The Nowhere Girl: A completely gripping and emotional page turner

by Nicole Trope

  When the first draft is done, Molly looks up from her computer in a daze. She checks the time and sees that it’s nearly 3 p.m., notices that she’s hungry.

  She stands in the kitchen, cutting some Cheddar cheese and putting it onto crackers. She has never really felt a hunger like this before, as though she is feeding something other than just her own body. She strokes her stomach softly. ‘Are you hanging in there, little one?’ she whispers.

  After she has eaten, she stretches out on the couch, slipping quickly into a deep sleep, only to be confronted with the barren road again. But this time there is something different. She thinks she can see someone in the distance, someone coming towards her. She strains her eyes in the dream until she sees a woman, a woman without a face but with a blur of brown hair. She begins to run towards her but she cannot seem to get to her. She runs faster and faster, pushes harder and harder, but instead of getting closer the woman gets farther and farther away. She wakes up with damp cheeks again, thirsty and despairing. What is going on? What on earth is going on?

  Nine

  10 January 1987

  Margaret

  * * *

  She wakes with a dry mouth and a pounding head. The room is dark and not even the smallest sliver of light slips through the curtains. A storm is coming. They said so on the news tonight, or was that yesterday or last week? She drags herself out of bed and uses the bathroom.

  She wants to just lie down again, to return to the darkness, but she needs some water. The tap in the bathroom trickles too slowly, something he’s going to fix when he’s ‘good and ready’.

  She shuffles to the kitchen, desperate for something cold in her throat. The bottle underneath the bed is cruelly empty. She will have to beg him to get her another. She will have to beg and plead and he will stand over her and watch her sweating and shaking and then he’ll say, ‘And what is the lovely Margaret going to do for me if I get her a couple of nice bottles of vodka? What’s she going to do for me, eh?’

  She will do anything for him, anything at all, but he doesn’t even seem to enjoy it now. ‘Like banging a bloke,’ he sneers. ‘Open your mouth and give that a go.’

  She wonders sometimes how he had known she was so vulnerable. Was it written on her face?

  Alone, that’s what she was without Adam, completely alone. Broken, at the funeral, surrounded by his workmates and a few of their friends, she had looked around and pretended that she was not alone, but she was. Completely and utterly. She understood the friends would drift off quickly, not wanting to be tainted by her tragedy. Most of them were only acquaintances because of Adam and his easy smiles.

  People found her difficult, reserved and quiet. She didn’t mean to be. It was just that it was so hard to relentlessly examine every single word she said before she uttered it that sometimes it was easier to simply be silent. Adam hadn’t needed her to speak. He was able to read her, to effortlessly do all the talking for her, understanding that she found it hard.

  ‘She doesn’t participate in class,’ was what the teachers told her parents. ‘We’re concerned that she has no friends.’

  ‘She’s chatty enough at home,’ her mother said, but her mother worked the night shift as a cleaner at the hospital and slept her way through her days, paying the woman in the flat next door to look in on Margaret through the night. Her mother barely exchanged a word with her, preferring to simply bark a set of instructions as she walked out of the door: ‘Make sure you use oven gloves to take that casserole out of the oven, throw a load of towels in the washing machine, tidy your room, keep the door locked, don’t watch too much television.’

  She would return home as the sun began to rise, and she’d fall, exhausted, into bed. By the time she was seven, Margaret knew how to get herself up and ready for school, walking the few hundred metres down the road to join dozens of other children, with parents chaperoning them and words streaming from their lips as easily as water gushed from a tap.

  Her father was away for weeks at a time, driving up and down the highways of Australia transporting everything from fruit to furniture.

  When he came home, he liked to sleep or go to the pub. He always brought Margaret a present, something small like a key ring or a bookmark. Margaret kept all his gifts in her treasure box, which was just an old shoebox decorated with glitter paint.

  On days when she was desperate for someone to talk to, she would open the box and take the gifts out one by one, reading the name written on each key ring aloud in a whisper to remind herself she still had a voice: ‘The Blue Mountains, Mudgee, Dubbo, Nyngan, Cobar, Wilcannia, Broken Hill.’

  The older she got the less she needed to speak at all. Chatter simply went on inside her head. When her mother said, ‘I may be late back from work,’ outside Margaret nodded her head but inside she replied, Have a good shift. When her father asked, ‘How was school this week?’ outside Margaret shrugged but inside she said, I sat next to a new girl at school today. She’s Chinese and she has silky black hair but she doesn’t speak any English so she smiled at me and I smiled at her. Sharon called me a weirdo and I wanted to cry but I didn’t. Inside Margaret talked and talked but outside Margaret said less and less.

  Margaret knows she must have liked to talk at some point but by the time she was ten she spent so much time on her own that silence felt better. And then when she did say something, her voice sounded strange and alien and she knew that what she was saying was stupid. She felt people laughing at her.

  ‘Does she ever talk to you?’ she heard her father ask her mother one night. Margaret was watching television right in front of them but sometimes they didn’t see her. Her silence made her invisible.

  ‘Of course she does,’ her mother replied, irritable and rushing for work. Margaret thought that her mother, Enid, must have an inside Enid and an outside Enid as well. The inside Enid heard Margaret talk all the time so the outside Enid didn’t know that Margaret hardly said anything at all.

  Margaret liked to spend her lunchtime in the library. ‘My little helper,’ Mrs Dorio, the librarian, called her. Mrs Dorio liked to talk about books she’d read and places she’d travelled to and her little dog called Pugnacious, who was a pug. Margaret liked to listen. Sometimes Mrs Dorio would stop speaking and say, ‘What do you think, Margaret?’ And outside Margaret would shrug but inside Margaret would say, I wish I could go to Italy and eat ice cream with you. I think Pugnacious is ugly–beautiful and I would like to pat him on his funny nose. I read the book you gave me last week about the Famous Five and I wanted a new one but I left it at home so I can’t swap.

  She met Adam when she was sixteen. She got a job delivering newspapers for his father’s newsagency. Her mother had taken her in, spoken for her. She didn’t mind the work. Even on the coldest winter morning she could appreciate the silence. She walked the blocks of her neighbourhood, admiring old houses that had yet to be torn down and replaced with square blocks of modern flats. She liked that she was contributing to the family income. ‘You keep most for yourself, just give me a couple of dollars a week,’ her mother told her. A small kindness that Margaret never forgot.

  Adam was there one day when she came to pick up her pay. His voice carried across the shop as he made the woman he was serving laugh. Margaret watched his father’s eyes shine at his boy. What would it be like to have someone look at me like that? she thought.

  ‘Here you go, love,’ said Mr Henkel to Margaret. ‘You’re one of my best, you know – never late and you never miss a day.’

  ‘You should give her a raise, Dad,’ joked Adam, his eyes sweeping up and down Margaret’s body and focusing on her face. Margaret felt warm. She became aware of her breasts pressing against her thin shirt, aware of her physical self for what felt like the very first time.

  ‘How about you treat her to lunch?’ Mr Henkel said to Adam. A wink and a smile. Mr Henkel wanted everyone to be in love like he remembered being in love with his late wife.

  Margaret remembers the panic that was
hed over her. What would she say? How would she eat? How long till he declared her weird or stupid? But Adam had soft brown eyes and wild curly brown hair. She knew she was supposed to protest but she was too busy staring.

  ‘Good idea, Dad. Come on, Maggie, let’s order everything they have at Macca’s.’ No one had ever called her Maggie. She felt that she might be a different person if her name was Maggie. Maggie was everyone’s friend and at ease in a crowd. Maggie was pretty and sweet and could be counted on for a good joke. She wanted to be Maggie, to be Adam’s Maggie.

  He was seventeen and training to be an electrician and he liked to talk, about everything. He barely drew breath sometimes and Margaret was content just to watch his mouth move. Sometimes a word popped out without her thinking, a thought or opinion making its way into the world by mistake, shocking her into clamping her hand over her mouth as she waited for his scorn. But he would nod his head, thinking through what she’d said. ‘You might be right about that, Maggie.’

  Pregnant at seventeen should have been a tragedy. It was, at least, for her parents, who had been waiting to marry her off and congratulate themselves for having survived a difficult child, though she was really anything but.

  ‘Slut,’ whispered her father as he watched her pack to go and stay with Adam and his father. Margaret was going to leave the box of treasures behind but at the last minute she took it with her. She would give them to the baby.

  ‘What did we do wrong?’ her mother moaned at her and then she stood and looked at Margaret. Outside Margaret just shrugged, infuriating her mother, who was concerned about the neighbours and the gossiping. But inside Margaret said, I love him, Mum, he makes me laugh and he even makes me want to let the inside words out. He cares about me, and I love his father too because even when I don’t say anything, Mr Henkel acts like I have and says, ‘I know that’s what you think, Maggie.’ And they both call me Maggie, and they don’t spit my name but say it softly and lightly so I feel like a different person and I think, I really think, that one day I will be able to speak again if I go and live with Adam and his father.

  Margaret was overjoyed.

  Mr Henkel didn’t mind her coming to live with them. ‘Since my lovely wife Alessandra is gone, it is just me and Adam. A baby is a joy and a blessing. Together we’ll be a happy family.’

  Adam spoke of his mother with reverence, and sadness darkened his features. ‘She was tired, just tired, but Dad thought she should get it checked out, and by then it was too late. We should have known. My grandmother died of the same cancer but we just didn’t think it was possible.’ He shook his head and then smiled at her. ‘Dad is really looking forward to having you live with us – he’s been cleaning like mad since I told him.’

  She was happy enough to leave school behind and help out in the shop, happy enough to take care of Adam and Mr Henkel, poring over old recipe books left by Adam’s mother, trying to teach herself to cook.

  Margaret coughs as the memories become stuck in her throat, in her brain. Her mouth could be filled with sand. She hates letting her mind roam around in the past. It never does her any good. It feels like all that was another life, never meant for someone like Margaret, who was too stupid to speak her thoughts to the world. She was a fool to think that could have been her life.

  ‘Why can’t we just run away from him?’ asks Alice whenever she sees her mother nursing a new bruise. Margaret wants to laugh when she says that. Run away? She doesn’t even have the strength to walk away. Where would they go? How would they live?

  He gives her money and does the laundry. On school days she hears him shouting at Alice to ‘get her skinny arse out of bed and get ready’.

  He’s not all bad. He can’t be all bad, can he?

  She makes her way to the living room. The television is on and Vernon and the girls sit staring at it as the ferocity of the coming summer storm is discussed on the weather report. ‘Secure garden furniture and keep pets inside,’ says the neat weatherman in his neat suit.

  Margaret wants to sit on the couch next to the three of them but she also wants to go back to bed, to forget. Lilly has her head resting on Alice’s shoulder, sucking her thumb and clutching the ugly stuffed toy she is so fond of. It was a gift from someone Vernon worked with, just a cheap rubbish toy, but Lilly loves it, is permanently attached to the stupid thing, content as long as she has it near her. Sometimes Margaret wants to snatch it away from her daughter so she will learn early on that contentment is dangerous and should never be counted on.

  She feels guilty when she has thoughts like that. She stares at the three of them again. If she wants to, she knows she could slip in beside them, snuggle up to her children, despite the sticky heat in the living room. Alice stares straight ahead at the television, her body upright and her teeth clenched. Margaret wonders why she looks so uncomfortable.

  She takes a step forward, suddenly keen to join the trio, to play the role of mother. But then she sees Vernon’s hand on Alice’s leg, up at the top of her thigh. His large hand, covered in calluses with its dirty nails, surrounding Alice’s skinny thigh. As Margaret watches, his hand moves even further up her daughter’s pale skin. Alice’s body turns to stone.

  Margaret shakes her head. She is not seeing what she thinks she’s seeing. She can’t be. She turns away from the living room. Her bed beckons and she can feel beautiful dreams of Adam calling her. That’s where she wants to be. That’s what she needs. She crawls back into her bed, closes her eyes and sees Adam’s smile. ‘Hey, Maggie,’ he says, ‘what have you been up to today?’

  Ten

  Now

  Alice

  * * *

  I park in the shade. It’s a strangely warm winter’s day, climate change sending everything haywire. ‘The cold will be back and with it, the rain,’ they said on the news this morning. Making my way slowly up the winding brick path that leads to the front door of the Green Gate Home, I feel like a child, delaying my reluctant arrival at school.

  It’s a single-storey building that sprawls over a nearly one-acre plot of land in the middle of a leafy suburb. The home gets an offer from an interested developer at least once a week because of its size and location, just twenty minutes from the city. I’m sure it will be sold soon enough, but I don’t know what I’m going to do if they close the home while my mother is still alive. I don’t think she would survive a move somewhere else.

  The actual building is at least sixty years old and was originally built as boarding for the adjacent Green Gate School. It has long been closed and the land sold off by children of the original owners, but the boarding facilities were turned into an aged care home, specialising in people with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.

  Though once beautiful, the building has fallen into disrepair with cracked ceilings and peeling paint, but I can’t move my mother out of here. She is frightened of the outside world, terrified of even a walk in the garden, content to be in her small room with her television, her computer and three meals a day brought to her.

  As I push open the glass door I am greeted by the usual smell of mouldy carpet and overcooked vegetables. These are details that bother me each time I visit, but I’m not sure a newer, shinier care home would have the same kind of staff I have found at the Green Gate.

  Most of them have been here for years and seem to be the kind of nurturing people born to care for others. My mother’s favourite carer is Anika, an Indian woman whose quiet grace seems to bring peace to even the most troubled resident. If I’m visiting my mother and Anika walks into the room, I watch her eyes light up, light up in a way that they never do when she looks at me. ‘This is Anika,’ she tells me every single time, ‘she takes such good care of me.’

  ‘And this is your daughter Alice,’ Anika will remind her. ‘You remember her, don’t you?’

  ‘I have a daughter?’ is a frequent reply from her. Her short-term memory disappeared first, but now, only a few years after I noticed the signs of dementia eventually diagnosed as early
-onset Alzheimer’s, her long-term memory has almost gone as well. Some days she struggles to remember who she is, let alone who I am. It is a terrible thing to watch what happens when someone’s brain turns against them, to see the strange confusion in their eyes, to witness their hopelessness in the face of their own misunderstanding of the world. For me, it is made worse by our strained relationship, by the fact that I never got to have a proper mother and now it seems she is a child again. I cannot forget everything she did when I was a child and she cannot remember.

  Alice loves her mother. Alice hates her mother.

  I smile at the nurse at the front desk, a young man I’ve seen around the home but haven’t actually met. ‘Hello, I’m here to visit Margaret Henkel,’ I say.

  ‘Oh yes, you’re her daughter Alice, aren’t you? She’s having quite a good day today. Seems fairly lucid,’ he says with a generous smile.

  ‘Wonderful,’ I reply, trying to force a smile back. I sign in and make my way down the boiled-carrot-smelling corridor to my mother’s room.

  It’s a cosy room with just enough space for a single bed, an armchair, a chest of drawers and a small television. My mother is sitting in the chair, looking out of the window at the overgrown garden that has maintained a rough beauty despite a lack of care.

  There are gardeners who come once a week to try and keep the weeds and overgrowth at bay, but the task is too big for them. The home can only afford to employ two gardeners at a time, and although it’s clear that they always start with enthusiasm, they usually resign after a few months. ‘It’s too much work,’ Anika has explained, ‘and once they realise it, they usually leave.’