The Kingdom Where Nobody Dies

by Kimberley Starr

  “You don’t need to talk to my mother, Mr Mathers,” she said slowly.

  “I’m sure I don’t,” Kevin Mathers soothed, peering over our shoulders into the darkness. “I like visitors. I’d like to have more of them.” Suddenly he looked cunning. “Do you know what? I’d like a visit from Andrew. Then I’m sure I wouldn’t have to tell anyone that you’ve been out so late.”

  “Andrew?” Brigid explored the steps behind her with an outstretched toe, as if to check their exact position before she turned and ran. “I’m sure he’ll come over and say hello some time,” she said, “if I ask him to.”

  “You do that,” Kevin Mathers said. “You do that now, and I might not need to call your mother.”

  “Now?” repeated Brigid.

  Kevin Mathers nodded.

  “But it’s the middle of the night!” I said. I couldn’t believe I’d been beginning to think he was slow.

  “I’m sure it’s a bad time for Rebecca Coleman to get a phone call, too,” he said.

  We just had to get out of here. “All right,” I said. “We’ll do it.” By the time Kevin Mathers realised we weren’t returning, Brigid and I would be in bed, desperately feigning sleep. “We’ll get him.”

  Mid-nod, Kevin Mathers reached out and grabbed Brigid’s arm, pulling her towards him and into the kitchen.

  “Your little friend can go and get Andrew,” he told her. “I’d like to start our visit right now.”

  He began to close the door. I reached for her wrist.

  Her shoulders stiffened as she shook me off. And shook her head, free arm waving around the backyard. “You don’t need to be here too,” she said. “Go and get Andrew, Maddy. I’ll be all right. Won’t I, Mr Mathers? You might like to make me a pot of tea.”

  It was the middle of the night and we were far from other houses. Even if we screamed, no one would hear. And if we vanished, no one would know where we were. Meanwhile, Brigid only had to keep herself safe for ten minutes. Then I would be back, with help …

  Who? I wondered as I ran.

  Rebecca? Being in trouble with her mother had to be better for Brigid than time alone with Kevin Mathers …

  But Brigid didn’t want Rebecca. Faster than I’d ever moved in my life, I ran all the way back to the Colemans’. The only person I could get was Andrew. He was strong, he could overpower the saggy-bellied man in moments. He’d be far safer in that house than Brigid or me.

  Panting, I counted down the windows until I found the one I thought was his. Thank goodness, it was open. I swung up into a fruit tree that grew nearby and winced as the thorny bark sawed into my fingers and knees. Branches crackled and swayed beneath my weight, as if they would break, but even when I’d grazed along as far as I could, I wasn’t close enough.

  “Andrew!” I yelled in a harsh whisper, thinking he might still be awake.

  There was no answer. I’d have to go inside for him, the same way that I fetched Brigid, only twenty minutes ago. Swinging down from the tree, I forgot about my scraped knees and ran around to the front steps.

  The front window was still open. I climbed in and ran as quietly as I could down the hall. When I found Andrew’s door, I ran in and flung it closed, switching on the light.

  “What the …” he demanded, sitting up and reaching for a blanket as if he might have been exposed. (Which he wasn’t.)

  “Who …” he began, peering at me through half-closed eyes that struggled with the light.

  I raced to him. “It’s me. Maddy. Brigid’s in trouble. She needs help.”

  “Trouble? Brigid?” Andrew jumped out of bed, reaching for a shirt. He fumbled with the buttons and grabbed a pair of jeans from the floor.

  “Do you mind?” He made a circular gesture with one finger.

  “Of course.” I blushed, and turned.

  “Is Rebecca …?” he asked.

  “No! Brigid doesn’t want …”

  “How did you get in?”

  “The front window …”

  He seized my elbow and pulled me back towards the door. “That’s how she got out? Come this way. Quiet! Rebecca’s not always good sleeper.”

  I followed him along the hall and through the kitchen. Andrew unlocked the back door from a key hidden beneath the fruit bowl. Halfway down the stairs, he paused.

  “All right, so she’s in trouble,” he said. “Where is she?”

  I swallowed. “The house across the park.”

  “The Mathers place?” Andrew turned to face me. “Are you both mad?”

  He took another step. The wrong direction. I seized his arm. “Where are you going?”

  “To get Mum. This needs more …”

  “No! You can’t do that!”

  “What sort of trouble is Brigid in?”

  “We were prowling around,” I said. “Mr Mathers caught us. He said he’d tell Rebecca unless you came over.”

  “Unless I came over? Why does he want to see me?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, despairing. “Maybe he’ll tell you. Come with me. Now. Brigid needs us, and she doesn’t want Rebecca.”

  Andrew looked dubious.

  “He’s apathetic old man,” I said. “You could overpower him easily if you wanted to. And you don’t want to get Brigid into trouble.”

  Finally, he shrugged and walked back to me. I felt my shoulders slump with relief.

  This time, we acted like normal people, walking up to the front door. As Andrew knocked, I peered through a grimy window. Inside, Brigid sat safely on one side of a couch, sharing it with a mess of papers and magazines, drinking tea.

  Kevin Mathers opened the door, saying nothing but staring at Andrew with a fixed, fascinated glare. “Andrew Coleman,” he murmured.

  “You know me, Mr Mathers?” Andrew asked. Tiny muscles flexed in his cheek and neck.

  “Yes, yes I do … Come inside, won’t you? Yes, I know you. I’ve seen you swimming. I’ve read about you in the paper.”

  He walked inside ahead of us. A strange smell of fried food and rotten apples wafted past, as if he never opened his windows. I looked at Brigid and gulped.

  “We told you we’d come,” I said.

  Kevin Mathers was beside her, sweeping magazines into a pile so there was room for me to sit. Brigid looked very girly and vulnerable, her ankles neatly crossed. She was so brave and so small! How could I have left her here, alone? I felt messy and wild and cowardly by comparison, and swung my hair over my face, filtering the unpleasant smells around me and breathing in chlorine and herbal shampoo.

  Dragging his tatty slippers along the worn carpet, Kevin Mathers approached a hard-backed chair, leaning forward to rest his chin in his hands and indicate that Andrew should sit opposite. Kevin Mathers’ room was as old as it smelled. Two big sofas had ripped upholstery and indented, greasy marks at head-level. Beer cans balanced on a stained coffee table, threatening to topple into white plastic plates that had been used as ashtrays.

  “Well, kids,” Kevin Mathers said. “It’s nice of you to come over.”

  I almost giggled from the strangeness, and the stress. Andrew didn’t seem to be listening at all. Instead, broad forehead creased, he gazed towards the discarded magazines. One cover showed a naked woman leaning forward over a chair. Her arse, pushed into a weird angle by the knife-point heels she wore, was stuck into the air. Various personal body parts were hidden by thick black writing in a language I didn’t recognise.

  Porn. I tried to catch Andrew’s eye but he wouldn’t look at me.

  “It was good of you to have us, Mr Mathers,” Brigid said. She elbowed me in the side.

  “Thank you,” I added quickly.

  Kevin Mathers began fidgeting with his fingers. “Um …”

  “Maddy said you wanted to see me.” Andrew was as polite as his sister. “Do you want to talk?”

  Kevin Mathers looked at his hands clenched in his lap. He seemed confused. “Would you like some cake? I have cake.”

  I thought of his kitchen and all
the filth. “No thanks!”

  Brigid frowned again. “We really shouldn’t, Mr Mathers. Mum doesn’t like us eating after dinner.”

  “Um … okay.” He sagged, as if coming up with the offer had been exhausting.

  “So what would you like to talk about, Mr Mathers?” Andrew asked. “Did you read the article about the Asian School Games, or the one about swimmers in future Olympics?”

  I looked across at him, even more impressed, if such a thing was possible. Andrew had been written about twice? The only people I knew who’d been in newspapers were dead, and that didn’t count. Anyone can have a funeral notice. But for Andrew, these articles proved that he really was someone.

  Kevin Mathers stood and shuffled towards a cabinet that held a pile of scrapbooks. He chose one filled with newspaper clippings and passed it to Andrew. “Remember this?” he asked.

  Andrew looked at the yellowed paper. “That was a long time ago. Is there much about me in here?”

  Kevin Mathers leaned closer to him. Flipping through the scrapbook, he displayed about a dozen newspaper photographs of Andrew, some photocopied. Andrew wrinkled his nose and tried to cover the gesture with a raised hand and a cough. “You’re very interested in my career.” He looked spooked.

  Kevin Mathers nodded emphatically. “All the young boys, especially the local boys,” he said. He flipped through the book some more and I saw articles from local papers featuring boys I either didn’t know or who had changed so much over the years that I didn’t recognise them.

  “No one’s been in as many newspapers as you,” said Kevin Mathers, with a proud smile. “You’re a real celebrity, a star, Andrew Coleman. And you’ll go further. Everyone will know you.”

  I watched Andrew’s worried expression slide into a slow smile. He was as proud of his swimming as Kevin Mathers was of his scrapbooks.

  “You think so?” he asked. “I’m not really a star, you know, not like in the movies.”

  “But you will be a star. And I’ll be so proud of you. I wanted to be an athlete, you know. A swimmer,” Kevin Mathers told him. “I had lessons. I could have been famous, too. Do you have lessons, Andrew?”

  “Um … I have a coach.”

  “Every day?”

  “Most days,” said Andrew. “It’s a lot of hard work. But it’s worth it.”

  Kevin Mathers looked dreamy. “If I couldn’t be a swimmer I should have been a pilot. It’s power over the elements, swimming or flying. I would have liked that.”

  He sat on the floor with the scrapbook, touching each article as though he was a librarian with a rare and valuable book.

  “Keeping those must be a lot of work,” Andrew observed, hesitantly.

  Kevin Mathers looked up. Glad to have his work recognised, his face creased into a smile. “It is. And it’s a real pleasure to have you here. Are you sure you don’t want cake?”

  Andrew shook his head. “I can only stay for a while. I have training in the morning.”

  A look of disappointment flitted across Kevin Mathers’ face, but he recovered quickly. “Of course you do. You’ll come again though, won’t you? I’ll … um … make the place more presentable. I … um … haven’t been able to open the windows and air the place in a few days.”

  “If you like,” said Andrew.

  I stood quickly, hoping Brigid wouldn’t have time to promise that we’d come back too.

  We returned to the river, to the fig tree we’d explored earlier. It seemed a safe distance from Kevin Mathers’ house. And we burst into exhausted, relieved laughter. Andrew clenched his fists as he chuckled and Brigid, clutching at her stomach, looked like she was about to have an asthma attack.

  “My God!” she said, between giggles. “Andrew, thanks so much for saving us like that. Maddy, I’m never doing anything you say, ever again. Hey, where are you going?”

  I’d just started to move away. “My grandma’s place,” I told her. “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “Because we have to go tell Mum!” Brigid said.

  “Tell her?” Andrew looked amazed.

  “No way!” I said. “We only just got out of trouble. Your mother doesn’t need to know about this.”

  “That man might have Cameron Seymour! He nearly had me!”

  Andrew gave me an alarmed glance and took hold of Brigid’s elbow. “We have no evidence of that, Bridge. Nothing we’ve learned tonight would change the police’s view of Cameron Seymour’s disappearance. There’s no reason for Rebecca to know where we’ve been.”

  Brigid hadn’t relaxed her jaw; she was not convinced. “We don’t know what the police think,” she said.

  “Nothing’s changed from the other day,” I said. “Do what we planned. Mention his name to your mother and see what she says.”

  Brigid turned away. “I’ll think about it tonight,” she said. “Cameron Seymour might be in a lot more trouble than us.”

  You have to suffer for your art. I’d read that somewhere. But after visiting Kevin Mathers, I thought more about bad luck than about suffering. And not just about the bad luck that brought Kevin Mathers and his garbage to his kitchen door at the same moment as Brigid and me. My artwork had taken a bad direction that night, too, only it wasn’t until I was lying awake in bed afterwards that I realised what had happened.

  I’d finally found the perfect location for Riverside Phantasy. And it was right behind Kevin Mathers’ house.

  Some people can paint a location from memory. Maybe it has something to do with training, or visual memory or imagination. I wasn’t one of those artists. I needed to be in a place, at least in the early stages of a painting, needed to see the precise changes of light and shade and feel how those related to line and form, even if my final picture ended up not using those exact details. And it was more than that, too. Every place had its own unique and hidden landscape of scents and smells that I seemed able to capture only when I was physically there.

  But in art class the day after our frightening excursion, I tried. I helped myself to a palette of browns and black and dark mossy greens. Holding my brush, I closed my eyes and visualised the eerie scene we’d passed last night. The river curved — like so — the mangroves bent and shivered. A century-old Queenslander, timber beginning to rot, cast a dark, tall shadow across the scene. As best I could, I drew those details in. Then I added the others, the figures who were the small-scale subjects of the painting. By the house’s stilts a stout man stood, one arm outstretched in the direction of a partly submerged brown shape that, in time, I hoped my paint might suggest was a drowned body.

  Mrs White marked off the other kids’ artwork and said we could work into the lunch break if we wanted. A few of us did.

  “Do you think you’ll ever be happy with that, Maddy?” she asked, standing beside me in front of the canvas. I was still dabbing and stroking after the others had gone.

  I paused and shook my head, not meeting her eyes. “I know it’s not right. I just can’t bring it to life.”

  But I didn’t ask her advice, didn’t need her suggestions for brushstrokes here or shading there. Even though she was my teacher, there was nothing she could tell me that was more vital than what I already knew. The only way to make this painting live was to go to the riverbank fig tree beside Kevin Mathers’ property and paint it there. I didn’t know if I’d ever be brave enough to do that.

  Jackie was eating mangoes in the lounge room that afternoon.

  “Hello, kiddies.” Her voice was high-pitched with pretend cheerfulness. “I let myself in, Rebecca gave me a key. I can’t get over how good Queensland fruit is. I’d completely forgotten. Andrew, would you like to make me some coffee? And maybe some cake?”

  Cake? The hairs at the back of my neck stood to attention. I told her that I wanted coffee too, even though I didn’t.

  Helping herself to more of Rebecca’s fruit from the coffee table, Jackie started fiddling again. Great slurps of coffee had already spilled into a china saucer on the table near her. She twisted str
ands of her dry hair into rough ropes, then pulled a beringed finger through those ropes until her hair was a shaggy, split-ended fleece. Something was on her mind.

  “I had some news today,” she said, when Andrew returned with a tray of drinks.

  “What sort of news?” he asked.

  “We … um … might have to go back to the states sooner than I thought. At least, Justin will.”

  Nobody said anything for a moment. Andrew stared at his glass.

  “Will you stay here after he goes?” he asked eventually.

  “I might,” Jackie said. “I guess it depends on how long you need to get things straightened out.”

  How long Andrew needed? I gazed at him, alarmed, and half-gagged on the coffee.

  He looked miserable. “I’ll need a long time,” he said. “Everything is here, my team, my friends, my coach.”

  Jackie sipped again from her coffee. “But not your mother,” she said. “Andrew, you’re fifteen years old. Now that Daniel … now that your father … is dead, you belong with me, where I live.”

  “We’ve talked about this,” Andrew said. “Isn’t there any way I can convince you?”

  Jackie put down her coffee mug before answering. She seemed to have trouble meeting his eyes. “There are plenty of opportunities for you in California,” she said. “Plenty of good coaches, plenty of pools. Your stepfather thinks you should come.”

  “They won’t be my pool, my coach.” Andrew sounded tired, as if this was a repeat of a previous argument and he no longer had any faith that he might prevail. “I want to try out for the Academy of Sport later this year.”

  Jackie pounced on his words. “See!” she said. “That’s in Canberra! You’d be going somewhere new anyway!”

  Andrew’s cup grated along the tabletop as he abandoned it and stood. Then he stomped off to his bedroom.

  Jackie’s face was strangely thoughtful beneath her fluffy-rabbit hair. When she saw how upset I was, she just shrugged. “I know there are a lot of changes for everyone right now. You had to come and live here with your grandmother, didn’t you? Well, Andrew has to come and live with me, where he belongs.”