Sheerwater

by Leah Swann

  2

  In the bathroom mirror the following morning Lawrence saw that his mouth was still stained as red as poppies. It made him think of how the great Romantic poets had loved opium, that drug swelling the self in grand ways till they believed they could rattle the gates of heaven with their pens. Would they have been able to write without it? Would the world still have a great work like The Rime of the Ancient Mariner? Without opium, would their visions have emptied themselves of lustre? It was a question he would once have discussed with Ava. He loved to lay out a new theory for her admiration. Such musings were lost on Vanessa, a sensate creature to whom poetry meant little – though she’d be interested in trying the opium pipe.

  Beside the basin was a stack of folded, freshly laundered white flannels. Lawrence soaked one in warm water and wiped the chemical raspberry stains away, then smiled to watch a mole vanish into the attractive dimple beside his mouth. He dropped the smile, let the tears form, let them roll. He wondered how his tears would affect Detective Ballard, whose lips were unpainted and plump as pink cushions. He’d so wanted to see those lips pursed around a cigarette.

  When he went downstairs, his mother was raging. ‘You have got to keep those cats in the laundry. They’ve made messes everywhere, just everywhere! You know I can’t stand cats.’

  ‘Cool it, Mum, it’s all good. I’m just minding them for Nige. We can take them back this morning if you like.’

  Lawrence took the spare phone from where he’d hidden it, the backpack, and his mother’s car keys from the hall table, and left without saying goodbye.

  He smelled the sharp new grass as he got into the driver’s seat. Winter was over. When winter ends, something new begins. He drove recklessly, grazing bins and kerbsides, speeding up and slowing down. When he stopped at the lights he stretched his fingers and bent each hand back till his wrists hurt. Transitory moods or states breezed through him. He was in dialogue with his future self and agreeably aware of a sense of sovereignty and purpose, and felt almost in control – and in the next second he was loose and bright and clicking and humming with possibilities that could go in any direction. Something energetic and compulsive within him was spinning like a wheel.

  Day Two

  Clouds passed over the Southern Cross and rained into the dark water, unseen by all but God and the fishes roaming the seaweed gardens, until the rising sun burned out all secrets as it leapt along the shoreline, polishing the limestone cliffs so they blazed gold over the ocean. In the rustling dry richness of the dunes stretching from Port Fairy to Cape Otway, aquatic birds woke to the demands of their creaturely life: penguins in their burrows and hooded plovers in shallow nests like bowls, sleeping, or waiting for light, or not waiting – merely being.

  Further out to sea the great sweeps of short-tailed shearwaters were crossing the darkened sphere towards Sheerwater on their way home from Alaska. Mile after mile their wings beat an ancient rhythm that scored the sky. Ragged with exhaustion, feathers falling, harsh voices calling, these teeming riders of the eastern gales climbed and fell through the stars and into first light.

  AVA

  1

  Ava hurried out of the manse past the car still loaded with belongings and yesterday’s hope towards the police station. How simply yesterday had begun! Why did I bother to bathe the boys? Why didn’t I put them in the car the moment they woke? She swallowed. There was a macabre vindication in the pain she felt every time she found new evidence of her own culpability. Their absence was unbearable. My heart’s a clot of blood. They shouldn’t have made a single stop! God, she was such a fool. When you start as fast and smooth as she had yesterday, you don’t let anything get in your way.

  When she was young and tucked up in bed, starlight coming through the window would cast a shadow from the plastic angel on her homemade altar and its shadow seemed more real than the thing itself, its wings big and soft and lovely on her bedroom wall. She liked to imagine it calling her, comforting her. Ava, Ava. One night the shadow was too big and humped and frightening and the angel looked as though it had great antlers or devil’s horns. She was so scared that it took her ages to work up the courage to reach for the light beside her bed. When she finally turned on the light she saw that her mother had pegged Ava’s hair slides onto the angel’s halo and flung Ava’s crumpled school jumper over its wings, and her fear vanished. She was not in her childhood bedroom now. There was no lamp switch to reach for, no flood of relief; there was only the shadow and the shadow was the thing itself.

  At the police station Ava was ushered into the same room where she’d been questioned the night before. Officer Spiteri introduced her to Detectives Ballard and Hawkins and left. The two police officers sat across from her. On the table was a phone and a notepad. For some reason she was sweating as though she were about to take an exam. Her lungs raced to keep up with every short, anxious breath she took, while her mind was full of unanswered questions and something angry.

  ‘Please sit down, Ava. I’m switching on my phone now, okay?’

  As she sat, something sharp prickled her leg at her left thigh. The fabric of her jeans was stiff. She scratched at the stiff patch and red dust appeared under her nails. In that instant the metal post and pulpy flesh and dying eyes washed up at her and she was revolted. She stood up again. ‘Please tell me, is there any news? Anything at all?’

  ‘No sign yet. I’m sorry, Ava.’ Detective Ballard’s face was without expression. ‘Let’s go back to yesterday. Seems the pilot was headed back to Peterborough airport when he ran into some trouble. We think it was probably bird strike, which is when—’

  ‘I know what it is.’

  ‘Could have been eagles, could have been gulls. Maybe the shearwaters coming back.’

  Ballard took the cap off her pen. She wanted to hear about the accident from Ava. Who was first on the scene? Who actually pulled the pilot from the plane? At what point did the pilot’s sister die?

  ‘The girl,’ said Ava. ‘Who was she?’

  ‘Both kids were related to the pilot. He’s uncle to about half the town. So, Ava, why did you pull over?’

  The questions continued. Why did Ava leave the boys in the car? What did she tell the boys when she left them? Yes, Ballard said, she knew the officers had taken the specifics but she wanted to hear everything directly from Ava.

  ‘What do you think has happened?’ Ava asked. My heart’s a clot of blood. ‘Where are they? I feel so sick.’

  ‘We’re doing everything we can. Please, sit.’

  ‘Everything you can,’ Ava repeated in a dull tone. Just what is this everything? Have you combed every house within a hundred miles? Linked arms and marched through the long grasses? Dredged the sea? She sat down and gripped her knees and searched the detective’s face, which seemed like an impermeable slap of sea-washed stone projecting neither like nor dislike. She glanced at Detective Hawkins, tapping away on a laptop. He didn’t even seem to be listening.

  ‘We think you’re right – someone must have taken them. But no-one passed through the roadblocks with two little boys in their car.’

  ‘Could they have hidden them? Did you search the cars?’

  ‘Not every car.’

  ‘So you could have missed them.’

  ‘Think of it this way,’ Ballard said. ‘When you’ve lost your keys at home, the best thing to do is to clean up. Put the bread in the breadbox, the milk in the fridge, the jam in the pantry. The thing is to restore order. You make the bed. Hang up your jacket. And there’s the bunch of keys, where you dropped them half an hour earlier when you changed your mind about the jacket. An investigation is like that. You keep cleaning up, the keys turn up.’

  Ava scratched at a cut on her wrist. Lost keys? Fuck off, she thought. She took a breath. ‘Are they alive? Just tell me what you think. You must have . . . some kind of sense about these things.’

  The detective nodded. ‘Yes, we think they are alive, Ava.’

  Ava nodded. ‘Okay. Okay.’

/>   ‘We went to talk to Lawrence yesterday. He seems to think you might have something to do with the boys’ disappearance.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yup.’ Ballard unwrapped a stick of gum, put it in her mouth and waited. Ava sensed the compressed energy in the other woman’s short, strong body, like flat-pack furniture that could spring into a new shape as needed – a desk, a bed, a chair. ‘But – how could I? I mean how . . . the plane accident . . . No-one plans for something like that . . .’ She swallowed, growing defensive under the detective’s watchful gaze. ‘I saw something coming out of the sky. I didn’t know what it was, and then I saw it was a plane. At first I couldn’t understand why it was flying like that. Then it crashed. I had no choice but to stop. I didn’t want to stop. I was in a hurry.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I hadn’t told Lawrence where I was going.’ Ava rubbed at the cold string of skin tightening around her neck. It seemed to connect to her chest. My heart is a clot. She knew what Ballard would ask next.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I didn’t want him to find some way of stopping it, like starting legal proceedings or slashing the tyres of my car . . . I wanted it to be a done deal.’

  ‘Slash the tyres of your car?’

  ‘Lawrence hates me. His hatred outweighs his concern for the boys’ welfare. It sounds wrong but I do believe that.’

  ‘He told us that he still holds out hope that the two of you will work it out. Do you still love your husband?’

  ‘Not really, no. I want him to get well for the boys’ sake.’

  ‘So you weren’t trying to take them out of his life?’

  ‘Not completely.’

  ‘So, explain to me, why didn’t you tell him where you were going? You sold all your furniture, rented a house up here, and kept it a secret, even from your friends, even from your mother, even from the father of your sons . . .’

  ‘I would have told him – or his solicitor,’ said Ava. ‘At some point I would have had to, I know that.’

  ‘If you didn’t have to, would you have told him?’ Ballard was tilting her chin towards the ceiling, and the angle made her jaw look bigger; the skin seemed dimpled, like hammered gold. This woman would hear any attempt at fudging, Ava thought.

  ‘If it wasn’t for the boys, I’d never, ever see Lawrence again,’ she said. ‘But that’s not possible. I just wanted space. That’s why I chose somewhere hours away. I wanted to make it harder for him to spy on us, to watch me from his car . . .’

  ‘He spies on you?’

  ‘I’ve only seen him do it once. But I feel him all the time.’

  ‘Would you say you’re paranoid?’

  ‘You get to a point where you don’t know what’s reasonable and what’s paranoid. It grows inside till you feel half-mad with it. I saw his car on the street sometimes. Any car I didn’t recognise as belonging to my neighbours felt suspicious.’

  ‘What other cars did you see?’

  ‘A Jeep, a few days ago. A beige Jeep. A blue Mazda.’

  ‘Did you get the licence plates?’

  ‘No. Of course not. I thought I was overreacting. Why? Do you think the kidnapper might have been parked there? There was nothing unusual when I left yesterday morning. I checked.’

  The detective made a note. Her hands were well formed, clean and calloused, and a ruby ring rested on the left ring finger. ‘Your mother says you can be irrational.’

  ‘You spoke to my mother before you spoke to me? That seems strange.’

  ‘She says you’re . . . sensitive.’

  ‘Everyone’s sensitive compared to my mother. She’s about as sensitive as a lump of rock. And she can’t be trusted to keep anything quiet at all. That’s why I didn’t tell her where I was going either.’

  ‘She says you have a tendency to dramatise. That you’re too mistrustful of Lawrence, even delusional.’

  ‘She has no idea,’ said Ava, feeling the dreaded helplessness racing through her like a poison in the blood. She met Ballard’s gaze. She wanted sympathy from this woman who was so hard and dry and cool and who regarded Ava so shrewdly. ‘Lawrence has an intense desire to appear as . . . blameless. Mum buys into appearances. She’s shallow by nature. She’s sweet in some ways. When I was growing up she either lavished me with attention or ignored me – but I guess she was good enough. I’m okay. But she never drills down into anything.’

  ‘Is she close to her grandsons?’

  ‘She loves to say how she was a tomboy, all daring, back when she was a kid, but there’s not much evidence of it now. They love her, though. They’re both affectionate boys. She gives them presents. Sometimes she plays games with them.’

  ‘There’s tension between you?’

  ‘Sometimes.’ Ava gave an angry shrug. ‘What difference does it make?’

  ‘Lawrence says you slapped him once.’

  ‘That was years ago.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I was driving and I saw him out when he should have been at work. I suspected he was seeing someone. I confronted him and lost my temper and slapped him. I instantly regretted it. He moaned and carried on about it for months! I felt both ashamed and angry about it.’

  ‘When did he start making you feel so unsafe that you eventually took out an intervention order against him?’

  ‘He wasn’t violent when we were first together. Not even for the first few years. And then – it was like he’d turned off some restraint in himself. There are layers of him.’

  Lawrence’s layers went something like this: Lawrence the violent who was short and solid and forceful and smashed her head against the wall so she saw stars and stupidly thought, So all the cartoons are true – you do see stars when you’re hit in the head! There was Lawrence the authoritarian who believed corporal punishment was beneficial to children; Lawrence the storyteller who wove such fascinating narratives from knowledge and life, Lawrence the flirt and Lawrence the schemer, who once revealed to her he kept tabs on people he planned to pay back for hurting him. In Lawrence, the layers seemed more separate and contained than in other people.

  When they first met she was enchanted by Lawrence-the-lover: gentle, fun, interesting, persuasive. She recalled him dancing at the New Year’s Eve party where they’d met. He’d led her into the terraced garden that stepped away from the house and deep into tree shadows, where they kicked off their shoes to feel grass underfoot cool as velvet. Weeks later they went on their first trip away and lay together on crisp sheets, bodies glowing from each other’s warmth as they breathed air sweetened by vases of lilies. When morning came he’d buttered the toast that arrived on a tray and spread marmalade on it and all was soaked in the scent of lilies, even the pillowslips, even the muslin lace of the canopy, even the soft locks of Lawrence’s hair. She’d drunk orange pekoe tea from a china cup and looked out at palm trees and sand so pale it made the lapping waves seem a translucent shade of emerald. Later that day they raced each other on that white beach and when she was winning he’d tripped her up and wrestled her to the ground and tickled her, and she felt happiness filling the gaps left by childhood yearnings for a real family.

  ‘He was very sweet and charming when we were first together,’ Ava said. ‘But there were odd things. He’d forget really deep conversations that we’d had, like they’d never happened. He had sudden fits of temper. He was so jealous. Not only of men – of women too. My friends stopped coming over. When I asked one of my friends why she never wanted to catch up anymore, she said that Lawrence had called her a user and told her that I only saw her “out of a sense of duty”. Which I never said.’

  ‘I see. And he has mental health issues.’

  ‘Yes. And I did feel sorry for him. And angry with him. No-one’s perfect. But I never thought that things would get so bad that Lawrence would bash my head against a wall. In the last few years his temper was terrible. Obscene.’

  Eyes crackling, hands white-hot, swearing at her under his breath and then shouting w
hile she winced inside, knowing that Max and Teddy could hear, knowing she couldn’t shield them from his fury. How dare you tell my mother that I raised a hand to you? I never raised a hand! He thrust her up against the wall and she turned away from the mad blue glitter of his eyes, unable to escape the hand between her legs and the breath on her ear, a horrible parody of intimacy.

  Where was the tender man who had led her through the shadows to a tree swing suspended from a magnolia and coaxed her to sit beside him, pushing the straps of her sundress down with cheeky fingers until she laughed? You’re a black swan, a possum woman, a gum-tree woman. If we get together, if you love me, if we make love, will you make me a part of you, make me like that too? Lawrence, pursuing her with a relentlessness that made her shiver to remember, but back then she’d been enthralled when he’d whispered poetry to her.

  Come to me in my dreams, and then

  By day I shall be well again!

  For so the night will more than pay

  The hopeless longing of the day.

  She hadn’t recognised these lines by Matthew Arnold. She would learn there was genius in his apposite quotes, especially for a man with such a strange and non-consecutive memory. He issued words in a sensuous stream. Only in recollection did she hear his stab at profundity slide into kitsch and shiver at the dual aspect of that unique Lawrentian coin: self-deprecating charm on one side and on the other, poison.

  Ballard’s phone beeped and she picked it up to read the message.

  ‘Seems Lawrence took his mother’s car this morning,’ she said. ‘Has he been in touch?’

  ‘No, we are not in touch.’

  Then Ava remembered the text message that had come overnight and flushed to the roots of her hair. She showed it to Ballard.

  My children have gone missing while in your care. There’s always some excuse, some reason that you haven’t taken care of them. In court, I will go for full custody.