White Throat

by Sarah Thornton

  Auntie Helen had welcomed her with that smile, brighter than the light that shone over the back door. She’d washed Clem’s school uniform and tucked her into bed with a hot milk and honey, the kind Mum made with the nutmeg sprinkled on top, then she’d kissed her forehead with lips like pillows. Clem spent five months at Auntie Helen and Uncle Jim’s until Mum had recovered enough to come home.

  ‘It can help sometimes to share stuff, you know,’ said Helen.

  Clem had told one person: Rowan, the guy who’d saved her life in the Arkuna National Park a couple of months ago. Had it helped to tell him? To look into another person’s eyes and share her unspeakable shame? She remembered well the flood of relief the moment she’d finally had the courage to say the words—the knot clenched tight inside had loosened, just a bit. Yes, she thought, it had helped. A single connection with another human being. And yet, she’d still run—left him standing there in her driveway. As she’d said to him, telling a friend, one friend, was not the same as facing the whole town.

  And now here she was with Helen, her childhood mum when Mum couldn’t be Mum.

  Clem took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh. ‘I…yeah… well, I couldn’t face Sydney.’ The only thing she knew after her release from prison, the only certainty in the swirling eddy of her fractured life, was that she could not face her colleagues, her friends, her family, anything of her previous life.

  Helen waited with patient eyes, both hands around her mug, saying nothing but speaking volumes with her stillness.

  ‘And…well…this is not something I normally discuss,’ said Clem, swivelling her mug around and around on the table.

  Helen nodded, sipped her coffee.

  ‘Yeah. So then I headed out west, and south…just drove around for a couple of weeks. Anywhere but Sydney. Ended up in Katinga.’ Crushed by guilt, wanting nothing but anonymity.

  She still had moments—in the middle of the night, usually—waking up in a sweat, seeing Sue Markham’s head slumped on the steering wheel. A blood alcohol level of 0.095, so the charge sheet said. Significantly impaired, but not so drunk that she could forget that image. Thinking about it now, she felt the dry hollowness in her stomach again, did a silent count to settle herself—three, four, five.

  ‘Then the team started winning, is that right? And you uncovered some sort of criminal conspiracy?’

  Clem nodded, still staring down at the mug on the heavy wooden table.

  ‘And then, wham, your past was all over the papers again.’

  Clem cleared her throat. ‘I think I better get going,’ she said, standing up.

  ‘No, no. Please, stay. It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have pressed you.’

  Clem was already out the door and hurrying to the car.

  Helen came over Thursday evening. She brought a bottle of sav blanc and filled Clem in on how the sit-in had gone. Ten of them in there for two hours, holding up the green bedsheets, letting every poor sucker in the queue know that Elseya albagula, the endangered white-throated snapping turtle—a turtle that could breath underwater through its bum, no less—was about to be extinguished in the Rivers region when construction began on the new port. The bank manager had been surprisingly tolerant until Brady brought out his handcrafted African bongo drums and the police were called to escort them out.

  It was weird at first, drinking with Helen—navigating that cleft in time when grown-ups of your childhood cross over into your adult universe. The years collapse like a concertina as you find yourself in the same room—but thinking about the style of the furniture now, without regard to how it might come together as a cubby house.

  Clem brought out another bottle from the fridge and as the evening wore on Helen began referring to her as Earless the Fearless on account of the fact a lowlife thug had sliced off the top of her ear in the Arkuna National Park. From anyone else it would’ve been bad taste, but with Helen it was welcome relief from the unbearable intensity of it all.

  And then there was the turtle. They were onto the top-shelf stuff by then, falling on the floor giggling like schoolgirls.

  ‘Oh God, how I love that turtle,’ said Helen, slurring. ‘Its little face and its bad breath. White-throated, arse-faced little darlings. Reminds me of all the butt-breathing arseholes who started sniffing around after Jim died.’ She laughed so hard she knocked over a glass.

  RIVER TIMES, 15 NOVEMBER

  Police have released the name of the woman found dead at the base of Howard’s Quarry on Sunday 13 November. Helen Westley, aged sixty, of Piama, was President of the Wildlife Association of the Great Sandy Straits. Four-wheel-drive enthusiasts made the gruesome discovery just after ten that evening. It is understood that Ms Westley’s battered body was found impaled on a fallen tree at the bottom of the fifteen-metre drop. Investigations continue.

  CHAPTER 2

  Clem gripped the order of service tight and turned it over. She could barely look at the photograph on the cover: Helen with her hands clasped in her lap, wearing the necklace she loved, the one Jim had given her just before he died. On the back was a verse Clem recognised, adapted from Theodore Roosevelt’s ‘man in the arena’ speech:

  Helen Elizabeth Westley

  The woman in the arena…she knew great enthusiasm, She spent herself in a worthy cause, she dared greatly.

  Clem had taken a seat in the fifth row, expecting the pews in front of her to fill up, but only a handful of people trickled in before the service started. Someone junior in a Queensland Parks and Wildlife uniform had been sent to pay their respects for Helen’s years of volunteering in the national park, there was a guy in a suit she suspected was from the Galimore Foundation, the main source of funds for WAGSS, and about twenty of the local protesters. She picked out Ariel and Brady, Gaylene and Mary—the ones she’d met in the shed last week. Ariel kept her head bowed and wept throughout, Gaylene had her arm around her shoulder. Mary dabbed at her eyes and Brady looked stunned or stoned or both.

  Was that really all? There had been no children for Jim and Helen; they’d tried, but no dice. Helen’s mother, stricken with dementia in a nursing home in Newcastle was the only family she had. The lump in Clem’s throat was the size of an apple. So few people, for a woman who’d contributed so much.

  And the police were making out it was suicide. Ridiculous. Disgraceful. Clem had told a pasty-faced constable as much, pointing out the long line of people who would be pleased that Helen, the wildlife warrior and thorn in the side of industry, was dead. Insisting that Helen was no more suicidal than her cat, Fluffy. When Clem demanded to know where the fuck the suicide note was the sergeant had come out to the counter: a short, wiry woman with a permanently fierce look on her face. Clem made the same points to her, with undiminished force, before storming out yelling, ‘Bloody well do your job and find out who the hell pushed that good woman off the cliff!’

  She found herself staring blankly now at the front of the chapel. An old friend of Helen’s from Sydney had started on the eulogy. Maggie someone. Clem remembered the name. Helen had said Maggie was horrified when she left Sydney to live in the uncivilised backblocks of Piama, Wouldn’t you rather Noosa, darling? They’d laughed about it, she and Helen, mimicking the Double Bay accent. It must have been the day after that night they’d got pissed together, a week ago now. Helen hadn’t been right to drive. She’d slept in the spare room and woken up in her go-getter mood, apparently unaffected by the big night, a fact that had only made Clem’s monster hangover even more loathsome.

  Over breakfast Helen had resumed her pitch to get Clem more involved in the WAGSS activism.

  ‘I get that you don’t want the performance art stuff,’ she’d said, nibbling at a slice of pawpaw, ‘But we’d be a good double act at meetings—your hard-arse to my charm. And believe it or not, your profile helps too. You’ve got a public persona like a magnet,’ she’d said. ‘You’re intriguing to people—smart city lawyer who stumbled…’

  Clem had recoiled at that. ‘Stumbled? Is that
what you call it? I drove my boyfriend’s Prado down the wrong side of the road, Helen, and I killed a person.’ She gulped and lowered her eyes, ‘A living person. A kid’s mother.’

  It was the hangover, she realised that now, but she regretted her petulance.

  Helen had just nodded with a forgiving smile and made a perfect little sound, neither rebuke nor consolation. Then she’d asked what Clem planned to do next, whether she would return to her legal career.

  She’d hit unerringly on the thing that scared Clem most: the uncertainty, the absence of any clue as to what she should do, where she should go, who she should be—it tangled her up in a web so thick she could barely see her hand in front of her.

  ‘You were so successful. Do you miss it?’

  ‘Which part?’ Clem said, buying some time.

  ‘Lifestyle, money, fancy digs, sporty car…oh, it was red, right? I bet the car was red,’ she said, excitedly.

  ‘Yes! A red Alfa Romeo.’ They laughed and Helen admitted she missed it too—her old life as a media advisor in Sydney, married to Jim, the love of her life, living large on the northern beaches.

  But Helen had known the truth of it without having to be told, without Clem opening her mouth, because then she said, ‘I guess that’s the hardest part…not knowing what you want, where you’re headed?’

  That was Helen. She seemed to know before you said anything, reaching out with effortless tenderness.

  Clem’s tears were streaming again now, as they had since she’d found out the dreadful news.

  Maggie was still speaking, from under her perfect silver bob, mostly about the high jinx of university days before the two of them proceeded to their careers: ‘Both ending up in media relations, would you believe! Helen for corporates and me handling matters of state for a spate of government ministers.’ There followed a sequence of tales that gave ample opportunity for repeated name-dropping. Helen would have been pissing herself, thought Clementine. She’d left that world behind years ago.

  The air conditioning in the chapel was too cold. Typical Queensland, steaming outside in strappy dresses and singlets, then goosebumps inside. Clem shivered as Maggie wiped away a tear, then composed herself to introduce Jonathon Galimore, the suit from the Galimore Foundation, the CEO in fact. He seemed rather young but it wouldn’t be a big role, administering his great-aunt Glenys’ multimillion-dollar fund for species survival—probably just him and an admin making payments, implementing whatever the board decided, attending a few functions. Nonetheless, Jonathon took the opportunity to big-note himself, each anecdote a thinly disguised reflection on his personal heroics. It was a relief when he moved on to the foundation’s achievements in shoring up populations of endangered animals across Australia. Finally, he mentioned Helen’s contribution, almost as an afterthought.

  Clem didn’t feel she could speak, but it seemed horribly wrong that these people knew so little of the woman Helen was. The love and comfort she’d freely given to her best friend’s little girl; the courage she’d had to take on such an unpopular cause in Piama; her spirited leadership of the rag-tag group of locals caring for their endangered cohabitants on the Earth—the goshawk and the sedge frogs, the koalas and the curlews, and of course the white-throated snapping turtle, so exposed and friendless now. It was a life overlooked.

  And everyone in the room believed it was suicide.

  Clem couldn’t disguise the puff of disgust that escaped from her mouth. A couple of heads turned.

  Jonathon had finished. That was it then, thought Clem. No prayers or poems, just the civil celebrant winding things up. Clem stuffed her wet tissue into her pocket and stared at the pale wooden coffin, imagining Helen inside and blocking out the well-meaning platitudes issuing from the celebrant, a stranger to Helen. The curtains began to draw together. Helen. Lying there in the box, unable to move, her laughter brought to absolute stillness, her beautiful smile lifeless. Decomposing already.

  The curtains closed, with a sigh, too fast: a jaunty swinging at the corners, a frivolous wave. Clem sat for a moment. She said a silent prayer, watched as the pews emptied, then followed everybody out.

  She’d been inside the chapel less than an hour but the weather had changed. The light breeze had dropped, leaving a dense, expectant heat that hung beneath a tower of storm clouds. The full height of the front was directly above, fifty storeys of outraged cold air shirtfronting the lazy summer heat.

  Clem walked briskly towards the carpark and a blast of icy wind arrived, sweeping a sudden chill across her bare arms. She breathed it in, hoping for some sort of relief.

  It was in that moment that she heard something. The hairs on the back of her neck sprang up.

  No. She didn’t want to acknowledge it. But she knew what she’d heard. Breezing past her impossibly, like a spirit: her name, Helen’s voice. She shook her head in a shiver. She looked around, as if others might have heard it too. It didn’t seem so. The rest of the mourners were in a hurry, rushing to their cars before the clouds dumped their load.

  Clem scrambled for her keys. Don’t be bloody stupid, Jones—it’s just the cold. A heavy plop on her forearm. The first drop. Huge, big enough to move itself and trickle down the curve of her arm. Then another, then they were slapping on her head, splotches forming on the pavement at her feet and a blast of wind blowing her hair back. The sound again…someone calling her name.

  Get in the car and get a fucking grip, Jones.

  As she reached for the car door she took one last look up, the rain slamming onto her eyes, the cloud above dark green at its base, layers of black above. Then a single, warning crack of thunder, like a curtain tearing.

  ‘Shit!’ Clem struck her head as she threw herself into the car. She swiped at the strands of wet hair that had whipped across her face. Her hands were shaking.

  Of course she hadn’t heard Helen’s voice. It was just the wind. But it didn’t feel like ‘just’ anything. It was as if the planet had roused itself to bring her a message, bidding Clem to…

  To what?

  But she knew what. It was obvious. There she was, the only one in the chapel to know…to know for sure, with a certainty that took her breath away, that Helen Westley, her dear friend, her second mum and a woman who had known great enthusiasm and dared greatly, had not jumped to her death.

  Helen Westley was pushed off that cliff. Clem knew it.

  This near-empty chapel, this pitifully limp service had been judged and overruled with all the power of the weather gods. Helen had lived and loved and contributed and made her days count on this planet. Then violently, shockingly, someone had killed her, and the police, who should have been working overtime to track down her killer, had consigned her to the archives: filed and forgotten under S for suicide.

  Clem’s head pounded. It was a death that nobody other than the turtle-lovers grieved for, and every other fucker with an axe to grind was pleased about. Helen had become an obstacle in the path of powerful people.

  And just like that, the resistance that had come so easily before—to let things take their course, stand back and not interfere—now sloughed off Clem’s shoulders like burnt skin. She knew, with a clarity she’d rarely ever felt, that it fell to her to expose the truth about the death of Helen Westley.

  CHAPTER 3

  Gripping the steering wheel, eyes staring blankly through sheets of water streaming down the windscreen, her thoughts began to realign, straightening up into logical grooves. The police had moved on, that was clear from her visit the day after they released the name. But there was an obvious list of people with a grudge against Helen—the executives from Marakai Mining charged with driving the mine project ahead; Blair Fullerton, the local mayor, who equated jobs with votes; and Ralph Bennett, the ‘Resident President’ of a vocal group of financially motivated locals—the Piama Progress Association—all hoping for economic deliverance from their desperate plight, to name a few.

  She would have to speak with them, each of them. But what was she
to do? Turn up on their doorstep with a notepad and pencil? Demand to know if they had an alibi?

  The rain was deafening on the Commodore’s roof, horizontal spears against the windows. The car rocked with each gust and she could barely make out what was happening in the car park. A hire car was first out. Maggie perhaps, up from Sydney? Then, turning the Commodore’s headlights on, she could see a blue hatchback with the celebrant at the wheel; then the Parks and Wildlife twin-cab ute; a kombi van stacked with four environmentalists crammed across the front seat and who knows how many more lounging on a mattress in the back; and behind that, Brady’s multi-coloured Corolla, complete with a very amateurish picture of the white-throated snapping turtle on the bonnet and plastered with ‘Abort the Port’ stickers.

  She needed a reason, a legitimate reason to meet with the people she now understood to be suspects. As each car filed past her, the awful thought began to take hold: she must take Helen’s place as campaign leader. It would give her access to company executives, the president of the progress association, the mayor and any other advocacy group that might want WAGSS to roll over and die.

  She let her forehead flop down onto the steering wheel. The prospect of such a role filled her with dismay. She had sought to avoid the WAGSS headquarters at Turtle Shores, resisted the sit-ins and the meetings. But this was much, much worse. She would be taking on all of that and the leadership.

  Lifting her head she saw the headlights flick on from the last of the vehicles left in the carpark—a flash-looking SUV. It reversed out of its space, the Galimore Foundation koala logo emblazoned on the passenger-side door. Helen had told her about the financial sources for the campaign. The Galimore Foundation was the biggest contributor. Without them the campaign would be hamstrung. But foundation funds didn’t come without jumping through hoops, the first of which was their fussiness about who they gave the money to, the ‘optics’ of having a squeaky-clean operation, a presentable leader. Helen had told Clem how much effort she’d put in to building her relationship with Jonathon Galimore—it was why she’d been so successful in getting such generous donations from the foundation.