by Scot Gardner
He tenderly brushed a mousy blonde lock from her forehead. ‘A surfer found her caught in the rocks below Keeper’s Point. Coroner said she’d drowned. Threw herself off the cliffs.’
I swallowed and it made an awkward noise. I knew the place. I knew the place where she’d died and the dark place she’d been before she went there, but I had questions. Was it courage that took her the last step, or weakness? Was it loss that walked her to the edge, or a search for freedom? I took her hand from beneath the towel. The skin was cool and soft. I only held it for a moment before awkwardness got the better of me but in that moment I wanted to weep and shout, rage and cry.
‘Such a waste,’ John Barton said.
The platitude grated. Did you hear that, Skye? I thought. That’s what happens when you don’t watch what you say; you end up sounding trivial and insincere. Here was a moment that called for silence, and your father spoiled it with a cliché.
‘The family has requested a viewing and I can completely understand why. She’s absolutely beautiful, even in death.’
John Barton observed and instructed as I washed the girl’s hair. My hands moved clinically but my breathing had no rhythm. I found another scar at the back of her head. It was concealed by hair but stretched from ear to ear.
‘After an autopsy, your brain could end up in your bum,’ John Barton said. ‘Literally.’
I looked at him and tried to smile.
I towelled her hair – it hung halfway to the floor – and John Barton sent me back to the drycleaners for Mr Neville Cooper’s clothes. By the time I returned, the rest of the girl’s body had been washed and dried. I was thankful to be spared that task.
We dressed Mr Neville Cooper and John Barton prayed aloud. ‘Dear God, grant this man some dignity in his final hours above ground.’
I constructed and carefully lined a Crenmore Imperial coffin while John Barton prayed aloud again. ‘Dearest merciful God, make this coffin big enough.’
He measured the shoulders and found they would fit. He measured the hips, and they would fit. It was the mound of the stomach that had him worried. He busied himself in the toolbox and returned armed with a dangerous-looking needle attached to a tube.
He unbuttoned Mr Neville Cooper’s jacket and clean shirt. When the rounded skin of the gut was exposed, he flicked a switch and a noisy pump started.
‘Trocar,’ he said, waving the needle. He drove it into the dead man’s belly and the tube instantly filled with bloody liquid. ‘Aspiration.’
The needle dug around inside Mr Neville Cooper, slurping and bubbling. It was macabre, this gratuitous mutilation of a corpse. Until that moment, John Barton had cherished the dead, treated them with friendly care and respect.
John Barton eventually stopped the pump. He tenderly bathed, dried and patched the hole he’d made with tape, and Mr Neville Cooper’s shirt and jacket fitted better than they ever had. He carefully lathered and shaved the dead man’s grey-stubbled face. After the labour of levering Mr Neville Cooper into his coffin, we found the lid closed cleanly. The aspiration had been a practical necessity, I decided. The man was dead, after all.
The girl’s name was Amanda Creen. One of her eyes was open a slit, as if she was discreetly watching our every move. John Barton wiped her eyes with paper towel, then parted the lids properly and dried her eyeballs. In death, her irises had relaxed and left her with the startled black stare of a wild animal. Owl eyes. John Barton tore small pieces of paper towel and pressed them to the delicate surface. With the lids drawn over the top, the paper towel kept them closed.
I blow-dried her hair and wished I’d had a sister or cousin to learn from. I raked it with a broad-toothed comb until it shone and made up its own mind about which way it was going to hang. Dry, it withdrew into silken ringlets and became half its wet length. It was so vital and alien between my fingers—
‘Okay, that’s probably enough time on the hair,’ John Barton said abruptly.
I stood and my knees cracked.
‘My word,’ he said. ‘Your knees sound like mine! How old did you say you were again?’
I smiled, a little guiltily.
‘We won’t have a photo for a couple of days but it looks as though her hair knows best. Good work.’
He threaded a large curved needle and sewed Amanda Creen’s mouth shut. It was a swift, practised action –, through the inside of the bottom lip, up and in front of the top teeth, into the nasal cavity and back into the roof of the mouth. With the two ends tied and the excess thread trimmed, her lips lost their kiss and instead pretended to sleep.
10
THAT AFTERNOON, THE same celebrant wearing the same garish purple-and-green tent conducted Mr Neville Cooper’s service. I stood at the back of the chapel and distracted myself from the proceedings with thoughts of Amanda Creen. I imagined lives for her that made sense of her death – a broken heart, a broken mind, an accident, foul play – all the while being drawn back by the lustre of Mr Neville Cooper’s eldest daughter’s hair. The living and the dead.
‘Now Neville’s eldest daughter, Nadia, would like to say something on behalf of the family,’ the celebrant wheezed.
Nadia. I remembered her name. She arrived at the dais, with her red nose and flushed cheeks, and I had to leave. I caught John Barton’s eye and he nodded solemnly.
I slipped through the door without making a sound and fought the urge to run. I shoved my hands in my pockets and just as quickly ripped them back out again. What if Amanda Creen’s heart had broken after a loss like Nadia Cooper’s? What if the same loss drove Nadia Cooper to the edge? The thought of her fiery hair spilling onto the stainless steel gurney made the blood in my veins go cold. What if the sight of me leaving as she got up to speak was the final straw? The idea was stupid but for some reason it took hold of me and almost propelled me back through the double doors into the chapel. Mad. It was real and confusing enough to keep me anchored to that piece of floor for the duration of the service. The music started, the coffin was committed and people began moving. I stood to attention like a guard, with my hands clasped in front of me, avoiding eye contact with the mourners as they left. All except one. The bloodshot eyes of Nadia Cooper caught mine. She was moving slowly and she peered up at me with a broken smile.
‘I’m . . . sorry,’ I said.
I did sound like a robot.
She touched my arm and her smile partially repaired itself.
‘Thank you,’ she mouthed.
I didn’t know precisely what I was sorry for – sorry for her loss, sorry for leaving, sorry for mixing her with Amanda Creen in my head, sorry for staring at her hair, all of those things – but it didn’t seem to matter. Her smile and that ‘Thank you’ hung with me for hours. All the way out to the crematorium. It was there like a puzzle in the back of my mind as I helped five men – including John Barton – load the coffin onto the rollers to take it into the furnace. It was there while John Barton drove the hearse back home at a slow crawl and spoke reverentially about the process of combustion of human remains. I was listening. Seven hundred degrees Celsius. Half an hour and the moisture has gone. Another half an hour and brittle bones remain. I was listening but there was something glowing inside me: a single ember, fanned by the memory of Nadia Cooper’s smile.
John Barton had work to do in his office. He sent me in for a cup of tea.
Mrs Barton was on the phone. Skye was slouched on the sofa, Moggy curled on her lap. The television bellowed.
Skye watched me enter the kitchen. Mrs Barton smiled.
‘What are you doing?’ Skye asked.
I held up the kettle.
‘Who said you could?’ she challenged.
I flashed my teeth at her and the next thing I knew she was there beside me, the cat under one arm.
‘You need permission. You can’t just walk in and help yourself.’
Mrs Barton excused herself from her conversation and covered the mouthpiece. ‘Leave him alone,’ she growled.
&n
bsp; ‘Who gave you permission?’ Skye asked again.
‘John Barton, your father and the owner of this fine establishment,’ I said.
Her mouth tightened, trying to hold in her smile of victory. She’d made me speak again. ‘He’s not the boss of the kitchen, I am.’
‘Skye!’ Mrs Barton hissed. She flicked her hand, but Skye didn’t react.
‘You have to ask me for permission.’
The cat mewed dismally.
I lowered myself onto a knee. We were face to face and I bowed my head. ‘Dear Skye, boss of the kitchen, may I please be allowed to make your father and myself a cup of tea?’
‘As long as you make me a hot chocolate.’
‘It would be my very great pleasure to make you a hot chocolate,’ I whispered. ‘If you would be so kind as to tell me how you like it.’
‘Milk warmed up in the microwave, three spoons of chocolate, three spoons of sugar and one marshmallow. White.’
‘Excuse me for one moment, Mrs Creen,’ Mrs Barton said, and put the phone down. She grabbed her daughter’s sleeve and spun her around. ‘That’s enough, Skye. Get out. Watch the TV or go to your room. Leave Aaron alone. He has work to do.’
The smiles vanished – the wry one on Skye’s face and the one glowing in my memory. Mrs Barton had been talking to a relative of Amanda Creen’s, possibly her grieving mother, and I’d been playing games with Skye. Skye dropped the cat and stomped off. She slammed her bedroom door, squealing fiercely something that only the walls could understand.
Mrs Barton’s eyes narrowed at me. ‘Don’t fire her up. Ignore her and concentrate on your work.’
I nodded sharply and watched the kettle as it boiled. I splashed my hand filling John Barton’s favourite cup but the scalding barely registered. I didn’t make a cup for myself. I didn’t make a cup of hot chocolate for Skye either, but I knew I would. One day.
John Barton stood beside the body of Amanda Creen. He was holding her hand.
‘This does not look good,’ he said.
He showed me her fingers. The nails were almost black.
11
NERIDA LONG – THE WEATHERED and crinkled wife of the park manager – was perched on the arm of Mam’s chair in the annex. She had Mam’s hand. Mam looked as though she’d been crying.
‘Here he is,’ Nerida Long said. She stroked Mam’s fingers and lowered her hand gently to the armrest. ‘Home at last!’
‘What happened?’ I asked. ‘Is everything okay?’
Nerida Long beckoned me outside. She stood close – too close – and whispered. ‘Mum’s a little confused. She was in Wendy Swain’s kitchen. Thought it was her own.’
Her voice expressed concern but her lips suggested glee.
‘You might have to keep an eye on her if she’s going to be doing this every day. Who’s David? That her husband? She was saying he was coming home for dinner. I didn’t say nothing. She been to see a doctor? And what were you doing in the ladies’ the other day? Hey? Candy says you was in the loo. What were you doing in there? Hey? Don’t make me have to kick you out or ring the cops, will you? Hey?’
‘Mam had an accident . . .’
‘Oh? You don’t go in there, though. Under any circumstances, okay? Come and get me if you need to. I’m only too happy to help, but I don’t want you going in the ladies’. Hey? Catch my drift?’
She touched my arm and I flinched.
I nodded my understanding and ducked inside.
Mam was watching Deal or No Deal as though nothing had happened. At the sight of me, her brow wrinkled.
‘About time you got here. Dinner’s spoiled again. Where have you been?’
‘I’ve been at work, Mam. Don’t worry about dinner, I’ll fix it. Who’s winning?’
‘Hey?’
‘Who’s winning on your show?’
‘Everybody,’ she said triumphantly.
Mam dried the dishes. She was meticulous and slow as the tide, but she got it done. I was in no hurry. My body ached for sleep but my head wouldn’t switch off. The day kept bubbling around in there without any mercy. I had never meant to annoy Mrs Barton. Or Nerida Long. I’d touched a dead girl’s hair and it had . . . opened something. I’d said sorry to another girl – possibly the same girl in my jumbled mind – and the opening had torn further. If Mam had another accident, I wouldn’t be calling for Nerida Long; I’d be taking her into the men’s. Nobody would question that.There were big signs on the beach warning people never to swim alone. I couldn’t read them in the dark but I would have ignored them anyway. It was partly the danger that made the beach my own. There was the unknown, the dark, the cold and the emptiness to contend with out there, but those concepts are all relative. Cold compared to what? A dead hand? Dark compared to what? Unblinking eyes? At times the ocean seemed full beside my emptiness. At times it was the one knowable thing in my world.
12
The air in the dream room is hazy, acrid and burnt. Beneath the ringing in my ears I hear my own breathing. My heartbeat. The toe moves – a faint twitch – and terror swallows me whole. I run, but movement is beyond me. I scream, but make no sound.
‘You right, mate?’
The voice punched through and the scream from my nightmare slipped past my lips and into the reality of the day as a kind of yelp. My limbs suddenly started working and I flailed.
The voice persisted. ‘It’s okay, mate. You’re okay. Here, sit up.’
I was on the sand. The old man helping me wore running shorts and a fluorescent yellow singlet. His forehead was glossy with sweat, though full daylight seemed some way off.
‘Can you tell me your name, son?’ the man asked.
I nodded and rubbed my face.
‘Can you say your name?’
‘Yes,’ I croaked. ‘I’m Aaron Rowe.’
‘Do you need an ambulance?’
‘No, I’m fine.’
‘Where do you live? Should I call you a taxi?’
‘No,’ I said. I scanned my surroundings. Had I slept all night on the beach? I distinctly remembered curling into bed after my swim. Yes, I still wore pyjamas. I took a deep breath, shivered. ‘I’m staying in the caravan park.’
‘Here, take my hand,’ he said. His fingers were hot and smooth. ‘Let’s get you on your feet. The caravan park, you say?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, that’s not far, is it?’
I shook my head.
The cold had made its way deep under my skin again. My teeth chattered. My legs threatened to cramp.
‘How’d you end up out here? You a sleepwalker?’
I didn’t answer.
‘My youngest son was a sleepwalker. Thought we’d lost him at one stage. Turned up in the linen closet. Would have been a laugh, but it was the neighbour’s closet.’
By the time we got to the pedestrian turnstile my limbs had unlocked. I thanked the man and apologized.
He held up his hand. ‘No trouble at all, Aaron. You might want to have a go at tying yourself into your bed. Worked for our Jason.’
He waved and jogged back along the beach.
*
The shower chased the ice from my limbs, but my core was slower to recover. Drug addicts on the beach had knifed people before. It would have been so easy to step around me and pretend I didn’t exist. Maybe he saw his son there on the sand? Perhaps the pyjamas were a giveaway? In any case, his kindness gave me something bright to ponder and breakfast tasted better because of it.
Mam whistled on her way to the toilet. I remembered the tune from my earliest days. It seemed an irreconcilable irony that she could summon that long-forgotten song but still called me David. That the light could fall brightly enough on that part of her mind but leave the can-opener in the shadows. I hadn’t even considered taking her to the doctor. Or maybe I had but dismissed it just as quickly on account of the complications that might arise. If Mam was having a bad day, she might impress the doctor so much that he’d lock her up. Getting Mam to the ot
her side of town on a weekday was an arduous task and the doctor didn’t work on weekends, did he? Then there was the fact that Mam wasn’t physically sick, and trying to convince her she needed treatment risked the very pointy edge of her wrath. And until recently she’d had moments of strangeness in a powerfully lucid world. How the tables had turned. As if a fuse had blown or a bearing seized. Some part of me was still waiting for her to snap out of it.
13
I TIED MY OWN TIE. It took four goes but I remembered the knot and the effort now was to get the lengths right before I started looping and tucking. John Barton noticed, tilted his head, hitched the knot this way and that, and then beamed.
‘Well done, Aaron. You catch on quick.’
The coolroom stank. It was an evil brew of gas and decay. John Barton made a noise of mild horror, as if he’d remembered he’d left the stove on, then tutted when he found the source of the smell. Amanda Creen’s body had changed. Her perfect skin had blotched and discoloured; her eyes were sunken and black. The beauty of the day before was gone. Now she was the decomposing corpse of a person who had suffered a violent death. A bruised and wilted rose.
Her toe moved. I could have sworn it. I saw it from the corner of my eye and my dream flooded in unchecked.
I made a noise like Moggy and crashed into the trolley on my way out. I ran past the office and into the foyer. I pulled up, panting, in the bright sunshine just outside the front door. John Barton appeared two seconds later.
He grabbed my shoulder. ‘Aaron? You okay?’
I nodded quickly.
He seemed unconvinced. ‘Here,’ he said, and patted the edge of the concrete urn. ‘Sit for a bit.’
I did as I was told and eventually found a rhythm to breathe by.
John Barton stared. ‘What happened?’
‘I . . . I . . .’
‘Yes? Take your time.’
‘I . . . It was nothing. Just my imagination running wild.’
‘What happened?’