January

by Gabrielle Lord

  The first shark disappeared.

  ‘Hang on!’ shouted a male voice. ‘You’re going to be OK. Just hang on, Callum!’

  I faced the circling shark, hook raised. The first shark was still hidden somewhere. There was no way I could fight off two of them.

  Above me, an orange-overalled man was being winched down from the helicopter.

  ‘Sharks!’ I screamed out. ‘There are sharks!’

  The first shark suddenly revealed itself, coming at me with open jaws, ready to ravage. With every ounce of strength, I roared and smashed the jag-hook across its upper jaw. It dropped away and, for a second, I thought I was safe. The upturned boat lurched. The second shark was underneath me now!

  ‘Hurry!’ I screamed into the sky. The orange-overalled man couldn’t hear me above the noise of the rotors and the engine.

  The sea flattened as the helicopter came in lower. The second shark surfaced. Now the two of them raced towards me.

  Somehow, I made out the man’s words. ‘I’m coming in close now! I’m going to grab you, OK?’

  What if he missed?

  What if I fell straight into the teeth of the two sharks?

  I didn’t know where to look—what to do …

  The first shark hit hard, gnashing its jaws, tugging and shaking the boat.

  ‘Let go, Cal! Let go and grab me!’

  The helicopter then came down so low I thought it would end up in the sea. Suddenly the shark released the boat, leaving three of its teeth embedded in the aluminium.

  The voice yelled, closer now. ‘Grab onto me!’

  The second shark knocked the boat, almost throwing me again into the water. It was now or never.

  Just as I grabbed onto my rescuer, the first shark charged the boat with such force that its body skimmed over it. I wrenched myself up fast. The man tightened the rescue sling, clamped his legs around me, then swung me away to safety.

  Beneath me, the sharks lunged, jaws gaping wide.

  I lay back and stared at the ceiling of my bedroom in our holiday house. The local doctor had checked me out, stitched my hand and given me something ‘to help me relax’. Yeah, sure. Relax.

  I’d told Mum and Gabbi some of what had happened out on the boat. If only they knew about that mental case, back home, yesterday. Now I felt really weird—spaced out—as if what had happened overnight had been some sort of hallucination. The pain in my fingers and the gash on the back of my hand proved its reality. I remembered the sharks and shuddered, then drifted back to sleep.

  It was dark. For a moment, I thought I was back in the shark-infested water. The room spun. I grabbed the sides of the bed and saw my hands; raw, scraped and swollen.

  Mum and Gabbi brought in some hot soup and pulled the blinds up, letting light into the room.

  ‘Where’s Uncle Rafe? Is he all right?’ I asked.

  Mum shook her head. I could see tears in her eyes. ‘There’s been no word about him at all,’ she cried. ‘Why didn’t you turn back before the storm? Even we could see the weather coming in!’

  ‘I tried to. I wanted to,’ I said. ‘I kept telling him, but Rafe—’

  ‘Rafe doesn’t know the estuary like you do!’

  ‘I know! But he wouldn’t listen to me, Mum!’

  The phone rang. ‘I’d better get that,’ she said, wiping her face and walking away.

  ‘Don’t worry about him,’ I called out as she left the room. ‘He’ll turn up.’

  Gabbi climbed on the bed. ‘I hope Uncle Rafe’s OK,’ she said. ‘Do you really think he’s going to turn up?’

  ‘He will. I’m sure he’s fine.’

  ‘But what if he drowned, Cal?’

  ‘Gabbi, he’s fine.’

  I hoped what I was saying was true.

  Gabbi snuggled down beside me. ‘I’ll stay here and protect you from anything bad,’ she whispered.

  I hugged my little sister. That’s what I used to say to her when she was really small and afraid of the dark. Now she was nine and afraid of nothing.

  ‘Thanks, Gab. But I need to sleep.’

  I woke up drenched with sweat from a nightmare. It was always the same one. I’m lying, unable to move—something horrible is happening—I’m freezing with cold and dread, but I can’t do anything about it. And somewhere there’s this threadbare white toy dog that, for some reason, scares the hell out of me.

  Gabbi came in, and I tried to shake it out of my head.

  ‘Are you OK Cal? You were calling out something. Three hundred and sixty-five what?’

  ‘Oh, nothing, I was just having a bad dream.’

  ‘Uncle Rafe’s OK,’ she said. ‘He washed up at Swans Nest.’

  I exhaled quietly.

  ‘I’m glad he’s alive, but the idiot almost got the two of us killed,’ I said.

  ‘Mum doesn’t think he’s an idiot,’ said my sister. I hated hearing that.

  Gabbi plonked herself on the floor, cross-legged, and looked up at me. ‘Why weren’t you wearing your life jacket?’ she asked. ‘The men from the helicopter said you didn’t have it on.’

  ‘I was wearing it. It’s somewhere at the bottom of the bay now.’

  ‘What? It fell off?’

  ‘I had to pull it off. It was dragging me down. The stuff inside must have been waterlogged or something.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of that happening.’

  Come to think of it, neither had I.

  Gabbi pulled off her silver and black Celtic ring and leaned up on the bed to stick it on my little finger. ‘Here. I want you to have this,’ she said. Dad bought the ring for her in Waterford and gave it to her when he came back from his first trip to Ireland.

  ‘Hey, I can’t take that from you. You love that ring!’

  ‘No, you have it. Please? It’ll keep you safe. If you’re safe, I’m safe too.’ She lifted my hand up with both of hers. ‘See? It fits perfectly.’

  There were voices outside as Rafe arrived. I could hear Mum shouting at him in the kitchen and I couldn’t help but smile. It hurt my face, but it was worth it.

  After Gabbi left the room, I checked out my face in the mirror. This was the first time I’d had a real good look at myself and I looked pretty shocking. I had myself a black eye, my lips and nose were skinned red raw, and my left cheek was all swollen and purple, with a long graze across it that marked me like war paint.

  I looked hard at my face. It seemed different. And not just because of the cuts and bruises. It was more serious, harder, determined. I had a lot to sort out and I hoped the kid behind the face was up to it.

  My dad was a photo-journalist. He’d gone to Ireland last year to gather footage for a documentary about Australian families with Irish ancestry. He was there with another colleague, researching, interviewing people and speaking at a huge conference, when apparently he stumbled onto something incredible.

  I was determined to find out whatever it was that he had discovered about our family—the massive secret he’d told me a little about in his last letter, over six months ago. I’d read and reread his words, trying to find something that would give me a clue. He’d sent me a drawing of an enormous angel too, that I was also yet to decipher.

  The angel stood tall and was dressed in a full military kit from the First World War. He held a flaming sword and his wings were partly folded, rising up above him. If he spread the wings out, he’d have a wingspan like a 747. A guy like that wouldn’t flap through the air, he’d whoomp, whoomp, whoomp like a Black Hawk helicopter.

  I pulled Dad’s letter out from my backpack.

  I pinned the drawing on the wall. A breeze from the window lifted the paper, making the angel look like he wanted to fly. I took him down and folded him away with Dad’s letter. I didn’t want Rafe seeing it.

  Dad’s words kept spinning around in my mind. I could feel grief grabbing me, but I bit it back. Us, rich? What had he discovered? I didn’t want any more danger. I’d had enough.

  I couldn’t wait until the other dra
wings arrived in the post. Maybe Dad drew something that would help me understand what in the world the Ormond Singularity was.

  364 days to go …

  ‘Cal? Cal? Are you awake?’ Mum gently shook me.

  ‘I am now.’

  Sunlight streamed through the cracks in the blinds and I could hear the sound of birds and the ocean. I loved the beach house, but I wished we were back home already and that I was waking up in my own bed. I tried to sit up quickly but fell back in pain.

  ‘How are you?’ Mum asked, straightening my pillow.

  ‘I’m pretty sore, but OK. What is it, Mum?’ I asked, noticing her puffy, worried eyes.

  Mum pushed her hair back with both hands. ‘After what you’ve been through, and now this happens …’

  ‘Mum, what’s going on? What’s happened?’

  ‘Cal,’ she said all too slowly, ‘our house was broken into last night.’

  ‘We were robbed?!’ I asked in disbelief.

  ‘Yes, we were robbed.’

  ‘What did they take? Do the police know about it? Did they catch them?’

  Mum looked over to Rafe as he limped into my room. He had some deep cuts down one side of his face and a bandage around his left foot. ‘Your mother’s just told you what’s happened back home?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, but shook my head.

  ‘How are you feeling this morning, Cal?’

  ‘I’ll survive,’ I said. ‘What about you?’

  Rafe looked down at his bandaged foot. ‘After we capsized I was washed away and spent most of the night drifting. But then I got caught up near the rocks at Swans Nest. That’s when I did this,’ he said, pointing to his foot and the grazes on his face. ‘We’ve both had some very bad luck.’

  I didn’t say what I felt like saying—how he’d contributed to our so-called ‘bad luck’. Maybe he’d listen to me in future.

  ‘Your life jacket held up OK?’ I asked.

  ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘I can’t imagine what happened to yours.’

  He spotted my dad’s letter on the bedside table and picked it up. ‘What’s this? A letter from Tom?’

  I snatched it away from him. ‘That’s mine,’ I said, stuffing it into my backpack on the nearby chair.

  Rafe shrugged and limped out of the room. ‘Well, you’d better have something to eat and get packed up,’ he called out. ‘We have to head back to Richmond. We’ve got a burglary to deal with.’

  The four of us stood in shock amid the mess in our house. The place looked as though it had been turned upside down, literally—the couch and chairs were overturned, books had been knocked off the shelves and were lying ankle-deep on the floorboards. Some of the paintings and Dad’s framed photographs were on the floor, glass shattered; others hung at crooked angles. The blinds and curtains had all been torn down. The place was trashed.

  We were all speechless. Our home wasn’t a mansion, like Rafe’s enormous place, but over the years Mum and Dad had spent a lot of time getting it really nice, with polished floors, high timber ceilings and tall windows opening onto the back garden. Now it looked like a garbage dump.

  The kitchen had also been totalled. Plates were smashed and cutlery was lying everywhere. The doors to the garden were swinging wide open and papers from inside were flying around the timber decking.

  ‘Oh my God,’ cried Mum. ‘I can’t believe this. What next?’ She leaned over and started picking up pieces of her favourite teapot. I stood there, helpless, wishing I knew what to do. ‘I’ll find you a new teapot, Mum,’ I said, trying to help her with the broken china.

  ‘It’s not fair,’ sobbed Gabbi, hugging Mum’s waist. ‘What are we going to do?’

  ‘What can we do but start the clean-up?’ I said, grabbing the broom and throwing it to Rafe, who caught it deftly.

  Mum smiled at me. ‘That’s exactly what your father would have said.’

  ‘I’ll check the grounds,’ said Rafe, throwing the broom right back to me, and heading for the backyard. ‘I’ll look for clues as to who did this. Find out how they got in here.’

  ‘What about the police?’ Mum asked, her big green eyes filling with tears.

  ‘It’s been a while, Win,’ Rafe replied, ‘since the police attended house burglaries.’

  Maybe I should have been grateful that Rafe was there to help us. But I just couldn’t. There was something about him that I didn’t like. Maybe I was angry with him for looking like Dad but not being Dad. He was sort of doing Dad things, like helping Mum cope through the last few months and taking over the business of the estate. But most of the time I found myself wishing he’d disappear.

  ‘Why did they do this?’ cried Gabbi ‘We’re not even rich!’

  Mum walked around, pale and silent, picking up chairs and standing them upright again. I followed her through the chaos and into her bedroom. Again we stopped in shock. All her drawers had been pulled out, and the clothes from her wardrobe lay in piles, all over the carpet.

  ‘No!’ Mum cried. ‘They’ve even gone through Tom’s things!’

  The suitcase that had arrived by sea mail from Ireland late last year, sent over by my dad’s landlady with the rest of his stuff, lay wide open, its contents scattered. Mum hadn’t been able to face going through Dad’s stuff and, until now, his suitcase had stood quiet and unopened in the corner of the bedroom.

  I could see some of his clothes; the big grey-green jumper he used to wear when he’d take me paragliding, his jeans, the colourful socks Gab gave him with the Disney characters on them, his flannelette pyjamas, and some of his old sneakers.

  Mum fell to her knees and pulled the big jumper to her, hugging it and sobbing. I knelt beside her, cringing in pain from my injuries, and put my arm around her.

  ‘Don’t cry, Mum. Please don’t cry.’ It was a stupid thing to say. I felt like crying, too. I never knew what to say to her when she was sad.

  ‘Who do they think they are? Breaking into other people’s houses like this! Turning our lives and our private things upside down! Like we haven’t been through enough!’ Now anger blazed on her face as she started stuffing things back into the suitcase.

  ‘My room’s like this, too!’ Gabbi said, crying in the doorway.

  I watched my mum pull herself together. She sniffed back tears and held out her arms to Gab. ‘Come on, sweetie. Try and make a start in your room,’ she said, ‘and as soon as we’ve finished in here, we’ll come and help you.’

  Mum and I began the clean-up in her room. I found something lying under one of Dad’s T-shirts that turned out to be an old, worn, leather-hinged jewellery box. Inside, on fraying black silk, was a deep oval indent where some large piece of jewellery must have once been. It was empty now. I showed it to Mum. ‘Whatever was in here has gone,’ I said. ‘What was it?’

  Mum took the jewellery box from me and closely looked over it. ‘I don’t know, I’ve never seen this before. Where did you find it?’

  ‘Just here, underneath Dad’s T-shirt. Must have been in the suitcase.’

  ‘Maybe what was in it has fallen out.’

  We searched everywhere but whatever had been in that box was definitely gone. Mum clutched the box close. ‘Your dad must have bought it for me as a present,’ she said. ‘And of all the things in this house, those damn thieves have taken it! His last gift to me and now I’ll never even know what it was!’

  ‘The police might be able to get it back,’ I said.

  Mum looked at me with fear in her face. ‘But Cal,’ she said, ‘how did the thieves know about the jewellery box in Dad’s suitcase when I didn’t even know about it?’

  She was right. Was this the only thing the thieves had stolen from our house—or—and I thought of Dad’s warnings in his last letter—had the contents of this old jewellery box been their target all along? This was quickly starting to look like something far more sinister than a break-in by a couple of petty crims trying to make a buck.

  For a moment I wondered if I should tell Mum about Dad�
�s letter and the warnings from the crazy guy that chased me on the street, New Year’s Eve. One look at her changed my mind instantly. She was far too stressed out. Instead, I went back to searching through Dad’s things.

  ‘What’s this?’ I asked, pulling out a transparent sheet of paper from the mesh sleeve in the suitcase.

  ‘What’s G’managh and Kilfane?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Mum, blowing her nose. ‘People he met in Ireland?’

  When Mum turned back to the floor, I put the transparent paper in my pocket. Something told me it could be important, like the drawing of the angel.

  ‘When I called the police,’ Rafe announced to us in the kitchen, ‘they said to make an inventory of everything that was taken. There’s a chance that something stolen from here might turn up in a pawn shop somewhere later.’

  ‘Nothing’s been stolen from my room,’ I said. As I had suspected, nothing of mine seemed to be missing. Everything looked trashed and thrown about, but my laptop, DVDs and CD player were still there on my desk.

  ‘Nothing’s gone from my room, either,’ said Gabbi, climbing onto one of the kitchen stools.

  Rafe closed the sliding door behind him and Mum poured him a cup of tea. We’d eaten almost a whole packet of chocolate biscuits, left untouched by the thieves.

  ‘That’s very strange,’ said Rafe. ‘Everything seems to be in order outside, too. Apart from the laundry door—which is where they got in.’

  ‘Rafe,’ said Mum, ‘there’s an empty jewellery box in Tom’s suitcase from Ireland. I don’t know what was in it, or if anything ever was in it.’

  ‘What suitcase? What jewellery?’ asked Rafe, anxiously.

  I stared at my uncle, wondering why he was suddenly so interested.

  ‘What is it, Rafe?’ said Mum, putting her tea down. ‘You look upset.’