The Kingdom Where Nobody Dies

by Kimberley Starr

  “Is anything there?” Brigid’s voice was a harsh whisper.

  I pretended I couldn’t hear and kept on walking, glancing back to see my footprints become wetter and wetter. By the time I reached the first of the mangroves, my socks were in danger of being soaked by my next step. It was only luck that had brought us here at low tide, I realised. At any other time of day we wouldn’t have been able to get this close.

  To my right I saw the remains of a disused dock. It was a long time since anyone had moored a boat here. Now, there was only one upright post amidst a heap of what looked like algae-covered driftwood.

  “Maddy!” Brigid yelled, suddenly running after me. “Careful! He’s coming out!”

  I moved sideways, seeking cover. There was the sound of a door slamming and then the clanging, dragging shriek of an old garage door being opened. Brigid sloshed towards me and we turned in the direction of the house and the noises.

  “I thought he already went out,” she said.

  There was the sound of an engine turning over.

  “But he never goes anywhere,” I said. “Hey, Bridge! Look over there!”

  As Kevin Mathers’ car belched and accelerated from the garage, I held out an excited finger in the direction of a shape I’d just made out a few metres away. Kevin Mathers’ secret. Hidden away, dragged into the sea grasses and moored to one of the mangroves was a dilapidated, corroded speedboat.

  Brigid grabbed my arm. “Do you think that’s his?” she demanded. “Do you think he has a licence for it? Do you think it’s registered?”

  Those were just the sorts of things she would wonder about. “Who cares about that?” I demanded, splashing closer. Water washed right over the top of my runners now, the air fouled with sulphurous gas from the ground I disturbed. Around my ankles, sea grasses waved like dark green hair.

  I didn’t know much about boats but it didn’t require expert eyes to see that only the motor, a small protuberance on the rear end of the vessel, had been recently cleaned. This old wreck was sometimes used.

  “Where do you think a man would go in a boat like this?” Brigid asked, reaching out to steady herself on its side edge.

  “Not far, that’s for sure. Do you think the police know about this?”

  “They must. They’ve had search parties here ever since Cameron Seymour disappeared.”

  “It wouldn’t do any harm for us to look, too.”

  I began moving around the boat, slipping my hand into the water and feeling beneath the sides. They were slimy and slick, but nothing was hidden there.

  “Yuck,” said Brigid, shifting her ruined shoes around in the mud. “You know, we’re really going to smell when we get home.”

  There was nothing beneath the boat, so I shifted my attention to its interior. Stained and slightly cracked, there were a couple of abandoned, twisted fishing hooks scattered at the base, along with mouldy lumps of something that might once have been bread. The only seat was a single bench with a broad break down the middle, superficially mended with strips of shiny black tape. Stashed behind it was a red tartan blanket. I waded into deeper water (the tide must have been coming in) and reached for it, gingerly.

  “Careful!” Brigid said again. “There might be spiders.”

  “There might be something here that can tell us where Andrew is!” I reminded her.

  She looked down at her feet. My own were completely out of sight, now, in knee-depth water. I didn’t want to think about what else might be down there in the brackish depths. Instead, I concentrated on the blanket, raising one edge of it and peering beneath.

  What I saw there made me forget the bad river smell and all the discomfort of being wet. Even Brigid’s annoying warnings left my mind.

  Hidden beneath the blanket, nestled against the bottom of the boat at one end, was a crumpled baseball-style hat. It was too new, too youthful to have ever been worn by Kevin Mathers. When I pulled it out, a flash of white attached to the inside brim caught my eye. It was an embroidered label, the sort that mothers buy to identify their children’s things at school. My mother used to buy labels like this, with Maddy written on them. But the name on the hat was what startled me, even though the hope of finding something like this was exactly what had brought us here.

  The name was Cameron Seymour.

  When I showed Brigid what I’d found, she went berserk, just like me in the shed. Clutching the cap in her hands, she pored over every detail of it as if there was a chance her brother could be somehow hidden there himself. Then her face went white, and she splashed through the water towards the house without a care for shoes or slipping.

  “Andrew! Andrew! Where are you, Andrew?” she screamed over and over again, as loud as she could possibly yell. She threw her voice around like an entertainer without a microphone.

  “Andrew! Andrew! Where are you?”

  I ran behind her, trying to make her stop. She was mad. You have to stop people behaving like that. She raced through Kevin Mathers’ yard and up the steps towards the kitchen door, like she was driven by some inner engine. The door handle rattled in her hand and she yelled again. I approached with the dim impression of picnickers in the nearby park, their faces turned to us in open-mouthed expressions of shock and distaste. They didn’t come to help. They probably thought we were just children misbehaving.

  “Andrew! Andrew!” Brigid yelled again. “Where are you?”

  “Brigid!” I called after her. “Brigid!” When I finally caught her, I grabbed her by the shoulder and shook her until she stopped.

  “Brigid!” I said. “We can’t get inside. Andrew might not be there anyway. Let’s get away before Kevin Mathers comes home. Let’s tell Rebecca what we found. She’ll know what to do.”

  Brigid looked at me through wild eyes. Their fire seemed gradually to diminish. With one hand she kept pounding on the door, but that noise slowed down, becoming less frantic and softer as she realised this panic was achieving nothing.

  We ran back to the Colemans’, Brigid ignoring the squeaking slurp of her shoes against the footpath. My feet were soaked and my jeans flapped wetly against my ankles, but I ignored that too. I had Cameron’s cap clasped tightly in my hand. We might be just kids, we might be wet right through, we might stink of river mud and excited sweat, but we had discovered something that would make a difference. Something the adults had apparently missed. And we were on our way to prove it.

  “She’ll be busy,” Brigid predicted, panting, as we reached her porch. “But boy! Will she want to hear this! Mum!” she called as soon as we pushed through the door.

  Rebecca turned from writing at the kitchen table to look up at us. The movement, compared to our frantic rush, looked like slow motion. The new uniform she wore was creased from her day’s work. Her mouth opened slowly into a thoughtful O.

  “Girls,” she said, her tone measured and deep. I was so excited I could feel vomit rising in the back of my throat.

  “Mum, we’ve just been to Kevin Mathers’ boat,” Brigid said. “Before you say anything —”

  Suddenly I realised how Brigid knew her mother much better than me. She had jumped in while Rebecca’s eyebrows were just beginning their slow slide into furrows of disapproval.

  “— we know that he killed Cameron!”

  The eyebrows halted in their slow descent and leapt wildly towards Rebecca’s hairline. “You’ve been where?” she demanded. “You know what?”

  “We’ve been to Kevin Mathers’ place,” Brigid said. “Mum, he has a boat hidden down in the mangroves. And we found Cameron Seymour’s cap!”

  Rebecca looked down at the table for a long moment before speaking, as if she was searching for something there. I was baffled. If Kevin Mathers had killed Cameron, then he must have Andrew too, I thought. Why was Rebecca behaving like this? This was her first clue towards discovering where her stepson was.

  But Rebecca didn’t look excited by what we had done, or impressed by our bravery and skill. Instead, she looked alarmed, even d
isappointed. And way too thoughtful to satisfy me.

  “Cameron’s cap,” she said slowly, as if she was chewing the words instead of speaking them. “You found it, did you?”

  Brigid, obviously disappointed by Rebecca’s reaction, nodded, unblinking. I don’t know if she could read her mother’s mind, or if she was just smarter than me, because she seemed to figure out the meaning of Rebecca’s silence pretty quickly.

  “You already knew, didn’t you?” she asked, in a small voice.

  Rebecca nodded slowly. It was embarrassing and infuriating at the same time. All right, so she was his stepmother, so she was in the police. I was in love with Andrew. I had the right to be informed, too.

  “You already knew?” I felt anger cut across my face like a scalpel. “You knew it was there?”

  Rebecca looked at me, frowning. Then she looked at Brigid. “Was it Madeleine’s idea to go over there?”

  This time someone did stand up for me. “No,” Brigid said, firmly. “I thought we had to so something about Andrew. Mum, if you knew the cap was there, why hasn’t Kevin Mathers been arrested yet?”

  For a moment Rebecca was silent again, her expression thoughtful. I looked around, feeling disorientated. The corner television set was tuned into the weather report. Thirty-two degrees tomorrow, and sunny. Who cared how many degrees it was or whether it was sunny? Where was Andrew? That was all we needed to know.

  “Girls,” Rebecca said at last, “I know you’ve been as upset by this as me — but this is my work, even if I’m not officially on this case. There are some things I just can’t discuss with you. But I’ll tell you this much — the police thought it best to leave the cap where it was, in order not to alert Kevin Mathers that he was of interest to them.”

  It was infuriating. “Don’t you want to know where Andrew is?” I shouted, exasperated.

  But Rebecca and Brigid both looked at me and frowned, and I realised I was suddenly up against the united front of mother and daughter. Even if Brigid found the situation as frustrating as I did, she wasn’t going to think badly of her mother. She didn’t know how deceiving mothers could be.

  My anger faltered there, as I looked at the two of them. When my mother first had cancer, she’d promised she wouldn’t die. But she had. Now I looked at Rebecca and Brigid, and remembered how it had been with my own mother. We had been a united front, too, most of the time. She had loved me. Time was passing. I suppose I was learning to forgive her for breaking her promise, for dying. Instead, I was angry at these two, because they were reasonable about losing Andrew. How could they act like this?

  “Of course we do, Madeleine,” Rebecca said, calmly, slowly.

  I glared at her.

  “Look, girls, I promise I’ll tell you what’s going on, as soon as I can. Okay, Madeleine?” Rebecca gave me a look that tried to make me smile, but I refused.

  Just then a familiar face floated across the television screen in close-up. Andrew. The three of us turned to listen. His disappearance was being covered by one of the current affairs programs.

  Rebecca’s face whitened in the glare of the television. As she moved closer, the interviewee for the program gradually came into focus.

  I blinked a few times; my eyelids should have wiped the mirage away. It was bizarre. To represent Andrew’s family and friends on the program, the television reporter had recruited Sylvia Short-skirts, one-time office assistant, now baby-sitter.

  Viewed seated against the dark blue backdrop of the studio set, it was impossible to tell how short her skirt was. But there was no mistaking either the girl or her attitude. Sylvia had obviously taken great care with her appearance, as if she thought this might be her big break. Her face was perfectly made up, her nails perfectly manicured. She tapped them against her chin, waiting to speak. Her silver necklace shone. Under the studio lights she almost looked pretty.

  The interviewer, a man in a suit and his thirties, introduced as Brian Stretton, was fiddling with his folder when the camera first focused on them. Sylvia smiled a Princess Diana smile, looking up shyly, and gave him the most earnest attention she could summon.

  “Now, Sylvia,” said Brian Stretton. “I believe you know Andrew Coleman, know the whole Coleman family, quite well?”

  Sylvia cleared her throat and swung her earnest gaze in the interviewer’s direction. “I used to work for Andrew’s father, Daniel Coleman,” she told him and the rest of Australia. “That was how I first met the family. I got to know Andrew a lot better afterwards, in my job looking after his little sister.”

  She looked at the camera again, and through it, straight at us. Brigid, like Rebecca, was staring at the small screen, her pupils small squares reflecting the television set. Her mouth was a small, surprised circle.

  “So, how is the family coping with this tragic situation?” The reporter emphasised his sympathy with a tilted head.

  “Oh, very badly, Brian.” Sylvia’s voice was low and serious. “Very, very badly. It has been a terrible year for them, with the death of Andrew’s father, and now this.”

  “It must have been very bad for everyone. You, for example.”

  Sylvia agreed with a silent, saddened nod.

  “I think our viewers will be interested in your friendship with Andrew Coleman and the theory you’ve developed about why he disappeared. Especially since no one has been successful in locating him yet.” Brian Stretton raised his pen thoughtfully and looked at the camera with an anxious expression as it panned in his direction.

  Sylvia coughed. “Andrew was a very disturbed boy,” she said. “Everyone knows that he was a swimmer with a big future. But these expectations were very hard on him. He had to train twice every day, both before and after school; he had no time for a social life or a girlfriend. He was completely burnt out from all the training he was pushed to do by his stepmother. He found it especially hard after his father’s death. I believe —”

  Her eyes opened wider, and she was even more earnest, which a moment ago, I would have thought impossible. “I believe that he’s had some sort of breakdown, that right now he may be out there, in trouble somewhere, needing help. And I’ve come on your show tonight to ask, if anyone knows where he is, if anyone who’s seen his photograph thinks they’ve seen someone who looks just a little bit like that, can they please come forward, for his mother’s sake?”

  “I can’t stand this.” Rebecca raised the remote control, hitting the off button. The television screen fizzled into silence.

  “He had a girlfriend. That was me,” I said quietly.

  Rebecca looked at me and smiled slightly. “We know,” she said. “And in every way that matters, I was his mother. I still am.”

  If I’d still been as angry about everything as I’d been a month or so earlier, I would have caught a bus to the real estate agency the next day and punched Sylvia right in the mouth. But things had changed. I knew anger wouldn’t solve anything. It seemed best to pretend Sylvia didn’t exist at all. And at least Rebecca stopped asking her to baby-sit.

  It seemed impossible to believe that a short time ago it had been Andrew sitting here, his arm around me. The afternoon following Sylvia’s small-screen debut, Brigid and I sat by the river and I tried to teach her how to draw trees, how to wash in the sky and puffs of white cloud. My painting Riverside Phantasy was quite developed now, in oils on a large white canvas that I left in Mrs White’s classroom. But I still needed to draw the river. These days, I was concentrating on the speedboats and wave riders that populated it, using oil pastels in violent dabs of bright red and yellow, a brilliant, vivid contrast to the shadowy river’s edge, where the twisted roots of mangroves hinted at the water’s dark secrets. I tried to sketch people, too, but that was getting harder all the time. My mental picture of Andrew was growing fuzzy around the edges, as if being slowly erased by the events that had followed his disappearance.

  Despite Rebecca’s injunction, we spoke of Kevin Mathers all the time, and wondered why the police weren’t acting on
the cap we had found. They should have taken him down to the station, arrested him for Cameron Seymour’s death, demanded to know what had become of Andrew.

  “It must be because they don’t have enough evidence,” I said. “There isn’t any other reason. He lives so close by, he’s weird, he’s a loner … they have all these clues that it’s Kevin, but the cap itself isn’t enough proof. That must be it.”

  Brigid gazed towards the brown river, its murky swell mirrored in the expressions that flowed over her face. She didn’t have anything to say.

  I was beginning to get another idea. “Brigid” — I leant sideways, excited — “there’s something else we can do. We have to go back to Kevin Mathers’ house.”

  Brigid frowned. I suppose she was remembering what Rebecca had said.

  “We have to take something of Andrew’s,” I continued. “The police will be able to arrest Kevin Mathers if they find something of Andrew’s there too.”

  Brigid frowned more deeply, but eventually agreed that, yes, we did have to do something. And she had no better plan.

  “It’ll be much easier now — we’ve done it before without being caught,” I told her. “We can get in as easy as anything. This time we’ll look around, but the main thing is to leave something. It’ll be easy.”

  Brigid didn’t look entirely convinced.

  My grandma wanted to talk. That afternoon, the awareness of her waiting drifted down the hallway towards the front door.

  “Come in, come in, Maddy.” She waved around a piece of paper that seemed to be a letter. “This is from your father. Let me tell you what it says.”

  She coughed and looked down as if she was about to start reading, then she coughed again, looking up. I could see her deciding to paraphrase instead.

  “Your father used to come and visit your mother here when they were courting, you know. He writes to you. When they name our street in the paper, he recognises it.”