Islands

by Peggy Frew

  So, to be honest, I had very little regard for these people, my whole attitude was, well, I was horrified at the thought of my kid having anything to do with them. But one time I was in at the police station and I asked to have a look at the missing persons register. That was a miserable experience, I can tell you. I mean, the sheer quantity, bloody hell. The number of unsolved cases, and on half of them it says that the family has grave fears for the person, they think they were murdered. I mean, all these people, all these faces, you’re just looking at face after face. And these people are somewhere, out in the world, and nobody knows what happened to them, and half of them are probably dead, you know, dead bodies, buried somewhere, or burned, or at the bottom of the bloody Yarra. And all the rest of us are going about our business. Maybe we’re even walking right past them, or over them.

  But anyway, back to my point: some of these faces are young. Some are even kids. And they look so innocent and small, you know, like—like Anna …

  Sorry. Ahem. So you look at these people I was meeting, on the streets, at the train stations, and you think how could anyone become like this, how could you have so little dignity? But then you think, well, they were all kids once. They were all, well, like Anna, once.

  Okay. So. So I went on with this investigation, every day after work, and every weekend. Showing people the photo, asking if they’d seen her, writing it all down, taking their photos if they’d let me, so I had a record of who I’d spoken with. But also, you know, I was actually looking for her. Anna. Always. I tried to be realistic—I mean, she’d been going off and coming back, that had been a bit of a pattern, and then something had happened, you know, to put a stop to the pattern; she’d gone to another city perhaps, or, or …

  But still, I couldn’t help thinking maybe it was just that, who knows why, but she’d decided not to contact us, and she was in fact still right here in Melbourne somewhere. Probably living rough, probably in bad shape. I tried to prepare myself for seeing her, you know, a bag of bones sitting in a doorway somewhere.

  I’d be … Shit, sorry.

  Ahem. I’d be catching the tram into the city and I’d picture myself finding her. I’d see myself going up to her and kneeling down, and her looking at me. I’d think about what to say. I’m not angry, you’re not in trouble. You need help. We’re going to help you. Come on.

  Phew. Sorry. Ah.

  Pardon?

  Well, I think she probably needed to go into some kind of clinic. That kind of help. You know, if it was drugs, and I’m not going to fool myself and say for sure it wasn’t drugs.

  So, yeah, my investigation. Maybe it was being in that house all on my own—not that I spent much time there—and maybe it was this other thing that happened … But anyway, it got a bit out of control. I mean, I didn’t see it at the time, but I was very much, I was consumed, I suppose. Junie started saying that she was worried. About me, my behaviour. A few times she showed up when I was in the city, you know, doing my rounds, she’d come and find me, and try to make me stop. She’d say, Go home, you need a break, you can’t keep on doing this.

  Well, Helen tried too, but I wouldn’t talk to her. I’d hang up the phone if she called. A couple of times she came to the house but I wouldn’t answer the door, I shouted out that I didn’t want to see her and she went away.

  They had a right to be worried. Looking back now, I reckon the police had contacted Helen, asked her to have a word with me.

  Well, because I was making a nuisance of myself. With them. You know, turning up at the station all the time and asking to talk with the bloke who was in charge of Anna’s case, telling them what I’d found out. Bringing them my own reports, I suppose, ha! And I’d do things like go and check in some out-of-the-way cop shop to see if Anna’s poster was displayed, and then if it wasn’t I’d kick up a stink.

  The other thing?

  Oh, right, yes. I actually think now that this might’ve been a big factor in me getting so, well, obsessed.

  Okay. So this is going back a bit, this was maybe ten months after Anna went. And, you know, there’d been nothing. The cops hadn’t come up with anything, and I hadn’t either, and actually I think at that stage I did have this idea of putting some kind of a limit on it, you know. Like at the end of the year I’d stop. This was towards the end of winter. Actually it was spring, September. But then I got a call, from the cops, and they’d found—they’d found a girl.

  It was a body. And it matched Anna’s description, and I had to go and see if it was her.

  I mean, fucking hell.

  And it wasn’t Anna, I saw that the moment they showed me her face. It was just, you know, a completely different girl. And Anna had this scar on her shin, here, she cut it badly when she was about seven, on these steps at my mum’s place. So she’d had stitches and everything, it was quite a big scar. And this girl had a scar too, that was one of the things that made the cops think it was Anna, but this girl’s scar was different, and it was in a different place.

  So anyway, it wasn’t Anna. And I went off, my legs were shaking so much I could hardly walk.

  No, I didn’t tell Helen. I didn’t see the point.

  No, I didn’t tell anyone. Who would I tell?

  Oh, actually, I might’ve told Junie.

  So I went off and I got in my car and then I just sat there. I was trying to say to myself, it’s not her, it’s not her, that’s a good thing, she’s still out there, that’s what this means. But I had this terrible feeling and I just couldn’t get rid of it. And I didn’t know what it was.

  I didn’t know what it was, I just said that.

  Oh, okay. What it felt like … Ah, sort of sick, in my stomach, a lot of the time. Dizzy, too, like something had happened to my balance. Sort of like I was floating around without anything to hang on to. And it didn’t go away. I’m not talking hours here, I’m talking days, weeks. And the only thing I could do, to feel like I had my feet on the ground, was to keep on with this investigation. It became a routine. I had my different places where I went after work, the train stations in the city, and these spots along the river, and then another time I’d go to St Kilda, or the bus terminal, and it was like a track I ran along, on autopilot in a way. I mean, looking back on it now it ended up not really being about finding Anna. Well, that’s not what I mean, of course it was about finding her, but in a funny way it ended up being about more than that.

  Yes, I think you’re right. It did sort of hold it off. Because when I stopped being busy, when I wasn’t at work or doing my rounds with the photo, that was when it came back.

  Yes, a definite connection. I mean, it started the moment I saw her, when they pulled back the sheet.

  Yeah, of course it did. Yeah, it made me think exactly that. I mean, that wasn’t the main thing on my mind, I have to say, because the main thing was the absolute horror of seeing a dead person, a young girl, dead. That was, it was, you know, very affecting. But yeah, somewhere else there in my mind was the idea that, okay, this could be Anna, what if it was Anna, how would I feel?

  Well, this is the thing. And maybe this does explain the awful feeling, where it came from. Okay, so, people talk about resolution, about how the worst thing is not knowing, and that finding someone dead is better than not knowing. But seeing that girl, it just made me think, right, this would not actually be an end point. There would still be so many things you wouldn’t know. I mean, they can probably tell you how someone died, if they drowned, or if it was a drug overdose or, or, God, homicide … But nobody can tell you why. Why she went off, why she put herself in these dangerous situations, why she wanted to take drugs, if that’s what she was doing. And you’re never going to find out, if she’s dead.

  I have absolutely no idea. She was loved, you know, she was a smart kid, she had a good brain. She had every advantage in the world. I mean, when I look at the opportunities my kids’ve had that I never got … There was the break-up, and of course that’s going to affect the children, but break-ups happen all t
he time without kids going off the rails.

  I really just don’t know. Do you think that might’ve been what the awful feeling was, the idea that I might never find out? That the chances are there will never be a resolution to this, an end point?

  Yeah. Yes, I think so.

  Well, I said before that I reckon I’m over it. And I’ve certainly put a stop to the, you know, the obsessive behaviour. Meeting Kathy’s what’s done it. But I do still get the feeling sometimes. It makes me sort of restless, like I want to get up and do something, go for a run, or jump in the ocean, to, you know, distract myself, escape.

  Or do my rounds with the photo of Anna, okay, yes. But I don’t. The way I see it now, I’m like an addict, and that behaviour, my investigation, you know, that’s my drug. And I’ve gone cold turkey. And that doesn’t mean I don’t care about Anna any more, or that I don’t think about her all the time, every time the phone rings … It doesn’t mean any of that.

  Support? Well, Kathy. She’s the big one. She’s the one that got me to stop.

  Well, she didn’t come along and say, Now look, you sad loser, this is very unhealthy behaviour you’ve got going on here, you just stop it right now, ha. No, it was just, you know, meeting her. Meeting her and her showing an interest in me, well, that made me look at myself from the outside. And it made me see that I’d, well, you know—I’d gone a bit mad, and I needed to stop.

  Yeah, so Kathy’s my main support. And I’ve moved out of the house. Helen and I have agreed to rent it out for a year. And then we might sell it.

  Well, of course there’s this feeling of, shit, what if Anna did come back, and neither of us was there, or what if she rang and the phone was answered by a stranger. But it’s been three years. If she was to come back, if she wanted to contact us, then we have to trust that she’d work out how to. You know, go to the cops. She was a smart kid. And she’d be … she’d be eighteen now.

  Which is hard to imagine.

  Look, I can’t—I can’t tether myself to this thing any more. I mean, that could’ve been the rest of my life, that searching, that endless …

  Or some other thing, some other way of, I don’t know, hiding. Booze, or gambling. So the way I see it, I have to make a new start. Kathy’s from Canada, and—I mean, she wants to give it some time, a year or so, to make sure we really are suited. But she’d always planned on going back, and I think that when she does I should go with her, go and live there. Junie’s grown up now, and I don’t have any other reason to stay here. And it just feels, it does feel a bit risky.

  Yeah, that I might get like that again. Obsessed.

  Time’s up? Okay. Well, thanks.

  Next time? Oh. I thought …

  No, look, really. Well, of course there’s more. We could go on forever, couldn’t we? I haven’t even told you about my mother, ha! But I’ve said what I needed to say. Thank you, it’s been good. It’s—I’ve—it’s—been dealt with.

  ANNAS

  1995, in the city. A Friday night, very late, so in fact Saturday morning. Junie leaves The Lounge with two other people. Sweaty, ears ringing. Five or six vodka sodas, no dinner. She trips at the bottom step and only just keeps her footing, hurtles past the bouncer, grabs at the wall.

  Junie is eighteen. It’s spring but it’s cold. She’s with Laura, her housemate of one month, and Matt, a boy from her anthropology tutorial. None of them know each other, really.

  ‘Walk home, or taxi?’ says Laura. ‘Where are you going, Davie-boy?’

  ‘Fitzroy,’ says Matt. ‘And it’s Matt.’

  ‘Okay, Davie-boy,’ says Laura. ‘We’re Carlton, so shall we all share a taxi? I have …’ She feels in her bag, then her pockets. ‘Five bucks.’

  Laura is lazy, Junie knows that much. Laura is partial to hungover Sundays on the couch under her doona, hogging the TV, with cheese on toast and what she calls equalisers—joints of very weak leaf mixed with dried oregano. Laura wears op-shop dresses and laddered tights, and Doc Martens. Her large thighs press together.

  ‘Fuck,’ says Matt, ‘it’s freezing.’

  ‘I’ve got ten dollars,’ says Junie.

  ‘Fabulosity,’ says Laura, and starts waving at taxis.

  ‘Come to my place?’ says Matt to Junie, in a whisper.

  Junie doesn’t answer, but she’ll go. Does she like Matt? Not really, not from what she knows of him. He takes himself too seriously and talks too close.

  When they have sex Junie will be dry, and she will apologise, and say it must be all the vodka. And she’ll try to avoid kissing.

  But first, no taxis stop, and then no more taxis come, and they begin to walk up Swanston Street towards Carlton, something, some part of Laura or her clothing, creaking quietly.

  They cross Lonsdale Street, and then as they’re crossing Little Lonsdale Junie turns her head and sees someone who looks like Anna. The person who looks like Anna is wearing dark clothes and so her hair shows pale down her back. She is thin, in sneakers and baggy jeans, and she is walking away, fast. Very quickly, before Junie can even stop walking herself, the person has gone, around a corner.

  ‘Hang on,’ says Junie to Laura and Matt, and runs. But when she gets to the laneway she thought she saw the girl go into there’s nothing. It’s a dead end. Junie runs all the way down it, past big black shapes—bins, piles of boxes—but there’s no one there.

  ‘Sorry,’ she says, back with Matt and Laura. ‘I thought I saw someone I knew.’

  ‘Oh,’ says Laura. ‘I assumed you were rushing off to have a little vom.’ She leans her head on Junie’s shoulder. ‘I’m tired,’ she says. ‘Will you carry me?’

  It had been night, and Junie was drunk enough for the headlights of cars to leave luminous trails as they passed. And could Anna’s hair have grown that long in only, what, nine months? Had it even been hair—could it have been a scarf, or a light-coloured bag hanging from a shoulder, and for a blurry moment it had looked like … ? Was the person in fact a girl? What had made Junie think it was a girl, and not a small woman, or even a boy?

  It is possible she hadn’t seen anyone at all, but still, for days, months and, with less frequency, years, in the dark of her mind the frail figure flashes up and turns the corner, again, again, again.

  1998, on a tram, a Wednesday evening. Junie is going home from an art opening she has left early because if she stays she’ll drink too much. She rents her own flat now, but as a consequence is always broke.

  A large group gets onto the tram and clogs the front half of it, where Junie is sitting. It’s a sports team of some sort—all men, muscled, clean-cut. They bawl unintelligible in-jokes.

  ‘Oi, Damo. Whatchya keep-ums?’

  ‘Geddout, ya moong.’

  She considers moving, but she’s hemmed in. She turns to the window. It’s summer, the light heavy and golden. Late office-leavers in their muted colours walk along the footpath outside the Fitzroy Gardens; beyond them, on the grass, sprawls a small mob of rough-looking men. One lies on his back, knees up, in wide shorts from one leg of which lolls something pink and puckered. There is a roar of appreciation from the sports team.

  Junie shifts her gaze again, and through the scrum of meaty legs and eye-level crotches catches sight, across the aisle, of another seated passenger. A shoulder, a wan arm, bent at the elbow. Restless fingers. Black singlet, small breasts, no bra.

  Junie’s breath catches. Her heart thrums.

  One of the sportsmen shifts and a chin comes into view, some hair, black, but that means nothing, hair can be dyed. Lips, very thin. Too thin. But still … Teeth appear. Wrong, wrong, wrong. A lump in Junie’s throat. Sweat behind her knees. But those fingers, that arm … She cranes through the tangle of men. Lift your arm, she silently begs the woman who isn’t Anna. Hold your hand like that again. Please.

  2011, the island, an afternoon. January, school holidays, any day of the week, time is not being closely monitored. Paul and the younger two children are at the beach. June has stayed behind with the old
est, Esther, who has been sick—a virus, a fever, a wakeful night. June hopes that they both can sleep while the house is quiet. They lie on the big bed in Paul and June’s room, under a sheet. The curtain in this room is missing some of its rings and sags near the top, letting in the light, which is hard, and somehow projects the green of the lawn in a watery oblong against the ceiling.

  June’s throat is sore, her joints ache, as she pulled the curtain closed the glare outside sent a black shimmer of pain through her eyes, but she doesn’t recognise what’s happening to her. It might be that she refuses to. Her youngest child is a toddler but she still feels as if she is recovering from something, and has felt that way since his birth. There is nothing wrong with her, and she takes an iron supplement. She just didn’t know how hard three kids was going to be, and illness on top of this general exhaustion is not a welcome prospect.

  Sleep crashes down, and June fights her way through a series of hot, dank nightmares from which she comes close to waking a number of times, feeling the room and her daughter there, but unable to open her eyes. It’s because she fell asleep first, before Esther, that she is so filled with dread in these half-awake moments—this, and the fever. There is a terrible sense of some unspecified failure, a lapse of responsibility.

  At last she gets herself awake, hauling up her eyelids with a mighty effort. The sun must have lowered in the sky because the green projection is gone, and the room is filled with a deep orange light. June is lying with the sheet clutched to her neck and her knees drawn up. Her skin is slippery with sweat, her mouth dry, her head pounding. She is looking at the curtain, the shape of the window behind it, the knobs of the wooden rings on their rail, the cobwebs in the corner. Behind her she can hear breathing, deep and even. She is sick—now she admits it.