Little Lost Girl

by Graham Wilson

  Soon it was agreed. Tom and Mary’s house would be theirs. The other two they would rent and, when their children were grown, if they had need of them they would be theirs. For themselves, they wanted to live in the big sandstone house with the view, where they had first truly met. They also wanted it again to be a house full of children and laughter; those they had already and, with luck, more yet to come, a whole tribe please God.

  In three more years three more children came and they knew it was enough. On quiet summer nights they would walk down to the beach, and sit staring out across the harbour, watching as stars rose in the east, sitting on the rock where they first had made their promises to each other.

  The first war came and went and all their children lived still. When their daughter Rachel was grown she moved to the house across the way, the first Balmain house, Roisin. Soon she had children and they had grandchildren, and again they thrilled to the patter of small feet.

  The hard years of the Depression came. Now there was barely money to buy food and customers stayed away from their shop of exquisite things. But Jimmy, ever resourceful, found new ways for them to live. He bought and sold furniture, often broken and needing repair, but sold for a pittance as families were forced out of houses and could not take it with them. With skill and care and his masterful hands, he would fix the locks and hinges, polish the wood, fix the legs. When he was finished it was as good as new; and those with the money would desire it. So their lives continued.

  The house in Smith St now had McNeil’s living in it. First they rented it to Mrs McNeil’s second son Robert and his new wife. Robert was young, hard-working and with the manner and looks of Matty. Then Dan McNeil died in a pub brawl. Ruth McNeil had worked hard all her life. Now she was old and tired. She found Dan had almost drunk their family house away.

  When her house was sold and the debts were paid Ruth McNeil had barely a pittance remaining. Robert was determined his mother would come and stay with him, even though he had two small children of his own.

  Jimmy and Maria knew help was required. So they determined their precious house, ‘Casa Ardwyn’, in Smith St, should go to Robert. He was so like Matty, the son in law they might have had. They found a way he could afford it that did not seem like charity. So now the title deeds were his. They knew Sophie would be well pleased.

  As the years rolled on Robert’s family grew up and Mrs McNeil died. The house was sold again, forgotten whose first it had been. Still the new owners clearly loved it and cared for it. Sometimes Maria and Jimmy walked along Smith St and came past it. In the front they would stop and admire the pretty roses and daises in the garden. Most years they walked past in the summer, when the frangipani tree was in bloom, stopping to smell its fragrance. Sometimes Jimmy would pick a flower and place it in Maria’s hair. Just rarely they would see a person there, glimpsed through the window.

  One day, as they came by, a little boy came out pushing a red tricycle, perhaps a year of two younger than their Sophie had been. They smiled at him. He smiled back, a happy boy with his toy.

  They did not say anything but, in his place, they saw the image of their lost child on her red tricycle. It tore into their hearts opening the pain anew. After that they did not come again.

  Chapter 20 - 1942 – Discovery

  The year was 1942. Sydney was under attack, with a Japanese submarine found in the harbour. There were army and navy people everywhere. Ships needed fuel and fuel needed tanks. The navy looked for good safe places to build tanks, not too close to where anyone lived in case of bombs, but on deep water where the big ships could come and go.

  One such place was Ballast Point, where a single big oil tank stood, used for the diesel fuel for truck and ship engines for more than 30 years, but now, leaking an oily film at the seams. The Navy decided this old tank was no longer safe and must come out. Into its place would go three brand new, larger and stronger, steel tanks. So the fitters cut apart the old tank’s iron plates and lifted off the metal base plate with a ship’s crane.

  Below the old tank was sandstone rock mixed with sand and rubble, sitting over bedrock. It needed to be excavated further for the bigger, stronger, foundations. So they brought in their machines; dozers, trenchers, backhoes, and cranes, to scrape away the soil and move the loose rock and then lift off the heavy pieces until they were on solid bedrock onto which they would lay a new cement foundation.

  There was one big rock slab at the front, closest to the sea, tipped at a strange angle, as if it had been dropped crookedly before. Part of it poked up above the ground. This needed to be lifted away to finish the levelling. They brought in their heaviest crane, and secured the cable around this large boulder. With a grinding of gears the crane took up the strain and slowly the heavy rock was raised out of its hole and swung aside.

  A dozer rolled forward to push aside the earth and remove the cavity. As it rumbled into place a worker standing to the side let out a whistle.

  He raised a hand and gave a shout to signal “Stop”.

  Everyone paused. He waved the other onlookers to come over and look for themselves. In this hole were a couple bottles and something else, white things. They lay in pieces on the ground. He climbed down. He realised he was looking at a human skeleton, not an adult but a child, in fact two children. Some long bones were broken as were the skulls, as if crushed by a heavy weight.

  “We should call the Military Police,” said the site foreman.

  They waited for an hour and two Military Policemen arrived.

  “Whoever it was has been dead for a long time, and you need to get on with your work,” said the first MP.

  So the MPs collected the remains and the other things from the hole.

  One wrote a short report in his notebook for logging at the base.

  In it he listed the items. “One green bottle, one blue bottle, one small chest, one blue carved bird, knife, bell, remains of some clothes and bags, maybe some bits of books,” he wrote.

  He continued, “Remains appear to be two children, likely age between 6 and 12, perhaps a boy and girl, don’t appear aboriginal.”

  Once all was collected they put the objects into bags with labels, then drove away to lodge the remains with the civilian police. In due course a police officer, Constable Jones, lodged them, along with the original report, with the coroner.

  Many people were dying at this time and the coroner’s staff was down to one; the others had been co-opted for the war effort. So the coroner glanced briefly at the bags’ contents. He made an entry into his log and his assistant collected the human remains along with the other detritus and put them, along with the original report, into a box which he labelled with the date and record number. He placed this into a storage compartment and closed the door, his work done. Perhaps, one day, when time permitted, someone would examine these items properly.

  As the war progressed, the deposition of more body remains continued, but, except in major finds or obvious homicides, the investigation was kept to a minimum. So they accumulated, each lot tagged, lodged in its container and placed into storage. When the war ended they were all moved together, into a new storage place, unopened. There they stayed.

  Slowly their existence and provenance drifted out of human memory.

  With the war and all its comings and goings in Sydney Harbour there was no longer room for a small neglected cemetery, at the foot of the hill, near the ferry wharf at Balmain. The gravestones were old and overgrown. They seemed to have been forgotten. Another cemetery in Leichardt had become the place of burials for many years.

  One day, with no permission sought from people who lived nearby or from known relatives, a team of workers arrived. By the end of three days the graves were all removed. They were placed together in a group in Leichardt. A small sign was left behind to advise anyone who cared about the removal. No one seemed to notice and no disrespect was intended, but it was wartime and things needed to be done.

  Chapter 21 - Rachel remembers

 
; Rachel felt old and tired. This morning, with the cold in the stone house, she had found it hard to get out of bed and her arthritis pained her. Still, after almost her allotted four score years, she still found simple pleasures in life. But today she felt troubled. It was hard to think exactly why that should be; perhaps it was just the passage of time, so much change over so many years.

  When she had first come to this house, so very long ago, it was like a light had been turned on in her life. Seen through her six year old eyes this house seemed huge after their small Balmain cottage. She had never been back there since, she could not say why. Even though she knew she had been happy there, that leaving closed a dark chapter of her life.

  But now she must remember. She drew her mind back to that time. An image of Sophie came floating into her mind, in her white communion dress, like in the picture her Mum had given her, when she was old and dying. Now she remembered that day. As she remembered she understood why she was troubled and what she must do. It was getting hard to remember sometimes, but today she would make herself remember. It needed to be today! If she left it until tomorrow perhaps her mind would be unable to hold it any more.

  She knew her memory was not good; sometimes she did not know where she was or what she was doing; sometimes a kindly neighbour had to help her find her way home. The doctor called it something with a funny long name that started with an O sound, Ozzimers, or something like that.

  Her one son lived far away in that City called New York. His job was something to do with money, Investment Banker; that was it. He decided, three months ago when he heard she was getting lost, that someone must stay in the house to help her. Now a lady lived with her called Maggie. She was nice, but she was a bit of a bother to always have around.

  But what did that matter, she knew what was wrong, she was old. All her friends had gone and, before long, she would join them. She was nearly ready to cross over, that’s what she thought it was like ever since her dear mother, Maria, had told her the full story. But, before she did, she must first tell her daughter about her mother’s, her grandmother’s and her own stories, She must do it to keep the memory alive, in case someone ever found where Sophie had gone.

  That was what she had been trying hard to remember, keeping alive this memory for Sophie. She had woken last night knowing that she could still just hold the story in her mind, in order to tell it. But it must be today or it may be too late. She pulled into her mind and held tight to what her mother, Maria, had told her a few days before she died. At that time it had been troubling her mother’s soul, this need to not let the missing Sophie be completely forgotten, to ensure that her story be passed on lest anyone ever discover what had come of her.

  She remembered too the pain that would come into her father’s eyes whenever Sophie’s name came up. It was, as her mother said, “harder to have one vanish and never know the where or why, than to see them die.”

  So, while her mother and father got on with life, after Sophie, creating a new happy family, the hole of her absence was always there. And if Rachel was truthful it had been like that for her too, she kept a lock on images of Sophie, blocking them from her mind. Mostly it had worked, but not quite. Now it was time to let them come back, to recall and tell another.

  She made a cup of tea and a slice of buttered toast. Sitting at the old wooden kitchen table, she felt those remembrances of her earliest childhood swirl around in her mind and rise to the surface.

  The strongest was of sitting on the bed with Sophie, in their room with the pink fireplace. Perhaps she was three. Sophie must have been in her second year of school because she was beginning to read, mostly picture books with a few words on each page. But Sophie and Rachel both thought Sophie was enormously clever. Even more than the reading Rachel loved the pictures and, while she could look at the pictures by herself, Sophie’s reading brought them alive in her mind. Perhaps that was why she had loved painting herself; it had been her own effort to recreate those early pictures that had flowed through her mind. Her daughter, Sarah, shared her love of painting too. Sarah had gone on to do it so much better than she, Rachel, ever could.

  Sophie’s favourite books were those about faraway lands, places with pictures of ships to take you there, travelling over vast blue seas. Lands of amazing high mountains with snow and pictures of waterfalls; and pictures of astonishing animals, the giraffes with their long necks, zebras that looked like funny painted horses, jaguars with their orange and black mottled skins that swam in the water and climbed in trees and huge brightly coloured parrots that flew overhead in the forests.

  She remembered how, sometimes, Sophie would get so interested in the stories that she would read on and on, page after page, turning too fast, before Rachel could look properly at the pictures. When this went on for long she would eventually get bored and fall off to sleep. Sometimes she just pretended to go to sleep, to get Sophie to stop reading and tuck her into bed, with a big hug and kiss, pretending to be Mummy or Daddy.

  Rachel also remembered her Gran Alison and, sort of, Grandpa Charles. But that memory was all smoky in her head, like you pushed your face up against frosted glass and tried to look through, but all you could really see were half shadowed outlines. There was something special between Sophie and Gran; it was like they could talk to each other without looking or saying anything. Rachel really liked her Gran, she made you feel warm inside, like you were the most important person there was.

  She remembered too the first time Sophie showed her the beautiful perfume bottle that her Gran had given her, covered in silver flowing waves, washing over a smoky, almost milky, turquoise sea of glass. All at once Rachel had felt so jealous. Why did Grandma give it to Sophie, not me?

  This feeling flooded back now, she felt the raw anger of her child mind rise again and then she recalled that day, long ago, when she decided to pay Sophie back for being chosen to have this thing.

  When Sophie went out with her Mum and Alexander, leaving only her and her Dad at home, Rachel had taken the perfume bottle and hidden it away in the back of the fireplace, high on a little ledge. After Sophie came back Rachel had watched her carefully. She was expecting Sophie to look for the perfume bottle where she last left it, or perhaps look in other places when she did not find it, then to ask if Rachel knew where it was.

  Rachel had made up her mind to deny knowledge of where the perfume bottle was gone. Instead she would wait until Sophie was not there to take it out and play with it, all by herself. If Sophie caught her with it she would tell her she had found it, fallen under the rug and was minding it.

  But Sophie had not done that. Instead of asking Rachel or searching for it she stood in the middle of the room looking puzzled for a few seconds. Then she walked over to the fireplace, reached up for the bottle and took it out. Sophie did not scold Rachel, it was as if she did not think Rachel had hidden if, but it had moved there by itself. All Sophie said was. “There you are, you naughty little bottle, you know you can’t hide from me.”

  Next day Sophie said to her, “The bottle wants to be shared between us, so you must also use it to hold your memories.” So, after that, they would sit together, each putting in their memories, side by side on the bed. Sophie now called it ‘our perfume bottle’, which really meant they both owned it.

  Another thing about Sophie that Rachel remembered clearly was the day, when her Grandma and Grandpa had died; it was a long time before other people found out about it. She and Sophie were talking about boys, or mainly Sophie was talking about Matty, in that ‘I love you’ way she had. Rachel was saying she thought boys were silly, feeling grown up talking like that with her sister. Suddenly Grandma was with them in their house, not on the boat which had crashed. Rachel knew straightaway that Sophie felt it, and she knew her Mummy felt it too, even though Mummy was outside the room. It seemed like a hole was open that let her Grandma in with them and let them see out into another place where the broken boat was.

  That memory drifted away. Then pain rose in
to Rachel’s mind. It was now the day Sophie had gone away and not come back. She heard her mother asking Alexander where Sophie was. Then her Mum went down the street to look for her at the McNeil’s. While she was gone there Rachel took out the perfume bottle. There was a big flash of lightning as she did this. It frightened her. And the bottle felt like horrible, like ice. It was cold and empty, with nothing inside. It hurt her hand to hold it. After that she left it in the bedside locker and did not take it out again. Then, from the day of the big church service the bottle was gone. Rachel knew at once where her mother put it, up in the chimney, but she did not want to touch it again.

  When Sophie went away her Mummy and Daddy did not understand she missed Sophie just as much as they did. They thought because she was only four she would soon forget her. But she could not forget, and sometimes she felt really sad and most wanted Sophie to come back, and sometimes she felt really angry because it was mean of Sophie to go away too soon.

  She remembered wanting to talk to her Daddy, soon after Sophie went away. But it was like he could not see her, even though she could see him. So she took his hand and said his name to make him look at her. For a second he saw her then his eyes went away to somewhere inside his head and she felt so hurt because she knew he had forgotten she was there. After that she did not try to talk to him anymore, and she tried her best not to think of Sophie either.

  Later she remembered that awful time when her Daddy was away for ages and ages, and her Mum had tried so hard to be brave and worked so hard. All her bad, angry part, from before Sophie went away, was gone; the times like when she sat in the chair and cried and argued with her Dad; now Rachel understood that was about the two little babies that died. But once her Daddy went away, even though she never got cross anymore, sometimes her Mummy would get so tired and lonely. And sometimes, at night, Mummy would cry in her sleep. Then Rachel would go in to her and cuddle close and they would both help each other to forget their sadness. Then, by helping her Mummy, Rachel started to feel better too.