by Leah Swann
‘Don’t worry, Ava, everyone’s onto it. Our Colac detective was in Melbourne today – so she’s going to speak to your husband before driving back later this afternoon.’
Spiteri said they were searching the crash site and the nearby bush and beach for Max and Teddy. Ava didn’t think they could be there. She hoped she was wrong. She hoped that Max had simply disobeyed her and was hiding with Teddy in some bushes because that meant they hadn’t been taken. It meant that it wasn’t Lawrence. His mellifluous voice slid like silk through her mind.
‘So, Ava, we’ll hear from the detective soon. You said there was a restraining order against your husband,’ Spiteri said. ‘An IVO, right? Are there family law court orders in place too?’
‘Orders? Oh – no. Not yet.’
‘So you don’t have full custody?’
‘No.’
‘So – if your husband has taken them, it’s an offence – he’s breaching the IVO. Just wait here, Ava, I’ll be back soon.’
Ava lost all sense of time. She went outside for air until someone called her to come back and she again sat on the bench between the wall and the old woman. She leaned forward with her elbows on her knees and pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes, her stomach cramping like a concertina. With her eyes closed she saw the dying woman and the soft light vanishing like enchanted smoke. She saw the wound and the blood and the skin turning silver as scales. Her throat pulsed and she tasted bile. She swallowed it down again and again. Water – she needed water. The horror grew as she tried to put it from her mind, if only she could, and maybe she was even moaning, it was possible, because the woman sitting next to her started rubbing her back in small circles. Over and over. A determined, comforting touch.
‘You got your children lost,’ the woman was saying. ‘Was it a whitefella? It was, wasn’t it?’
Ava couldn’t speak.
‘Someone took em? You didn’t think he was going to let you keep em, did you?’
We were so close. We were nearly there. Twenty minutes away from a new life. Only twenty minutes. Nearly home free.
‘They took me from me own mum,’ said the old woman rubbing Ava’s back and speaking in a rhythmic and almost dreamy voice. Her hair was long and rough and grazed Ava’s cheek as she leaned closer. ‘Said it was for a better life. They tried to hide us. We went running. We were flying. But the trees were too skinny to hide behind. They came, the van came. Six whitefellas in suits for only a handful of us kids. They grabbed us. Took us to the van. They say Mum cried for three days on the roadside. They say they had to carry her home, feed her like a baby. No-one loved us at that orphanage. It wasn’t no better life. No. It was bloody awful.
‘Later they took me babies. All three of em. Didn’t leave me one of em to love, not one. I never seen em again, and then I seen my oldest boy Davy at a football match. I seen my baby’s face as a man’s face. Didn’t see the turning. Didn’t see the turning from a boy into a man. They stole that forever. You don’t get it back. You can’t never get it back. Never never never never.’
The sadness of this story seeped into Ava, too raw to hold back sobs. The woman kept massaging, unperturbed.
‘Hey there, Auntie Mary,’ said Spiteri, reappearing in front of them. She was holding a phone. ‘You got a bed tonight?’
‘The Rev’ll put me up,’ Auntie Mary said. ‘You come with me. The Rev’ll look after you. We’ll all pray. We’ll find your sons. He found my son. He tole me about that football match. Said he thought that man might be my son . . .’
‘This your phone?’ Spiteri asked Ava, holding it out. ‘It was found at the scene.’
Ava wiped the dusty case on her jeans, ran her finger over the cracked screen and saw the text she’d ignored while she was driving.
Hi baby, Lawrence said yesterday he’d heard you were going somewhere? And I remember you said something about a trip to Sheerwater sometime? Hope you guys work all this out.
Ava leapt to her feet as though gouged.
‘This is it!’ she shouted at Spiteri. ‘My mother told him where we were going!’
Her head was cooking. She remembered the ping her phone had made. She should have checked the message then and there. What do you do when your mother tells your husband where you’re going, even though she’s only guessing, even when you’ve told her things are getting worse, you’ve told her and told her not to interfere? Maybe she should have explained the situation more fully to her mother. But Vanessa wasn’t to be trusted. She liked Lawrence. If Ava had read the text, maybe she wouldn’t have headed for Sheerwater. But what would she have done instead?
‘Calm down, Ava. Come with me.’
Spiteri led her away from the crowded foyer into a back room heated by a little two-bar heater. Ava stared at the glowing orange bars and blinked – she hadn’t seen a heater like that since her grade three classroom. Sheerwater police station was a backwater, old and scummy and underfunded! Amateurs! This was bad. This was so bad.
She clutched at her head. ‘I told you guys. I told you it was him. It’s Lawrence. Call off the search. My ex will have them.’
Spiteri removed her glasses. ‘The thing is, Ava, we checked it out. Your husband is Lawrence Bain, right? He’s at his mother’s house in Camberwell. He’s been there all day.’
‘Well, of course his mother would say that,’ Ava said. ‘She’s protecting him.’
Spiteri was shaking her head. ‘No, Ava – Lawrence Bain was visited by a psych nurse today. At midday. We’re waiting on documentation. Lawrence will have to sign a waiver over his medical records but we’re sure he will because it’s in his best interests to do so – our detectives will get one from him. The crash was around eleven-thirty. Lawrence would have had to be on the road before eight. See?’
Ava felt a wave of weakness rising through her legs. She’d heard people say their legs buckled. A screeching racket grew louder and louder and she raised her eyes to the high window to see a blurred white storm of cockatoos descending on the branches of a tree just outside.
‘Sit.’ The police officer levered Ava into a chair with strong hands. ‘We think the boys got out of the car and made a run for it, or tried to look for you, and got lost—’
‘But that doesn’t make sense. I told them to stay in the car . . .’
She thought of Max, big-boned, big-eyed, pushing his way towards her through the crowds at the school gates, or carrying little Teddy in his arms in the backyard, swinging him around. She thought of Teddy earlier that day at the servo playground. Throwing stones. Gilded with light.
‘Max always does what I say. He’s nine. Very responsible.’
Responsible to a fault. It was the core of him. You don’t need to check, Mum.
‘Anyway, they wouldn’t have left Winks. They would’ve come looking for me. They wouldn’t have run off.’
‘Maybe something made them want to hide.’
Ava felt a part of herself coming loose and staggering into a new darkness. ‘Like what?’
‘We don’t know. Another possibility is that someone else, an unknown third party, has them. Maybe someone’s going to bring them in.’
Ava had to repeat this aloud. She felt she was forcing each of the officer’s statements through her brain to cognise it, like pushing mash through a sieve. ‘An unknown third party?’
Fear rolled sickly through her belly. She was leaking tears. She tried to speak without her mouth crumpling: ‘You mean . . . they might have been taken? By a stranger? But why? I mean, it was a crisis, it was—’
The door opened and a second cop put his head around the door. ‘Hi, Ava? Mary’s at the front desk saying you’re going home with her.’
‘She means back to the Rev’s shelter,’ Spiteri said. ‘Do you have somewhere to stay?’
‘I’ve – leased a house.’
A key was waiting in the letterbox on Smoky Point Road, one of the most picturesque – if windblown – streets in Sheerwater, or so the real estate agent had sa
id. A two-bedroom cottage with a swing set out back and a pink flowering gum out front. ‘The flowers are as pink as sunset, so bright, practically iridescent,’ the agent had told her on the phone. ‘I’ve got a flowering gum myself. Flocks of parrots feed on the nectar. It’s so nice, you’ll love it.’
Ava had told the boys about these parrots and they’d all talked of a birdbath and Max said he’d start a new feather collection. This morning the unseen cottage had been an adventure waiting to be had: the fun of making up camp beds, of frying eggs on a strange stove, of exploring a new yard, of choosing a place to build the new sandpit that she’d promised and of the trucks that she’d buy, one each of their very own. Her stomach became a steely ball sending weird hard shoots up into her chest. The dog. Where was Winks? She asked Spiteri.
‘We’ll get her for you. She’s tied up out the back here.’
Ava nodded. She pushed past the cop in the doorway and went back out to the busy reception area, where Auntie Mary stood hunched and shawled and waiting beside two men. Ava recognised one of them as the man who’d helped at the accident.
‘Hello, Ava,’ he said, and extended his hand.
She shook it uncertainly. ‘Were you tailgating me? On the road? Before the – crash.’
‘It’s possible. If so, I’m sorry. I was . . . Anyway, Simon’s my name.’ He took a step back and put a hand on the arm of the man beside him. They were the same height.
‘This is my brother, Reverend Caleb Manrose.’
Something decent and straightforward in Caleb’s bearded face made her aware of her disordered senses. If this was the Reverend that Mary was talking about, she understood why it was with such affection. In the noisy, heaving, chaotic police station he was motionless, as calming as a benediction.
4
Ava emerged from the dizzying whirl of the police station with Winks on a lead and crossed the road to her car. She’d refused Simon’s offer to drive it for her. Yes, she could drive. And Simon drove too fast. He’d apologised again. Whatever, she’d said. Whatever. She was fine to drive. Her hands were barely trembling.
She followed the Reverend’s old Toyota down Sheerwater’s main street lined with eucalypts and yellow wattle, passing cafés, a library, a post office, a supermarket, a surf outlet with a rainbow of surfboards lined up outside, and a hardware store with ads scrawled in yellow paint directly on the glass: Bulk Turps, $15.99; establishments whose modern ugliness was relieved only by violet splashes of twilight catching on a window or fluttering over the fake geraniums at the doorway of a two-dollar shop, where a woman was dragging cartons of cheap plastic sand-buckets inside. How strange was this little town Ava had intended to make home. Only last night she’d lain awake dreaming her way into the place, thinking it would soon become far more familiar. Like the back of her hand. All had changed. In the blink of an eye. These stupid little phrases!
If she hadn’t let the boys run off to play at the servo playground she’d have driven on to Sheerwater happily unaware of the plane crash with her boys safely buckled in the back. They’d have arrived at their new home hours ago, and they’d be unpacking, playing, resting, fighting over beds, fighting over toys, tired and grumpy and happy. She couldn’t stop thinking about those few minutes when Teddy ran off to the play area, those minutes when all was lost, a tiny gap in time that now kept widening when she should have submitted to the momentum. The widening gap. The widening gyre. Where was that phrase from? So famous, and gone from her.
Streetlamps came on and cast puddles of cold light. Everything was both unreal and too real. Tension crawled over her skin and twisted through her gut. The five points of a star were refracted by the windscreen into infinite needles of light. She blinked. The shopfronts ended. Everything seemed to soften a little. To her left beyond the rooftops the ocean was turning smooth and grey and receding into a misty nothingness, the sun no more than a sad and whitish phantom hovering at the horizon.
The Reverend’s car turned at the corner and she saw the street name: Smoky Point Road. Ava followed. The cottage she’d rented was here, somewhere – yes, there it was, number five. Tiny, with a heritage wire fence and a pathway leading to a front door painted with a design she couldn’t make out.
‘I will go in there with my boys,’ she said aloud. But her voice quavered and lacked conviction. What was wrong with her? Maybe Lawrence was right, maybe she was missing some essential ingredient or knowledge that prevented things like this from happening. Maybe she was not strong enough or practical enough or even sane enough.
Winks whimpered on the front seat beside her, then jumped into the back seat and sniffed and cried again.
Maybe the boys would be back tonight. Maybe the cops were right. Oh please, let them be right! Maybe the boys were this very minute being lifted into the strong arms of their rescuers, sipping fresh water, being told they’d be back with their mother soon. She pictured Teddy. Whining. Crusted nose. Shadowed eyes. Aching for sleep. Her hands tightened on the steering wheel. And Max? She couldn’t think of Max without wincing. Her big boy, sticking out his lower lip, determined to be brave, doing his best to look after Teddy. She chased after them with her love, reaching for them with its bold, red rays, making them shields, protecting them – only she couldn’t protect them, she was deluding herself, she’d let them down, she’d lost them.
The Reverend’s car pulled up in front of a bluestone church beside a long hall. Ava parked behind him. Out front, people of different ages were gathered, some with hands in pockets, some smoking, some chatting, some serving. There was a steaming pot on a trestle table covered in cloth.
Ava opened the car door. Winks yelped and jumped out to relieve herself on the kerb. Poor little dog.
Simon, Mary and Caleb approached Ava’s car. ‘Come on, come on,’ Mary said, waving to her. ‘Come in, you’ll see.’
‘I’ll go in and let Grace know we’re back,’ said Simon, and turned towards a house next door to the church.
‘Thanks, Simon. You go on and get some soup, Auntie,’ said Caleb. ‘I’m taking Ava to the manse with me, alright? That okay with you, Ava? Do you want to stay with us tonight, rather than trying to unpack at your new place?’
Ava nodded.
‘We’ll get them boys back, you’ll see, the Rev’ll pray,’ said Mary. ‘You’re a good girl. I was not good. God saw me failing and said, nope, you’re not gettin them back till they’re all grown. That’s what God thought. And then I only got one back, that’s the truth. There’s me beautiful daughter out there somewhere, she had eyes all silver-green, green as gum leaves, she’d be old by now, she wouldn’t know me, old lost mother with hardly a tooth left. I’m a sad thing.’
She folded her fleshy arms around Ava’s neck and held her close for several moments, rocking, and Ava surrendered to Mary and the force of her suffering as though clasped by Sorrow itself.
‘There’s no hurt like it,’ the old woman was saying. Compassion shone out of her as pure as sunlight. ‘It hurts and hurts and hurts and never stops. Them fellas don’t know it. They never been a mother.’
Mary released Ava and turned towards the hall, pulling her shawl close, moving slowly with the weight of those who had gone before her and those who had been taken from her.
‘Where is Mary going?’ said Ava. Her throat was dry.
‘To the shelter.’ Caleb paused and glanced over her briefly, politely, before casting his eyes down. ‘Ava, do you have a spare jumper in the car? It’s just . . . my children . . . will see.’
Ava looked down at herself and saw red stains on the white wool. Whose blood was this? The dead woman’s? The pilot’s? Her own? She tore off the jumper and threw it to the ground and shivered in her t-shirt while she popped the boot and opened her bag. She raked around, finding pyjamas, toiletries, not what she needed, till she grasped a quilted hoodie and put it on and zipped it up. There was probably blood soaked into her black jeans as well. The material was stiff. On the ground by her feet she saw a tightly rolled up
thing with a rubber band snapped round it. She picked it up and jammed it into her pocket. The cash roll. She’d forgotten.
‘Why don’t you bring in a few things? You can clean up in the house,’ Caleb said.
He took Ava by the arm and without meaning to she leaned into him. She wasn’t quite able to maintain her usual separateness. He led her to the house. Sensations came and went in flashes. She smelled Caleb’s scent of aniseed and pine. Marguerite daisies sprouted by the concrete steps, bushy and white, their round gold centres following her like eyes. Inside, sounds came at her: a television buzzing, children squabbling, a pot bubbling. Caleb led her through to a large open kitchen and living room. Winks followed. A tall woman with a profile like a cameo – slim neck, curling wisps of hair – was lifting a clump of herbs dripping red from a simmering pan of tomatoes, filling the space with the spicy fragrance of cloves.
‘Grace?’ Caleb spoke softly. ‘Grace, this is Ava, the woman from the accident.’
Grace turned, wiping her hands on a tea towel, which she cast aside as she stepped forward and did an extraordinary and perhaps instinctive thing: she reached for Ava and put her arms around her, cupped her head and stroked her hair, as though she was a little girl. After Mary’s embrace it was too much. Ava wept. The woman held her wordlessly until Ava pulled away.
‘You’ve had a dreadful shock,’ Grace said. ‘Why don’t you sit down with Simon? Dinner’s almost ready. You’ve both been through something today, but of course it’s much worse for you, Ava . . .’ Her voice faltered.
Ava should have given the police more details about the boys. She should have written that Teddy was a fast runner – he might flee from the strangers trying to rescue him. She should have written that Max had a large head and round eyes of an unusual colour. She’d put brown but they were more than brown. The outer rim of each iris was encircled with a shining deep blue as beautiful as a painting.