They asked Joe how long he’d known Amanda and what his relationship with her had been. He stumbled slightly on that question, wanting to be honest but embarrassed to admit he had always had a crush on her. He didn’t confess in the end, and I was glad. It seemed to me that it wasn’t what they were angling at. They just wanted to know which of the two they had been – friends or boyfriend and girlfriend. The never-never land of hopeless love had no place in the notes they were no doubt taking.
Joe told them about Stevie and how he and Amanda had been together for almost a year, and how she ended the relationship. ‘But I don’t think Amanda was that upset. Well, not about Stevie anyway. They hadn’t been arguing. He was kind of too young. Too nice for her.’
‘What do you mean?’ The policeman’s voice was softer now, coaxing. He was probably leaning forward, trying to appear kind, although the reason for his visit was always going to stand in the way of any attempt to be human.
‘I don’t know. Amanda was just more edgy than him. Older. Not in years. Just in the way she was. She was into trying stuff.’
Joe told them the little he knew, even describing how she’d been on the afternoon she’d come back here, a couple of days before she died.
‘What about her girlfriends?’ It was the other policeman talking now. ‘Had she had any arguments with them?’
In the silence that followed, I could only presume Joe was shaking his head or thinking. Eventually he explained that Kate was her best friend, and they never seemed to argue. ‘Then there’s Cherry, I guess,’ he added.
‘Tell us about Cherry.’
‘Cherry just hangs with us.’ There was the sound of a chair shifting, the wooden legs clattering against the slate floor. ‘But she’s no one’s friend. I mean we go to her house and she comes to our places, but it’s not like she’s really close to any of us. Although in the last few weeks, Amanda had been hanging with her a bit more.’
‘Do you know why?’
‘I guess she was at more of a loose end when she broke up with Stevie. Maybe she felt sorry for Cherry. It was kind of weird. I guess we just all felt she was filling time and that she’d soon get sick of her.’
One of the policemen wanted to know why.
‘Because Cherry tries so hard. And the more you try, the less people are interested.’
From across the hall, I heard the lounge-room door open. Dee was coming out. I moved back, closer to the wall.
She went into the kitchen to ask Joe if he was all right, and to remind him that she was happy to sit with him while he was interviewed, if that was what he wanted.
He was fine, he told her, doing little to hide the impatience in his voice. The door shut gently and the other policeman spoke: ‘Can you tell us a bit about Lyndon?’
Joe was silent.
From the hallway outside the kitchen, I heard Dee cough slightly, and I knew she too was listening in.
‘Why?’ Joe eventually asked.
‘We just want to know more about Amanda. It helps to understand how she died and why. And obviously her friends are a big part of that picture.’
‘They weren’t really close.’
Neither of the policemen said anything for a moment. Up in the darkness of the landing, Sammy squirmed in my arms. I put her down on the floor and watched as she nosed open Dee and Tom’s door with small insistent pushes.
‘But he is part of the group?’
Joe must have nodded.
‘And so they obviously had some contact with each other.’
Again, there was no verbal response from Joe.
‘Did they like each other? Dislike each other? Do you think Lyndon had–’ and the policeman paused here, searching for the right phrase – ‘the hots for her?’
I squirmed slightly, knowing Joe would have as well. There was nothing worse than adults trying to convince you that they speak your language.
‘Not that I know of. But then he doesn’t tell me much any more.’
‘And why’s that?’
‘Don’t know. He’s gone kind of distant with all of us. Has been for a while. His life is...’ Joe paused for a moment. ‘But you’d know about his dad and his brother.’
I thought back to the afternoon, only a few days ago, when I had seen them all down at the waterfront, and the way they had seemed uncomfortable with Lyndon. He had been angry. And they had been wary.
‘We’ve been told there was something going on between Lyndon and Amanda.’
Joe’s response was immediate. ‘No way.’ And then: ‘Who told you that?’
Neither of the policemen answered.
‘What makes you so certain there wasn’t anything between them?’ It was the younger policeman asking the questions now.
‘We just would have known. I mean we all hung out together. There would have been no reason to hide it. And they never seemed – you know–’ now it was Joe searching for the appropriate word – ‘affectionate with each other.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Unless she started seeing him when she was with Stevie and she didn’t want him to know.’ His voice trailed off as he considered the possibility. ‘I mean, you just don’t know. You don’t ever really know anyone, I guess. She was Amanda, but who knows what she really thought or felt.’
I stood up slowly as the policemen thanked Joe for his time. My legs were stiff from having kept them crossed, the pins and needles in the soles of my feet making me walk with a heavy lumbering stride that Dee heard.
She called out from the bottom of the stairs: ‘I thought you had homework.’
‘I thought you did too.’
She wasn’t amused.
My desk light was still on and my diary open at the entry I had begun before the police arrived. On the floor near the end of my bed was the skateboard Nicky had lent me. I nudged it out with my toe, letting it roll beneath my left foot as I opened my maths book and began the long list of equations set for us to complete over the weekend.
nine
Fact: Kate didn’t know Amanda had been seeing Lyndon.
Or at least that was what she told Joe, and I only know this because I heard Joe and Dee talking the morning after the police interview.
Joe had called Kate that night. She’d been as surprised by the news as he was. And then she had backtracked, saying that it might have been possible, and that she’d begun to wonder whether she knew Amanda at all.
I guess they all felt like that.
Cassie had no trouble believing that the rumour about Amanda and Lyndon was plausible. Sonia and I weren’t so sure.
We sat on the street, once again talking about her and how she could have died. The jacarandas were still, but to the south the clouds were condensing as a storm built, moving slowly towards us. The first fat hot drops would soon sizzle on the bitumen, leaving slicks of rainbow oil smeared across the tar.
I had been showing Cassie and Sonia my skateboard moves, which consisted of little more than being able to roll precariously for a few metres, then leaping off before the steep incline that led to the waterfront. Despite practising, I hadn’t improved all that much, but I persisted, partly because I wanted to learn but also because when I got on the board, I felt like I was closer to Nicky, foolish as that may sound.
‘So that’s it?’ Sonia shrugged.
I handed the board to her. ‘You give it a go.’
The deck rolled too fast, and she wobbled, hastily jumping off, leaving it to race all the way to the bottom of the hill.
‘Go get it,’ I grinned, pointing to the end of the street, ‘Miss So-That’s-It.’
As she carried it back up towards us, Bradley Parsons came out of the gate with his mother. Each Saturday she took him off to a sheltered workshop, picking him up again in the late afternoon. Squeezing himself into the front seat, he rolled down the window, peering out at the darkening sky, while he waited for his mother to start the car.
‘Hi,’ he called out to Sonia, who did her best to ignore him.
With the window sti
ll down, he continued to call out as Mrs Parsons pulled the car out onto the road and began to drive up the steep incline towards us.
It was Cassie who responded – ‘Hi Bradley’ – and she waved.
‘I love you,’ he told her, leaning out the window as the car picked up speed, his voice loud and booming.
We giggled.
The branches of the trees overhead began to stir, and with the onset of the wind, the first rain fell, finally breaking what had felt like weeks of unbearable heat. Cassie screamed as a crack of thunder shattered the stillness and the birds, twittering wildly, flew off in a great arcing swoop.
‘Lets go to the caves.’ I made the suggestion out of habit, because this was where we hung, but it was only as we were running down the hill, leaping the stairs two at a time, that I wished we’d just gone to my place. The waterfront now held a menace it had never had before.
The river was choppy, tiny white waves crisscrossing its once smooth surface, the water a deep lead green. As we reached the shade of the first desert oaks, each needle glittering with rain, the storm picked up in intensity.
We made a run for it. Across the burnt grass, whipping our ankles like paper cuts, to the rocks, the sandstone a deep orange swirled with cream and ochre as it soaked up the wet. My thongs were slippery and I had to be careful now, not wanting to fall on the sharp oyster blades, while the other two, who were in their sandals, ran ahead of me.
It wasn’t until we were right near the entrance to the first cave that we saw Lyndon. He was sitting on his own, knees to his chest, a half-empty bottle of what looked like Brandivino next to him, a pack of cigarettes beside it. Seemingly oblivious to the downpour, he hadn’t moved back under the shelter of the rock lip, but had stayed where he was, his dark brown hair slicked across his forehead, his shirt soaked through, and his faded jeans a deeper blue from the rain.
The tide was high and unless he moved back, our knees would literally brush against his face as we tried to edge through to the next cave.
It was Sonia who summoned the courage, asking him if we could get past.
‘Nothing stopping you.’ He didn’t look at her and it was hard to make out his words against the pounding of the rain.
We had no choice but to squeeze past him, the legs of his jeans cold and wet as I pressed closer than I wanted, and then, just as I was almost out of his reach, he grasped my ankle, his hand clammy on my skin.
I tried to squirm out of his grasp, scared I would overbalance and fall into the river below.
‘Have a drink.’ He went to lift the bottle and knocked it over, the last of the alcohol running out across the rocks and into a pool before he could stop it. The bottle then rolled, bobbing up and down in the tide, as it floated away.
I stepped backwards, wanting only to keep walking with the others to the cave, but I didn’t. I kept staring at him.
‘What are you looking at?’ He was leering now, trying to stand, his balance wrong as he clutched onto a rock ledge and hauled himself up.
I took another step backwards, the roar of the rain on the river too loud for the others to hear me if I screamed and there was a moment when I felt I should call out because he was frightening me, but then I also realised he was too drunk to focus any sort of harm on me.
‘You should be careful,’ I told him, when I finally found the nerve to speak.
He just stared at me.
‘You’re drunk. You could fall and drown.’
He leant against the rock, his eyes half-closed. ‘Like Amanda?’ And I couldn’t tell whether it was tears on his cheeks or just the slashing of the rain.
He turned his back on me and began to pick his way slowly, precariously, along the rock ledge towards the grassy reserve below the path back up to our street. I almost followed to make sure he was safe, but I was scared and I knew that he would only push me away. So, instead, I stayed where I was, watching him, ready to run if he slipped and fell (although whether I would have had the strength to drag him out of the water is doubtful), until he had made his way off the rocks and away from the rush of the river.
I was drenched. My jeans and T-shirt left a pool of water on the floor of the cave and I pressed back against the cool roughness of the sandstone wall as I tried to wring them out, my teeth chattering with the sudden cold.
Cassie and Sonia were only a little drier, and the three of us huddled close. There was the remains of a fire, burnt ashes and clumps of charcoal, black and ready to crumble in your hand. In the corner was enough dry wood to light a small flame. The problem was matches.
Cassie grinned. She had some in her pocket, along with a now sodden joint she had nicked from home. The paper disintegrated in her hand, the small amount of dope wet on her palm. I was glad it was going to be impossible to smoke. The last thing I felt like was another attempt at getting stoned. The matches, however, weren’t much better. The tip flaked away as she tried to strike it against the side of the box. I rubbed both dry and she tried again and again, until eventually there was a small sputter of flame, enough to catch the end of a twig.
‘There’s no way she would have even looked at him,’ Sonia said, returning to the topic of Lyndon and Amanda.
I coughed in the smoke and moved a little closer to the cave entrance. ‘You’re the one who always says he’s sexy.’
‘He has a certain something,’ she conceded. ‘But you see him that pissed...’
Outside the storm had stopped. The freshness of the southerly was pushing the clouds, clearing patches of blue in the sky, washed by a watery sunshine. The current was a petrol blue now, dark and oily, the tide slapping downriver with a newfound vigour after the lazy torpor of so many long, hot days.
Standing out on the rock ledge, I looked to see whether Lyndon had left the reserve. There was no sign of him, the pale grass flattened by the downpour.
‘I reckon it’s possible.’ Cassie wrung the ends of her hair. ‘There was something going on with her. Remember?’ She looked at me for confirmation. ‘That afternoon with Joe? She wanted to say but she couldn’t.’
I nodded.
‘Maybe she was pregnant to him.’ Cassie’s eyes widened as she imagined. ‘Maybe he didn’t want her to keep the baby and maybe she did. Remember?’ She turned to me again. ‘She said everything was shit.’
I did remember.
‘But perhaps she backed out. She wanted to keep the baby. And Lyndon freaked out when he heard, they had an argument, he pushed her, and left. She hit her head and she died.’
Cassie had her hands on her hips; the look of satisfaction on her face was hard to mistake.
‘Solved.’ She grinned. ‘Detective O’Donnell figures out another case.’
It was plausible, I had to admit. ‘But there’s no evidence.’
Sonia wasn’t budging. ‘I still reckon she would never have gone round with him. She was Amanda. He’s Lyndon. And besides, someone would have known they were together.’
‘Someone did.’ Cassie had her arms crossed now. ‘Or else why would the police have asked Joe whether it was true?’
Behind us the fire was going out. The thick smoke had forced us all out into the open now, and we stood on the ledge, only metres from where they had found her body. I looked down at the river, not wanting to imagine, but unable to stop myself from seeing her, her long brown hair floating out like silk.
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