by Peggy Frew
Everything’s okay, she tells herself. It’s just the fever.
But the dread will not pass. She knows what she has to do: turn around and look at Esther. But she can’t. Because there is an idea there, in her mind, from one of the dreams, perhaps, which float overhead and drift below, crowding her, clinging like seaweed, that the child behind her is not Esther, but Anna.
Anna, sleeping, a girl again, hair orange in the orange light, bitten fingers slack against the sheets, face calm and babyish. The silky skin of her eyelids. The tip of her tongue showing between her lips as if it, the tongue, can remember and mourns thumb-sucking.
June’s eyes must be closed again because everything is warm and dark. Anna is out of the bed, she has woken up and is sitting near June’s feet. Junie, she says. I am so sick of all my books, I am just so bored of them. Imagine if I went outside and I was looking on the ground for a new book, and one just appeared. She starts to bounce on the bed, pushing off from the floor and then thumping down beside June’s feet. Imagine. If. Every. One. Of. Those. Spiky. Weeds. Turned. Into. A. Book. Her bouncing gets faster and lighter. Her voice ruptures, unwinds. Erv. Ook. Weeb. Her fingers bat at June’s leg.
June jerks upright, gasping, throwing off the sheet. Esther is there, her dark hair, her striped t-shirt. Sleeping. From the laundry comes a muffled banging. The washing machine: sweat-soaked sheets from last night have unbalanced its spin.
The front gate gives its opening squawk, and there is Maggie’s voice, and Paul’s. June flops down again. Her heart thumps. There isn’t time. She wants more time. She wants to go back to something.
2012, the island again. Easter, the chill gathering in the evenings, the days closing down rapidly. June has gone by herself to the supermarket in Cowes to buy chocolate eggs. They will have to hide them inside this time—last year something got to them in the backyard, rats, or possums. There is a photo of the children holding their mangled tinfoil prizes, three forlorn faces, the littlest with actual tears, the other two hamming it up, knowing such tragedy will not be allowed by their parents, that replacement chocolate will be provided.
The town is jammed with SUVs. Lines of cars inch up and down the main street; at the roundabouts, where signs painted on the ground warn pedestrians to give way to vehicles, groups of people venture forth, hesitate, fall back again. June parks in a back street and walks, avoiding the roundabouts. She passes the CWA, which is closed, a lowered blind covering most of its window display in what could be seen as a demonstration of withholding, of disapproval. As if the tourists, thronging to Bakers Delight, to Coles or to the surf shops, would care. She passes a cafe that was once called—mystifyingly, because it appeared to sell the same ‘cappachinos’ and toasted sandwiches as the other island cafes—Café Praha. June has no special connection to Café Praha, in fact never visited it, but for some reason it’s stored in her mind, along with other, perhaps more obvious landmarks, as an emblem of the old island.
The Shell House. The old penguin parade, sans concrete stadium, where you just sat on the beach behind a line of staked rope. The old supermarket with its rectangles of speckled linoleum, green, pale yellow, salmon pink. The CWA, smelling of wool and lemons, where children of all ages were—and are still—frowned upon, despite most of the items for sale—jumpers, bootees, baby blankets, knitted toys—being for them. The Anchorage general store, which sold jelly rats and Fags before they became Fads. And Café Praha, not at all Czech.
June crosses at the traffic lights, new, to the Woolworths, also new. She is almost at the entrance when she sees the woman. Sitting on a bench. Leaning forward, elbows propped on knees. Cigarette, skinny legs. Long hair, dull blonde, dry-looking, kinked at the back from a ponytail elastic. Her face is hidden.
Why would she be here, now, this place, if she’d avoided them all this time, if she’d made herself disappear? But there’s no reason to this, no logic. June knows what can’t be; what she wants is to be mistaken, she clutches at error with both hands, she stands without moving, almost not looking, barely breathing.
It’s a mist, a detergent bubble with sliding rainbows, an eggshell perished in the sun. To examine it is to break it; all she can do is exist, with it, for as long as it allows. It sits right in her chest, and each careful inhalation finds its edges, but also crumbles them.
The woman’s fingers rise to her hair. June lets go of caution, takes one deep, full breath. What if, what if, what if?
And now back again, right back to 1995. January. Anna has been missing for one month. Approximately—there is no specific start time for the missing-ness, because Helen at first didn’t think she was missing. When John went to the police it was a Monday, late morning. Monday, December the twelfth. But the last time Helen saw Anna was on the Friday morning; Friday, December the ninth. Before she left for work Helen had gone to Anna’s bedroom and seen Anna there in bed, still asleep.
They have gone over this many times, and they go over it again now. It’s a Saturday evening at Avoca Street. John has that day been helping Junie move her things from her room in his flat into a room in a group house in North Carlton. She starts her arts degree in a couple of weeks. Orientation. A process she will hate, with its enforced socialising, its jollity, its undertones of initiation. The only thing about it she will embrace is the drinking.
The idea of getting to know something, of orienting yourself, of a framework of references, an ordering of time and place, will seem ridiculous. Because everything, the whole world, has been collapsed and then reopened in a new way. There is no framework, there is no certainty, there is, above all, no predicting.
Junie can look back on the past, when Anna was there. She can see, behind her, that world, where things were aligned. And then there is a signpost, a marker, which is Anna being gone. And after that the void opens, and the plank appears, the plank reaching over the void, the plank that you have to walk on, even though right in front of you it ends, and there is only empty space. But as you walk, as you wake each day in the world of No Anna, you step and a bit more of the plank appears below your foot. Only enough, though, for that one step. No Anna, today. This is all you know.
But none of it has happened yet, the laughable and miserable Orientation, the bands playing in the Union Square, the plastic cups of beer, the evenings at pubs, the booze-clouded, regrettable sex with someone called Chris and, another time, with someone called Nathan. Now Junie sits at the table, tired in her body, and looks past John at the bottom of the stairs, visible through the doorway that leads from the kitchen to the front of the house.
‘So you went to work,’ says John, ‘and when you got home there were signs that she’d eaten something, and …’
‘Weet-Bix,’ says Helen. ‘She’d had a bowl of Weet-Bix, and left it here, at the table.’
‘What, so you’re her maid now, are you? Why didn’t she put it in the dishwasher?’
‘I’m not her maid. I don’t clean up after her. She usually puts her dishes in the dishwasher. Perhaps she just forgot that time.’
Helen’s mouth is rimmed with worn-off lipstick. She turns and turns her glass on the table. They are all drinking wine.
John sighs. ‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘Okay, so she took a bag with her.’
‘Her usual bag, her backpack.’
‘And it didn’t have anything extra in it.’
‘As far as I could tell, no.’
‘And she locked the back door and put the key in the hiding spot.’
‘And I don’t know what time that was, but I think before two pm because that’s when I called and she didn’t answer.’
‘Although she might’ve been in the shower.’
‘Or even asleep, still.’
‘So it could’ve been any time up until five or five-thirty.’
They go on and on, combing out these facts. Junie rubs at a splinter embedded in her thumb. She glances towards the back of the house. Then again at the stairs.
‘And there were no messages,’ says J
ohn. ‘No missed calls at my work. From her.’
‘And none at mine either.’
‘And she seemed normal? Well, as normal as—’
‘John! She was normal! Things were just, she’d been struggling a bit, at school and—’
‘Right, the school business. So on the Wednesday you took her for a tour at the whatsit, the special—’
‘It’s a community school.’
‘Right, for dropouts.’
Now their voices snap down fiercely.
‘John! I was just looking at options. To keep her engaged with her education. For God’s sake, it wasn’t working where she was, even you would have to admit that.’
‘Well, to be engaged with your education it does help if you actually go to school.’
‘She’s not a baby. They get beyond the age of telling them “because I said so”.’
Junie gets up. She goes to the toilet in the upstairs bathroom, which has become, since Junie has gone to live with John, Anna’s bathroom. The things in the shower are the same as they always were: the soap, the shampoo, the face washer hung over the edge of the screen. Through specks of dried toothpaste Junie in the mirror looks the same as always. On the vanity top is a toothbrush and tube of paste. A hairbrush, with a floss of Anna’s hair in it. In the top drawer, old make-up, inherited from Helen. A stump of lipstick, dry mascara. They’ve always been there. From dress-ups, very long ago, or a school play. Anna doesn’t wear make-up, or at least Junie has never seen her wear it. Hair elastics, sunscreen, Impulse deodorant. Nothing new.
The second drawer down had been Junie’s, and still has some things she left in it; Body Shop perfume oil, chapsticks, more hair elastics. Nothing changed.
The third and last drawer contains, as always, pads and tampons.
Anna’s room is the next one along from the bathroom. The door is half-open, and the blind must be up, because it’s not dark in there. From the hallway Junie can see the bookshelf, the foot of the bed, the rumpled covers. She turns back, goes partway down the stairs and stops.
Here was where she sat one night and heard Helen and John arguing, when she was twelve, when they were still together. When John said, Is there someone else? Something had gathered in the house then, a presence, invisible. The air had bulged with it. And a similar presence is here now, and has been since these evenings began, since the day she got home from school and John, waiting for her, said, Something’s happened. We’ve got to go over to Helen’s. It’s at the edges of the rooms, and it’s behind the doors, around the corners. It’s an impossibility. It’s Anna, but she’s not there.
CHRISTMASES
1994, Avoca Street. Anna missing two weeks. Presents for her will remain under Christmas tree, unopened, until packed away along with tree (synthetic, reusable, purchased circa 1980) by Helen in late January. When Helen moves out of Avoca Street in August 1995 presents will be transferred to her new house, and will remain in storage until she moves again in 2001, when they will be donated to the Salvation Army, still wrapped but with cards removed.
For Anna from Helen: a necklace, silver, eye-shaped pendant, Egyptian style, commented on by Anna herself at St Kilda markets, Helen returning later to purchase. Wrapped in paper saved from last year. For Anna from John: copy of Huckleberry Finn, hardcover, gold-edged pages, marbled endpapers. Bought Christmas Eve at bookshop near John’s flat. Gift-wrapped by bookshop staff. For Anna from Junie: nothing.
For Junie from Helen: maroon long-sleeved top from Sportsgirl, velvet trim at neckline and cuffs. Wrapped in paper saved from last year. For Junie from John: same as Anna’s, above, except Tom Sawyer. For Junie from Anna: earrings, silver-plated (cheap), small studs in shapes of palm trees.
For Helen from Junie: Vanilla Nourish Body Lotion. For Helen from Anna: earrings, silver-plated (cheap), large hoops with hammered texture.
For John from Junie: box of handkerchiefs. For John from Anna: nothing.
No gifts exchanged by John and Helen.
Cold ham, chutney, green salad, egg salad, cheese, biscuits. Olives, chocolates, cherries. White wine, red wine, sparkling wine, expensive. All purchased at Coles and Liquorland on Christmas Eve by Helen. Tinned apricots and custard, purchased by John at 7-Eleven on Christmas morning.
Helen: I thought you were getting the pudding, John.
John: …
Junie: He forgot.
Helen: Oh, well. I love tinned apricots!
Junie: …
John: …
Helen: That ham was all right, wasn’t it—for Coles.
John: It was nice.
Helen: How sweet of Anna to get you those earrings, Junie.
Junie: I can’t wear them. I have a reaction to the cheap metal.
Helen: Well, I’m sure Anna didn’t know about that when she bought them.
Junie: …
Helen: Well, I think it’s lovely that she got you something.
Junie: As opposed to how not lovely it is that I got her nothing.
Helen: Junie! Come back! I didn’t mean …
John: Let her go.
(Helen pours more wine.)
John: No more for me, thanks.
When Helen finishes her own glass of wine she will reach across and take John’s and drink that. She will drink the best part of two bottles of wine.
In Anna’s room, upstairs: unmade bed, Sheridan sheets from outlet (gift from Helen a year earlier); half-drawn curtains, dust motes, tumbleweeds of carpet fluff; musty smell, tobacco, vanilla; top of desk entirely covered, top layer including Essential Mathematics 10, A4 school notebook marked Anna W, 10 C, Humanities, two empty cassette cases labelled in pen, Anna’s writing—The Breeders and Smashing Pumpkins—hair tie with small orb of matted hairs attached like a bead, hardcover notebook, A5, unlabelled, paperback copies of The Chocolate War, On the Road and The Great Gatsby, small wooden box with carved flower on top, containing cigarette papers and a few crumbles of marijuana leaf, two cigarette lighters, small round jasmine-scented candle, three-quarters burned, various pens and pencils. Blu-tacked to wall above desk, posters of The Breeders, Sonic Youth, Nirvana, photograph of Anna and Junie swimming at Red Rocks Beach, aged approximately eight and ten years respectively, project poster from primary school: Phillip Island and it’s [sic] Chicory Kilns. (On Victoria’s Phillip Island you will find many cute little buildings with pointy roofs, but did you know what they were once used for?) On floor, pair of jeans, inside out, pair of underpants, also inside out, being ‘worn’ by jeans, grey windcheater, inside out, various socks, t-bar school shoes with backs trodden down, school jumper, inside out, school dress, inside out. Bookshelf with books including Snugglepot and Cuddlepie, The Magic Pudding, Seven Little Australians, as well as, filling two shelves, Choose Your Own Adventure paperbacks, arranged in series order.
Hardcover notebook on desk contains drawings of trees, faces, Egyptian symbols, and one page of Anna’s writing. I live with my mother, things are sad but we laugh a lot, the laughing and the sadness are actually almost the same thing. They are connected, anyway. It gets to be like a power, it gets so big I feel like a giant, like I could take the whole world inside my heart. Doesn’t anybody else see how beutiful [sic] this world is? Tonight I got up on the roof and watched the sun going down and it’s like the most massive high you could possibly get, and I was straight sober. It comes from sadness, isn’t that funny.
In Helen’s room, downstairs: bed semi-made, Sheridan sheets from outlet, bought same time as Anna’s, curtains open, window open, carpet vacuumed. Faint scent of cosmetics—synthetic apple. On one bedside table, tube of hand cream, paperback copy of The Bonfire of the Vanities, box of tissues. Inside drawer of bedside table, condoms, lubricant. On other bedside table, nothing. Inside other drawer, nothing. Chair with pair of tan stockings draped over it, also dark green skirt and ivory camisole; on floor under chair, black shoes, mid heels; on top of chest of drawers, framed school photographs of Anna and Junie, aged around six and eight respectively, framed
wedding photograph of Helen’s parents (black-and-white), framed university graduation photograph of Helen (black-and-white). Inside left top drawer of chest of drawers, lingerie, red, black, pink, lace. Inside right top drawer, cotton underpants, white, pale blue, yellow, two bone-coloured bras, elastic puckered, another bra, greyish, formerly white, pilling on straps.
When Junie comes back into the kitchen and she and John prepare to leave Helen is in the back garden unsteadily pulling up weeds.
John (by the gate, whispering): Do you think you should stay, Junes?
Junie (not whispering): Why?
John (whispering): You know, to give Mum a bit of … I mean, she looks like she needs someone to …
Junie: …
Helen (calling): You off then, you two? Hold on—take some parsley. There’s so much, it’s seeded itself all over the garden … Here. Actually, hang on, let me get a plastic bag.
(Helen goes inside, colliding gently with the doorframe as she does so.)
Junie: I’ll wait at the car.
John: Wait a minute. Junie …
Helen: There you go. Where’s Junie?
John: She’s gone out to the car. She said to say goodbye.
Helen: Oh, okay. I’ll come out and wave you off.
John: That’s all right. You just take it easy, Hel. Why don’t you have a bit of a lie-down.
Helen: I’m fine. I’m fine! Tired from work, that’s all.
John: …
Helen: Oh, Johnny, where is she? I keep expecting her to walk in. It’s silly, but I woke up this morning and I was sure she was there upstairs, in her bed.
John: …
Helen: Whoops, sorry!
John: You right? Here, come and sit down.
(John helps Helen into the kitchen and into a chair.)
Helen: I’m fine! I’m fine!
John: Here, drink some water.
Helen: That chardonnay was good, wasn’t it. Where is it, I might just have one more—