The Vanishing Moment Page 11

  ‘It gets even weirder,’ Arrow says, her voice dry, and she tells Marika what happened to Bob. ‘He really believes in parallel universes with different endings.’

  Marika stretches her legs. ‘Crazy stuff. The man’s not well.’

  ‘But what if it’s true?’

  ‘It would be tempting,’ Marika says, ‘to exchange your own unhappy life for a chance of a happier future. But would it be the right thing to do? Could you be happy at someone else’s expense, even if that someone is another version of yourself?’

  Arrow nods. ‘That’s sort of what my dad said.’

  It’s getting late and Marika wants to go home, have a bath, scrub the clay from under her fingernails. She’s about to get up, when Arrow says, ‘What would you do if you heard this voice say, “I can Interchange, Marika. Shall I?”’ She’s made her voice breathy, mysterious.

  Marika flinches. ‘That’s not funny!’

  ‘Sorry, I wasn’t trying to make a joke, but would you answer yes or no? Think about it seriously. Please.’

  Interchange. To exchange. To swap.

  Marika thinks, This is the way it could be…

  They’re on an outing, a rainy autumn-day outing to the aquarium. As the attendant stamps the back of their hands with the entry pass (a blue octopus symbol), Marika has the oddest feeling. She’s lived this moment before. She tries to get a fix on the memory, then tantalisingly, it slips away.

  The place is jostling with students on an excursion. To Marika they are just school kids, high-spirited at being let out of class for the day. But to Jasper they are wonderful beings. He gazes up at them in awe. He butts them with his head, grabs a rugby-forward leg, won’t let go. The girls squeal, ‘Oh, isn’t he cute!’ The boys indulge him – ‘Hey, big guy. Wanna wrestle?’

  It’s a good day. Such a good day. They see starfish and seahorses, seals and sea snakes, giant crabs, octopuses, manta rays and sharks.

  Marika is feeling tired. Her back aches from lifting Jasper up to see the fish. Suddenly, he bounces in her arms, knocking her chin. Her teeth bite down on her tongue.

  ‘Oh!’ With her free hand, she wipes away a dribble of blood.

  Jasper is gazing up at her, his eyes big. ‘Sorry, Marika,’ he says.

  She squeezes his waist comfortingly. ‘It’s all right, just an accident.’

  From the corner of her eye, she becomes aware of someone watching them. A stocky woman with dull red hair. She’s holding a toy kangaroo, and she’s smiling at Jasper, the way people do to attractive children. An elderly man with a book on sea animals is regarding them, too, his eyes darting like tiny fish.

  ‘Time for lunch,’ Marika says. She hurries down the aisle, pushing the stroller with one hand. As she nears the corner, she glances back. The woman is still watching them. Her mouth is twisted. She looks disappointed. The old man has turned away, the book clasped under his arm.

  Jasper struggles in her arms. ‘Put me down,’ he demands. And she does. But she is gripping his hand firmly as they emerge into watery sunshine.

  Yes, this is the way it could be.

  The room is as quiet and still as a rock pool, so quiet, so still, that in its greeny depths, Marika thinks, you could hear a crab scuttling, a chiton creeping, a worm burrowing.

  She ponders about living out another version of her life. A life with Jasper in it, a life where there was no kidnapping, no grief. Another Marika, another Mum, another Steve would have to find the courage and patience and endurance to go on.

  She clenches her hands, then lays them, palms open, on her lap. ‘No,’ she says. ‘No.’

  ‘No?’ Arrow looks at her with wonder. ‘I’m not sure I could be as unselfish as you.’

  ‘I just think you have to come to terms with the life you have.’ Marika rubs her face, touches her eyes. ‘I don’t believe it – the bloody tears have dried up!’

  She starts laughing, and can’t stop.

  On the way home, Marika gazes up at the sky, black as a ploughed field, the stars glinting like hard, white stones. Millions, billions of them. They make her feel tiny and insignificant.

  In the morning she might feel differently, but right now she’s strangely comforted by the immensity and indifference of the universe.

  Back at the house, she stokes the fire, staring into the flames. They dance and tease like little red and yellow imps.

  Did she only say no because she suspected that Arrow would have said yes?

  She doesn’t think so. This is her life. Here and now. There is no escape.

  Bob needs to see a doctor. He’s obviously hallucinating. She knows what that’s like. When she was still on the tablets, trying to dull the pain of Jasper’s disappearance, she wasn’t always quite sure what was real and what was imagined.

  Like that truck she saw speeding past as if on urgent business. It was white with a red sign: ‘Pavement Management Services’. She hadn’t realised that pavements needed controlling. But of course, they do. They’re an unruly lot. Lumpy, uneven, patched, cracked, stained, ribbed with weeds, smeared with dog shit. The playground rhyme ‘Step on a crack, break your mother’s back’ began chanting in her head.

  As she stared, the pavement started to writhe. Loosen, like a scab on a wound. An elderly man stumbled, grabbed a fence post. A mother, with a child in a stroller, staggered, as if she could feel the ground shifting.

  Marika remembers how she ran into the house and shut the door. She didn’t want to see the pavement crawl away with its crusty underbelly dragging in the torn earth.

  She didn’t tell her mother and Steve. A few days earlier they’d looked at her with concern when she’d talked to them about the bag lady.

  A runaway from an old people’s home, she resided at a bus shelter in Johnstone Street. Resplendent in pink satin and beach hat, encircled by bulging black plastic bags, she nodded regally at passers-by. Some, including Marika, stopped and asked if there was anything she needed.

  ‘Coke, please,’ she said, or ‘Bottle of water, cheese croissant.’

  ‘Why are you here?’ Marika asked.

  The woman smiled. Her smile was so warm it was as if she’d swallowed the sun. ‘I am waiting for lift off,’ she said.

  One morning she’d vanished – and so had the bus shelter.

  But Marika’s mother said, ‘I never saw her.’

  And Steve said, ‘There’s never been a bus shelter in Johnstone Street.’

  Were they right? Had she imagined it? But it’d felt real. She’d believed it, just as Bob believed that what had happened to him was real.

  The phone rings. It’s her mother. Without any preamble, she says, ‘I dreamed about you last night. I dreamed that I touched the tears on your face. Please come home.’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Marika promises. Her heart sings. ‘I’ve stopped crying, Mum.’

  ‘And I’ve just started,’ her mother says, her voice wry.

  Early the next morning, Marika packs her bags and has a quick breakfast. She clears the fridge of anything that’ll rot, then locks the front door behind her. She tucks a note for Andy under the front doormat: ‘I’ll be back. And then I’d love to come for dinner with your family.’

  She knocks on Arrow’s door, waits until she emerges, rubbing her eyes, childlike in a big T-shirt and grey track suit pants.

  ‘I just wanted to say goodbye.’

  Arrow’s mouth droops. ‘You’re going. Is it because of last night?’

  ‘My mother rang. She wants me to come home.’

  ‘That’s so good. But I’ll miss you.’

  ‘We’ll see each other again. Either here or in Sydney?’

  ‘Sure.’

  When Marika glances back, Arrow is still standing at the door, looking small and forlorn.

  On the way to the train station, Marika stops at the garage. Bob rolls out from under a car, his hands slick with grease. From a grubby blanket in the corner, Frankie gets up stiffly and totters over. She strokes his head, then says to Bob, ‘Last night
I imagined that I was offered Interchange. I turned it down.’

  He nods, his face expressionless. ‘Good luck, Marika.’ He slides back under the car.

  She stares for a moment at his feet. His shoes need resoling. She pats Frankie again and is on her way.

  The train stops and starts, shuffling through dairy country – green hills dotted with cows, gum trees, coral trees, here and there solitary palms, the remnants of ancient rainforest. She thinks about her mother’s dream, about her mother touching her tears, wanting her back home. She can’t wait to be there.

  Steve greets her at the front door. He opens his arms and she flies into them.

  Marika and her mother sit, unspeaking, at the kitchen table so rich and golden, so glorious, it’s as if a sunset has fallen from the sky. It’s hard to believe this blessing was crafted from old cedar telephone poles – plain, humble, lanky as country boys. Without them, though, gleaming silver cables could not sway and sing, could not speed a thousand tongues, a trillion words of love and loss, regret and hurt.

  Marika’s mother strokes the silky wood, over and over, as if to summon volt, amp, kilowatt. Marika fingers the only blemish – a crusty black knot, until, at last, she is able to clear her throat and speak.

  The door to Jasper’s room is wide open, the sun pouring in through the window. ‘I haven’t stopped hoping that we’ll find him,’ her mother says, ‘or that we’ll find out what happened. But I’m not going to make a memorial of his room. I don’t want it to become as musty as an old museum.’ She smiles. ‘I like to come in here and just lie on his bed. Do you remember how excited he was when we bought it?’

  ‘He called it his “big boy’s bed”.’

  Her mother picks up one of Jasper’s favourite books about a Green and Golden Bell Frog. The creature is lime green, eyes popping. It has a rose-pink, measuring-tape tongue. ‘Kiss it, Mummy,’ he used to say. ‘Kiss it.’

  And she did, while he held his breath, waiting for it to turn into a prince. Jasper believed in miracles. After all, during a holiday at a farm he’d seen misshapen tadpoles transform into jaunty, acrobatic frogs.

  Marika’s mother puts away the book and curls up on the bed. She holds out her hand. Marika lies down next to her. She’s sure she can smell Jasper’s hair, whiffy, a bit unwashed. Her mother tells her about a species of desert frog, Cyclorana platycephala. Wrapped in wafers of shed skin, sealed in clay chambers, they sleep for months, even years, until awakened by seeping water.

  ‘Imagine incarcerating yourself in darkness,’ Mum says, ‘trusting that the rains will come and you will scramble back into the light.’

  Her arm is around Marika, her breath warm on her neck as slowly they, too, begin to dig their way out, hoping to surface.

  28. BOB

  This he remembers:

  One moment he was hunkered down in the Jacksons’ house, the next he was here, watching a footy match on TV.

  He stared around, at the serene Arthur Boyd prints of the Shoalhaven River on the walls, at the blue-patterned rug, at the brown sofa and chairs. He knew with certainty that he’d never been here before, yet it felt oddly familiar.

  Interchange. To exchange. To swap lives.

  He belonged here now.

  His mother entered the room with a tray of cheese and biscuits.

  ‘Why’re you staring like that? You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.’

  He laughed with relief and joy. ‘You’re looking pretty, that’s all.’

  He couldn’t take his eyes off her. No bruises, no sad down-turn to the mouth, no miserable eyes.

  ‘Mum,’ he said, ‘after my father died, why didn’t you remarry?’

  It was her turn to laugh. ‘No one asked me.’ She looked at him reflectively. ‘There was a man I rather liked. Dean. But one morning you spilled a glass of milk and he slapped you. So I gave him his marching orders.’

  ‘Are you happy, Mum?’

  ‘I have my ups and downs. What about you?’

  ‘I want to be.’

  He felt guilty about the other Bob who had no one and nothing, but he was glad to be here.

  Then he realised, with a stab of grief. In this world, there was no little sister, no Ellie.

  29. ARROW

  Arrow potters about the house. She thinks of Marika, so joyful, on her way home. She admires her – she’s resilient, purposeful, brave, talented. All those things she is not. I will make changes to my life, she vows. I will.

  She’s envious, too, of Marika’s relationship with her mother. The two of them sound so close. What must that be like? Dimly, she remembers how she used to chatter to her mother, telling her everything, trusting her. When she was a little kid, her mother was the world; now she’s an annoying satellite. How did that happen?

  She decides to phone her mother, just to have a chat and to ask about Mr Watts. She also wants to talk to Bob. As he claims to have swapped from one world to another, was the previous world the same as this one? Were they very different, or were the changes subtle? Was that why he kept on touching poles and signs? Checking that he hadn’t been shifted to another world?

  But first she’s going to make a pilgrimage to the place Fergus loved best: the beach at Black Rock. The dream of the happy family picnic is still vivid in her mind.

  As she drives through the forest of wattle trees, tea-trees and banksias, she hears a whipbird calling – the extraordinary whistle ending on a loud, cracking note. She listens again, her head cocked, waiting for the ‘choo-eee’ to follow.

  Feeling a bit more cheerful, she parks the car in the small public car park at the top of the road. The only other car is a battered grey Mazda. Plastered to the back window is the ubiquitous sign, ‘Child on Board’.

  She starts walking down the well-worn grassy path to the beach. On her left is the neatly maintained house with a million-dollar view of the ocean. The old man and woman she’d seen days earlier are now digging holes and planting sturdy-looking shrubs. They’ll need to be tough to withstand the wind and salt.

  They look up and say hello as Arrow walks past. She greets them and saunters down to the beach.

  A small boy is sitting alone in the sand among crusty layers of seashells. He’s picking them up, one by one, examining, selecting. Next to him is a yellow plastic bucket. No adult seems to be looking after him, though there is a woman in a bright blue anorak not too far away, fishing off the rocks.

  Arrow crunches up to him, bends down.

  ‘Hello. You’re all on your own. Where’s your mummy?’

  He looks up at her. His eyes are sea-green, doleful. His hair sticks up at the back. She resists an impulse to smooth it down. She’s seen him somewhere before. Perhaps playing on the sand at Shelley Beach?

  ‘Mummy’s gone,’ the child says.

  Arrow points to the woman on the rocks. ‘Who’s that then?’

  ‘Auntie Mo. She’s catching a little fishy for my dinner.’

  ‘Yum. Lucky boy.’

  He sifts some shells in his hand. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Arrow. What’s yours?’

  He looks secretively at her. ‘Jason,’ he mumbles. ‘D’you want to help me find some shells?’

  She glances up. The woman has turned her head, is watching them. Of course, stranger-danger. You can’t be too careful these days.

  ‘Sure, but I’ll just go and talk to your auntie first. Be back in a moment.’

  She straightens up and strolls across the rock platform towards the woman. In her jeans, boots and bulky anorak, she looks solid and capable.

  ‘Good day for fishing?’ Arrow asks. The woman gestures to a covered bucket. ‘Not bad. Caught some tailor. I’m hoping for salmon, but they’re more plentiful at dawn or dusk.’ Her voice is husky, as if she’s got a cold or is a heavy smoker.

  ‘Your nephew said you were catching a little fishy for his dinner.’

  ‘He’s a fussy eater. Would happily exist on baked beans.’

  ‘Sounds like most kids.’r />
  ‘He’s going to help me make a batter. With any luck that might tempt him to try a few bites.’

  The woman looks vaguely familiar. From one of the shops? Vinnie’s? It’s always difficult to place people when you see them out of context. She has short reddish hair, greying at the temples, and a lined but attractive face. Next to her is a black tackle box filled with line, hooks, pliers, weights, shiny lures. And two knives. One short, one long. Both smooth and sharp.

  ‘He wants me to help him collect some shells. Is that okay?’

  The woman shrugs. ‘He’d empty the sand of shells if I let him.’

  Arrow laughs. ‘He’s a sweet little fellow.’

  The woman smiles. It lights up her face. She looks younger, gentler.

  ‘He’s my lovely boy.’

  For a moment everything stops – the waves in mid-swoop and plunge; the seagulls wheeling and crying overhead; rags of seaweed fluttering in the wind.

  Arrow feels herself starting to sway. She hasn’t heard those words for eight years. The very words that made Daisy so jealous.

  This can’t be her. It can’t be. Not here. Not now.

  It is. It is. Oh, my God, it is.

  Arrow fears her knees are going to buckle.

  ‘Are you ill?’

  Arrow steadies herself, takes deep breaths. Her mouth is so dry she can feel her tongue sticking to her palate.

  She moistens her lips. ‘Just a bit of vertigo. I shouldn’t go so close to the edge.’

  ‘Have we met before? There’s something…’

  ‘I live in Sydney. This is the first time I’ve been here. We always holiday on the north coast. My name’s Nikki, I’m at university.’ She’s gabbling, saying too much, trying too hard. She steps back. ‘I’ll just go and help him find some shells.’

  The woman nods, reels in the line. ‘Tell him we’re leaving in ten minutes.’

  Arrow forces herself to saunter, to stoop to peer at fish and plant fossils, to poke her fingers into warm little rock pools. The back of her neck prickles. She’s sure she can feel the woman’s eyes fastening on her like fish hooks.