The Kingdom Where Nobody Dies

by Kimberley Starr

  He scratches his groin and taps the meter box. “I’ll have to charge you.”

  “That’s fine.”

  He cuts the engine and reaches into the backseat for a newspaper as I step away, looking around for familiar sites.

  Sometimes my own memories seem strange, misshapen things. I try to keep this in mind when some of my clients back in Rockhampton need help distinguishing what they remember from what they fear. Everything here seems smaller than I remember; I have grown. The street is not so wide, the houses not so large as I recall. And of course, my memory has captured the places I knew best, the places where things happened to me, with greater clarity than the rest.

  Now I realise that the windows of the Colemans’ old place are no more shiny than those of the more modern house across the road, the flowers are no brighter in their garden than in others that line the street, despite my memory of their place being so vivid.

  The park, too, is smaller than I remembered. New play equipment has been installed, a brilliant red-and-yellow construction of metal and plastic standing in a bed of bark chips. It is deserted. Only the fig tree, its giant branches stretching overhead, is as big as I remember. Behind it, the house that Brigid and I once called haunted is no larger than any of the others, although my memory has not exaggerated its decrepitude. Vines have reached even further over its roof. From here, the place looks more like an overgrown hill than a house.

  I stand for a moment, trying to imagine the vines less thick, the walls as they must have been when flakes of blue paint (I think it was blue) were still visible. How it was when I was fourteen, in the days when I was trying to disentangle that part of my nature that was me, myself, from that part that was pure grief.

  I shake the thought aside and try to forgive myself for indulging it. It seems I’m always feeling guilty about something. But maudlin memories don’t make me a bad person. I walk further, trying to concentrate on what remains from the old days. Anything I see might help me put all this into perspective. There was a shell of a wrecked car over there amongst the other junk, wasn’t there? And wasn’t it picked over again and again by thieves and vandals? Perhaps it’s there still, beneath the vines and the weeds and the tumble of Coke cans and chip packets tossed from the park.

  Only the path from that house to its jetty, rickety as ever, looks less overgrown than it did twenty years ago. I walk closer to check. I have spent a lifetime in an unnerving conflict, between trying to forget what happened here and needing to come to terms with it. Now I am here, at once guilty and unsuspected, I do not want to remember. I have read too many texts about the difficulties and opacity of memory, about its framework, about whether it can be falsified and what “false memory” would mean. I know about synapses and neural pathways. Almost as well as anyone, I know how brains work. Which is to say, I’ve read all the current speculations about that mysterious organ. I know that every thought of the past is a reconstruction, yet my own memories have never seemed as alive as they do right now, when I risk losing them. I clench my fists, a useless amulet against losing track of myself the way my mother did.

  Here I am, not locating 1984 as I usually do, in the refrain of an old George Michael song found by chance on the radio, or in the sudden glimpse of a purple fabric the exact shade of the jacaranda that grew in my grandmother’s front yard. Instead, I’m here in the physical space, among what remains of the material objects that were part of my own youth.

  I knock on the front door that was once my grandma’s. A strange woman answers. Her face holds a puzzled frown. I tell her I own her home (I’m not sure she believes me) and ask if everything is all right with the house, with the agent.

  “It’s fine,” she says, looking over her shoulder with obvious desire to go back inside. “Look, do you have a card or something I can check?”

  I shake my head, but wish her the best as I leave.

  Summer storms are part of Brisbane’s subtropical climate, and by the time my taxi returns to the Regatta ferry terminal, dark clouds have gathered in the sky, low and menacing.

  “You sure you don’t want a lift all the way into town?” the driver asks. “I don’t need the fare, but that river’s gonna get pretty choppy.”

  I’ve always loved the cleansing effect of a storm, the way lightning seems to slash rips into the dank humidity that precedes it, the way rain washes away all the dirty impurities of a day. I shake my head. “Thanks, I’ll be fine.”

  A small crowd already waits for the ferry. I join them and peer past the handrail at the river beyond. With the changing weather, it has lost its sparkle. The blue-and-white ferry hastens in the shadow of the thunderhead, looking much smaller than it did on the outbound journey. Nearby, a sign reminds me that way back in 1974 the original pier was washed away by the flood that devastated the city. No one around me thinks of that now; they are busy with their bags and their hats, the magnitude of their need to be somewhere else. Although the river has always flooded periodically, no one ever expects it to happen again. Lightning doesn’t strike the same spot twice, as I was reminded yesterday.

  I consider the missing boys whose stories have meshed with mine over the years, and watch as the first flashes of lightning touch down somewhere inland. Here comes the ferry. It’s time for me to get back to the hotel and to think about tomorrow.

  My grandma’s street was long and curved, echoing the long curve of the Brisbane River. An ordinary street. Yet over the course of one week, two tragedies had happened there.

  Members of Cameron Seymour’s search party went door to door asking for information. Neighbours shared little bits of gossip combustible enough to ignite fully fledged rumour. On the bus route to school, I imagined bad news spreading like bushfire through front gardens.

  It was the same at school. Even though I kept quiet, everyone knew Daniel Coleman was dead. He had drunk too much, had driven anyway, and was dead. He should be thankful — well, if he wasn’t dead, he should have been thankful — that he hadn’t killed his son, too. People wanted to talk to me about it, ask me what I knew. But all I wanted was to get back to my painting.

  Mrs White sat at the front of the classroom, flicking through a couple of class rolls and pencilling notes beside a few of the names. Although the Year Nine double period finished hours ago, paintings we’d worked on still decorated the walls, mine with roses blackened from yesterday’s efforts. Gazing back at it, I loitered near the door.

  “Madeleine, have you forgotten something?” Mrs White asked, looking up at me.

  I sucked in my bottom lip, letting my schoolbag dangle at my side. “My painting’s not finished yet. Can I work on it some more?”

  “Don’t you have another class?”

  “No … well, maths.”

  “Maths is important.” She reached to tuck a strand of grey hair behind her ear and smiled, sliding her paperwork into a large black folder. “But this is a hard time for everyone. Maybe more so for you. If painting helps, you can go to maths later.”

  It was a bit weird, but she’d been nice before. Maybe she really did understand, at least a little bit. I remembered a word she’d used earlier. Catharsis.

  “Do you want to talk?”

  Now, that was a question I’d heard before.

  No. The answer was on my tongue before I realised she was talking about my painting, not my mother. “I’d just like to paint,” I said, instead.

  Mrs White nodded. She turned towards the storage cabinet at the front of the room, extracting a key from her pocket. “Let me get you some equipment, Maddy. Is it all right if I call you that?”

  “People usually do,” I said. “It’s just that no one here knows me very well yet.”

  “We’ll have to do something about that. It’s early days. You haven’t been at school for a full week yet.”

  She stood at the cabinet door, passing me tubes of the colours I’d been using. The vase of roses I’d originally painted in honour of my mother was a much darker thing now, as if it had been
scorched. The petals that had once been pink and fresh were now grey and droopy, once-green leaves grey and wilted. Behind them the shadows were untainted black.

  “I’m impressed with your skills, Maddy,” Mrs White said. “If you want my help, be sure to ask.”

  She stood beside me while I tied a smock over my uniform and screwed the lids off several of the tubes. She was still there a few minutes later, when I began painting. Normally, I hate that. Only my mother had been able to watch me paint without really pissing me off. But Mrs White was different, her eyes more knowledgeable and somehow more understanding than those of other strangers. She thought I was good at this. That was important. Then she began talking.

  It was a long time, too, since I’d been able to talk while I painted. She didn’t ask how I felt about my mother. She didn’t ask about Daniel Coleman. Instead, we discussed ordinary things, like I was just some ordinary kid. I told her about Grandma’s neighbourhood, and about Mrs Wilson who lived across the road and who cared more for her garden than her husband. She had a fabulous front yard, my grandma said, but not much of a marriage.

  “They’re incredible, the Wilsons,” I told Mrs White, as I zigzagged a line of coal-grey onto the canvas. “They fight and insult each other from 6 pm at night to 8 am every morning. 8 am, on the dot. That’s when Mrs Wilson goes out into the garden. She wears these bright floral gloves and smiles at everyone, like we haven’t heard anything. I couldn’t figure out why she was so happy at first.”

  “Maybe she likes gardening?” Mrs White suggested.

  “She smiles because her husband’s gone to work,” I said. “Then she’s happy to see him home too, at 6 pm, but it’s never long before they start fighting again.”

  A long pause followed. Didn’t Mrs White find this interesting?

  “Not every marriage is like that,” she said finally.

  She was Mrs White. I supposed that meant she had a husband. But I didn’t want to hear about him. In one corner of my painting, I mixed a little of the grey in with the blue.

  “I know,” I said quickly. “The Morgans live just past the Colemans. Also right on the river. They don’t fight. Mr Morgan does stock market reports on TV.”

  Mrs White leaned back against a nearby desk, arms crossed, and nodded encouragingly. I didn’t know why she was being so nice to me, but it was good.

  “His wife is this tall, thin, elegant woman,” I continued. “She wears evening gowns to the supermarket. She told my grandma that furniture speaks to her. Yesterday, when the police dug trenches near the river at Seven Mile Rocks, they did that because of Mrs Morgan’s secret information. They didn’t realise she got the tip-off from her toaster. Grandma hopes Will Morgan doesn’t get his financial information from the same source.”

  I talked on, although I didn’t know why these stories were so important to me. I simply talked, and Mrs White listened, as though what I said was important and she was fascinated to hear it. Gradually I began to realise what I was doing.

  “You must think my grandma does nothing but gossip,” I said lamely, when a bell sounded, meaning that school was over for the day. I’d missed science, too.

  Mrs White looked at me and shook her head, smiling. “Your painting shows promise, Maddy,” she said. “And I’m glad to listen if you want to talk. Come back tomorrow, if that helps. Maybe after maths.”

  At the bus stop that afternoon, the questions continued. I was the only kid from our part of the street who still went to school. Everyone was interested in what I might know about Cameron or Daniel:

  Was a man in your street really gaoled for kidnapping?

  Do the police think that man forced Mr Coleman off the road because Mr Coleman knew what happened to Cameron Seymour?

  Were Andrew Coleman’s legs completely smashed? Will he ever swim again?

  Sally Green, her plaits even tighter than usual (maybe her mother thought making her ugly was a safety precaution) asked me that last question.

  “There’s nothing wrong with his legs,” I told her. “I saw him yesterday. He looked fine.”

  That night, while we were eating something from a tin served with reheated rice, and the TV droned in the background, I asked Grandma about the Seymours, Cameron’s parents. She inserted a fingernail between her teeth and gave me a weird glance as if she was trying to figure out who I meant.

  “We’ve certainly had our share of tragedy lately,” she said. “They say bad news comes in threes.”

  “At least the Colemans know that Daniel is dead.”

  Another speculative glace. Grandma swallowed a forkful of food with a splash of cask wine. “You think that makes losing someone easier? Nothing makes it easier.”

  A moment later an ad break interrupted the famine she was watching on the news, and she turned back to me. “That’s a rental house they live in,” she said. “The Seymours. That’s why the lawn never gets mowed.”

  “I thought the overgrown house belonged to Kevin Mathers.”

  “Another disgrace. That’s not because he’s renting, though. Kevin Mathers inherited that place from his parents. No work’s been done on the property in three generations.” Grandma waved towards her own kitchen, itself perhaps forty years old. “I haven’t been to his place for years, but I don’t think he even has electricity.”

  She turned on her own lamp with an exaggerated gesture, as though having the power connected was still amazing. I thought of all the wires connecting our house to everyone else’s. There had been so much death and loss here lately, as though we really were all connected. I still couldn’t believe anyone really understood my own particular grief. Not even Grandma, who kept saying that she wanted to.

  While I cleaned off the table, she moved over to her favourite chair and pulled out the crocheting she seemed to be always working on.

  “What’s that for, anyway?” I asked.

  She must have assumed I knew, after seeing her working on them for such a long time. There were dozens, maybe hundreds, of little agonised squares. She gave me another surprised look. “I give these to old people’s homes. They get made into blankets. We all need to give back to the world. If you want, I can teach you how to crochet.” She looked vaguely hopeful.

  “Er … I don’t think so. No.”

  Mrs White was right about one thing. Painting helped me. Maybe crocheting helped my grandma. That didn’t mean I wanted any part of her ugly handiwork.

  * * *

  “Come on, Brigid!” I called from the edge of her backyard, a couple of hours later. I’d spied her red hair through the rear window. But it took a while for her to separate the curtains and lean out, her eyes even puffier than before.

  “Where do you want to go?” she called.

  “Just along the river.” I waved my sketchbook at her. I had great hopes for Riverside Phantasy being my major work for the year and still needed a location. “Come on! You’d like a walk.”

  Her head vanished for a few moments. I could imagine Brigid in that back room, asking Rebecca if she could come out, as if she was six instead of twelve. Then she appeared in the window again.

  “I have to get dressed,” she said.

  Get dressed? It was four o’clock in the afternoon. I shrugged and strolled back behind my grandma’s shed, lighting a cigarette as I went, and sighing. These things were expensive and I would soon need another packet. That meant opening one of my father’s envelopes, if only to extract the money order that he usually tucked into his letters.

  Brigid found me sitting in our own little spot, semi-hidden, a few minutes later. I’d flicked open my sketchbook and left it on the grass. Nothing I’d drawn was quite right yet. There were a few sketched mangroves that I was quite pleased with, but anyone can draw a tree. It was the river I needed to concentrate on; its particular curves and turns, the precise blending of dark copper into the shadows beneath overhead branches …

  “You really like art,” Brigid observed. She sat, pulling her knees against her chest and wrapping h
er arms around them.

  I pushed the cigarette under Brigid’s nose. “You want a puff?”

  She shook her head. I shrugged. I didn’t care. She’d get into them sooner or later. Everyone does.

  “You’re pretty good at art,” Brigid said. “My favourite subject is geography.”

  The weather was less glorious than usual, the bushland a darker green, less bleached by sunrays. The sky above the wide brown river was splotched in different shades of grey. Brigid’s mood seemed to match. She turned to me.

  “Your mother, can I talk about her?”

  I probably should have expected this, I thought as I finished exhaling. “Why?”

  “She died,” Brigid said softly. “Your mother, I mean. And I want to know, how did you ever get used to it?”

  “Get used to it?” It was February. My mother had been dead for precisely two and a half months. “Those are just words. You can’t get used to it. I don’t know what you mean.”

  “She had cancer?”

  I nodded.

  Brigid leant forward to retie her shoelace. “I suppose you had a while to say goodbye, then.”

  Did she mean her father’s death was harder to bear than my mother’s?

  “I had to watch her fall apart.” I fired the words like bullets. “It was in her mind. It spread to her brain. Yeah, I said goodbye, when she couldn’t talk and didn’t remember who I was.”

  There!

  How was Little Miss Shoelaces going to take that? At least she hadn’t been forced to watch her father as he died. Why wasn’t she be big enough for me to hit? My angry gaze darted up the road towards the house on the other side of the park. Overgrown with vines of purple and yellow flowers, it was as out of place in this neat suburban environment as I felt, with all my wild emotions. There was just a weird man living there on his own. His mother had died too, and Brigid had said the place was haunted.

  Haunted! The idea made me angrier still. Of course there were no ghosts. But, I thought, there should be! I burned with the need to tell my dead mother how angry I was about all this. Shouldn’t Brigid feel the same?