The Vanishing Moment Read online

  About the author

  Margaret Wild is one of Australia’s most highly respected and best-loved authors for children and teenagers. Her verse novels for young adults are Jinx and One Night. Jinx was shortlisted for the CBCA awards and for the Queensland, NSW and Victorian Premier’s Awards. Margaret is the recipient of many awards, including the Nan Chauncy Award.

  THE

  VANISHING

  MOMENT

  MARGARET

  WILD

  First published in 2013

  Copyright © Margaret Wild, 2013

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or ten per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  A Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available

  from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 1 74331 590 3

  eISBN 978 1 74343 337 9

  Teachers’ notes available from www.allenandunwin.com

  Cover and text design by Sandra Nobes

  Cover photos by Shutterstock

  Set in 11 pt Fairfield Light by Sandra Nobes

  For Olivia

  ‘If there are multiple worlds

  then let there be one with an ending

  quite other than theirs.’

  Gwen Harwood ‘The Twins’, Selected Poems

  Contents

  1. BOB

  2. ARROW

  3. MARIKA

  4. BOB

  5. ARROW

  6. MARIKA

  7. BOB

  8. ARROW

  9. MARIKA

  10. BOB

  11. ARROW

  12. MARIKA

  13. BOB

  14. ARROW

  15. MARIKA

  16. BOB

  17. ARROW

  18. MARIKA

  19. BOB

  20. ARROW

  21. MARIKA

  22. BOB

  23. ARROW

  24. MARIKA

  25. BOB

  26. ARROW

  27. MARIKA

  28. BOB

  29. ARROW

  30. MARIKA

  31. BOB

  32. ARROW

  1. BOB

  This he remembers:

  They were on the highway, after three exhausting hours at the big shopping mall. His stepfather, Dean, was drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. Not a good sign. His mother was silent, her hand touching the bruise on her cheek. His little half-sister, Ellie, was asleep next to him in the car seat, her face angelic but sticky.

  Swearing, Dean swung out to overtake the car in front. An enormous truck loomed towards them, horn blaring. It sounded like an elephant farting.

  He laughed. Mistake.

  Dean swerved to the side of the road, stopped violently. Ellie woke with a jolt. Burst into tears.

  ‘Now see what you’ve done!’ Dean was out of the car, pulling open the side door, yanking him out.

  He tumbled to the dirt, one thong still in the car.

  ‘Walk home since you find my driving so amusing!’

  With a squeal of tyres, the car sped off.

  He scrambled up, his knee grazed, his heart racing. Ahead stretched the road, shimmering in the heat. On either side was dense, grey scrub.

  He swallowed his tears, tried to still the panic. He’d wait here. They’d come back, wouldn’t they?

  2. ARROW

  Eyes open, hands flickering, she sleepwalks.

  Unhook chain, turn key in lock, glide down steps, brush past hibiscus blooms heavy in the orange dark, breathe in thick perfume of gardenias glossy gleaming, push past cobwebby hedges black-gapped, unlatch gate, lurch along pavement humped by roots of trees. Stop. Gaze at road heading south. Dream under smithereens of stars, under swerve of moon, until found, led safely home.

  Or not.

  Prodded awake, she sways, dazed, disoriented. The bottoms of her pyjama pants drag heavy with dew. Her long hair is plastered to her face and neck. She peels off some sticky strands.

  Three boys are circling her. She smells stale beer, cigarettes. ‘You a zombie, or something?’

  ‘You looking for a good time, blondie?’

  ‘Little titties. Heh-heh.’

  She’s had dreams in which she can’t yell for help. She tries to, but the words choke in her throat. Sometimes she manages to wheeze, like a dog that’s had its vocal cords cut.

  Her throat is dry, closed. If she manages to squeeze out a sound now, it’ll just be a peep. Will that make her seem even more vulnerable?

  Silently, out of the shadows, an old man emerges, propelling himself on a red aluminium walking frame.

  ‘Arrow?’ he says. Mr Watts, her sickly next-door neighbour. Not only will she have to try to defend herself, but she’ll have to protect him.

  The night is getting worse and worse.

  ‘I’m looking for Killer,’ Mr Watts states. He turns to the boys. ‘He’s a Rottweiler with a very bad temper. I hope he doesn’t attack anyone. He usually goes straight for the jugular.’

  The boys glance at each other. ‘We’re running late,’ one of them says.

  ‘Yeah. See ya, blondie.’

  They stride away fast, hoods up, hands in pockets.

  Arrow grins. ‘Killer?’ she says.

  ‘Well, anything’s possible,’ says Mr Watts.

  A little Silky Terrier patters cheerfully towards them. Arrow scoops it up. It looks at her with dark almond-shaped eyes, then licks her with enthusiasm, its tongue like a pink petal.

  ‘Naughty girl, Lucy,’ scolds Mr Watts. ‘You mustn’t run off when I let you out for a piddle.’

  ‘Thanks, Mr Watts,’ Arrow says.

  ‘Thank my insomnia and Lucy’s weak bladder.’

  They walk home slowly, Lucy wriggling in Arrow’s arms. Mr Watts is wheezing. He has emphysema and a wonky knee. Arrow wants to do something for him. ‘I could exchange your library books for you, if you like?’

  ‘Good, I’ll give you a list. What are you reading at the moment?’

  ‘Nothing. I can’t concentrate. TV’s easier.’

  ‘There’s a reason it’s called the idiot box.’

  ‘Perfect for me.’

  ‘You’re bright enough, my dear,’ Mr Watts says, ‘as you well know.’

  Arrow shrugs. She also knows she just can’t find the energy to do anything. She’s unmotivated, purposeless, lazy, selfish, spoilt…

  They’re nearing home. She hopes her mother hasn’t discovered she’s missing.

  Wishful thinking, of course. The house is lit up like a football stadium.

  Somnambulism. Such a soft, drowsy word. Such sleepiness in every syllable. Say it slowly. Say it like a chant. Som-nam-bu-lism. Som-nam-bu-lism. Som-nam-bu-lism. As steady as a heart beat, as sure as a footstep.

  Her name is Alyssa, but her father nicknamed her Arrow when she shot out of her mother’s womb four weeks early one brisk Saturday morning in the Westfield car park. Such boldness! Such impatience to be born!

  She thinks with wonder of her fo
rmer self – all rip and zip, rush and zoom – vaulting over coffee tables, swinging on door frames, swarming up trees, revelling in her quick, light body.

  At eighteen, she’s still slightly built, but she feels slow and heavy, sluggish as a clogged drain. She’s finished school, and now not studying or working. She sleeps till noon, rummages in the fridge, glazes in front of daytime TV watching anything from ‘Play School’ to ‘The Bold and the Beautiful’.

  She doesn’t bother making her bed, sometimes she doesn’t shower. She wears the same clothes day after day. Her body feels so heavy and tired that she hasn’t the strength to lift her arms and tie back her hair.

  Her parents have given up circling study courses and job ads. Their lips are growing thin.

  ‘I’m not sponging off you,’ she reminds them. ‘I pay board and lodging.’

  ‘Aunt Maggie’s spoilt you rotten,’ her mother hoots. ‘Fancy giving you thousands of dollars just for passing Year 12! Now when I was a teenager…’

  Arrow smirks. She doesn’t believe her mother ever was a teenager. She was born wearing sensible, lace-up shoes and a cashmere cardigan.

  ‘I don’t think Aunt Maggie meant you to use the money to laze around,’ Arrow’s father says, more mildly.

  ‘Yeah, I know.’ Her great-aunt’s unshakeable belief that Arrow can be adventurous like her – hop on a hot air balloon, ride a camel in the Sahara Desert, have a love affair with an Italian prince – should prod her out of her inertia.

  It doesn’t. Nothing does.

  Her friend, Nikki, begs her to come to her eighteenth birthday party, theme: ‘Doctor Who’. ‘I haven’t seen you for ages! Please, please come! It’s going to be so much fun!!!’

  Yeah, right.

  Nikki, alluring in a purple flapper dress and turquoise flats, throws her arms around Arrow. ‘I’ve missed you! You don’t talk to me anymore. You don’t come around. You don’t call.’

  ‘Nothing to say.’

  Disbelievingly, Arrow looks around at the bowls of jelly beans, blue lemonade, fish fingers and custard, even a Tardis piñata. Most people are sporting fob watches, long scarves or bow ties, zapping each other with homemade sonic screwdrivers. No doubt it’s all meant to be witty, ironic and retro. But if it wasn’t for the eskies of wine and beer, as well as a jug of lethal punch, she’d swear she was at a ten-year-old’s party.

  Nikki introduces Arrow to her uni friends. They ooze health and vitality, nearly splitting their skins with zest and gusto. They make her feel like a little blotchy lemon left withering on the branch. A sour, dry little lemon.

  They’re all studying, working part-time, planning holidays and overseas trips. They make an effort to be friendly.

  ‘So what do you do?’

  ‘Eat, drink, sleep.’

  They laugh. They think she’s trying to be amusing. No one believes her.

  She grabs a bottle of cheap white wine and retreats to a dark corner.

  Cyberman (cardboard boxes covered in tin foil) creaks down next to her. He takes off his head. Not a good idea. A box is preferable to Venusian volcanic zits and craters. She looks away.

  ‘Your hair’s amazing,’ he says. ‘Sort of like white-gold.’

  She grunts. She’s heard this all her life.

  He peers into her face with concern. ‘You look sad. Have you lost K9?’

  Huh? Oh, the robotic dog, of course.

  ‘Ennui,’ Arrow says.

  He blinks.

  ‘Look it up in the dictionary.’

  ‘In one of the Doctor’s universes,’ he says valiantly, ‘you’d fall madly in love with me.’

  She shudders, and gives her full, loving attention to the bottle.

  Cyberman puts his head back on. ‘It’s my spots, isn’t it?’ he says, his voice muffled. He struggles to his feet, and lumbers away.

  Arrow feels sorry for him. For one second. His replacement is more interesting: narrow brooding eyes; thin scornful mouth. Like her, he’s made no attempt to dress up.

  Her mobile rings. Mum. She wants to ignore it. On the other hand, her mother is capable of turning up (in dressing-gown and slippers) to retrieve her errant daughter.

  ‘I’m fine.’ Not yet raped, bashed, murdered. ‘Be home soon.’ Sighing, she switches off the phone.

  From across the room, Nikki catches her eye. ‘Mum?’ she mouths.

  Arrow nods, and they both laugh.

  ‘Going?’ murmurs the boy.

  ‘Going,’ Arrow says. He doesn’t look heartbroken. Oh, well. When she totters home, her mother is still up, listening for the key to turn in the lock. ‘Night, Mum.’ She evades a kiss and escapes to her bedroom. It’s a lovely nest of soft, unwashed sheets, piles of clothes (dirty and clean) dumped on the floor, sticky cups and plates. She likes it. It’s her passive-aggressive way of driving her mother crazy.

  Arrow sleeps in most days. When she can be bothered, she crawls out of bed and goes to the local shopping centre. Not to shop, or to meet friends. Just to weigh herself at the chemist’s. Inexplicably, she weighs a schoolbag of books more than she should. Her friends used to joke about her heavy bones. How could she be so thin and weigh so much? She knows the reason now. When you die, someone claimed, your body is twenty-one grams lighter because that’s what your soul weighs. The soul she carts around is a guilty, leaden thing, lodged lumpen.

  Summer drags itself out. Nights are bubbling hot, people sleep strewn across beds like wilting flowers. Only cicadas rejoice, their supersonic shrills drowning out the whirr of fans.

  Her friends, even Nikki, stop phoning, no one visits. She doesn’t care. She doesn’t want to hear about their uni courses, jobs, holidays, boyfriends, girlfriends. It’s all too much.

  But she’s been going regularly to the library for Mr Watts. Many of the books on his list are so old the library doesn’t have them.

  ‘You should get a Kindle,’ she tells him. ‘Then you could download anything you want.’

  ‘My son’s threatening to give me one for my birthday. But I like paper and the feel and smell of a book. You should try it sometime.’

  ‘Stop nagging,’ she says. ‘I get enough of that at home.’

  He chuckles, and shuffles off to put on the kettle.

  Her father knocks on her bedroom door, persuades her to go for a walk down to the park.

  For most of the time, they stroll in silence. She can feel him crackling with energy and interest in the most ordinary of things: the raised reptilian roots of an ancient fig tree; a tiny baby twirling its fingers, entranced; a father teaching his little boy to ride a bike; a ratty dog tussling with a ball; a palm tree clacking in the breeze.

  She stops suddenly.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Nothing.’ And it is nothing. For a fleeting moment she had a feeling of déjà vu – been here, done this. There’s a rational explanation of course – something to do with neurological functions of the brain. But it’s unsettling, as if something is nudging at her, wanting to be let in.

  Her father puts his arm around her. ‘What’s happening to you, Arrow? You did so well at school. We had such high hopes—’

  ‘I hated school! I just did it because I had to.’

  ‘Really? I had no idea.’

  His astonishment is comical. Round open mouth, raised eyebrows.

  ‘If I’d told you, you would have made a fuss. Mum especially.’

  ‘Can you try to be nicer to her? Please?’

  With two fingers, she picks his arm off her shoulder. His hurt is palpable. She wants to say, Sorry, Dad, but she also wants to punish him. He lets Mum boss him around, boss them both around. Everything has to be done her way. If he wasn’t so weak, he wouldn’t have let Mum force him to abandon their house in Shelley Beach all those years ago.

  ‘I was happy there,’ she says. ‘It was my home.’

  He knows exactly what she means by ‘there’.

  ‘I know you were. We all were. But after the murders…’

 
Arrow’s heard this all before. After the murders her mother was convinced Shelley Beach was a dangerous, unpredictable hell. Never mind that the usual crime rate was very low, just the occasional car broken into, or a letterbox blasted with firecrackers on Guy Fawkes Night.

  It was a quiet little town, not fashionable enough for wealthy holiday-makers. It had pretty weatherboard houses, fibro holiday shacks painted bright blue or pink, some new brick bungalows with elaborate post boxes and regimented gardens, owned mainly by retirees. There were five caravan parks, a surf club, a bowling club, one primary school, a huddle of small, scruffy shops and one café that changed hands every two years because no one ate out very much.

  Children rode their bikes, swam, surfed, played cricket in the streets. People fished, gardened, walked their dogs. Nothing much happened in Shelley Beach. A garage sale was a big event – and an opportunity for neighbours to snoop. It was the safest, dullest place in the world, and Arrow loved it.

  But her mother packed them off to Sydney, to a solid middle-class suburb with solid brick houses peopled with solid professionals driving solid four-wheel tanks, their solid, obedient children kept busy with tennis, ballet, soccer, clarinet and violin lessons.

  ‘You can’t stay holed up in your bedroom forever,’ her dad says now. ‘You criticise your mother for not embracing life, but you’re doing exactly the same thing.’

  Stung, she doesn’t reply. She knows she has to do something, but what?

  3. MARIKA

  Just after dawn, Marika dresses quickly – T-shirt, jeans, sandals – and goes out of the back door, along the flagged path to the shed she uses as a studio. The air is fresh, bird-bright, full of possibilities.

  She pushes open the door, switches on the light and puts on the jug to make coffee. As always, she looks around, rejoicing in the earthy smell of clay, the old floorboards filmy with plaster dust, the workbench with its clamp, hammers and nails, the sink clogged with clay, the jars of tools, the shelf with its well-loved books, the comfy armchair in which she can curl up and dream.

  She’s getting ready to start a new sculpture. She doesn’t rush, she knows from experience that she needs to think and feel her way into her subject. This one will be of Echo, the Greek nymph so dreadfully punished.