Simon waited for Audrey’s answer.
‘No thank you,’ she said. ‘Simon and I have something to discuss.’
‘Yes, I’m fine,’ Simon agreed.
‘Okay then.’ Ned got up and dusted off the back of his jeans. ‘Back soon.’
Audrey walked to the water’s edge. She climbed a small rock and jumped off it; her layered dress made her look a bit like a bat, flying in the daytime. Simon met her where she landed.
‘It was different, you know,’ she said.
‘What was?’
‘When my mum went missing.’
‘Your dad told me.’
‘There was a sniffer-dog down at the beach. Gin wanted it to catch a Frisbee. It didn’t make any difference. We had to pack up half the house—the bits that she used.’
‘The bits she used?’
‘Some of the furniture, things she was halfway through.’
Something snagged in Simon’s mind. ‘Did your mum…make things?’
‘Yes,’ said Audrey. ‘She made things from wood.’
‘Did she make the table, in the dining room?’
‘When did you go in the dining room?’
‘With Madaline. She interviewed me.’
‘Madaline?’ Audrey’s face darkened, then just as quickly relaxed. ‘Stephanie. That was her name. She was a sculptor. She used to make us animals, when we were littler. She was always carving.’ Audrey picked up a pointed stone from the ground
and began twisting it, whittling into her palm. ‘Just because she disappeared,’ said Audrey, ‘doesn’t mean your mum and dad have.’ She smiled, and Simon thought her smile was the small start of something good.
They walked together down to the water’s edge where tall stalks of grass stuck out, mud-caked into spider’s legs. ‘I don’t miss her, anyway,’ said Audrey. ‘I just got used to it.’ She weighed the whittling stone in her right hand. Making Simon jump, she rushed her arm over her head and hurled the stone up into the sky, out across the water. ‘I don’t miss her,’ she said again, as the stone shrilled through the air in a high arc. It finally landed, making a pleasant white dash in the water.
‘Bet you can’t do that,’ she said.
Simon smiled. ‘Bet I can.’
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Furthest throw wins.’
Simon looked around and found another stone. He’d played cricket at one school. He was sure he could throw better than a girl. It would be easy.
‘Get ready to lose,’ he said, like someone out of a movie. He wound up and let the stone go. As he released it, he realised his grip was too weak, and it went out too flat and wobbly, crashing into the water like a diving plane.
Audrey threw another one—small and round: a water stone—and it went even further. She laughed. ‘There’s no way you can throw further than me.’
A quick anger buzzed in Simon’s stomach. Just because he was lost, just because Audrey could make up the rules, that didn’t mean she had to win. He had to beat her. They each threw three more times, and each time Audrey won. ‘You’re not trying,’ she kept saying, even though she knew he was. On the fourth go, Simon remembered the rocks in his pockets. He had forgotten about them. He thought of Pony. He reached down and got one out. Its weight felt right in his hand.
‘What’s that?’ said Audrey.
‘My secret weapon.’ He turned the rock over in his hand, enjoying its glint, its glittering jewels. ‘I’ve been saving it up.’ He turned it over in his hand until it nestled snugly in his grip.
‘It’s too big,’ said Audrey.
‘No it’s not. There’s no rules about that.’ He turned around, stepped back and readied his arm. He knew his throw would be enormous. He could picture it sailing over the lake completely, tracing a superhuman path that would set a record. He pictured the rock hitting one of the trees on the opposite shore, lodging in halfway up its trunk. He would show Reception what he was made of.
He ran four steps, leaned back and hurled his arm forward with all his strength and all his anger and all his sadness. Just as he did, a voice rang in his head, as clear as air itself. A sideways feeling: his mother’s voice: You need to understand, but it’s quite obvious you can’t. Simon felt a weight leave his fingers. His vision skewed and his body stuttered forward as he regained his balance, but when he listened again the voice was gone. His eyes settled easily on a spot on the horizon, but the sideways feeling was still there. Something wasn’t right. Something wasn’t where it was supposed to be.
The rock.
Simon was off-balance again, spinning his head in every direction for signs where the rock was coming down. It hadn’t fallen in the water because there was no sound, no splash. He searched the sky, eyes flicking. Perhaps he had thrown it to the other shore. Perhaps he had won—but then he saw it—a dark spinning shape, a full stop falling through the air. It was too fast to follow and all he heard was a dry noise as he spun around and saw Ned falling like a shot solider, his white thermos cup, his sandwich, crashing against the ground. Ned collapsing, crumpling, his body with no apparent memory of how it was supposed to land. And then stillness: a patch of red, growing slowly, like a handprint against Ned’s hair.
Audrey screamed. Not a quick shrill shout but a slow moan. Simon’s body was frozen in a flashbulb pose of expressed energy: shoulders bunched, body hip-swivelled, face contorted with effort. He couldn’t see the rock, only what it had done.
Ned lay on the ground in an impossible spiral shape. His arms and legs curved somehow in the same direction, as if his body was circling in on itself. But what Simon noticed most was the bright stain that was breeding red tendrils in the thatch of Ned’s hair. With a self-taught trick, Simon tried to convince himself that the blood was paint that had fallen from above, descending on Ned from a puncture in some stratospheric balloon. But he knew the only thing that had fallen from the sky was the rock he had thrown.
Audrey fell silent; she turned her head to Simon. Her face showed little: except her eyes, which simply said I fear this. They turned together, and their bodies moved slowly forward. As they approached, Ned’s body seemed to loom unevenly towards them. Neither of them could measure a response. There was nothing to compare it to.
Ned’s body heaved and Simon’s breath stopped in his mouth. Ned’s arm dragged itself towards his head, his fingers searching out the dried blood and the gash beneath. He climbed slowly to his haunches, hair swinging before his face, grained with dust and twisted into thick dirty ribbons. Audrey held out her hand—too far away for Ned to take it—and let out what was a cry and a question.
Ned didn’t seem to hear it, or perhaps he couldn’t. He rose to his feet, both hands rising to his head; blood began to run down the inside of his forearms, dripping in measured doses from his elbows, making dot patterns on the bone-white rocks below. The dots followed him as he staggered forward, connecting his steps together. He looked up and met Simon’s gaze, as if remembering something important. When he removed his left hand from his temple, a fresh complaint of blood spilled free.
Ned’s mouth opened to speak, and what Simon heard was, ‘I remember,’ though he wasn’t sure if Ned was even making words. Then, with a loud exhalation and a final widening of his eyes, he collapsed again.
Audrey sprang to her father’s side with the reflexive quickness of panic. She grabbed Ned’s jacket, bunching it up in two little fists. She shook him, tried to pick him up. Her arms strained, but Ned remained where he was. She turned to Simon. ‘Why did you do this?’ she said, her voice not wet and wavering, but so dry that her words cracked in her throat.
‘I didn’t!’ said Simon hopelessly, ‘I didn’t do anything.’ He thought of his mother’s voice, how it had appeared from nowhere.
‘You threw the rock!’ Audrey cried, shaking Ned’s jacket. ‘It’s my dad!’ Then she wept, whooping sobs, sucking in air that never satisfied her breaths.
Simon grabbed at his thoughts. Here came Gin, splashing towards them in the water. He didn
’t want Gin to see. But what about the rest of the people, scattered all around the dam, scores of them, more than enough to help, but too far away. What was it Madaline had said? Communication…
‘The whistles!’ he shouted.
‘What?’ Audrey’s entire face burned red.
‘Every group leader has a whistle.’
Audrey seemed to understand. ‘It’s around his neck.’ Simon crouched down to help, but Audrey slapped him away. She put her fingers up to Ned’s throat and tried to work her hand underneath his collar. Simon made himself look into Ned’s eyes. They weren’t focused on him. They weren’t focused on anything. His eyelids were broken blinds, sagging sadly.
Audrey was trying to force down the zipper on Ned’s jacket. She had to push her hand against his chin, her fingers staining red. Eventually the zip came loose and she pulled out a small plastic whistle. Trembling, she unclipped it from its length of cord. The side of the whistle that had been resting on Ned’s chest was covered in blood.
‘What do we do?’ said Audrey. ‘It won’t work like this.’
Simon took a deep breath and grabbed the whistle from her hand. He pulled the bottom of his T-shirt out from under his jumper and rubbed the whistle as hard as he could. When he brought it back to his face, it looked nearly clean.
‘Should I try it?’ he said to Audrey.
Audrey nodded her head.
Simon put the whistle to his lips, and he could taste the smell of old money. He took a breath and blew as hard as he could. The whistle spluttered, but that was all. Simon closed his eyes. It wasn’t going to be like this. It wasn’t. He hit the whistle against the side of his leg, again and again. Something had to go right, eventually. He put the whistle to his mouth again and blew. And a piercing, trilling, beautiful sound shot out into the winter air, its pure echo ringing out. Simon blew it, over and over, harder each time, until he felt his last breaths leave him, the last efforts of air clawing at his lungs to remain.
Madaline hadn’t always hated hospitals. Her childhood self had been intrigued by the secret world of healing. She had been
fascinated by X-rays, how you could see inside someone, transforming them to ghostly tracings, seeking out a broken bone or the dark evil of illness. She blamed the handsome doctors of her mother’s guilty afternoon soap operas, somehow even more
glamorous than the privileged heiresses and boat-hopping playboys. They were the ones who put things right. Hospitals, in those impossible lens-softened worlds, were the noble purveyors of justice and rightness.
That was before afternoons in a television’s glow were replaced by after-school trips to waiting rooms; lounge-room lace curtains replaced by thick hospice blinds. That repeating pattern of brown bare trees she still saw sometimes when she closed her eyes. Her father, looking lost in his own body.
Madaline locked her legs out straight in the plastic chair and had unconsciously hooked her thumbs over the top of her belt, a classic police pose. They’d taken Ned through to Emergency straight away because of her uniform, although once the triage nurse looked at his head, the injury was enough.
‘He was hit by a stone.’ It did sound unlikely, but there was nothing Madaline could do about the nurse’s sceptical look except set her mouth in a grim line and hand Ned over. The bandage she’d wrapped around his head was already sodden with blood, and he slipped in and out of consciousness.
She’d sped all the way from Reception, hurling them seventy kilometres up the highway, all the while talking manic rubbish to Ned. Now he was in safe hands, and all she could do was wait. Thinking, he could have died, could have disappeared from the world so easily.
Audrey and Gin sat beside her. Audrey had not said a word the whole way. She’d sat with Ned in the back seat, cradling his head in a towel, looking desperately sad. Madaline had had to prise her hand away from Ned’s as they wheeled him away.
‘Do you know the Green Lantern?’ Gin swung his legs on the waiting room chair.
Madaline looked at him. ‘Do I?’
‘Yes,’ said Gin. ‘Do you know why he’s the Green Lantern?’
‘To fight crime? To do good?’
‘No,’ Gin’s mouth twisted up in thought, ‘do you know, um, how he’s the Green Lantern?’
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘how he became Green Lantern. No, I don’t.’
‘He made a ring from a meteor,’ said Gin, ‘that fell from the sky.’
‘I see.’ Madaline remembered Gin when she first met him: a little ball of energy. Wouldn’t stop running. He seemed devoid of colour, now. Immersed too deeply in his own fantasies. His eyes lost somehow in his face.
Madaline heard a metallic chime, and it took her some moments to identify her own ringtone. All her messages coming through. Every time you left town, all your calls would catch up with you. She unclipped the leather pocket and took out her phone. Ancient police issue, a brick of a thing. All the messages were from her mother, of course. Same time each day, six-thirty in the evening. Madaline pictured her mother sitting in her perfectly rustic kitchen, leaning back on the old church pew, third or fourth glass of wine in hand. Always the same wine, a blistering local red, a roundhouse of tannins. Those kohl-rimmed eyes fixed on a point on the wall as Madaline’s phone rang and rang.
It was another form of avoidance, Madaline knew. Something else to ignore, hoping it would disappear. Then: what if something happened to her mother—an accident, like Ned? Who would rush her to the hospital? Who would notice if she choked alone in the kitchen or keeled over in the garden? Who would care if she slipped into the bath with a pair of fabric scissors?
Madaline realised she was bleeding. She’d been scratching her arms, a pattern of midge bites that machine-gunned up her arm. She turned to the kids. ‘I’ll be back in a sec, okay?’
Gin nodded his head. Audrey said nothing.
Madaline got up and looked across the waiting room. Yes, there was a public phone, the large metallic box propped up on
a table, the token plastic shield protecting it from God knows what. She dug a hand into her pocket. If there was nothing there she wouldn’t call. She fumbled out a two-dollar coin; shit. She put it in the slot and dialled her mother’s number. She kept her finger poised above the phone’s cradle as the line burred over
and over. She hardly needed a reason to press it.
‘Hello?’
‘Hi, Mum.’
‘Madaline. Mads. Darling. How are you?’ Her mother’s voice seemed rushed. Madaline pictured her in patchwork overalls, in her gardening shoes, hands covered with black northern soil, the phone wedged between cheek and shoulder. ‘What’s wrong? You’re not calling from home?’
‘I’m fine,’ said Madaline. ‘I’m…calling from a hospital.’
‘A hospital? What’s the matter?’
Madaline enjoyed the panic in her mother’s tone. ‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘Just a work thing.’
‘Oh good. Just a sec though, I’m covered in dirt.’
The line went to hold. Gentle piano music. Madaline tapped her fingers on her holstered gun while her mother made her wait.
‘There we are. Now, Mads, how does it take you this long to call your mother back?’
‘You know,’ said Madaline, ‘work.’
‘Oh, surely not. That little town can’t have that much crime. It’s not exactly Midsomer Murders, is it?’ She laughed, a melodious chuckle that Madaline had no doubt she’d practised. There was silence for a few moments, then, inevitably, ‘Why don’t you come home, sweetie? I’ve got this whole house, and it’s like you’ve forgotten—’
‘God, Mum, you wonder why I don’t call you.’
‘Oh, I know. Fighting your battles.’
‘I’ve been here four years. Fighting my battles? What does that mean?’
‘I worry about you down there. Especially after that poor lady, the horribleness—haven’t you had enough?’
Madaline ground a palm into her eye. The horribleness. Her mother’s shorthand for a
nything that needed forgetting. Her husband’s death. Her former career. Stephanie Gale’s disappearance: a time in Madaline’s life she regretted, every day, involving her mother in.
‘Everyone asks after you. They want to know how you are, Mads, and I can’t tell them anything.’
‘Everyone?’ said Madaline. ‘All those friends I’ve never met? Is it pottery classes still, or dream-weaving this week?’
Her mother sighed down the phone. ‘I’m trying to move on with my life, Madaline. It would just be nice to see you do the same.’
‘Oh for fuck’s sake, Mum. You want me to move on by coming back home? Become a good farmer’s wife, child on each hip, dinner on the table?’
‘There’s no need to swear. And I still see Will down the street sometimes. You did a—’
Madaline slammed the phone down, her chest heaving with angry breath. She looked around and realised people were staring at her, Audrey and Gin regarding her with a mix of suspicion and wonder. She tried to remember why she had cared whether her mother was alive or dead. It didn’t really matter either way.
Through the car window Simon could see Iris waiting. She was swathed in a bright orange dress, her eyes ringed in black makeup and her hair pulled back. It made her eyes appear larger, her cheeks shovel-sharp. Simon could not remember his grandmother looking like this.
‘Iris will look after you here,’ Tarden mumbled. He had the corner of his little finger clamped in his teeth. ‘I’ve got to get back to the Magpie, okay?’
Simon nodded. He undid his seatbelt and opened the door. Iris came towards him, her body held in the shape of a hug. ‘Come here,’ she said. ‘Come inside.’
Simon felt himself move towards her embrace; he wanted to let himself collapse into his grandmother’s arms. But he stood still, remembering she was a stranger now. Another part of this town he wished had never existed. Iris let him go and ushered him inside.
‘I’m cooking,’ she said. ‘Come into the kitchen and I’ll make you some tea.’ The kitchen. Simon tasted banana and bacon on his tongue, his body remembering.
The Ottoman Motel Page 12