The Whole Bright Year

by Debra Oswald

  And anyway, Radenko wasn’t the worst boss she’d ever had. He paid the lousy wages promptly and he kept the bouncer on shift during the clean-up after closing time so Sheena felt safe on the premises in the early hours of the morning. Not every boss would have done that.

  La Parisienne was the kind of place where female patrons were handed a voucher for two free drinks when they walked in. The bar offered a cheap price on jugs of Slimy Maria (milk mixed with Tia Maria) and Fruit Tingle (a lurid cocktail that really did taste like the lollies). With that discount supply of infantile drinks, patrons could get themselves seriously pissed at great speed.

  It attracted a lot of under-age girls, especially in the school holidays. The bouncer on the door didn’t notice – he was a nice-enough Islander guy but dumb as a box of rocks. The police didn’t give a flying fuck if there were minors drinking there – they were too busy counting the cash in the paper bags Radenko and other proprietors handed over on a regular basis.

  If a girl came in who looked fifteen, Sheena would assess if she was the kind of kid who could take care of herself. If she was a naive little twerp likely to get herself silly-drunk and then pregnant or, worse, acquire herpes from one of the losers in the bar, Sheena would swing her intimidating gaze onto the poppet. ‘How old are you, princess?’ If the teenager then blanched and stammered and scurried away from the bar, well, that decided it. Sheena had probably saved the girl from getting herself into a mess. But if some chick pouted her strawberry-lip-glossed mouth, poked her padded bra defiantly through her tank top and claimed to be eighteen, Sheena would shrug and let it go. Those sharp-elbowed little molls could look after themselves.

  The worst thing about the job was being awake all night and attempting to sleep in the day. Night work messed with her body, making her feel unhealthy and slightly dirty all the time, even though she showered twice a day. The uniform contributed to the dirty sensation – the cheap nylon fabric didn’t breathe at all, so Sheena was trapped in there with her own sour sweat no matter how much deodorant she sprayed on beforehand.

  Then again, it might have been Surfers Paradise itself that felt unhygienic to her. She’d forgotten how much she hated the place – it was as ugly as sin and harboured more arseholes per square yard than anywhere she’d ever lived. But there was always work to be had on the Gold Coast for someone like Sheena, and the streets were full of people day or night, constantly generating noise you could disappear into. Sometimes that was an advantage.

  On the bus trip up to Queensland, Sheena had imagined throwing her body into the surf. It would be good to live near the beach again. But in fact she hadn’t taken herself to the beach once in the four months she’d been here.

  When the La Parisienne money was counted, packed and locked away in the safe – the registers had balanced tonight, thank Christ – Sheena wriggled out of the miniskirt and pulled on tracksuit pants. It was cold walking through the streets at five a.m. in June. More importantly, she didn’t want any smart-mouth dickheads gawping at her legs in the fishnets.

  There was still more than an hour before sunrise, but it was never properly dark in the centre of Surfers. Street lamps, neon signs and car headlights combined to pour a thin slurry of light over the buildings. Every morning, heading back to the fat at the end of her work shift, Sheena would be reminded that this was the time of day she used to start work at Celia’s place.

  The night Kieran and Zoe shot through, there had been an initial burst of activity. Phone calls, torchlight searches of the property, Celia driving up roads in several possible directions, more phone calls. There was fuck-all chance of finding the kids that night but everyone, including the old Hungarian lady, went along with the futile effort so they could hurl their feelings into some busy-busy action.

  Just hours before, Joe and Sheena had been fucking, but for the rest of that night, while helping with the search, they didn’t even make eye contact. Okay, getting sprung in a pants-down pantomime, like something out of a Benny Hill sketch, would not have been a highlight in Joe’s life, but the man’s discomfort was deeper than simple embarrassment. Sheena wondered if he had the secret hots for Celia and now reckoned he’d blown his chance. Or maybe he was ashamed to be caught rooting a slag like Sheena and worried his upright friend Celia would think less of him.

  There was an acidic silence going on between Celia and Joe, no question. Maybe she was angry because his negligence – being sexually distracted at a crucial moment – had contributed to Zoe’s slipping away. Or she was annoyed because Joe was the dimwit who’d brought Kieran there in the first place. Possibly, Celia held a candle for Joe so now she felt jealous. Or she’d simply lost respect for him because he’d chosen to have sex with Sheena. Whatever. There wasn’t a lot of goodwill towards Sheena in any of the possible tunes playing under that muffled anger.

  Celia was sharp when she quizzed Sheena. What did you say to Kieran? What did he say to you? What were the words you used? Your exact words? Even though Celia sounded stern, she couldn’t bring herself to meet Sheena’s gaze, because it was obvious both of them had stuffed this up. Sheena had been an idiot to go along with the plan, but it had been the mother’s idea to offer the bribe in the first place.

  Anyway, the kids would probably have run off together no matter what anybody had done or said. The sting for Sheena was that Kieran and Zoe had driven away believing they’d been betrayed by the people who were supposed to want the best for them. Sheena didn’t like knowing that was what they would have been thinking. Then again, bugger them. And bugger Kieran especially. She’d turned herself inside fucking out to save him from his mistakes and now he’d thrown that back in her face.

  ‘That’s it. That’s it,’ Sheena had said aloud as she shoved Kieran’s clothes into the 44-gallon drum Celia used as an incinerator for rubbish.

  She wouldn’t waste one more scrap of energy caring what her brother did or what he thought. She just wanted the car back, but she wouldn’t hold her breath that would ever happen.

  Sheena had been keen to get away from the farm but she was stranded on account of Kieran stealing her car. Joe didn’t have his vehicle on the property either and there was no way Sheena was going to ask Celia for a lift. Eventually Roza suggested a solution: one of the growers down the road had a truck due to take peaches to market. Sheena could cadge a lift on the truck into Narralong.

  Before she left, Sheena divided up the cash Celia had given her. She calculated the amount she and Kieran were legitimately owed for the picking work and then subtracted the money Celia had spent paying for the car. That left Sheena with a few hundred bucks – enough to get back to the city and survive until she found work. The rest of the money she handed back. She didn’t want someone like Celia going around saying she was a cheat.

  She wrote out a page of the names and likely addresses of Kieran’s mates she could remember – any info that might help Celia find her daughter. Not that Sheena reckoned it would come to that. She was sure the girl would get a fright soon enough and scurry home to her mother.

  Sheena bought a bus ticket from Narralong to Sydney and then headed to Queensland. When she arrived up in Surfers Paradise, a woman she knew, an acquaintance really, mentioned there was a room available in her flat. The bedroom was laughably small and the whole building stank of rancid cooking fat from the takeaway place on the ground floor, but the previous flatmate had left behind a mattress Sheena could use, and the place was better than nothing.

  Two weeks ago, Sheena had walked in the front door to find Murray, aka The Dickless Wonder, ensconced on the couch. He was mates with the guy who lived in the front room and the two of them were putting in a productive evening of bong-smoking.

  ‘Sheena!’ Murray had said when he first saw her. ‘Hey, have sex with me.’

  Astonishingly, the Wonder was still single.

  Murray became a frequent visitor, often hanging around the flat now he was back living in Surfers. Every time he saw Sheena, he would repeat the request: �
�Have sex with me’.

  This particular morning, Sheena dragged her carcass in the front door to find the Dickless Wonder sprawled on the couch, unconscious. She tried to slip quietly past him to the bathroom, but even at five-thirty a.m., his groin could detect the presence of a female and rouse him from sleep.

  ‘Sheena. Hey, have —’

  She slammed her hand in the air – Don’t bother – and he obediently shut up. But then – she must have been in a weakened state – she flicked her head for him to follow her into the bedroom.

  Celia was behaving as if she had arranged to meet someone in the foyer of the Pancake Parlour, so her presence wouldn’t appear odd to the customers or staff.

  She had brought her daughter to this pancake place once when she was twelve, as a special Sydney treat. Zoe had been fizzy with excitement about every detail – the flamboyant menus, the booths, the extravagant piles of gooey food.

  Celia pictured the scenario of Zoe bringing Kieran to this same Pancake Parlour, the two of them laughing and relishing the nostalgic fun of it, eager to share this moment from her past. Celia could easily imagine her doing that. Of course the odds of Zoe turning up here on this particular Sunday were impossibly low – ridiculous, beyond all logic – but trying something was preferable to waiting with nothing.

  A teenaged couple on an excruciatingly awkward first date ventured into the restaurant, but it was mostly families arriving for early dinners. Special-occasion dinners. The little kids were thrilled and uncomfortable to be dressed up in their scratchy best outfits as their parents wrangled them to queue up behind the Please Wait Here to Be Seated sign. When a hostess signalled to a family group to follow her, with a stack of oversized menus tucked under her arm, the children gasped as if they were being escorted towards some indescribably exotic wonderland.

  While Celia waited, the crowd grew and she had to keep shuffling out of the way. ‘Excuse me.’ ‘Sorry.’ ‘Please, you go past me.’ ‘No, no, I’m not in the queue.’ ‘I’m just waiting for someone.’

  She had been maintaining her rounds of the city. In a cycle of two or three days, she would loiter outside places Kieran frequented (according to Sheena’s notes), then find a chair in the waiting area of a hospital casualty department for an hour or two, then walk through areas of town the young couple might hang out. In recent weeks, she had added new locations to her search sequence, places that might draw Zoe’s interest – the beach, the art gallery, movie theatres on George Street. But Celia could only guess. She couldn’t be sure what kinds of things would interest Zoe now.

  When Celia was in her teens, she never expected her parents to understand what went on in her head. She considered herself to be swimming along a very different channel to them, even while occupying the same house. Both her mother and father had been born at the beginning of the century, and so much in the world had changed, leaving parents and children with few shared points of reference. Her parents were formal people, reserved, slightly bewildered by the modern world, operating from a framework so old-fashioned they didn’t really comprehend that it was old-fashioned.

  There was love in their family, without doubt, but no assumption of understanding or common ground. Her brother, five years older, had left home straight after school, taking a job with an oil company in Scotland, and it felt as if Celia was left living in a house with two people who spoke a different language. She mostly relied on the cheerful nodding and clumsy miming gestures used to convey goodwill to foreigners. There was no chance any nuances of experience could be communicated.

  That was how it had seemed to Celia at the time, anyway. Now she accepted that she couldn’t have known what was going on in her parents’ minds, what they did and didn’t understand about their child. Chances were they perceived far more than she’d imagined and the two of them were watching her as she floundered along, observing with clear eyes, calling out to her from the shore, even if she hadn’t heard them. She would love the chance, now, to ask them how that time had seemed to them. But before she’d ever understood enough to form those questions, they were both dead – her mother from cancer, her father a heart attack.

  There was affection and mutual devotion during the periods of sickness and grief, but never any suggestion that her parents would tell their daughter how it felt to be dying, how it felt to lose a spouse. She wished now that she’d asked them a hundred questions.

  She wanted to ask Zoe a thousand questions. But she was willing to ask nothing, content not to utter a word – whatever Zoe wanted – as long as she could know she was alive.

  At each post on her searching rounds, Celia would find an unobtrusive spot to sit, in the hope that Zoe might wander past. She was convinced she would be able to pick her daughter out in a crowd of people, instantly recognise some gesture, the shape of her shoulders, the way she carried her head. Her child was so known to her, embedded in the tissues of her body, that she would identify her from the tiniest glimpse.

  In the nightly phone calls to Roza, Celia didn’t mention her searching routine for fear it would sound deranged. And for her part, Roza tried not to sound too worried about Celia’s mental state. Roza would often pass on messages from Joe – well, always the same message. ‘Joe says to please tell him if there is anything he can do to help.’

  Celia tried to avoid thinking about Joe. At first she had been angry with him – he’d been too busy bonking Sheena to notice Zoe being spirited away by the boy. Later, once her head had stopped spinning, Celia accepted that was nonsense. Joe and Sheena’s sexual encounter had made no difference to the outcome. But it had left Celia feeling foolish. She must’ve been so thick not to have noticed Joe’s attraction to the woman. And she felt slighted that in all these years he’d never made a pass at her. Celia always assumed he was so staunchly faithful to Heather that he would never consider straying. But he strayed with Sheena without too much persuasion. Celia’s pride was wounded a little. But then she would feel ashamed for indulging a trivial vanity. Such petty thoughts were burned away by the intensity of worry about her daughter.

  Now that her relationship with Joe had been severed so abruptly, Celia was forced to recognise how important he’d become to her. For years she’d relied on him as a friend, a kind of brother really, but he’d also occupied a husbandly place in her life – without the romantic components of a marriage. She missed talking to Joe. She missed him.

  Apart from the early postcard (Don’t worry), Zoe had made no attempt to contact her mother, no message to indicate she was alive, not even through an indirect channel that would preserve the secrecy of her whereabouts. Zoe’s silence was meant to punish her mother. Well, Celia hoped that was the reason – it was better than the other possible reasons for silence. And even while she suffered the sting of knowing her daughter hated her, at least it felt like a kind of connection.

  Sometimes, when Celia needed to conjure up her daughter’s presence, she deliberately envisaged an argument – Zoe yelling at her, excoriating, accusing her mother of betrayal and suffocation and crazy behaviour. She imagined her own bleating declarations of good intentions and love. In the imaginary scene, whatever she said only made Zoe angrier and more scornful, but at least her daughter was thumpingly alive in her mind, and there was a small consolation in that. And of course there was a self-lacerating urge, a wish to punch at herself for mistakes made.

  Before, Celia had never tried to imagine the future too much. There were still two more years of school. Zoe would probably have to go away for tertiary study, but that had seemed a long way off still. And anytime she had envisioned Zoe’s future out in the world, it wasn’t this.

  The next time the pancake hostess appeared to fetch another family, she glanced at Celia and raised her eyebrows. Can I help you?

  Celia smiled and shook her head. No, you can’t help me. Not unless you happen to know where my daughter is.

  She gave up on the Pancake Parlour and headed back out into the street.

  A few days later, when
Celia knocked on the door at Freya’s house, she must have been looking wretched, because her sister-in-law said nothing after her initial ‘Celia’. Freya drew her inside and sat her on the big squashy sofa in the sunroom, shooing her two little sons out of the room.

  Celia had been out all night, wandering between locations on her list. Freya’s family was just waking up, eating breakfast, preparing for the day. Freya pressed a mug of tea into Celia’s hands, then conducted a murmured conversation with her husband in the kitchen. A little later, Celia heard him bundle the kids out the door to school and Freya on the phone to her office, arranging to take the day off work. Celia would normally have protested, not wanting to disrupt their life, but today she was too depleted to argue.

  She dozed on the sofa for hours, on and off, with Freya offering food, magazines, bath, television, never pressuring Celia to explain herself. Around midday, Celia woke to see her sister-in-law sitting in an armchair nearby, her head angled down over the big folder of work papers on her lap. Freya kept her fair hair layered short, feathered around her face. She had the same creamy colouring as Marcus and Zoe.

  In the first year after her husband was killed, the grief would hit Celia in waves, forceful and unpredictable. But at the same time, there was Zoe, this creature who needed things, practical things, and who brought an astonishing amount of joy. Extraordinary, the way two such strong feelings could exist inside a person’s body at the same time.