Burnt Snow

by Van Badham

  With half a glance, I saw that what shouldn’t be possible, was. The red light changed to green. The battery bars on the screen display built from one, to two, to three. I pulled my head and hand away from the wall light and was stung by an electric shock. The light flickered in the room, and some force seemed to fall downwards from the soles of my feet.

  But the battery on the camera stayed full.

  In the corner of the control panel, I found a button with the icon of a trash can. With the controls of its menu, I worked out how to erase everything on the video from my entrance onwards. Once I was certain I’d managed it, I switched off the camera and dropped it into my handbag. I felt cold relief as I walked from the bathroom into the corridor.

  Lucy stood ahead of me, with two uniformed police officers and the doctor from the unit. I tried to raise my hand to wave at Lucy, but my arm felt incredibly heavy. This sensation spread into the rest of my body and I had only seconds to comprehend the alarm that registered on Lucy’s face before I lurched forward and tumbled to the ground.

  30

  When I came to, I was sitting up in a bed, under a very thin blanket. An anatomical poster was on the wall. They’d put me in a hospital bed.

  I realised I was in a room with Lucy and the two police officers.

  One officer was male, tall, with a blank face and small eyes; the other was a female officer whose chunky weapons belt made her look stocky and dangerous. Lucy, I saw, now had no makeup left around her eyes at all. A nurse stood behind the three of them.

  ‘Bit of a big night for ya?’ asked the male cop with forced gentleness.

  ‘How’s that head?’ asked the nurse.

  ‘Fine,’ I said, though my limbs were weak and my brain was foggy. ‘I just feel so tired.’

  ‘Stress reaction,’ concluded the nurse. ‘Poor little thing.’

  ‘Sophie, do you want to tell us what happened to your friend now?’ The male cop produced a notepad. ‘We’d like to get a statement as close as possible to the event.’

  As I retold my fabricated story for the third time, I tried to fight off the awareness that I was actually lying to police.

  ‘Did you see anyone else at the scene? Anyone coming or going?’ asked the woman cop.

  I shook my head, rubbing my fingers into the sheet of the bed. ‘Are you looking for the guy who beat them up?’

  ‘We’re trying to establish if a third party was involved in what happened to your friend,’ said the woman with a cold smile. ‘We’d like to establish just exactly how and why the men were hurt.’

  ‘I gave them the camera,’ Lucy said. ‘I didn’t think you’d mind if I took it out of your bag.’

  ‘Why’d you take it from the scene?’ asked the male cop.

  His question was delivered so casually it made me suspicious. I answered slowly and clearly for Lucy’s benefit. ‘I didn’t want to leave it lying around. Lauren had no top on. I guessed … that there might be things on the camera she wouldn’t want anyone to see.’ I forced my face to look as innocent as possible. ‘Did I do the right thing? I only held it by the handle because I didn’t want to mess up any fingerprints.’

  A professional smile from the male cop. ‘Lauren doesn’t get her top off for just anyone then?’

  Lucy was fierce: ‘Not for anyone, at all, ever.’

  ‘She’s just not like that,’ I said, aware he was trying to provoke me, but not knowing why. ‘That’s why Lucy and I were so worried when she went missing.’

  ‘Had you seen her with the men before you found her?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘We last saw her with Brad Piers,’ said Lucy. ‘I gave you his number.’

  ‘Why weren’t you with her, Sophie?’ asked the woman cop.

  ‘I was talking to one of the entertainers,’ I said. ‘Only for a minute. Then I lost her in the crowd.’

  ‘And what was his name?’ asked the female cop.

  I shrugged my shoulders. ‘I don’t know. He seemed nice, though.’

  The male cop wrote something in his book. As he did, the female cop stood up. At her neck, I saw a glint of gold. While she looked at Lucy for a moment, my vision sharpened. On a gold chain at her neck was a circular charm. Inside the circle was a triangle. In the triangle, there was an eye.

  I heard Ashley Ventwood’s wrist snap under a stamped foot.

  Lucy’s eyes followed mine to the female cop’s neck. ‘I like your charm,’ she said.

  The female cop gave her first genuine smile of the interview. ‘It’s my grandmother’s lucky charm,’ she said, turning to me. ‘With this job, you need all the protection you can get.’

  The room was quiet.

  ‘Where are the … men?’ I asked, listening to the male cop’s pen scratch into his notepad.

  ‘They’re under police supervision,’ said the female cop.

  ‘At the police station?’

  ‘They’re receiving medical care,’ she said, smiling again. ‘It must have been disturbing to see them all messed up like that. We appreciate you giving us a statement when you’re not well yourself,’ she said. ‘We’ll need to take all your details, of course, in case of a further investigation.’

  ‘In case Lauren presses charges?’ asked Lucy.

  ‘Or in case one of the men dies,’ said the male police officer, flipping his notepad shut.

  31

  Lauren, Lucy told me, was still hooked up to the respirator. As Lucy was going to the main hospital reception area to wait for her mother to arrive, I took up the nurse’s offer to stay in the hospital bed for a while. As Lucy and the nurse left the room, and the bright light was flicked off, I turned over on my side and buried my face in the soft hospital pillow, shrugging into the thin blanket, holding my pendant against my chest.

  Yes, my brain was foggy, but it wasn’t as foggy as it had been for, say, the past sixteen years of my life. The crippling tiredness I felt wasn’t because I’d had an insane night, or weekend, or fortnight since I’d arrived in Yarrindi. It wasn’t because of the bleeding faces of Lauren’s would-be rapists, the drugs or the cops. It wasn’t Izek and his graphic-novel history of the Middle Ages, replete with gibbet and dead friends. It wasn’t even because of what I’d seen myself do in the chilling, pixel-perfect reality of the digital video screen – although, of course, all of that was part of it.

  I was exhausted because my brain was resetting and whirring through the events of my life both as I remembered them and as I let myself remember them. I was in that hospital bed, but I was also a little girl, at the beach, playing in the water and suddenly caught in a rip. At the point where I started to sink into the depths of the water, a white hand shot through it, grabbed my polka-dot swimsuit and dragged me from water to air. I swallowed oxygen and my mother, my rescuer, cried, holding my tiny body to her own. She was completely dressed, and soaking wet.

  Now what I let myself remember was that when my mother held me, out of the water, out of danger, I looked down at myself and saw, not legs, but the silvery tail of a fish – not a dream, as real as the sand or the water. My mother sang to me and the tail faded with her song.

  My brain flickered and flew. Lights turn on. Cats hiss. A bright sky is suddenly clouded black, riddled with lightning. I’m at Nanna’s house. I’m a child. I’ve found a book full of strange pictures. I ask Nanna if it’s a colouring book. Inexplicably, the book freezes in my hands. I yelp at the frost-burn. Nanna bustles around my stinging hands so quickly, I forget that the book was ever there.

  A peach swells on a tree. I’m at the playground and a boy tells me I’ve got funny hair. I start to cry. Crows soar over a sunset sky.

  A collection of coloured stones in a tall glass jar – my nanna takes them out, one by one, lays them on a table in front of me. They have names, you know, she says. Rose quartz … lapis lazuli … aventurine …

  Night. My father is in the car, and he tells me to fetch my mother from the greenhouse at Flower Power. She has stayed after work, and when I
find her, she is standing between two aisles of towering plants whose leaves are lit by moonlight. Before I let her know I am here, I see the plants are growing, inches upwards and out. When a frond of a huge fern flicks open, I shriek. My mother turns to me. Her face is dark. She’s smiling.

  Onyx … opal …

  Our old house in Bowral; a naked window suddenly crawls with a jasmine vine. My mother has a fox in her arms. Clouds are rolling across the sky. Nanna’s ice-blue eyes.

  Fourteen. My mother and I are in the city, buying art supplies from Dymocks on George Street. She’s holding a wooden artist model in one hand and she snatches me with the other.

  I’m nine. I’m staying with Nanna; she and I have gone to the shops on a wet day and, walking back, I see a sparrow fluttering on the pavement. I reach down, squatting under my umbrella – the sparrow’s frightened but it’s weak and can’t fly away before I pick it up. Nanna thinks it has a broken wing and I start crying because I’m worried that the little bird’s in pain. Nanna tells me I can bring it into her house on the condition I don’t tell my parents, and while I hold the trembling sparrow in cupped hands, tears running down my face, Nanna boils water and adds things from jars to a tureen on her stovetop, and she asks me to drop the bird in. I do it, and Nanna holds my hand as she sings a Finnish song over the steaming water. My face is splashed with water as the bird, healed, soars out of the tureen and flies around the kitchen.

  My mother has a wooden artist’s model in one hand and she’s seen a man in a suit in the stationery section at Dymocks.

  I’m five. I’m in a playground, crying. A boy has told me I’ve got a fat face. I think you should apologise to my daughter, says my mother.

  The car park at Yarrindi High. I look forward to talking to you about Germany, Mum says to Michelle, starting the engine of the Getz.

  The sparrow flies around the kitchen. Amethyst … says Nanna, Bloodstone …

  We’re in the playground. I don’t talk to strangers, says the red-faced little boy to my mother, while I try wiping my tears against her skirt.

  Nanna places a pink stone in front of me. Rose quartz! I announce, and Nanna rewards me with a cookie.

  My mother’s feet have thyme leaves on them. There’s peach oil on my face.

  You have a bee on your collar, says my mother to the red-faced boy.

  My mother twists the stomach of the wooden artist’s model. The man in the suit falls to the ground. Don’t look, she says. Her eyes are black. I hear the man in the suit gasp – as if he can’t breathe. I hear the staff run to his aid.

  The red-faced boy has a bee on his collar. He has a bee on his face. He has a bee on the back of his hand. He has three bees crawling up his arm. He starts to tremble.

  Your mother, writes Lauren, she scares me.

  I’m almost seventeen. I’m on the floor of a book room at Yarrindi High School, being kissed by Brody Meine. His hair falls in his green eyes as he caresses my face and explores my mouth with his perfect tongue. His chest is pressed against me and I can feel the crackle of blue electricity that coats him like a second skin, thinner than the layer of an onion. I know that crackle means trouble, but I kiss him anyway, ignoring the fluttering storm building outside, the crows summoned by the frisson of me touching something I have been very clearly instructed to avoid – because of who I am, because of my mother, and my grandmother, and because of a reality that a video camera and two men in hospital won’t let me deny any longer.

  Does your stone talk to you? asks Izek. I think she knows what she is. She just can’t say the words.

  The red-faced boy is covered in bees. They are crusting his arm, crawling over one another. They buzz and he trembles, standing still. I see urine running down his leg. His eyes are watering. No one likes being made to feel small, says my mother. I hear the bees buzz, and the boy starts to whimper, as she gently turns me away from him. Behind me, the sound of the buzzing grows louder, and louder.

  In the dark hospital room I couldn’t see my tainted stone very clearly but I held it in front of my face, just the same.

  ‘What is the word, stone?’ I said to it.

  The voice that replied was my own, but I could finally accept that it was no internal monologue I was hearing.

  It’s ‘witch’, Little Bear, said my stone.

  It was like having my head turned in the right direction for the first time in my life.

  I really had to talk to my mum.

  32

  Lauren looked awful.

  Her face was puffy and her eyes were swollen closed. Her hair was mussed and tangled, crispy with product. They had her hooked up to a drip, through a painful-looking device rammed into the skin of her hand.

  Lucy and her mother looked almost as bad. They’d both been crying. They held one another’s hands really tightly and stared over the bed.

  Lauren was off the respirator now. The clock on the wall said it was almost six am, but there were no windows in the casualty ward.

  I was in a chair, closest to the bed – both Lucy and her mother had refused to sit down. We stared at her for minutes, maybe hours, listening to her sleep. Whenever something trembled behind Lauren’s closed eyes, Lucy would sob.

  I thought of the wounds on the smoker’s face and tried not to think, I wish I’d killed him.

  After a while, muscles on Lauren’s face started to flutter. She seemed to be tasting something in her mouth. ‘I’ll get a doctor,’ Lucy announced, almost running out of the room. Lauren coughed.

  ‘Hell,’ Lauren said in a sickly, slow voice. Her eyes were still closed.

  ‘Baby?’ said Lauren’s mum, leaning in and stroking Lauren’s hair.

  ‘Hey there,’ I said.

  ‘So …’ Lauren gurgled weakly, ‘… what do you reckon? Totally … awesome evening?’ She coughed again.

  ‘Kind of a big one,’ I said, unable to prevent myself smiling.

  ‘Baby, don’t talk,’ said Lauren’s mum. ‘Let yourself rest.’

  Lauren frowned. ‘Night’s still young,’ she said. ‘I’ve worked out that … I’ve been drugged and hospitalised. Maybe there’s still time … to get kidnapped by terrorists as well.’

  ‘Lauren, for crying out loud!’ said her mother. ‘Are you trying to send everyone crazy with worry?’

  ‘If I do, get the hospital … to give you … free Valium,’ she said, smiling.

  ‘Lauren, please,’ begged her mother, but Lauren limply waved her mother away.

  I thought she was falling back asleep, but I felt something pull at my tuxedo jacket. Lauren had a fistful of my sleeve.

  ‘It’s going to be all right,’ she said to me.

  ‘I promise to God you will be okay,’ I assured her.

  Lauren tried to shake her head. All the drugs had made her weak, and her hand dropped from my sleeve. ‘Not me,’ she said. ‘You.’

  Lucy walked into the room. A doctor was with her.

  ‘You know I’m good at … keeping secrets,’ Lauren said, and fell back asleep.

  33

  Although I argued I had enough money for a cab home, Lucy insisted on driving me back to Nanna’s house. We did a short round trip back to Kings Cross first, collecting the things I’d left at her apartment. Lucy said I could keep the strappy black high heels from her wardrobe. I stared at them most of the journey home, reflecting that when I’d put the shoes on only a few hours ago, my world was a completely different place. Odd memories of my own bear growl echoed in my ears.

  I texted Mum from Lucy’s car telling her I was on my way, so she was ready in the lounge room at Nanna’s house, anxious – and aggravated – by the time Lucy was backing out of the driveway and I was fumbling for my keys at the door.

  Before I could twist the keys in the lock, the door swung open and Mum was there. I tripped slightly on the doormat.

  ‘What’s going on?’ she demanded in a harsh whisper. ‘Why’d Lucy drive you home? Did you and Lauren have a fight?’

  ‘Where’s Dad?�
� I asked.

  ‘In bed, asleep. Do I have to wake him up?’

  I shook my head. ‘Let him sleep. You’ve got clothes on – we’ll go for a walk.’

  ‘Walk? What’s wrong? You look terrible!’

  ‘Lauren got drugged.’

  Mum lunged out of the doorway. ‘Drugged?’

  ‘Come on,’ I said, turning around.

  We walked through the gates of Nanna’s villa complex and I could feel my mother shudder as the gate squeaked on an unoiled hinge. It was at least seven o’clock in the morning but the light was still very low – damp clouds were in the sky and I guessed it was going to be an overcast day.

  Mum was wearing some cotton trousers and a velour top I knew belonged to Nanna, and we made a mismatched pair as I marched away from the house and she followed me. A few houses away from Nanna’s, an empty block of grey gravel and grass led towards the beaches of the bay. I turned into it, making for the cement boulevard that followed the sand.

  ‘What do you mean, she got drugged?’ Mum said, when she knew we couldn’t be overheard.

  ‘I mean that while I was talking to someone at the party, two guys took Lauren upstairs, fed her GHB and tried to make a porno with her in it, unconscious. We got her to hospital and she’s going to be okay.’

  Mum’s eyes were wide and startled, like a split boiled egg. ‘Lauren and hospital and who was this person you were talking to? Was he in on it with the Lauren business? Was he that boy from town? Tell me he wasn’t that boy from town.’ She stopped in her tracks. Her arms were folded and a slight breeze made her hair look slightly demonic.

  ‘Of course he wasn’t the boy from town, but the drugging thing is not the point,’ I said gruffly, walking on. She followed. ‘When I went looking for her I could smell them, somehow, these guys who had taken her. And I followed the smell … I thought I was hallucinating but I’m not, Mum, I saw the video.’