The Kingdom Where Nobody Dies

by Kimberley Starr

  I leapt to my feet and raced along the footworn path along the backs of the properties, only pausing to pick up handfuls of gravel.

  “Maddy!” Brigid yelled, running along behind. “Maddy! What are you doing?”

  I didn’t answer. When I reached the boundary line of Kevin Mathers’ property, I stopped so suddenly that Brigid almost collided with me.

  I’d been in the softball team back at my old school, and I could still throw fairly accurately. I took a handful of pebbles in one hand and heaved them into the air, aiming in the direction of the house.

  “Maddy!” Brigid breathed, but I could hardly hear what she said next; her words were sighs lost in the clattering tumble of stones on a rusty tin roof.

  I took another handful and threw them, too. And more. The weird old man who pretended there were ghosts could have heard nothing like this since last time it hailed.

  “There!” I said, turning to Brigid. “Do you think we’ve chased the ghosts out by now?”

  Brigid opened her mouth to speak, then shut it again and gripped my arm. There was a sound in the house. A shout, more frightened than angry. I thought I heard footsteps, followed by a loud thump, then silence.

  “Are you crazy?” Brigid hissed. “That’s Kevin Mathers! He’ll come out for sure, or he’ll call the police.”

  She was right. Of course he would.

  “Quick!” I turned. “Run!”

  We raced back past the park, and collapsed on the ground at its edge near the toilet block, panting.

  “Shouldn’t we go home?” asked Brigid after a long moment. “They might find us here.”

  I shook my head. “There’s lots of people here. Let’s wait and watch.”

  But the police never came. No one came, except a couple of boys on BMX bikes and another on a skateboard. After a while we stopped listening for the sound of sirens, almost disappointed.

  “Imagine how weird he must be,” I said. “Wouldn’t anyone call the cops after something like that?”

  “Maybe it’s happened to him before. Mum said people aren’t very nice to him. Maybe that’s what she meant.”

  “I think it’s strange,” I said. “If he didn’t have something to hide, he would have come looking for us.”

  “Maybe we should ask Mum.”

  “No!” I said quickly. “I don’t want trouble. I just think it’s strange, that’s all.”

  “Yeah.” Brigid chewed the end of her hair. “I still want to ask Mum. I mean, with Cameron missing —”

  “You can’t tell her what I did!”

  “I don’t mean that. I’ll just drop Kevin Mathers’ name into a conversation.”

  I thought about it for a minute. “I’d like to be there.”

  “All right. We’re going to Dad’s office tomorrow to sort out his things. You can come too.”

  “She’ll want me to come?”

  “She’d like company.”

  “My grandma talked to me about Andrew,” I said, as we walked back into the park.

  “Did she?” Brigid stared at the ground, as if counting the horseshoe impressions we passed.

  “She said Andrew might have to go back to his real mother.”

  “I don’t know why he would. I mean, Andrew doesn’t want to go, and Mum wants him to stay here.” Brigid turned to look at me. “You like Andrew, don’t you?”

  I coughed. She was too direct. “He’s pretty cool,” I said. “I mean, it’s terrible what happened to him, being in the car and all.”

  Brigid strolled over to sit on one of the swings strung from the branches like tears, and I crossed to the one beside her. “I didn’t mean like that,” she said. “I mean, you like him like him. You don’t have to answer.”

  I sat on the next swing. I didn’t have to answer? Brigid was less gossipy than almost anyone I knew. I quite liked that. “Does Andrew see his mother very often?” I asked.

  “Hardly ever. Jackie — that’s her name — sends cards at Christmas but that’s really all. Hey, Maddy! I bet I can swing higher than you!”

  I laughed and used my feet to propel me into the air. “No way!” I yelled. “Not a little kid like you!” Together we swooped into the air in arcs like chained birds.

  “I suppose Rebecca will have to give up going back to work now,” my grandma said, the morning before the funeral.

  I looked at her and shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  Brigid talked about it later, though, approaching Daniel Coleman’s former office in Kenmore. Her face was glum. “Mum says she wants to work more than ever now. She needs a life outside the house.”

  We crossed to the footpath beside Moggill Road, drinking flavoured milk from the corner shop. Brigid was walking more and more slowly, as if our arrival could be forever postponed. If she kept this up, I thought, soon she’d be walking backwards.

  “Did your dad work here for long?” I asked.

  “Forever. Do you want to go get another drink before we go in?”

  It had been a hard day for Brigid. Neither she nor Andrew was back at school; as far as I knew, Andrew hadn’t yet left the house. Trauma, said the doctor (said Brigid). Give him a few days’ break, let it all sink in, send him to a psychologist.

  “I’ve never seen him train so hard,” Brigid told me as we left the second shop, cracking open cans of lemonade. “He’s down at the pool before I wake up. I hardly see him.”

  “He’ll knock other swimmers out of the water at the next big meet.”

  Brigid frowned. “His coach isn’t so sure. He’s worried about over-training. You can work too hard, you know. It’s bad for the muscles.”

  “So why doesn’t Andrew stop?”

  “Mum says being tired means he doesn’t have to think.”

  I shrugged. “He should try painting. That helps me.”

  “He doesn’t sit still long enough to draw,” Brigid said. “Anyway, here we are.” She tipped her half-full can into a kerbside garbage bin and pushed through a heavy glass storefront door. I stepped in behind her and looked around.

  To describe the office where Daniel had worked as grey would have been a massive understatement. There were steel-grey doors, dove-grey carpets, smoke-grey walls and other greys I didn’t know the names of. The non-colour lurked in shadows and beneath the desks and at the edges of housing advertisements on the walls.

  Brigid said hello to two women who could only be seen through a strange grey haze, partly smoke and partly room freshener. One of them browsed listlessly through a pile of folders, while the other tapped a pencil against her desk, reading a document. The folders, the pencil, the desks, the filing cabinets were all grey.

  Brigid’s face was taut and white as she coughed and made her way over to her mother.

  I followed her. The photographs of empty houses were beginning to give me the creeps. Houses aren’t supposed to be like that; they’re supposed to be full of furniture and life.

  “Hello, Mrs Coleman,” I said.

  Rebecca smiled a dim, half-hearted smile that suited the greyness of the room.

  “Hi, girls. I’m glad you decided to come in together. I don’t like Brigid travelling alone on that bus any more.”

  One of the girls stood. She wore a skirt so short I wasn’t sure it was a skirt. Her chunky silver necklace made a rattling noise.

  “Hello, Brigid,” she said. “Who’s your friend?”

  No I’m so sorry to hear about your father, no how awful to be without a father while you’re still so young, none of those nauseating things that adults are supposed to say. Something in her favour.

  “I’m Madeleine,” I said.

  “And you live nearby?” the girl asked. “That’s nice.”

  Rebecca stood behind the box she’d been busy filling with the contents of Daniel’s desk. “Oh, good,” she said. “You’ve met Sylvia.”

  The silver-necklaced girl smirked, and began to pull a narrow cigarette carton from her shirt pocket before pausing to give Rebecca a thoughtful look. On top
of the filing cabinet behind her rested an assortment of air-freshener cans, some rusty with age.

  “I was just introducing myself to Brigid’s friend,” she said.

  “Oh, good,” said Rebecca again. “Because maybe she’ll be with Brigid sometimes, you know.”

  Brigid turned to Rebecca, one eyebrow raised. “Mum? What do you mean?”

  Rebecca wiped a strand of auburn hair from her eyes. Her hands were dusty, their once perfectly manicured nails chewed right down. “Did I forget to tell you?” She sounded tired. “Sylvia’s agreed to baby-sit when I’m on night shift. Isn’t that nice?”

  Sylvia looked from Brigid to me, smiling again through sharp-looking teeth.

  “Mum,” said Brigid in a voice that had a note of panic in it. “Mum!”

  Rebecca turned. “I want someone responsible to be with you while I’m working.”

  While Brigid frowned the deepest lines I had ever seen, Sylvia laughed. “Actually,” she said, “I’m looking forward to it. Maybe you can help with my wedding plans.”

  Brigid scowled and sat in the corner. She seemed to have forgotten why we came. I sat beside her, flipping through a pile of real estate brochures and coughing in an attempt to remind her.

  “I’m too old for a baby-sitter,” Brigid complained, a couple of times.

  I coughed a little less discreetly.

  “What is it?” Brigid asked, at last.

  “Kevin Mathers,” I mouthed. “Mention him to Rebecca.”

  Brigid waved her hand dismissively. “Everyone knows he’s weird. This is important.”

  While the Colemans were adjusting to the death of Daniel, the Cameron Seymour story continued to obsess the rest of the city.

  “Mum’s going to be searching for him when she gets back to the station,” Brigid said as we walked home along the river, behind a row of houses.

  Mad Mrs Morgan was in the backyard, bending and stretching below the clothes line as she unpegged her washing. She leered out at us as we strolled closer.

  “You two girls take care,” she said.

  Before we could answer, one of her sheets became caught in the breeze and blew against her like a shroud. She pushed it aside and stepped towards us, dark eyebrows drawn together.

  “Terrible things are happening,” she said. “Terrible things. Unspeakable things. Down by the river. In the darkness. Near the water. Terrible, terrible things. You take care they don’t happen to you.”

  We both looked up at her and giggled as we sprinted past.

  “I wonder what told her that,” I asked Brigid, in a loud voice. “The fridge or the toaster?”

  Mrs Morgan wasn’t the only neighbour to caution us. Mrs Wilson looked up from her gardening next morning as I walked to the school bus stop, and said, “I’ll look out for you, Maddy. You’ll be all right.”

  As if a kidnapper or a pedophile might be intimidated by her spade or trowel!

  The bus pulled past the Seymours’ house on the way home. Was that a shadowy figure behind the curtains? Someone watching us? I looked away.

  “It’s getting spooky around here,” I said to Brigid when Rebecca led me through to her room.

  It was the afternoon before Daniel’s funeral. Brigid nodded and went back to sewing a button on a pleated navy blue skirt. “At least no one’s throwing stones on our roof,” she said.

  “I’m glad he didn’t chase us, though.”

  I thought of what I knew about Kevin Mathers. His house on stilts was eerie, perched on the corner of the park where the river curved and flattened like a sunbaking snake. We still hadn’t spoken to Rebecca about him. But no one who was guilty of anything terrible would live in such a terrible house. It would have been too obvious. It was easier to put him out of my mind than it was to make a confession that might get me into trouble.

  “Are you really going to wear that skirt?” I asked.

  Brigid nodded, her chin at a defiant angle. “Mum doesn’t want me to. She says it’s not fashionable enough. But I want to say goodbye to Dad in something he knew.”

  I thought about Rebecca and her fashion magazines. She’d been carrying one the first day I’d seen her, and she usually had one beside her whatever else she was doing. It seemed kind of weird to be worried about fashion at a funeral, but at least Brigid was finally rebelling about something. There were times her good daughter routine seemed unhealthy.

  There was a new-looking Mercedes parked outside the Colemans’ house when I came home from school on Thursday, the day Daniel Coleman was buried. I’d been planning to avoid Brigid and any boring details of her father’s funeral. The car changed my mind.

  Whose was it?

  Someone rich, obviously. The riverfront neighbourhood was quite well off, but no one in our street had a car of these proportions: silver and huge. I peered in its darkened windows as I crossed the street from the bus stop, briefly imagining that it belonged to a movie star.

  The car looked as immaculate inside as it did outside. I’m always suspicious of people who are that clean; wanting your car to look like no one drives it is unnatural. Fighting off the urge to scratch my grandma’s house key down its silver duco, I realised curiosity had got the better of me.

  The Colemans’ front door was open again, and I could hear the noise of lots of people talking in the rear of the house. Of course. The wake.

  I’d forgotten about that. My mother had one, too. I remembered floating around, miserable and confused. The name itself seemed cruel. Mum had been in some dreadful nightmare world for weeks; now she would never wake again.

  The owner of the Mercedes was one of the mourners here. A movie star was mourning Daniel Coleman? Well, that was worth finding out about.

  As I knocked, Rebecca walked down the hall in a long black dress, carrying a glass of white wine. Apart from reddened eyes, devoid of make-up, she looked ready for a cocktail party.

  “Hello, Madeleine. I knew you’d realise your grandmother was here. Come through.”

  I followed her to the kitchen and family room, where a group of black-clad mourners had gathered around the big table and the sofas. They ate cake and drank wine, and seemed to be concentrating on not laughing too loud. My grandma was one of them, sitting next to Sylvia from Daniel’s office. Sylvia’s skirt was just as short as before, except darker. Seated opposite, Brigid, drinking something green and fizzy, had a green stain running down an otherwise white shirt. Andrew was nowhere to be seen.

  I took the glass of green stuff Rebecca gave me and went and sat on the floor beside Brigid, curling my legs beneath my skirt.

  “Where’s Andrew?” I asked.

  “He’s out the back,” she said tonelessly. “With Jackie — with his mother.”

  Pretending it didn’t matter much, I got up again and walked towards the window. “Oh.”

  Jackie Ambrose, I had been told, lived in the United States with her second husband. This explained the Hollywood-looking car, at least. They must have rented it.

  “What does Jackie do?” I asked.

  Standing, Brigid spilled a bit more green stuff on her shirt and didn’t bother wiping it off. “She helps actors with make-up. Not for the movies. For publicity campaigns and television appearances. That sort of thing.”

  It was strange to think a woman who lived in Hollywood and worked with movie stars had once been married to Daniel Coleman, Brisbane real estate agent. But when I looked outside, there she was. The driver of the Mercedes. Standing beside Andrew. They both leant on the pool fence, talking and drinking.

  Jackie was almost as tall as her son, with the same bronze skin and golden hair, except where he was so athletic and healthy-looking, everything about her was thin. From the heels of her stilettos to the chain that linked her handbag to her padded shoulder, to the hair in a wiry cloud around her long, narrow head, she was thin, thin, thin. And even from where I stood, her pushiness was as obvious as her thinness. She stood as close to her son as she possibly could, moving a little closer to him every few
moments, forcing him to step back.

  “Anything out there, Madeleine?” Sylvia had walked up so quietly that I didn’t know she was there until she spoke. She rhymed my name with “vine”. I hate that.

  “Nothing,” I said. Grandma told me this was my favourite word.

  Sylvia peered out the window, towards the sky and the pattern of bushland and houses on the other side of the river. The children’s playground seemed to be sewn into the view like an applique on one of my grandma’s quilts, only pretty. Framed by the bush and the playground and the mangroves, the wide brown river wound on its way. In the foreground, Andrew and his mother were still talking.

  “A very good-looking nothing,” Sylvia said, in an appraising voice, just as if Andrew himself was a piece of real estate. I wondered if a woman of twenty-something would find Andrew as attractive as I did. Perhaps she would.

  Brigid had gone back to her seat. I walked back to her. “Do you want to go outside for a while?”

  Brigid shrugged. “I s’pose so.”

  Andrew and his mother were still talking when we reached the bottom of the stairs. He turned to face us, his head blocking the sun. Its brightness transformed his golden hair into a halo.

  “Hello … um …” he stumbled.

  “Madeleine,” I said, looking at his mother. “Madeleine Jeffreys. Pleased to meet you, Mrs Ambrose.” Andrew’s awkwardness increased my confidence; it made us a bit more equal, even if his awkwardness was because he’d forgotten who I was.

  “Pleased to meet you,” Jackie said, without looking at me. She wore too much make-up. Hopefully, she wouldn’t want to live with a grown-up son as a daily reminder of her age.

  “We were just discussing that poor lost boy,” she said. “Gone for eight days! How can his mother stand it?”

  Andrew stared into the distance. Brigid once told me he hadn’t seen his mother for five years. Jackie didn’t seem to find her concept of grieving motherhood at all strange. “So Madeleine is a friend of yours from school?” she asked.

  “I live next door.”