I have kept some secrets too well. I have an illness. I am afraid the doctor is not being completely forthcoming about my prognosis. I have a marriage that has failed and a guilty awareness that I shouldn’t feel so devastated, that I’m a modern woman in a modern world, that I shouldn’t put so much store in the affections of a man. I should be able to get by on my own, to imagine a future without him.
Secrets. I can’t let my dependency show. I have a lifetime of memories and guilt that I don’t know what to do with. The sound of them rattles through my conscience like pebbles on a tin roof.
“His name’s about to be announced anyway,” I say to Ken. I can tell from the mild expression in his eyes that he doesn’t really mind.
“You need some caffeine?” he says. “It’s almost time for us to go back.”
Over coffee he wants to talk about profiling. “Do you really need to know this?” I ask. “Don’t you just need to prove that he did it?”
“Juries like to know about motivation. The prosecution will have you involved. We just like to find out what direction it’s going.”
“Either way I’m pretty sure he’s headed for jail.”
“It’ll be pretty tough for him inside, I can tell you. Bastard should have thought about that before he started killing kids. Say, do you reckon he thought of that?”
“Of what?”
“About what would happen to him if he was caught?”
I shake my head. “I don’t think that crossed his mind for a moment. But he wouldn’t have stopped, even if it had.”
Overhead, the clock ticks to 2 pm. I’m on my way to tell the Brisbane Boy-Killer about the stones. Then I might just go outside and howl until the powers that be decide that I’m insane too.
Grandma had my mother’s photograph and her childhood toys. Somewhere, kept for me, was my mother’s wedding ring. Grandma remembered my mother at fifteen; I remembered her at thirty. Once I said to Grandma, “You’re not remembering my mother! You’re thinking of someone who never existed!” But now I realise that the childhood Joanne is the only one who ever really existed for her mother. And fourteen-year-old me exists within my own mind as vividly as thirty-year-old me. Over the years, I’ve regarded that summer in a similar way to an unfinished painting. I return to it again and again, but with each age I pass, the brush strokes I make change it so much it might be a different piece of art. I have these images to remember myself by, as my grandma and I had the relics of my mother’s life.
Can all these people really be me? They are me and more: they are me at fourteen; in the same place — Brisbane; and in the same mental state — grief. But they are also me as seen through the various filters I applied at twenty, at twenty-five, at thirty. Sometimes, I imagine I’m more careful now. I know how to control my temper, or at least how not to let it show. I find it harder to make judgments about people, too. I’ll never treat another person as we treated Kevin Mathers. Meanwhile, there are all the judgments I make about myself …
I was on television, part of the story that first brought Andrew to national prominence. Perhaps under ordinary circumstances he would have been regarded as just another teen runaway. But Andrew lived on Cameron Seymour’s street. Once that was known, his face began to plaster newsstands and feature as the lead image on the TV news. My grandma called me to the sleep-out with an excited squeal, so that I could see myself leaving the Colemans’. I looked serious in my school uniform, my hair inadequately hiding my face. Somehow they had found out who I was, too.
Madeline Geoffreys. They’d misspelled my name in a white caption. Victim’s girlfriend.
Victim? I gasped and looked at my grandma. Had something happened that I hadn’t heard?
“What was that about?” I demanded urgently. The reporter murmured something about kidnapping that I didn’t quite catch.
My grandma gave me a weird look, as if something was wrong with me. “Poor Rebecca, first Daniel and now this.”
“Kidnapped?” I asked. “Do they know that for sure?”
“It happened days ago. Are you feeling all right, Maddy? You aren’t … doing drugs again, are you?”
I suppose it was a legitimate question. At the time, it made me mad. While Grandma flicked through the channels to find other news programs, I stayed silent.
“All I have to say is no comment,” a frustrated Rebecca insisted on two of the networks. Another just showed a still photograph of her face, looking anguished. They say a picture tells a thousand words. I doubted I could ever paint as many words as seemed to shout from Rebecca’s eyes.
Go chase down cancer or something, I wanted to tell the reporters. That’s a killer.
When I stood at the back window and looked out to the yard and the river beyond, rain drizzled over the city like feathers from a shaken, moth-eaten quilt. And when I went outside, the rain clung to my skin, bringing out a humid rash. The city itself was sick. Members of its press corps sat in our street, while mothers suffered just a closed door away, and children were plucked off the streets as if lifted up by the wind and wafted away.
I scratched at my arm, feeling somehow the cause of it all. Had I somehow brought the contagion of a larger city when I arrived? I’d known I carried something awful, but usually thought it was just the suspicion that my mother’s cancer might be hereditary, that I might die from it myself. But it was Andrew who had vanished. Andrew, the image of health and strength. The irony of it was almost unbearable.
Just below stood the shed — and the spot where we’d sat together, just a couple of days ago. The shed was old and rusty, and had been there since my grandfather’s day. Its roof looked as though it was likely to fall in or to be blown off; grass grew against the door so that it looked almost impossible to open.
I leaned my head against the window and gazed down, deep in thought. There was the door, and I had opened it, however impossible it looked. Inside, I had stashed my little bags of dope and cigarettes. The impossibility of that door seemed strange now, as if it should mean something to me. It was such a logical place for Andrew to hide. I should have gone there straight away.
The wind blew up as I crossed the lawn. I was cold, the rain blowing against my chest and into my face. Opening the shed door seemed even harder than it had been before. It was late summer in a wet year, and grass grew quickly and thickly. Perhaps I’d have to cut some of it away.
Abruptly, the door gave way and, feeling a bit like an amateur detective on TV, I stepped through. It was a kind of intuition, I suppose, that made me look for something there. What would I find? Some sort of note perhaps? A tell-tale rearrangement of the junk?
Of course I should have known better. There was no note, no shuffling of my grandfather’s old tools. The antique lawnmower, the various spades and trowels, everything was just as I had seen it last time.
Even the slight disturbance to the dust in one of the far corners was something I could remember making when I last came here, the day before Andrew Coleman disappeared.
Everything in my life fell into that breakdown of time. Before Andrew disappeared became a definite chapter of my life, as had the period before I met him, and the period before my mother died.
Other people, I imagined, had lives that moved from one act to the next, relatively smoothly, fluidly. Nothing lasted for me, especially happiness.
Happiness. I wanted some of that to last longer than half an hour. It wasn’t fair. Something here in the shed had to be different, there had to be some sort of clue, something to let me know where he was and why. And why he wasn’t here.
But the lawnmower, the gardening implements, the tool boxes were stubbornly silent. I didn’t know whether to fly at them in a rage or throw myself down and howl the frustrated tears that had built up and burnt my eyes for days and weeks. Months, perhaps.
For a moment, I thought I was going to cry about my mother as well. But I didn’t. In fact, as soon as I thought of my mother, the desire to cry vanished. I was angry. Furious. I kicked at the l
awnmower in my passion and rage. But it just moved on the dusty ground with the annoying shuffle of its weight. I kicked it again, harder. And a third time, so hard my foot hurt. I felt the pain as an insult, as if these things were attacking me. Then I went really crazy with it, lunging at the mower and at the toolboxes, lifting old rusty metal things up into the air with tremendous heaves, feeling that I had the power of Hercules or some American wrestler.
I wasn’t looking for clues any more. I knew there was nothing here for me. I just wanted to destroy, because there was nothing for me anywhere. I wanted to destroy everything.
By the time I finished, there were old tools scattered everywhere. There was a pile of wooden pieces in one corner, where an ancient box had fallen to pieces under the force of my rage. The lawnmower lay helplessly like an upturned bug. Dust had fallen from the roof into my hair as the rain had fallen outside, turning to mud. Streaks flowed down my cheeks. I must have looked like some sort of witch.
Then there was a little voice at the door.
“Hello?”
I turned, my hands forming fists, aching for something else to hit. It was Brigid, looking as wet as me, if cleaner.
“Brigid! I didn’t know you —”
She came towards me, her hands held out, despite the falling dust. “I was outside —”
“In the rain?”
Brigid nodded. “This was one of the last places I saw Andrew.”
I hugged her then, stepping towards her before I was even aware of it. The dust still fell, she was as dirty as me now. But we were proper friends again. Or maybe we were proper friends for the first time.
Brigid started coming to my grandma’s house in the afternoon, mostly to get away from the mini-skirted, baby-sitting Sylvia who arrived each day with her bag and manicure set and a pile of magazines. Sylvia sat in the Colemans’ lounge room and fussed about her face and nails, listening to music and spending hours on the phone. No one rang to talk to Brigid any more. They could never get through. Sylvia was always speaking to her fiance, or her mother, or her future bridesmaids, planning her wedding.
“I can’t stand her,” was the first thing Brigid would say, as she rounded the bend in our self-made path, crossing towards our river spot. I would shuffle aside to make room for her, not needing to ask who she meant.
We’d sit or lie there in the shade of the shed and the vine-strangled trees, talking about Andrew, about how much he meant to us, about the places he could be.
I took my sketchbook and sometimes some oil pastels and pencils, and Brigid watched as I sketched and coloured, and sometimes she tried some artwork of her own. Beneath the cheery clear sky, the muddy brown river had become dangerous because Cameron’s body had floated in it. The world had become a different place. We didn’t dare speculate that Andrew might be found there as well.
Around us, the sun shone again and the world stayed green. Plants grew lush and thick even though Andrew’s absence cut through our days like a chainsaw. We were left raw and exposed by it. Wherever we went, including places he’d never been, we felt his absence. Even a perfect day was a sad thing to us, as if Andrew had somehow been sacrificed for the sunny sky and the warm breezes. I began to work on my Riverside Phantasy, and Mrs White seemed impressed and pleased, and I was a little bit ashamed because art still mattered even though people suffered so much.
“Sometimes,” Mrs White told me, “that’s when art matters most.”
I looked at her and still wasn’t sure. But I also wasn’t sure when she told me I needed to stop complaining about my grandma and start talking to her instead.
“It’s not as easy as that,” I said.
Mrs White leaned forward with a brush, and made a little dabbing mark to show me a new way of blending shadow into a dark background. “Wait for the right time, Maddy. When it comes, it might be easier than you think.”
I didn’t think the right time would ever come.
Sometimes I walked home with Brigid and we crept into the room where Sylvia sat doing her nails or chatting on the phone. Brigid and I left her there and moved from riverside to school with the restless momentum of a swinging pendulum. We didn’t know how we did things or why. We desperately wanted to do something to help find Andrew, and were frustrated with our inability to think of anything.
There’s nothing we can do, we would tell each other in the bleak afternoons, as we trudged across the road from the bus stop, our schoolbags growing heavier with each passing day, as if we carried our hearts in them.
The crowd of journalists outside the Colemans’ house thinned as days passed with no body discovered, and no more missing boys. Interest moved on to new stories, new mysteries. An election was called; disappearing children seemed less important.
Sometimes in the mornings, Brigid and I got together and fantasised about how we might act if the investigation were up to us, and not the adults.
“I can’t understand it,” I said. “I asked them about Kevin Mathers. They must know where all the weirdos are. Why can’t the police just arrest him and demand some answers?”
“They have all these rules,” said Brigid, who seemed to think she was an expert about her mother’s work. “They hardly ever arrest anyone unless they know he’s done something. They can’t actually force anyone to talk.”
I sneered. “What’s the point of that? If I had a gun, I’d know how to force the truth out of him.”
“Oh yeah? How?”
“I’d shoot him, if I had to.”
“No you wouldn’t. And if you did you’d be out of the police straight away. They’d sack you.”
“I’d get out of it somehow. Anyway, I’d have learned something!”
“Only if he knows something.”
“He does. He has to. Everyone knows that murderers read pornographic magazines.”
Brigid nodded. “I think I saw something like that on television,” she said.
We had seen Kevin Mathers’ store of porn, and the articles he’d collected about Andrew. He was our man. There must be evidence around his house somewhere.
“If the police could learn anything, then Mum would.” Brigid’s trust was frustrating. But I’d never had such a close friendship, never had so much in common with another person as I did with her. We were powerless and grieving. And no one seemed to think there was anything suitable for us to do but cross our ankles beneath our skirts and wait while Andrew was found and we got over our parents’ deaths. They couldn’t be right. There had to be something we could do! As time went on and no other suspect had been named, it had seemed more and more obvious to us that Kevin Mathers must be the culprit.
In the end, we did the only thing we could imagine. We decided to get some evidence against Kevin Mathers for ourselves.
Planning wasn’t even hard work. We walked past Kevin Mathers’ house at least twice a day on our way to and from the bus stop. And watching to see if there was truth to the rumour that his house was haunted had taught us some of his habits. We knew that he hardly ever went outdoors, except to go shopping, or for a little walk that he took now and then, down a path at the back of his yard towards the river.
“That’s strange,” I said. “What do you think he does down there?”
Brigid shrugged, uninterested in this line of enquiry. “Lots of people enjoy walking along the river. Like you.”
I grinned. “That’s just what I mean. I go there to do things I want kept secret.”
“That mightn’t mean anything. Adults don’t have to obey rules like us and keep it secret when they disobey them.”
“Except there are still some things they can’t do, and some things they might want to hide …”
Andrew had been missing for a week by then. Brigid closed her eyes. She didn’t want to think about things that adults shouldn’t do and might want to hide. It was easier just to go along with me.
That afternoon, we followed the river path to Kevin Mathers’ property and played around noisily for a while, hoping he’d co
me out if he was there, and tell us to be quiet or bugger off, the way any normal adult would. We scuttled around, tearing strips off the paperbarks and throwing them towards the river, screaming the words to skipping-rope rhymes we both knew from primary school, aiming rocks high into the trees to make the birds squawk and flee. Kevin Mathers made no protest.
“He must be inside,” I said.
“And deaf.” Brigid bit the skin on the side of her thumb. “So, we’re safe. What do we do now?”
I shrugged. “I suppose we start looking.”
“Well, yeah. Any idea what we’re looking for?”
“Something incriminating.”
Brigid shrugged and rolled up her sleeves. We’d walked down to the part of the riverside area where scrubland gives way to long, wheat-like grasses. She started pulling some of the reedy grasses to the side.
“Most of these houses have paths down to the river,” she said. “Dad said some of them are hidden because the council complained about boats being moored on public land.”
“But this isn’t public land. Kevin Mathers lives here.”
“He doesn’t own the land right beside the river. No one does. Your grandma’s land stops before the water too. It’s some sort of council rule. It’s officially parkland.”
I looked around. Kevin Mathers was obviously hiding something here. A boat was as sensible a thing to look for as anything else. “Let’s go closer to the water.”
Brigid glanced down at her neat sneakers, pristine white laces tied into perfectly symmetrical bows, and then at the muddy ground near the water. “Maybe you can look down there?” she suggested.
I was already on my way towards the mangroves that grew in the tidal flats. Once the grasses ended, the mud was thick and slippery and made pulling, squelching, sucking noises with each step I took, as if it wanted to hold me back. When I turned back, I saw that Brigid was right. There was a concrete path hidden by the long grasses, so broken and old that some of the concrete was turning back into powder. It ran almost to the waterline. This was the way we’d seen Kevin Mathers come.
The Kingdom Where Nobody Dies Page 17