The Kingdom Where Nobody Dies

by Kimberley Starr

  As I swallowed, garnering my resolve to walk over and knock, just for a visit, a car approached so quietly it seemed to slide up the street. I turned again.

  Daniel Coleman, Andrew’s father, was driving up in a shiny new BMW. He honked the horn and honked it again until Andrew and Brigid, still in their school uniforms, came racing outside, feet pounding on the timber porch. Their mother, carrying a magazine, followed.

  “Isn’t she a beauty?” Daniel demanded of them, as the window slid down.

  Andrew raced down and peered in at his father. “It’s great, Dad!” He didn’t notice me standing there with one foot raised from the gutter, schoolbag dangling at my side.

  “It finally arrived.” Rebecca Coleman’s mouth curved into a smile as she approached. She gave the car’s sleek duco a gentle touch then turned to look at me. Her hair, like her daughter’s, was a bright auburn. She smiled, showing faint lines in her skin.

  “Hello, Madeleine.”

  I swallowed, the uninvited intruder. “Hello, Mrs Coleman.”

  Behind her, Brigid grinned. She was younger than me, but her smile was so warm I wondered if we’d be friends.

  “You haven’t met Brigid,” Rebecca said. “She’s been away for a couple of weeks, staying with her grandmother.”

  “Hello,” said Brigid. “Do you like the car?”

  “It’s pretty nice.”

  “We’ve been waiting for it for ever” Brigid exaggerated happily.

  Andrew joined his father, looking over the dashboard controls and walking around to flick open the bonnet and poke at something beneath.

  “Men!” Rebecca laughed, giving the car a pat. “Come inside, Bridge. I’m sure we’ll get a ride later. Madeleine, would you like to come too? For some lemonade or juice?”

  I still felt out of place, and shrugged. “Maybe.”

  “Well, come on. We’ll be out later.” Rebecca turned to Daniel with a look I hadn’t seen in a long while. My parents used to look at each other like that, before Mum’s smile got tired and sad, and Dad stopped smiling at all. The glance only lasted a moment, then Daniel turned back to his son.

  If I ever had the urge to paint the perfect image of father and child, I would want them for my models. They had the same broad shoulders, the same gold-flecked hair and blue eyes. But Daniel was a bit paunchy, his shoulders softer-looking and sloped, as if the muscles were annoyed about their own slow dissolve into fat.

  “We’ll take her for a spin soon,” he promised. “What do you think, Rebecca? This’ll be good for business. Clients will love it.”

  “It’s great, Dan,” Rebecca said. She laughed, walking towards the house. “Come on, Madeleine.”

  “All right,” I said. “I think I will.”

  The afternoon felt slightly surreal, as if a wish had unexpectedly been answered. Was that a slight flutter in my grandma’s front curtains? They were usually drawn tight.

  “You should tell your grandmother where you are.” Rebecca must have seen the movement too. “We don’t want her thinking you’ve disappeared.”

  I shook my head. “I think she knows already.”

  Rebecca had run out of lemonade and poured us milk instead, serving it with shortbread biscuits on a heavy white plate. As if we were just little kids.

  “You girls take that inside and play,” she said, pushing us towards Brigid’s room. “I have things to do.”

  “Mum’s going back to work,” Brigid confided. “In the police.”

  “Really?” I tried imagining Rebecca in a dark blue uniform but couldn’t see her chucking criminals in jail or being called pig by school kids and drug addicts.

  “She used to work for them before,” Brigid said. “This is my room.”

  The walls were a sunny yellow, her bedspread a cheery patchwork. There were no posters anywhere, and she didn’t have a record player or even a radio. “How old are you?” I asked.

  Brigid didn’t care how uncool her bedroom was. “Twelve.” She threw herself onto the bed, then got up again to pull out a photograph album filled with pictures of herself and her grandmother on her recent trip.

  “We had so much fun!” she said.

  I couldn’t believe her and stared out the window, across the neat garden to the long slab of river beyond the back fence. My grandma was just next door, no doubt crocheting madly, and sniffing. I didn’t think she’d recognise the word fun. Maybe the Colemans were a different species from us.

  Grandma sometimes said she was coping with my mother’s death, but I didn’t believe her. For one thing, she said it too often. I’m all right, Maddy. I’m coping. No one has to worry about me.

  Over and over these words would come, the way I used to say I’m on a diet when I wanted to be on a diet but also wanted to eat a Violet Crumble. The sympathy cards, on the top of Grandma’s bookshelf when I first arrived, had gradually been breeze-blown and swept into a neat pile beside her sofa. Many times I found her crying. But she never admitted it was about my mother. Instead, she became upset about disaster stories on the television news and the latest tragedies in Dynasty and Dallas. Her claim to be coping was a bit pathetic, really.

  One night, she looked up from her dinner plate and called me by my mother’s name: Joanne.

  I glared at her. I couldn’t turn into Mum, even if I wanted to. Grandma’s eyes clouded over as if she’d suddenly developed cataracts. Whatever she’d been about to say was bitten off like a mouthful of unsavoury food.

  I couldn’t understand it. I remembered the time when Mum said she wanted freedom for me, because her own childhood had been too restricted. Apparently, Grandma hadn’t even let her paint, saying Mum should concentrate on more important subjects like maths and science.

  So why was Grandma so cut up about Mum’s death? It was a mystery to me.

  That afternoon, Grandma’s voice reached me as I stood in the hall with my schoolbag in one hand, shoes in the other. “Maddy, is that you?”

  I hated going into her house, through the front door as heavy as gloom, into the dark hallway. I hated crossing into the dim space that was temporarily my bedroom. But mostly I hated being summoned to the back of the house, to the fusty closed-in veranda that Grandma called her TV room and liked to keep as hot as a sauna.

  “You should tell me when you go somewhere.” Her voice was getting closer. She must have realised I wasn’t coming.

  She appeared at the end of the hall, her face puffy and creased in the gloom. “I worry about you, you know.”

  I placed my shoes in an alcove beside the door, as if I’d taken them off to do that, rather than to sneak in without being heard. “You don’t have to worry about me, Grandma. I can look after myself.”

  She looked at the shoes. If she said something like Joanne never left things lying around like that (just yesterday, she’d said Joanne never flicked her hair) I’d scream.

  Instead, she turned and walked back the way she’d come. “Next time let me know where you are.” The words drifted from her departing back.

  I flicked my hair even though she couldn’t see it and walked down to my bedroom.

  Queenslanders are rarely built with big bedrooms, and mine was the smallest in the house. On the day I arrived, Grandma had asked Mr Coleman to help move an antique sewing machine outside, and replace it with a narrow iron bed that had been stored under the house. It filled an entire wall, beneath the window. The other wall was taken over by a big mahogany wardrobe that stank of mothballs, a contagious smell. Hanging inside, my clothes had begun to smell like little old ladies at the start of winter, so I’d replaced them in my suitcase, stashed under the bed. It was actually an arrangement that I quite liked. Each day, getting dressed, I was reminded that staying here was just a temporary thing, like a holiday or custody visit. Once Dad came home from Japan … I shut that thought off, right away.

  If I’d come here when I was nine instead of fourteen, that wardrobe might have looked like a route to Narnia. It had one thing I liked, even if I couldn�
��t dream of escape, and that was a lock. At first, the big brass key seemed welded to the keyhole. But eventually I’d twisted it out. Now I slid it back in, fiddling until I heard the catch release. Then I pulled open the creaky door and dumped my schoolbag on top of my sketch pad. I had nothing I really needed to hide (well, not in my schoolbag) but it was private. Even if smelly.

  Privacy was something I craved. Not that I felt sorry for myself. I knew I had to be grateful for somewhere to live while my father was busy doing whatever it was he wrote about in the letters that I didn’t want to read. That was why I had to put up with all this. And I was putting up. Unlike Grandma, when I said I was coping, I meant it. I did.

  Locking the wardrobe door, I pulled out the copy of Hamlet I was meant to start reading for homework and sank onto the bed. I had my quilt from home (deliciously feathery — my mother had helped me choose it) and my own paintings Blu-tacked to the walls. But the room still smelled dankly of the ancient mattress with its memory of old dreams and older sleepers. Further down the hall, my mother’s former bedroom was larger and airier; reserved for guests, said Grandma.

  It was more like a museum or a shrine. When I asked to sleep there, Grandma blinked and said I was not that sort of guest. I belonged with the old wardrobe and narrow iron bed. And the truth was I didn’t really mind about my room, decorated as it was with the things my mother had owned when she lived here. There was a pair of ballet shoes, a set of maths textbooks, and photos of her as a child and teenager. One showed her in a full-circled, stiffly petticoated skirt, as young as me. The photos, like these old things, things I never associated with her, seemed proof that the mother I knew had never really lived here. The daughter my grandma tried to invoke was a different person entirely.

  “Oh no!”

  The exclamation came from the TV room, then there were footsteps, stopping too soon in the hallway. At my mother’s door. “Joanne? Jo …”

  I closed the book at the scene where Hamlet is talking to his father’s ghost. I think I’ll always remember that.

  “Grandma, what is it?” I stepped into the hallway as she turned away, one hand clamped over her mouth.

  Her face was pale, but for once she forgave me for not being Joanne. “Do you know that little boy down the street? The one with the spiky black hair? Cameron Seymour?”

  I shook my head, curious. “Should I?”

  “Those poor people, his parents.”

  “Something’s happened to him?”

  As if he was an assassinated president or dead rock star, people in River Pocket will always remember what they were doing when they heard that Cameron Seymour had disappeared. I remember everything from the precise scent of old dust in that room to the startled look in my grandma’s unhappy eyes and the fingers that twisted through her bobbed grey hair.

  “He’s missing.”

  It’s such a menacing word. Missing. Hearing its hissing sound made me shiver. Somewhere out there, another bond between mother and child was stretched or broken.

  “Missing?” I demanded. “What do you mean?”

  “Come with me.” She padded along the hall, hands clutching at her dressing-gown. “He caught the bus into Toowong to meet friends yesterday.”

  I followed her into the TV room, which was as hot as usual. She sat amidst a pile of crocheted squares and I perched on a nearby ottoman.

  “He never came home?” I asked.

  Grandma shook her head. “They’ve just spoken to his father on the news.” Her right hand reached for the crochet hook that was never far away. “His mother is sedated. They shouldn’t do that to her. Sedate her, I mean. Use drugs.”

  The television set was still on, but a noise seemed to come from the window behind it. I walked over to check.

  “They think it helps,” my grandma continued. “But it doesn’t. Things will be just as bad when she comes out of it. They don’t know what a mother feels.”

  I didn’t want to think about how mothers feel. That word, missing, still echoed around my ears. I was furious with my own mum for leaving me here.

  “Is someone out there?” Grandma heaved herself out of the sofa and came to stand beside me as I adjusted the curtains and peered out. At the edge of her property, where the land sloped past the garden shed and down to the river, torch beams flickered in the darkness, accompanied by the deep, indistinct sound of men’s voices.

  “A search party,” I said.

  Grandma’s eyes flickered as she looked at me. I couldn’t quite understand the emotion. Fear? I felt she wanted to grab my hand.

  I stepped away.

  She sat down again, leaving the curtains open and checking through them from time to time. I sat on the furthest chair and forgot about Hamlet as the television news droned on to the next story, an African war or famine or something. Maybe a government had been overthrown somewhere. Unlike a disappearing child, it was nothing that really touched us here in River Pocket.

  The next day the school, the suburb, the city went crazy. Cameron Seymour, missing, was far more significant than he’d ever been before; we knew more about his disappearance than we’d ever known about his life. What might have happened to Cameron was the subject of conversation at supermarket checkouts and on talkback radio. No one had seen him since he left River Pocket, and the ordinary suburb was transformed to a place of menace. Children could simply vanish here, it seemed, as completely as a splash of rain into a puddle, as smoke into air.

  By the day after he’d gone, we all knew the details, pitifully few as there were. Cameron had been walking to the bus stop, but the bus driver on that route didn’t remember seeing him. Nothing, not even bus trips, was going to be the same. Every child in River Pocket felt it. Brigid was not to go out by herself. Andrew had tighter restrictions, too. His parents’ biggest worries used to be over-training at the pool and the effect this had on his school grades. But homework that was rarely done, even possible training burnout, seemed trivial now.

  Brigid talked to me about her brother after school. “They want him home by six each night, or else to phone to say exactly where he is. Mum says she’ll never be sure about us again.”

  We were sitting on some smooth rocks beside the river, the world concealed by long grass, overgrown tree stumps, and the solid grey of my grandma’s shed. Before us, the river was a winding, muddy brown, shot through with ripples that caught the sun and sparkled like scratched bronze.

  “Where do you think he is?” I took a drag on my cigarette, puffing a little spitefully into Brigid’s face, because she’d refused one. Her hair was the same colour as the flame from my lighter when I flicked at it, still trying to tempt her.

  Brigid blinked but otherwise ignored the smoke. “There are so many places to hide. Just about every house has a storeroom underneath. He could even be under ours.”

  I thought about my grandma’s house. Raised on stilts, it was crammed with possible hiding-places. The long narrow piece of land it was built on stretched from the river to the street. Plenty of places to hide there, too. In those early days, most kids thought he’d just run away and hidden. Everyone wanted to run away at least once, and some of them — some of us — had.

  “I hope he comes home soon,” I said.

  “So do I.”

  I took an extravagant draw on the cigarette, exhaling in the direction of a cloud that hung in the sky. For a moment it looked like I’d put it there.

  Brigid took a long breath and turned to me. “Have you ever run away?”

  “A couple of times.” I tried to sound offhanded. “Once before my mum got sick, and then again after she died.”

  “Really?” Brigid looked impressed. “Where’d you go?”

  “Not far.” The first time had been a bit embarrassing, really. I’d walked less than a block from my parents’ house, hiding in the shade of a deserted corner shop before I stopped, wondering which way to go. I decided to wait and let everyone suffer. Two hours later, bored, I returned home. No one had noticed I was g
one. I didn’t tell them. After my mother died, I ran away again. That time was something I could talk about.

  “Once, I spent two nights at my friend Kelly’s home, but Kelly’s mum called my dad, wanting money to take me to McDonald’s, so he found out where I was.”

  “Would you run away again?” Brigid asked, wide-eyed.

  “I think it’d kill my grandma. Even worse than having me here does. I think you should run away, though.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you never do anything you shouldn’t.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Yes it does. No one likes a goody-two-shoes.”

  Brigid pulled at a grass shoot. “Plenty of people like me and I’ve done lots of naughty things.”

  “Oh yeah? Name one.”

  Brigid cast her eyes around and leaned closer, as if she thought someone might be spying from behind some bushes.

  “See that house over there?” she asked, pointing.

  Stubbing out my cigarette, I turned to look. I could just make out a patch of decaying blue-painted timber behind a tangle of green vines that had threaded themselves through window frames and around downpipes. Thin strands of vine tapped the roof in the breeze as if searching for purchase there. Lower, a balcony handrail hung at a precarious, broken angle. The surrounding yard was a clutter of rusty machinery and other junk.

  “Does someone actually live there?” I asked.

  Brigid nodded. “Everyone says it’s haunted.”

  “And saying there’s a haunted house is the naughtiest thing you’ve ever done?”

  “That’s not what I mean.” Brigid looked offended. “You make it sound like I’m just a little kid. What I mean is, I’ve been there.”