by Tim Buckley
Emily took the phone from me and started reading it again, maybe to be sure it was real and not some bad dream. I sat back in my seat, head in my hands, with a groan. How had I failed to see this coming? How had I missed the signs when Napier was casually drinking my coffee? But honestly, even with the benefit of hindsight, I’m not sure I’d ever have seen it coming. Sure, I knew I had to be careful, I knew that there were holes in the chain of events that might trip us up. But I thought this was a genuine human interest story that any newspaper would look to carry, and we were hardly the celebrity-types to generate the kind of salacious gossip that would titillate the Observer’s readership. We were ordinary unknowns, and it made no sense that they would want to villainise us. He’d somehow dug up the truth but the truth told a lie. Sure, I’d been to the pub, but I wasn’t pissed and I didn’t have to be dragged from the driver’s seat of my car. Sure, I’d said that the town had moved on, but I’d never suggested that there was any malice in that. Sure, we’d had a windfall and set about creating a new life, but not with the arrogant entitlement he’d suggested. The one thing we’d been guilty of, the one thing for which we should have been demonised, was that we’d left our baby alone in the house that night. He hadn’t even uncovered that fact and yet he’d nailed us to our crosses anyway.
“That explains the odd looks we’ve been getting,” I said. “This must be all over town.”
Bobby grimaced and shook her head.
“I hate to tell you, Wilde, but first place I saw it was a link on Facebook. This town loves a bit of local scandal, it’s going to spread like a bushfire.”
Emily finished reading and put the phone down on the table.
“I just need to go to the bathroom,” she said, quietly.
I watched her go and I wanted to go after her, to tell her it’d be OK, that I’d fix it. But I knew her well enough to know when she needed to be alone and, in any case, I wasn’t sure what I could do to make this better.
“What are you going to do?” Bobby asked, reading my mind.
I shrugged.
“I don’t know. I haven’t a clue. I’ll have to go up there, talk to him face to face.”
“You think that’ll do any good? He’s not going to change his story, is he? Anyway, what’s out there is out there. You can’t make it ‘not’ out there.”
“I don’t have a choice. I can’t just let this lie, can I? I have to do something.”
And so I ended up back in the jeep and, having dropped Emily home, back on the road north. This time I passed Mandurah and Rockingham and took the highway for the Swan River crossing and Perth city centre. We’d taken Cara to Rockingham to see the dolphins the summer before. She’d become obsessed with dolphins after watching an animated film about a mermaid. Often, when we went to the lighthouse, she would stand by the window staring at the sea below, willing them to jump out of the water and sparkle in the sunshine. Sometimes she would convince herself that she’d seen them and I’d stand beside her, pretending to see them too as they danced and played in the waves.
The tour out of Rockingham didn’t normally allow small children and so we’d booked the whole boat so that she would be allowed on board. In light of Napier’s article, that was perhaps the kind of thing that earned us the “entitled” tag, but we hadn’t done it to flaunt our wealth nor to avoid other people, we did it simply to let Cara have an experience that she wouldn’t otherwise have had. We’d bought her a kid’s wetsuit and lifejacket and we headed off out of the harbour and out to the ocean proper. Cara was used to the sea and so I’d assumed she would be happy in the boat, but it turns out that happy beside the sea and happy on it and far from land are two very different things, or at least they were for Cara. Added to that, it turned out she was prone to seasickness. We were about to call the whole thing off and ask the crew to take us back in when one of them spotted a pod a couple of hundred metres away.
“What do you reckon?” Dolphin Boy asked. “Think we should take her closer?”
Dolphin Boy was the name they’d given to Kyle, a scrawny, tanned kid with bleached blond hair that straggled to his bony shoulders. His job was to get into the water with the dolphins and see if they wanted to play. He had a handheld motor screw which acted like an underwater jet ski and allowed him to keep up with the pod and to play among them. Sometimes they weren’t interested and, if that was the case, they were not to be bothered but rather they were to be left alone to get on with feeding or nursing or mating or whatever it was that was keeping them occupied. More often than not, however, they loved the human company and they would dance around him and show off to the delighted spectators in the boat.
So it was that day. We decided to take the risk and stay out, taking the boat closer to the pod. Dolphin Boy leapt off the side and started racing and chasing and pirouetting among the dolphins and they, in turn, started copying his movements and breaking the surface of the water beside the boat. All of Cara’s fear and nausea evaporated in an instant as she squealed in delight at the show that was unfolding a few feet away. Suddenly, among the pod, we could see a young calf sticking close to its mother’s side.
“It’s Fluff!” Cara squealed, after the little stuffed toy she’d got from some of our travels. “Fluff with the doffins!”
We sat there for another ten or fifteen minutes and she was transfixed, unable to speak for the excitement of it all. Eventually, the pod had enough and moved off at such a pace that even Dolphin Boy’s motor screw couldn’t hope to keep up, and so we waved them off and headed back for Rockingham.
Rockingham. Every road sign that announced the name kicked me hard in the stomach.
I crossed the Narrows Bridge and made my way downtown towards Barrack Street where the Observer had its offices. It was a new building, all steel and glass, looking out over Elizabeth Quay and the Swan River. The reception area stretched up to the roof like an inverted cone, with each mezzanine floor looking down over shiny balustrades.
“Hi, I’m here to see David Napier,” I said to one of the three receptionists.
“And what’s the name, sir?”
“Wilde.”
“And you have an appointment, Mr Wilde?”
“Er, yes. Yes, I do.”
“No problem,” she smiled, “if you just take a seat I’ll let him know you’re here.”
I walked over towards the window and sat with my back to the reception desk, looking out over the water, past the wine-bottle green aiguille of the bell tower and the S-shaped squiggle of the bridge. I was, I realised, pushing my luck. These impulsive wild goose chases had taken me to Mitchelstown, to Carter’s office in Mandurah, to Toby and his sordid affair and now to here. I hadn’t wanted to give Napier any warning that I was coming, but there was every chance that he’d be away from the office, off making up stories to destroy somebody else’s life. Even if he was here, he didn’t have to see me if he didn’t want to and, I had to admit, there was little enough reason for him to want to. I was all but readying myself for the three-hour drive home, when the receptionist came over.
“Mr Wilde? I’m afraid there’s been some sort of misunderstanding,” she said, looking apologetic. “Mr Napier has no record of your appointment and he’s out of the office right now. He said he’d be back later, he’s not sure when, but if you leave him your mobile number and if you don’t mind staying close by, he’ll give you a call when he gets back so you can meet up?”
I gave her my number and made my way out into the sunshine. I wasn’t really in the mood for food or coffee and, though I’d have loved a beer, I had to think of the drive home. Besides, I didn’t need Napier smelling more alcohol off my breath. So I wandered into the gardens around the government buildings and sat down on a bench overlooking a lawn where some old folks were playing bowls. The knock of wood on wood echoed in the stillness of the trees, with the odd clap or shout of congratulation or commiseration. There was a bowls
club in Thurles when I was growing up and we passed it sometimes on our way into or home from town. In the unspoken sectarianism of the day, it was the haunt of the town’s Protestant community and their dwindling population meant that the numbers on the lawn grew steadily smaller and older. Not that he would ever say it, but Eoin’s contempt for the well-to-do with nothing better to do was clear and somehow I inherited his bias without ever really giving it any thought. When I was a kid, bowls was a game for the affluent and the crusty and the nearly dead.
There’s not much new in life, I suppose. We don’t have many revelations that a million people before us haven’t had, we don’t make many original decisions and we don’t go through many unique transformations that generations of our forefathers haven’t thought were original and unique when they made them or when they went through them. One of those transformations, I’ve found, is that much of what I considered dull and humdrum when I was young feels strangely, appealingly comfortable now that I’m older. As I watched them bowl that afternoon, it wasn’t that I wanted to be one of them or to be already their age, but I did envy them the stability of their lives. I envied them knowing who they were and being comfortable with it, being happy in the company of their husbands and wives and friends, knowing that they would be there to the end. I know age brings its own troubles and, believe me, I dread getting old. But I had always thought that Emily and I would grow old and content together. I never thought we’d be in a bowling club or a golf club or a bridge club, but I assumed that we’d be together and happier for it. With everything that had happened, it felt like that platform had been ripped from under my feet and there was no certainty anymore, no sense of a comfortable future. So I watched them bowl and I envied them a little bit.
I’d been sitting there for a long while and I was starting to give up on Napier when my phone rang.
“Mr Wilde? It’s David Napier. I’m sorry I’ve taken so long to get back to you but I’m in meetings all day today. But look, I have an hour free now if you’re still in town? There’s a little café across from my office, The Bookshelf, meet you there in, say, fifteen minutes?”
The Bookshelf, I guess, is a bit of a media haunt. There are a couple of other newspapers based around the Observer and the café was full of hungry-looking types with shifty eyes. Or maybe that was just what it looked like to my suspicious mind. I felt like I was being followed by a hundred of those eyes as I walked over to the table where Napier was sitting.
“Mr Wilde,” he said, getting to his feet and reaching out a hand, “it’s good to see you again.”
I stopped and stared in disbelief at his outstretched hand. Did he think we were mates? Had he forgotten what he’d written about me, about Emily? I ignored his hand and sat down.
“What the fuck were you thinking, Napier?” I growled at him, trying to resist the urge to shout. “You’ve painted us as monsters, you fucking bastard. What the fuck were you thinking?”
“Look, Mr Wilde,” he said, “you weren’t exactly straight with me…”
“Are you saying I lied?!” I said and failed to stifle all of the anger I felt so that a couple of hacks at the table next to ours turned to look at us without trying to hide their curiosity.
“No, no I’m not. But you didn’t tell me all of the truth, did you? And that’s the same thing, in my book. You didn’t tell me that you were out drinking that night. You didn’t tell me that Emily had run away. You didn’t tell me that you’d come here after winning the Lottery…”
“What the hell does that have to do with anything?!”
“It’s all part of the whole, Mr Wilde, and if I’m going to tell a story then it’s important to tell the whole story.”
“And what about the rest? I never said people didn’t care! And what about Emily’s vineyard? And about my writing? And who told you I’d had a go at him in the café? It was that little bastard Gretz, wasn’t it?”
“Listen to yourself, Wilde,” he said, quietly. “You have to understand that people make up their minds, take positions on things, especially when your head rises above the parapet. You guys have kept yourselves to yourselves, and that’s fine. But then you have to accept that people will make up their own minds without really knowing you. The less they know you, the more aloof – and arrogant – they might think you. I’m not saying I agree with them, but they have an opinion and, like I say, I have to tell the whole story. I didn’t say anything that wasn’t true or didn’t represent people’s points of view.”
I hated to admit it, but he was right. I’d probably have done the same in his shoes. The irony was that, in trying to keep from him the facts that might make us look bad, I had probably contributed to the narrative that would do just that.
“You have to remember why we’re doing this, Wilde,” he said.
“To sell more papers, I assume,” I said, bitterly, childishly.
“No, to get Cara’s face into the public consciousness again. That’s what this is all about, remember, getting her out there again and into people’s minds. It might not be the weekend supplement but this is a full-page feature in a national newspaper. I could have written just another article about how tragic it all is and it would just have drifted right over their heads. People would nod sympathetically and then go straight to the sports pages. So we have to make it interesting, and a bit of conflict is always interesting to people. Scandal, money, controversy, upstarts being put in their place – that’s what makes people read the story. And if that’s what it takes, then isn’t that what you should be doing? Even if it makes life a bit uncomfortable for you?”
I didn’t want to admit it, I wanted to stay angry, but I could see his point of view, of course I could. I had to admit, too, that while his version of events might have been a different colour to mine, he hadn’t lied or made anything up.
“But you’ve painted us as assholes,” I said. “Who’s going to want to help us after this?”
He shook his head.
“That’s not the way it works. This will keep people talking about her and, if anybody has information that might help a child, they’re not going to keep it to themselves just because they don’t like you.”
“But you sat in my house pretending to be on our side, then you buried the knife in my back and twisted it. You might not have said anything that wasn’t true, but you might as well have lied to me.”
He took a breath and nodded, contritely.
“I know,” he said, “and for that I’m sorry. I didn’t want to shaft you, but what could I do? I’ve got a job to do, and we can’t get approval for every piece from everybody affected by it. Look, I am on your side. Let’s see what comes out of the woodwork off the back of this, yeah? We’ve already had a big response to the story so there’s every chance we might get a hit.” He looked at his watch. “I have to go, Wilde. But I’ll call you if we get anything, I promise.”
He stood up and picked up his briefcase and this time I did shake his hand. He’d hurt us, that’s for sure, but maybe it would all prove worthwhile in the end.
34
I’d hoped that all of the talk about a curse at the lighthouse would just die out in the end, but it wasn’t looking like we were going to be so lucky. The mood had changed up at the site and where the place used to ring out with banter and laughing and tuneless whistling, there was a dark silence up there now punctuated by bad-tempered snarling and grumbling. Maybe I was just imagining it, but it felt like nobody really wanted to be there and Nathan said he’d had a few problems with workers not turning up. Two of our best guys who’d been there longest had even got into a row over the milk at the coffee station and started to batter each other until Nathan doused them with a power hose. Everybody knew that Stevie wasn’t making much progress in the hospital and that didn’t help matters.
Despite the atmosphere, or maybe even because of it, we were making reasonable progress. The revised plan that we’d
submitted to the council was on track – or at least not too far off track – and we were looking good for the interim inspection that Pete Baxter was due to carry out early the following week. But even still, it wasn’t a very pleasant place to be and I missed the days when I used to go up there for a bit of light relief, when Cara and I would wander round, getting in the way and watching the transformation of the old place.
It hadn’t occurred to me that the crew might have been in any way affected by Cara’s disappearance, but something Robbie said made me realise that they, too, felt her absence. It was the day after I’d gone to see Napier in Perth and I’d gone up there just because it felt like I’d been avoiding the place. I was sitting outside the cottage reading the paper when he came over to ask me if I knew when Nathan was coming out to the site.
“I think he said he’d be out in the afternoon,” I said, “he was doing something up in Bunbury, I think. Anything I can help with?”
He shook his head.
“It’s not important,” he said, “just want to make sure he’s ordered more render.”
He was about to walk away, but he turned back, and hesitated.
“Any news about the little one?” he asked, looking at his feet and avoiding my eyes.
I put the paper down.
“No, Robbie, no news.”
“Sorry to ask, mate,” he said. “You must miss her. We all do.”
He nodded to himself and went slowly back to where he was working.
I’m not superstitious, but I could see how the chain of events on the site might weigh on the workers’ minds. I hadn’t really thought about it until then, but Robbie made me realise that they’d gotten used to Cara, gotten to know her almost. And she knew them too, had grown more comfortable with them and around them, less coy when they spoke to her or joked with her or tousled her hair. She took a shine to Robbie in particular. He was building a little wall to enclose some of the machinery units outside the cottage – the pump, the air conditioning and the like – and he was methodically trowelling the cement and then laying the bricks one by one. Cara had been standing staring at him for a few minutes before he noticed, eyes wide and swaying to whatever tune he was whistling. Robbie didn’t have kids, didn’t really know much about them, but he was tickled by her fascination.