by Leah Swann
She felt her phone shudder and she clutched at it and read the message from an unknown number, blinking, and clutching the migraine side of her head like an emptiness in one half of her brain, and the emptiness vibrated with the kookaburras laughing from that paperbark tree, as she read the message over and over, her eyes watering in all the light and wind.
How dare you lose our sons, you careless bitch. Remember what I told you.
Someone approached and spoke to her: ‘It’s Ava, isn’t it? Uncle Dave wants to see you. He wants to thank you.’
Ava squinted, trying to make her out. It was the girl from this morning, the one who said her uncle was the pilot. The girl was so close that she seemed as brightly blurred as an astral form. This girl shouldn’t speak to her, she should know – the whole world knew – that Ava was a woman whose children had been taken.
‘I – can’t.’
Her tongue was thick and almost paralysed on one side. Was she having a stroke? Thin colours stained her peripheral vision – rose, turquoise, a soft orange-gold like a distant flame.
The girl grabbed her wrist. ‘It would only take five minutes, only five minutes . . .’
I’ll do what will hurt you the most.
The girl’s friends were running towards them and a crowd was gathering and Ava was crying out like a crazy woman: ‘Get away! Get away!’
As the colours faded, images foamed through her, fast and loose. The blood-smeared postcard and the other postcard from long ago, somehow connected, the dog running ahead of her, the boys’ faces in the rearview mirror, the shearwaters tracing infinity over the face of the earth. She was falling through corridors of memory, opening doors to empty rooms and nothing made sense. This strange, demanding girl had better get the hell out of her way. If she didn’t move aside, Ava would have to flatten her, and she would, she would do it, she’d knock her down, bloody hell, and there was Capelli with his apron flapping, get back to your crabsticks, oh God, she was a sideshow, there’s nothing to see here; stand aside, stand aside. Nothing to see.
‘Please!’ she cried out.
She pushed blindly through the crowd to cross the road to the police station. She had to get to Detective Ballard.
No-one could help her but Ballard the lifebuoy, bobbing close by, glowing and dependable, a woman solid and physical and strong. Ava could see the brown brick structure of the police station ahead of her with its blue sign saying VICTORIA POLICE, and she hoped that Ballard was still there and hadn’t flown off in her helicopter like Baba Yaga in her mortar, rowing with a pestle; she heard voices crying out behind her to stop and to watch out and she ran in desperation to get away; there was a shining shape to her left, a car, and she fell into it, over it, heard the hard crunch of metal colliding with bone and rolled off the bonnet onto the kerb on the other side, knocking her head, and she tried to get to her feet, tried to breathe, but she couldn’t get air, she was drowning, stars were exploding, tiny silver stars one after another, distant fireworks, until consciousness streaked out of her like a streamer vanishing into the black.
5
Ava dreamed that she’d dived into a well.
When she woke she saw above her a white and flat substance that looked like it had been gouged repeatedly with a pick. Everything hurt. It took several minutes to understand that it was a ceiling divided into panels by intersecting plastic rods. She blinked. She was in pain. Elbows stinging, hip and leg throbbing as though they’d been smashed against rocks.
She felt herself inspected. She turned her head. The woman in the next bed was staring. Ava looked away. So. A hospital. She forced herself to sit upright. She wanted news. She needed water for her dry mouth. A television hung in front of her and she reached for the remote.
‘It’s five to eight,’ said the woman in the next bed. ‘Or turn to News 24.’
Five to eight? At night? In the morning? Ava wanted to bat away the woman’s stare. She tried to get up to close the curtain around the bed and weakness flooded her aching limbs. She embarked on a less ambitious mission. Her phone. She had to find her phone. Her handbag was beside her on the bedside table, smeared with blood. She opened the zip and raked around. She found the phone. The battery was almost flat. There were no new messages. Not even nutty ones from Vanessa. She found ABC 24 and waited, and all at once there were the beloved faces of Max and Teddy, the flames of a burning house, and the hateful spectre of Kirsty Collins, the photo Simon had given to the police, All missing, perhaps dead, and then she was screaming and the woman in the next bed was shouting for the nurse.
Someone gripped her upper arms hard and held her still. She heard Simon’s voice. ‘Ava.’
‘What fire, what fire?’ She was sobbing. ‘Get off me. LET GO!’
A nurse arrived. ‘Do we need another sedative?’
Simon looked into Ava’s face and said: ‘Calm down or they’ll knock you out. Got that?’
‘The boys—’
‘Calm. Down.’ It was a command.
Ava squirmed out of his grasp and pushed at him so hard that she fell out of bed. As she lay on the floor Ava felt there was no strength left in her, nothing in her but a vile curdling of grief and fear.
Simon and the nurse helped her get back onto the bed.
‘We don’t know yet,’ Simon said. ‘They’re searching the site. The fire’s out. But no bodies – the boys haven’t been found.’
Tears welled in her eyes. She tried to understand, to put it together. ‘What – what fire?’
‘I’m waiting to hear more from Ballard. We don’t know yet. You were hit by a car. Do you know that? Do you remember?’
She gave several shuddering sobs. Bodies. The word Simon let slip conjured small and smoking corpses. She pulled her knees to her chest and felt cuts or scabs splitting under the bandages on her legs. The nurse pulled the curtain around the bed and poured a glass of water.
‘Ring Ballard,’ Ava said to Simon. ‘Ring Ballard.’
‘Drink,’ said the nurse.
Ava sipped. Her lips cracked and she struggled to swallow; her neck and torso seemed to have hardened into a concrete block.
Simon tapped his phone, waited, listening, then shook his head. ‘She’s not picking up, sorry, Ava. I’ve been ringing her.’
Ava tried to speak. All she could manage was a gasp followed by a strangled outbreath.
Simon sat beside her. ‘Let me tell you what happened,’ he said. He spoke in the same quiet and measured tone that he’d used when speaking to the dying woman in the plane. We need special equipment to get you out of this. ‘They found that woman – Kirsty. Apparently she was at a house near Mering.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘It’s between here and Warrnambool. Closer to Warrnambool, I think. This house was on fire this afternoon. After the fire, neighbours told the cops that someone arrived there the day your boys went missing. The place is often empty, it’s someone’s holiday shack. Apparently the neighbour heard children playing and calling and, later, a man shouting.’
‘When?’
‘This afternoon.’
Calling. The boys were always calling as they rode their bikes to the reserve they called The Forest. Watch me! See this, Mum, their pure young voices pealing like silver. She felt savagely jealous that this unknown neighbour had heard them when she herself could not.
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Okay. So. It might have been. My boys. Alive. This afternoon.’
She saw Teddy and Max as they were before dawn only yesterday, fresh from dreams, soft from bed, their slippery skin, their tender eyes, their wet woolly curls kinked with soap. Max and Teddy now in a room somewhere with the curtains drawn, or in the back seat of a car driven by their father, or running hand in hand down some unknown street. She saw them running, their backs to her. Turn towards me, little ones! Run into my arms and I’ll never let you go! They can’t hear her, just as the falcon cannot hear the falconer. She should never have let them out of her sight for a single second. She should h
ave dialled emergency services and driven on, like Ballard said. What had she done to deserve this? She knew the answer. She had hurt Lawrence and wasn’t being allowed to get away with it. She’d put her sons in more danger by fleeing him, not less.
She breathed in and out till her torso loosened a little. Try to function, she thought. You’re bruised, your body aches, your heart aches, yet you’re alive, you’re sane and strong, the boys must be alive, they must be, they need you.
‘You,’ she said to Simon. ‘You knew about Kirsty. Are you psychic?’
‘Certainly not. It’s not like that.’
‘Do you – have a feeling about the boys? Where they are?’
His phone rang. ‘It’s Ballard,’ he said, and stood up to take the call.
Ava couldn’t hear what Ballard was saying and it was all she could do not to snatch the phone from Simon. His responses were muffled by loud sounds in the hallway, a clattering trolley, a voice approaching. A familiar voice. ‘Bed six . . . what room is that . . . up there . . . I’ve driven all this way, I didn’t know I had to stop in Colac, and I almost went past but that detective called me, she’s something to deal with, my God, she didn’t seem to understand the shock you feel when your daughter’s been hit by a car . . .’ A huffing and a clicking of heels on linoleum. No, please no. Ava couldn’t handle this right now – but yes, here was her mother swinging through the door of the hospital room.
‘My poor, poor girl! I’m so sorry you’re going through all this,’ Vanessa said, and flung her arms around Ava, making her want to cry. ‘We have got to get these boys back. As soon as I saw the fire on the news I came. I know you don’t usually need me, darling, but sometimes a person just needs their mother.’
Vanessa flung her keys and bag on the floor by Ava’s bed, sat on the visitor’s chair and looked at Simon. ‘Who’s this?’
Simon shook his head to indicate he couldn’t speak.
‘Mum, shut up,’ said Ava, remembering – like a reflex – that it helped if you told Vanessa what to do. ‘Shut up. Simon’s talking to the police.’
‘Oh – the surgeon guy. The other hero.’
Ava flipped her phone in her hands. The battery was too low. What if Max tried to ring her? He knew her phone number. She’d drilled them both. Ted could never remember but Max knew it off by heart. They’d sung the numbers to the tune of ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’. He was a smart boy. Good as gold. She could rely on that. Unless he was hurt . . . He isn’t hurt, don’t think that, he’s fine, he’s fine, so is Teddy, they’re both fine, and I will see them again. She needed a phone charger.
Vanessa said: ‘You know, there are things I have to tell you. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’
Sorry? Why was her mother sorry? Vanessa was never sorry for anything; it was a character trait. Ava looked more closely at her mother. Chalky skin. Clothes that were clean but just clothes; they weren’t an outfit. Hair unstyled and loose, puffy eyes bare of their habitual blue makeup crust.
‘Right now, what’s the most important thing?’ Vanessa asked.
The most important thing was to be available for Max if he tried to ring. If he could, he would.
‘Do you have a phone charger?’
Vanessa blinked. ‘Yes – yes, I do,’ she said, picking up and looking in her handbag. ‘Damnit. I’ve left my phone in the car. But there’s a charger in here.’ She extracted the small white object from her handbag and plugged it into the wall, then took Ava’s phone and connected it to the port.
Simon’s voice rose as he ended the call.
‘No bodies at the scene, that’s confirmed,’ he said to Ava.
‘Thank God.’
‘That woman, Kirsty Collins, is in a hospital in Warrnambool, not conscious yet, so the police haven’t been able to question her. Seems the fire was deliberately lit while she was inside the house.’
Was it lit by Lawrence? Ava had always wondered if he had this capacity. In the past she’d put the thought aside as too difficult to contemplate. She’d seen more than once – like when he’d pinned her to the wall – that whatever was good in him could so easily exit, leaving that strange deadness in his eyes.
‘So where could the boys be?’ asked Vanessa.
‘They think Lawrence’s taken them somewhere,’ said Simon.
‘Were they in the fire? Were they hurt?’
‘It’s not even definite they were at the house,’ said Simon. ‘Ballard thinks the boys are with Lawrence, but he didn’t take Kirsty’s Jeep. They’re talking to bus drivers. He might have hidden them somewhere else.’
‘So they were in it together? Kirsty and Lawrence?’ asked Ava. She remembered the Jeep in her street a few days earlier. Did it belong to Kirsty? Had she been watching them? Who would do this, abduct two children? Lovers, maybe? What was going through Lawrence’s mind to be acting like this? He’d done strange things in the past but – apart from breaching the IVO – never anything unlawful.
‘That’s Ballard’s theory.’
‘Okay. So how long do we have to wait for news?’ said Ava.
‘I don’t know,’ said Simon. ‘Maybe not long.’
Vanessa got to her feet, shaking her head. ‘I don’t believe Lawrence would light a fire with someone in the house. But he does frighten me. I haven’t been thinking about you enough, Ava. I don’t think we really know Lawrence, do we? Or do we? God, I don’t know – what a mess, what a mess. Let me get you something. Coffee. You like coffee. You look pale, my love.’
When Vanessa returned a few minutes later, Ballard was with her. Ava noticed that the detective’s forefinger was resting on her mother’s elbow very lightly, a proprietorial touch. Vanessa tossed her handbag on Ava’s bed and handed her a hot cup of coffee.
‘Ava, how are you? I’m so sorry that you’ve had this accident,’ Ballard said. ‘I think Lawrence wrote those postcards. Even the old one you got. There were two in Kirsty’s flat. And Vanessa says she got one too. All anonymous, but he’s the common factor.’
‘Lawrence wrote me the one from years ago? The one he was so angry about?’
‘Maybe he wanted to scare you. Maybe he wanted a reason to be angry with you.’
‘But he wasn’t like that back then.’
‘Wasn’t he?’
Vanessa leaned forward, almost imperceptibly shaking off Ballard’s finger, and said, husky and excited, ‘Do you think he has some secret double life? A serial killer?’
‘No, I don’t,’ said Ballard. Her voice was hard.
‘No, no, of course not. Sorry, that was insensitive . . .’
How could Lawrence have written that postcard? Or maybe it was a coincidence; after all, it was no more than hypothesis on Ballard’s part.
‘Oh my God, I’ve had the worst few days,’ Vanessa said. ‘I’ve been so worried! Out of my mind with worry. And Lawrence! He rang me on the day the boys went missing. Just after you left, Detective!’
‘Did he? Why didn’t you tell me earlier? We’ll need to hear exactly what—’
‘He was full of it. Saying he didn’t trust you police to find the boys. And then he rang me just before, when I was driving, said he wanted to say goodbye, that he wouldn’t be seeing me again. Either he’s leaving on a trip or he’s suicidal, that’s what I think,’ Vanessa said, her eyes darting towards Ava. ‘He sounded kind of mad.’
‘Did he give you any idea where he was?’ Ballard said.
‘No. It wasn’t his usual number. Came up as private.’
‘Why don’t you come with me to the station? We really need you to concentrate on what he said. Every detail matters.’
‘Oh, I can’t go to the police station now. I need to book somewhere to stay. I’m so tired after the drive.’
‘There’s a motel next to the station. I’ll get you a bed there. But right now, we need to talk. You’ve come to help Ava, right? So let’s talk. I feel like you’ll be able to help us quite a bit. I’ll give you a lift.’
With conflicting emotion
s, Ava watched her mother pick up her handbag and depart with the detective. Her relief was tinged with the perverse wish that Vanessa would stay to stroke Ava’s hair while she wept like a child into her pillow. She sipped the hot coffee and even though it was sour she knew she would drink it all. Ballard looked over her shoulder as she went out of the door and said: ‘Listen Ava, you must rest now. We’ll let you know the minute there’s any news.’
6
The panic simmering in Ava’s stomach like milk close to boiling was dulled by the heavy viscosity of the drug that lay over it, slowing the heart, slowing the blood. The air was like water when you breathe it in gently as she’d once done by accident and could do again, forcing death, when she chose.
Simon remained sitting nearby looking at his phone.
‘Can’t we just leave?’ she whispered.
If she could just get up out of this bed she could escape into the fresh, dark night, out of this blaring artificial light and endless white noise! Her drugged limbs were woodblocks but she couldn’t stay here. She wasn’t sick, she was a careless bitch, as Lawrence had said. Coldness closed in on her as the long hours reached for midnight.
Simon put his phone in his pocket. ‘They want to keep you in overnight.’
Ava pulled off the sheet. ‘Is your car downstairs? You could help me.’ Please, she thought. Please help me. But Simon’s eyes were bloodshot and he wasn’t looking at her and she remembered he was a stranger. ‘Why are you still here? I don’t even know you.’
Simon met her gaze. That dark stare coming from the rough and unhealthy and vestigially attractive face seemed suddenly alien, even threatening. Who was he? Why did he care?
‘You look bad,’ she said.
At that moment she didn’t mean bad as in unhealthy. She meant bad like a bad person. The words were spilling out of her mouth. She would goad him into helping her. He would unlock her cage or he would leave – either way, she would get out of here.
‘Your eyes look bad. You’re a drunk. An addict.’