by Tim Buckley
“That’s her, mate,” he said, softly, “there wasn’t another little girl like that. I’m sorry.”
I stopped short and handed the box back to him. My head dropped to my chest and I tried to rub away the throbbing in my temples.
“I’m sorry, mate,” he said, again.
I took a deep breath, nodded to him and turned away up the beach.
24
It wasn’t long after Emily’s episode on O’Connell Bridge that I had the call from Jessica asking me to come in to see Brendan for a chat. Brendan doesn’t really do chatting, so something was obviously awry and, to be honest, I’d have won no prizes for guessing what it was. The call was more in the way of a summons and I was due to see Brendan late in the afternoon so I stopped off in Toner’s for a couple of quick reinforcements. From the start, Brendan had always been good to me and I trusted him without question. I appreciated, too, the oddly paternal way that he looked after me and kept me heading in broadly the right direction. But he was an experienced and straight-talking pragmatist and so his style of mentorship could be brutal. I guessed that I had some of that coming and I knew, deep down, that I probably deserved it.
Despite my very best intentions, I was still a few minutes late when I got to the office. When Jessica showed me in – and without looking up from the pile of papers through which he was thumbing furiously – Brendan grunted and waved a hand at the high-backed chair in front of his desk that only served to heighten the sense of interrogation. The office was like the library in a Merchant Ivory stately home, walled by floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that silently creaked under the weight of a thousand tomes. A huge bay window looked out onto the little park in Merrion Square and the artists that hang their canvasses for sale on the railings around it. Behind the huge mahogany desk, Brendan had the air of a brooding bull about to charge. He muttered to himself as he flicked through reams of papers, grumbling now and again in exasperation at some discrepancy or typo or failure to follow his instructions to the letter. Finally, he gathered up the chaos of pages on his desk in a rough pile and pushed them to one side. Already in a bad mood and we hadn’t even started. Great.
My sense of foreboding had been warranted, even if I hadn’t expected what prompted it. I was late with a first draft for my publisher and I knew Brendan was shielding me from the flak; I had expected the floodgates to open. But that, it turned out, was the least of my worries, as Brendan pointed out over and over again. The problem was that I hadn’t yet paid my tax bill for the year before and the Revenue had come calling. Now, I was never top of the class when it came to the administrative side of the writing business. No, I’d be the one standing in the corner with the pointy hat staring blankly at a tax return or a royalty statement like a child with string theory. I didn’t really understand the mechanics of the money coming in and I knew it was probably going out too fast. Brendan realised early on that I had no idea how to manage my money and so he’d hired an accountant called Brian to look after my finances and to give me a rudimentary budget. It was Brian’s job to make sure I didn’t gorge like a lion on the kill of my first royalty cheque. Brian despaired of me, I think, giving me simple, almost monosyllabic instructions for any task that he couldn’t do on my behalf. One of those tasks was paying the tax bill that he had prepared for me – just paying it, just writing a cheque. The problem was that I’d invested that money in a holiday to South Africa, a new state-of-the-art sound system and quite a lot of beer. At least I had some good memories to show for all of that – and some very foggy ones too. What I didn’t have was the money to pay what I owed nor any idea where it was coming from.
Brendan was reaching the end of his tether.
“Just stop pissing about, Wilde!” he growled, when I started to make my excuses. “The money’s gone and you have until the end of the month to pay what you owe them. You’re way behind with the first draft and you’ll get no more money until you’ve hit some targets. And even then only if they stick with you that long. Let me give you the short version – you’re in deep trouble and it’s time you got your shit together.”
I couldn’t really argue – that just about summed it up.
25
The wind was blowing hard up at the lighthouse, screaming through the gaps in the buildings. Sheets of chipboard flapped and clapped, like huge hands applauding the storm. Dark clouds scudded across the sky, threatening rain that still hadn’t come. Below, white horses galloped along the tops of the waves.
I’d had a dream almost every night since I’d got back from Mitchelstown, exactly the same dream. I was walking through a shopping centre, so crowded with shoppers that I could scarcely get through the throng. I felt trapped among them, like I was only able to move as they moved, dragged to wherever they were going. Then, on an escalator at the far end of the concourse, I saw Cara. She had her back to me, going up, holding the hand of a tall man in a dark overcoat. She was wearing her dungarees and bright pink wellington boots.
“Cara,” I shouted, “Cara! Wait! Wait for me!”
But she couldn’t hear and even though the escalator was moving along, she seemed to get no closer to the top.
“Cara, wait!” I wrestled with the crowd, pushing through and clambering past faceless shoppers. They were all walking the same way but it was like I was going backwards. Finally, I got to the bottom of the escalator and grabbed the handrail, pulling myself past and through the crowd.
“Cara, it’s me! Wait!” She was closer now, I could almost touch her. Then I reached out one more time and I caught hold of the back of her dungarees. She turned to look up at me and smiled. But it wasn’t Cara. It was the cheeky smile of the little girl on the beach, grinning up at Tony but mocking me.
It wasn’t the first dream I’d had, it wasn’t the first time that my subconscious had punctuated my sleep with a meticulously crafted movie scene. Cara on the beach or Cara at the lighthouse or Cara sitting in her high chair at the table in the kitchen, her grinning face covered in whatever she was eating. In one, and it was a recurring dream, she was walking away from me along a leaf-strewn path through a wood, dappled sunlight flickering through the trees. She was older in the dream than the Cara who was taken, maybe a couple of years older, and she wore a pretty dress and coat. Maybe that Cara is the little girl I always thought she would be, a few years on. She looked alone and small, dwarfed by the trees on either side and yet she walked straight and strong. I couldn’t see her face, but I knew it was defiant. In front of her, the path seemed to go on and on. Without end. With no end in sight.
Every time I went to the lighthouse, I looked down to the beach below and expected to see the old woman in the tattered overcoat. I’d looked up the lighthouse on the Australian lights website but there hadn’t been a keeper for forty years, not since the last keeper was washed off the rocks by a freak wave. At any moment, the ocean could rise up and take everything away, the old woman had told me. You never know when it could all be taken away.
I’d neglected the lighthouse in the time since Cara had been taken, of course I had. It was partly because everything other than Cara seemed so utterly unimportant, so contemptibly trivial, and partly because the place was filled with her, with her laugh, with her babbling to her toys. I was suffocated by it. Eventually, Nathan had to lay it out for me.
“Look, mate,” he said in his matter-of-fact way, “we’ve come to a fork in the road. The next chunk of work is going to need another chunk of cash. You need to decide if you want to do that. Your heart’s not in it, I know that, and who could blame you. But you need to make the call.”
He was right, my heart definitely wasn’t in it. In fact, I would probably have been happier if the place had been blown off the cliffs and smashed on the rocks below. That would have been one less thing to worry about. I kept putting off the decision, putting off having to even think about it, but the whole thing came to a head when Pete Baxter called from the council planning depa
rtment. They knew we were running late again and, while they understood the situation, they still needed a commitment that the job was going to be finished. If I couldn’t give them a plan, they’d have to knock the place down and I’d have to pick up the cost. It was an ultimatum that I was getting used to. And so there I was, standing on the clifftop buffeted by the wind, staring up at the light. There was the sound of an engine behind me and I turned to see Nathan’s truck pulling onto the site.
“Strewth, mate,” he called out over the howling wind, holding on to his cap, “this is nuts! Maybe we should go back into town and get a coffee, eh?”
***
“So what are you thinking, Wilde?” Nathan said, stirring sugar into his coffee.
We’d come back into town and to The Pantry and the howling wind had just about abated in my head. Nathan had got us a couple of steaming mugs of strong coffee and he’d ambled through some small talk. Now he figured it was time to get to the real issue of the day.
I shrugged.
“Baxter told me how much it’ll cost to tear the place down and redo the site. I’ll have to pay for it and it’s a bloody fortune.”
“And you’ll have nothing to show for it except a plot of land with no building permission.”
“That’s it. Look, it’s not like we couldn’t afford to do that if we really had to and, I have to tell you, there are days…”
“But there’s no point throwing good money away?”
“Exactly. We’ve been here before, but it’s like the more work we do on the place the more it costs to knock it down. So we might as well keep going, even if I just end up putting it on the market when it’s finished.”
“You reckon you won’t keep it?”
“I don’t know, Nathan. I really don’t know.”
“Well, at least if we crack on you’ll give yourself a bit of time to think it over, eh?” He paused and took a mouthful of coffee. “No joy down in Adelaide, I take it?”
I shook my head.
“No. Complete dead end. There’s been a few more messages on the website but the cops have looked into them and they’re all just cranks. Everything’s dried up and I’m going crazy doing nothing.”
I leaned back in the chair.
“So what are we looking at, Nate,” I said, just to change the subject, “to finish the place?”
Nathan just whistled.
“The fact that we got it watertight, that’s massive. Otherwise, we’d have been rightly screwed. But that was only the start, you know that. There’s all of the interior work to do, the extension of the living quarters and the connection between the house and the tower. Then we have to finish the plaster outside and get the whole thing painted and weatherproofed.”
“Give me a number, Nate.”
It was a big number but the alternative was to lose a fortune. I knew that we’d been spending a lot of money and our bank balance was falling at an alarming rate. I’d made a mental note to check our finances but I hadn’t got round to it. Even so, we could cover the costs without too much trouble. It might have been good money after bad, but at least I’d have something to show for it at the end.
“And can we scale back a bit,” I asked, “without reneging on what we committed to the council?”
“A bit, yeah. I mean, you could cut back on the finish inside. I reckon there’s maybe ten or fifteen per cent in that, tops.”
“OK,” I said, “I’ll transfer the cash to the project account. Let’s get the boys back on site. I’ll talk to Baxter and let him know that we’re back up and running.”
26
I didn’t tell Nathan that Emily had left me; it was too soon and I was still trying to get my own head round it. I called her from the airport in Adelaide to let her know that the lead had proved to be a dead end and that I was on my way home. She was deflated at the news but I read nothing more into it than that. The house was empty when I got home, I guessed she must have gone into town and it never struck me as odd that her car was outside. Until I got to the bedroom. There, lying lonely on my pillow, her wedding ring and engagement ring were on top of a folded letter. I was tired and I had to stand still for a moment to grasp what had happened. Emily had left? No. Emily had left me. I picked up the rings as if I was afraid they would break in my fingers and opened the letter.
My darling Wilde,
Since you came into my life, I’ve never wanted anything in that life other than to grow old with you and to live every day with you by my side. That’s still what I want, all I want, but I know now that I’ve lost you. You’re still here with me, by my side, but really you went away the night we lost Cara. You will always blame me, you will never forgive me. I lost my daughter too, but you don’t think that I deserve to grieve. So I’m going away so that you can get on with your life and maybe I can get on with mine. I’ll send someone for my things when I get settled somewhere. Please don’t come looking for me – this is hard enough already and we don’t need more fighting and more shouting and more hurting each other.
We’re hurt enough.
With love,
Emily
I had to read it two or three times before I could understand what the words on the page were saying to me. It was like deciphering a foreign language, translating the words and putting them together to arrive at a sentence that didn’t make sense. I slumped onto the bed under the weight of them. In the relatively short time we’d been together, we had had the usual rows and quarrels that come with learning how to be together. But in that time, we had never really fought and I had never felt that she might leave me or that I might ever want to leave her. We’d argued but then we’d always worked it out because we’d always known we could work it out. I had never really had to think about it and so I couldn’t imagine living a life that didn’t have her in it. It was true, there had been some fighting in the days after I’d learned the truth about that night. We’d both shouted and said some things we shouldn’t have said, things we didn’t really mean. Even so, Emily’s note was a bolt from the blue.
I called her phone, of course, but it was switched off so I left her a voicemail and a text message and sent her an email. I should have been more worried but, to be honest, I fully expected to hear a car crunching on the gravel at any moment and for a contrite Emily to climb out of a cab. So I started up my laptop and checked the website for messages about Cara. Then I trawled through the same message boards and forums for any clues and then checked my emails. That’s when I saw that my note to Emily had been returned undelivered – the only reason I could think of was that she had closed her email account. I sent another note but with the same result, unknown recipient. I tried her phone again and this time, instead of going to voicemail, a recorded message told me the number had been disconnected. This wasn’t just some spur-of-the-moment stunt, she was really covering her tracks. Now I was starting to get worried. For the first time maybe since I’d met Emily, I had no idea where she was and no way of finding her.
I ran up to the bedroom and checked her wardrobe. I couldn’t really tell what was gone because I didn’t really know what had been there to start with, but the blue leather tote bag was gone from the press on the landing. It wasn’t a big bag so she couldn’t have taken much. I checked the bedside locker and, sure enough, her contact lenses were gone along with all of the paraphernalia that goes with them. And her passport wasn’t there.
Then it struck me that she might have left some instructions with Karl to look after the vines, he might have some idea what she had been planning.
“Hey, Karl,” I said, when he answered his phone, “listen, Emily’s gone away for a couple of days and I just wanted to check if she’d asked you to do anything, you know, anything that needs to be done while she’s gone?”
“No,” he said, and he sounded genuinely surprised, “she didn’t say anything to me. I mean, I’ve got the usual list of what has to
be done but it’s not a lot to be honest, we’ve been flat out getting the place in shape for a few weeks now so it’s just the usual stuff really. Is there a problem?”
“No, no problem. Thanks, mate. See you tomorrow, then?”
“Yeah, see you tomorrow.”
So she’d been “getting the place in shape for a few weeks”? Was this in her head all that time? I tried to remember how she’d been, if there’d been any clue, but I honestly couldn’t remember. I thought about going to Sergeant Willis but how would it look if I went there and told them she’d just left, packed a bag and taken off? That would be just the thing they’d want to hear. Then it hit me – money! She’d need money and so she’d have to use her cards. One of the things Brian had drummed into me was the need to control our cash. I’d never had an online banking account before – I didn’t really need a website to tell me I had no money – but Brian set me up and showed me how to use it. With more money to manage when we came to Australia, I set up another online account with the bank here when we moved. All of our accounts were joint accounts so if Emily had used her card, I’d be able to see where she was.
I logged on to the bank’s site and went through her cards. Sure enough, a week before, she’d bought a plane ticket to Sydney and, that morning, she’d withdrawn cash from an ATM in the city. She’d had a coffee and bought a book. There was a charge from Hotels.com too, but I couldn’t see what hotel it was for. Fuck it! I knew she was in Sydney but Sydney is a big place – without knowing where she was staying it was useless.
I went onto the Hotels.com website and put her email address into the Username box. I sat back and tried to think – what would she use as a password? I tried all of the usual suspects – her birthday, my birthday… Cara’s birthday… but no joy. Then I remembered her email password – mickeymou5e. I clicked ‘forgot password’ and the site told me it would send a new password to the registered email account. I logged into her email, typed in her address and the password and… Username unknown. Of course, she’d cancelled the account. I thumped the desk and the little pot of pens hopped up and crashed to the floor.