A man walked past her in his bathers, then dived into the confusion of water. She noticed that when he surfaced he was suddenly further out and to the left. The rip was strong, but it looked like he knew what he was doing. The wind and the waves and the man in the water made her feel better. For a moment there wasn’t space in her head for her stupidity and uselessness, her appalling judgement as a mother. Her belief that Dick was right to leave her, and that Prue would be better off with him.
She’d worn her bathers underneath, not seriously thinking of a swim, but now she peeled off her clothes and ran to the water’s edge. She didn’t dive, but walked in, slowly, getting the feel of the water, the strength of the undertow. She couldn’t see the man; he must have left when she wasn’t looking. She looked up to see a wave, bigger than the others, that would break on top of her. She needed to get further out, to be safe. She pushed hard off the bottom and swam towards it, ready to dive into the wall.
Years later, when Jean died, Prue went to Sydney to sort through her possessions. She found a photo of Jean, much younger and smiling into the camera. Alongside her was Dick. Prue wondered who had taken the photo.
Forty-nine
Greta sat in the chair by the fire, while Clive busied himself putting on more wood so the flames blazed into the evening sky.
‘Let me tell you again, Clive, I did not go to the police and report you. I should’ve done but I didn’t. I was frightened of you. I still am—look at what’s happened. So your revenge is, again, wrong. Wrong target. It’s wrong whichever way you look at it—I’m not the person you’re after. I don’t know who is, if anyone. So now you should stop this, let me go.’
He didn’t acknowledge her words. She wondered whether he’d heard. He was again wearing his gloves; she hoped it was only because of the wood. After a while he sat opposite her, his eyes cast down.
‘I would like you to be my friend,’ he said.
‘Clive, you don’t make friends by abducting someone and keeping them prisoner. It’s not how it works.’
‘I’m sorry about that. It’s too late now. It’s happened. And now you would go to the police if I let you go.’
‘So you plan to keep me here forever?’
‘You would become my friend. After a while. We’ve lots of things in common. We’ve talked about that. You told me things. I would like to let you go but I can’t. It would cause too much trouble, and I’ve had enough of that. It’s my turn for things to be different. And it’s nice here. It’s a good place. You’ll have to stay, and we’ll get to know each other and things will change.’
‘Clive, I cannot stay here. I’ve a life to lead, a place of my own. I’ve come halfway around the world to return to it. It means a lot to me.’
‘And I don’t? You don’t want to stay here?’
‘No. It’s not possible.’
‘Well, it’s not possible for me to let you go.’
‘This is not some game, you know. It’s not children playing at kidnapping the enemy. It’s real, and very serious.’
‘That’s why you have to stay. The day after tomorrow is Christmas Day. We should have something special to eat.’
Greta stared at him until he looked away. She didn’t know his limits, how far she could insist that what he’d done was wrong, a crime, before something happened. She could imagine him exploding, and he still wore his gloves.
That night she could hear movement in the trees around the van. She was used to the sound of kangaroos, but this was different. Her body was tense, her heart beating too fast. She didn’t know what to expect from this man. She got out of bed and looked through each of the small windows. There was enough light from the moon for her to see anything that was close by, moving. The sound she heard seemed to come from behind the back of the van, so she stood at that window for a long time, looking out. How strange it was to be here, imprisoned in the bush by a man who could seem so reasonable one moment. And then, the next. Three weeks ago she was in Hamburg, lying in a plush bed, pampered by everything around her. Then she began to realise that the chaos that was Europe was not some media-driven abstraction. It was real: it affected people she knew, a pandemic of suffering and instability. So she’d left. Which is what she always did. To come back to what? What was this? Something you read about, with a bad ending. She shivered. Her feet were cold; there was not enough blood circulating through her body. She wrapped her arms around herself, rubbing her shoulders. She moved her legs up and down, but didn’t stomp her feet. She would be silent. And then there was a movement, and a shadow. It was him, definitely. What was he doing out there? What did he want from her? In the last few days she thought there’d been a change in him, as if he were trying to keep his anger under control.
She went to bed but couldn’t settle her wayward mind. Her body tingled. Why would he focus on her, when he knew, finally, that she had nothing to do with the deaths of Maia and Harry? Or that’s what she hoped he knew. Maybe it was because she was alive and they were dead; you heard about that sort of thing happening, people hating someone for that reason, but it made no sense. She thought it suited him to believe she’d gone to the police. And then there was the way he looked at her. You couldn’t mistake that look, and yet it gave her a sense of power over the man that was not without some gratification. She did not want to think that there was another story that she should acknowledge, even if it belonged in the world of crazy people: there was a link between the life and death of Maia and the life and death of Marvyn, and she was being called to account.
In the morning, when Clive unlocked the door, clumsily because of the gloves, she immediately noticed the hardness in him.
‘You can start earning your keep,’ he said, looking into her eyes. She stepped back from him. ‘No, not like that, not yet. You can come and clean my van, and then the shower that you love using. After that, you’ll collect some wood.’ Greta had worked most of the night on the chain between her ankles. All along she’d believed something would happen—that she’d find some chance to get away. Then she’d found an old-fashioned can opener wedged between the wall and the little gas stove. The palm of her hand was sore, bruised from banging the pointy end of the opener against the join in one of the links. At first she’d tried to lever them apart, but the metal was harder than it looked, and it had taken hours to create a gap wide enough to separate one link from the next. Her back hurt, but now she could move freely. She lay down on her bunk and waited.
Fifty
Tinny arrived home from hospital a changed man. When he caught a glimpse of himself in a mirror, he wondered who that old man staring back at him was—his face was haggard. He wasn’t sure whether the new Tinny was a good move on his part, or on the part of whoever, or whatever, had moved him. Yet he felt he had no choice; perhaps, finally, he had become the person he was supposed to be: someone without boundaries, no longer shaped by an obligation to entertain and a need to be loved. It could be frightening. In the early mornings, when the sun shone and the wind blew cold from the east, he stood in a clear space with his eyes closed and his arms outstretched, like a charlatan on television, and absorbed, and was absorbed by, the warmth of the sun and the chill of the wind, the sounds of the sea, the difficult parrots, the solidness of the earth beneath his feet. He believed it had all started with the knife of the surgeon, a man who’d had a fit, and an old woman visited by sons he couldn’t see but glimpsed in the corridors of his vision. When he no longer knew who he was.
It could happen to him at any moment of the day, or evening. It happened with people he knew and with near strangers. He felt joy, sadness, laughter, tears that properly belonged to the lives of others, but became his life, his happiness, his suffering. Open, vulnerable, empathetic— he didn’t know what you’d call it. Madness, perhaps. He shouldn’t say too much. He spoke about his boys with tears in his eyes. He didn’t care about his weakness, his soppy vulnerability, but didn’t want to make something out of nothing that collapsed back to nothingness.
/> Tomorrow he would talk to Peaches, to thank her for being a mother while he was away becoming something else. He would say it was time for Skel and Rock to come home. They should spend Christmas down south with their father.
Fifty-one
After a troubled sleep, she woke up. The sun was already high enough for patches of light to be inside the van. She slid open the one, narrow window that was not locked; it was far too small for her to crawl through. Outside, it was perfectly still. The peppermints were glinting with overnight raindrops, beads threaded along spiky leaves of the xanthorrhoea. In the far distance she could hear the ocean. She imagined the size of the swell. She breathed in the cool air and tried to calm her fluttering stomach. She didn’t know when Clive would arrive, but usually it was midmorning, with some excuse to talk, or to carry out some activity which he said needed doing, like cleaning out the gutters, sweeping the vans, attending to the vegetable patch. Or going for a walk. For the last few days they had walked on his land, up the hill from the site, but not out onto the path that ran along the river. Someone might see them and wonder about a woman with her hands chained together, cuffed, who would most likely call out, loudly, that she’d been kidnapped.
Greta didn’t have a plan. All she knew was that she must surprise him the moment he appeared. After that, she would lose whatever advantage she might have. She drank her coffee and forced herself to eat a small bowl of muesli. She tidied the van and swept the floor with a dustpan and brush, plastic, that he had given her. She tried to read but the words didn’t mean anything. She reread a page and then gave up. Already it was hot and she was sweating in the close confines of the van. She drew deep breaths and stayed calm for a few minutes. She needed to go to the toilet, but what if he came while she was sitting there—what could she do? She thought what she might do, the moment he opened the door. Kick him, hard, between the legs. She’d heard about that, and seen it acted out in films, but it was not something she had any experience of. Was there a crucial spot which caused men pain, for them to double up and gasp, or was the general area of his testicles enough? What if she missed, or was too slow, and he grabbed her leg and tipped her backwards? What would he do to her? What revenge? Once again, her heart beat faster.
She stayed on edge all morning, but when Clive didn’t turn up by lunchtime she decided he must have gone out—he must have walked somewhere, because she hadn’t heard the car. Maybe along the river. She wondered whether he would keep his gloves on. When he started wearing them the night before, she knew he was trying to control his demons, his anger, the pleasure he took in women’s skin, their throats. His skin on their skin. It terrified her. When he first told her, she couldn’t look at him as he spoke. It was perverted, and dangerous, his desire. But he knew, understood something—maybe the gloves kept him safe, like a child with magic protection, wearing a cloak or a scarf, carrying a toy with magic powers. But that wasn’t enough. Not for her.
When she heard the key in the door, she jumped. She hadn’t heard his footsteps outside. She stood up. The door opened outwards and she rushed at it with her arms braced in front of her chest. It slammed into him, knocking him backwards off the two steps. She ran. She wanted the pathway around the river, but she couldn’t head towards the tall gate at the bottom of the small paddock that took you there. It was locked, so she’d have to go for the fence, which had barbed wire stretched over the top.
She knew she could outrun Clive, and she had a good head start. It all depended on how quickly she could get over the fence. She was too big to go through it—it was new and the strands of wire were tight. She ran headlong down the paddock and up the slight incline, her stride monstrous, arms pumping, chain ends swinging. Already her breath was coming in gasps. She couldn’t hear anything, no one running close behind, no pounding footsteps. She reached the fence and glanced behind. No Clive. Then she saw him. He’d gone straight to the gate, unlocked it and was on the pathway that led directly to the river. He would get there before her, so she’d have to stay on the side of the hill, in the bush, which was dense with undergrowth. She pulled off her T-shirt, placed it on top of the barbed wire, put one foot on the middle strand, and swung over. Frightened and clumsy, she slipped and jagged her pants on the barbs. She toppled over the other side, ripping the material and the skin of her thigh. She was up and running. There was blood on the palm of her hand and her leg was throbbing. She left her shirt on the fence.
It wasn’t just her heart that beat wildly but her whole body, her legs, her stomach, her head. Her eyes were blurred with sweat. Everywhere she felt sticky, and she knew that at any moment she might lose control and pee her pants, but she couldn’t stop running, following wherever she could the narrow kangaroo pads on the side of the hill. In the glare of the sun, the sky was a murderous blue. She had no idea what Clive would do to her if he caught her. Beside himself with rage.
She crashed through the smaller scrub, yanking her feet out of creepers that wouldn’t break off. Finally she had to stop, drawing great gasping breaths from fear and exhaustion. She crouched behind a tree and immediately lost control of her bladder. She stood up again, pulled down her jeans and underpants, squatted and tried to avoid her boots. She couldn’t pee all at once. Then she was up again, but she decided to go back the way she had come. Clive would be on the river path, trying to track her movements; he knew that, eventually, she would have to come down off the slope of the hill. But he wouldn’t know where, unless he could follow her from below.
She had cuts on her hands and arms from sharp twigs, and low-hanging branches whipped her face and chest. She ran on, then once again stopped. She stood still and listened. For a while all she could hear was the thump of her heart; when that finally stilled, she could hear nothing. There was no wind to disturb the leaves, bend the small trees. It was not hot enough for the crickets, but then she noticed bees at some early blossom. She could hear their hum. She waited, then slowly made her way down the hill. She reached a point where she could see the path below; walking along it were a man and a woman.
She set off down the slope, careless of rocks and holes hidden under leaves, of vines that held her back. At one point she could not stop herself and sprawled over, grazing her arms and face. In an instant she was on her feet, worried about the noise she was making, sure that Clive must be able to hear her and would be waiting below. When she got to the path, the couple was still in sight, a hundred metres ahead. And beyond them, there was Clive, standing with his head bent over and his hands on his knees. She ran towards them.
Fifty-two
Tinny was by himself in his shed home, a cup of tea in his hand and his feet propped up near a small fire—a companion fire, as he called it. He was not feeling on top of the world. Rock and Skel had spent Christmas in the city. They were too late to book a seat back home on the bus, but he didn’t think that troubled them too much. The good news was that Greta had turned up. She’d been home to Germany and come back—but to where, exactly? Her shed, of course, but where, in one’s heart and mind, was that? She’d had adventures—well, misadventures, serious ones. She’d been kidnapped by that religious madman, but it was his fault. He’d told the police what had happened down the coast, so it was he, Tinny, who was to blame. But someone needed to do something. Silence is not golden, not often. But then there were consequences. Unintended. Collateral. Should he have kept his trap shut? She’d told him she didn’t want the police to know, and he’d ignored her wishes. He did what she told him not to do, but he’d had to do it. He would go and talk to her, explain what had happened—if she wanted to see him again.
Then who should rock up?
‘Ah, Rock, my boy. Good to see you.’ And he gave him a big hug.
They held each other, and when they stood back, both had tears in their eyes.
‘I believe you and your brother had a good time in the city, while your dad was being transformed into something else in hospital?’
‘Well, it wasn’t all fun, you know. Seeing you
sick.’
‘No, I suppose not.’
There were words he should not say, but they came out anyway. ‘So Peaches has won, eh? Your dearly beloved mother.’
He put on his declamatory voice: ‘She came to motherhood late in life, but made up for the lost years by assiduously caring for her younger son—who’d been carelessly looked after by his father—when she realised that he existed. Somewhere along the way, she had misplaced him. Not lost, exactly, just couldn’t remember where she’d put him. Ah, there you are, Rock, she said, I’ve been looking for you for years. And all that time, you were right in front of me. What does it feel like, to have discovered your mother?’
Rock looked down and shook his head. ‘It feels good, Dad, but it’s not a competition. She hasn’t won anything. I do want to see some more of her, but I also want to be in the city. It’s good down here—but not every day, not all the time. Do you understand that?’
‘I do, dear boy. Of course. There’s more things in heaven and earth. But it doesn’t mean that I’m not a bit disappointed. I won’t say hurt, because that might seem like blackmail, might make you feel guilty. And what about Skel? Won’t you miss your brother?’
‘Of course. But it’s not like I’m leaving the country, going away forever. It’s only the city and I’ll visit lots.’
‘But you are leaving the country, Rock. Whether the country’s leaving you, well … But they all say that, I’ll be back, and then they get stuck. Busy, busy. Things to do on the weekend. Hard to get a lift. The bus is too slow and too long. New friends. Girls, even. Is that what it’s about, Rock? Not enough girls down here? Not the right ones for you?’
‘Sure, Dad. I think this place is good for you, and probably Skel. You’re both a bit funny. Inside your heads. You can talk to that other person who’s also yourself. Some people think that’s a bit mad. Probably if you were in the city, they’d lock you up. But here? No one can tell the difference. And anyway, who’s here to hear you? The fish that you talk to, the kangaroos? And sometimes Greta—she’s alright.’
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