by Meg McKinlay
Panic stabbed at my chest.
I had to go down, but could I make it – without flippers to kick myself down, to get to the shed?
To get to Liam.
I took a deep breath.
Wish me luck.
Something slammed up from underneath me, tumbling me off the raft and into the water.
A head, hands, a boy. Coughing and spluttering and grabbing at the air.
“Cassie! Ow!”
“Ow yourself!”
We hung there, treading water. I listened to his breathing, rattled and rough.
“Are you okay?”
He nodded, then pulled himself slowly over to the raft. “Yeah. I … hang on.” He held on to the side for a minute until his breathing slowed.
“Where were you?” I said.
He grinned. “I got in.”
“You got it open?”
“Not exactly. I mean, yeah, but … not the way you think.”
He explained.
How we were idiots. Because as soon as we found a door that was all we could think about. Because doors were the way into a place. Even though we’d already broken off a big chunk of roof, making it weak, making a hole. Which Liam could hammer through, with an otherwise-useless torch, and then pull himself through, and past, and down into the shed.
Where there was a big space of nothing he could swim down and into and feel his way around, running slowly out of air and then, just before he gave up and kicked his way back through the hole, finding it.
“What?”
Liam grinned. He held up his other hand, which had been sculling underwater, and I saw that he was holding something.
Something fat and roundish, made of plastic and glass.
A side-view mirror?
Or at least part of one. The housing had broken down and it was cracked and split.
But you could still see what it was, what it had once been – the cloudy glass panel, the faded splinters of red plastic.
I stared at him. “There’s a car down there?”
“Yep.”
My mind raced with possibilities. A car? Drowned in the flood?
I thought about Dad in the Valiant, panicking about petrol. Thinking for a brief, crazy moment about racing back into Old Lower Grange.
And then I shivered.
What if someone did get caught in the flood?
What if there was someone in there – a body?
A skeleton, by now.
Liam laughed. “Nah, it’ll just be some old bomb someone left behind. Pretty cool, still … hey?” He broke off.
“What?” I began. Then I felt it. The water moving beneath us – only slightly, but it was there. Bubbles coming up.
“Is that you?” I said.
He shook his head. “I’m here. I’m–”
Then it popped up with a sickening bounce – something grey and sort of round and sort of …
I screamed.
It was a head, bobbing between us, a skull, slimy with lake weed.
“Oh my god,” I said. “Get it away, get it …”
We both scrambled backwards at once. We were a mess of arms and legs and flippers and the thing was sitting on the water’s surface, grinning at us with its broken mouth and its lopsided eyes and …
Oh.
“It’s okay,” I said, because it was, suddenly.
It was still weird – very weird in fact – but it was okay.
I swam over and scooped it in to my chest, then kicked back and sat it up on the raft.
“Geez,” said Liam. “I thought it was a … you know.”
“Yeah.” I ran one finger along the ridge of an eye socket. “It kind of is.”
He peered closer. “What is it, anyway?”
“A head,” I said. “Clearly.”
I told him about Dad’s artistic vision.
He nodded slowly. “Right.” Then he peered at the head. “It’s pretty weird looking. I guess it’s been under there for a while.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But that’s not the reason.”
Then I grinned and climbed up onto the raft and we headed back for shore.
eighteen
“Where on earth did you get this?”
I almost didn’t tell Dad about the head. I knew it would lead to questions I’d find hard to answer.
But I also knew it might lead to answers I wouldn’t get any other way.
And I had to know. We had opened the box and this had come out. This and a mirror, attached to a panel, attached to a car.
“The lake?” Dad said. “Did Elijah take you?”
“Not exactly,” I began. “I … go there sometimes. It washed up.”
It was kind of true.
Dad frowned. “Cass, you’re not to swim up there on your own, all right?”
I nodded.
That was also true, these days.
“Washed up, did it? I guess I can’t say I’m surprised. I had some firing problems back then … air bubbles, that sort of thing.”
Dad peered at the head. I had let it dry in the sun, then wrapped it in my towel and carried it down in my backpack. The hair was a bit smudged and there was a large crack at the base of the skull from when I’d jolted over a big rock, but otherwise it looked the same as when it emerged from the depths.
Completely unrecognisable.
Except to Dad, of course.
He snapped his fingers. “But that’s … but it can’t be!” He rubbed the back of his neck with one hand. “How bizarre.”
“What?”
“I did leave some of these behind, when we moved.” Dad smiled, remembering. “I was learning back then, so they weren’t very good, but mostly I just liked the idea of it – of them staying behind, ‘living’ in the town for us.”
“That’s … um, kind of creepy.”
“That’s one way of looking at it,” Dad said. “As you know, I have a different vision. What’s strange is that this wasn’t one of them.”
“One of what?”
“The heads I left behind.” Dad went to the shelf where he kept his books and ran his finger along the spines. “Yes, here it is.” He pulled an old album out and leafed through it. “See?”
There was a page of notes and sketches and a small, faded photo taped down the bottom, partly obscured by Dad’s thumb.
Across the top, in thick black texta, was a single word:
FINKLE.
“Finkle?” I craned forward. “I didn’t know you’d done him before. But that doesn’t …”
Look much like him, I was going to say.
Even taking into account twelve years of water and the uniqueness of Dad’s artistic vision, the head we’d found had nothing in common with Finkle. It was too small, for one thing, and the hair was all wrong, and the nose was–
“Not that Finkle,” Dad said. “His wife.”
“Finkle’s wife let you do her head?”
“Of course! Well, I’m sure she would have if she’d known about it.” Dad tapped the photo with one clay-brown finger. “I took this in the supermarket, from behind the bread display. Not hiding, exactly, just … anyway, it was a gift for Finkle. He was going over to the Lenton Festival and said he’d drop some pots off at the Craft Market for me. This was my way of saying thanks.”
I stared at the mangled head. “Right.”
Dad looked thoughtful. “She left him not long after that, actually. Moved up to the city. I always wondered if the head had something to do with it.” He grinned. “Not seriously, but–”
I cut him off. “So how did it end up in the lake?”
“That’s what I can’t work out. If I remember, it was a few months before they dammed the town. We were getting ready to move, packing everything up.”
“But what about the head?”
“Well, that’s what I’m saying. That’s when I gave it to him.” Dad stroked the smooth curve of the skull absently. “I packed it into a box and put it in the boot of his car myself.”
; “And now it’s in the lake,” I said. “At least it was in the lake and now it’s here.”
Dad brightened. “Yes, it’s quite fitting, isn’t it – like it’s returned to the place of its birth. The circle of life and all that.”
“Yeah, except that this isn’t the place of its birth,” I said. “In fact, it was closer to your old studio when it was up in the lake.”
“Good point. Well, maybe that’s why it was there. Maybe it was trying to get back home again.”
“This isn’t really helping,” I said through clenched teeth.
“No, I suppose not. But it’s interesting, isn’t it?” Dad smiled. “I could ask Finkle if you like, when I see him next. Which reminds me …” He gestured towards a low table in the centre of the room. There was something perched on it, something vaguely head-shaped, swathed in bubble wrap.
“Is that–?”
Dad nodded. “Just in time.”
He was right about that. The centenary was only a few days away. “Shouldn’t it be on, like, a stand or something?” I said.
“Plinth is the word you’re after.” Dad sighed. “And yes, it should. But Finkle insists I don’t attach it until just before the ceremony. I think he’s worried about bird poo or something.”
Tyres crunched outside and I looked out to see Elijah’s ute pulling up.
“Perfect timing!” Dad said. “I’ll pack this thing properly and give it to him to take in tomorrow.”
He slid Finkle’s head into the box and closed the flaps over the top, then reached for the sticky tape to seal them down tight.
nineteen
When Dad told Mum about the head, she frowned.
That was probably because it was her usual response to anything to do with his heads.
Then she dropped her fork onto her plate with a clatter, sending flecks of spaghetti sauce flying.
That was probably because he had suddenly produced the head from under his chair and set it in the middle of the table, like a zombie centrepiece.
“Andrew! Get that thing out of here!”
“Don’t talk about Mrs Finkle like that,” Dad teased. “She’s a lovely lady. Was, anyway. It’s been a long time. Anything could have happened, I suppose.”
“Twelve years. Has it really been that long?” Mum sighed. “Where did you get this?”
“It … washed up, apparently. At the lake.”
Dad told Mum about the day Finkle came over. How he’d put the head in his boot. How he could see him now, clear as if it was yesterday, waving from his little red car as he sped off in a cloud of dust.
But he didn’t tell Mum about me swimming.
Maybe that was because I’d been keeping his head-related secrets for years, telling Mum he was busy glazing pots when he was really obsessing over how to make someone’s ear look slightly less like a deformed cabbage.
Maybe it was because it was hard for anyone who wasn’t Hannah to say much of anything at dinner, and afterwards, and on into the rest of the evening, because she was so busy telling us all about the centenary preparations. About how the book was finished and the ceremony was all planned and the band was going to be significantly less lame this time and she was feeling a bit nervous about everything but she was sure it would be fine in the end, an occasion to remember and no matter what anyone said she was proud of herself and so was Howard because she had worked really hard and done an excellent job.
“See?” After the dishes were cleared away, she emptied her work satchel, set her laptop down between us, then laid a sheaf of papers out across the table. Printing proofs, she called them. She said she didn’t have a proper copy yet, but nearly everything was here. “I just had to change a few things, fix a couple of typos.” She turned to me. “You should thank me, Cass. They tried to call you Carrie at one point.” She smoothed the pages down with the palms of her hands. “But basically this is it.”
I leaned over as she flicked through the glossy, oversize pages.
It was amazing – almost like a real book. There were headlines and photos and text, all wrapping around each other at odd angles in a way that looked funky and interesting, like it had been carefully designed by someone who knew what she was doing and was on top of everything, and not someone who at any point in her life would have become paralysed, sobbing uncontrollably halfway up a tree.
It looked different from the way it had on the screen, on the computer. It looked polished and finished.
But it looked different for other reasons too.
I turned to Hannah. “What happened to the stuff about the bushfire?” Six years ago a fire had come within a few kilometres of the town. I had seen Hannah working on a page about it. She had laid it out with some photos and an interview with the Clancys, whose farm had been threatened.
Now it was just gone.
Hannah waved a hand. “Oh, I deleted that. I couldn’t get it to fit properly in the end. Nothing really happened, anyway. And we could use the space. Howard wanted to put in more about tourism.”
There were other stories missing, too, when I thought about it. The time the Porters’ sheep got out and stopped traffic on the highway, making the news as far away as Perth. The year Miranda Hopkins made the top 100 of Australian Idol. And the time Sam Farrington got lost in the bush and half the town went out searching … no, that one was still there, but it had been reduced to a tiny square and added to the page about the endangered bilby, in a way that made them seem weirdly connected.
“Can I look on here?” I reached for the laptop.
Hannah nodded. I pulled it over in front of me and snapped it open. It blinked quickly to life and I clicked onto the “Council” folder that was sitting on the desktop. Inside that was another folder called “Centenary”, then another called “Book”, and inside that were row after row of documents.
Draft 1, Draft 2, Update, Revised Version, November 19, November 19.2, New Revision … the names scrolled on and on.
Hannah was right. She had done a lot of work. She had done all these drafts, all these versions. All of them telling the story of the town. All of them telling the same story, differently. She had deleted some things and added others. She had narrowed things down and now she had these shiny pages which would soon be bound tightly together into a book, solid and final.
My fingers hovered above the keyboard.
It was a funny thing about computers. You could just press the delete button and make things disappear. It wasn’t like a hard copy where if you liquid-papered over something, you could scratch it off later and see what you had written, faint and ghostly but not gone; where even if you used pencil and rubbed something out, you could still see the marks, the thin patch on the paper that told you something different had come before it, that what you could see wasn’t all there had ever been.
Computers were different. You could save the changes and pretend they never existed in the first place. They didn’t leave a trail, but made a smooth, slick surface that told you it was truth, had always been, would always be.
Is that what would happen, I wondered? Now that we had the Centenary Book, the official new story of Lower Grange, would that solidify into its own kind of truth? Would anyone ever bother to go back and see what sat quietly in the margins?
As Hannah talked on about the band and the plinth and the quality of locally made sausages, I clicked back out of the “Centenary” folder and back into “Council”.
Then I noticed something.
There was a document open, sitting there minimised in the corner of the screen. I clicked in the top right hand corner to close it, but a window popped up.
Save changes before closing?
I don’t know, I thought.
They’re not my changes.
It’s not my document.
I clicked cancel and the document popped up in front of me.
Meeting, 11 January.
They were notes from a council meeting two days earlier, Hannah’s rapidly typed notes, full of errors she w
ould clean up later.
EL: 12 Barker St resident complains about neighbour dog. Regulations? Get someone out there to check it out. Refer to ranger.
GC: Footpaths on Kitchener St need work. can we sned someone to look asap plz.
AM: shd have gourmet sasuages for shindig NO MSG the health of our children is at stake (steak? hah!) and blahblahblah
HF: east side lake fence needs work, higher, stronger, maybe new fence between east side and Point as well, plus new signs and stuff, do something etc. VERY IMPORTANT to keep people out. VERY IMPORTANT, yes Howard we get it, we do!! maybe electrify fence!!! the safety of our children and all that. mild electric shocks no problem if prevent drowning. Refer: enginnering?
There was lots more – tightly packed lines about rubbish collections and firebreaks and overdue rates – but this was where I stopped.
A new fence? Higher, stronger, electrified?
Wow. Finkle really meant it when he said he didn’t want people up there.
I clicked behind the document, into the “Council” folder. There were more documents labelled “Meetings”, going back years. They weren’t all Hannah’s. Most of them were from way before her time. I guess she just had them as a record, so she could look back and go, HF said this in June 2005 or 12 Barker resident is only complaining about dog because neighbour wouldn’t pay for new fence two years ago or whatever.
There were two documents for each date – one full of messy notes, like Hannah’s, and one labelled “Minutes”. These were neat and formal. They’d had the mistakes and the yes, Howard! comments deleted. Now they looked official and serious.
I scrolled back through the directory, through the documents, through the years. All the way back, twelve years ago, to when the town was drowned.
There was stuff about protests and debates and arguments. There was stuff about levers and bands and sausages. There was stuff about swimming pools and lakes and fences.
Lots of stuff about lakes and fences.
Report suggests east side of lake for swimming area. Close to town, easy access for residents.
HF: concern about snags and danger.
RW: same on other side?
HF: west side better outlook, appeal for tourists
BT: residents should take priority over tourists!