Audrey’s reaction was not one Simon expected. Audrey’s features—instead of widening with shock, or puckering with anger—simply receded, like water into a sponge. ‘No,’ she said eventually. ‘It’s just us.’ She ruffled her left hand deep into her hair.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Simon, ‘I didn’t mean—’
‘Iris’s room is on the end at the left,’ interrupted Audrey. ‘You can find your way I’m sure.’
‘Audrey—’
‘See you, Simon.’ She clomped back down the hallway without giving him a chance to respond.
Simon was left alone in the empty corridor, with its invisible ghosts and misspoken words.
Ned’s house always reared up on you before you realised it was there. Its colonial roof appearing first above the rise of the hill, then the rest of it, a castle, an outpost. It had been built as a postmaster’s house, or so Ned had told her, back when Reception was a whaling town. Sometimes, the house seemed to hang out off the edge of the land, clinging impossibly to the air.
Madaline had been here first four years ago: her first seaside summer. She’d come straight from Sydney, from a place she’d felt filled with manic boredom. Two years following orders, following protocol, making career progress by simply having no other purpose in her life. She’d been running, of course, from an old life, and had taken the posting in Reception as something of a compromise: halfway between the polluted crush of now and the humid cloak of then. Ned and Stephanie Gale were the first to welcome her, perhaps enjoying the companionship of someone close to their own age, perhaps sensing her vulnerabilities. Just the view, the house appearing, had filled her with a gladness she hadn’t known for so long. Even though the feeling was faint now, nearly washed away.
She felt another pang of memory. Her first night in Reception. Bare walls and a single bed: space waiting to be filled. Flicking on every light in the house, clapping her hands to test the echo. It had reminded her, more than anything, of the single, spotless lock-up Tommy had shown her in the police station attached to his house. If we do our job right, he’d said, we’ll never have to use this. Tommy, even then, was a country cop diffused to cliché: tyre-truck stomach, orange fingertips, a drinker’s rippled gaze. Above his desk was a framed newspaper clipping of his famous hostage case. He was so different: stout even then, but strong with it, his eyes bearing dark intensity. Tommy X-ray.
The person she knew now—her boss—was an old man treading water till retirement. The saddest thing was he had lost his perspicuity, the one trait that had really set him apart. The way this morning he had already decided the Sawyers had done a runner. The easiest option for him.
Madaline parked her car, adjusted the rear-vision mirror. She caught herself checking her hair and slapped the mirror back into place. At least Tommy’s integrity had taken twenty years to leach away. Hers had gone inside a fortnight.
A blur came at her from the other side of the house. Ned’s son, Gin, dressed as Superman. A mud-spattered red cape flew out behind him. He seemed, in fact, sodden with water. His outfit was stained dark, sticking to his skin. What was once—Madaline guessed—a carefully formed cowlick, was now a thatchy mess. She saw Ned’s face in Gin: a bright eagerness, an important detail.
She got out of her car. ‘Gin,’ she called. ‘Hi!’
Gin stopped in his tracks and then started running towards her. ‘Hi,’ he shouted. ‘I’m Superman!’
Madaline walked up the hill towards him. ‘I can see that.’
‘And you’re a policeman!’
Madaline ran her fingers across her starched collar. ‘Well, yes. Police officer. It’s a bit cold for a swim, isn’t it?’ She motioned at the darkened S on his chest.
‘Have you found Simon’s mum and dad?’ Gin came up to her, but stopped a few metres away. He squinted at her through one eye.
‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘But it won’t be long.’
Gin nodded, a resigned gesture. Madaline felt a familiar tightness in her chest. She had given Gin the same false promises about his own mother. She wondered if he still remembered.
‘Is…your dad here?’ she said.
‘Think so. Want me to go get him?’
‘Sure.’
‘I’ll fly back to the house, okay?’
‘Okay.’
‘But will you watch me fly back?’
‘Sure.’
‘But you promise?’
‘Yes,’ said Madaline. ‘I promise.’
Gin turned around and ran back to the house, arms out-stretched. He was acting, Madaline thought, insulating himself.
She wondered how Audrey was. Madaline had seen reports from counsellors, from teachers, but they didn’t tell her what she really wanted to know: whether the hollow space that grief had scooped out of the little girl was beginning to fill again.
No amount of training could have prepared Madaline for what she saw Audrey go through. It was as if a light had been switched off inside her: she’d been shrivelled, submerged by her loss. It was clear she had worshipped Stephanie, never far from her side. After disappearance was replaced by probable death, Audrey had filled a bathtub, climbed in and refused to leave. Madaline, sent to interview her, knocked on the bathroom door—talked through it—for nearly ten minutes, before forcing open the lock. Audrey was still, lying down, her face the only part of her above the water line. Her waist-length hair drifted in the water as if it was the water, swirling strands covering the surface completely. It was only when Madaline said her name that Audrey’s eyes opened, that she raised herself up and it was clear that her hair no longer attached to her head. Her patchy skull turned and the girl met Madaline’s eyes. The hair in the water began leaching red and Madaline only realised what had happened when Audrey’s arm emerged, holding a pair of heavy fabric scissors, her wrist hatched black, her arm streaming blood.
It was this image that stained Madaline’s dreams, more than any other.
Simon put his ear to the cold wood of the door, like he had seen in the movies. He couldn’t hear anything. His grandmother’s room was, as it turned out, only two doors down from his. He strained as hard as he could to listen. He wanted, somehow, to hear Iris’s steady breaths, wanted to recognise her instantly, even from such a tiny detail. He was worried no one had roused her the night before. Worried that her sickness was a deep, debilitating disease. What if she had wasted away? What if she was nothing but a skeleton sunk into sheets?
Simon held his breath and knocked at the door, gently, with a bunched index finger. The sound was nearly deafening in the quiet of the hall. He felt suddenly, impossibly out of place. He flexed his legs, ready to leave, but no voices protested, no feet came running across the floorboards. No sound at all, in fact, except the growing rumble of distant waves.
He tried the door handle, but pushing against it he felt a great resistance. More than a lock, perhaps: almost as if something heavy had been pressed against the door. Suddenly, then, a voice from inside the room, so familiar that Simon’s breath caught in his throat.
‘Who’s that?’ said the voice.
Simon’s mind spun back to the glare of a window, his starfish hand pressed against it. His scars itched: he imagined criss-cross lines linking each of them. Join-the-dots. This was his last chance to run away. To keep running until he found a home. ‘It’s me,’ he said. ‘It’s…Simon.’
Silence from behind the door. Then a scraping sound. ‘Simon?’ The voice was weak.
‘Yes,’ he said again. He had the strange sense of being an imposter, like he wasn’t Simon, or at least wasn’t the Simon he was supposed to be. ‘It’s your…grandson.’ The word was so strange.
‘Just a minute.’ The scraping sound came again, closer this time. ‘Turn the handle to the left. Turn it the wrong way.’
Simon opened the door. The room was bathed in light, the soft grey of the day baking through a bay window at least twice the size of the one in Simon’s room. The rest of the space was almost bare. A double bed, a small d
esk at one wall. The desk was made of a strange dark wood, polished to a raspberry gleam. The bed was the same, the red frame nearly hidden beneath a soufflé of pastel bedclothes, numerous puffy doonas and fringed bedspreads, pillows like layers collapsing. But he couldn’t see his grandmother anywhere. ‘Hello?’ He stepped into the room. He thought of Audrey’s ghosts: disembodied voices, furniture shuddering, unaided, across the floor.
‘Simon.’ His grandmother’s voice was close, frail, quiet, as if by his ear.
He felt a chill. ‘Where…where are you?’
The door swung back, only slightly, and Simon saw her. Somehow hidden in the only shadow that escaped the window’s light, in a long white embroidered gown, was his grandmother. The nightgown was like a lace curtain, layering her body completely except for her head. Her hair was different—the familiar grey replaced with blonde, light like balsa wood—but her face was the same: the fine features and wide cheeks she’d given to Simon’s mother, the elegant, confident sweep of her eyebrows that lent themselves to surprise and sadness. She appeared, somehow, to be younger. She drew out her arms to Simon, her hands unfurling from beneath her gown. Her fingernails were tipped with dark purple polish.
‘Simon,’ she said. ‘It’s been so long.’
Simon let himself into her embrace. Her arms were so strong they crushed his nose into her stomach and all he could hear was the leaf-rustle of starched fabric and the round smell of sandalwood. His senses of her, still present, even after all the years. He let out a sigh, which he realised too late was so full of sadness that it choked his throat.
‘Everything will be fine,’ Iris said, patting Simon’s head. ‘Everything will work out.’
‘They’ve gone,’ cried Simon, bunching up his fist just under his eyes. ‘They’ve gone.’
‘I know. I know.’ She stroked his hair. Simon felt as helpless as he’d ever been in his life.
Iris led him to the bed and made him sit on the edge facing the window. Without thinking, Simon let himself flop back against the soft snowfall of pillows. He stared at the ceiling. How did he feel so comfortable with someone he hadn’t seen for so long? His grandmother sat down next to him. She didn’t say anything, just let him sit with his thoughts. He liked this.
‘Grandma?’ Simon tested the word out as he said it.
‘Yes, Simon?’
‘Do you think…do you think Mum and Dad will come
back?’
‘Darling, I know they will.’ Iris lay back on the bed, pushing some pillows down to the opposite end to rest her feet on. Simon noticed she had the same purple polish on her toenails. ‘They probably just wanted an adventure.’
‘An adventure?’
‘You know, a break from the ordinary.’
‘But…why didn’t they tell me? If they were going on an adventure?’
Iris stretched her limbs out, shivering her skin. ‘Sometimes you just have to get up and go. That’s what makes it so exhilarating.’
‘Exhilarating?’
‘Yes. The worst thing you can do is think about it. You just go.’
‘But didn’t they think of me?’
Iris sighed. Her body sunk further into the sheets. ‘It’s all…cycles,’ she said. ‘It goes around and around.’ She pushed back her hair. ‘I was the same.’
Simon turned his head to look at her. She’d closed her eyes, and with it, her spark disappeared. She was his grandma again, the person he remembered. Fragile, fearful, a force of weakness.
‘It’s my fault,’ she said. ‘You came here because of me.’
‘You said you were sick. You said—’ Simon couldn’t finish the sentence. He couldn’t bear to think that Iris was his one remaining link to something he knew, a link that would soon disappear.
Iris kept her eyes closed. ‘I know what I said.’
Simon sat up in the bed. ‘But we hadn’t seen you in so long.’
‘Well, that was my fault too.’
Simon watched a tear fall from his grandmother’s eye. She reached out and found Simon’s leg. Her fingers traced his scars.
She said, ‘I disappeared too, Simon. I disappeared to my own adventure.’
Simon felt, for the first time, a deep unease. ‘Where did you go?’
‘I sold the house—that awful house. I travelled. I had to cut away everything that I was. You probably can’t understand, but I had to.’
Simon nodded.
‘I couldn’t stay, Simon. Where I was, what I was…I was
hopeless. Truly hopeless.’
‘No you weren’t,’ Simon said quietly.
‘Your mother,’ Iris wiped away another tear. ‘I was a failure to her, and to you. I was a dead end.’
Simon remembered what it felt like when he landed. When all the air escaped from him and all he could feel was the sun and the cold dirt, as if he no longer existed on the earth. Before the pain flooded up through him, the deep sense of being broken. And the sound of a boiling kettle, so loud from the house, screaming to be removed from its place.
A knock at the door made them both jump.
‘Iris!’ Ned’s voice came through the thick door. ‘Is Simon in there with you?’ There was a panicked edge to Ned’s voice; Simon wondered if Audrey had told him where he was.
‘He’s in here,’ said Iris. ‘Everything’s fine.’ Her eyes had flecks of red. She wiped them with the back of her wrist.
‘Madaline will be here soon,’ said Ned. ‘She just wants a quick chat.’
Simon wondered why Ned didn’t open the door. ‘Okay,’ he said. He got off the bed and looked back at Iris.
‘You go,’ she said, waving her hands at him. ‘She’s probably going to tell you she’s found your mum and dad.’ She smiled. ‘We’ll talk later. I’ll be here.’
‘Okay,’ said Simon. ‘Thanks for—’ He trailed off. Iris had already drawn a doona up around her and turned away.
The sand was winter tight, so dry it nearly crackled. Tarden turned his boot to an angle and scraped across it, watching the grains crumble like stale breadcrumbs. He sometimes thought he was building his own desert island here, behind the house, the crabs bringing with them their part of the sea. He wedged the plastic tub between his stomach and the old freezer. A familiar pain shot across his gut as he tugged at the freezer lid, but this was as much a part of his routine as anything else. He knocked away the padlock with his free hand. The freezer lid refused to open, its rubber seal stuck fast. As he tried to wrench it the tub slipped and he cringed at the sharp crack as it hit the side of the freezer. He felt water spurting against his arm and knew the side had split.
He put the tub on the ground; the sand beneath leached quickly dark. He took off the lid and the crabs were tumble-turning, colliding. One had its claws free, holding fast to the legs of another. Tarden swore at himself for trying to take a shortcut: they deserved better than this. They deserved to have their final moments cloaked in calm, even if not comfort. He used both hands to prise open the freezer, shielding his face from the inevitable briny stench. He bent down over the tub, reaching in with a wide grip and hoisting the unbound crab from the water. It came out with two legs seized in each claw, a limb thief. He wiped his brow with the back of his hand. Three more legs floated in the tub, along with a twisted gnarl of twine. A stupid mistake. He’d let his focus slip. Let those other thoughts cloud his mind.
He slammed down the freezer lid and the sound echoed, a deep metallic chime, recalling the mellow ring of steel drums. The only music he’d heard for years, the Jamaican who they’d let work in the kitchen who’d hammered tiny dints into metal bowls. He’d been allowed to keep the bowls, to everyone’s surprise, and would play them some nights when curfew lapsed. The sounds would sweeten the stale air trapped between the walls, replacing that voice of despair that sometimes overtook you. He wondered how many lives the sound had saved.
Tarden inhaled the ocean air deeply; he still remembered to count his blessings. A pair of butcher birds chortled together d
own at the fence line. The breeze had picked up again. The mistletoe—like waterfalls high in the weeping gums—whistled and rushed. He stood for a moment, letting every one of his senses take its
fill: a practice he had promised himself, once a day for the rest of his life.
There was a sudden sickly humming. The freezer’s motor struggling. Tarden drew his hands down over his face. It was all too much sometimes, these little details, all adding up. Every week he promised himself he’d talk to Robbie about buying a new freezer and new equipment. It wasn’t much to ask. But every last dollar had to go into the shed, with the promise of so many more dollars to come. He threw up his hands, appealing to no one but himself. He started to walk back to the house, defeated already by the day. He stared back at his abandoned crab tub. He knew he’d caught by far the best haul of the morning. It was a daily ritual, the fishers meeting at the Ottoman to compare hauls. Even the blokes from the trawlers sometimes turned up in their shiny utes and monogrammed polo shirts. He’d told them all that morning about his catch, his crabs as big as dinner plates, heavy with good meat. It was a pissing contest, really, but Tarden was still proud of the envy on the other fishers’ faces. He didn’t have to go on about what price he’d get. For him, it was the satisfaction of hard work rewarded.
In a daze, Tarden swung open the back door with his foot,
then cursed himself. Even though the flyscreen hung three-quarters open no matter how hard you kicked it, Tarden hated to take his home for granted. In the kitchen, the fridge buzzed like a blizzard. On its last legs as well. He swung it open, the bottles in the door rattling, the buzzing growing louder. One day it would just conk out, and then what would they do? All that technology sitting across the yard while the house and cars slowly fell apart. They hadn’t taken a holiday in over two years. But there was always something new to buy: better storage, better transportation. Always problems to anticipate, always complications to rectify. It was never easy. And now another headache: the car Robbie had brought home last night. A huge, stupid, fuck-off complication.
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