by Tim Buckley
“Hey,” she said, taking my elbow and kissing me on both cheeks like a friend.
“Hey,” I said, all of the casual detachment I’d been practising evaporating in her presence. “Usual?”
She nodded and took a seat at a table in the corner. I watched her check her phone and then pick up a magazine from the table which she flicked through impatiently and discarded where she’d found it. She seemed like she was in hurry and it made my stomach tighten. Gemma handed me the coffees and I took them over to the table.
“So, how are you?” I said, brushing some imaginary crumbs off the chair and sitting down across from her.
“I’m OK. You?”
“OK, I guess.”
As though choreographed, we took sips from our mugs, put them back on the table and looked around the café, in perfect harmony. If there is a God, he must think he’s hilarious. I couldn’t think of anything to say that didn’t sound stilted or false and so I just dived in.
“The council has repossessed the lighthouse,” I said. “They’re going to knock it down. There was a hearing in court in Bunbury and the judge found me liable for all of the costs of demolition. Cecil Farnham is negotiating with them, he’s going to try to keep the number as low as he can, but it’s going to be a lot, no matter what he does. I know we haven’t talked about what we’re going to do about money, but I just thought you should know. I’d appreciate it if you could, you know, be careful.”
She nodded.
“I am being careful, Wilde,” she said, firmly. “I’m only spending what I have to spend.” She paused. “And I’ve sold the sheep.”
“What?” I was genuinely stunned. “The babydolls? Why?”
She shrugged.
“They’ve been sick a lot and it’s been costing a lot of money in vet’s bills. I don’t know if it’s because of… what happened, the vet says they seem agitated and they’re not eating properly. So, I’ve sold them. To a petting zoo in Dunsborough.”
I felt like a shit, like I’d shot Lassie. I didn’t want her wasting money, but I didn’t want her to hurt.
“I’m sorry, Emily, I know how you… that must have been hard. And I wasn’t trying to suggest that you weren’t being careful. I just wanted you to know.”
She nodded again.
“OK.” She thought for a moment. “What are we going to do?” she said. “About the money, I mean?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t even thought about it, to be honest. We could just split it fifty-fifty, I suppose? Put it in accounts in our own names? I suppose we’ll have to get a lawyer involved eventually but I can’t even pay Cecil for what he’s done about the lighthouse. I can’t afford to pay him for anything else right now.”
“We don’t have to move it, do we? We could just leave it where it is. I’ll keep my card and you keep yours.”
It was surreal to think about us carrying on with our lives apart but still behaving like a married couple, but in the absence of a sensible alternative, I couldn’t really argue with her.
“Sure,” I shrugged. “Why not?”
She looked at her watch.
“Was that it?” she said. “I’ve got some things to do, so…”
“Er, yeah, that was it. Thanks for coming in.”
“Sure.”
She finished her coffee and stood up to leave.
“See you, Wilde.”
“Yeah, see you, Em.”
***
I sat there for a while, nursing the cold coffee, relieved that there hadn’t been a row but reminded as well that we hadn’t even begun to figure out what we were going to do, how we were going to extricate ourselves from the union that had come to define us both. I missed her terribly but I was still angry with her and I couldn’t see that anger ever fading. I missed her but I knew that what I really missed was the way we used to be and we could never be that way again. I drank what was left of the coffee with a grimace and headed for home. I was walking along the beachfront to where I’d parked the jeep when Sergeant Willis called over to me from the far side of the street.
“Wilde, just the man I wanted to see,” he panted, out of breath after dashing through the traffic to cross the street. “I was just heading out your way, actually.”
“What can I do for you, Sergeant? Is it about Cara?”
“Actually no, it’s about Bryce Cooper.”
My stomach lurched so hard I felt sure he could see it and it took a moment before I could trust myself to speak.
“Bryce Cooper? What about him?”
“He used to work for you, didn’t he? At the lighthouse?”
“Yes, he did. But he quit a while back.” I said as little as I needed to because I didn’t trust the words not to trip me up.
“Not your best mate, I’ve heard?” he said, and only the sly smile with which he said it saved me from panicking even more.
“I guess.”
“Thing is, he’s gone missing. He had a couple of outstanding tickets for disorderly conduct, breach of the peace, that sort of thing. Nothing serious, took a leak against a shop window one night, would you believe that? Anyway, he was due in the Magistrate’s Court yesterday but he didn’t turn up. He’s been renting a room on Harbour Street and I went round there but apparently he hasn’t been home in a few days. Some of his stuff is still there, I don’t know if he took the rest or if that’s all he had. These labouring nomads travel light, you wouldn’t believe it – the guy he was renting from reckoned he hardly had a clean pair of pants! He said Cooper kept anything valuable in a backpack that he took everywhere with him, and that seems to be gone. He owed the bloke a few weeks’ rent, it looks like he’s done a runner and got out of Dodge. I was just wondering if you’d seen him at all?”
I shook my head slowly to give me some time to get the answer right.
“Er, no,” I said, “I haven’t seen him in a while. Since he left the site, I think.”
“Yeah, didn’t think so but just wanted to check. Not to worry, we’ll find him. ‘You can run, but you can’t hide,’ isn’t that what they say?!”
67
I’m sitting on a huge, flat-topped rock looking out over the ocean a hundred feet below. Cara and I used to spread a tablecloth on this very rock and munch on sandwiches and drink juice while the crew worked on the lighthouse. Robbie would come over and pretend to eat a sandwich, then produce it from behind her ear like a great magician and she would almost fall off the rock from laughing so hard. It all seems so long ago, almost as though it was a movie I saw when I was a little bit drunk and I can’t quite put the plot together in my head. I remember everything, of course. I remember the lighthouse that stood proudly behind where I’m sitting. They’ve done a good job, to be fair to them. Both the lighthouse and the cottage are gone, the foundations have been excavated and replaced with earth and grit. The surface has been covered with local shale and stone and young seaside foliage and grasses are taking root. You would honestly not know what had been there, so faithfully have they restored the land. They’ve done a bloody good job. This is my land. It’s worthless and I’ll never be able to sell it, but it’s mine and at least it’s beautiful.
I remember the old woman on the beach, or maybe I don’t. I remember the little makeshift kitchen where Nathan and I would drink coffee and dream big. I remember Stevie’s mangled leg and the ghostly pallor of his face. I remember Cooper coming to bully and Walter Gretz coming to gloat. I remember the day they came with the bulldozers and the wrecking ball. I remember standing on my own on the edge of the site and watching as they swung it first at the lantern room and then dropped it metre by metre until the tower was gone. I remember all of it, but I can’t put the pieces back together.
“Are you OK?” says Emily, and she puts her hand on my arm.
She insisted on coming with me when I said I wanted to go out to the Cape. I didn’t argu
e, I was glad of the company. I’ve been quiet for a while, I guess. Maybe she’s worried.
“Yes, I’m OK,” I say. I smile and squeeze her hand.
“What are you thinking about?”
“A million things! You?”
“About Cara. I wish I’d spent more time up here with you two. She loved it here, didn’t she? Loved being a part of it, with you and with the men.”
“She did. She loved being the centre of attention!”
She is quiet for a moment, the breeze playing in her hair so that she has to keep brushing it away from her eyes with the tips of her fingers. Then she turns to look at me, to look into me, so strong is her gaze.
“Are we ever going to find her, Wilde?” she says, in a whisper.
It’s the question I ask myself every day.
“I don’t know, Em. But we’re never going to stop looking, are we? No matter what.” I pause, then start to tell her something I thought I never would. “A few months ago, there was a post on the website, the first one in months. Some bloke from Sydney had been on business in Kuala Lumpur and reckoned he saw a little Caucasian girl leaving a school with a local woman, remember? He reckoned she looked like Cara?”
“I remember that post,” she says. “I remember it. But the guy, he sounded like a crazy person, no? He didn’t sound like a businessman, I thought he had probably never been to Kuala Lumpur in his life.”
She was right, the message read like it had been written by someone stoned or pissed or mad. It was all over the place, it almost didn’t make any sense. So many nutters had posted their crazy ramblings on the site, maybe some of them believed it. I fell for that one and I’m not proud of it, it was stupid. I had no reason to think there was anything more to this story than there had been to any of the other crank postings to the site. I certainly don’t have money to be throwing around, every spare penny I have goes on the monthly payments to the council under the agreement Cecil Farnham hammered out for me. I’m the only person I know paying a mortgage to have their house knocked down. But it was the first post on the site in ages and so…
“Well, I tried to get in touch with him but he didn’t respond. I went to the cops but they had no interest. So… I went to Kuala Lumpur. I stayed in a grotty backpackers’ hostel and I went to the school every day for a week. I showed the picture of Cara to everybody, watching for a white kid among the hundreds of locals. Eventually, the school principal called the police. I was taken down to the station and they questioned me. The cops were actually very sympathetic, very nice, but they made it very clear that I’d be arrested if I didn’t stop harassing the kids and their families.”
“So what did you do?”
I shrug.
“What could I do? They all thought that I was the crazy person. Maybe they were right. So I got a flight back here. The whole stupid thing cost me a fortune. I’m sorry, Emily. I guess if we’d talked about it…”
“Don’t be sorry. I’ve done stupid things too.”
“So what stupid things have you done, then? Bet you can’t beat Kuala Lumpur?”
She shakes her head, laughing at me.
“Oh no,” she says, “nothing so stupid! But I’ve been stupid too, or desperate maybe. There’s a woman at the wine board – she’s very kind, always very kind to me – she said that she was at her church in Mandurah and she saw a little girl that reminded her of Cara and she prayed for me. That was all. She didn’t say the girl looked like Cara, just that she thought of us. But I went to the church in Mandurah every Sunday, for every Mass, for two months after that, looking for this little girl. Two months! Me! Can you imagine? My first time at Mass in thirty years, nearly!”
“So did they convert you?!”
“No! I might have been crazy but I wasn’t the only crazy person there, I think!”
I look out to sea again then close my eyes to let the breeze wash over my face. Somewhere out there, Bryce Cooper is still keeping our secret, mine and Mitch’s. Somewhere under the waves he’s rotting away, desperately trying to get to shore to tell the world what I did. He’s still on some police wanted list I’m sure, down at the bottom with the other fugitives that nobody is really looking for because nobody really cares. Someday, somebody will surely sound an alarm, somebody will miss him and reveal the mystery of his disappearance? Perhaps, but a mystery is only a mystery if anybody can be bothered to solve it.
“What are we going to do, Emily?” I say, suddenly.
She furrows her brow as though she doesn’t understand the question.
“What are we going to do?” I say again. “I mean, we’ve been apart for a long time now. Do we need to make it official? To get on with our lives?”
We’ve broken up but we’ve done nothing else. We still have the house, we still have the farm, we still have the same bank accounts, for Christ’s sake. We’re like a married couple who never talk and live in different places. She says nothing, just looks at me, and I can hear her brain whirring behind the bluest eyes.
“But will we?” she says eventually. “Will we really get on with our lives? How can we? We are always going to be bound by this, no matter where we are. Everybody keeps telling me to move on but what if there’s nowhere I want to go?”
She’s right, of course. In all the time we’ve been apart, I haven’t taken one step on the road that is the rest of my life. It’s a lonely-looking road and I don’t like it.
“You could come back,” she says, slowly, watching my face carefully, then hurries to clarify. “Not like before I mean, not like a… ‘couple’. But you can work from here, no? I can work on the vines. We can look for Cara, together. As friends. Friends with a very complicated history that will never go away.”
I should dismiss the idea, it makes no sense and it will only end in tears. But I can’t.
“OK,” I shrug, just like that. There’s no debate, no argument, no discussion. Just “OK”. “We can be grown-ups about it, I guess. And there’s no point me spending money on rent when I can live here, right?”
She smiles with something that looks like relief.
“And it was nice to wake up beside you yesterday…” she says, staring at her feet and so quietly that I can hardly hear her.
I nod and she moves closer so that I can hold her. I put my arm around her and her hair blows softly in my face. We had nothing and then we had so much and then we lost it all, and here we are, full circle. Just the two of us, again. In the end, that’s really all we ever had.