The Ottoman Motel

by Christopher Currie

  Underneath his borrowed jumper, Simon’s borrowed shirt was beginning to itch. He had left his own things in the plastic bag Madaline had brought; he would put on proper clothes when he was back with his parents. He put his cheek up against the door, but it was harsh fabric, not the warm leather of his parents’ car. He watched the sky. It was bare of snaking powerlines but shapes still fractured the clouds: snarling, palsied wolves and dragons.

  Audrey tapped him on the shoulder and put an envelope in his hand. On the envelope, in triple-layered writing, was his name. Simon remembered how he used to write like this sometimes, holding three textas together at once, writing like a rainbow.

  ‘What’s this?’ he said.

  ‘Just open it.’

  Simon opened the envelope and some glitter fell out onto his lap. Inside was a card, with leaves pressed to its front. Audrey grinned at him.

  Dear Simon, You are cordially invited to Julian (Gin) Gale’s 5th Birthday Party. Venue: Our House. Time: 11am-3pm. Please RSVP to Audrey Gale, 1st Floor.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Simon.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ Audrey replied. ‘It’s tomorrow. You and your mum and dad can come.’

  Simon smiled.

  They rounded the lake and came out at the top of a gravel carpark where a dozen or so cars were parked. Simon didn’t recognise any of them, except for Tarden’s yellow four-wheel-drive. Simon’s whole body jolted. Where was his parents’ car? He felt a fresh squirt of panic. Maybe Madaline had taken it as evidence as well. Maybe there was more than one carpark.

  Ned parked the car. He turned around in his seat. ‘Simon,’ he said, ‘we don’t have to stay here. Any time you want to leave, you just tell me.’

  Simon nodded. His face felt like a cold flannel.

  ‘He’ll be fine,’ said Audrey. ‘Won’t you?’ She picked up Simon’s hand and squeezed it. ‘There’s nothing to be scared of.’

  Ned and Gin got out. Simon undid his seatbelt and sat for a moment with his fingers on the door handle.

  ‘It’s really okay,’ said Audrey. ‘We’re all here to help you.’ She had a mole at the corner of her eye that Simon hadn’t noticed before.

  Simon got out of the car. Magpie Lake was a white place: not light, but bleached. Nothing like the postcard picture he had imagined: it was grey water and naked granite, weary winter grass. He stared out across the lake.

  Groups of people had gathered below the carpark. They’d formed tight circles on the grass, mostly men. Fishermen, Simon guessed, who knew the lake. They were smoking, laughing, drawing shoe-patterns in the dirt. Schoolchildren waiting for their teacher. Simon noticed Jack Tarden talking to two other men. One was thin, his neck bent down like a vulture, wearing a peaked cap. A trail of cigarette smoke whispered from his fingers. The other man was large, with curly black hair, wearing a blue and black chequered shirt that was dark in waves where his sweat had stained it.

  Madaline busied herself in the boot of her car and emerged with large rolls of paper and a megaphone. Gin was walking along the top of one of the wooden barriers that fenced the carpark, his arms outstretched for balance.

  Audrey came up next to Simon. ‘They’ll probably use a grid,’ she said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘They divide a map up into a grid, and then every grid gets

  a number. You cross each number off on a list so you know

  where you’ve looked.’ She made hatch-patterns in the air with her fingers.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I’ve done it before.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘I just have,’ she said. ‘And that’s how you do it.’

  Simon imagined black lines running away from him, down over the rocks. ‘What about the water?’ he said.

  ‘The water?’

  ‘How do gridlines work on the water? You can’t walk across it to check.’

  ‘No,’ said Audrey, ‘of course you can’t do gridlines on the water. That’s just stupid. What a stupid thing to say.’ She turned around and walked off to watch Gin balance-beaming.

  Simon went over to where the other searchers were gathering—most standing in a large semicircle around Madaline’s car. A

  large piece of paper was spread over the bonnet, weighted down

  by a megaphone and what looked like a walkie-talkie. Simon counted twenty-three people, the rising wind tugging at their clothes. To the edge of the group, the waitress from the Ottoman was looking off into the distance, slowly revolving the piercing under her lip.

  A little further away, Madaline and Ned were talking to Tarden, along with the thin smoking man and the fat checked-shirt man. Ned saw Simon and beckoned him over. ‘We’re about to start the search,’ said Madaline, ‘and I just wanted to know how much a part of it you wanted to be—whether you want to go with one of the teams, or just stay here.’ She made it sound like a playground game.

  ‘Are you using a grid?’ said Simon.

  ‘A grid?’

  ‘On a map. Are you using a grid on a map?’

  Madaline’s face looked half-amused, half-worried. She said, ‘Something like that. We’re going to have different teams search different parts of the dam. We’re going to lead one each.’ She motioned to the others. ‘You know Mr Tarden of course.’

  Tarden nodded. ‘Jack,’ he said, ‘please.’

  ‘This,’ said Madaline, ‘is Mr Kuiper. A friend of Jack’s.’

  The thin man smiled at Simon. He had thick lines under

  his eyes, and at the corners of his mouth. ‘Hello, Simon. A

  pleasure.’ He had a strange, high-strung voice and an accent Simon didn’t recognise. Kuiper, thought Simon. Viper.

  ‘This is Mr Patterson.’ Madaline gestured at the fat man. ‘He owns the Ottoman.’

  ‘Call me Nat.’ He smiled at Simon. His skin was brown and soft, like Madaline’s leather chair. Curls hung over his forehead like the tendrils on ferns. ‘Pleased to meet you, Simon.’ He reached out his hand and Simon shook it. Nat’s fingers were brown, but his palms were pink.

  ‘Nat’s going to lead one of the teams,’ said Madaline. ‘His family used to live around the mountains out this way.’

  Simon looked at Nat, wide-eyed. ‘Really?’

  ‘A while ago,’ said Nat. ‘Before I was born. I’m sure it’s all up here somewhere, though.’ He tapped his head.

  Kuiper suddenly began to cough violently. He doubled over, hugging his waist with his arms. He quickly straightened up and cleared his throat. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘My allergies are hell this time of year.’ He wiped an invisible tear from the corner of his eye. ‘Where were we, Madaline?’

  Simon felt Kuiper’s sharp accent cut through him.

  Madaline took off her hat and put it under her arm. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I just need to talk to Simon about what he wants to do this morning.’ She crouched down so her eyes were at Simon’s height. ‘Do you know if you want to come along with any of the teams?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Simon. ‘I think so.’

  Ned rubbed his hands together. ‘I was thinking maybe Simon could come with me,’ he said. ‘I could take the other kids as well, just down around the shoreline. Nothing too hectic.’

  ‘That might be good,’ said Madaline. ‘Simon, does that sound okay? Going with Ned and Audrey?’

  Simon thought for a moment. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘But how will we know if another team has found my parents?’

  Madaline removed a metal whistle attached to some string from her pocket. ‘Each leader has one of these.’ She strung the whistle around her neck. ‘If anyone…When someone finds your parents, all they have to do is blow on the whistle. You’ll be able to hear it for miles out here.’

  Simon looked out at the surrounding hills. He imagined the sound of a whistle circling the dam. ‘Okay,’ he said.

  ‘Good lad,’ said Ned, zipping up his green jacket so it closed up just under his chin.

  ‘All right,’ said Madaline. ‘Let’s g
o.’

  They made their way over to Madaline’s car, where the rest of the search party were waiting. Simon’s stomach pitched and reeled like a wave-tossed boat, but his head was somehow clearing. Any sense of fantasy, of imagination, was leaving him. This was real. This was his answer. The pain of not knowing would be replaced by one overpowering truth: everything, eventually, had to end.

  Madaline smoothed the map out, realising too late that what she thought were wrinkles in the paper were really tracings of the lake’s edge. The map Nat had brought was old: hand-drawn, photocopied more than once; some lines had two or three sketchy echoes, others faded in and out of clarity. Still, the general shape of the lake was there. It did look a bit like a bird. Not a magpie, really; maybe a hunched and curious vulture. In the top right-hand corner the lake fed into a thin channel that squirmed out towards the sea.

  She picked the megaphone up off the corner of the map, and the paper flapped up violently, snapping like a loading sail in the wind. She jammed one hand against it as she tried to activate the megaphone with the other. Where the hell was Tommy? He was supposed to have arrived before her to get everybody ready but no one had seen him.

  Madaline heard the whine of feedback and spoke into the megaphone. ‘Hello?’ Her voice blared out and the searchers fell silent. There weren’t nearly enough people for a proper search. Pathetic numbers, really. Kuiper and Tarden had done no more than trawl the back tables of the Ottoman, but it was better than she could have done herself. Some of them were wearing their orange SES jumpsuits but had rolled them down to the waist for easier access to cigarettes; it was also a subtle indication that it wasn’t a real emergency. Nat was here, which was good, and Megan: a closed Ottoman meant a better turn-out than she had feared. They were bored bodies, Madaline thought, looking for something to do between the tides. She recognised all the faces, even if not the names. They were faces she’d dealt with, come up against, especially in the winter months; by late April, the phone calls would start at night. Mostly just boredom and bravado; most of them settled down after she arrived, happy for the attention. If they wanted to take it further, she’d cuff them and issue a few threats, but she hardly ever had to use the lock-up. At most, they’d get a summons to appear up at Byron or a tongue-lashing from Tommy for wasting everybody’s time.

  Madaline didn’t like to admit it, but she was secretly glad of these outbreaks of real police work. Perhaps she welcomed the attention as well. None of them were bad people, really, they’d just become stuck in a life that offered no change and little reward. Not that she could talk.

  A familiar blue and white four-wheel-drive came down into the carpark. Tommy’s face was red behind the wheel. He parked and stepped carefully out onto the gravel, pulling on a reflective vest. Everyone had turned to look at him.

  He waved his arms down at them as if discouraging applause. ‘How are we all?’ His blinked his eyes rapidly. ‘This dry wind, bloody hell.’ He came up into the circle of searchers, pulling a squashed pack of cigarettes from his back pocket. He lit one, sheltering it from the breeze with his body. ‘Madaline,’ he said. ‘This is your operation. Just pretend I’m not here.’

  Madaline gritted her teeth. The lazy bastard hadn’t changed. Ever since she had arrived, he had treated her not as a welcome addition to Reception’s police presence but an excuse to do less himself, to be a police officer only when it suited him. The first days of Stephanie Gale’s disappearance had been the worst. The way he constantly threw responsibility to her, the junior officer. Back then, the world was not the freezing edge of a winter lake but the apricot arms of summer sand, stretching endlessly in both directions. The dark mass of the bluff, the beckoning crash of warm-weather waves. And Ned, in his perennial green jacket, despite the baking heat. Madaline in a uniform of even fresher fabric.

  Had she known her feelings for him then? Probably not. So why had it all seemed so hard? Why had a routine search started to feel like the slowest torture? It came back to her often, the memory of those first days. The same emergency service jumpsuits, the same expectant faces. They shot into her mind with the strange warm glow of ancient photographs.

  Madaline found herself talking, her voice suddenly clear: ‘Thank you all for coming this morning. As you have no doubt gathered, time is of the essence. We have two missing persons who were last seen heading for this site at approximately six o’clock yesterday evening. Bill and Louise Sawyer, both of the Gold Coast, took a room at the Ottoman Motel with their son, Simon. They left him in the hotel room, heading to Magpie Lake.’

  A different photograph flashed into Madaline’s head: a stretch of cane fields, a cleared track narrowing back to the horizon. Her father, leaning on a shovel, foot propped up on the blade. The only way she could ever remember him: arms crossed like a single muscle against his chest, eyes etched into a permanent squint. A grimace, a fortress.

  ‘Their car was not parked here at the lake, but we have reason to believe they may still be here. Bill and Louise are both in their mid-to-late thirties, and have no experience in bush survival. We are to assume, unless we learn otherwise, that they are both in the vicinity of the lake. I have appointed four—’ she shot a glance at Tommy, ‘five team leaders, along with myself, to guide the separate teams to different areas around the lake. Please see me to be allocated to a team.’

  Her mother, sprawled on a cane chair. Christmas Day. The sweat from a true tropical summer shining her brow. In the warm Polaroid wash, her face reduces to shapes: fat circles of mascara, wedges of lurid eyeshadow, the fractal damage of self-crimped hair. Madaline, behind the lens, taking her very first picture.

  ‘Your group leaders will each have a map of the area they will search. Please stay with your teams, and report to your leaders anything you think is pertinent to the search. Leaders will alert me to any significant developments, otherwise we will reconvene back here in three hours. Remember water, remember a hat. This is a mostly contained area, and I am confident it will be just a matter of time until we find Bill and Louise. Any questions?’

  The wedding waltz. That stupid tradition. Every face in the crowd blasted by a too-bright flash. Madaline with her back to the camera. Her hair is longer, plaited down below her shoulders. Will’s face wears a look of rare contentment. The smile that stretched his lips ever since she told him yes. What the camera can’t see—what history didn’t record—was Madaline’s animal groan, barely covered by the music, her tears misconstrued as happiness: her mortal fear that she’d made the worst mistake of her life.

  Back near their new house on the Gold Coast there was a pretend beach. Instead of sand there were small smooth stones that

  clicked and shrieked when you walked across them. The rocks sat beside a long pontoon that ran from the back of their house and jutted out into a canal. On the second afternoon after they’d moved in, Simon had gone with his father to the pontoon to

  watch the flat orange sunset spread across the rooftops on the opposite shore. His father had his new camera slung around his neck, the oversized lens sticking out from his chest. The pontoon was covered in a rough ridged carpet that smelled salty and wet. The beach-stones were deep black, slippery as whale’s eyes, the water milling around their edges. His father had picked up a handful and was at the pontoon’s edge, skimming them across the water.

  Simon had asked if they could go swimming in the canal. People don’t go swimming here, his father had said, throwing his last stone. Simon let his gaze settle on the soft chop of the canal waves. A sadness overcame him: the thought that no one had ever dived into the water, nobody had ever swum with those waves to start a journey to the sea. The knowledge that this new place was no different from any other; it was just a new set of boundaries to settle within.

  The water of Magpie Lake was quite clear up close, the colour of cold tea. A line of fine pale sand ran just past the shoreline, disappearing eventually into shadow. Simon bent down and dipped his hand beneath the water. He sank his fingers into the sand
, releasing a swollen cloud of white that roiled in the gentle tide. The water was icy, but felt good against his hand. He thought perhaps the lake was friendlier in smaller pieces.

  Simon’s mood had improved. Madaline had spoken with such authority, such certainty, that it was impossible to think his parents would not be found. She was in charge now and he finally had hope. Like she’d said, they had no experience in the bush. How far could they have gone? Simon pictured his parents wandering out from the bush, flanked by searchers, clothes muddied and egos dented. It might almost be funny. He wished he’d helped Madaline more when she interviewed him. He wished he’d said important words into the tape recorder, remembered important things she could have written in her book.

  Gin had removed his shoes and was already wading, knee deep, a little further out. He was pushing his hands through the water, palms down, as if trying to wipe the surface clean. Audrey remained some way up from the shore. For some reason, she hadn’t wanted to come down to the water and Simon wasn’t about to argue with her. Ned strolled along the foreshore a little way ahead, hands behind his back. After an initial burst of combing through the grass, none of them had wanted to keep going. It didn’t matter to Simon: he knew his job now was to stay here and wait. His ears strained, waited, for the sound of a whistle.

  He wondered how long they would stay in Reception after his parents were found. He hoped they could stay for a little while, hoped his mother could spend some time with Iris. Perhaps they could all stay at Ned’s house, stay in one of the rooms. It would be like a real holiday.

  Still squatting, Simon took his hands out of the water and wiped them on his trousers. He felt a hard lump at the side of

  one leg, then remembered he was wearing Pony’s army pants, with all the pockets. He found the pocket with the lump in it and pulled out a flat black stone the width of a tennis ball. He had a strong urge to throw the stone, skimming across the surface of the lake, the way his father had done at the canal. But then he thought of Pony, who seemed to keep stones like other people would keep seashells. He put it back in his pocket.