by Tim Buckley
“Hey,” she says, softly. “What are you doing?”
I shrug.
“Nothing. Just sitting. I’m just… sitting.”
She walks over, gathers up her long skirt under her and sits down on the floor beside me, arms around her knees. We sit there in silence for a while.
“Is it the vines?” I say, after a while. “Is it really the vines that are keeping you here?”
She doesn’t look at me, but shakes her head.
“Why didn’t you say?” I ask.
She says nothing for a moment, doesn’t move, then she looks at me.
“Because you’d have told me I was hanging on to the past,” she says, and there’s frustration in her voice. “You’d have told me that I had to let go, that we have to move on, just like the psychiatrist told me, just like everybody keeps telling me. ‘Move on, Emily, it’s not your fault, Emily, live your life, Emily, there’s no point in staying here.’”
She shakes her head and rubs the back of her neck.
“But this is all we have left. This is the only place I can be near her. And I keep thinking – what if she comes back, Wilde? What if some day she comes back and we’re not here? How will she find us? I know that’s stupid, but I can’t bear that she would think we just… moved on.”
We sit in silence again, broken only by the chime of the clock downstairs. I don’t know what to say now. I’ve been so angry at her thoughtlessness, at her selfish refusal to sell this place, but I was wrong. Has she been coming in here every day, sitting here like this, just to get a bit closer to her? Just to touch something she has touched, because that’s as close as we can get now? Touching by proxy.
“I love her,” Emily says, suddenly, “you know that, don’t you?”
She’s taken me by surprise. I’m not sure where this is going or what I’m supposed to say.
“I know.”
She shakes her head.
“I don’t think you do. I don’t blame you for it, but I don’t think you know. Everybody thinks I’m a cold-hearted bitch—”
“Nobody thinks that, Emily—”
“They do, they think that I’m not a real mother, that I don’t feel what a real mother is supposed to feel. And I know I haven’t always got it right, but that’s just because I’ve been so scared of getting it wrong. I’m scared of hurting her or harming her or doing something stupid. I love her so much, I never want to make her unhappy. But I’m scared that I will.”
She looks around the room.
“Do you think about her all the time?” she says.
I nod.
“All the time,” I say.
“But how much? Like every day when you wake up, or every hour, or…?”
“No, all the time. She’s in my head all the time. It’s like she lives in my head and watches all the other stuff go through it. When I’m working or when I remember to pick up some milk from the shop or when I think of a joke I heard, she’s there watching it all, nodding or smiling at my thoughts. She’s always there. I need her there.”
There’s a pause and when she speaks again her voice is a whisper.
“I’m so scared I’ll forget things, Wilde. Scared that if I forget anything, I’ve lost it forever. I’m so scared that I’ll forget her voice, what she sounds like. And I will forget, you know? I can’t remember my grandmother’s voice, I can’t remember what she sounded like. I know that when I think of her and the things she used to say, I know that I’m dubbing the memories. I can’t remember, and some day I’m going to wake up and I won’t remember Cara’s voice. And when that happens, there will be no way to get it back.”
I know exactly what she means, I dread that day too.
“Do you think…” I start the question but I don’t know what words to use. “Do you still think that, one day… Do you still believe, really believe, that… that we’ll find her? That we might find her? That she’s OK, out there somewhere? Or even that she’ll grow up and somehow find out about us and she might look for us?”
She nods.
“I do. I think I do. But I’m scared that some day I might not. Do you?”
I think I do, but I’m not going to tell her that I’m not sure. I do think that she’s still out there somewhere, maybe in this country, maybe not. What I can’t say for sure is if I think we’ll ever see her again. But I can’t tell Emily that. She deserves my certainty that there will be an end to this nightmare. So I nod.
“I do.” I run my hand over the pink bedcover on her cot, it’s soft and cool to the touch. I leave my hand there. “You know what scares me the most, though? That I wouldn’t recognise her. That she could walk up to me some day and I wouldn’t know who she was.”
She shakes her head.
“You’d know her, of course you would.”
“But how? Even now, she’s going to look different. She’ll have grown up, her hair will be longer, you know what it’s like. Remember when Kim had her baby, little Conor? Look at a picture of him today and one from when he was two or three – he’s like a different child. I wouldn’t recognise him now and we used to see him all the time. In another few years, Cara will have grown up, she’ll have changed too.”
“You’d know her, Wilde. In a crowd or on her own, in a picture or on the TV, she’s our little one. We know every freckle on her face, every mannerism, you’d know her straightaway. You’d pick her out of a crowd. The way she would carry herself, or the way she would angle her head or laugh. You’d know her, of course you would.”
I don’t labour the point, there’s no point. I think she’s deluding herself and there’s no way I’m going there. She knows that so she says nothing either, she doesn’t want to make me say what she doesn’t want to hear.
“I’m not afraid of that,” she says, after a few moments and my head is so full that I have to think back to remember what she’s talking about. “But I am afraid that, if I was in the shopping mall and I didn’t see her in the crowd, that she wouldn’t recognise me. She might see me, if she was there with somebody else, and she wouldn’t know to call out to me. I might pass within a few feet of her, and she wouldn’t know because I’d just be another stranger in a crowd. Any time I’m in a crowd of people, I’m always looking out for her. But I can’t see every child in a crowd, so maybe I wouldn’t see her. Maybe… I’ve missed her already… Maybe she saw me and didn’t know… didn’t know to cry out to me…”
Her body seems to lose its rigidity and she sags into a heap, sobbing softly into her sleeve. I lean over to her and put my arm around her pulling her to me. She is trembling noiselessly. This is what it’s like, every day. Wondering where she is and what she’s doing. Who is with her, what she looks like. One of the detectives, back in those early first days, told me that, often, abducted children are taken out of the country, to somewhere out of the way or to somewhere they could go unnoticed, maybe New Zealand or the US or Europe. Maybe she doesn’t even speak English, maybe the few words she had have been lost in the past. Maybe… The thoughts chasing around my head threaten to drive me mad, just the noise of them.
58
I had a shower and put the bloodied clothes I was wearing through the wash twice before I stopped moving and it was then that the enormity of the night’s events finally hit me. But I wasn’t overwhelmed by them, for some reason. I didn’t want to scream or cry or roll up in the foetal position on the bed, I wasn’t overcome with guilt nor was I at a loss to know what to do next. In fact, I was quite sanguine about the drama that had just unfolded. I no longer had to worry about a violent threat to the vineyard or to the house or, more importantly, to Emily. I should have been struggling with the fact that I’d taken a life and that, no matter how little I thought of Cooper, a life was never mine to take. I should have been, but I wasn’t. Cooper had gone there to do harm. He was likely going to kill Mitch and then he would probably have killed me. What I�
��d done, I’d done in self-defence and to defend Mitch. If Cooper had met a violent end, nobody could deny that he’d had it coming.
The sun was up and I made a coffee to take out onto the balcony. The morning was bright and warm and the sea glistened in the early light. The effect of the adrenaline was wearing off and I was feeling the lack of sleep and the effects of Cooper’s punches. He’d really only got me with one to the face before Mitch had tackled him and so I didn’t look too bad, just a bit of swelling and a dark ring under my eye. But I had to go on as usual and I had to get over to the lighthouse, so I got dressed and called a cab to come from Clovelly so that I could pick up my car from town. Then I drove over to the lighthouse.
There was nobody at the site when I got there, it was still early, so I made myself another coffee and sat looking out to sea. I’d never warmed to Bryce Cooper while he’d worked here, but then I never really knew him. Nathan had hired him on the back of a reference from a guy he used to know in Perth and who had employed Cooper on a site in Fremantle. He wasn’t a bad worker and he was as strong as a bull ox, which was really all that mattered. He had spotted an opportunity to get more money when he and the other three had left the job and then he’d tried to turn the screw by demanding more from me to bring them back. All of that had pissed me off, there was no doubt, but I couldn’t really blame him and I would probably have got past it, in time. I’d obviously pissed him off too and it was what he’d done after that – and what he had still been prepared to do – that I couldn’t forgive. Now he was gone and nobody knew, and I had to go on as normal and show no sign of it to the rest of the world.
Nathan, as usual, got there before the rest of the boys and he was clearly surprised to see me there at that hour. He was even more surprised when he saw the side of my face.
“Bloody hell, Wilde,” he said, “what happened to you?!”
“This?” I touched the side of my face and recoiled a bit when it stung. “It’s nothing. Mitch and I had a little… disagreement last night, got a bit out of hand.”
“Shit! Do you want me and the boys to have a chat to him?”
“No, no, no, no, no… It’s fine, Nathan, really. To be honest, it was as much my fault as it was his, six of one, half a dozen of the other. We sorted it out and we’re mates again. Nothing to worry about.”
He looked sceptical, and my attempt to make light of it sounded a bit hollow, even to me.
“What was it about?” he said. “You boys seemed OK leaving the pub?”
I resisted the temptation to fabricate a complicated story that would surely unravel later, so I just shook my head.
“It was nothing, really. All forgotten now so let’s move on, eh?”
He held his hands up.
“You’re the boss,” he said, with a smile. “What do you want to tell the boys?”
“Just that I got in a bit of a scrape last night. Nothing else. They’ll probably find out in time, but no need to elaborate today.”
He poured himself a coffee and refilled mine.
“You really are full of surprises, aren’t you?” he said. “Didn’t have you down for a scrapper!”
“I used to run away but I’m not fast enough anymore! Listen, Nate, I’ll tell the guys about the objection when they get here, OK?”
Nathan nodded.
“If you’re sure, Wilde.”
“I am.”
“What did Farnham say?”
I blew my cheeks out and shook my head. I talked him through what Farnham had told me and the upshot of it all.
“In a nutshell, I’m screwed. He says we can fight it, rely on precedent to get the court to quash the objection, but I don’t think he’s very hopeful. In any event, he doesn’t think it will all take long so we should have an answer soon enough.”
There was the sound of an engine down the track and Robbie’s truck appeared by the gate. The four boys climbed out and went round to the back to get their kit then came up to the little kitchen that was the hub of activity on the site. Ben let out a whistle when he saw my face.
“Strewth, boss,” he said, “what happened to you?”
“Aw, just had a bit of a disagreement with a bloke last night, Ben. You should see him, though!” They sniggered, probably more at the thought that I could have won a fight than at the joke, and then I gathered them round to tell them the news. “So listen, guys, there’s something I need to tell you. You’ve all been loyal to me, stuck with me through everything that’s happened, and I appreciate it. That’s why I’m telling you this now. Someone’s lodged a planning objection with the council. They’re threatening to shut us down. I’ve talked to a lawyer and we’re going to fight it, but there’s no guarantee we’ll win. The bottom line is that we might be forced to shut up shop, and I wanted you guys to know that now and not when they close us down, if it comes to that.”
There was silence while they let it soak in, then they had questions they were clearly uncomfortable asking me. Robbie eventually took on the role of spokesman.
“How long do we have? If they close us down, I mean.”
“Two weeks, I’d say. Maybe three.”
“Who objected?” Ben asked, emboldened by Robbie’s lead. “We haven’t done anything wrong.”
“The plan for the site included a public right of way. It was a mistake on the plans. When you take it out, the footprint of the building is too big.”
“But they said the plans were good, didn’t they? The council said they were OK.”
“They did, but at the end of the day it’s our responsibility – it’s my responsibility – to make sure it’s all in order. I just missed it.”
“So what do you think the odds are? That they’ll shut us down?” Jason asked what they all wanted to know.
I raised my eyebrows and took a breath.
“Honestly? I have no idea. But I think there’s a good chance we’ll lose. So look, all I can ask is this… I know you guys need to work and there’s a lot of work out there. I understand if you want to check out what’s available, but I’d just ask you to hold off taking anything else until at least we have a better idea what’s likely to happen. Give me a week and I’ll come back to you with an update. If I hear anything meantime, you’ll be first to know, I promise.”
There was shuffling of feet and furtive looks thrown between them and it was clear they wanted to talk about it among themselves and out of our earshot.
“All right, guys,” Nathan said, “take fifteen and grab a coffee and then let’s get to work, OK?”
They wandered off and Nathan went to get something from his car. Left to myself, I stared out to sea and thought of Cooper’s body somewhere out there under the waves. Leewara wasn’t far down the coast, he might even have drifted up to where I was looking. I felt strangely at peace with what had happened but I was afraid that it still hadn’t sunk in and that the real reaction was yet to come. I had done no more than defend my friend and my property and I was OK with that. More than my conscience, however, what was gnawing at me was the prospect of getting caught. We’d tied up the loose ends but now that I’d had time to think, doubts were popping up in my head. Cooper’s backpack, for example, had Mitch wrapped it up with the body? And had he cleaned the blood off the baseball bat? I remembered the tyre tracks that we thought might lead us to Cara and it struck me that we might have to explain Mitch’s tracks in our quadrangle.
“You all right, mate?” Nathan had come back and was looking at me with concern on his face. “You look a bit distracted. Are you sure this thing with Mitch is all sorted?”
I nodded.
“It’s not that, Nathan,” I said, “it’s just… well, it’s everything, to be honest. Cara, this place, Emily… I’ve got a lot going on, you know?”
He nodded and put a hand on my shoulder.
“I know, mate, and you know me and Carly are here if th
ere’s anything you need, right?”
At least nobody was going to be suspicious if I seemed worried or preoccupied. I reached into my laptop bag and pulled out some plans of the lighthouse and the site.
“I said I’d get back to Baxter with some ideas, Nathan,” I said, smoothing out the papers on a makeshift table and laying stones on the corners to keep them from lifting in the breeze. “Ideas to reduce the footprint. Let’s see if we can come up with a fantasy that they might actually fall for, eh?”
59
It was a pointless task and it yielded the nothing that I knew it would. The only way we could reduce the footprint was by taking the roof off the cottage and moving one of the walls in by a couple of metres. That meant knocking down one wall and shearing a couple of metres off the two adjacent walls. It wasn’t even obvious that we could do that without taking out those two walls as well, then rebuilding them, replacing the windows and putting the top back on the whole thing. The floor inside would have to be lifted and re-edged and the kitchen, which of course was at that end, would have to be re-plumbed and reinstalled. Nathan and I threw a few numbers down on the page but even before we added them up, it was clear that I couldn’t afford the outlay and that the process would take a couple of months with a reduced crew. I gathered up the papers and stuffed them back in the bag. Those plans used to be my pride and joy but I’d gone past caring if they were dog-eared or torn at the folds or stained with tea or coffee. It wasn’t like it fucking mattered anyway.
All of which meant the meeting with Baxter was as short as it was always going to be. The only way I could do what they were asking – demanding – was if they put up some of the money to finance it. Baxter didn’t even have to take that to a meeting of some sanctimonious subcommittee for debate, he told me there was no chance that was going to happen, ever.
“So what happens now?” I asked him.
“I guess we go to court,” he said and, in fairness to him, I could tell he felt bad. Not take-it-home-from-work-and-stop-him-sleeping bad but if he could have changed the circumstances, I think he would. “The council applies for repossession and they’ll start taking it down.”