by Debra Oswald
When Zoe first disappeared, Celia had lodged a missing-person report at the Narralong police station. The sergeant, Noel, was kind in a slightly patronising way, but unquestionably kind. As he filled out the official paperwork, the biro clamped in his meaty paw, he related stories about the many teenage runaway cases he’d encountered over the years, a dozen girls who had run off but returned home safely a few days later. His tone was steady, relentlessly calm, intended to reassure. Celia was hungry for any reassurance on offer, but as she listened to the police sergeant talk about those other runaways in his avuncular sing-song, she couldn’t take any comfort. If anything, Noel’s stories had the effect of slapping her with the realisation that Zoe wasn’t some capricious teen having a tantrum. This was something different.
Those first two weeks, Celia had stayed on the farm, never moving out of earshot of the phone. If she ever ventured from the house, it was only as far as the packing shed, where the ringer on the telephone extension was good and loud. She prowled the yard, never letting her eyes drift away from the driveway for more than half a minute, as if the fixedness of her gaze could conjure a vehicle to appear and deliver her daughter home.
Then in early February, a postcard arrived, with a photograph of a kangaroo on the front, and on the back, in Zoe’s handwriting, the words Don’t worry. The postmark was smudgy but could well have said Leeton. Celia took the kangaroo postcard as code that Zoe did not intend to show up at home anytime soon. The missing-person file would bump along through the system and police would do what they could, she assumed. But Celia knew she was the one charged with finding her daughter. That was when she left the property and set out to search.
She tried to be logical about it, mapping routes between towns where Zoe had schoolfriends, but also keeping in mind the timetable of the harvest circuit. Zoe and Kieran needed money but would want to keep moving, so picking work made sense.
Celia developed a routine: when she reached each new town, she would check in with the local police, then do the rounds of the pubs and milk bars, asking questions, showing a photo of Zoe. The only useful picture she had was a snapshot taken in a cafe on Zoe’s last birthday, slightly out of focus. The other option was a school portrait photo – her daughter with plaited hair and a dutiful smile, stiffly posed against a mottled blue backdrop. Zoe had never really looked like that portrait girl, and she surely looked even less like that unworldly teenager now.
Celia would then drive around to any properties in the district that hired casual pickers, talking to the farmers. The minute she said her daughter was sixteen and missing, the farmers would generally be helpful. They were no-nonsense about it, without the sort of fuss that comes dripping in pity. Their straightforward manner suited Celia, because a direct hit of sympathy might well have cracked her apart. She would leave each farmer a copy of the photo with her home phone number written on the back, in case Zoe turned up after Celia had gone.
At the beginning of March, there was a bloke, a grape-grower, who recognised the photo. According to the guy, Zoe and Kieran had stopped by looking for work but the place already had its full team of pickers. The grower remembered them because the two kids had been smiling for no good reason he could decipher and had been ‘all over each other like a rash’.
Celia quizzed the man. What exactly had the two kids said? How did they seem? Did they say where they were headed next? The grower tightened up his face against the battery of questions but he didn’t take offence; he could see she was in a desperate state of mind. He was sorry he couldn’t offer anything more in the way of useful information.
Through March and into April, Celia had persevered, gripping onto that one sighting and any other mention of a young couple that could have been them, or a car that could have been Sheena’s old bomb. She followed the routes she guessed Zoe would have taken, chasing after the seasons, the stone fruit, the grapes, the apples.
Easter fell in the second week of April. Months back, before school broke up for the summer holidays, Zoe had been invited to spend the Easter break with her friend Mandy, whose family kept a caravan by the beach at Kiama. Celia had said yes immediately, but she had also immediately calculated the risks involved in Zoe travelling in the McAloons’ car from their house in Evatt’s Bridge all the way to the coast, the chance of her being swept away by a strong rip (she’d done so little ocean swimming), the odds of the symptoms of a sudden-onset illness going unnoticed by people who didn’t know her daughter well. As always, she conducted this protective voodoo without saying anything to Zoe. Celia’s enthusiastic ‘Yes, of course you can go. How wonderful!’ was genuine – she loved the idea of her daughter having a beach holiday with her friend. That was why she had given Zoe the beach towel and beach bag for Christmas. The phone calls to arrange that trip seemed inconceivably long ago now.
Mandy was the first of the friends Celia had called when Zoe disappeared. The girl insisted she hadn’t spoken to Zoe since school had broken up the previous December and had no idea where she was now. Celia had believed her, if only because Mandy sounded so miffed about being neglected by her supposed best friend.
Later, on the Saturday of the Easter break, Celia replayed in her mind that phone call with Mandy, questioning her own ability to detect dishonesty in the voice of a sixteen-year-old girl. Mandy might have been hiding something. People could lie much more fluently on the phone. Face to face, it was harder to lie and easier to read a lie.
Once that doubt took hold, Celia had immediately checked out of the Batlow motel where she had slept the night. She drove out of the town, away from the apple orchards, across to the coast, then north to Kiama. She drove too fast and she drove for hours, only ever stopping to fill up the tank or buy food she could eat at the wheel. It was absurd – a few days would make no difference, but she couldn’t suppress the urge to rush.
She reached the caravan park in the early evening, obeying the signs to slow down along the road that ran through the grassy area set aside for campers, with little alcoves carved out of the coastal shrubs for people to pitch their tents. The camping ground was thrumming with activity – it was the time of the day when dinners were being prepared and children were being hustled to showers – and filled with a burble of noise from pop songs on transistor radios, the clattering of cooking implements, toddlers squealing as parents chivvied them along. Half a dozen kids were playing cricket with one of the fathers on the open patch of grass. A mother herded her twin girls, maybe five years old, back from the ablution block in their matching terry-towelling ponchos. A cluster of grown-ups stood around a barbecue, cans of beer in hand, laughing and blustery.
People turned their heads to stare at Celia – curious, not hostile. A farm ute, driven by a solitary woman, was incongruous here. She kept weaving through the place until she found the section with the semi-permanent caravans, where she spotted Keith McAloon’s electrician truck parked alongside one of the vans.
The van was set up for years of holidays – chocked in place on a concrete pad, hooked up to a power socket, bordered by succulent plants in pots painted bright blue. A striped annex was attached to the side and under its large awning there was room for a table and chairs.
‘Oh. Hi,’ said Elaine McAloon as Celia approached her. The two mothers had met at the end-of-year school concert and spoken several times on the phone.
‘Hi, Elaine.’
‘Keith!’ Elaine called out to her husband, who was turning sausages on the barbecue on the other side of the gravel roadway. ‘Keith, it’s Celia. Zoe’s mum.’
Celia saw the glance flicked between the two of them. The gossip mechanisms had done their work. They both knew she was the mother whose daughter had run away with a young man wanted by the police.
Keith trotted over to the caravan, tongs in hand. He smiled hello, but then exchanged another look with his wife, both unsure what to say.
Celia jumped in to save them from their awkwardness. ‘Listen, I’m sorry to just turn up like this.’
Celia’s chest lurched for one brief, excruciatingly hopeful moment. Then she looked round to see it was Mandy running up the path, holding a blow-up surfing mat on her head.
‘Oh. Hello, Mrs Janson.’ Mandy was straight out of the surf, her ruffled orange swimming costume still wet, shins crusted with sand, hair a salty clump, nose peeling from sunburn on top of sunburn.
Celia moved towards her. ‘Mandy. Where is she? Do you know?’
‘Beg yours?’ the girl responded. She was flustered, looking caught out, guilty.
‘You have to be honest with me. Have you talked to her? Has she told you where she is?’
‘No, sorry. I mean, I haven’t talked to Zoe at all for —’
‘Has she sent you letters? Has she made you promise not to tell anyone? Is that what’s going on?’
‘No. Dead-set, Mrs Janson, I haven’t even . . .’
‘You must tell me the truth, Mandy.’
‘Look, I think Mandy’s made it clear she hasn’t heard anything,’ said Keith, his composed adult tone forcing Celia to hear the hectoring pitch in her own voice.
She had ended up moving intimidatingly close to Mandy, skewering the girl with her gaze. And by this point the McAloon boys, eight and ten years old, had also scooted up from the beach. The two little brothers froze, registering the tension in front of them, and glanced to their mother for explanation.
Keith shifted himself in between Celia and his daughter – a shielding move, but shielding Celia as much as Mandy, protecting this poor distressed woman from doing something foolish.
‘Celia, how about you come over and sit down,’ he said.
His wife chimed in, with an equally mollifying tone. ‘Stay and have some dinner with us. There’s plenty.’
Elaine indicated the table where she was preparing the food: a bowl of salad, a platter of waxy cheese slices, bread and margarine, tomato sauce, all waiting for the sausages. Elaine McAloon was in the process of arranging vegetables into faces on plates for the two younger kids – shredded-lettuce hair, cucumber-slice eyes with grated-carrot eyebrows, tomato cheeks and half a slice of tinned beetroot as a mouth.
Celia swivelled back to see that Mandy was fidgety, with the embarrassed grin of an adolescent who has no idea how to be at that moment. She suddenly struck Celia as so young. The panic she’d seen on Mandy’s face was not guilt about lying. The girl had been nervous because she was just a kid, a kid afraid of Celia’s ferocious questions.
‘I’m so sorry, Mandy. Please forgive me.’
‘Oh, that’s – y’know . . .’ The girl didn’t know how to respond and kept silently appealing to her parents – What do I do now?
‘Please, Celia, stay and eat with us,’ urged Elaine. ‘We’ve all been worried about Zoe but good lord, you must be —’
‘No,’ Celia said too abruptly, then quickly modulated her tone. ‘Thank you, no. I should go. I’m sorry for barging in on your holiday. I’m sorry.’
Celia was already hurrying to the door of her ute, desperate to escape the pitying looks from these people, from their uncomprehending kindness.
Keith called after her, ‘We’ll let you know if we hear anything. If Zoe gets in touch with Mandy, we’ll call you quick smart. That’s a promise.’
Celia nodded her thanks through the windscreen, then swung the ute around and away. She drove out of the camping ground and picked up speed on the main road. She drove non-stop until the light had completely gone from the day. She wasn’t heading anywhere in particular, other than far away from her own appalling behaviour. Once it was dark enough, she felt a little more comfortable, her shame unseen now that she’d sunk into the night. At the next crossroads, there were signs to Sydney and she pointed the vehicle that way. There was no future in trailing around the picking circuit any longer. Celia guessed – all she could do was guess – that Zoe would have headed for the city by now.
The first thing Celia did in Sydney was hire a private investigator, a guy she found in the yellow pages, and give him all the information she had. She suspected he was ripping her off, but she would do whatever might have some chance of working.
Several good-hearted friends had repeatedly offered Celia a place to stay in Sydney. It would make sense financially, but as a guest in a friend’s spare room, she would be obliged – after some period of indulgence and sympathy – to behave normally. And she would be obliged to talk about what had happened. So she made excuses to decline the invitations. The hardest person to turn down was Freya, her husband’s sister. There had always been a strong friendship between Celia and her sister-in-law, which had intensified when Marcus was killed. But that was the problem – Freya’s eyes would be on her and there would be questions whirring in the air even if little was said. So Celia decided it was best to stick with motels. She found places in the outer suburbs of the city where the rooms were cheaper.
As April rolled into May and now June, the bank manager in Narralong expressed concern about the growing overdraft on the farm account, and Celia was required to call him on several occasions. She found that there was a voice she could use – this was more easily achieved on the phone – a steely tone but with a hint of crazy glinting off the edge, which, when coupled with some mention of ‘my missing daughter’, managed to shut someone up. However misguided people thought she was, they would step aside and let her continue on. It was an unworthy manoeuvre, that voice – cheap emotional blackmail, really – but it achieved what Celia needed to keep going without wasting time.
When the weather turned cold, she bought a knee-length sheepskin coat from the Salvation Army op shop. This wasn’t about comfort – if anything, she felt a penitential urge to endure physical discomfort – but wearing that coat allowed Celia to stay outdoors for long periods of time. She was following up addresses Sheena had given her – places Kieran had lived or liked to hang out – and sometimes stationed herself outside a certain house or pub, hoping for a sighting of Zoe or the boy. Thanks to that warm coat, she could sit and wait for hours and hours.
Sheena’s fingers were black up to the second joint from counting banknotes into bundles and rolling piles of coins into the paper wrappers. She would have to scrub her hands with washing-up liquid to be rid of the money grime, then slather on moisturiser so she didn’t end up with dermatitis again. After a busy Friday night, La Parisienne finally closed at four a.m. but Sheena had to stay back to clear the tills and lock up.
In a narrow street off the main drag of Surfers Paradise, La Parisienne declared itself to be a nightclub but was just a bar really, seeing as there was no dance floor. The decor was red and black, with one wall sporting a shithouse mural that optimistically claimed to be a silhouette of the Paris skyline and, in the foreground, featured the outline of a French hooker with a disproportionately big head and one stilettoed foot up in the air at a supposedly saucy angle.
The lighting was kept dim, with red bulbs and fringed scarlet lampshades, so in the low light the place didn’t look too terrible to the customers, especially through the added filter of numerous Bundy-and-Cokes. But now, with the fluorescent lights on and the chairs up on tables ready for the cleaners, the shabbiness was on display. Every surface was scuffed or gouged, the velvet upholstery on the booths saggy and tatty. By the end of the night and before the cleaners arrived, the floor was as grotty as you’d expect, with spilled drinks dried into sticky blotches that attracted a garnish of fluff, scraps of paper, human hair and cigarette butts.
To go with the chic French decor, female staff wore a uniform supplied by the management: a red off-the-shoulder peasant blouse with an elasticised neckline, a black miniskirt and fishnet stockings.
As Sheena counted the money at the end of each night, she always sat with her back to the Parisian mural, because in the merciless white glare of the fluoros, there was something truly depressing about that abysmal painting, sad beyond any joke Sheena coul
d construct in her mind.
Sheena had left Celia’s place the day after the huge mess. She didn’t want to hang around Sydney, so she headed for Surfers Paradise, figuring she’d find work there. In fact, she secured a trial shift as a barmaid at La Parisienne the first afternoon she asked around. Within days she was on the full-time roster, mostly because Radenko, the owner, liked the fact that the other bar staff – all young women – were scared of Sheena and therefore less likely to fiddle the till when her eyes were on them.
Within weeks she was promoted to night manageress, probably because she was the only staff member with two neurons to rub together and smart enough to know that it would be unwise to skim money off a guy like Radenko.
Sheena might rejoice in the exalted title of ‘night manageress’ but the pay was shit and Radenko still expected her to wear the same slutty outfit as the rest of the staff. So, as she sat counting the night’s takings, she could feel the abrasive mesh of the fishnets waffling her thighs against the chair and the nylon of the peasant blouse scratching wherever it touched her skin.
Radenko was in his fifties, dark-eyed and bulky, one of those men whose neck was as wide as his skull, so his head just sort of merged with his shoulders. He had propositioned Sheena the third night she worked there – blessedly doing so in a direct, verbal way rather than by groping her. He simply said, ‘Sheena, would you like to become my mistress?’ When she said, ‘No, thanks,’ he just shrugged and accepted her polite, equally direct refusal.
She had worried that the boss might become a nuisance, sniffing around her, but he seemed philosophical about the knockback. When he entertained business associates in the back booth – Radenko ran construction businesses and other ventures Sheena knew better than to be curious about – he insisted Sheena serve their table. She would pour the Liebfraumilch and bring over platters of oysters kilpatrick from the seafood place round the corner. The boss also liked the way she could pour cream into their glasses of Tia Maria so a layer of white sat on top of the syrupy brown liqueur. Whenever she came over to their table, Radenko would slip his chunky arm around Sheena’s waist and smile seductively, giving his associates the impression she was indeed his mistress. It was no problem for Sheena to allow that impression to stand, especially if it meant keeping her job without actually having to sleep with the guy.