The Lone Child

by Anna George

  ‘Coldest April morning in fifty years,’ he said.

  ‘Is it. Thanks for coming out.’

  She could smell his breath: cigarettes and lime cough drops. The cigarettes prevailed. She’d never seen a policeman smoke in uniform. She doubted they were allowed. As he tried to step into her warm home, she moved to block him. ‘My baby’s asleep.’

  He pulled a disappointed face – inappropriately, she thought – then lolled a lozenge from one side of his mouth to the other. ‘What’s this about a child?’

  ‘I saw a young girl in my garden. But now I can’t find her.’

  The way he was eyeing her wasn’t sexual but it wasn’t entirely respectful either. Neve felt her body flagging as she stood. He was staring at the milk-splattered cloth nappy on her shoulder and the tube of lanolin in her hands. Her crinkled tracksuit pants and bed hair.

  ‘Where did you see her?’

  He coughed.

  ‘Oh . . . In the garden . . . Actually, first on my balcony. Well, I didn’t see her in the garden. But she vanished in there.’

  He glanced towards her tiered garden of succulents, without conviction. ‘How long ago?’

  ‘Half an hour. Or an hour. I rang straight after but . . . I’m losing track.’ She looked at her wrist but it was bare. It must have been after nine by now.

  ‘Looks like hubby needs to step up,’ he said, with a sniff.

  ‘I saw a child,’ she said slowly. ‘On my balcony. Same child that I saw yesterday at the beach. Alone. When I had to fish her out of the sea.’

  His voluminous eyebrows wriggled across his forehead. She could see him thinking. Sentence by sentence.

  ‘The girl belongs to the creature that ran into my wall.’

  ‘Yeah, you think? I saw the hole.’ He let himself be distracted, seemed almost grateful of it. ‘Hard to miss. We ran the plates . . . turns out the car’s from Frankston.’

  Neve shook her head to focus and to ward off these irrelevant details.

  ‘You won’t get anything out of them. Rego’s expired.’ His tone had a bite she didn’t expect. He’d lost her.

  ‘The girl was lightly dressed. She must be freezing.’ She tried to sound less exasperated. ‘She’s very young. Four or five. Skin and bone.’

  He nodded to himself. The tension left his face, his cheeks softened, his forehead dropped. Neve felt that weariness again; if she wasn’t careful, her eyes would close. But she needed to give this man a prod.

  ‘Good luck.’ She turned to withdraw, dropping the lanolin, but still he didn’t budge.

  ‘I’ll take a look around. Speak to your neighbours.’

  As she bent to retrieve the tube, he stomped his feet as if to rouse them. But incredibly, he didn’t move off. There was no urgency. Or intensity. As if a child like that would just turn up. Or not.

  ‘Take that path down to get to the balcony,’ said Neve, pointing.

  ‘I live around the corner, on Cove Lane.’ His tone was more conversational, yet she sensed a ploy. ‘I saw your lights on yesterday morning when I was paddling.’

  Her frown lodged itself on her forehead. He wasn’t interested in the child, or her wall. That was the dangerous thing about institutions: the personal bled in, individuals had agendas. Self-interest.

  ‘I’m going now,’ she said.

  ‘I haven’t seen folks here since, gee, 2008.’

  She folded her arms across her chest. So that was it . . . With his right hand, he rubbed the facing panel of chilled stone. His hands looked strong: thick-fingered, wide. It was a possessive gesture, like a farmer patting a cow’s rump. Neve watched his hand until it stopped. He was right about 2008, more or less. That’s when her father had left Australia, his business in ruins for a second time, and he hadn’t been back. Her stepmother and half-sisters rarely came across to Victoria. But they’d kept the house, despite the line of creditors that’d trailed her father’s businesses. The Ayres family trust owned it, and half a dozen more around the globe. Over the years, Neve had weekended here only occasionally, usually at the last minute, on a whim. She suspected the Senior Constable knew as much.

  ‘You staying for a while or having a little holiday?’ He said the last in that ridiculous, high-pitched voice men used when imitating women.

  ‘I haven’t decided.’

  He peered over her shoulder again, trying to steal a glimpse of the foyer, the high ceilings and those magnetic views. The desire to be lost in a view was universal. But she kept the gap tight.

  ‘My baby’s asleep.’

  ‘Yeah. You said.’ Had she?

  ‘The place’s aged well.’ His tone was almost accusatory.

  ‘Yes.’ That was the beauty of stone. It endured.

  He was well off script and they both knew it. Neve inhaled. She’d intended to keep a low profile with the locals. She stepped backwards. ‘You need to start searching, now.’

  Senior Constable Jenkins turned. ‘Here’s a tip for you.’ He raised a bushy eyebrow. ‘Call a stonemason from out of town.’

  She let her breath out slowly from her gut and watched it evaporate. Had she been wrong to come to Flinders? While she’d wanted to feel closer to her mother, in some abstract way, she didn’t have the strength for this, especially not while she was sleep-deprived, muddle-headed. She’d thought the local fury around her father had passed, long ago, or would, at least, not touch her now. But some people had memories like elephants. She had a hunch one of her father’s companies had owed Jenkins or his family money. The Jenkinses could have invested in one of Sam Ayres’s commercial developments on the peninsula. That was unfortunate, for them. But what did that have to do with her?

  The wind curled the top of the cypress trees. Leaves rained down. Neve peered into the man’s yellowed eyes. The world was an imperfect place. Businesses failed. What was legal wasn’t always ethical.

  ‘I want you to find that child,’ she said. ‘And leave.’

  The man’s eyes shrank, with offence and disbelief, and something else. Validation. He’d been right to dislike her. Her kind.

  He turned, heading downhill, diffidently. As Neve watched, she heard her phone beep. Only her business partner knew she was in Flinders. But she’d asked Owen not to call for a month. While in exile she didn’t want to be reminded of home. Until today, no one else in the world knew where she was – except a flaccid, speechless being, with poor sight.

  Watching the policeman disappear, she hoped she’d seen the last of him.

  She fumbled for her phone and squinted. Various friends continued to call despite her silence. But this wasn’t any of them. She tried to read the scrolling words but the tone was chatty; and she couldn’t read on. She pictured Kris in a cafe in Prahran: languidly enjoying a short black and his long weekend. The disinterested father of her child. Why was he contacting her? Even from a distance, he couldn’t respect her wishes.

  Wind surged through the shrubs and alongside her resolute stone house. The energy was agitating and fierce. Further down the property, garden equipment was tumbling and spilling; she heard a chair tossed onto its back, the scrape of wood. A second front was coming. She closed her door and leant against it, grateful for its heft. It was only then, she realised: she’d forgotten to mention that, last night, the child had rapped at the nursery window. Tried to come in.

  8

  Sal Marioni was making porridge in his mum’s kitchen when his phone rang. Rain was animating the tin roof and he could barely hear the phone over the racket. Having already spoken with his brothers, he had a feeling it wasn’t a social call. It was a client. But he was in no state to talk about stone. He watched the clock ticking in his mother’s stove. The clock that had, until recently, been broken, with its red second hand unmoving.

  Taking the porridge off the flame, he nearly burned his hand. He’d made too much again; he’d forgotten how to cook for one. His gaze returned to that clock.

  Eight weeks ago, on the very first night he returned freshly alone to her
house, it’d started. Tick. Tick. Tick. The funeral home people had collected Marina Marioni’s body and his brothers had retreated to their families. Coming in, he’d flicked on the lights and the fuse box had blown with a loud bang. In his thirty-odd year association with that house, he hadn’t heard the fuse box blow. ’Course, it’d ‘gone’, but not with a bang like that. Then, when he’d turned the power back on, that old clock had leapt to life. It hadn’t stopped since.

  The next day, as Sal made the arrangements, he’d been visited by a large orangey bird too – something he didn’t recognise. It had alighted on his mother’s guttering and watched him as he puttered about her house. It had stayed for hours, eyeballing him. He’d never seen a large bird that close and unafraid. It’d been watching him that intensely, he’d half-expected it to speak.

  He wasn’t that sort of man, new-age, or spiritual. But that evening two candles had guttered as he lay in bed. There’d been no breeze, no open window or shutting door. No reason for the things to bluster, their flames dancing and flattening and rising again, as if blown by invisible lips. In bed, he’d watched them for minutes. Puzzled. Sad. Touched. That you again, Mum? Eventually, the flames steadied, upright, unwavering, and he blew them out.

  Every day since, though, he’d been alert for more . . . aberrations.

  The phone continued to ring as wind lashed the shutters. He roamed the rest of his mother’s modest house. The three bedrooms, one bathroom. The floor creaked beneath the carpet as he stepped from room to room. At least the house was still alive. Shifting and changing with the earth and the weather and time. Sometimes yielding, sometimes cracking. He glanced up at the tears in the wallpaper. Over the years they’d appeared and then grown, forking towards the carpet. His mother couldn’t see them in the end and he hadn’t the heart to tell her about their progress, but he liked them up there now.

  In the sleep out, he paused. Water was dripping through a light socket. Dangerous, sure, but not particularly ghostly. He made a note to return with a saucepan. In the laundry, a window was open and rain was slanting in. He shut it, with a quick glance at the sopping vegie patch and the buffeted Hills Hoist, the empty bird feeder. But no, she wasn’t out there, whipping off the sheets. Apart from the rising storm, nothing was out of order. As far as he could see.

  And he was intimately familiar with this place now, and the way his mother had liked it, in a way he’d not been before. Living with her, he’d been doing the tidying and the washing this last year. He knew where the sheets lived and how she liked her pillow slips ironed. She’d kept everything in pristine condition; he didn’t know how she’d done it. Made things last. As the drumming on the roof grew louder, he hesitated in her bedroom; her bedspreads were forty years old. It looked like she bought them yesterday. He was in danger of shedding a tear over that. He wriggled his toes to dam the flow. Somehow that tip from the funeral celebrant worked.

  The phone stopped. He put a saucepan in the sleep out and listened as the drips added another percussive, lonely note to the house. At thirty-four, he felt too young to be an orphan.

  He hadn’t been close to his dad, who’d left when Sal was five and his brothers were three and one. When he’d heard, eight years ago, that Sandro Marioni died alone in Perth, Sal hadn’t felt much. But with the passing of his mum, Sal was feeling everything. The world around him felt emptier yet his experience of it was heightened; and his own end felt more inevitable. The whole thing was grim. Now there was no buffer between him and death. It was his and his brothers’ turn to step up to the grave. He felt it like a tap on the shoulder. Not that he’d said as much to his brothers or anyone else. He doubted they’d understand.

  Over the last year, his status as a single, thirty-ish man living with his mother hadn’t sat well with his brothers. They’d teased that he fit the profile for a serial killer. Called him by his three names: Salvatore Franco Marioni. Because, according to them, serial killers were always known by three names. He’d thought that honour was reserved for presidential assassins . . . Either way, he didn’t care. He’d enjoyed his time with his mum. A lot. He liked discovering new things about her, like how in the last year, she’d developed a taste for chocolate peanuts and cryptic crosswords. And the afterlife.

  They were both lapsed Catholics and that’s where his religion stopped. Since he was a kid, he’d had trouble believing in the Resurrection. Which was a problem given it was the cornerstone of the Christian faith. That aspect of it hadn’t bothered his mum, though. She liked it, and the various saints and their visions. For her, the problem was the other stuff – the gender politics, the homophobia, and the paedophiles. For years, she’d been a contented agnostic. Then, in recent months, lo and behold, she’d become a spiritualist.

  She’d come to believe, specifically, in the nearness of the dead. That only the finest membrane separated the living from the departed. A membrane sensitive people could see and hear through. A membrane the dead could move through and so could birds, carrying the spirit of the recently departed across the threshold. He didn’t believe it himself, mind, but she’d become quite passionate about it. And she wasn’t bothered when some random spirit came through in a reading, with a message, rather than her sister, or her parents, or even her ex-husband. Though he’d worried about her faith in the psychics, he didn’t run them down. He had simply asked her to be on the lookout for shysters. And nutters. On that, he didn’t know what differentiated people who saw and spoke with spirits from the mentally ill. But he didn’t press it with her.

  Thinking about those psychics, though, gave him the willies. Some of the things they’d said! Things they couldn’t possibly have known, regardless of how well they could read a person. What had one of them told his mum once? ‘Your single son is underperforming socially. He needs to get out.’ Talk about cheeky. His mum had had a good laugh over that.

  He returned to the kitchen and tried to eat some porridge. He wondered whether his brothers had had any similar weird happenings. He’d never asked what they thought of her Sunday trips into the city to see the mediums. He assumed their relationships with her hadn’t deviated far from his; the key difference being his brothers were busier – with wives and children. But he was the one who’d looked like her: dark, with narrow hips and a squarish face. He’d shared her interests too – in food and people. If she was going to send anyone signs or visit, it’d probably be him.

  Outside the pine trees were getting drenched. His appetite was gone. The phone started again. He considered the house around him brimming with seventy-two years of life. He’d been out of action eight weeks and was no wiser to what his mum may or may not be up to. His bristly cheeks itched. The rest of his life was opening up like a long, wide question mark.

  What now, Mum?

  She’d been a good one for advice. The nurses who’d visited had said that too. He listened to the house. He could hear the clock ticking again. It and the phone duelled for his attention. They became equally hard to ignore. In the end, reluctantly, he reached for the phone.

  It was a woman. Unfamiliar. Her voice was cultured and sonorous. And yes: a client.

  ‘You do realise it’s Good Friday?’ he said, though not unkindly.

  There was a pause; then she launched into her tale. Though vague on details, its urgency was palpable. When she was done, he cast his mind back over a decade. Yes, he could remember her, and that house.

  ‘I’ll come when the weather clears,’ he said, ending the call.

  To his surprise, the rain on the tin roof was loud, like applause.

  9

  Through the rain, a car appeared, coming from the direction of Flinders. It was a four-wheel drive and royal blue. Leah’s first instinct was to hide behind the Holden. Mitch hated four-wheel drives and she would’ve preferred a regular person too, not someone posh. But as the car got closer, she made herself lunge towards it and put out her hand. She tried to look normal, not half-drowned and wobbly. The car braked to pull up opposite the Holden. Wet grav
el kicked up from its back tyres. The driver dropped the window and gestured to her.

  At the car, Leah had to look up. The driver was a large woman, wearing a hat, and a bright white shirt. She wasn’t wrinkly, though she was old – about fifty. Her eyes were light brown and sparkly, and her teeth were super straight.

  ‘What’s happened?’ she said.

  Her words were round and fat. When she turned to inspect the Holden and saw its dinged-in bumper bar, her eyes changed; she looked into the nearby trees, like someone was going to jump out and bash her.

  Leah knew she probably should tell the woman that she’d lost Tayla. Accidentally. Overnight. But something stopped her: shame or fear or both.

  ‘Did you have an accident?’

  Getting wetter, Leah looked each way down the road. She wasn’t good with words at the best of times. While she was waiting, she should’ve been practising what to say, like she used to when she was a kid. Back then, it’d take her weeks to get the guts to ask Gran for a night out or a friend to come round. It’d take her another week to get over Gran saying no. This morning, she didn’t even know what to ask for. A lift to Flinders? Or to a petrol station? She only had six bucks . . . Or should she risk getting in trouble, losing the girls, and tell the woman the truth?

  ‘Have . . . you . . . had . . . an . . . accident?’

  ‘Um . . . no.’

  She didn’t want to make a fuss, if she didn’t have to. Step by step, she told herself. The woman didn’t need to be involved in finding Tayla. She could handle that. ‘I’ve run out of petrol . . .’ She said it quiet and closed her mouth. Her head swam.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  Leah made her voice louder. ‘I’ve run out of petrol.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’

  The rain was stopping. The woman eyed Leah’s dripping nose, her grey hoodie and her battered runners. She looked about to speak. Could be she was going to say, ‘Look at you, you’re tiny,’ or, ‘What a slip of a thing!’ New people always said something like that, sooner or later. Or they commented on her super long hair. To the old Leah, that was; the Leah that kept to herself with a decent husband and a cosy house, a permanent job, and time to do her hair. She put one foot over the over and tried to cover the hole in her left shoe.