Her blood leaped wild in her chest, threatening mutiny.
The danger had evaporated in the blink of an eye. Kerry pulled the bike over and turned the engine off. The road curved empty and innocent ahead, a black-grey strip of normality edged with eucalypts and paddocks. Cicadas roared in the trees. Puddles lay in the grassy gutters from yesterday’s storm. A placid Hereford rested on its knees, chewing the cud and wearing a white egret perched between its horns. The contrast between what was and what could have been stunned Kerry.
She panted, close to tears. Everything could have ended ten seconds ago on this sunny back road and the Hereford would still have sat there chewing, the cicadas would still have been thrumming. Only, she would have disappeared. Kerry shivered as she realised that Pretty Mary would have received yet another dead daughter as a birthday gift.
~
From where he sat at his dining table, Jim Buckley saw his pig dog loping, very tired and very sore, across the lawn towards him. The Patterson Herald fell from his hands onto the floor. He rocketed to his feet and marched outside to the veranda where the dog stood, her sides heaving.
The pig dog lifted her nose, hoping for a pat, or a treat. At least some encouragement. It had been a very long day for her, and an unheralded one. But Jim could only gape as the dog’s smooth white tail gave an uncertain wave. He slowly circled her, speechless, before putting his mobile to his ear.
‘Patterson Police.’
‘Nunny? Jim Buckley.’
‘Yep, how can I help you, Mayor?’
‘I’m gonna send you a photo in a minute. Photo of my dog. I want you to find out who’s responsible. Start with that smart cunt Kenny Salter.’
‘A photo of your dog?’
‘Yep. You’ll see what I mean,’ Jim spat. ‘Top priority, Nunny. And let me know when you’ve brought him in.’
‘No problem at all,’ answered Senior Sergeant Tony Nunne, a man who knew just how high it was wise to jump when the mayor used your primary school nickname. ‘I’ll grab Luke Chin and head over there shortly.’
Jim paused. That wouldn’t work.
‘Ya might wanna leave Luke out of it,’ he advised. ‘I’m not after a quiet word in Ken’s ear this time. That black cunt’s pushed the envelope a bit too fucking far for his own good.’
~
Kerry bought a pie at the Sugarloaf to celebrate her ongoing existence. The hot mince gave off a tantalising aroma when she peeled back the pastry lid. All those times at high school, smelling the white kids’ tuckshop pies and never having the bungoo for a bought lunch. Hot pies still smelt like luxury to her. And while she had a little bit of the council cash left, Kerry intended to live like she meant it. Adrenaline coursed through her, making her jumpy. She felt like sprinting up the street, screaming that she was ALIVE! She wanted to grab someone and tell them how she had nearly died, wanted to smash windows and punch out some arseholes who really deserved it. Wanted to stand barefoot in the main street and howl her victory to the sky.
Her next stop was gonna be the pub for the biggest bottle of vodka they sold, because once she got home she was getting wasted. Chug-a-lug, baby, oh yeah. Ken would be on black cans at the party tonight. So yep, she’d buy a ginormous bottle of vodka and make a night of it. If Ken wanted any drama she’d go down swinging.
Waiting for her pie to cool, Kerry wandered along the footpath and stood in front of Patterson Real Estate. She really should chuck a brick through that fucking window one of these nights. She looked below the riverfront acreages to some ads for waterless weekender blocks serially abandoned by disillusioned townies. Opposite those were the rentals. Kerry read wryly as she bit into the pastry. Everything in Patto was laughably out of reach, three and four hundred bucks a week, but a couple of places in Durrongo were cheap on account of being both ancient deathtraps and also for sale. Kerry took another bite. Chewed. Tried to imagine staying on in New South Wales, having her own place. Living by her own rules. Working the markets for rent money. Maybe get Donny to share with her, he could chuck in for food, or else cuzzie Chris with his missus Shakayla and their kid. No Ken grinding her gears with his bullshit. A place where Steve could visit, or not, as he pleased. Not forever. Just till she could work out what could be done to save the island.
She chucked her pie packet in the bin, wiped her mouth and snorted. Not very bloody likely that they would give her a house, especially once they realised she was a Salter. But fuck it, she could have been lying dead on the bitumen five clicks from town, so what did she have to lose? The worst they could do was tell her to fuck off. Kerry pushed open the door.
Three minutes later, Kylie shoved a form at her.
‘If you could sign here, and here,’ she said without warmth, ‘to confirm that you understand there’s no liability to us if anything breaks or falls down on your head. They’re pretty old, those places. I think this one might actually be a converted milking bails …’
Astounded, Kerry signed on the dotted line. This was what it was like then, to not hear get back to ya humpy or that one’s just gone. She looked at her arm. Yep, still black.
‘I’ll just go out the back and take photocopies,’ Kylie said, picking up Kerry’s licence and Medicare card. She either hadn’t noticed, or didn’t care, that the Queensland licence had expired years ago. ‘The agent’s got the keys, so if you don’t mind waiting, she shouldn’t be too long …’
Still laughing in disbelief, Kerry told her she was in no particular hurry. Alone in the front office, her gaze fell on the other side of the counter. Bit of a pigsty. A cold, half-drunk cappuccino had grown a wrinkled skin. Hand-scrawled notes: ring Mandy re netball. Plumbers’ quotes for working on drains at a block of units. A menu from Thai Kingdom. At the top of Kylie’s intray sat a manila folder labelled 375 Mount Monk Road. The poltergeist house!
Grinning at the memory of her mother’s scam, Kerry opened the folder just a crack. Bought by ‘THE PURCHASER/S’ Ryan and Jasmine Marsden of 10 Tibouchina Street, Gloucester, from ‘THE VENDOR/S’ James William Buckley trading as Patterson Real Estate. Buckley’s fingers in every fucken pie in town, that’d be right. The Marsdens had paid him three hundred and twenty grand for the termite palace on five acres. Kerry began mentally to multiply the number of acres in Durrongo Shire by three hundred and twenty thousand, and then divided that number by five. Stymied, she soon gave up on estimating what her family was owed by the Australian state. The number of billions didn’t matter much. It wasn’t like they were ever going to fucking get it back.
Idly she scanned the rest of the contract until she got to the witnessed signatures at the bottom. Then she blinked.
No.
What?
Hang on.
What!
It couldn’t be there, and yet it was there.
Kerry flailed in a giant, dumping wave. She fought to break free of the choking water that surged around her, threatening to drag her down to nothingness, as she read and reread the nonsense words at the bottom of the contract. Impossibly, stupidly, across from the Marsdens’ two signatures, beneath a third, illegible black scrawl, someone had typed:
Donna Z. Salter, NSW licensed agent 80451.
‘Excuse me, you can’t be looking at that,’ Kylie snatched the manila folder away and snapped it shut with a glare. ‘That’s commercial-in-confidence!’
Kerry didn’t apologise. Didn’t even step back. She remained rooted on the spot, gaping and blinking, staring through Kylie as though she hadn’t spoken.
Kylie peered at her, like she was wondering if Kerry had gotten drunk or high in the couple of minutes she’d been photocopying. She put the manila folder into a steel drawer, then shuffled the papers she held into a neat rectangle, hesitating over the keys to 402 Mount Monk Road. Just get anyone in there, Martina had told her a fortnight ago. It doesn’t matter who, they’re all basically condemned shitholes anyway. Two lots
of prospective renters had come back shaking their heads.
‘Hello? Can I get you some water or something?’ Kylie was beginning to worry.
All Kerry heard was roaring in her ears. She sank down onto a chair beside the door and leaned forward. Put her head in her hands, trying to fit the broken pieces of the day back together. Had Jim Buckley stolen her dead sister’s identity? Was it him who had murdered Donna, all those years ago? Or – extremely unlikely but possible – could there be two Donna Z. Salters in northern New South Wales?
She looked up to find Kylie offering her iced water from the fridge, and to call someone.
‘Who sold that old house on Mount Monk Road?’ Kerry croaked, water slopping over the rim of her glass to fall in bright clear blobs onto the impermeable blue carpet. ‘To the Marsdens?’
Kylie hesitated. She was beginning to worry that this Abo chick was some kind of nutter. Then, to her relief, the back door of the agency swung open.
‘Holy Jesus Christ on a biscuit,’ said Martina softly, walking in and recoiling. She switched instantly to battle mode. ‘Kylie, can you take a couple of hours off and go out, love? I’ll manage things here. Quick sticks!’
‘But – what are you – I mean, are you – are you going to be okay?’ Kylie grimaced. Are you going to be alright with this aberrant black body in the office, she meant. Safe.
Kerry’s face had turned the colour of mangrove mud at low tide.
‘It’s fine, just go,’ Martina insisted, ushering Kylie towards the door with five fingertips stiff in the small of her back. Though of course nothing was fine, not anymore. ‘Come back at one.’
Jesus shitting Christ. Another fortnight and she would have been back at Rose Bay. Two miserable little weeks.
With a confused shrug, Kylie headed out the door. In three fast moves Martina had flipped the office sign to Closed, snicked the lock, and switched the office phone to message bank.
‘You’d better come through,’ she told her little sister.
~
Dazed, Kerry followed Donna to the rear corner office.
‘Drink?’ Donna reached low beneath the polished mahogany of her desk to slop golden liquor into two squat crystal glasses. The solid thunk of the Johnnie Walker bottle landing on top of the desk snapped Kerry back to reality. She looked at Donna’s left wrist.
There it was, the faint scar from Ken’s ten-speed racer, the day he failed to brake when Donna had stood in the way demanding her turn.
Donna threw back a neat mouthful.
‘It’s you, isn’t it?’ Kerry was bewildered.
‘Drink. It’ll help.’
‘Why … why didn’t you let us know you were alive? What were you … where have you … Jesus Donna, why the fuck?’
‘Why am I here now? Or why did I stay away? Bloody sit down, will you?’ Donna answered, sculling two more fingers before refilling her glass. She pushed the second tumbler across at Kerry, who gave it the briefest of glances. The scent of whisky sickened her. It was the stench of winter 1999, when Pretty Mary had handed her troubles to a Higher Power and gotten sober, and Dad Charlie had perversely taken to the bottle for the first time in his life.
‘Sit down, Kez,’ Donna repeated, calmly crossing her legs.
Kerry fell into the chair.
‘Why not let us know you were alive?’ she blurted furiously. ‘For the love of God! Do you know what you put Mum and Dad through?’ She shook her head. Pulled out her phone and began to stab at the keypad.
‘You need to wait,’ Donna said, urgently. ‘It’s really important. Before you call anybody …’
Kerry looked across the desk at this glossy stranger. Donna had different hair – straight now, and layered, with blonde highlights, making a kind of expensive ashy effect. The nose was different too, narrower and with more of a peak. But it was her sister, alright.
Whenever Kerry had imagined Donna alive it was as a weathered version of the teen who had left the pub in a stranger’s Mitsubishi. A middle-aged woman still wearing those girlish cut-off jeans and a Bon Jovi singlet. But Kerry’s picture was all wrong. Donna bore the years lightly, even considering the nose job. She was fit, arms and legs toned, not much different in the waist than she had been at sixteen. Oh, she had the lined cheeks of a drinker if you looked closely, but there was nothing much else to say she was anything but your ordinary Aussie chick. Terribly, terribly ordinary. That olive skin had let her slip away and become somebody else altogether. Who would I be, if I wanted to disappear, Kerry wondered? Somebody Kumar, somebody Garcia. A black American from Atlanta, Georgia: Kerry M. Washington, at your service, ma’am. All Donna had needed was to get a nose job and break her family’s hearts.
You stone-cold bitch.
‘Please. Just wait one minute—’
Kerry lowered her phone.
‘Is this all you’ve got?’ She nodded at the cut-glass tumbler in front of her.
‘It’s Johnnie Walker Red.’
Kerry grimaced. Held her nose closed with two fingers as she sucked half the vile fluid down. She shuddered as it hit her tastebuds. Breathed out loudly in disgust, and wiped her mouth.
‘You’re obviously not an aficionado?’ Donna raised her eyebrows. Kerry just looked at her. Was Donna making a joke? Expecting her to – what? Laugh? No. I’m not a fucking aficionado.
‘Go on then. But this had better be good,’ she said tightly. Because what could Donna say that would help? What could take away the years of not knowing, the tortures they had imagined? Those hideous nights when Pretty Mary sobbed on the other side of the bedroom wall, while the top bunk above Kerry stayed forever empty – a sheeted, pillowed grave – and Dad Charlie raged at everything in his terrible grief till it felled him.
Donna toyed with her glass. Swirled the Scotch in a circle to the left, then to the right.
‘So, I left after the big fight that day, when Mum booted me out …’ she said, then stopped. ‘What do you want to know, exactly?’
Kerry snorted. What did Donna think she wanted to know? Her fucking bra size?
‘Why didn’t you let us know you were alive, one. Where the fuck have you been and what have you been doing for nineteen years, two. And why disappear into thin air in the first place? Try that, for starters …’ Kerry was beginning to yell. She felt like rising up, a force of nature. Felt like smashing everything in this fancy office. She could pick up the heavy office chair she sat in and slam it through the internal window. Could hurl the desktop computer to the carpet, watch it explode into fragments of grey plastic and wire and glass, then take Donna by the arm and sling her into the plaster wall … and if she did all those things, then maybe, just maybe, all the stuff on the outside of her would match the stuff inside her, to the tiniest degree, and some kind of balance would be restored.
But Donna was mouthing something else now, something about stabbing Pop, and the scissors getting stuck in his chest. Her sister was coming in and out of focus.
‘… and afterwards, I didn’t know if I’d killed him or what … there was no Facebook back then, remember. And the longer it went on, and when nobody came looking, the more … normal it felt. To stay gone. To just be someone else.’ Donna’s voice was clipped. ‘And after a couple of years, I was someone else … I became a different person, Kerry. I don’t expect you to understand, but I’m not Donna Salter anymore. Except for my passport and my real estate licence. I’m Martina Rossi. I’ve been selling houses in Sydney for fifteen years, and I’m bloody good at it, too.’
‘Well, that’s lovely,’ Kerry said sarcastically, ‘and I’m truly happy for ya, Martina. Only you didn’t kill him. He died at home in bed a couple of months ago. And your mother’s having her sixty-fifth birthday party tonight and she thinks you’re as dead as he is.’ Kerry made Donna look at a picture of Pretty Mary at Sandy Beach lagoon. Smiling up for the photo real happy way, her fir
st good day since Pop passed.
‘Here. Ya mother. Remember her, do ya?’
The photo winded Donna like a rabbit punch to the guts. She had thought so many times over the years about Pop and Dad Charlie. About Black Superman, and the others, yes. All of these populated her imagination – obsessively in the first months, then less and less as the years sifted by. Even last year she had found herself idly wondering, once in a blue moon, who they had become, whether she would recognise them, encountered at random in a Sydney street. But Donna had known immediately back in ’99 that in order to survive she would have to forget the stringy brown woman aghast in the kitchen, screaming about what was to become of her if she didn’t mend her wicked ways. There had never been any question of remembering that. Pretty Mary had been surgically excised from Donna’s consciousness from the beginning. Asked by acquaintances if she had a mother, she routinely replied no and wasn’t even lying. A guillotine had fallen between then and now, and everything on the other side of that shining blade had been put away forever.
Donna contemplated Pretty Mary’s image for a long moment, then put the phone facedown on the desk. Her mouth stayed grim but her eyes were moist.
‘She’s alive then.’
‘Yep. And you need to be there tonight. It’s the least you can do.’
Donna sculled her drink with a shaky hand and put the empty glass down. She was desperate for a smoke, but her cigarettes were in the Mazda. Without thinking, she poured again.
‘Do ya wanna slow down a bit with that?’ Kerry asked, seeing the tremble in Donna’s hand and misinterpreting it as the DTs.
‘Will Dad be there?’
Kerry realised how very far Donna had wandered. ‘Dad’s … Dad had a massive coronary in the kitchen a few months after you took off. Fifth of June 1999. Sorry.’ She berated herself for the ‘sorry’. She had nothing to apologise for. It wasn’t her who’d fucked off and killed their father with worry. ‘Ken’s divorced. Got three kids that we know about. Two little girls with a Torres Strait chick who went back home with em. And Donny’s the oldest, he’s nineteen. Mel’s boy, lives at home. Mel’s dead. Aneurysm.’
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