by Wendy James
“OMG. What teacher would do that?” Julia, the newest and youngest member of the English staff, looked appalled.
“And you do have that connection to Manning.” Phil was like a dog with a bone. “Didn’t you teach at some private school there?”
“Manning College. It was a few years back now. I’m surprised you remember.”
“I always like to know where people taught before they washed up here in paradise.” His voice had an edge of bitterness. “People don’t come out here for no reason, do they? There’s always something they’re running from.”
I’d applied for the position at Enfield Wash on spec, after a couple of years of highly unsatisfying casual teaching in Sydney. I’d been shocked when I’d got it but said yes even before visiting. Enfield Wash was a small inland town a couple of hours north of Sydney—too far from the city to be attractive to those who wanted to live close to the center, but not isolated enough to be counted as additional rungs for those climbing the education department ladder. Enfield Wash High needed a teacher who had enough experience teaching drama to run junior classes, direct a school play every few years, and take the occasional small class of students through to their final exams. Rather like mine, the school’s expectations weren’t terribly high.
From what I could glean on the net, Enfield Wash seemed a reasonable place to settle. The town, unlike others in the region, had somehow survived despite its small population. Perhaps because of its relative isolation, it still had a reasonably thriving commercial center, and the economic migration, youth unemployment, drugs, crime, and general disaffection that had destroyed so many other once-prosperous inland towns hadn’t been quite as pronounced. It wasn’t exactly a buzzing metropolis, but there were enough flourishing businesses and families to make it a viable place to live. As well as the wheat and sheep and dairy farms that had once been the town’s backbone, there were wineries that attracted tourism and a growing number of city people buying up acreages. The town boasted a respectable number of cafés, a library, a bookshop, eight hotels, a twenty-four-hour manned police station, and a sense of community. It also had the Franchise, a large and very well-maintained nursing home with a waiting list that was significantly shorter than any I could find in Sydney.
Leaving Mary in the care of a respite nurse, I took a trip in early spring to scope out the town and find somewhere for us to live. I’d decided to bite the bullet and put my Bondi apartment, which I’d owned since the early nineties and had well and truly paid off, on the market. Sydney prices being what they were, I was going to be able to afford a significant upgrade and still have money to spare.
The local real estate agent, whose thirteen-year-old daughter I was likely to teach (“Total drama queen, that girl. Just like her mother.”) couldn’t hide his excitement when I told him what I was after—space, privacy, a garden, something old that didn’t need renovating—and how much I was prepared to spend.
“Well,” he’d said, after the initial thrill had subsided, “you’ve got two options with that sort of money.” He’d driven me to the town’s premier street—a wide, tree-lined avenue in an area known as Parliament Hill.
The houses were grand: late-Victorian brick mansions with manicured gardens behind high iron and sandstone fences. Most had swimming pools, and a few had tennis courts. They were elegant, welcoming, well looked after, homes where generations of children were born and raised, homes that weren’t really appropriate for a single woman and her mad mother.
The agent had stopped out front of one imposing pile. “This one’s been on the market for three years—takes a while to sell this sort of place. They’re asking six hundred and fifty thousand, but as I said, I reckon they’d take six hundred. Maybe even five eighty. You’d still have quite a bit of change. It could do with a bit of updating, but it doesn’t need too much. You could maybe refresh the bathrooms, the kitchen. Knock out a few walls and open it out.”
I’d given the house no more than the briefest glance before shaking my head. “It’s so beautiful, but not really what I’m after. It needs a family. Kids,” I managed to say without self-consciousness.
“Yeah. True.” He’d given a regretful sigh, then almost immediately brightened up. “How about out of town?”
I hadn’t really considered living out of town, but why not?
“I don’t want anything too big; I don’t want too much to maintain. And I don’t want animals or . . . crops or anything.”
“No. I s’pose . . .” He paused and looked at me closely. “Hey, I know you. You were that girl. What was her name? Queenie? From that show, oh, what was it? Surf something?”
I laughed. “Gypsy. And it was Beachlife.”
“Beachlife. That’s it. Gypsy. Wow.”
“I’m surprised you recognize me. I’d have thought you were a bit too young.”
“Oh yeah, maybe. But I’ve got four older sisters, and they made me watch it. They had it all on video.” His grin was sheepish, his cheeks slightly pink. “And you’re coming here to teach? The school must be stoked to have someone like you teaching drama. An actual celebrity.”
“It was such a long time ago. I’d be surprised if anyone else even remembers the show. Anyway”—I changed the subject gently—“you were going to tell me about some places out of town.”
“Yeah. Right.” He cleared his throat, assumed a more businesslike demeanor. “I’ve got just the thing. It’s not quite an acre—so there’s not too much to look after. There’s a fair bit of lawn, I guess, but you can always get someone to come and mow it if it’s too much.”
He’d driven out of the town then, headed west up one hill and then down another, around what looked like a small lake but was actually the town’s old reservoir, the Lock, and then out into less hilly farming country. It had been a cold, dry winter, and the paddocks were gray and not particularly appealing, but the surrounding countryside was beautiful: gently undulating land as far as the eye could see, with the peak of a heavily wooded mountain—Mount Waltham, apparently—in the distance.
“The place I’m taking you, the old Gascoyne place,” the agent said, “has been subdivided. It’s an old farmhouse; parts of it are more than a hundred years old, but the owner built himself a new place and is selling off a bit of land with the old homestead on it. Actually, it’s a bit of a sad story.”
He was clearly eager to tell me, and, curious to hear the local stories, I was happy to oblige.
“Oh?”
“Yeah. Poor bastard. He started building it when he got married. His parents were in the old place. But then his wife got cancer and the house was put on hold . . . She died, oh, a while back now. She was a lovely woman—another teacher, actually. By the time he got back to work on the new house, his parents had died, too. He probably should’ve stayed in the old place and sold the new one for a pile, but I guess he wanted a fresh start.”
“Sounds like it.”
“Yeah. He’s a typical grazier, tough as old boots, maybe a bit arrogant—but I think it really stuffed him. The old place has been a bit of a nightmare to sell, to be honest. Most people who want to live out of town are after at least a couple of acres. And they don’t want these old places.”
“No. I like the idea of its age, but I don’t know that I really need a homestead. There’s only the two of us.”
“Well, it’s not a mansion or anything. Not like those places in town. The Gascoynes had plenty of money once, but it all went back into the land, so the house is nothing fancy. It’s pretty small. And it could probably do with some renovating down the track. The garden’s something special, though. And the views.”
The agent was right—it wasn’t anything fancy. The original house had been built in the mid-nineteenth century, but there’d been various additions and alterations since. The house was tin-roofed weatherboard, in need of a lick of paint, with a wide veranda out the front. The three small bedrooms, dining room, and dim lounge looked desperately in need of an update, but the north-facin
g kitchen/family room—added sometime in the 1970s—was warm and comfortable-looking. An old breezeway with a corrugated-iron roof ran from the current kitchen to the original kitchen, which was now a laundry.
A door in the hallway that I’d mistaken for a linen closet opened onto a stairway leading down to a basement. The basement had been divided into two thin-walled rooms, one with an en suite toilet. Another set of steep wooden stairs connected the basement to the laundry. The basement rooms were cool and dank and faintly whiffy.
“I think they used these for guest bedrooms at one stage, or maybe storage,” the agent said. “You could make a great wine cellar down here,” he added wistfully. “The temperature is perfect. But the Gascoynes weren’t really a wine cellar sort of family, I guess.”
The front garden, old Mrs. Gascoyne’s garden, was beautiful. It was all a little wild and unkempt now, but its good bones were still in evidence. I could see the remains of old flower beds, climbing roses and jasmine, camellias, an assortment of natives. An early-blooming jacaranda scattered its blossoms across the lawn. The agent walked me from fence line to fence line and then around the perimeter of the original home paddock, which housed an enormous tin shed—a three-car garage, apparently. All up, the property was just over half an acre. The surrounding land all belonged to Chip Gascoyne—the original homestead just a small sliver in the middle.
“Chip?”
“It’s Charles, I think, but he looked a lot like his old man as a kid, apparently—you know, a chip off the old block.”
“So where’s his new place?”
“It’s across that paddock, just behind that windbreak.” He pointed to a row of tall trees behind the garage. “It’s actually less than half a K away as the crow flies, but you’d never know it. There’s a gate in the dividing fence just behind the shed. And there’s a rough kind of path between the two properties. Your only other close neighbor is Honor Fielding. She’s just a bit farther up the road. Honor’s that celebrity PR agent, media person? I guess you’ve heard of her, being in showbiz and all that?”
“Of course.” I was slightly surprised. “What’s she doing living out here?”
“She actually grew up in Enfield Wash, and she and her husband bought a weekender a couple of years back—five acres. They’re not here that often. They come up for a few days, maybe once a month, a bit more in winter. Her dad’s at the Franchise, so she comes up a bit to see him.”
I looked back at the house. It was certainly no architectural marvel, but it was solid and cozy. There were views out to the mountain and across the plains, but the property was sheltered, relatively secluded. It was peaceful, a long way from the rat race, but not too far away from the comforts of civilization. It was just what we needed. I paid a deposit that day.
My students, too, were obsessed with the Canning case. When the story first broke, it was almost impossible to keep them focused on any other subject. I had come to my Year Eleven drama class prepared for a tedious but necessary discussion about their woefully inadequate practice journals. Instead, when I walked in a few minutes late, the class—only fifteen students, but with enough enthusiastic extroverts to make it feel like fifty—was agog with the recent news: the girl found unconscious in the shepherd’s hut, her story of abduction, imprisonment, and escape. They were full of theories, too—why the woman had taken her, who they might be, whether the girl was making it all up—but then why would she? Why would anyone make up such a crazy story? The conversation was impossible to close down. Every time I tried, there was a chorus of Oh, Miss and someone added another unlikely fact. In the end I gave up. “Okay,” I said, “I get it. I’m fascinated, too. Honestly. But I can’t just let you sit here gossiping all day.”
Yes, you can, came the chorus. We won’t tell. Come on, Miss.
“But what we can do is use it,” I told them, in my best inspirational-teacher voice. And I meant it. At first glance it might have looked like the tackiest of tabloid stories, but wasn’t that what drama, what all art, was primarily about? To explore the full range of what it means to be human, the extraordinary moments as well as the ordinary, the extravagant, and the necessary.
So instead of the dull double period I’d planned, the class worked on three-minute improvisations in groups of two, exploring whatever elements of the story interested them.
First, though (there’s always a quid pro quo for classroom fun), we discussed the story’s meaning. What was the significance of this tale of abduction, imprisonment, and escape? Could they locate any universal resonances, thematic implications, mythological connections? What might it tell us about the times we lived in, contemporary culture?
As always, the class came up with more than I expected, surprising me with their insights. It was a story about moving from childhood to adulthood; a story about the perversion of adult power; a story about abuse, but without real physical harm; it was a story about courage, about heroism, about oppression and freedom.
“Does it remind you of any other stories? What about fairy tales?”
“Cinderella?”
“It’s sorta like a modern Hansel and Gretel, isn’t it? Only there’s no Hansel.”
“And no gingerbread. Or lollies.”
“The basement would be, like, the cage.”
“But she didn’t get to push the witch into the fire before she left.”
“They haven’t actually found her yet. Maybe she did.”
We discussed characterization. I asked them how they imagined the girl. They’d seen snippets on the news, but what sort of a girl was she, really? What sort of a girl was she before she got into this situation? Was there anything that made her particularly vulnerable? They knew bits and pieces about her: that she was a foster child, a scholarship girl at a posh boarding school, that she was probably a bit of an outsider, not a rich kid. Bright, hardworking, ambitious, most likely. And they could see from the pictures that she was pretty. But networked beings that they were, they knew other things, too, things that hadn’t been reported in the media. These days there was always someone who knew someone who knew someone.
“I have a friend,” one girl said, “who went to her old high school. She was a bit of a skank, apparently.” Another girl said she’d heard Ellie Canning had been in trouble for drugs, that she was about to be expelled anyway. Someone else had been told she was a Jesus freak.
“And what about the two women?” I asked. “Who were they?”
So far, very little information had been released about the women who’d abducted the girl. All we knew was that there were two: one middle-aged, the other elderly. And then there was the intriguing question of motivation. What on earth was the rationale behind the kidnapping? Why did they take her? Why did they keep her?
“I really don’t get it. What would two old women want with a girl our age?” asked one. “What would be the point?”
What indeed?
“Hey,” said one of the boys. “You live with your mother, don’t you, Miss? Somewhere out of town? How do we know it wasn’t you?”
“But Miss lives miles from where she was found,” someone else chipped in. “As if Miss would kidnap a girl.”
“What would I want another teenage girl for,” I sighed, “when I’ve got all of you?”
They had no trouble imagining the scenario and the characters, but a truly plausible motive eluded them.
Inevitably the subject of sex reared its head. There had been no mention of the girl having suffered any sort of sexual trauma, but what else could it be, they wondered. They knew all about the most recent high-profile abduction cases; they’d read the news, seen the movies—the ones where the girls had been held for years, given birth even, and they all knew that on some level, these cases always involved sex. But in those cases the perpetrators were men. Our scenario was quite different: this time the villain wasn’t male, and the idea perplexed as much as it intrigued.
“It’s totally weird, though, isn’t it, Miss? I mean, women don’t really
do that sort of thing?”
“Don’t they?”
“Maybe they’re lesbians,” one girl offered tentatively. “But they’re both old, aren’t they? Erg.”
“That doesn’t stop them being perverts.”
“Are you saying lesbians are perverts? OMG. That’s like totally homophobic.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“Maybe she wasn’t there for the women. Perhaps they’d just sort of caught her and were getting her ready for a man? Maybe she escaped before he got there?”
“Maybe they’d captured her for the white slave trade?”
“Maybe it was a brothel?”
“Okay,” I said, “these are all good ideas. But I want you to try a bit harder, think a bit more deeply. What else could it possibly be? Aren’t people ever abducted for other reasons?”
“Maybe they’d taken her there to do the cleaning?”
“Maybe,” said Jess Mallory, one of my more promising students, a quiet, diffident girl who had a surprising intensity onstage, and who had been given the main part in the school play, “maybe the younger woman wanted a friend. Maybe she was lonely. Or maybe she wanted a daughter?”
When it came to the crunch, they all avoided making motive explicit in their improvs. Most of them portrayed the girl thrashing about, terrified, desperate to escape, and her captor either vicious and abusive or stern, cold, impervious.
Only Jess Mallory’s vision departed from this. Jess’s kidnapper sat by the girl’s bedside, held her hand, and crooned nursery rhymes—“Three blind mice, see how they run”—with her voice high and wispy and slightly off-key. She smoothed back her captive’s hair, murmured words of love, told her stories, echoes of familiar fairy tales—“Snow White,” “Hansel and Gretel”—talking to her as if she were her long-lost daughter, or the ghost of the woman’s own past. The captive, played by Katie Miller, one of my least enthusiastic students, lay as if catatonic, eyes open, but displaying no emotion at all. And it was this particular tableau, the entire class agreed, that was the most terrifying, the most sinister of all.