by Krissy Kneen
‘Oh. On his phone. In the lunch room, you know. Anyway. Sorry.’
She nodded.
‘They’re catching squid off the jetty here. Pulling them in. A whole bunch of them.’
She smiled. ‘I love squid.’
‘I know. Matty told me that. I said he should bring you along jigging with us but he never did. When I saw you just now I thought I could bring my jigs down Southport way. Tonight? Or tomorrow? We could catch enough in an hour for a couple of meals each. While the going’s good, that is. Might all be over by the weekend and I’m back on nights then anyway.’
‘Oh. I don’t…Umm, sure. That would be great.’
He glanced up and she caught his eye for the first time. Another quick flush of blood across his cheeks. She felt certain that Will had been one of Matthew’s close friends. Wondered why Matthew had never introduced them.
‘Sun sets pretty early now,’ he said, looking away again. ‘Dusk any time from five, I suppose.’
‘How about four-thirty, then?’
‘Tonight, was it? I’ll pick you up.’
‘I suppose you know where we live. Everyone seems to.’
He shrugged, seemed embarrassed. ‘You should wear a coat. You’ll catch cold walking around like that. Wind’s coming up off the icebergs, feels like. Eh?’
He reminded her of Matthew, a larger, shyer version of her boyfriend. It was her turn to feel the colour come into her cheeks.
‘Thanks,’ she said and turned back to the dusty tins of refried beans, worried that she might tear up and embarrass herself. She saw him leave out of the corner of her eye. Watched him squeeze into a car that would have been more comfortable for someone her size. His knees up around the steering wheel, the chassis scraping along the ground as he backed out over the gutter, awkward clashing of gears.
When he was well clear she stepped out into the wind. There really was ice in it. Her jumper was too thin, the cold cut right through it. She stared across at the pie shop—closed due to bereavement.
The pie shop, her boyfriend, the wind. Everything an omen.
She remembered walking up a hill, just outside the compound. How old would she have been? Thirteen? The congregation were all barefoot, some of the men carrying large wooden crosses. Her toe was bleeding. She was holding back tears, a sense of terror and of joy churning through her. The world was ending. In a few hours they would all be dead. They would ascend. They would be reborn.
She remembered her disappointment—everyone’s disappointment—when dawn came and they were still alive. How could Silas get something like that so wrong? Her mother looked embarrassed on their descent.
How come he got it wrong, Mum? I mean, he’s the mouthpiece of the Lord.
He wasn’t wrong. The Lord pardoned us. A temporary pardon. See that bird? A butcherbird. It’s a sign. The world will end soon, just not today.
She thought of her mother now. The feeling of dread so strong it was difficult to remain rational. Something terrible was happening, and not just to her: the world seemed to echo her loss. She was a scientist. She knew the earth had at least a few good decades left, but all the world was screaming out that she should carry those crosses up the hill right now. The End Times had finally arrived.
Police cars. Again. They were waiting at the house when she arrived.
She sat in the car for a moment, listening to the thud in her chest. If this was the moment it would stay with her forever. The sound of the ocean at high tide. The sky, dark-clouded and beginning to spit, spattering the windscreen. Was this how she would remember him? Raindrops on the windscreen?
She stepped out of the car. It was the same police officer, the one with the eye. It slid around to the left now as he tried to look at her. She found herself wondering if they let people into the police force with eye trouble, or if it was an accident on the job. He held his shoulders back, tough. Didn’t look quite as young or sweet as he had a handful of days ago.
‘Miss Weir.’
This wasn’t it, then. If it was bad news he would be more contrite. And there were too many of them; she counted four on her front stairs alone. She could hear another two talking somewhere close, on the beach, perhaps. Under the house? She peered past Lazy Eye, trying to catch a glimpse of them.
‘We just have to ask you a few questions about your, about Mr Masterton.’
‘Yes?’
They had been under the house. She could see one of them walking up the side stairs, brushing away cobwebs. She wasn’t even sure if it was legal for them to be on her property. The shack was built on Crown land, she knew that—and even then, she was only renting from Matthew’s mother. Did that affect her rights? She shut the car door firmly.
‘Have you found him?’ She knew they hadn’t.
‘Can we come in?’
She hesitated; nodded. ‘Sure.’ There really was nothing to hide, but she had an odd feeling of having done something wrong. It was her mother’s old suspicion: gripping Jessica’s hand tighter whenever a police officer passed them in the street.
She opened the front door. The place looked like someone had broken in and ransacked it. She was suddenly aware of her clothes, which seemed to be strewn from the front door right through into the kitchen.
She shrugged. They knew what had happened. They must know about the apathy that comes with grief.
There was nowhere to sit down. She pulled the chairs out from the table and tipped each of them sideways, spilling her papers. Her own copy of her bound thesis tumbled open onto the floor with a loud thud. She saw the pages turned over, bent, disfigured, torn. For a moment she almost felt a twinge of care.
She sat, and Lazy Eye perched awkwardly on the fold-out camp chair. They had never got around to buying proper furniture. Jessica had thought that her stay here would be temporary. Each passing year seemed like it might be her last. A permanent sense of temporality: years, poised to move on and yet never going anywhere at all.
‘Your hus—Matthew. He liked to do a bit of home brewing?’
‘You’ve been under the shack.’
‘No—I—we just—everyone knows about that. He used to give it away at Christmas.’
She nodded. ‘Is it illegal?’
‘No. Nothing like that.’
‘Did you see his smoker down there? He liked to smoke fish. Tried making cheese one time but we couldn’t keep it warm enough for the culture to grow.’
‘Miss Weir…’
She didn’t like the way he said Miss, like he was making some comment about her relationship with Matthew. Passing judgment.
‘What is this about?’
‘Miss Weir.’ Lazy Eye glanced back in the general direction of the two officers who were crowding the lounge room with their big shoulders and their tight blue trousers and gun belts. The room seemed even smaller with so many people in it. It was a tiny cottage, compact, self-contained. Big enough for the two of them but barely room for anyone else.
She wondered how the officers must see her now. Lost, probably. Defeated. She kicked at the fallen thesis, pushing it out from under her feet, crumpling the pages as she did it. She would never read the thing again. Eight years. The way she had looked forward to the title. Doctor.
‘Did—Matthew have anything to do with drugs at all?’
Her brow furrowed. This was completely unexpected.
‘What, home brew…?’
‘No. Stronger drugs? Illegal drugs?’
‘No.’ There was no need to feel guarded about the question. This one was easy. ‘No. Never.’
‘Are you certain you never saw Mr Masterton high on drugs?’
‘Never.’
‘Consorting with anyone who was high on drugs?’
‘Are you joking?’
‘We just have to ask, Miss Weir.’
Dr Weir would be better: it said nothing about her relationship to Matthew. She would tick the ‘Dr’ box on every form from now on. She would introduce herself as Dr Weir whenever she took a tour
through the caves.
‘What’s this about?’
‘Was he friendly with anyone who deals or manufactures illegal drugs?’
‘God, no. What? I don’t know what you are talking about.’
He stood.
‘What is this about?’
‘We just have to follow every lead, Miss Weir.’
‘Doctor.’
‘What?’
‘I just—it’s—I’m Doctor Weir. Now.’
‘Doctor Weir.’
She heard it and felt nothing. It didn’t make a difference what they called her.
‘We’re sorry to bother you, Doctor Weir. We need more information…the investigation…Do you mind if we have a look in his room?’
‘Our room.’
He waited. His eye slid away from her face. He wrestled it back.
‘All right.’
‘We’re trying to find him, m—doctor.’
‘His body.’
‘We are just following up on a lead. I am really sorry to distress you, ma’am.’
He seemed like a nice enough person. He wasn’t the enemy. She nodded, and waited quietly, hovering in the corridor as one of the police officers opened Matthew’s bedroom drawers, and then hers. Lifted his magazines one by one off the bedside table. There was only room for one of them in the room; the others waited awkwardly by the front door.
The officer held up a notebook. It was the book Matthew kept his notes in, notes for brewing, notes for smoking, notes for preserving.
‘Do you mind if we take this for a while?’
‘I want it back.’
‘Of course. Do you mind if we take his computer?’
‘He didn’t have a computer.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah. The laptop’s mine. He never touched it.’
‘You still have his phone?’
She took it out of her pocket.
‘Will this help you find him?’
Lazy Eye took it from her. Slipped it into a plastic bag. ‘I hope so.’
She nodded. She noticed how the floor shook under their feet. Too many men crammed into too little space.
They stepped out into the icy midday sun and it felt like the air rushed back into the shack, filling it with emptiness. She touched her pocket and missed the weight of the phone.
In the lounge room she picked up the heavy bound book. Dr Weir. She smoothed the cover down with the palm of her hand. How Do Glow-worms Say Goodnight: The circadian rhythms of bioluminescence in the Arachnocampa tasmaniensis of Mystery and Exit caves and, in particular,Winter Cave. The table was piled with books and papers. Jessica placed the thesis back on the chair.
She wrapped the scarf around her neck.
On the way to the car, she paused. Pushed past the overgrown fronds of the tree fern they had been meaning to cut back; ducked down the short flight of concrete steps. It was raining lightly and she tugged her hood up over her hair. The sound of the ocean hushed louder. High tide, and the water was already lapping against the rock wall.
It was dark under the house. When she switched the light on there was a scrabbling sound. Rats, perhaps, or a wallaby. Maybe even a devil, she’d heard of them making their nests underneath houses. She picked up a broom that was leaning against the wall. His crates of beer were just as he had left them. The plastic vat perched on a workbench, the bags of sawdust, the jars of herbs and spice. She took a step into the room and there was that sound again, a scuttling. She didn’t want to have to face a rat. She backed away and left the broom near the entryway.
In the car she turned the heater on full and was blasted by cold air as she backed out onto the road. She shuddered and fiddled with the buttons, knowing the heater wouldn’t warm up till the engine did.
The drive was automatic now. She didn’t even remember indicating and turning onto the Ida Bay road. The forest swept by in thick clumps. The windscreen wipers cleared away the streaks of rain. She turned the music on. Bach. A sound from the before time. She glanced at the entry to Hastings and Newdegate caves. Next week perhaps she’d call them. Let them know she was ready to come back to work. She breathed out, felt her shoulders shift down: she hadn’t realised that she was holding them so tight and high. She relaxed into the drive.
Jessica parked the car where she always parked it. She clicked the boot open, pulled her waders on. It was raining harder now but it didn’t matter. There was a rain jacket in the back and she pulled it on over her coat. She always wore the jacket anyway but it was odd to start off on the walk without a backpack; it made her feel light, trudging along the muddy path. There was space to notice: the thick undergrowth, the thump of something hopping away, a bird screeching, a print in the mud—small, oddly shaped—with what might be a row of claws near the pad of the foot. An echidna, maybe? She didn’t really know one print from another. She was always too absorbed in her own work to see anything outside of it.
The creek was flowing now; she’d have to watch that. There were times when she’d had to turn back, wait till the rain eased before making her way down to the cave again. The water came up quickly in the wet. Caverns flooded. She had heard about a school group trapped by a sudden downpour, the way back completely impassable. Two children swept away, along with a teacher who tried to rescue them. A second teacher claimed by the caves later when he took his own life, racked by guilt and grief. She had thought at the time how hard it must be for the one who survives.
Jessica picked an easy path across the creek, rock to slippery rock. Easier in the daytime, but she was glad of the gumboots.
She felt the calm of the cave as soon as she stepped through the unmarked entrance. The air was different in here. Colder, damper. Still. There was a silence as if she was holding a seashell up to each ear, a silence filled with the pulse of heart, the whoosh of blood.
She waited till her eyes adjusted. Closed them, counted to ten, lifted her chin and opened her eyes to the universe unfurled above. Her tiny, miraculous larval galaxy.
She knew everything that any human knew about these creatures. She knew that the glow occurred only in the larval stage. That it was used to attract prey, and that sometimes the prey was the adult incarnation of the glow-worm. Cannibalism—the children eating the adults. The children coming too close, eating the other children. She knew that now, in winter, all around her adult flies would be hatching out of the pupas, complete with sexual organs but without the ability to eat at all. They would fly and fuck and lay eggs and die. She had spent many hours contemplating the brutality of it. And yet, every time her eyes adjusted to the dark and she looked up at the little blue lights, she saw not a colony of worms but a whole universe—and her own self, so insignificant under the great sweep of the night sky.
The first cave was the largest. There was one of the biggest colonies of glow-worms in the world clustered here, dangling their sticky threads from the rocks above. She waited till the silence dissolved and the sounds of the world returned to her, the constant trickle of the creek, the drip of moisture. Her heart quietened.
She snapped her torch on and stepped carefully over rocks and mud towards the narrow passageway. There were three main paths into the cave system: Exit, Mystery and now, because of her own work, Winter Cave. She had spent eight years working in the caves—exploring, searching, questioning—and she had only scratched the surface.
There were mysteries here, rumours spread by speleologists, pictures on the rocks further north in the cave system, old pictures, sacred sites hidden away in the vast network of caves. She had never seen them, for all her exploration. The glow-worms lived closest to the entrance caves. No need to crawl through claustrophobic passages or dive through flooded caverns. She loved the caves, but they scared her too.
She squeezed through the narrow crevasse, feeling the walls push close around her. She ducked, turned side-on to negotiate a particularly narrow corridor. She remembered her first time in this passage. The terror that she would become trapped here, the rising panic
. It had ebbed over the years, replaced by a sense of homecoming. Now it felt like a gentle cradling, a hug.
A cavern. Smaller than the entrance cave. The little lights on the ceiling and walls seemed to cluster in patches. There were areas of darkness like small islands between the glittering lights. She sat on her favourite rock, her chair, and folded her hands into her lap, letting the torchlight play around her feet.
For the first time since pushing through the narrow passageway into this chamber, she had nothing to learn from the place. She had no burning questions to be answered, no camera equipment to record the glow-worms’ light emissions, no notebook to make notes about her work. She turned the torch off and sat in the dark, but it was not dark. There was always the half-light. Always the universe of larvae peering down at her.
She used to sit here and whisper to them. At first, she would ask them what her research question should be. After a year of study, they had answered her.
Do you sleep? she would ask, checking through the graphs mapped out by the raw data. Getting to know the universe, each individual star. Do you sleep? And they took a long, slow time to answer her, but when they replied their answer was as clear as if they had spoken.
Yes, they said. We’re sleeping now. Yes.
Now her voice rang out, surprising her.
‘Is Matthew dead?’
So this was why she had come here. This habit of sitting on the one rock and whispering her question to the universe. She pretended to be a woman of science but she was still her mother’s daughter, looking for signs and miracles.
‘Is Matthew really dead?’
No answer. Jessica took a deep breath. It was nine o’clock in the morning. She had waited seven years for the answer to her first question and she knew now that yes: at this time, her glowworms would be sleeping.
William’s car smelled masculine. Briny, with a hint of cheap aftershave. She looked down at her feet, expecting cans and chip packets, but the floor was meticulously clean and Jessica wondered if he had vacuumed it for her benefit.
William had known Matthew. She pulled the edge of her coat in and shut the car door. A shiver of relief. She could have driven down to the pier in her own car, but there was something chivalrous about the gesture of a lift. She was safe for now, in someone else’s hands.