‘You should just keep your door shut,’ I told Dee whenever she said she’d had enough, Sammy was going back to the pound.
‘Why should I have to do anything?’ she asked me. ‘She’s the one who should be changing her behaviour.’
There was never any point arguing with Dee.
On the floor next to her bed was the book she was reading, spine bent back to mark her page. Her glasses lay on top of it, smudged, the lens sticky-taped into the frame. There was some semblance of order on Tom’s side of the bed (his books were stacked neatly on his bedside table, his glasses were in their case), but the effort seemed futile in the face of the rest of the chaos.
I headed downstairs, wishing I’d stayed at school. I didn’t want to be on my own. I flicked on the television and then flicked it off again. I swung in the hanging cane chair Tom bought when he sank the lounge room, and then I leapt out, almost hitting my knees against the sharp edges of the built-in seats. I couldn’t keep still.
Shutting the front door behind me, I went out again, riding my bike through the gate and into the empty midday heat.
We live in the middle of a narrow street that leads down to the top of the waterfront reserve. Jacarandas line either side, the tips of their branches almost touching overhead. Behind sandstone walls you can see glimpses of the houses. The Scotts are directly opposite. They’re both in their seventies and occasionally ask me to ride up to the chemist to pick up a prescription. Dee insists that I help them out, but I don’t really mind. Mrs Scott always makes me a warm milky tea and gives me a biscuit she’s baked when I return. I sit in her kitchen and talk to her about my favourite authors. She was an editor in a publishing house, and sometimes lends me books, hardbacks with yellowed paper – stories that are old-fashioned, and I pretend to have enjoyed them when I give them back. I thought for a moment about going there now, wanting company and perhaps even to talk to her about what had happened.
I eventually decided to ride to the waterfront. Normally I would have assumed Joe would be there, but today I wasn’t so sure. I was nervous about going there. He would have felt the same. Yet I made myself head down the hill, partly to find him but also because I wanted to see where it had happened, perhaps in the hope that this would make it what it had always been – a place where we hung.
At the bottom of our street is the Parsons’ house, right next to the steep stone stairs cutting through the reserve. Thick ivy grows over the wall that borders their garden. Behind it you can see the shutters askew on their hinges, the iron roof of the verandah leaning down at one end, the guttering hanging loose.
Bradley Parsons is sixteen years old and must weigh about sixteen stone. His eyes squint and he always comes in too close when he tries to talk. ‘What you up to?’ he asks, and we back away. Sometimes he just leans over the top of the wall, calling out to anyone who passes by and occasionally picking his nose.
Lyndon, who could be a cruel bastard, called Bradley a disgusting freak of nature. Once he blew a long green stream of snot out of his nose and into his hand, holding it out for Bradley to eat. When Bradley shook his head, Lyndon gripped him in a headlock and smeared the snot across his cheek. I didn’t see this, but Joe did. He told Dee, trying to explain that Lyndon had days like this, days when he was so angry that none of them could talk to him.
She said it was no excuse. ‘No matter how hard he’s had it, he shouldn’t do something as shameful as that.’
As I stood at the top of the stairs leading down to the waterfront, I could hear the slap of the current against the sandstone boulders. The river was swelling as the tide turned in the heat of the afternoon, lapping over the rocky outcrops cutting jagged lines into the curve of the banks. There was a sound like a stone being thrown into the deep grey of the water, the splash cutting through the stillness. Someone was down there. I hoped it was Joe.
I dropped my bike at the top of the path. Each step was uneven, but I knew them so well I had no need to hold onto the railing – besides, the flaking paint always left at least one needle-sharp splinter in the soft flesh of your palm.
At the bottom of the steps the grass grows long and thick down to the muddy edge of the water. At low tide, small crabs scurry down into the ooze trying to find some shelter from the fierce sun. I stood still for a moment, listening. To my right, the river bent slightly, the bank narrowing to a strip of sandstone and the crusted shells that cut through the soles of your feet. If you picked your way along the edge and around the slight bend, there was a cave, just high enough for you to sit, hidden from view. Sonia, Cassie and I used to hang there in first year with Ricky and Jez, two boys in our year. We took it in turns to kiss, giving each other commentary on technique. The thought embarrassed me now.
To the left, the reserve stretches to an outcrop of rock that is rarely covered by the tide. At the shore are other caves, higher and narrower; they are more like overhangs of sandstone, the rock coloured in rainbow strips of ochre and yellow and orange. In one there are Aboriginal paintings, small figures of kangaroos and men, scrawled over with graffiti – who loved who scribbled in charcoal. This was where the older kids came, lighting fires, sneaking cigarettes, drinking and smoking dope. For years we had spied on them, Joe included, but now he was one of the gang that met down here after school, hanging until the sun slipped behind the bend, leaving the bush deep, dark and dense: black shadows and shapes that still had the capacity to appear menacing despite us all knowing this country so well.
As I walked along the edge of the reserve, being careful not to make any sound or step out far enough to be visible from the caves, I came close enough to hear Joe and Kate, and then the others, Cherry, Lyndon and Stevie all talking.
At first there were only mutterings, but then, as I stayed still and silent, watching and listening carefully, I heard their words more clearly.
One of them was crying. I presumed it was Kate. Stevie was comforting her. Lyndon asked someone to give him a match and then he walked out onto the rock. He stood tall and thin in his long tight jeans, an old T-shirt and thongs, smoking and pacing, agitated. I moved back, sitting at the edge of the scrub and hoping he wouldn’t see me. Lyndon scared me. There was something hard and tense in him, a cruelty that made others do as he said for fear of reprisal. Sonia had told me she thought he was sexy and I had seriously questioned her sanity for the second time in our friendship (the first being the time she found God during her brief stint with the local Christian fellowship).
‘He’s a bully,’ I said.
She reminded me about the time he had stopped Brent Davis from humiliating a new kid. Brent was in his last year. Lyndon was only fourteen. Brent took the kid’s pants down and left him naked and crying on the oval. Lyndon had gone to his rescue but he had also gone berserk, ripping the pants out of Brent’s hands and giving them back to the boy. In the fight that followed, Lyndon’s nose was broken, the blood streaming down his face as he continued to struggle, despite three teachers holding him back.
Lyndon lived with a brother who was much older. Their place was on the other side of the overpass to us, where red-brick flats were built up along the main road. Joe once told me that Lyndon’s dad was in jail, and he made me swear never to tell anyone. I wanted to know what he’d done. Joe thought it was armed robbery, but he wasn’t really sure. Once when he was much younger he had spent the night there, only to call Dee and Tom at midnight. Lyndon’s brother was drunk and angry, and Joe was scared. Tom brought them both home. The next morning Lyndon insisted on going back to the flat to see his brother before school. He wanted to check that everything was okay. Tom went with him. Later, he told Dee that the brother had been very sorry, but he had still felt bad leaving Lyndon on his own. ‘He’s just a little kid,’ he said. ‘He needs someone to look after him.’
Lyndon stood there now, and he flicked his cigarette out into the water, before turning back to the others.
‘Jesus.’ His voice was harsh and he must have been talking to Kate because the
crying stopped. He had his arms folded across his chest and his back to the others.
Kate’s reply was high and strained. ‘I was just asking.’
There was muttering from behind her, and then Joe spoke clearly.
‘She asked all of us. Not just you.’
Lyndon didn’t turn around.
Cherry came out on the rock then. She was part of their gang but she wasn’t. No one really claimed her as a friend, although in the last few weeks Amanda had begun to hang with her more often. Her parents were wealthy and lived only two doors up from Amanda’s, also in a house with a garden that opened up onto the waterfront reserve. Dee called Cherry’s father ‘a slimy arsehole with a foul temper’. Len Atkinson owned one of the development companies trying to build housing at Greenwood Bush. He’d once visited us, bringing a bottle of very expensive wine as an ‘offer of peace’. Dee refused to take it. She told him she had no animosity towards him personally but she disagreed with what his company was doing and was not going to change her mind. She told Tom that he became nasty then. He called her a foolish housewife and warned her, and her friends, to back off.
Cherry always had more money than the others, even more than Amanda, and she spent it at the local milk bar and tuckshop, buying whatever anybody wanted. She also snuck out bottles of wine and cigarettes from her house, taking them to parties and giving them away in the hope of being liked.
Her long hair fell across her face and she scratched at a mossie bite on her arm. ‘Do you reckon the police know what happened?’
Lyndon snapped at her. ‘How would I know?’
Joe told him he didn’t have to be such an aggro dickhead. As he stepped out of the cave, I knew I had to start thinking about turning around and heading back across the reserve before he made a move for home and found me spying on him and his friends.
‘The police don’t know how she died.’ Joe looked at Cherry. ‘That’s why they wanted to talk to us.’
Lyndon shook his head. ‘Wise up. Just ’cos they say they don’t know doesn’t mean shit.’ He looked out to the rocks. ‘I’m not talking to them unless I’ve got a lawyer.’
‘Why?’ Kate came out of the cave. She stood on the rocks next to Joe, her gaze turned directly to Lyndon. Behind her the tide was creeping up over the boulders, lapping at the edge of the oyster shells, the water now deep enough to drown in. In the afternoon light, it sparkled and glistened, the surface covered in a thousand flecks of dancing diamonds.
I stood up, ready to creep back, and then I heard Kate’s voice, clear and sharp.
‘It’s not like we’ve got anything to hide.’
I glanced behind me and she was standing there, directly opposite Lyndon, looking straight into his face.
He didn’t move. His hands were on his hips and he glared at her, bending slightly so that he could bring his face close to hers. ‘Say it.’
She stepped away, almost colliding with Joe.
‘I only said she’d been strange. There was something she wasn’t telling me.’ Kate had stayed still, determined not to be cowed in the face of his anger. ‘I was asking if anyone knew. That’s all.’
Stevie was on the ledge now, his arm on Lyndon’s. He was talking to him, his voice too low for me to hear the actual words, but he appeared to be trying to calm him down.
‘No one’s accusing anyone.’ It was Kate again, head held high. She was surrounded by the others, all but Lyndon clustered close in that early afternoon sun, the rocks white hot beneath their feet.
I had seen them, there on that ledge, so often, always with Amanda in their midst. As I stood at the edge of the grassy reserve trying to catch a few last words before I really did have to run back up the stairs to avoid being caught, I was aware of how strange it was to see them without her. Amanda Clarke had died, and the reality of her absence was right there in front of me. When something like that happens, it’s a deep shock sent up from the depths, the force building, knocking everything off tilt.
four
Fact: Amanda Clarke had a secret.
I wrote those words the day after we learnt Amanda had died, aware that there was something wrong with the sentence. I had heard Kate say Amanda wasn’t telling her something, but was that enough to make the secret a fact? There was so little that could be held up as the complete and irrefutable truth. I had to be more precise.
Fact: Kate said she thought Amanda had a secret.
That was better.
When I left the waterfront that afternoon, I rode to our gate and then changed my mind. I still didn’t want to be home alone. I saw Mrs Scott in her garden and asked her if she needed anything from the chemist.
‘No,’ she smiled. ‘But some company would be lovely.’
There was a book on her kitchen table that she said had taken the world by storm. It was called The Female Eunuchand I picked it up to look at the cover. It was an image of a headless, limbless woman’s body hanging in black space. There was something shocking to it, a brutality that made me put it down again quickly.
‘I only read stories,’ I explained, when she offered to lend it to me.
She said that surprised her. ‘A young woman with an enquiring mind such as yours? You miss out on so much if you limit yourself.’ She turned the book over. ‘It’s by a feminist called Germaine Greer. It talks about a need for change. Women have been treated as second-class citizens for too long, never accorded the same rights as men.’
I told her it sounded like a book Dee would have.
‘It’s not only interesting,’ Mrs Scott smiled. ‘It’s an entertaining and stirring read. Puts the fire in your belly.’
I asked her if she had heard about Amanda and she shook her head.
‘Tell me.’
I tried, but there was so little I could say with any certainty. Amanda was dead. That was a core truth, everything else around it was just tales.
Mrs Scott listened without saying a word. When I finished, she showed me a picture of her and her husband sitting on a picnic rug with another couple. The waterfront was more overgrown then, the grass long and dry, and the bank opposite covered with scrub, no sign of the houses that were yet to be developed. They used to paddle down the river in a dinghy and catch fish. Sometimes Mr Scott would chip the oysters off the rocks, the shell tough and brittle, the flesh slimy and salty, feeding them to his wife on the tip of the blade.
‘I loved them,’ Mrs Scott said. ‘Absolutely delicious.’
They also swam then, although they were wary of sharks.
‘On a hot summer’s day, the river would be thrillingly cold, worth risking life and limb for.’ She smiled. ‘Although we never went far out from the shore and I was always nervous. It was so dark, deep and green, you could never see what was lurking underneath.’
She tapped the photograph, her long, white finger touching the other man’s face, as she told me he had drowned. I couldn’t see him clearly, he had turned away from the camera and he was in the shade of a large desert oak, the light dappled and dancing across his features. He had a hat pulled to one side and he appeared to be laughing. The woman opposite him was leaning in close, her eyes bright in the direct light.
She was his wife.
He had gone down there late one night, diving off the rocks into the deep rush of inky water, black under the heavy night sky. He may have been drunk and in high spirits. Or perhaps he had been troubled, battling a problem alone. No one knew why. Darting down into the darkness, his foot was caught by a reed, snagged, twisted and trapped. He would have struggled to free himself, body flicking in a panic like a fish on a line, turning and tugging as he tried to disentangle the slippery knot around his pale flesh, more desperate as he ran short of breath, until the air in his lungs emptied and the bubbles stopped rising to the surface and he collapsed, limp and lifeless, eventually floating, pale to the surface.
They had found him the next day.
It was a terrible thing, Mrs Scott said. She had looked away for a moment before p
utting the photograph back on the shelf. ‘His wife desperately wanted an answer,’ she continued, ‘a truth to hang onto.’
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