Ruth’s salt theory began with the moon. She’d told nobody about it; she knew it had no scientific basis. She kept it to herself the way someone might keep a shell or a pebble tucked in a pocket, in the silky lining next to the heart, to be taken out every now and then and contemplated.
She first noticed the salt cravings when she was pregnant with Laura, and over the years she realised they intensified right before her period. Malcolm sometimes caught her munching potato chips or popcorn or salted peanuts and he’d say, ‘Aha. That’s enough of that, I think,’ and take the food away.
‘I am not a child!’ Ruth had yelled at him once. He’d just looked at her, then taken the bowl of nuts and said, ‘We’ll just pop these away, shall we?’
From then on, she kept her salt consumption hidden. She knew Malcolm was only concerned for her health, but she couldn’t explain to him the urgency she felt when the craving began. Besides, a little bit now and then didn’t hurt. She sprinkled it on her meals before she took them to the table, before she’d even tasted the food. She kept packets of salted nuts in her desk at the library and, for emergencies, in her handbag. Sometimes, as she passed the kitchen, she dipped her fingertip in the salt and licked it, as if tasting cake mixture.
One restless night, she’d risen from bed and paced round and round the turret, eating cashew nuts. She’d been flushing her pills away for almost three months. Laura had been gone for six years. Another year and she’d be officially dead. Ruth could see right down the hillside; the roofs of the houses were propped-open books, each containing a different story. The moon was almost full. From the turret she could see the silvery ocean. Turrets, she recalled, were built on Victorian houses so wives could watch for their husbands returning from sea. She felt the salt gritty on her fingers, working its way under her nails, and when she finished the bag of nuts she held her hand up to the light. The salt grains were luminous. The moon, she thought, controlled the salty tides. Her body retained water right before a period. The more salt she consumed, the more water she retained. Laura could be in the sea somewhere, under the glowing moon. She licked her fingers.
She could never put her theory into words. It existed at a physical level, like the body’s knowledge of pain or heat. Malcolm wouldn’t understand. That was all right. By the next week, she was pregnant.
Daniel was fourteen days overdue.
‘We’ll have to induce you,’ the doctor said, and Ruth had no choice. As they wheeled her into the stuffy delivery room she recalled something she’d owned as a child: a glass globe, the size of an orange. It was filled with water, except for a tiny bubble of air at the top, like the space in an egg. Inside, surrounded by pine trees, stood a plastic Santa Claus. Ruth didn’t know who had given her the globe or what had happened to it, but she remembered shaking it and shaking it at Christmas time, making it snow in summer. And she remembered believing that each night, when no one was looking, the Santa floated to the top and breathed, taking into his plastic lungs enough air to last a day.
They gave her invisible gas for the pain. Malcolm held her hand and told her everything would be fine, but Ruth didn’t want the baby to be born. She wanted to keep him just a little longer.
And then she was holding him, her yellow baby, his skin the colour of sunlight, and the nurses were taking him and tagging the crease of his wrist and saying he’d be fine after a few sessions under the lamps, and Malcolm was stroking her hair.
‘You’ve done so well,’ they told her, plumping pillows and tightening sheets. ‘You should be very proud of yourself.’ And although they were smiling and Malcolm was calling her darling and photographing her and his son rather than endless icy landscapes, she knew she was holding a flawed child, an unlucky exception.
She and the baby had to stay in hospital for a week following the birth. Nothing serious, Malcolm told people, just a little jaundice. Flowers filled her room. She lay for hours gazing at roses and carnations, at pollen-filled daisies, sprigged curtains, buttercup-yellow walls. The nurses wore enamel name-tags in the shape of dinosaurs or sunflowers or pieces of fruit, and the doctors encouraged her to use their first names. The baby cried and cried. Ruth longed for a blank room, plain bedding, anonymous staff. Somewhere as empty as an unmarked page. The place where she’d had Laura had been like that.
Friends and acquaintances visited and fussed. They commented on her hair, her complexion, told her she looked wonderful. No one lingered. No one mentioned the fact that, on her sixth day in hospital, her daughter had been missing for seven years. You need your rest, they said. We mustn’t keep you. Some deposited gifts on the edge of the bed and backed out the door, explaining they were no good with hospitals.
‘If there’s anything else we can do,’ they said.
No. There was nothing.
Seven years. Ruth had thought she’d feel worse, but she was too exhausted; the baby had been crying non-stop for the first six days of his life. Now, though, he was silent.
‘Tired himself out, has he?’ said the nurse. ‘Maybe Mum can get some rest too.’
Ruth drifted in and out of sleep. The bundle in the cot lay so still that whenever she woke she had to check he was still there.
After an insipid lunch, she made her way down the corridor to the snack machine and bought potato chips and nuts. Today, she decided, she would give in to her salt cravings. She knew it was unwise. She knew how it got into the blood, how it could clog the arteries, damage the heart, but she needed it. She ate as she made her way back to bed and each time she swallowed she felt a tide rushing through her, shaking in her head like waves. In this country, there was no escaping the sea. She remembered her schoolteachers telling the class what to do if a tidal wave hit. The telephone book had even carried tsunami advice, printed in capitals and accompanied by cartoon waves, tiny palm trees: MOVE TO HIGH GROUND. KEEP AWAY FROM STREAMS FLOWING TO THE SEA. NEVER GO TO THE BEACH—IF YOU SEE THE WAVES IT IS TOO LATE TO ESCAPE THEM. Ruth knew that such warnings were useless, that no one could survive the ocean. She chewed and swallowed, chewed and swallowed. Was salt water bleaching the bones of her daughter? Was it corroding her fingernails, her painted toes? Was Laura in the sea?
Although it hurt, she ran back to her room. The baby was fine, of course he was. He hadn’t moved. Even when Malcolm came to visit, and woke them both, the baby didn’t jostle his arms and legs and screw up his face.
‘Is there something wrong with him?’ said Malcolm. ‘It’s like he’s a different child.’
There were more bouquets waiting at home. They occupied the hall, the lounge, the bedroom. Some had even been placed, unwisely, in the kitchen, and were already wilting.
‘I borrowed some vases from Mum,’ said Malcolm, sliding Ruth’s neat blue suitcase on to the bed. ‘I’ll unpack for you, shall I?’ And he flicked back the clasps.
The bundle against Ruth’s chest started to stir then. It opened its tiny dark eyes for a moment and moved its lips. It dribbled.
Ruth smiled at it. ‘Daniel,’ she said. Are you a Daniel?’
Malcolm held up a nightdress. ‘Machine or hand wash?’
There was some interest in the birth. Two women’s magazines requested an interview with Ruth, and three newspapers phoned.
‘Thank you,’ Malcolm told them, ‘but this is a family time.’
One paper did a story anyway, a weekend feature announcing Life Goes On.
‘This is a family time, ‘says father Malcolm Pearse, but what sort of family life is possible when a daughter has disappeared without trace?
There was a photograph of Laura playing tennis. It covered half a page.
Malcolm telephoned the paper from work. He was calm, he was polite. He wouldn’t give them another story, no Fathers’ Anguish or Wounds Still Raw. He hoped he made himself understood.
After that, he and Ruth and the new baby were left alone. They no longer struggled to pretend things were normal, because they were. Meals were cooked and consumed, clothes washed, worn and washed, curt
ains opened and drawn. Ruth took leave from the library to look after Daniel, Malcolm received a substantial pay-rise. They renovated the bathroom, bought a bigger car, a new cat. They went on holiday to Bali and Hong Kong; they spent a week in Sydney. Daniel went to day care, Ruth returned to work part-time. Things were so normal that they no longer noticed the sly staring in the street, or if they did, they no longer mentioned it to each other.
Paper is not strong. It can be cut, torn, crumpled, burned. It can be ruined by water, consumed by silverfish, pitted and corroded by moths and worms. It can be wrapped around gifts to embellish good intentions and thoughts that count, then ripped open in a moment and discarded. It can be blown away by a breath of wind.
In the silent dining room, the night before she returned to work full-time, Ruth stared at the bush-walk photograph. It was a piece of paper, nothing more. It wasn’t even a good likeness. The dense trees and ferns had made it overexposed, and Laura looked paler than she really was. Her freckles were dissolved, the smattering of spots on her forehead had disappeared and her tiny eyelid scar was invisible. Laura had liked it; she’d called it her cover-girl picture and pinned a copy to her wall.
‘Do I really look like that?’ she’d asked, so Ruth had said yes, because she wanted Laura to think herself beautiful. But it wasn’t a good likeness. She should have told the police, insisted they use a different shot. It turned her daughter to moonlight, this picture.
Ruth went to the kitchen. The non-stick pan hung on its special hook, the kettle rested on its stand, the copper-bottomed pots glinted like gongs in the dark. Everything was in the right place. Even Daniel, she told herself, was where he should be, tucked up in bed, safe. He would come to love Colette. She would be like a big sister. In the pantry Ruth found half a packet of peanuts, and she swished them around in her mouth. The salt dissolved and trickled down her throat and she realised she wasn’t hungry at all. Peanuts were one of the most high-energy foods, and energy was the last thing she wanted now. She wanted calm, the ability to lie still. She wanted her feet to stop twitching, her fingers to stop flickering as if practising scales. She wanted to slow herself down. She spat the peanuts into the sink. They rattled like teeth.
When she arrived home the next day, Ruth found Colette sitting at the kitchen table reading a magazine. The breakfast dishes had been done, the bench tidied and the tea-towel placed precisely on the rail.
‘Where’s Daniel?’
Colette looked up. ‘Hi! I’m finding out how to remove yellow stains from a wedding dress,’ She held up Woman’s Day.
‘Is he on his own?’
‘He’s asleep,’ said Colette. ‘He even suggested it himself. He was no trouble.’
‘Asleep?’
‘Mm. Can I get you a coffee?’
Ruth was already heading towards the hall. ‘Please,’ she called.
In Daniel’s room the curtains had been drawn and Ruth could just distinguish her son’s face. She held her cheek close to his mouth to feel his breath. Then she tucked the sheet around his chin and returned to the kitchen.
‘So how was the first full day back?’ asked Colette.
‘It was fine.’ Ruth watched the girl opening cupboards, arranging cups, pouring water. It was odd that she seemed to know exactly where to find everything; in this new house, Ruth herself was still learning the co-ordinates of her possessions. ‘Quite good, actually. But they’re computerising the accounts system at the moment. It’s really slowing us down.’
‘It’ll be worth it, though,’ said Colette. ‘It’ll make life much easier.’
‘I suppose so,’ said Ruth, remembering when the library had no computers at all. She thought of the old card catalogue, the rows of dark wooden cabinets. They were in the basement now—level zero—along with all the books that hadn’t been issued for twenty years or more, and the newspapers. Jan had asked her to go down there that afternoon for an urgent request, and she’d pulled open one of the long, narrow drawers. She’d supported its weight with one hand and had run the other along the cards, across their furred edges. The library still had to produce a new card for every new book, in case the system went down. A power cut, even one blown fuse and the whole thing could be demobilised.
I’m so glad you’ve enrolled in self defence, wrote Colette’s mother. When do you start? Soon, I hope. And how wonderful that you’ve found a part-time job, I imagine you’ll need a bit of extra pocket money now that you’re paying rent. They sound like a nice family. Such a shame about their daughter, I remember her being in the news and how worried we all were, still you just never know what life has in store for you, perhaps their little boy is some comfort. How are you finding your lectures? What is Nathan studying? I’d like to hear about your new friends. I suppose with work and study and now your evening classes you don’t have much spare time, but I’d love to hear from you if you do get a moment.
There was one man in the class. Colette wondered what his reasons were for being there; for one ridiculous moment she imagined him planning an attack, researching the techniques that could be used against him. He was a slight person, and she noticed that all the other class members were especially gentle when paired with him. Even the tutor, who often chose Roland for demonstrations, was less aggressive with him than with any of the women.
In one exercise, when he grabbed his partner from behind, the woman—a young mother—simply crumpled. For a moment nobody knew what to do, least of all Roland. He let her go and stood back in surprise as she sank to the floor. The other pairs froze in various positions of attack and defence while the woman lay whimpering on the padded mat. Then the tutor strode over to her and patted her on the back, saying, ‘All right, then.’ The woman stopped coming to classes after that.
One morning Colette woke to find her bed covered with photographs, as if there had been a quiet snowfall during the night. As she inched back the duvet she discovered that some pictures had worked their way into her bed. She had been sleeping on them, and when she picked them up in her weak, morning hands she found that they were warm, that they had taken warmth from her own skin. She thought of the landscapes on Ruth’s sideboard, the silver-framed stretches of snow and ice. She shook her sheets then, and beat her mattress to be sure she hadn’t missed any pictures. As she bent to make her bed she felt something sharp cutting into her side. When she lifted up her pyjama top there was a photograph stuck to her skin. She peeled it away. Herself, aged about sixteen, running. And it was then, while she was still half asleep, that she remembered where she had seen the other photo on Ruth’s sideboard: it had been in the papers and on the news for weeks, many times, years before.
‘Of course,’ said the lecturer as he distributed the essay questions, ‘at this level you’re expected to start thinking for yourselves. You’re welcome to come up with your own topic, but you’ll need to discuss it with me before mid-year.’
Colette scanned the photocopied sheet and found nothing that interested her. The birth of the trade union movement, the Depression, the perceived threat of Japanese invasion during World War II: she had exhausted every one of the topics before. She wanted to learn something fresh about the past, to feel the texture of new information between her fingers. It was possible, she supposed, that the questions were deliberately dull, designed to bore students into exercising their creativity. While the lecturer talked about the unacceptability of hand-written work and the impossibility of extensions without a medical certificate or proof of bereavement, Colette invented possible topics. She imagined turning up at his office to discuss Hairstyles of the Suffragists, or Twentieth-Century Representations of the Sheepdog, or From Dripping to Vegemite: an Analysis of Post-Colonial Sandwich Spreads.
At the library the microfilm collection filled shelf after shelf. Colette weaved in and out of the rows as if negotiating a maze, reading dates, names of newspapers. They suggested an almanac, a comforting natural order: there were Stars, Times, Evenings, Mornings. She thought of the amount of news the boxes con
tained, tried to visualise the robberies, sales, wars, elections, murders, births. Every row was the same as the last; a brick wall, well over her head. She slowed down in 1988. She couldn’t remember what time of year Laura had disappeared, but suspected it had been in the summer. She recalled stuffy car-rides, her mother tuning the radio to the news and shushing her and Dominic at any mention of Laura’s name. Colette stopped in the second week of January. The time of her own birth; it seemed as good a place as any to begin.
The library was totally quiet. There were no gossiping groups filling in time between lectures, no patient explanations of chemistry or statistics. Colette heard nothing, not even the sound of pages turning. As she withdrew the box she felt uneasy. Who was she, after all, to be poking around for information? Ruth would be horrified if she knew. She’d never once mentioned Laura; the photograph in the dining room was the only clue that she’d ever been part of their family. Colette’s hand brushed the metal shelf and she felt a snap of electricity. She had always been susceptible to shocks. If she brushed her hair for too long it floated about her head like seaweed. She avoided wearing man-made fibres. Once, when she’d removed a polyester jersey in the dark, she’d seen sparks leap from her body.
‘Touch the glass when you’ve opened the door,’ her father told her as she climbed from the car. ‘To ground yourself.’ But then he left for Australia, and there was no one to tell her how to protect herself, and although his car-window trick still worked, Colette didn’t understand why.
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