by Colin Dray
Officer Samantha told them about how Dettie had phoned their father; about how she had called to tell him she was bringing his children to live in Perth. Their father had told her she was being silly, Samantha said, and once he’d hung up, he called their mother to let her know where they were. While Samantha spoke, Sam remembered Dettie’s face as she hissed into the phone near the railway station, her shoulders knotted and her finger jabbing at the air. He’d been so scared then that she might look over and see him. She’d seemed large and forceful, ready to snatch their whole trip away in an instant; but looking back now it was all so feeble. A scared old woman pleading into the phone because she had nowhere else to go.
‘Because of that call your mother knew that you guys weren’t hurt. And I know she’s going to be very, very happy to hear that you’re safe with us now.’ Samantha smiled. ‘So we’re going to make sure we take good care of you until she gets here, all right?’
Suddenly, Sam sat up and gestured for a pen. When she realised what he wanted, Samantha took a biro from her top drawer and gave him the back of an incident report. ‘Is that good?’ she asked.
He nodded. The pen was dry and he had to scratch it angrily on the corner of the page before the ink started again.
What happened to Jon? he wrote, the nib digging into the page.
Samantha looked confused.
‘Jon?’
He travelled with us. Hitchhiker.
‘Where’s Jon?’ Katie perked up. ‘Is Jon here?’
It took a few minutes—Sam writing; Katie excitedly filling in the gaps—but eventually Samantha got the idea. They had picked up Jon along the way and he’d gone missing the previous night. Sam was unable to tell her exactly where they’d last seen him, but he knew it was after Caiguna, somewhere near the Dundas Nature Reserve. To Sam’s surprise she didn’t seem as concerned as he would have expected, but she promised to have the officers interviewing Dettie ask what had happened and let them know.
‘Is Daddy coming home?’ Katie asked.
Samantha puffed out her cheeks. ‘Oh, that I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t think that he’s—’ She leaned over the desk towards them. ‘You know what? How about if I get someone to check that, okay?’
Katie’s expression collapsed into a heavy frown.
Sam was clutching the pen so tightly his fingertips were white. Their father was a waste of time. He wanted to keep talking about Jon, but Katie’s eyes were filled with tears. Samantha smiled tightly.
‘But until we hear back from your mum, why don’t we start to talk about what happened on your trip, hey? Can we do that?’ She lifted out another pad of incident reports, and scratched around in her drawer until she located a short, chewed pencil. ‘So what happened, guys? What happened with your aunty? From the beginning.’
The children sat picking at their clean police T-shirts. Katie put her hands around her Milo mug, but didn’t pick it up. Sam wondered how to start, drawing a circle around Jon’s name with his pen.
‘She was angry,’ Katie said.
Samantha nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, she was. She is. But she’s not angry with you, sweetie. At the moment she’s just a very upset lady. Very confused. And we can try to help her by being very honest about everything that happened, okay?’ She wrote the date and time up in a corner of the notepad. ‘So your mummy went to work that morning, and then what?’
Slowly, Katie started to answer the questions Samantha was asking about the trip, and Sam, writing on his pages, would clarify details. About where they’d travelled, as best they could remember; how long Dettie would drive before stopping. Samantha asked whether Dettie had yelled a lot, and why Katie’s clothes smelt like petrol. A couple of times she asked whether they had seen Dettie taking any pills, even if they were just vitamins, and whether she’d ever gotten lost or confused on the roads. Mostly Katie just answered yes or no, and Samantha would nod, scribbling down whole sentences on her pad while shielding the words with her hand. Sam’s recollections were more specific, and he tried as best he could to offer the names of every town he could recall and roughly when they were there.
When she’d finished, Samantha stood up to go and type her notes. Sam grabbed her shirt as she moved to leave. He pointed at what he had written, slapping his pen on a single word, circled several times:
Jon?
66
For over three hours Sam and Katie waited at a conference table by the station’s kitchen. They had sandwiches and orange juice and chocolate bars. A fan fixed to the wall in a corner hummed down at them, slowly shaking its head. Officer Samantha helped Katie plait her hair into a French braid—something Sam had never learnt to do properly—and found them a handful of pencils and a stack of printer paper with which to amuse themselves.
At first Sam spent his time writing down every detail he could about Jon. That he was from England; that he’d been to Noosa; that he was heading west. He described his canvas shoes and his scraggly beard. The colour of his dusty luggage. He wrote down words Jon had used like hard graft and wowsers. It began as a way of giving the officers something to search for, but it soon became a kind of sprawling portrait, a repository of everything he remembered about Jon from the past couple of days. That his father had worked as a mechanic. That he’d been married once, but his ‘missus’ had not been very nice. That his ex-girlfriend’s brother knew sign language. Samantha said that what he had written would help, and even took a blurry photocopy of the first few pages, but by the time he was writing down Jon’s technique for cutting mangos and the nervous way he chewed his thumbnail, she lost interest.
After a while, as he thought of anything else to add, Sam started doodling around the edges of the page. Bushes and trees. Birds. A car. And beside the car, because he could think of nothing else, a zombie. He used a green pencil for its skin, like they had in the comic book, and drew long, spiky nails and teeth. And it looked terrible. Not scary or threatening at all—even with a scribble of red gore on its lips it seemed more like an angry green man with silly hair. Even the hook he scribbled on the end of one wrist looked awkward.
On a counter beside the station’s microwave was a small black-and-white television that Samantha had turned on so they could watch afternoon cartoons. During the ad breaks it kept showing news bulletins that updated the progress of the fires. Sam saw images of fire-fighters shouting out orders and firing hoses into the blazing scrub. He watched for their faces, wondering if he might recognise any of the men who’d stopped their car, but most were wearing masks or sitting in the shadows of their trucks, sucking oxygen from bottles. There was footage of a huge helicopter that inched across the sky, dumping water into the largest flames. Smaller planes were circling the smokier areas, opening their bellies to release water that turned to white foam the moment it touched air.
With the television’s sound down low, and the noise of the office surrounding him, the footage of the fires seemed eerily calm, like a dream. Most peculiarly, during one newsbreak he actually saw himself and Katie. His and his sister’s faces were up on the screen with the word FOUND written beneath them. The pictures were old school photos—the one of Sam was before his operation, with short hair and no stoma. Sam tapped Katie to get her attention, but by the time she turned to look a team of football players were practising on a field.
Sam went back to drawing. On a clean section of page he started drawing flames—red and orange flickers, like leaves. As he coloured over them with yellow, he thought about the campfire Jon had made for them at the rest stop the night they had left him behind. He tried to draw Jon into the image, in beside some bushes. He pencilled his flannel shirt and his ripped jeans, and carefully outlined his jaw with brown whiskers. He remembered the way Jon’s eyes had shimmered in the light of the fire, like they were wet—but he didn’t know how to draw that, so he left them plain. When he was done with the shape of Jon, he tried to sketch Dettie in beside him—her cardigan and her messed-up hair. But when it came to her face,
he wasn’t sure how to draw her features. He held the pencil above the oval shape of her head, imagining her smiling, imagining her snapping at them. At times she’d been ferocious, cornered and feral, like she was when the fire-fighters had dragged them free of the car; other times she had been sweet, cradling the red-haired boy who had fallen from the train, picking daisies with Katie. He could see her yellow smile and her narrowed eyes. He saw her singing along to the radio in her shaky opera voice, or smoothing aloe vera on his arms. There didn’t seem to be a single Dettie to draw, so he left most of her blank.
When Officer Samantha noticed the first picture she was winding a rubber band onto the end of Katie’s plait. ‘Oh, that looks nice,’ she said. ‘Is that your car?’
Sam nodded.
‘That looks good,’ she said. ‘Oh dear! That’s a zombie, isn’t it?’
Sam smiled politely, but he suddenly had the feeling she was patronising him somehow.
‘He’s very scary. What’s he saying?’ Samantha’s voice was a little too soft. Too soothing. Aping surprise.
Sam shrugged. He wrote on the bottom of the page:
Nothing.
‘That’s right. I forgot,’ Samantha said. ‘Zombies can’t—’
She stopped. She swallowed and leant over to point at the second picture, of Jon. ‘And who’s this coming out of the fire? Another zombie?’
Sam shook his head, but Samantha was busy straightening Katie’s braid.
‘He looks even scarier than the other one, I think,’ she said, nodding. ‘I bet you’re going to be an artist when you grow up.’
It was the kind of compliment he would have once puffed up to receive, but now it rang hollow, an empty platitude to keep him sedate.
Sam wrote Jon’s name in large letters and drew an arrow. Samantha, meanwhile, had turned towards the front desk where the officer was waving for her to come over to the phone. She squeezed Sam’s shoulder and lifted Katie off her knee. As she rose, he slapped his hand upon the table, startling both her and his sister. He pointed again at the page.
She read the name. ‘Oh. Okay,’ she said.
He drew another large question mark.
‘I know. I know. I promise, we’ll ask.’ Samantha nodded and crossed the station floor to take up the phone receiver.
Katie climbed back up onto a chair and helped herself to some pencils and paper. Far behind her, on the opposite wall, Sam saw an interview-room door opening and Dettie slowly emerge. She seemed shrunken. When two officers guided her to one of the desks on the furthest side of the room, she sat silently in a metal folding chair, stiff, with her eyes half closed. They’d taken her handbag, but she was still twisting Katie’s handkerchief in her fingers, staring down at it. Sam had to lean around an office partition to see what was going on, and if he strained he could hear the droning voice of the police sergeant who was reading something to Dettie, pausing only occasionally to clear his throat.
Finally, the sergeant stopped, straightened the handful of yellow papers he had been thumbing through, and sat up in his chair. ‘Ma’am,’ he said, fitting a paperclip over them, ‘is this statement—which I have just read back to you—correct, as to your recollection, in its entirety?’
Dettie gradually emerged from her daze. She nodded.
‘Then can you please sign your name here at the bottom?’ the officer asked, sliding the statement over to her and laying a pen on top.
Dettie eased forward in her chair and folded her arms tightly across her belly. Hunched, she leant across the corner of the desk and stared down at the papers, unblinking, for almost a minute, before lifting the pen.
‘It’s Bernadette,’ she said to herself as she slowly completed her signature. ‘Like the saint.’
The corner of the sergeant’s mouth twitched and he took back the pen.
Sam couldn’t hear all of what he said next, but he heard something about theft and child endangerment, and offering to speak to a lawyer.
Sam waited for Dettie to say something in reply, but she closed her eyes and nodded.
‘Hey, kids!’ Samantha was calling to them. ‘Come on. Come over here, I’ve got a surprise for you.’
They both turned in their seats. Samantha was standing by the front desk waving them over. In her hand she was holding out the phone receiver.
Katie leapt out of her chair so fast she stumbled. Sam pushed back from the table, scattering his pencils. They scrambled over and pressed their ears together above the earpiece. Katie held her hands over her mouth as she trembled with excitement.
‘My darlings? My babies?’ Their mother’s voice, thinned out through the speaker but warm and familiar, warbled on the other end of the line. She was laughing and weeping and breathing deeply.
Katie whined and collapsed against Sam’s side.
‘Sweetie, Katie, don’t cry,’ their mother was saying. ‘It’s all right. You’re safe. And I’m on my way.’ She sounded breathless.
Sam tugged the phone closer and tapped the mouthpiece. He made a popping sound with his lips.
‘Sam? Honey, is that you? Sweetie. Oh. Thank God. Thank God. I should never—Sam, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. For everything. Mummy’s going to be there soon, okay? Mummy’s going to be with you really, really soon. I love you. Make sure Katie—Katie? I love you both so much. I’m so sorry.’
She was talking almost too fast for Sam to make out, and Katie was howling beside him.
‘You be strong,’ their mother was saying. ‘I couldn’t be more proud of you. Of you both. I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.’
Clutching the phone in both hands, holding it up for Katie, Sam glanced up at Dettie. Through his blurred vision he could see his aunt still sitting at the sergeant’s desk. She had turned to look at them both, holding a lit cigarette in her fingers. Her face was drawn and thin, and it too was wet with tears. As Sam wiped his eyes, she turned away.
Samantha left them to talk. When Katie had calmed down enough to speak she clutched the phone tightly to her head, telling their mother hurriedly about the trip. Sam tried to listen in, but Katie was so eager she eventually twisted the receiver from his hands. She mentioned the boy with the chipped tooth and Sam throwing up. The firemen, the handkerchief, how Dettie never let them wind the windows down.
‘She was scary,’ she said. ‘She’d get all mad. All the time. We went to a petrol station at one place and she sprayed it on me. The petrol. All on me.’
Katie waited with her mouth open as her mother said something.
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘And I kept asking to call you, but she said you already left to go to Perth. That you went already. And I said, “No she didn’t,” but she yelled at me. She yelled all the time.’
Their mother was talking again.
‘No, don’t cry, Mummy,’ Katie said. ‘She was like that to everyone. She even made Jon leave.’
Their mother must have asked, because Katie explained all about Jon. All about his wife, and his stories, and the way he said bollocks. It made them laugh, and Sam could tell that somehow it was helping his mother to relax on the other end of the line.
Katie talked for almost an hour, and finally Samantha had to come back and take the phone from her hands. Their mother promised she would be there soon; she was flying, and they had to wait for her plane, but the three of them would travel home together.
Sam wondered what would happen to Dettie, but he was too tired to find a way to ask.
67
Later that evening the children lay on foldaway beds in the station interview room. Katie was asleep but Sam was lying still, staring at the ceiling, when he heard the door creak open. A tall silhouette peered through the frame. It was Samantha, asking in a whisper if he was still awake. He propped himself up on his elbows. Their father was on the phone.
Katie rolled over to face the wall when Sam tried to wake her. ‘He doesn’t care,’ she said. ‘He’s not coming back.’ She pushed the pillow to her ear.
Sam didn’t want to leave her
, but he was just going to the next room, and it was quiet and safe now. He rose from his cot and followed Samantha out into the office, shielding his eyes from the light.
The room was emptier than it had been during the day. The television was off, and when his eyes had adjusted it seemed like the yellow walls had darkened to a pale orange. The phone was off the hook on the front desk, and as they crossed the floor he remembered the old cassette tape he had found in the laundry cupboard. The one with him and his father singing ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’. On it, his father’s voice had seemed flintier than he recalled, and it had been difficult to align it with the image he tried to keep of him, larger and more sonorous, in his mind. But now his father was close again. Just on the other end of the phone. Waiting.
Samantha wheeled over a chair for Sam to sit on, and then lifted the receiver to speak.
‘Hello?’ she said. ‘Yes, sorry about that. I’ve got Sam here. I’ll just put him on.’
She winked and passed Sam the phone. As he took it, he squeezed so hard the plastic squeaked.
‘Hello? Hello, are you there?’ It was his father’s voice. But it sounded even thinner than it had on the tape. ‘Is anyone there? Hello?’
Sam made popping sounds with his lips into the receiver. He felt the muscles in his throat tightening, trying to talk. He wished, once again, that he could whistle.
‘Am I on hold—? I think they’ve put me on hold.’ His father was talking to another voice in the background. A female voice.
Still popping, Sam tapped on the mouthpiece.
‘What’s that?’ his father said. ‘Hello? Is someone—Sam? Oh, it’s you, buddy. Of course. No one was talking so I thought they’d—’ He cleared his throat. ‘Hey, how are you? Eh, buddy? I’ve been worried sick. They couldn’t tell us anything. Are you all right? How’s your sister? Is she there?’
Sam was nodding, shrugging, clicking his tongue; trying to make any noise. He had the phone pressed so hard to his ear that it hurt.
‘Sam, I said, are you all right?’ His father’s voice sounded distant through the crackle on the line. ‘I’ll tell you what,’ he said. ‘You knock once for yes, two for no. Are you good?’