The Silent Inheritance

by Joy Dettman

  Out where? Didn’t know where she was. Didn’t know for how long people could stay alive on only water.

  Refugees who went on hunger strikes didn’t die fast. Their bodies ate up their fat, then ate up their muscle.

  Emaciate: To reduce to flesh and bones.

  She’d been running down the escalator to catch the four-thirty bus. Escalators throw people off at the bottom and that stupid old lady had stopped—

  She could hear something out there, or beneath her. A refrigerator motor maybe. Something. Then it stopped. Like a car when someone has turned off the motor.

  Did what she’d told herself not to do. She screamed. Had no voice in her lower register but could still make a high shrill scream. She made it long. Then listened.

  Nothing.

  Her mother would have come home late on Friday night, with him. They wouldn’t have noticed that she wasn’t in her room. They would have gone to bed. They would have noticed on Saturday, would have phoned the police.

  If you gave a police dog a piece of clothing the missing person had worn, the dog could track that person’s scent.

  They’d had two months to track Monica. They hadn’t found her, not until she was dead.

  And there was someone out there. She could hear scratching, scraping now, and close.

  ‘Help,’ she tried. Just a husky whisper, so she did the high-pitched scream again.

  And a door slammed, like Grandpa’s screen door used to slam, and there was a light, proper white light where she saw that grey slit, flashing light, like it was signalling. She grabbed for the empty water bottle and ran it backward and forward against the bars. Only plastic. Not noisy enough. Reached between the bars to hammer on the wooden floor with the side of her fist. Someone was out there and they had to be able to hear that.

  A wolf heard it. It howled. Then a door opened and she was hit in the face by a blast of light, and whatever was holding the light was howling, and she screamed and huddled in the corner, hiding her face from the light and that inhuman thing that had put her in this cage.

  ‘I have gags for squealers,’ it said, and she screamed again because the voice sounded like Mr Watts, her maths teacher, and because knowing who he was made her know something she’d been refusing to let herself know. She’d done something stupid.

  Saw a white hand inside the cage. It was emptying something from a can into a bowl and she screamed at it because she knew she was going to be dead before 22 April and that Daddy would go home to America without her.

  ‘You won’t like my gags,’ he said. Then he was out that door and gone with his light, and the black was back and it was everywhere.

  Not everywhere. Her eyes had photographed his light and his hand. Now her eyes played that image back, played it green, played it orange, and she sat quieting her breathing by watching it, clinging to it until it grew small and dissolved. She cried for its absence and because he was probably Mr Watts who had given her and Samantha a ride home from the shops two weeks ago and he hadn’t been like a teacher. He must have offered to drive her home on Friday. She must have got into his car alone – and she’d called her mother a fool for being tricked by David Crow?

  She was sitting on her hair and it was hurting, and that real hurting stopped her tears. She’d had an elastic band around her ponytail at school. Lost it, and her hair was everywhere. Her hands reached up to gather and plait it. Useless fingers in the dark – until she closed her eyes against the dark, which didn’t change what she could see, except maybe her brain knew why it couldn’t see so it sent different messages to her fingers. She got her hair plaited, got it tucked down the neck of her uniform. There was little enough space in his cage without tangling herself up in hair.

  Tried then to think of getting into Mr Watts car, but all she could remember was almost knocking that old lady down, then chasing her spilled shopping, chasing an apple beneath a food court table and knowing that she was going to miss the four-thirty bus.

  She could remember the couple sitting at the table an apple had rolled beneath. They’d been eating a huge plate full of fish and chips, at half past four in the afternoon – and if she could remember what they were eating, why couldn’t she remember getting into Mr Watts’s car?

  Because she was starving hungry, that’s why, because her stomach was aching so bad for food, she’d have eaten a raw fish if she had one.

  He’d put something from a can into a bowl. Probably dog food. There were too many stinks in here to smell anything. How long would a starving person starve before she ate dog food?

  Dogs ate meat and meat rotted in your stomach and the bacteria from its rot gave you cancer of the bowel, so her mother said. Sugar was poison too. It gave you diabetes. Grapes were full of sugar, so eating too many was bad for you. Broccoli tasted like poison but was full of iron, stopped bowel cancer and had no kilojoules in it, so was good. If you sat slouched over your computer, your spine grew twisted.

  Her mother might have been right about spines. Danni’s felt as if it was going to snap. She had to straighten it, and there was only one way she could, by putting her head against the top end bars and her legs between the bottom bars, which was how she’d found those bottles of water.

  And one shoe found more. Pulled her foot back and swivelled around to reach for what she’d kicked. One, two, big cool bottles.

  Whoever he was he didn’t want her to die of thirst, or not yet, and he’d put something else on the floor, a can of something with a ring-pull top. She picked it up and shook it. It didn’t feel solid like the jellied dog food Samantha’s dog ate, which had to be gouged from the tin with a knife. She brought it into the cage to shake close to her ear, and it sounded squishy, like it could have been baked beans. Her mother ate baked beans because they were full of fibre and protein and low in kilojoules.

  She placed it in the corner with the bottles, then, leaning low, sniffed where she’d seen that bowl. Maybe she could smell dog food, but it didn’t smell bad. Anyway, dog food was probably mostly cereal and vegetables with a bit of whale or horse meat in it. She hadn’t eaten meat since she was ten. Grandpa did though, great slabs of it he fried in butter.

  She sniffed again, her nose almost in the bowl, and it smelled almost like baked beans. She stirred it with her fingers, and it felt like baked beans so she licked her finger, and it tasted of baked beans juice. Like an animal then, she crouched low over that bowl, not lapping beans with her tongue but scooping them up with the spoon of her fingers, scooping and swallowing, not caring if they hurt her throat or not.

  She’d care if they came straight back up so she stopped herself and sat back, licking her fingers clean before reaching for one of the new bottles of water, cool water.

  She’d hardly peed since she’d woken up, and when she had, she’d done it on the straw, like her pet hamsters used to pee on their straw.

  Her cat had been fastidious about its personal habits. It used to dig holes then cover up what it had done. Samantha’s dog didn’t. He wet and pooped anywhere, then walked away from it, laughing about who was going to step into it. Thank God she hadn’t needed to do more than pee. It was like her intestines had sense enough to hang on to what they had in them.

  She ate two more scoops of beans, then left the rest to eat when the smudgy grey comet came back, which must have shown her that morning had come. Cats and dogs and hamsters couldn’t think ahead to being hungry in the future. She could, and she wasn’t hungry now, so she did what she’d started to do, got her spine straight, her legs between the bottom bars, head against the top bars and shoes against the padded wall. Almost comfortable, she allowed her mind to wander to a game she used to play on her father’s old computer, where a cartoon man was locked into a castle and she’d had to make the right choices for him to find his way out. The game had rules, and a Help box she could click on.

  What were the rules of Mr Watts’s game? Maybe he’d told her one. I have gags for squealers, he’d said.

  If he gagged her, s
he’d die of thirst.

  It was like she was locked into a horror video game, where the cartoon man’s one object was staying alive until the crusaders came to save him.

  Screaming did no good. She couldn’t fight, so it was a brain game, and as she lay on her back, staring into black, she began to build her own help box.

  Rule one. No more screaming.

  Rule two. Eat whatever he gives you, even dog food.

  Rule three. Stay alive until Daddy comes. The police might give up but he and Grandpa won’t ever give up.

  THE PHONE CALL

  ‘Just because they searched his brother’s boat and didn’t find her doesn’t mean that he hasn’t got her hidden somewhere,’ Barbara told the telephone. ‘He’s got her, David, or he’s paid someone to hide her until the police get sick of looking.’

  ‘Have you had any sleep?’ David asked.

  ‘I wake up, and he’s stuck here … my father … and he backed up everything Martin told the police, and about you and everything.’ No reply from his end. Nothing. She waited. ‘I can’t breathe, David. Get me away from him.’

  ‘Not a good idea at the moment. We need to take particular …’

  ‘I’m sick of appeasing the whole fucking world,’ she said and pitched the phone at the three-seater couch where her father had set up his bed.

  She’d told him to sleep in Danni’s room. He didn’t do stairs, and when she’d told him he wasn’t sleeping on her couch he’d all but accused her of renting a house with stairs just so he couldn’t visit his granddaughter. She’d booked him a room at a motel. He’d cancelled it, and when she told him straight out that his sweat stank, he’d showered, in her bathroom, and she’d had to clean and spray it, and it still stank of him when she went in there to get one of David’s Xanax, and she only had two left.

  Have to go to a doctor and get more, swallow pills all day, tune out. She’d done it before, done it for months after she’d had that kid. She washed down the small pill that matched her bathroom then she slid into bed to count down to that place where her brain switched off.

  Sleep was beautiful. It was the waking that hurt, and being woken by voices from the sitting room, her father was loud.

  ‘Look on the bright side,’ he said. ‘You can’t pay for this sort of advertising.’

  Then David’s voice, and Barbara rose and dressed, and went out to the men, and to a newspaper on the dining room table advertising Crows in large black headlines …

  CROW DENIES RELATIONSHIP WITH MOTHER OF MISSING DANNI

  So much for Appearances and Appeasement. The whole of Melbourne now knew that David Crow was an Adulterer.

  Her father had called him an adulterer in Sydney, had called him a fake bastard too, and the fake bastard didn’t greet her with a kiss. He sat, his back to the window. Her father was seated on Barbara’s recliner. Two males, on two well-separated chairs.

  Her father liked that recliner, placed conveniently for watching the television. He had the remote in his hand. A commercial was playing, but muted. He didn’t like commercials.

  No place left for her to sit other than on the three-seater couch that stank of her father’s folded bedding.

  Needed David beside her. Needed him to hold her. He had at her mother’s funeral – and made love to her after it.

  He hadn’t come out here to hold her but to offer his valued employee any assistance she may require.

  ‘Then convince the police that Martin paid someone to take Danni. She wouldn’t get into a stranger’s car!’

  ‘You’re in denial like you’ve been in denial your whole life,’ her father bellowed. That room was too small for his bellow – and the television was now bellowing, or the police inspector on it was.

  ‘Turn it down!’

  ‘Danni Lane’s mobile was tracked to an address in Box Hill,’ the newsreader said.

  Knew that already. Knew a ten-year-old boy claimed to have found her phone on the nature strip out the front of his house.

  Martin knew that the police could track mobiles. He would have told whoever he’d paid to pick Danni up, to get rid of her phone, which Barbara had told the police last night.

  She looked at David, then her father. Like bookends to those peach drapes, the Roman emperor, his perfect profile cast in bronze, and the giant lizard man with his spiky white army haircut.

  In Sydney, David had said that he loved her, that he was in the process of divorcing his wife, but because the business was in both their names, it could take a little time.

  In Melbourne she’d found out that he was scared witless his wife would divorce him. In Melbourne she’d worked out that he needed his wife and kids to keep him safe while he played with fire, unafraid of burning his fingers, because Mummy and the kids would haul him back from the flames in the nick of time.

  Just a pretty boy who’d grown so well protected from the heat of life, he’d bypassed maturity.

  Martin had bought himself a pretty model with his parents’ plush New York unit, then he’d tossed her into the flames and expected her to come out a wife and mother.

  She’d never wanted to be a mother. She’d wanted her photograph on the cover of a Vogue magazine.

  It was on the cover of today’s newspaper. They hadn’t got hold of a photograph of her standing with David. They’d boxed them separately, but side by side. It was a good one of her.

  Shouldn’t have dropped the kidnap charges that time Martin and his brother had taken Danni on that boat. Should have let him rot in jail. Hated him.

  Hated that bronzed Roman emperor too. Give him ten more years of good restaurants – and his wife’s cooking – and his dimpled chin would become many.

  She’d grown an extra chin when she’d been carrying Danni. Had stirred sugar into her coffee, eaten chocolates, biscuits, eaten anything to satisfy the alien eating her from within.

  ‘A big baby,’ the doctor had said, then he’d let her scream it out, let her spend twenty-four hours screaming it out, and when it was out, when they’d tried to put that bloody thing on her, she’d damn near pitched it at them.

  Hated the way it had left her, the bloated flabby belly, stretch marks all over it, her bulging breasts. To this day, every time she looked in a mirror she saw that bloated self standing behind her.

  Phone ringing. The old controller couldn’t get out of his chair fast enough to control it.

  ‘Barbara Lane,’ she said.

  ‘Barb? It’s Martin.’

  ‘Where is she?’ she screamed.

  ‘I know you’re frantic,’ he said. ‘I believe your father is with you. Can I speak to him, please.’

  ‘Stay away from him and me.’

  ‘I lost my phone in transit—’

  ‘I don’t give a shit what you’ve lost. Where’s Danni?’

  The lizard man wrestled the phone from her hand, and she ran from him to her room, to her bathroom, slammed the door and snatched that last Xanax, washed it down with water from her tooth-brushing glass. And the water tasted of toothpaste, so she threw the glass at the basin. The glass shattered.

  He came, David. He stood behind her in the doorway. Saw their reflections in the mirror standing side by side. Saw his non-smiling mouth, the sag of his throat. Saw her own face washed clean of makeup, her staring eyes. Ran from herself.

  David gave way. Her father tried to hold her, but she got out the front door and out of that house.

  It was too close to the street, and news vans, cameras were out there. Turned the other way. Yapping dog down the bottom end of that enclave of townhouses – and Jake, and she knew Jake and she ran his and the dog’s way.

  ‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘I can’t take it. I can’t.’

  ‘You poor lady,’ Jake said. ‘Has there been news?’

  ‘They’re doing nothing,’ she said. ‘They’re listening to lies.’

  ‘Come inside for a moment,’ he said.

  She looked back at the house David had bought for them, and he was getting into
his car. Saw her father’s back. He liked newsmen. He was walking out to the street to talk to them. Safe from them down here. There was a long paved drive and many houses between Jake’s and the one she called her own, and she turned to her neighbour, and followed him and his dog into a house which was a mirror image of her own.

  It made her dizzy, or the pill she’d taken was making her dizzy, or her blood sugar was low. She swayed on her feet, and he steadied her with an arm, and his arm around her, he guided her towards his kitchen.

  ‘Joan believes that a cup of tea will cure all,’ he said.

  She wasn’t there. He made the tea, and Barbara sat at his kitchen table, in a kitchen more worn than her own. She drank his tea there, ate his dry biscuits with cheese.

  He spoke of his Joan later, of her stroke, of their need to live close to the rehabilitation hospital.

  ‘She was Professor Murray. She lectured at the Melbourne University,’ he said proudly.

  ‘My father wanted me to go to university,’ Barbara said.

  ‘It is a lucky parent who has his expectations realised.’

  ‘He told the police to take no notice of anything I said about Danni’s father kidnapping her, and now he’s down here too and telling them more lies.’

  She spoke of her mother’s stroke later. She told him how they’d kept her alive with machines for a week, and how her father had told the doctors to turn the machines off.

  ‘He’s a control freak,’ she said. ‘He’s spent his life ordering everyone around. I came down here to get away from him but I don’t know anyone.’

  ‘You know me and Joan – and Snow,’ he smiled, and he patted her hand, and why couldn’t she have met someone like him instead of selfish bastards.

  She sat with her new best friends for two hours, and when they had to leave, they walked her to her door.

  THE HOWL

  The traffic was not heavy at eight on a Saturday morning. He enjoyed driving and was feeling the kinks of the week smoothing out, or he was until he flicked on his left-hand-turn blinker and saw a truck and its spilled load of building material blocking his road. Slowly but surely the city was moving out to claim its share of his hill. During recent years, arty houses had been erected out this way.