Darkwater

by Georgia Blain

  She paused.

  ‘You’re quite right to question everything that is being said. It’s essential.’ As she held up the teapot, I looked at the liver-brown spots on her hands and the plain gold band around her wedding finger. ‘Who says this is tea? I’ve told you that’s what it is, but how can you be sure? All you can do is look at the evidence.’ She took a sip. ‘It tastes like tea. It certainly smells like tea, and it looks like tea.’

  She offered me another biscuit, and I took one, biting into the crisp sugary coating, and letting it dissolve in my mouth.

  ‘So, I think we’re pretty safe in calling this tea.’ She smiled again, and I thought she had finished. But then she leant across the table and took my hand, her skin cool and dry. ‘Or are we? What if Mr Scott walked in the door now and told you this was something quite different?’ She looked towards the back of the cool kitchen, where the screen door opened onto the garden where Mr Scott was mowing the lawn, the smell of clippings sweet and summery.

  ‘Would you listen to him?’ The whites of her eyes had yellowed, the blue irises were faded and watery, but you could still see how piercing they would have been.

  I nodded although I wasn’t entirely sure I would have taken the time to continue discussing tea with her husband.

  ‘He might have his own evidence.’ She stood up now and opened the back door, letting in a little more light as she called out to her husband that his cup was getting cold.

  I thanked her, pushing back my chair.

  ‘That’s what you need,’ she continued, as she rinsed our cups under the tap. ‘The capacity to retain an open mind, a willingness to re-examine the evidence if it’s called for. And–’ she turned towards me, and pressed the copy of The Female Eunuchinto my hand – ‘the strength to be able to admit when you are wrong.’

  Dee was home. Before I’d even opened the door, I heard her in the kitchen and I could tell she was furious.

  ‘They should never have let the police talk to them without their parents.’ Her university notes were spread across the table, the phone was pressed to her ear, and she was throwing meat and roughly chopped vegetables into a pot. Stew, I realised, not looking forward to the prospect.

  ‘We need to both go there tomorrow and talk to that idiot of a principal.’

  Tom must have been on the other end.

  ‘Both of us,’ she insisted.

  Upstairs Joe had his door shut. Pink Floyd was playing loudly. I knocked and when he didn’t hear me, turned the handle slowly. He was lying on his bed, drawing. The fine smudge of red around his eyes showed he’d been crying. He sat up, the paper slipping to the floor to reveal a rough line sketch of Amanda. He didn’t bother to pick it up. He just stayed on the edge of his bed, knees drawn to his chest and, as he started crying again, I sat with him, not sure how to help him because the role of comforter was not one I was frequently called upon to play.

  ‘You know how they found her?’ He looked down at the holes in his jeans, revealing the fine bones of his knees.

  I shook my head.

  ‘She was facedown in the water, lying there, her foot stuck in a gap between the rocks. Her head was bleeding. They reckon she’d cut it.’

  ‘Was it an accident?’ I hardly dared ask the question.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  The record came to an end, the needle stuck in the groove, clicking monotonously as it went round and round the turntable. I lifted the stylus and put it back on its rest. The window was wide open and there was, for the first time that day, a slight shift in the breeze, a hint of cool to relieve the unrelenting burning heat, as the evening slowly began to colour the sky with a softness that would deepen into night.

  Downstairs, Dee had put on a Joan Baez record, folk songs that Joe and I hated. We both rolled our eyes.

  ‘How’s Kate?’ I asked, remembering her fainting that morning and then the way she’d stared Lyndon down that afternoon, shoulders square as she’d faced him on the rock ledge.

  But Joe didn’t want to talk any more. The moments in which he let me into his life were rare and they were always brief.

  ‘Upset,’ he replied and it was all he was going to say. He put Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heavenon, the build of the music competing with the whining of Joan Baez downstairs, until eventually I couldn’t stand it any more and I put on my own record in my room – Cat Stevens singing Sad Lisa– as loud as everyone else in the house.

  Later that evening, when Tom came home, Dee sat us all down and said we needed to talk about Amanda.

  She took Joe’s hand in her own and surprisingly he didn’t try to pull away. ‘What has happened is terrible, and if there is anything – anything at all – that you know, you should tell us. We won’t be angry.’

  With his eyes fixed on the table, my brother kept jiggling his leg up and down, up and down.

  ‘Roxie and Max must be a mess.’ Dee turned to Tom. ‘I don’t know what we should do – whether we should go round there, or call, or drop in a card, or flowers?’ She ran her hand through her hair.

  Tom told her flowers sounded like the best idea and then he too turned to Joe.

  ‘It’s important. You, too.’

  He looked at me and I shook my head and shrugged my shoulders, then, unable to stop myself, I started to cry, an image of Amanda facedown in that river seeping like a darkness through me.

  ‘I’m all right,’ I pushed Dee away, but she didn’t remove her arm.

  I picked Sammy up and held her tight, her soft brown hair knotted between my fingers, and her body warm in my lap. ‘Was she murdered?’ And then I finally managed to ask the question I’d been wanting to ask, although I wasn’t sure if I wanted to know the answer. ‘Was it one of you guys?’

  Joe looked horrified. He pushed his chair back, the legs scraping against the slate floor. ‘How could you think that?’

  I told him I was sorry. I didn’t really think that, but there were so many rumours.

  ‘Like what?’ he demanded.

  ‘Nothing.’ I knew I was turning all that I had heard into one big ugly accusation. ‘It was just when the police called you all in...’

  Tom told us to both calm down. ‘No one thinks you or any of your friends did anything. And what happened with the police was wrong. They shouldn’t have talked to you without a parent or lawyer present.’

  ‘Lyndon wanted a lawyer.’ I spoke softly, aware that Joe was still glaring at me.

  ‘How do you know?’ he asked.

  ‘Sonia said that Sal had said.’

  ‘If he did want a lawyer, he was quite within his rights,’ Tom intervened. ‘Don’t go jumping to conclusions.’ He began to clear the dinner plates, stacking them in an ordered pile next to the morning’s dirty plates and bowls, still waiting to be washed. ‘Whose turn?’

  Both Joe and I pointed at each other.

  Tom threw the tea towel at me and the rubber gloves at Joe.

  ‘How come you don’t do anything?’ I asked. ‘Why is it always the women and the children?’

  Tom folded his arms. ‘I’ve been working all day.’

  ‘So have we.’ I could see his scepticism. ‘At school.’ And I nodded at Dee. ‘At university.’

  Dee smiled. ‘She’s got a point.’

  Tom shook his head. ‘Dee cooked. I was at work until six. You two are doing the dishes.’

  I was about to insist, to tell him that he never did anything around the house. We were the only ones who had picked up the slack since Dee started studying, but I could tell he was on the verge of losing it, and although it was rare for Tom to shout, it wasn’t good when he did.

  Later that night, when I’d finished my homework, I showed Dee the book that Mrs Scott had lent me.

  She told me she’d read it. ‘There’s a copy upstairs.’

  I said I’d flicked through it, but it looked a little boring to me, although I did agree with what she was saying – ‘Germaine, that is.’

  ‘Tom doesn’t do anything arou
nd the house,’ I insisted.

  Dee agreed he didn’t do much. ‘He’s better than a lot of men though.’ She was sitting at the kitchen table trying to finish an essay, and she looked tired. ‘But when you talk about equality between men and women, it’s more than just housework. It’s being able to do the same jobs that men do. If you want to be a builder like your father, why not? If you want to go into politics, or run a company, or drive a truck – your gender shouldn’t matter. There’s been a division between what’s regarded as women’s work – usually the caring professions like teaching and nursing that are always chronically underpaid – and men’s work, which usually has a higher status in society. I can give you some other books to read.’

  I shook my head. She was boring me now, and I wished I’d never opened up the conversation. ‘I just think things need to change around here.’ I waved my hand towards the sink.

  ‘They are changing,’ Dee told me, and she nodded at her books. ‘More than you realise.’

  She turned back to her papers and then looked up at me one more time.

  ‘Keep an eye out for your brother.’ She had pushed her glasses down to the end of her nose and was looking straight at me. ‘This has been upsetting for everyone – but very much so for him.’

  five

  Theory: Amanda Clarke killed herself.

  Sitting in my bedroom, looking out at the darkness of the Moreton Bay fig that grew in our garden, I heard the bats screech, their leathery wings a whoosh in the night as they swept down on the rotten fruit that clung in clusters to the branches.

  I hated bats. Once Joe had knocked one down from where it was stretched between the telegraph lines, electrocuted. Its wings were shrivelled, cracked and crisped. He had challenged me to touch it. He had promised me his pocket money for the next month. He had even said he would do all my chores. It was one of the only times I didn’t take up a dare.

  I was meant to be in bed so I had only my desk light on to see by. This was the first entry where I had moved away from facts and decided to leap straight into something larger – theories. I didn’t know whether Amanda Clarke had killed herself but it was certainly possible. We had talked about suicide in social ed. People killed themselves when they were in trouble or depressed and believed they were alone. Father Mullaney, who took the class, told us that suicide was a sin. Only God could decide when our time was up.

  ‘What happens if you don’t believe in God?’ I asked, and he fixed me with a cold stare.

  ‘That,’ he said, ‘is the problem. Lack of belief will drive any of us to despair.’

  Kate thought Amanda had been strange before she died.

  I didn’t know her well enough to tell whether there was a change to her. From a distance, she seemed like someone who would have had no reason to kill herself. She was Amanda – cool, perfect and untouchable. The only noteworthy event in her life at that time (that I knew of) was the fact that she had dropped Stevie, and he was the one who had seemed upset about that.

  ‘He’s a wreck,’ Joe had told me at the time. ‘He has no idea why.’

  ‘Was there someone else?’ I had to ask the question as though I didn’t care. It was the only way I ever got any information out of him.

  ‘If there wasn’t, there will be soon.’ And he had grinned at me, puffing out his chest.

  But there was an indication that Amanda was, as Kate had said, strange, when she came to our house two days before her body was found at the waterfront.

  She had been crying. Joe, who was always awkward with any show of emotion, was hugging her, holding her head against his shoulder, his long blond hair tangled into the smooth sweep of her own dark brown hair that fell, like mink, to her shoulders.

  Cassie and I had almost walked in on them, but we had stopped just outside the kitchen. With her hand on my arm, Cassie’s body shook with laughter as we witnessed what we first thought was a love scene.

  ‘Jesus,’ Cassie mouthed. ‘She’s only just broken up with Stevie.’

  Joe moved to kiss her, brushing her hair with one hand. Amanda stepped back agitated, and I didn’t want to watch any more. Tugging Cassie by the wrist, I pulled her out into the hall.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Joe sounded embarrassed.

  She didn’t reply.

  ‘It was a mistake.’

  When she finally spoke she told him she thought he was her friend.

  ‘I am,’ he insisted.

  Her reply was scornful: ‘I thought I could talk to you.’

  I didn’t want to listen any more. ‘Let’s go,’ I mouthed to Cassie and when she didn’t move, I spoke loudly, wanting them to know we were there.

  Joe had already stepped away from Amanda and she had wiped the tears from her eyes. He glared at me as I poured two large glasses of juice.

  ‘Let’s go to my room,’ Joe eventually said, not even daring to look at Amanda. ‘Away from them.’

  Both Joe’s bedroom and my room are above the sunroom that Tom added to the house. It was meant to be the place where we watched TV, played games and, invariably, fought, although as we had grown we used it less and less. If you opened the window in Joe’s room, you could climb out onto the sunroom roof. It looked west, up towards the overpass and flats, baking in the afternoon heat, the tar on the roof often melting, sticky and sweet, into the soles of our thongs. This was where Joe went to smoke dope, knowing that the sickly burning smell would float away. In his room it lingered in the seagrass matting, a dead giveaway on the rare occasions that Dee went in and tried to clean up.

  Cassie and I sat on my bed painting our nails, a different colour on each finger, trying to catch drifts of conversation from the roof below. I grew bored quickly, and went to put a record on, but Cassie, who’d always had a bit of a crush on Joe, wanted to keep listening.

  ‘Do you reckon they’d give us a smoke?’ she asked, and I rolled my eyes.

  Joe was doing most of the talking. He mumbled at the best of times and it was close to impossible to make out much of what he was saying. The little we caught was dull. It involved homework, a new Slade record and then the party at Cherry Atkinson’s that weekend.

  ‘You going?’

  Amanda sucked in the last of the joint and stubbed it out on the roof.

  ‘No.’ Her reply was abrupt.

  ‘Why not?’ There was a sizzle of a match as Joe lit a cigarette. ‘I thought you were friends.’

  Joe had once told me that he felt sorry for Cherry. They only went to her house because her parents were often away, and they were able to drink as much of the Atkinsons’ alcohol as they wanted. Once Cherry’s father, Len, had come home early and discovered them all. He lost it, Joe said. More so than just getting pissed off about a party. He hauled a couple of the kids up and tried to fight them when they refused to leave. Lyndon was the only one who took up the challenge. Another time, the police were called by neighbours, and once, a kid was taken to hospital after nearly drowning in the pool. Dee and several other parents had banned Cherry’s parties unless adults were present. Joe just never told Dee that was where he was going.

  Amanda said she and Cherry weren’t really friends. ‘I just hang with her at the moment. What’s so strange about that?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Joe assured her.