The three of them are squirming now.
‘And Leia’s charging round the shop, trying to climb up the video shelves!’ Chris makes the scrabbling motion again, his face a mask of open-mouthed terror. ‘And the girl in the shop,’ he leaps up, hunching his shoulders and crying out in a high-pitched voice, ‘she’s screaming, I DON’T LIKE DOGS! And I’m chasing Leia all round the shop yelling at her, but she’s possessed!’
Cathy pushes in, ‘She destroyed all the shelves—DVDs and videos everywhere—and knocked a little boy over!’
Margaret cries, ‘The general manager of Video Ezy in Sydney rang the Rundle Council to complain!’
Mandy has been smiling as she listens, but now she simply watches the three of them—Chris laughing with his head back, Margaret and Cathy tittering.
Eventually Margaret says, ‘Anyway, she’s been very good since then. Haven’t you, Leia. Yes.’ And she tears a lump of bread and feeds it to the dog.
‘Till the biting,’ snorts Cathy into her glass, giggling again.
Margaret has noticed Mandy sitting silent across the table, tilting her wine glass on its base, turning it in small circles on the table.
‘It was back before Christmas, love—in November, I think,’ says Margaret, her voice steadying. She casts her gaze to the ceiling, trying to remember the date, as if a specific chronology will somehow ease the tension that has suddenly stretched over the moment.
‘I think you were in—’ she searches her mind again, flushing—‘Oh. I’m not sure. Baghdad, I suppose.’
She shoots a testy glance at Cathy, who is still snickering with Chris and pawing the air. Chris catches Margaret’s frown, and looks at Mandy, and stops laughing.
Mandy smiles tightly. She feels the muscles in her face.
For most of November she had been trying to get into Basra. A quick, rainy pattern of images and sensations ripples through her—the juddering of the car, the nights peppered with brightness. Adrenaline a taste in her saliva for days. The dead dogs rotting. She had not told Chris or her parents she went to Basra, and if they had seen any reports on television they didn’t notice hers. Or had forgotten.
She leans across the table to collect their empty plates. ‘I didn’t know you were all here together then. I would have phoned,’ she says, standing. She grips the plates and turns toward the kitchen. Her father lies lifeless in a hospital bed, and they are telling dog stories.
The other three glance at one another.
At the door Mandy stops, turns and says, ‘I don’t suppose anyone’s heard from Stephen yet?’
CHAPTER SEVEN
Day two
MANDY WAKES at four into the stark blue space of her jet lag, eyes wide open. Chris breathes heavily beside her. She has had a dream, a bad one, but there is no clarity to her recall of it—only the familiar riverweed of dread, wrapping itself beneath the surface of the night.
She sits up, careful not to wake Chris, and eases out of the bed. She feels around in her suitcase on the floor for clothes, then carries them through the darkened house to the kitchen, where she dresses. She has never been more awake, alert. A streetlight and the moon fill the kitchen with a pallid light; enough for her to be able to put the kettle on.
She takes her hot cup and sits out on the back step with it, listening in the quiet, until the sky begins to lighten, revealing the simultaneous familiarity and strangeness of this house, this yard. Above her is a pergola of white painted wood that has been added in the last four years, and a sturdy jasmine has plaited itself around the nearest post. Next to the garage is the old neat square of tough lawn bordered by a hydrangea, some azaleas alongside the garage wall. The rusting basketball ring is gone from above the garage door. Some sparsely planted red-leafed cordylines now line the driveway, but the same old crazy pavers shine in the gloom, leading down to the fishpond at the bottom of the yard, fashioned from lumpen rocks by her father in the seventies.
In the middle of the square of lawn is a new-looking slatted teak table and heavy matching chairs, a closed shade umbrella held steady by a hole in the table’s centre. She imagines the family gathered around the table, passing a bowl of curled pink prawns to one another in the white heat of Christmas Day.
She thinks back to where she was that day, to the story she filed. They went for the routine: the American soldiers’ Christmas lunch (wild turkey cooked by locals) followed by some footage of the almost empty Catholic church service in Amariya (Iraqi Christians too afraid to go to Mass)—and then the day’s list of atrocities. The assistant dean of Baghdad’s medical college shot dead, latest figures showing around 300 academics murdered since the invasion. An interview—at the Hamra as usual now, since they no longer went to people’s houses—with a middle-aged professor mourning his neighbours’, and his own, lack of courage these days. That they must leave the bodies where they fall, go about their business, pretend not to see; it’s become too dangerous to offer help to the dying. ‘On my way home from work as I reached my street, I saw a man lying in a pool of blood. Someone had covered him with bits of cardboard. He wasn’t dead. This was the best they could do. I drove on.’
She and Graham had edited the package together, finished with a solemn piece to camera in the compound, sent it off. She’d reworked the details into an 800-word piece for the Times, then joined Graham in his room for a drink. He’d just got off the phone from his wife in Sydney–Shelley had had to wake their younger daughter at eight-thirty to find her Santa presents, while her sister had been up since dawn. Mandy and Graham had raised their beers to each other and muttered, Merry Christmas. Then they went downstairs to join the others for fatoush, beef jerky and more beer. Afterwards she watched DVDs in her room, and then left a message for Chris on the answering machine at Rose Bay. He was at his parents’, she’d assumed.
But now, watching the light of dawn wash over the silent backyard of her childhood, she wonders if maybe Chris was here instead, sitting at that new table on the lawn alongside her father in a red paper hat. Cathy had texted her mobile, ‘with love from us all’, but maybe that included Chris too. Passing salads and slices of ham to one another, having Christmas without her.
But without Stephen either, apparently.
The last she heard of Stephen, from Cathy, he was working for the police service in some typing job. Mandy imagines him slouched in an office chair somewhere, typing at a computer. Charting, she supposes, the everyday failures of petty thieves and violent husbands, pathetic public servants with hard drives full of kiddy porn. Lost adolescents and their heroin drudgery. The routine miseries of the drowning unemployed.
Thinking of Stephen now, it seems to Mandy as though he himself has always been lost, even in the years before his physical drift from the family. He has always seemed, since adolescence and for no graspable reason, to carry within him a bedrock of resentment—towards her in particular—never articulated and never resolved, but which has formed the foundation for his every conversation, every glance from his guarded eyes.
Not that she has had what could be called a conversation with him in years.
She realises now she is relieved that he has not come home. And in this dusky backyard with the first chitterings of lorikeets sounding from somewhere across the roofs, it seems to her that this is a particularly Australian thing, that boys might go into the funk of adolescence and never come out. This destiny of innumerable young men to live their lives adrift.
When the sky has lightened some more she takes her cup inside, rinses it at the sink. She scrawls a note to the others, then shoves her feet into a pair of sneakers, finds her wallet on the kitchen bench and returns to the back door, steps through and closes it quietly behind her.
She walks across the spongy grass and down the driveway. At the front gate something small moves on the ground; an Indian mynah bird is stabbing at the grass. She nears the bird and it stops pecking but does not flee, simply stays where it is, motionless. As she passes, the bird seems to watch her over its shoulder, through its s
ly yellow-rimmed eye.
She thinks of the boy again, his watching: the dazed concentration of his gaze, the limp arms slick with blood. Perhaps this morning’s dream was just another mutation of this too-familiar image. The mynah takes a few strides in its lazy gait, still watching her, waiting for her to leave before returning to its jabbing at the grass.
She lets herself out of the gate, and begins to walk through the streets of her childhood town. The sun is almost up, and the houses have begun to absorb this soft light, not yet hardened into day.
She walks down Aurora Street, past the familiar houses, all squat, post-war red brick, like her parents’. Some have long-past attempted gardens in front—a few leggy, squalid roses, a ragged pencil pine or two—others, neat but parched lawns and rangy cotoneaster hedges. The neighbours’ cars are in garages or car ports, parked at the far ends of driveways, shining moulded shapes of white and silver.
At the corner she turns into Fitzroy Street, and the crepe myrtles are in shocking pink flower all down the road. When she was little she loved their gaudy pinks and crimsons, but as she grew older she began to realise they were tawdry, that these were the colours of bargain shops and chemist-brand lipstick, and she became ashamed of them. Now, as she walks through the streets, the flaring crepe myrtles are the only bright shriek in all the dried-out anonymity of the town.
A few blocks on—past the Baillieus’ house, past the play park—she reaches the fire station. On a square white perspex sign is the fire service badge and then, in red and black plastic, racks of removable capital letters: RUNDLE FIRE STATION. Another line beneath says EASTER MESSAGE: DON’T BE A BUNNY, BE FIRE SAFE. It’s either almost a year old or two months early. The station is silent, the corrugated roll-a-door closed. She turns and stops here at the top of Monarch Street, the wide grey road sweeping downward. Rundle is spread out there below, a town of low red-brick and fibro buildings, with their whitened aluminium or painted tin roofs—but the town’s scale is entirely dwarfed by the wide, wide plains beyond. The sky is enormous, and in the distance are the blue torn-tissue strips of the mountain range. It is a landscape of horizontals, and Rundle itself is only another one, smeared over the pale brown land. Across the road, in the gutter outside a beaten-up house with white roses blooming, is an abandoned stereo speaker on its side. Just near it on the grass, a blue sign on two short poles says HOSPITAL in white lettering, with an arrow. She steps across the road to follow it.
* * *
MARGARET FINDS herself awake in an odd position, on her side with her arms out in front of her chest, one leg kicked across the bed. Mid-hurdle. The bed has been a spacious shock each morning since the accident; but each morning too, the dislocation dissolves a little more quickly. She turns and lies on her back in the pale blue bedroom, her gaze tracing threads of cracks in the ceiling plaster. Then she remembers that the children are here. Her pulse enlivens, she is suddenly fully awake. Today Chris will help her to buy paint for the bathroom. She spoke to him about it yesterday, hurriedly, when the girls were out of the room. Now, here in her bed, she has a lovely feeling of extravagance, of order, as she imagines the smooth creamy expanse above her while she bathes.
But also she must go to the hospital, she thinks with a start. First she must go there. It is possible to feel guilty about the hospital not being her first thought. And also for secretly counting as if all the children were here when Chris is not really her son, and Stephen is not here but somewhere in Sydney.
She supposes he is somewhere in Sydney.
Margaret swallows down the small gasp that might come if she lets this unknowing about her son rise to the surface of her thoughts. She allows herself a quick vision again of the creamy bathroom—but then is filled instantly, and thoroughly this time, with shame. A catastrophe has befallen her family, her husband. Even to think of a painted bathroom is an obscenity.
She is probably tired, and she has been through a lot. This is something people have said to her often in these last few days, and although Margaret knows Geoff would scoff at such self-indulgence, she now tweaks the phrase into consciousness. I have been through a lot. The words have enough gravitas to allow her to squish into a small and manageable parcel her guilt at not thinking first of Geoff and the blank space of Stephen, and later of the children—and the bathroom—and Margaret sits up.
IN THE kitchen the ABC news blurs statically from the clock radio on top of the fridge. Chris wipes the bench with a pink dishcloth, his body jiggling with the vigour of his effort. Cathy, in striped cotton shortie pyjamas, is slouched in a chair at the table, a cup of coffee held in two hands. She has one brown foot resting on the seat of the chair opposite her. She flaps a sleepy wave at her mother as Margaret comes in, then rubs her itchy nose with the flat of her hand.
‘Where’s Mandy?’ Margaret says.
‘Hospital,’ answer Cathy and Chris together.
Guilt flushes through Margaret again. ‘Oh,’ she says. She is moving towards the kettle when the radio newsreader’s voice catches at the air. An American reporter held hostage in Iraq has appeared on a video, pleading for help.
‘God,’ breathes Cathy. All three have turned to look at each other, then quickly away, listening to the radio.
‘Jill Carroll was kidnapped on the seventh of January in Baghdad,’ says the newsreader.
They stare at the table, the kettle, the bench, hearing a hissing background and then the hollow, schoolgirl’s voice echoing in some faraway room.
‘Please just do whatever they want . . . There is a very short time.’
‘God,’ says Chris. They stay silent for a long second, until there’s a pause and the newsreader says that supermodel Kate Moss will appear on the cover of Vogue despite being caught using cocaine.
Margaret exhales a long, slow breath.
Chris says, ‘Sit down Marg, I’ll make the tea.’
Margaret moves obediently to the table and pulls out a chair. The moment has passed. Cathy swigs from her cup.
‘I’ll try Stephen again,’ she says, getting up from the table.
Chris switches the button on the kettle to red, and pushes two pieces of bread into the toaster. He watches the torn edges of the bread begin to smoke, listening to Cathy walking through the living room to the telephone in the hallway, and then pours the hot water into a cup for Margaret. Turning back to the table, the teabag label fluttering against the cup, he sees his mother-in-law’s folded hands, her closed eyes and her silently moving lips.
He knows it is not the reporter, but the reporter’s mother, for whom Margaret is saying her prayer.
CHAPTER EIGHT
STEPHEN LISTENS to tapes of coppers asking people questions, of the people answering or not answering the questions, and types them into a computer. He works in an office in the city where there are other people typing with headphones on, typing out the flat voices, the evasions, the fright and the arguments, the bullshitting. The sniffing, the throat-clearing, the bewilderment. Since his first week, years ago now, every tape has sounded the same. A young bloke and his excuses; a weary or bored copper, repeating the same questions in that brainless way.
Did you steal a Ford Falcon GX with the registration number SHY 768.
Nup.
Did you park the stolen vehicle at 55 Dalhousie Road, Matraville.
Nup. I wanna see my girlfriend.
The coppers write their own statements to be read in court. Then the defendant said the words, ‘oink, oink, oink’ in a loud and abusive tone.
Stephen is not as fast as some, but he can decipher the words through accents or coughs or slurring, and he can make sense of what is said. They are not allowed to change the words of the defendants. They leave in the ums and ahs and fucks and shits. Sometimes they take the shits out of the coppers’ words, but not always. They always take out the fucks when the coppers say them though. You stupid fucking little cunt. They take those out.
Stephen’s mobile has rung several times each day since last week, with
Cathy’s number coming up. His phone has also beeped all week with texts from her, and she has emailed, the messages tagged with a red exclamation mark, every day.
But this time when he looks at the phone the number appearing is his parents’, in Rundle. He lets it ring, watching it vibrate, a dying blowfly across his desk. He has long ago turned off the message bank.
Where were you at nine o’clock.
There have been no messages from Mandy.
When Stephen thinks of his older sister he recalls her as a tall, skinny teenager at the local swimming pool, a towel flicked over her shoulder. Or slouched along the living room couch, watching television in the heat of the school holidays, her flat eyes staring at him as he tried to explain the rules of cricket. She would just get up, stride across the room and change the channel while he was mid-sentence. His feelings toward Cathy are more benign—she’s younger than him—but still, as they were growing up, whenever Mandy was around the girls seemed somehow perpetually organised against him.
Now Cathy is thirty-seven and Mandy forty-two, but it is their teenage years he lingers in.
The phone stops buzzing. He picks it up and clears the 1 missed call message with a couple of thumbstrokes. As he turns back to his computer screen he wonders if Mandy is receiving the same phone calls, the emails. Wherever she is. Whichever Middle-East shithole she has chosen to live in for the month.
Sometimes he has watched her face on the television late at night, her accent changed, her voice charged with urgency, talking into a microphone but shabbily dressed in greens and browns, and always behind her some pale ruined building, and dust, or dug-up ground. Her voice never wavers or pauses. Sometimes he has watched her on the television in the pub, and has sat back on his stool, one hand on the bar and a schooner tilted in the other, looking up at his older sister talking about explosions or disease or looting or suicide bombings, and then her face has disappeared from the screen while the camera moves across more broken houses, wailing people, holes in the ground, burned cars, and underneath the television screen in the gloom there are always a few young people dancing around a pool table, a boy pinning a girl to a wall while she smiles drunkenly into his face and hooks her fingers through the belt loops of his jeans, and an old eighties song comes on the video hits machine, and the young people yell, yeah! And whoop and lean over the pool table, waggling their bums as they line up a shot and sing and get drunker. On these, like most, nights Stephen walks home alone up the dark footpath to the brightly lit door of his block of flats.
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