Vic yawned. It made no sense to him too and he was tired after a long day of flying and driving.
Her aunt took the initiative, “Actually I think we all need to head off to bed now, it is getting late and you both look tired after your trips. Maybe, you should leave reading the letter until you wake in the morning with a fresh mind. I will pop your kids in the bath and put them into bed. Susan, you should go a have a rest with Vic and your baby now.”
Susan felt happy to oblige, since coming to live here David and Anne seemed always happy to go off with others and, in truth, after her bad night of sleep last night, she was suddenly very tired.
She took Vic’s hand. They went to their bedroom, happy to be together with their baby, knowing talking would wait. As she lay beside him she said, “I have much news but I need to rest before I tell you.”
He tucked their baby between them, put his arms around her and they fell asleep.
She dreamt of meeting Vic for the first time. He was standing next to a helicopter. She was travelling with another man whose face she could not see. But she was happy. Everything around her in this dream was bright with full colors, green trees, blue sky, golden sun, red dirt, and Vic’s berry brown skin. The colors were unbelievably beautiful. She did not want to wake from her dream. It was a warm and happy place which she did not want to leave.
She woke to find Vic staring intently at her. She told of the dream and he stroked her and held her close, telling her that she had remembered the first day they had met. Still in this happy place she returned to sleep.
The sky was just glowing in a clear cold daylight when she woke again. Her baby was restless, seeking food and she gave it a breast, watching as he sucked greedily. She snuggled into Vic, wanting to postpone the telling, it all seemed too complicated and hard to explain now, plus she could feel his early morning desire for her and she wanted that too. So they postponed a little longer with joined pleasure. She dozed again. Her mind snapped sharp awake. It was time to speak.
So she told him of it as it happened, the taking of the pictures, those images of another time that kept coming into her mind, the diary, the man with the crocodile face. Then she told how she had seen the place where the things were stored and had known they were there and what the code was, even though she had no remembrance of leaving them there three of four years past. Having told up to this part she went and took the book and the stones from her bag and passed them to him.
“It is time for you to begin to tell me who I was before,” she said. “I need to know, I cannot block it out any more.”
He nodded and looked at the book with wonder. “It is hard to believe I am holding it. I have read parts. Anne read it all, not this book but a copy. You must have copied it, as you did with my book, and stored the original for safe keeping with the stones. They belonged to Mark, they are yours now.
“The book, this diary, is the story of Mark. He was your lover before me. He is the father of Anne and David. He was my best friend and I miss him still. It is a hard story. It tells of bad things that Mark has done. I can tell you parts, Anne can tell you more.
“If you wish I can read this with you, or I can sit with you while you read for yourself. Only a small part is a story about you. You came last; his last great love. When I knew you then I was only a friend, a friend of Mark who took you both flying for a magic day of scenery and fishing. By the end of that day you were my friend too. After that you travelled on further with him but I never saw you together again.
“When you left him he was dead. In that you played a part, but it is not something of blame. Mark knew there was no other way for him; he could not escape his past. So he chose to give his body to the crocodiles. That is why you see a crocodile face. It was as if, when he left, what remained was a crocodile spirit. Sometimes that spirit has haunted you too.
“As to the stones, I knew he owned some such; he was a rich man. He once told me he an old timer had shown him a fabulous opal mine, far out in the desert. It gave him more money than he ever needed. Instead he chose to live and work in the outback; it was the only place where he felt at home.
“As part of this life he bought and traded gemstones with other miners, always at a fair price. He would keep the best stones for himself, saying he loved to have these things of beauty. I think only I and Buck knew of this. Sometimes he would give them as gifts to friends.
“Even though he was rich he lived simply and spent little on himself, his needs were few. So those stones were his own collection and, when he went, he gave them to you to do with as you wish.”
Vic picked up the book and turned the pages until he came to where Susan first appeared. He said, “Here he tells of when he first saw you.”
He read aloud the words;
“Beach Girl, beautiful. She stands there with her toes in the little waves, hair flung back like a Greek goddess, arms stretched out to the morning sun. She is enchanting and I want to know who she is. I stand on the shore path, watching her in the bright light. When she looks my way I move behind trees, now I can only glimpse her. Then she comes my way, I keep out of sight, it might look like I am spying.
“She has stopped at an ice cream stand. Now she walks on, licking a cone with such pleasure, the ice cream trickles down her fingers and she licks it off. I wish I was an ice cream drop.”
Vic finished saying, “I wish I could write as well as he. In the moment I first saw you I felt something the same too. Part of me was jealous of Mark in that instant but part of me was also delighted that my friend had found such a wonderful person.
“I could not believe it when I heard he was gone. Even though I wanted you for myself I also felt entrusted by him to look after you.”
Mark’s words and Vic’s word both moved her greatly even though it was only Vic she knew, she remembered Mark not. The Mark she knew was only flashes of a face at the edge of the light.
She moved in against Vic and held him telling him she joyed greatly in being entrusted to him. Then she joined her body to him again and drifted back to sleep.
It was mid-morning when she woke again, saying, “Now I must read that letter from Anne, which Cathy, gave me last night.” She found the letter and opened it, taking the folded sheet in her hand and speaking the words,
“Dearest Susan,
I hope this letter finds you well, and congratulations on the great news about your little boy, Vic. I know I have said it to you on the phone, but I still find I want to write it too. I am so, soo, sooo excited for you.
I have also read about your heroic husband, and the stories which are now beginning to be told about his heroic wife, though last time I talked to Vic he said you had little interest in reading these stories, they had largely passed you by.
So, if you do not now know about your life or choose not to want to know, please put this letter aside without reading more. I would not have brought this memory back, but this story is not only about you.
I started trying to find out about you, my missing friend, but along the way I found the stories of others, those I called the “Lost Girls”. I have told these stories as best I can, and that would be the end, except that one girl is lost no longer, that is Cathy, who you have now met.
She has decided her story will cause much pain and yet it must be spoken. The man who is with her is the man who wrote awful things about you. He is the man who Vic punched and left in the gutter at your wedding. Now he is ashamed of what he did to you, knowing much he wrote was untrue. He has played no part in the recent stories about you and Vic, except to write a piece asking others to respect your privacy.
However, now, he is helping Cathy tell her story. Like you she has suffered much, but she wants the truth to be known. It is a hard story for her family to hear, it will be a hard story for her to speak of, yet she feels she must.
But, before she opens her own Pandora’s Box of secrets, she had set one condition, not to protect her family but to protect you. If you decide, after having met with
her, that you want this box of secrets closed, nothing further told. Then she and Jacob will tell of it no further, lest it harm you.
They say that, after the harm done to you in what Jacob wrote, their first consideration is to harm you no more. So Cathy has asked to meet with you, if you are willing, to tell you the story of her life and what she knows of Mark.
Then, she can decide if she is brave enough to tell the story of her own life for others to hear, her parents first and then the world.
So, if you are willing to know what happened from that time lost to your memory, then meet her, listen to her and hear what she has to say. If this is too hard, no one will blame you and she will speak of it no more and trouble you no further.
So I leave it with you to decide whether to hear her story. I know it and it is a brave story, but it is not mine to tell.
Please give your baby and your other delightful children lots of hugs and kisses from me and David and from all your other Australian friends.
We all miss you and Vic greatly and hope to see you again soon.
Your closest and ever loving friend
Anne”
Vic and Susan began to talk in earnest as she put the letter aside; it was the narrative of a lost year of her life that he told her. He did not know of the years before she came to Australia, but their importance was minor and others could fill them in.
However he knew the story of his wife from many sources, from the documentaries on all the lives of the ‘Lost Girls’ that Anne had made and which he had forced himself to watch despite the pain, from reading some bits of Mark’s diary, really only the parts about himself and Susan.
Due to the sensitivity of parts the full transcript had not been released, but Anne and the police had gradually worked through the different parts with the named parties, checking facts and verifying contexts. She and Alan had spent many hours with Vic going through the parts where he was either mentioned, where they concerned Susan or where the locations and other things may be within his knowledge.
At that time all had agreed that, with Susan gone, the diary was Mark’s bequest to Vic. It was also Susan’s gift to him in another time. So, although he had never fully looked at it before, it was agreed he had a right to it.
While he did not know all its contents and had largely avoided the parts that told bad things about his friend, yet in the knowledge sharing as they searched for Susan, he knew the main facts.
Now, slowly, over a morning, as their bodies lay almost together in a bed, he filled in the story. There were times when it was very hard and tears flowed, for both of them, at the unfolding tragedy of this man. But Vic knew that now it was begun it could not be stopped until an end was reached. So they talked, mostly it was Vic’s words as she had no memory other than the fragments that came two days before with the taking of the pictures.
She watched as he spoke, looking with a rapt face and intent eyes, occasionally asking him to stop, occasionally seeking for him to hold and comfort her. It was late morning when he finished. They knew others of the family had attended to their children David and Anne, and Susan had stopped once to feed Vic again. After the telling was done, they lay together, barely moving for a long time.
Finally she roused herself, saying. “Thank you for telling me, perhaps it is good that I don’t remember, though now I feel a huge void in my life, before it was just an empty place, like a blank sheet of paper, with nothing written.
“I do not know why I can no longer remember; perhaps it was protection so the awfulness could not reach me. Now part of me wants to stay in that place of forgetfulness. Another part wants to know it in my own mind. I fear that the memory will tear its way through, whether I want it or not.
“But I cannot go back to the place of unknowing, I must go forward. So I must go and meet with Cathy and hear her story. Before I do I will read what Mark’s diary say about her so I know at least a part of her story and can spare her telling that. I will do it this afternoon.
“Then perhaps I will read more of what it tells of me. For now I cannot bear to read the middle part, that which tells the worst of the man Mark. I find that this part is something I do not want to know.
“Will you come with me when I meet Cathy and along with her the man Jacob? If Jacob is helping her then I must help him. I know you fought with him to protect me but that is past. I cannot hold anger against him.”
Vic nodded, “Yes I will come and I will not fight with him.”
*
Next morning they all met in a café in the local town, a neutral ground.
Vic opened by shaking hands, with Jacob, saying, “My knuckles still hurt for a week after I hit you, I hope your face did not hurt for too long.”
Jacob answered, “I like people who fight for what they believe, though it was a month until I could eat without pain in my mouth. However it is past and I feel no pleasure in what I did and wrote.”
With that they shook hands and walked off to look at the countryside for five minutes while the girls talked alone. It was an intensely private thing, for Susan to tell Cathy she had read in Mark’s words of her most intimate and private memories as told to him when he was her lover; her rape as a child and the death of her sister. It was said in a minute. Then they just hugged in the way that sisters do. After that they talked for half an hour.
Cathy and Jacob told how they had met with Alan and he had told them he had passed over this same information to Scotland Yard a year and a half ago for its investigation. What was strange was that they had passed over the information in a case where the accused was now a missing person. Cathy’s uncle, George, had disappeared about four years ago now, bare months after Cathy met Mark and before Susan had first come to Australia.
George was on a tour of duty in the Middle East, providing support and intelligence in Iraq at a time when information emerged about a child pornography ring. His name was linked to it, nothing definite, but he was sought by the police to interview. The contact was only with a senior officer, so he should not have known of the police arranging an investigator to go to Iraq to meet him. But it seemed he was tipped off.
One day he had not come to work. All inquiries had since found no trace of him. He was skilled in working and operating in this environment. Perhaps he heard something and went underground. All that was officially known was he could not be located without any specific fears for his safety.
Four years was a long time, so it was hard to know what to make of it. It was particularly hard for Cathy’s mother. He was the younger brother and she did not know of what he had done to her daughters. Now he was missing too it was like she had lost one daughter, then another and now a brother. But Cathy was now the daughter who had returned. With Susan’s permission she would no longer live a lie.
Before the meeting was done Susan found herself offering to come with Cathy while she told her parents what had passed. Cathy was determined it must come out; she had moved past secrets and the harm they caused.
So that afternoon it was just Susan and Cathy who sat in another Scottish living room as they told a story, a story that no-one wanted to hear.
Mark and Jacob collected the children and drove in the countryside. David had taken a real shine to Jacob and sat on his shoulders as they walked in in the woods and hills around the villages they visited, Annie was happy to have Vic’s undivided attention. As they walked the men talked, sharing childhood tales, the boy who was mostly black and grew up in a rough London neighborhood, but fed his imagination on his mother’s Caribbean tales, and the other boy who was similarly black and grew up in a rough town camp in the middle of Australia, but was dragged into being something better by a sister with high expectations. By the end of the day they were fast friends. Each loved a woman who was alike, a survivor of something awful; the women could comfort each other in a way of sisters. So they must be like the brothers, and they felt like brothers. It seemed right.
They returned as the winter sun was setting to a somber l
iving room, tears had been cried, but there was forgiveness and the relief of knowing.
Cathy, having got her story out, decided it did not need to be spoken of further. She had been reconciled, only a vanished man remained. Grief must be endured as the family faced the truth. So all agreed the story would end here, unless the man was found.
Vic felt it was better that way; Cathy’s family had more than enough to deal with without having the story of such a man told outside their family circle, though his unexplained absence made full closure impossible.
Chapter 41 – Fading, Fading Colors
Vic and Susan spent most of the next two days with Jacob and Cathy. By the end of that time a fast friendship between all had formed.
Jacob took Susan aside, before leaving, saying, “I cannot believe what I wrote about you. It is so untrue. I had blinkers on my eyes. I was so angry that you dared to challenge the world, not bowing to its power. I confused that courage with mockery. Now I see what you were doing was refusing to give in to awfulness. It is good you do not remember that time. I would rather you never read what I wrote about you then.”
Susan said, “We did not know each other then, now we are friends. As I do not remember, it does not hurt me. So I will never read it.”
Then they were gone, returning to London to talk again to the English Police, then on to Australia via the Middle East, for one last attempt to find the Uncle who had remained elusive until now.
It was strange how, despite both Jacob and Cathy being UK citizens, they decided to spend their lives in Australia, at least for now. Both said it felt like home, it where they had found each other and a wholesome new life. Even if Cathy never found her Uncle and Jacob never published any parts of this story, they had reached joint acceptance. Now their lives had moved on
Vic felt a pang of regret that it was not him and Susan on the plane returning to his home. As winter ground slowly forward in Scotland he really missed his Australian life, particularly the endless bright sunlight.
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