box on my lap. A dark stain formed on my jeans: the river water I’d brought with me, leaking from a corner of the box. I watched the stain spread slowly, like a pool of blood.

  I tipped the box sideways and the leak bec
ame a gush. A trail of water trickled down the steps. I smelled that rank, muddy odour that would never really leave me.

  The padlock was small and flimsy, the kind you’d find on a cheap diary, and when I twisted it the catch broke off in my hand. I rummaged through the contents. Near the bottom, I found what I was looking for.

  Arden had taken Silence’s pages—did they hold some proof of her guilt?

  The paper was soaking wet, the pages fused together. My hands shook as I peeled them apart and laid them flat on the warm concrete.

  The ink was blurred and illegible in places, some sentences only fragments, but the format was unmistakeable. It began with his full name and place of birth and ended with a quote about God only taking the best. In between, he’d listed a short lifetime of imaginary achievements.

  My stomach twisted. Arden hadn’t taken his pages because they were incriminating—she’d taken them as insurance. I let out a shriek of frustration.

  A man setting up a butcher’s sandwich board across the street looked up, alarmed.

  I knew why Silence had written his own obituary—it was meant for his wall. But anyone who hadn’t known him would have seen it as a suicide note. But I knew. He was forgotten, left waiting in a train station for his sister who never came, and he believed that remembrance was love.

  I tore up the pages, ripped the paper into tiny pieces, rolled them into balls, and flicked them into the gutter. I closed the box and hid it behind a bush.

  If I couldn’t protect Silence, I would protect his memory.

  I wish I could say that I told the absolute truth—but I didn’t.

  In my version, I named only Arden and Malik. I described them as accurately as I could, as they were, beautiful, bold and brave, before they became nothing. I told the officer they were alive, out there somewhere, and that Silence was dead. In my story, the others were ghosts. No, I didn’t know their real names. No, I didn’t think I would ever see them again. No, I didn’t know where to find them.

  I wish I could say that I bore the ordeal alone and that I did it with grace and dignity, but I cried. I cried during the hours-long interview until I was hoarse and the police officer gave me a break. He let me use the station’s shower and I cleaned up my face as best I could. I hardly recognised myself. With my short hair and big eyes, my skin raw from sun and exposure, I looked old. The cut behind my ear was healing badly, set in a patch of bald skin.

  I thought of Darcy. Her empty hand that pulled me up into the light. How I still didn’t believe in magic. Not omens or premonitions or that a future could be foretold. But something inexplicable had happened out there.

  I fell asleep on a couch. When I woke, Grandfather was there. I wasn’t surprised, because I was the one who had called him.

  He spoke using his hands and long, legal jargon and a booming voice. I saw flashbacks of Vivienne when he pushed his tongue between the gap in his teeth and thought hard about what he was going to say next.

  I felt weightless, relieved that someone else was dealing with it all.

  He signed forms, fielded questions, took notes. In comparison, the police officer seemed small behind his desk. He shrank further when Grandfather pointed out that much of the interview had taken place without an adult or guardian present.

  ‘You can go,’ the officer said, finally.

  ‘I don’t have to go back there?’ I squeaked.

  ‘A patrol will head out. Until we can ascertain whether there has been a crime, you’re free to go.’

  Grandfather fished around in his pocket for his keys. He put his heavy hand on my injured head, ran it down my cheek and cupped my chin. Then, as if he realised that touch could unravel us both, he let it drop to his side.

  He held the door open for me.

  Outside, I stood on the kerb, squinting in the sun. I had nothing. Even less than I had before.

  I looked up the road and saw the familiar grid-style streets. The red dust I craved. Ancient trees that would have a heartbeat if I pressed my ear to them. I looked down the road and saw barefoot children and wandering dogs.

  I took a step off the kerb, held a wet finger to the breeze, read all the signs. It was the same sleepy town I’d lived in or passed through a hundred times before. It was as good a place to start as any.

  But I felt nothing. Not a beat of nostalgia or wishful thinking. Nothing.

  I picked up Arden’s box.

  Grandfather watched me without expression as I climbed into the back seat of his ancient, dusty Mercedes.

  I tucked the box under the passenger seat and helped myself to a mint from the console. Our eyes met in the rear-view mirror and I gave him a tired smile.

  Grandfather cranked up the volume on his radio and I heard a familiar country song. He pulled away from the kerb, kicking up dust, and we left the town behind.

  I stretched out on the back seat and closed my eyes… Troy Cassar-Daly. ‘Everything’s gonna be alright’.

  I smiled again. You could find relevance in anything if you looked hard enough.

  Grandfather passed his jacket over the seat for me to rest my head on, and drove.

  He said nothing.

  The stop-start motion of the car and the smell of exhaust told me we were nearing the city. I saw landmarks and buildings that didn’t seem alien anymore, just different from what I was used to.

  ‘You’re awake. Where do you want me to take you?’

  I had assumed he would take me back to his house. I figured he’d lock the door and hide the key and spend the next ten years lecturing me about how irresponsible I’d been. I wasn’t sure how to feel about the fact that he was letting me go again.

  ‘The train station,’ I said quietly. I added, ‘Thank you.’

  ‘You need to be available for questioning. I gave my word.’

  ‘I’ll be around.’

  He sighed like he didn’t believe me. ‘Did you find him?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Your father.’

  ‘What makes you think I was looking for him?’

  ‘It’s human nature. To want to know where you came from.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter that much to me anymore.’

  It didn’t. If I couldn’t find all the pieces of me within myself, I sure as hell wouldn’t find them in a stranger.

  My life would always be full of unanswered questions. I would always wonder if, had I taken another direction, Silence would have lived. I’d always regret my fascination with Arden and my desire to be like her. I would question my past, whether Vivienne was somebody I ever knew at all. Did the stories come first? Or did I? Did I survive because of everything that Vivienne taught me, or is there something at work that I’ll never be able to explain? Growing up is made up of a million small moments in time, and one of the most painful is the moment you’re severed from the whole, when you realise that your parent is complicated and fallible and human.

  ‘You know, where you’ve been isn’t as important as where you’re headed.’

  ‘Vivienne used to say that,’ I said.

  ‘Hmm.’

  He parked the Mercedes illegally with the end sticking out into traffic. He opened the car door like a chauffeur.

  ‘There are some things I need to do…’ I said. I picked up the box and got out.

  ‘Then you have to do them.’ He sighed. ‘I tried, you know. I cut Vivienne off without a cent. Then I tried to bring her back. You, I offered you money and I let you leave. It seems there was no right way to keep either of you.’

  I wanted to say something—but I couldn’t find the right words.

  He opened his wallet and pulled out a handful of fifty-dollar notes. ‘Don’t argue. And here.’ A mobile phone. ‘I never did figure out how to work the bloody thing. Use it, if you need to.’ He handed me the money and the phone, closed the rear door and stooped to climb in. He stopped and looked over his shoulder. ‘You look just like her.’

  He left me blinking on the footpath.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-
FOUR

  It was atonement, I suppose. Or a pilgrimage, depending on how you look at it. I had this niggling need to put things right. Or as right as I could make them, given the circumstances.

  One dead, two missing, six lost—and me. I was none of those things. It was up to me.

  I sat on Silence’s bench in the train station for a long time. I watched passengers come and go. A few looked curiously at Arden’s box, like it was possibly a bomb, and to me it was. Tick-ticking away.

  I checked the cameras overhead, my figure mirrored in their black, plastic bubbles. I counted them: one, two, three, four. Four different angles. The one nearest to me that must have captured the image in the paper, and the one I wanted—the one I’d hoped for—across the tracks on the side without pedestrian access.

  I couldn’t even remember the exact date I had left Grandfather’s house; it seemed so long ago.

  The security guard remembered.

  ‘I shouldn’t have you in here.’ He frowned and showed me into his office. ‘Come on, then. Just a minute or two.’

  He played the recording for that day, that hour, that blink-and-miss-it minute. He replayed it from all four angles, each time whistling a long, low note.

  ‘I thought you were on drugs,’ he said shaking his head. ‘Nobody thought to rewind further back. We didn’t check the far camera. The police and the papers only have the footage of you. Would you look at that?’

  But I couldn’t look. I turned away. It was enough for me to know that Silence wasn’t invisible, that others would see him too.

  I bought some new clothes—a T-shirt, underwear, jeans—all a size smaller than I usually wore. I used most of the rest of Grandfather’s money to book a room in an inner-city hotel.

  The bored girl at the desk didn’t ask for ID. She didn’t pay any attention to my hacked hair and puffy face. As I handed over the cash I saw that my fingernails were ingrained with red dirt and the palms of my hands were cut and peeling.

  The girl gave me a key. She tucked the notes away in a cash drawer. The whole transaction was completed using about fifteen words.

  My room was on the ninth floor. It was basic, not quite clean, but the shower was hot and the soap smelled nice. The cut above my ear stung and throbbed. I avoided washing it but the water still ran pink. In the glare of fluorescent light my legs were covered with purpling bruises, the skin stretched thinly over my bones.