by Anni Taylor
No, not frightening him. Worse. He wore a defeated expression, as if he was used to people yelling at him and shaking him, while all he was trying to do was survive another night.
I backed away completely.
And ran.
7.
PHOEBE
Wednesday morning
BY THE GREYISH QUALITY OF THE LIGHT, it had to be close to seven in the morning. A chorus of traffic from the streets rumbled to life, as though a button had been pressed to unmute the noise. As I neared the harbour, the first pale light of dawn washed through the sky. Everywhere, the fog sat heavily, pressing on the city.
People sparsely dotted the streets. Drivers delivering loads and early-bird business owners stared openly at me. I was clothed in pyjamas. Barefooted. My steps clumsy.
I was a strange sight for them. Did I need help? Was I drunk? A drug addict? They didn’t know, their eyes cautious.
The walk back home seemed to stretch out infinitely.
Hell. I’d come all this way inside a dream.
Anything could have happened to me.
I couldn’t take the sleeping pills again.
They’d become dangerous.
The moist, salty air of the ocean clung to my skin as I finally reached Southern Sails Street. My street ran vertically to the docks, rising crookedly up a hill.
The street didn’t welcome me. The terrace houses stood with dour expressions. All the houses here were the same inside and out. Tall, narrow, and joined together like skeletal ribs. My family had lived on this street for ten generations. But the houses had older, more distant thoughts than those of a little boy lost and a woman on the edge of losing her mind.
Built by the government over a century ago to house its lowly-paid maritime workers, the terrace houses had stayed the same all this time. Back then, fashionable Sydneysiders didn’t want to live in this rat-infested area. No one had cared about the harbour view or the proximity to Circular Quay and the ferries or the history (the first fleet landed here from England in the 1700s). The rats brought the bubonic plague, which swept through Sydney in the two decades from 1900. One of my ancestors had made a fine living as a rat-catcher in those days, until he succumbed to the plague himself. A massive pylon rose behind my street—one end of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The descendants of the maritime workers, squeezed in the middle of a modern, burgeoning city, had been hanging on by their fingernails. None of them owned their houses. But now, investors were circling like sharks, eyeing this street greedily. The government was selling it off, piece by piece, to the rich. The houses on one side of the street (the lower, less moneyed end) had been knocked down months ago—the flattened side of the street a constant reminder to the residents living on the other side that their time was running out. They’d all soon be gone, too.
My head was woozy. I could still hear the boats knocking against the docks as I headed up the slope of the street. The sounds seemed to scatter and echo everywhere.
Knocking. Knocking. Knocking.
Grabbing a fence, I steadied myself.
I had to get home.
Luke woke at seven every morning, like clockwork. I couldn’t let him know I’d been out wandering the city in a dream. I hoped no one else was awake and peering through their windows.
I passed Nan’s house at number 25. She was an early riser, but she’d be busy with her housework. Next door to Nan’s at number 27 was the Wick house—old Mrs Wick and her thirty-two-year-old daughter Bernice, who rarely left the house. Both of them slept in until way past ten. Next was number 29. The abandoned house. Did a curtain just shift as I passed by? I craned my head to gain a better view. The living room curtain was as it had been for years—hanging on the same crooked slope, undisturbed. Still, I thought I’d seen it move. Maybe squatters had moved in. Or maybe it was my memories of that house playing tricks on me. The terrible thing that had happened at that house threatened to push its way into my mind. But I pushed back, as I always did. I’d learned how to shove that memory deep and stop it from surfacing.
I shivered, wishing that of all the houses on this street that were due to be demolished, this one would be next.
Luke’s parents’ house was next, at number 31. At least I knew that they were away at their holiday house and weren’t there to see me walk past in my pyjamas. Their front yard was the most perfect in the street. Tiny, like all the yards—but perfect. They had a gardener looking after it at the moment. Inside and out, their townhouse was pristine. I envied the kind of home life that the Baskos had given Luke when he was growing up. They hadn’t been rich (they’d had more than most on this street), but they’d doted on him. I’d never even heard them argue. Hell, I’d never heard them say an unkind word about anyone. Luke’s mother even found compliments for people behaving badly.
I continued up the steep hill that led to the gate of my house. Number 88. The gate was hanging open when I got there. God, I must have blundered through there an hour or so ago, in a dreaming haze.
A stiff blue envelope stuck out of the mailbox. I pulled it out as I stepped past. There was no name or address on the outside. Probably one of those To The Householder campaigns that promoted sticky labels for little Sally’s school lunchbox and fat exploder pills for her mother (because women apparently were in constant need of having their fat exploded).
A faint coffee scent wafted from the envelope. I imagined the letter deliverer gulping a quick cup of coffee in his or her car before running out to stuff mailboxes. I knew the scent, the exact type of coffee. My eyesight wasn’t the sharpest for someone my age, but I had the keenest sense of smell of anyone I knew. I could tell what someone had last eaten when they walked near me. At school, I’d always won the blindfold contests where you had to name a scent.
The envelope smelled of the caramel mochaccino that was sold at the Southern Sails Café—the coffee shop down at the harbour end of my street. They roasted their own coffee beans there.
Continuing down the front path, I turned the handle on the front door as slowly and cautiously as if I were trying to crack a safe. Stepping inside, I caught sight of myself in the hall mirror. I could see what everyone had seen on my way here. My hair hung long, dark, and limp around my face and shoulders. A faint dusting of freckles sat on top of chalky skin. My eyes dull and stony. My body clothed in wrinkled pyjamas (I barely ironed anything, let alone pyjamas).
Dropping the envelope on the hall stand, I continued on, stealing up the stairs and along the cushioned hallway that led to the bedroom. With the blinds completely drawn, it was like the world was still in the deep of night.
Luke faced away from me, quietly snoring. I slipped in beside him, taking care that I didn’t disturb him. If he woke, I could say I’d just been to the bathroom. But that wouldn’t explain my cold skin or the smell of the docks in my hair. I should have gone straight into the shower. But I was exhausted.
He had that same spicy scent of perspiration and musky aftershave he always had before his morning shower. Manoeuvring closer, I let his scent become mine. His body against mine felt good. I needed shelter, sanctuary.
He murmured something I couldn’t quite understand. Talking in his sleep was what he did. He talked in his sleep, and I walked in my sleep. Both of us trying to figure things out in our minds during the sleeping hours. The insanity of having a child vanish into thin air never left either of us, night or day.
A minute later, I felt him stirring.
He made grumbling, protesting noises before waking fully and rising. But I knew that once he’d showered, he’d snap fully awake. He’d start mentally planning out his meetings with colleagues and clients. He’d be rehearsing his spiel for later, when he was leading fussy home buyers and Chinese investors through outrageously expensive Sydney real estate. As the man who built one of the top agencies in the city, he knew exactly what to say. He prided himself on being honest, and he was. He often disarmed buyers with a completely unexpected comment about the dated look of a bathroom or the cra
ck in a wall. It made him sound open and gregarious. Then he’d follow up with a burst of positives that made the negatives sound either inconsequential or easily fixable.
Luke picked up his suit from the bedroom chair when he returned from the shower. His eyes looked intensely blue beneath his wet hair. I liked him like that. All his layers peeled off. Once the shirt and jacket went on, it was like he was wearing an armour, and he became business Luke. Business Luke was someone much more distant.
“I’ll bring home some dinner tonight.” He buttoned his shirt. “That okay?”
“Of course.”
“Feel like anything specific?”
I shook my head. “Anything.”
“Give me a call if there’s anything else you want me to get.” He kissed my forehead, and with a quick love you he was out of the room.
The house felt empty even before I heard the slam of the front door downstairs.
I sat on the bed, trying to psych myself to move from the bedroom.
Some days, I didn’t move from here. Each day consisted of dead hours: twenty-four hours with all the minutes ticking too fast and too slow at the same time.
I lived for the nights and my dreams of Tommy. I’d totally lost enthusiasm for everything else. But I couldn’t have the dreams anymore and risk wandering outside at night.
Somehow, Luke had managed to pick himself up and carry on. Less than a month after Tommy went missing, Luke had been back at the office. My career (if you could call it that) had been in acting. My two recent attempts to perform in a local amateur theatre production—just to get myself back on track—had failed miserably. Luke had come along and watched and clapped harder and longer than anyone else, but it’d been obvious to everyone that my acting was as hollow and putrid as an old gym shoe.
An injured moth fluttered in circles inside my head.
Tommy’s voice repeated itself over and over.
You’ll never find me, Mummy, if you don’t know where to look for me.
8.
LUKE
Wednesday morning
FROM MY OFFICE WINDOW, THE CITY was a swirl of wintry fog and tall towers of Lego bricks. It looked like it could all tumble down and disappear into the harbour. Sometimes, I wished it would.
The first time I walked into this office and saw that view, I thought I had the whole world in my fist.
I’d already secured the girl, and now my life was complete. Later, when Tommy came along, I even managed to replicate myself.
That life was gone.
Six months without Tommy. No real leads. Just dead ends.
And guilt.
When Tommy first went missing, I never thought a day could go past ever again where he didn’t consume every second of my thoughts. But I was wrong. Someone had to go back to work, and after months, slowly, a day did slip by where I was so flat-out busy that I didn’t think of him—until I came home and saw the reminders and photos of him everywhere.
Sometimes, there was a reminder that hit me in the face so hard that it took my breath away. Like one of his old baby rattles that I found lying in the bottom of an office drawer, long forgotten.
How did a couple move on after their child went missing? Short answer: they didn’t. You just kind of moved sideways, trying not to lose sight of that point where you last saw your kid.
But if I had to pinpoint the exact moment that things went wrong in my life, I couldn’t say it was the day Tommy went missing.
When it came to real estate graphs, I could chart the swings of the market—the busts and the booms. If I were to try and graph my own failures and successes, I wouldn’t know where to start. No, it wasn’t Tommy’s disappearance where the line began trending down. The trend started before that, but it was hazy.
I still couldn’t let go of what it was supposed to be: my perfect life with Phoebe.
When I was growing up, other girls were other girls. But Phoebe was always the girl. Even when I kissed other girls. Even the year I lived with Kate.
Phoebe was the least accessible person I knew. Every part of her mind was held in compartments. Some compartments were securely locked. Some compartments were open, but only sometimes. You could knock on a door and maybe, just maybe, Phoebe would let you in.
It was no different when she was eight years old. Phoebe, Saskia and I grew up rough and determined on the city streets. The three of us lived on the low end of a street of neglected townhouses that were desperately buying time: Southern Sails Street. All soon to be knocked down to make way for those who deserved to be there (those who could afford it). At the high end of Southern Sails, huge old mansions graced the street. No one was threatening to knock those down. The government had never owned them. Kate and Pria had lived up that end—still did—in their parents’ expensive houses. They’d attended private girls’ schools and used to walk primly down the footpath in their straw school hats.
When we were all around age nine, Saskia commandeered Kate and Pria into our unruly gang. The five of us made a force to be reckoned with, even if most of us were girls. Bernice Wick had come in last, but she was never one of the gang. Not because she was a couple of years older but because she just didn’t fit with us. She was too damned strange.
Phoebe didn’t try at all. She didn’t have to. She had an aura about her even back then. Her name had been Phoebe Vance. She was fiercer than anyone, but she’d drop everything and climb a tree or drainpipe in a flash if someone’s mangy kitten had got itself stuck. She entranced me with large brown eyes that seemed like they could shoot lasers if she chose them to.
All of us were in and out of each other’s houses on the weekends. Except for Phoebe’s house. Her father, Morris, dominated the Vance family home. His moods controlled the atmosphere. Stormy day, winter or roasting summer, it was all under Morris’s sky. Phoebe’s mother reminded me of a sapling, struggling to find its way above the forest canopy to find its own sunlight, but ending up aging and withering where it stood. It was obvious to me that Phoebe had learned to put up a protective barrier. If her father was raging, she pretended to understand and she sidestepped him. If he was drunk and bitter, she’d get him coffee and cake. If he was in one of his rare sunny moods, she’d laugh along with him.
But I watched her. I saw her fingers twisting around each other as she laughed. I saw her smile drop like a stone when she left a room in which her father was. I heard the false tone in her voice when she asked if he was okay and if she could get anything for him.
Phoebe was always acting. Pretending that her life was better than it was. You could hear her father roaring at her mother, and Phoebe would come out of the house with her head up and a smile. No wonder she became an actor as a career choice. She’d had plenty of practice.
I wanted to save her and give her a different life.
I worked hard, and it was all for her. I built up a real estate agency that was one of the best in the city—and the most profitable. I wanted her to be proud of the man I’d become. I’d be her port in the storm, always. I’d never be the storm.
I knew that Phoebe loved her mother, but she never respected her. Roberta Vance had poured all her energies into the house. It had to look exactly right at all times. Especially during Morris’s meanest bouts. Her dinners were legendary. She pored over recipe books and came up with meals that made me secretly wish she’d teach them to Phoebe. It seemed that the worse Morris got, the more effort Roberta put into dusting and arranging every item in the house. As though putting the house into order somehow neutralised Morris’s tantrums. She could clean and mop and sterilise Morris’s existence in the house. At times, I caught her counting and recounting things. And dusting imaginary dust.
When cancer got Phoebe’s mother, it seemed to me like the house itself had crawled inside her. All of the caustic cleaning chemicals and Morris’s rage mixed together into one toxic brew.
Phoebe was just sixteen then. She was left living with her father and Nan—her maternal grandmother. How Nan had produced
a daughter like Phoebe’s mother, I’ll never figure. When I was growing up, I always saw Nan as a scowling, embittered but stoic presence. She was still there, the old battle-axe, firmly wedged into the wood of the house. Nothing—not the government or anyone else—was ever going to dislodge her.
Morris drank himself into an early death a decade after Phoebe’s mother died. In those years, he’d had a continuous startled look on his face, as though he couldn’t accept that she was really gone. As though at any moment, she was going to come back through the door, put his shoes away, and make him dinner.
Phoebe was living in London then. I’d been on an extended holiday, staying with her. And she was pregnant with Tommy. We returned to Sydney for her father’s funeral, and we never went back to London. I got stuck back into the real estate agency that I’d created with my old school friend and fellow shyster, Rob Lynch. It happened just at the right time. In the months before a real estate boom, Rob and I rode the crazy wave.
When Tommy was nineteen months old, I paid a bomb for one of the new townhouses that had been built near the upper end of Southern Sails Street.
I thought Phoebe would love that. So many people she knew were there. Her grandmother and my parents still lived there. Pria still lived in her childhood home with her nine-year-old daughter, Jessie. Kate lived with her husband and twin boy and girl (in the newly renovated upper level of her parents’ house). Saskia was on the next block, in a swish apartment that overlooked her old street. So we were all still there—the Southern Sails gang.
Stepping over to my desk, I tapped a few keys on my keyboard and had a florist send Phoebe some flowers. I needed to give her some kind of reward for coming out to dinner last night.
I knew Phoebe wouldn’t really appreciate the flowers, but I didn’t know what else to give her. Nothing impressed her. Before, I’d given her the world. But there was nothing I could give her to fix her life now. I couldn’t give her Tommy back, no matter how much I wished I could.