Devastation Road

by Joanna Baker

  Chess said, ‘How did you go at Wando’s last night?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Tara.

  ‘Did you finish the history thing?’

  Tara screwed up her nose. ‘The term’s virtually over. We ended up just watching TV.’

  ‘In Wando’s room?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Chess had never been in Wando’s room, but she knew he had a TV in there. I must’ve said something about it one day. She remembers things like this — little details about people’s lives. It was as if she kept files of information about people instead of having relationships with them.

  She kept going at Tara. She thought it was a conversation. ‘So his parents thought you were working.’

  ‘Yes.’

  In front of us the bank screened off the town and behind us, across the reserve, there was a hillside with an old church, near the road to Albury. The houses up there were large and had good views. Tara’s was one of them.

  ‘Streaming or TV?’ said Chess.

  Tara hesitated before answering. It was easy to see she didn’t want this conversation. ‘MKR.’

  ‘On Seven? Live?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What about The Bachelorette? That’s on Ten isn’t it? You must have watched that. Everyone does.’

  ‘Of course.’ Tara rolled her eyes. I began to be glad Chess was there. To sit here in complete silence would’ve felt wrong, and with Chess asking questions and making stupid comments — well at least it meant I didn’t have to. Unfair, I suppose, but Chess didn’t mind being laughed at.

  After a while she gave up. I told myself it didn’t matter.

  I was just about to lie back on the grass when Tara stood up and said, ‘It feels better if we just keep moving.’

  She started walking off across the grass in the direction of the path. Chess and I followed.

  The second bridge was about twenty metres downstream. We stopped there, leaning back on the rail, facing downstream. The pattern of the water was reversed from the other bridge. What I mean is upstream the water ran noisily over rocks and downstream it entered a deep pool. Not far from us a dead branch stuck up from the water, silver and soft-looking. I threw a few stones in.

  Another sleepy silence grew between us. Chess sat down on the bridge, which was pretty dry, and poked at the water with the toe of a riding boot, watching the ripples from my stones.

  After a while she said, ‘There’s a fish in there.’

  I looked in an uninterested way to where she was pointing. There was something grey-white under the water, not far from the town-side bank.

  I said, ‘It’s not a fish. It’s not moving.’

  ‘No.’ Chess sounded thoughtful.

  Tara had gone up to the shallow side of the bridge. She was holding back her heavy hair with one hand, watching the water.

  Chess was fascinated by her submerged white thing. She leaned towards it, narrowing her eyes.

  ‘Piece of rubbish,’ I said, and threw another stone.

  ‘Mmmm,’ said Chess. Slowly she got to her feet, still peering through the ripples. She stepped down to the muddy water’s edge.

  Suddenly she was wailing.

  ‘Matty! Oh, Matty! Oh my god!’

  My first response was a stab of annoyance at what she was calling me. I was aware of Tara watching us. But what Chess said next drove this from my mind. She looked up at me, swaying in shock, clutching at roots on the bank to keep herself from falling. She had gone grey in the face.

  ‘Matty, it’s a hand. It’s a human hand.’

  ***

  My memory of what happened next is pretty uneven. Mainly it’s just a sick-feeling blur, but there are some things I’m sure about.

  It was Chess who went plunging first into the water, grabbing at the hand and pulling, and I know that the voice screaming at her — the high-pitched hysterical squeak telling her to leave it alone — was me. I don’t know where Tara was in all this. Watching from the bridge I think. Chess was saying there was a person on the end of the hand and there was just a chance they might be alive, and I got into the water to help her. I remember the cold, and that the water was chest deep, and that the person was amazingly heavy to drag up onto the bank, and that at some point I realised it was Deb.

  My first real picture is the body — a damp white shirt and a tight black skirt and high strappy shoes on white feet, the whole thing streaked with mud — but even that picture is broken up and not very clear. Mostly I remember the voices.

  I was gabbling about resuscitation. ‘What is it? ABC? Airways, Breathing … and C … what’s C?’ I grabbed Chess by the shoulders and started shaking her. ‘Do something! You know everything! What is C?!’

  I remember Chess’s black eyes holding mine. She took one of my hands off her shoulder and pushed it firmly onto Deb’s forehead, saying calmly, ‘Feel it, Matty.’

  I snatched my hand away.

  ‘She’s cold,’ said Chess. ‘Almost the temperature of the water. She’s dead, Matty. She’s been dead for a long time.’

  Somewhere beside me I heard Tara’s voice, weak and breathy. ‘My God. Deb. Poor Deb.’ And then, in a dazed kind of way she added, ‘She just got engaged. She hasn’t even got the ring yet.’

  I didn’t see Tara’s face when she spoke and after that I think she might have gone off and been sick or something. But what she’d said was true. Debbie had a bit of jewellery on — earrings and a thin gold chain round her neck — but there was no engagement ring.

  And there was no Eye of Ra either.

  ***

  Now there’s a change in my memory of the scene. The voices finish and everything goes still. And it stops seeming like a dream and becomes horribly real — real Chess, real me, sitting on a scrappy lawn, beside a piece of dark water, facing a body that used to be a real friend.

  And the one thing I have a perfect picture of, which I can still call up as clearly as a glossy photo — the thing that will never leave me — is the face. Deb’s face, blue-white, hard-looking, more like china than skin, framed by ringlets of dirty yellow hair.

  Chapter 4

  My parents’ garden is full of flowers — not those bright squashed-up things surrounded by concrete edges — our place has great bushes of flowers, straggling and sticking out and frothing up, around the stone walls of the pottery shed, and making high cushions around the paving. There are a lot of trees too, and other stuff scattered about — ladders, wood, a rusting iron bucket, and two statues from Dad’s arty friends. What I’m trying to say is the place is not tidy, and that gives it a sort of comfortable feel. Good place to come when life turns on you.

  I don’t sit in it much. We do eat meals out there, and it’s OK for a wake-up coffee at about midday on Sundays, but apart from that I really don’t go there, unless it’s to fish a pair of socks off the line. But the following Friday, after Debbie’s funeral, we all ended up there — Chess, Wando, Tara and me.

  ***

  It had been a tough week. The death of Debbie had rocked the whole town and it had definitely rocked me, but somehow not in the way I would’ve expected. I didn’t feel sad, the way I had when our bearded dragon had died, or the way I had when my best friend, Peter, had moved away. This time, it just felt as if nothing was normal any more.

  And I was the least normal of all. Something inside me seemed to have stopped working. For the first few days I did nothing. Not normal nothing, which was drawing and watching TV. Actual nothing. I would find myself sitting at the table, or on the side of the bath, staring into space, not even thinking.

  Mum made lasagne and cake and took it to the Wilsons, and she visited a lot of other people — Debbie’s aunties and old school friends — anyone who might be affected. Sometimes she dragged me along, I think just to get me moving again. But being out was no help. I would just watch people huddled in little groups, discussing things with tired faces. Sometimes they said things to me, about Debbie, about how bad it must have been, but I couldn’t
answer. Words just didn’t have anything to do with what had happened. I felt as if the air had gone thick and cold, and everything was distant and distorted, so that I couldn’t even really understand what was being said to me.

  On the Wednesday I went down the street, to the Yack Motor Garage, to spend some time with Steve. This is where I go to get away from things, because Steve doesn’t go in for a lot of emotional drama and he usually just lets me sit there and watch him fiddle with engines. But this week even Steve looked at me in a worried kind of way. He was thinking it too. There was something wrong with me. I was one of the people who had found Debbie. I wasn’t being sad enough. I wasn’t being sad properly.

  But what would be the right way to be sad? Maybe I shouldn’t even be out walking around. I just didn’t know. It wasn’t something there were rules for. And even worrying about rules was wrong. I shouldn’t be thinking about my own behaviour when someone I knew was dead. So that was another thing I was doing wrong.

  The thing I couldn’t explain to anyone was what had happened to my brain. There were great big spaces between my thoughts, full of cold air. Even by the end of the week I hadn’t managed to think about Debbie at all. Every time my thoughts went in that direction they dissolved into jelly. This was wrong. It was obvious that everyone else was thinking about her all the time. I was being a coward.

  ***

  The funeral had been hard to take for everyone. I’d been to funerals before, but only of old people. At those everyone looks serious and thoughtful and there’s a feeling that something big has happened, but there are also stories and even some laughs. Debbie’s funeral wasn’t like that. It was horrible. Half her family were sobbing and the faces of the others were so bad I couldn’t look at them.

  With a mother like mine, I’d got used to seeing people in trouble. People were always coming around to our house for chats with good old Sarah Tingle — people who had lost their jobs, or people whose kids had left home, or whose old relations got senile — anyone with a problem. Mum would sit and let them talk. Sometimes I’d go and hide, but often I’d stick around. It didn’t bother me the way it bothered some kids. Usually there was something you could say — give a bit of sympathy or crack a joke.

  But this time everyone was helpless. And that was the first thing I did start to feel. It still wasn’t the right feeling. It was more like anger than sadness. Inside the church I clenched my fists on my knees to stop myself from punching something. There just wasn’t anything you could do, except sit around together radiating and absorbing bad feelings. Everything was terrible, terrible, and nothing that could be said would ever make a difference.

  And there was something else. Worse than being helpless, I was left with this feeling of guilt. Guilt about losing Debbie, about all these people suffering. As if I’d done it. I knew it didn’t make sense. But I’d been with Debbie before she died, and I hadn’t prevented it. Instead I had found her, pulled her up, given her back to the world, cold and wet and lifeless. It was like when you see something get broken. You feel guilty just because you were nearby.

  ***

  After the funeral, there were tea and sandwiches in the church hall, but again I was just standing in the corner, staring at everyone. Tara must’ve felt the same way, because after a few minutes she left. Wando went with her. In the week since we found Debbie, they’d hardly been apart for a second. I could see Tara needed Wando. He made her feel safe. As soon as they moved, I followed, catching them up outside, and behind me came my favourite shadow, Chess.

  We didn’t know where to go. We just hung around in the church yard until Mum gathered us up and lured us home with a promise of lumberjack cake. She would’ve left Dad there to apologise for us and help clean up. She never forgets details like that.

  ***

  So we ended up in our back garden. It wasn’t a lively party. Chess helped Mum put some food out, but the rest of us just wobbled our chairs around on the uneven bricks and watched them do it. It was hard to tell what the others were thinking. Tara was the same as she always is, fairly expressionless. Wando was the only one who looked at all upset — red and a bit sweaty. Chess finished helping and then sat and watched everyone from the shade of the plum tree.

  I was feeling hollow and vaguely sick. I was haunted by the image of Deb’s pale face but I was finding it hard to connect the dead Deb with the living one. It sounds stupid, but I was having trouble even realising it had happened. Debbie hadn’t been big in my life, but she’d always been there, part of the background. I couldn’t help feeling that if I walked into the bakery she’d still be there behind the counter. Not tomorrow maybe, but one day. The fact that she wouldn’t be there, or anywhere, ever again and that she’d never wear her little earrings or pat her stomach and say ‘shaddup’, or say anything — or see anything — well, it just seemed so much for one person to lose.

  Silences don’t bother my mother, and they never last long when she’s around. There’s something about her — other people can’t help talking to her. She gets into this listening thing — does a lot of ah’ing and says ‘yes’ really slowly, and doesn’t pass on her own opinions. She’s also tall and has broad shoulders and thick muscly arms, so she looks as if she could hold things up without dropping them. I’ve always thought that had a lot to do with it.

  Mum believes everything should be talked about. And she has heaps of comments and questions to get things going. Today she used something completely new.

  ‘I hope the police treated everyone all right?’

  That didn’t get her very far. We all mumbled ‘yes’. The police had spent a lot of time investigating Debbie’s death. Over the past week we’d all had long interviews with them, about finding Debbie’s body, the conversation in the bakery the day before, and anything else we knew. For my part, Mum knew how the police had treated me because she’d been there. They’d been mostly nice enough, sometimes acting a bit suspicious, but nothing too heavy. They did dwell on the fact that I’d been involved in two major incidents — a fire and a death — within two days of each other, but, like me, they were unable to figure out any connection.

  There was another little silence and then Tara said, ‘I don’t know why they tried to make so much of it. I suppose they have to check these things, but it was so obviously an accident, right? They seemed to think she might have committed suicide. I told them there was no way.’ She paused for someone to agree then said, less sure of herself, ‘Didn’t everyone?’

  We did our ‘yes’ murmuring thing again. Tara was under a branch of our Japanese maple, which was decorating her face and shoulders with the shadows of starry leaves. It made her difficult to see properly. She reached forward, got her tea from the table and took a sip, all very slow and deliberate, but she clutched her mug high in front of her chest with both hands.

  I tried to help. ‘I told them it must’ve been an accident. Debs was very happy when we saw her wasn’t she, Chess? And we were the last to see her.’

  ‘We were the last people to admit they’d seen her,’ corrected Chess.

  Tara turned to Chess: ‘And did you tell them how happy she was?’

  ‘I said she was excited about something.’

  Tara said, ‘She was going to see Andrew Colston after work, up at the old Uniting Church.’

  I remembered, Tara had talked to Debbie that afternoon in the bakery.

  Tara said, ‘She would’ve had to go through the reserve and across the creek to get there. That was where they always met. Apparently he’d just asked her to marry him.’

  ‘Oh my Lord,’ said Mum, as if this added to the tragedy. Which I suppose it did.

  Tara put her cup back. The table was covered in cheese, bread, fruit and cake, with a pot of flowers near the middle and piles of plates and knives. It’s always like this at our place. No fuss, Mum just puts out masses of food and lets everyone go for it.

  Nobody jumped into the food today.

  Tara said, ‘How can someone die in a tiny bit
of water like that anyway?’

  Wando spoke for the first time, his voice rough and uneven. ‘Some people are saying she had a skinful.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mum and Chess together.

  ‘What’s that?’ said Tara. ‘She’d been drinking?’

  But Wando had used up all his powers of speech. With great concentration he picked up a knife and cut himself a hunk of cheese.

  Chess was quick to fill in for him. She loved supplying facts. ‘The police told Debbie’s parents that the level of alcohol in her blood was consistent with her having drunk nearly a bottle of wine. It would explain how she could have drowned in that narrow creek. Normally she would have just pulled herself out.’

  ‘But you don’t drown, do you? Just because you’ve had a few drinks?’

  ‘Not always. But if a person has a lot of alcohol in their blood it’s easy to become disoriented, especially with the shock of falling in. There’s also a reflex on falling suddenly into cold water. You gasp and suck in and pass out. It’s called a shallow water blackout.’

  ‘Well there you are,’ said Tara. ‘She was only little. A bottle would’ve been enough to put her totally off her face. And then going across the slippery bridge after all the rain …’

  ‘Seems odd, though, doesn’t it,’ said Chess, looking from one of us to the other with her black eyes.

  It annoyed me, Chess being logical and sharp. Everyone else was happy to just feel sad. But Chess was going to try to turn it into some kind of puzzle, to show us all how clever she was. Suddenly I felt tired. Something inside me went soft and weak, as if I might just melt down into the chair and wail with sadness. I wished they would all go away.

  Tara said, ‘What’s odd?’ sounding bored.

  ‘That she would drink all that, by herself. Before she met him.’