The Kingdom Where Nobody Dies

by Kimberley Starr

The dirt path to the Colemans’ house was stubbornly empty. I’d been expecting to see Andrew’s face, mouth curved in a wide grin, as he sauntered towards me. But he never came.

  When I got home that night, I was not just high, I was well and truly stoned. I was being chased by bears. Each one had a head that looked like Andrew’s, and prowled menacingly in my direction before changing tactics and running straight past as if I didn’t exist at all.

  I stumbled in through my grandma’s back door, hoping she was in bed. I wanted to bury my disappointed dreams together with my spun-out body beneath the folds of my quilt. I made it to my bedroom and into bed without retching, and lay there as the ceiling spun with swirling bright colours as if a distant galaxy had been sucked into my room. I was a black hole of emotions. Outside, I heard strange sounds that I later learned were sirens, but I incorporated them into my fantasy and danced beneath the covers to the tune of a million trumpets. The rest of the neighbourhood peered through their curtains at the horror that was unfolding along the river, and the rest of Queensland heard on the TV that Cameron Seymour’s disappearance had finally been solved. But I knew nothing except myself until morning.

  Dawn arrived. I can never remember being so thirsty. The bears came back, but they were angry this time and stood around my water glass as if they wanted to hoard fluids before hibernation. When I summoned all my strength and sipped from it, they sucked the water from my mouth and I was just as thirsty afterwards as I had been before.

  I was sure the thirst would kill me, and that it wouldn’t matter anyway, because I was past ever being loved or wanted. I might as well die. One of the bears came too close and sniffed at my breath as if he wanted to suck out my soul as well, and I finally screamed, and the bear turned out to be my terrified grandma. She called her doctor, who said he didn’t make house calls.

  Eventually, the bears went away, but my thirst lasted far longer. I stayed in bed the next day, drinking as much as I could, as much as my grandma could bring. She tiptoed in bringing glass after glass of water, finally a whole jug of it. When she talked about calling an ambulance, I relented.

  “I think I feel a bit better now.”

  My grandma took a deep breath and I thought I heard her say, “Thank God!” but I knew she hated me, so I must have been mistaken. I tried to drink a little less water after that. Tried to visualise my tonsils floating on what I’d already swallowed, tried to imagine I might drown in what I had already consumed. But it was impossible to quench my thirst. I felt as parched as a desert.

  I turned on the small radio beside my bed and listened to the news. Cameron Seymour’s body had been found in the river, his gradual drift downstream interrupted by the boat ramp at the end of the River Pocket pier. His body had been trapped there, held against the rocks as tidal waters receded, exposing him to the evening air. He’d been discovered about an hour after Andrew and I planned to meet.

  While I’d been smoking my third joint and passing from comfortable numbness to time-staggered hallucinations, while Andrew-headed bears chased me into my grandma’s kitchen, while I ate all the remaining cheese cubes and half a mudcake, while the bears vanished into the cracked walls as I made my way to bed, Cameron’s desperate parents were told that he’d been found. Before I woke in the morning, the police search had widened. Now they were definitely looking for a child killer. Reporters were more excited than before. On the radio, the heartbreak of the riverside discovery was repeated again and again, each time seeming increasingly less real, more like a folktale, a legend. A newsreader on the station I usually listened to maintained her shock and breathlessness with each repeated broadcast, as if she had a short-term-memory problem. I reached out and moved the dial. On another station Mr Seymour was being interviewed.

  “Are you relieved your ordeal is over?” the reporter asked.

  Long breaths were drawn in the pause that followed. “Nothing is over. This is just the beginning.” Mr Seymour sounded tired as well as angry.

  There were no more sirens that day; the worst was known and the panicked part of the search was over. But the street still thrummed with cars cruising past. Helicopters hovered overhead, propellers cutting noisy gashes into the pain of my headache. Later, I walked to the sash window and shaded my eyes with one hand as I gazed outside. Beneath a violently blue sky, all I could see were the white and green of paperbarks, the grey of their shadows on the surrounding scrub. Splashes and yells suggested divers at work nearby and increased my thirst. I threw myself back into bed and watched the overhead fan sweep in easy circles. Closing my eyes, I imagined what my ceiling might look like if I attached a loaded paintbrush to each blade.

  Gradually, I felt better, and the light through my window stopped feeling like an assault. Grandma continued walking in and out, wiping the sweat off my face with a washcloth. I wondered if I should thank her. Maybe she’d been nice to me before and I just hadn’t noticed it.

  When I didn’t need the washcloth any more, she carried in a cup of tea and a plate of toast and jam. I ate it even though I wasn’t hungry; it was good to feel looked after.

  “Sing out if you need anything else,” Grandma said.

  Had my mother felt like this when she was sick and stuck in bed? Maybe, if I hadn’t been so angry, I could have brought her tea with toast and jam, too. She probably would have liked that. Grandma patted the end of my bed, then sat, carefully, on a corner of it.

  “Jackie’s gone back to America,” she said. “The States as she calls it. Apparently she couldn’t bear to be separated from her Justin any longer. They say she took Andrew with her. I’m surprised she could get his passport organised that quickly.”

  As soon as she left, I stumbled out of bed and into the jeans that hung over my wardrobe doorknob, feeling around for one of the T-shirts that my grandma liked to pick up and hide in a drawer. I had to know what was going on.

  * * *

  Rebecca opened the front door and stared at me for a moment before speaking. I held my breath. Was I about to be turned away as a bad influence, or, worse still, was she about to lecture me about drugs?

  But her eyes were clear and sad. “Madeleine.” She held her ground. “I suppose you want to talk about what happened yesterday?”

  Well, no. “I suppose we need to,” I said.

  Rebecca nodded, still blocking my entry. “I haven’t quite decided what to do about that. Things are a bit … confused at the moment. But I do think you should speak to your grandmother.”

  “Yeah … may I talk to Brigid, though? Now, I mean?”

  There was a long pause before Rebecca relented and moved aside. “I know it feels like drugs are everywhere these days, Madeleine,” she said as we walked down the hall. “But they’re still dangerous. I don’t want Brigid exposed to them, you understand?”

  I looked down at my feet — hopefully, this looked contrite — and nodded.

  “She’s in her room,” Rebecca said.

  Brigid looked up at me and grinned when I came through.

  “How are you?” I asked, feeling ridiculously formal.

  “All right.” She put down the book she’d been reading and slid over on her bed.

  There was nothing for it but to jump right in, so I held my breath and jumped.

  “I was wondering if Jackie and … um … Andrew … have gone yet?”

  Brigid smiled again. “Jackie’s gone, that’s all,” she said. “Andrew’s at swimming training.”

  “Ahhh,” I said. So where had he been last night? “He does a lot of that.”

  “What would that be?” asked Rebecca, at the door.

  “I just said Andrew’s at swimming practice,” Brigid replied.

  Rebecca came into the room and began folding a pile of clean T-shirts into one of Brigid’s drawers. She gave each of us a long look, as if weighing something up. “Andrew takes training very seriously,” she said. “Do you girls want to go for a swim?”

  Over glasses of orange juice in the kitchen, Brigid told m
e her mother was working on the Cameron Seymour case.

  “Everyone’s working on the Cameron Seymour case,” Rebecca chipped in.

  “How’s it going though, Mrs Coleman?” I hoped I sounded polite.

  Rebecca shrugged. “It’s very difficult.”

  My radio had already informed me about the few clues the forensic team had released. Although Cameron’s body had been found half-tossed from the river, as though the water didn’t want it any more, he hadn’t actually drowned.

  “How do they know whether he drowned or not?” I asked Rebecca.

  She looked at Brigid. “Forensics have a number of clues. I’m not sure how much of this you girls really want to hear.”

  “We want to hear everything!” Brigid said.

  “We’ll see it on TV anyway,” I added.

  Rebecca spoke slowly. “There was no water in his lungs.”

  Brigid stood, mouth half-open, fascinated. “So what killed him?” she asked.

  “He had lots of fractures,” Rebecca explained. “We think he fell somewhere. Or was pushed. He had a punctured lung. Do I really want to be telling you this, Madeleine? Brigid? Why are you so curious?”

  I shrugged and drained my glass. A key turned squeakily in the front door and heavy footsteps sounded in the hallway. Andrew.

  He walked through and saw us there. “Hello, Rebecca.” He gave her a small kiss on the cheek. Turning, his eyes didn’t quite make contact with mine. Then he reached for a glass and poured himself a drink.

  “Hi, Bridge, Maddy.”

  “We’ve been talking about Cameron Seymour,” Brigid said.

  “He didn’t drown after all. He fell,” I said.

  “Well, that’s what we think at the moment,” Rebecca clarified.

  Andrew raised an eyebrow in her direction. “Fell? Off what? The boat ramp?” He sounded dubious. “Why wouldn’t he just paddle out of the water?”

  Rebecca shook her head. “Not from the boat ramp,” she said. “Anyway, it isn’t as simple as that. There’ll be an official statement tonight so I might as well tell you now. The boy’s body was weighed down so that he’d sink.”

  It couldn’t be true. Yet it was. This unquestionably evil deed had happened right here, near our homes.

  “Meanwhile, Madeleine,” Rebecca said, “Brigid’s busy, so why don’t you and Andrew go for a walk? I’m sure you have something to talk about.” The look she gave Andrew was loaded with meaning.

  “Let’s take a bus into Indooroopilly and see a movie,” I suggested quickly.

  Andrew looked from Rebecca to me, his expression inscrutable. “Great.” He sounded far from excited and enthusiasm rushed from me like air from a punctured tyre.

  “Maddy, make sure to tell your grandmother first,” Rebecca admonished as we headed to the front door.

  “Yeah, okay,” I said. Sure.

  Andrew didn’t want to be with me. I had to do something about that, had to convince him I was a sophisticated, desirable woman. I didn’t have a clue how to go about this.

  Stepping from the veranda, I moved closer to him and asked quietly, “Has Rebecca said anything about catching us smoking?”

  Andrew felt around in his pocket, finally withdrawing a wallet. Scowling, he checked through its contents. “Only about a hundred times.”

  “I didn’t think she’d let us see each other again.”

  He looked down at me as we walked, eyebrows raised with surprise. “Are we seeing each other?”

  My cheeks burned red hot. Furious with myself, I had to look away.

  Andrew was thoughtful for a minute. “Rebecca wants me to talk to you,” he said eventually. “Wants to make sure you aren’t a bad influence on Brigid.”

  “Ah.”

  I kept my face averted, scavenging for a thought that wasn’t humiliating. “I was worried about you the other night,” I said at last.

  “Sorry about that. I had to help Jackie get to the airport and make her understand about me staying.”

  Relief. “You could have told me.”

  “Sorry. Look, it doesn’t really matter, does it?”

  We didn’t talk again until we were sitting on the bus, limbs deliciously in contact, and moving past the Seymour house.

  “Poor old Cameron, hey?” Andrew said. “I wonder how he died.”

  “Anything could’ve happened,” I said. “I once read about a woman who fell from the thirtieth storey of a hotel in America. She fell so hard she was almost ripped in half. And there was no one in the hotel who knew who she was, so at first the police thought she’d fallen out of a plane.”

  Andrew looked at me dubiously. “You read funny things.”

  “All they knew was she was dressed in black,” I ploughed on. “She was so injured they couldn’t even use her dental records for the ID.”

  “Well, all sorts of strange things happen over there,” he said.

  I grinned. It was comforting to think that the world’s weirdos had a natural home, even if we didn’t.

  He held my hand as we walked across the blue carpet into the cinema. While Kevin Bacon was Footloose and the police continued searching the riverbed, we went through all the usual teenager-on-a-date rituals. I wondered if he was going to put his arm around my shoulders and leant closer and closer, hoping he would. When there was no longer any room for him on the armrest, he finally conceded, yawning and stretching and leaving his arm at an awkward, uncomfortable, thrilling angle. Did he want to kiss me again? If so, he was too scared to try.

  Afterwards, we were two pairs of feet keeping company on the footpath beneath an umbrella. Rain fell suddenly, as if someone was pouring water through a heavenly sieve. I felt like half of a greeting-card couple. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if life could be frozen in a single moment, when things feel good and everything seems exactly right? I’d have to learn to paint these feelings, too.

  Then, suddenly, I was talking. Really telling him things: about my mother and how I felt after she died; how everything that had seemed important before she was sick — like being popular, and having things that the other kids had — stopped mattering for a long while afterwards. I told him that no matter how terrible everything seems when you’re first grieving, after a while you start to notice that life is going on, and more, that you can cope with it. I surprised myself. I didn’t realise I had these ideas until I heard myself express them.

  There was no one home when we got to the Colemans’ house. But folded in half on the kitchen bench was a note, with Andrew written on the outside. He read it aloud.

  I’m over with Madeleine’s grandmother. Can the two of you meet us over there please? — Mum.

  “What do you think they want?” I asked. Dread was injected into my bloodstream.

  Andrew was less worried. He wasn’t used to life turning into a catalogue of disasters.

  “Probably just visiting,” he said.

  I’d already dropped my bag beside one of the couches, and Andrew bent down to pick it up.

  “Do we really have to go straightaway?” I asked. What had I expected? That Andrew would ravish me in his room, on top of the scattered clothes and dog-eared textbooks?

  “I suppose.” Andrew looked away as if embarrassed to be caught doing what he was told.

  I shrugged and allowed him to lead me, no holding hands this time, back to my grandma’s.

  I glared at Rebecca. She wasn’t in her police uniform, but it was obvious she was here to uphold the law, even if I couldn’t understand why. I mean, hadn’t she agreed to our trip to the movies? So what had made her angry enough to dob us in?

  Meanwhile, Grandma was here to act as judge and jury. She gave me a disappointed look through eyes that were too much like my mother’s, and too teary.

  “Madeleine, I told you to let your grandmother know where you were going. You didn’t do that, did you?” Rebecca’s eyes flashed as she looked across at me.

  I shrugged. I hadn’t told Grandma, of course. But what was the big deal? I never w
anted to tell her where I went; it was too close to acknowledging that she had legitimate authority over me.

  “I went next door, looking for you,” my grandma said.

  Rebecca reached for her coffee, one of the adult drugs of choice. “Madeleine, it sounds like there’s a communication problem here. You have some things to talk about.”

  Andrew was silent, hands shoved in his pockets. I was isolated from them all, as if they were puppets and I alone possessed genuine feelings. “It sounds like you’ve told her already,” I said resentfully.

  “I’m here as a mother, not as a police officer,” Rebecca told me. “You’re a friend of both my children, Madeleine. I want to help. If you can talk to your grandmother while I’m here, I can help her understand the pressures teenagers face these days.”

  “You thought you could make things easier for me?” I demanded. Trapped and wanting to get over this quickly, I turned to my grandma. “I smoked pot. Someone gave it to me at school and I shared it with Andrew. It was just once.”

  Rebecca looked at me, and then, for a longer time, at Andrew.

  Grandma looked faint. “Smoked pot? Just once? I certainly hope it was just once.”

  Rebecca moved a chair towards her. “For your sake, Andrew, I hope so, too,” she said. “Apart from how unhealthy drugs are, they’ll be testing for cannabis at swimming meets, you know. Are you trying to sabotage your career?”

  Andrew looked fear-struck, as if this had never occurred to him before.

  “We’ll talk about this some more at home,” Rebecca continued. She stood and signalled to him that they should both leave.

  Meanwhile, my grandma looked at me and shook her head. “I’ll have to speak to your father about this.”

  I snorted. “What difference will that make?”

  My grandma stood and went back to the sleep-out, and a few moments later I heard the television being turned on and the sound of channels being switched.

  “Mum doesn’t hate you, you know. It was your grandmother who went to speak to her first.”

  Brigid was standing up for them. I turned my back, wishing she’d just go away. But we were waiting at the bus stop, and there was nowhere for her to go.