The Vanishing Moment Read online

  And she’s decided she is going travelling soon, though it’s only a couple of hundred kilometres south, to Shelley Beach, where she used to live.

  Her mother looks aghast. ‘No! Not there!’

  Arrow feels a shaft of pity. She suppresses it. She’s not going to let her mother’s fears become hers.

  After the murders, her mother ran after her while she rode her bike at the park, in case she rounded a corner and vanished. She wasn’t allowed to go on a sleepover until she was sixteen and too old for one, anyway. Her mother would go on dates with Arrow, if she’d let her. Not that she’s had a boyfriend for ages.

  But her father is pleased about her plan. At least she’s shifting her lazy bones.

  ‘As long as you don’t pick up hitchhikers, and you phone or email to let us know how you’re doing.’

  Arrow nods.

  ‘Don’t worry, Mum. I’ll be fine. Really.’

  Her mother wants to buy her a new jacket, scarf, jumper, boots. Encased in warm wool and leather, she’ll be safe. Arrow curls her lip, but agrees to go shopping. Such a simple soul, her mum.

  At the department store they ascend an escalator as steep as a church spire to the Heaven (or Hell) of Ladies’ Wear. The escalator is mirrored on both sides. Their reflections – myriads of Arrows and Mums – stretch ahead.

  Arrow stares at her reflections. They stare back blankly. Imagine if one of them scowled, turned away, stalked off?

  9. MARIKA

  Marika is surrounded by security officers, one only a boy, his fingers peeping like mice from the sleeves of his oversized jacket. Police, their eyes tired, faces meaty, fetch her a chair, a glass of water.

  She babbles, goes over it again and again, trying to remember something, anything that will help find Jasper. There’d been an elderly man close by, consulting a book on sea creatures. A middle-aged woman with dull red hair, holding a toy kangaroo, a joey in its pouch. Some children shoving in to get a closer view of the fish. Nothing odd. Nothing out of the ordinary.

  Bring in the dogs, fan out, question, search the aquarium, forecourt, playground, shopping precinct. Bystanders milling around, unwilling to miss out, knowing something – who, what, why? – has happened.

  Phone calls. Mum. Steve. Arriving shaky, disbelieving, terrified. Mum’s mouth fixed in a silent scream, like a Munch painting.

  Marika feels the blood suddenly rush out of her head. Hands clammy, she pants, looks around blurrily. Everything around her is impressionistic – dots and dabs of colour that close up make no sense. And now she’s disembodied, floating, viewing the people huddled in agony below: the girl, the woman, the man. She feels sorrowful, but detached. She’s glad she’s not one of them. Then the woman stretches out a hand, makes the girl put her head between her knees…Marika feels a tug, and is reeled inexorably back into her body…

  Night falls. They are told to go home. Wait. Wait. Wait. No news. No news. No news.

  Sedation. Diarrhoea. Vomiting. Stomach empty-wrenching, arms wrapped around the cold, white toilet bowl, Steve half-carrying her back to bed.

  Newspaper headlines as large as graffiti. Radio updates on the hour. TV appeals on all channels. Mum tearless, face clenched, begging. Later, Steve howling in the garage, among paint tins, wheelbarrow, spades.

  Marika’s friends phone, determined to be positive, so hopeful that she screams they are idiots!

  Steve’s mother comes over every day, looking frail and helpless. She holds Marika’s mother, rocking her as if she were a small child. Marika sees the blame in this woman’s eyes. Her mother is too old to have another baby. Steve will never again be a father. Not that they want another child. They just want Jasper.

  Friends, neighbours, not knowing what to do, what to say. Making soup, stews, leaving casserole dishes on the doorstep. Marika gags at all the food in the fridge.

  Letters, cards, flowers, too many, shrivelling in plastic wrappings. Acquaintances with averted eyes ducking across the road, or gabbling awkwardly.

  Crank calls. Psychics. Leads. No leads. Silence. Marika listens for the telephone, listens for the doorbell, listens to the voices in her head. Some whimper, If only, if only. Some castigate, condemning her to hell. Others reason, justify, excuse.

  Waiting. Replaying. Praying.

  Sleeping. Sleeping. Sleeping. Hoping never to wake up.

  One morning Marika pushes away the drugs. She emerges, groping, from oblivion, feeling one hundred years old, her cheeks streaming with tears. Tears that will not stop.

  With shock, she realises it is the end of autumn. The last few leaves, crimson, yellow ochre, umber brown, drift down from the trees. She steps around them. The leaves are as big as rounds of Turkish bread, enticingly crackly. Jasper would have loved jumping on them, running through them, scattering them, his arms flung out in triumph.

  Steve says, ‘Your mother can’t cry. She can’t cry because she’s clinging to hope, clinging to the belief he is still alive. Your tears are killing her.’

  Marika dabs at her face, hears herself groaning. ‘I’ll stop crying,’ she promises. ‘I will.’

  But she knows she can’t. She is afflicted, as she should be. There is no respite.

  Abduction. Every parent’s worst nightmare. You don’t want to dwell on it, not even think about it in passing, in case you tempt the fates.

  Fact is, you’re far more likely to lose a child to everyday events: car crash, drowning, poisoning, house fire. Children fall out of trees, run across roads, topple out of high chairs, fall off balconies, play with lighters, poke things into power sockets. These are the realities, enough on their own to make parents sick with fear.

  But you can’t live in fear, so you take precautions to keep your children safe. And when you put them in the care of others, you check out the day-care centres, the preschools, the babysitters, to ensure they are trustworthy.

  Babysitters are trustworthy. Sisters are trustworthy.

  Curse me, curse me, curse me.

  She can’t sculpt, can’t even sketch. The urge to create has fled. Without her art, she is nothing. Just a useless, weeping ghost of a girl.

  She stares at herself in the bathroom mirror, at her red swollen eyes, her papery, sore skin.

  Poor me, she mocks, poor me. Look how I mourn. Look how I cry. So hopelessly, so copiously.

  Cry-baby! Sorrowing fool! Self-pitying creature! Dry your eyes, blow your nose, wipe your face. Smile. Do something.

  She goes back to uni, tries to catch up. Everyone knows what happened, of course. They’re so caring and kind, they make her feel like a freak. She’s the Girl Whose Little Brother Was Kidnapped.

  She still attends lectures, but stops going to tutorials where students are more likely to want to talk to her. She hangs about the house, feeling useless.

  ‘You could visit your grandmother for me,’ Mum says. ‘Would you, please?’

  Marika’s mother is back at the research lab, investigating endangered frogs.

  Habitat loss, pollution, pesticides, fungal diseases – there are many causes for disappearing frogs.

  A disappeared child, however, is unfathomable.

  When she’s not working, her mother haunts the parks and playgrounds, museums, the zoo, anywhere a child might visit. She scans faces, sees Jasper everywhere, only these little boys are strangers, not Jasper at all. Steve goes with her when he can, though Marika knows he thinks the searching is fruitless.

  She is humbled by his loyalty, his goodness. She wishes he would shout at her, condemn her, but he and Mum insist she is blameless. She was just in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

  The only place Marika’s mother can’t bring herself to visit is the aquarium. Marika makes herself go instead.

  Her heart thumping, she queues for the ticket, gets her hand stamped, and trudges up and down, around and around, feeling that she’s in a watery hell. The fish are a blur; all she can see are the children squealing, laughing, whingeing, clamouring. None of them are Jasper. Of course the
y’re not. This would be the last place the kidnapper would return to.

  On the day she goes to visit her grandmother, Marika is up early. She borrows Steve’s station wagon, fills it with petrol, checks the oil. It feels good to be doing ordinary things, good to escape the house.

  Her grandmother has been in a nursing home for three years. It’s a kind place, or, at least, it appears to be. The nurses are friendly, always laughing. If they weren’t, they probably wouldn’t be able to cope with the dribbling, wetting, shitting.

  It takes Marika two hours to drive there. She’s filled with dread. The home is clean and bright and smells sweetly of potpourri. But it also smells of disintegration, of bodies withering, of minds turning to mush.

  Luckily, her grandmother is one of the less damaged. She’s not yet secreting scraps of food in her bed, or urinating on the floor. She’s not ripping off her clothes and running naked through the grounds like that poor old man who used to be a judge. His wife is mortified, rarely visits.

  But her grandmother is now beginning to night wander, her short-term memory so impaired she becomes confused about whether it is night or day. No one has told her about Jasper’s disappearance. It would only upset her, and, anyway, she has Jasper totally mixed up with her long-dead son, Tim.

  Mum had told Marika how her parents had tried everything to keep Tim alive. They flew in miracle cures from Canada, Mexico, Rio de Janeiro. They pumped him so full of drugs that he looked like a fat, sad gnome. They transfused him with rivers of blood until, at last, he begged, ‘Let me die.’ He was seven years old.

  Now as Marika walks up the driveway, she waves to three women sitting at a bus stop. It’s not a real bus stop, and no buses ever come or go. It has been specially constructed to mollify those patients who believe they are still living in their own houses with a bus stop outside.

  After waiting for an hour or so, one of them will say, ‘I don’t think the bus is going to stop today. Oh well, we’ll go shopping tomorrow.’ Contentedly clutching their handbags, they drift back inside for lunch.

  Perhaps I should construct a new reality for myself, Marika thinks. In my reality Jasper will be alive, and we’ll be waiting for a big blue bus to take us to the zoo, or whatever our hearts’ desire. Of course, I’d have to be mad, but this could be the solace of madness.

  You’re disgusting, she tells herself. Disgusting to wish for madness when you’re here, in this place, surrounded by such stricken people.

  Her grandmother is in the lounge room of the locked security ward, watching TV with a handful of other residents. The sound is turned down so low you can’t hear a thing, but no one seems to mind. In one corner of the room is a white baby’s cot filled with cuddly dolls and teddies.

  Marika’s grandmother has her own special teddy, a soft golden bear with trusting brown eyes. In the evenings, she likes to curl up in bed with her lurid crocheted blanket and her teddy. She talks to it, telling it about her day.

  ‘A visitor – for me?’ Her grandmother struggles out of her chair, beaming like a child who has been given an unexpected treat. ‘My daughter,’ she announces proudly to everyone as they make their way out to a sheltered, sunny spot in the garden.

  ‘Will you brush my hair?’ she asks.

  ‘Of course,’ says Marika, opening her bag and taking out the old, ivory-handled hairbrush her mother made sure she’d packed.

  ‘One hundred strokes,’ her grandmother instructs.

  ‘One hundred strokes,’ Marika repeats. She brushes gently, rhythmically, counting aloud.

  The old woman’s eyes are shut, her face blissful.

  Marika remembers her grandmother as strong, independent and feisty. She is now mild and submissive and smiles too much, as if she is afraid of missing a joke in the conversation.

  ‘There,’ says Marika, laying down the brush. ‘Your hair’s lovely and shiny.’

  ‘You’re crying!’ Her grandmother looks afraid. She looks like a child who has found an adult weeping.

  Marika wipes her face with the back of her hand. ‘It’s nothing,’ she says. ‘Don’t worry.’

  Her grandmother smiles. She looks around, her eyes big, wondering. ‘Where is my husband? Why doesn’t my granddaughter visit? What’s your name again?’

  Later, as Marika drives home, flat elongated clouds are streaming across the sky like great white birds.

  She drives fast, fast as a snowbird, but her grandmother’s voice pursues her.

  ‘Where?’ she says. ‘What?’ she says. ‘When? How? Who? Why?’

  10. BOB

  This he remembers:

  He was being bullied at school by a brute of a kid: Colin McIver, two years older than him, big and scary as a T-Rex.

  When he came home, with his shirt torn and his arms bruised, Dean said, ‘Right,’ and marched him over to Colin’s house. He banged on the torn screen door.

  Mr McIver, scratching his flabby white belly, said, ‘Yeah?’

  ‘My boy wants to fight your boy,’ said Dean.

  Mr McIver grinned. ‘Sure.’

  He bawled over his shoulder, ‘Colin! Come here!’

  The fight didn’t last long.

  11. ARROW

  Arrow informs the library about the lost book and pays for a replacement. She doesn’t get around to buying another mobile. Apart from Nikki, there’s no one she really wants to phone. And it’ll make it more difficult for her mother to keep tabs on her while she’s away.

  She needs to leave soon. This morning when she looked out of her bedroom window, she caught a glimpse of a group of young people loitering outside in the street. The man seemed to have something stuck over his nose. Was it him, the one she pushed over? She’s not sure. It’s a long way here from Newtown. What are they doing here?

  She could phone the police, but what could she say? She doesn’t know for certain it’s them, and, besides, she attacked the man. Possibly broke his nose. The police might charge her with assault.

  She’s transfixed behind the curtain, peering again and again. She strains her ears, thinks she hears a girl’s cackling laugh.

  Shivering, she rubs her arms for comfort. She knows what they want. They want her.

  It’ll be good to disappear to the south coast for a while. Let the muggers get over it and get on with other things.

  In the meantime, she’s trapped.

  Tucking Poor Fellow My Country under her arm, she goes out to the back garden and searches for a gap along the lillypilly hedge that separates her house from Mr Watts’. Crouching low, she pushes aside branches and twigs, and emerges scratched and dusty, plucking cobwebs and dead leaves from her hair.

  Mr Watts is hanging out the washing. He and Lucy regard her, astonished. Barking, the little dog skitters around her ankles.

  ‘Unusual entry,’ says Mr Watts. ‘Something wrong with the front gate?’

  ‘Muggers,’ says Arrow. ‘Here, Mr Watts, happy birthday.’

  ‘For me?’ He takes the book and examines it. ‘Oh, Arrow, this is far too generous.’

  ‘No, it’s not,’ she says, her voice gruff.

  ‘If you bring in the washing basket, I’ll make you a cup of tea and you can tell me about the muggers, whoever they are.’

  When Arrow’s finished relating what happened, she adds, ‘Don’t tell my parents. My mother’s frantic enough about me going away.’

  ‘And you think these people are here waiting for you, in the street?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  Mr Watts plods over to his walking frame. ‘I’m going to ask them if they’ve seen my vicious dog Killer.’

  ‘No!’ Arrow jumps up. ‘I don’t want you to get involved.’

  ‘Calm down, girl. I’ll be fine. Just stay inside with Lucy.’

  He pushes the frame out of the front door and up the path. Holding the little dog firmly, Arrow peers out of the lounge-room window, but thick camellia shrubs block her view. If she hears loud voices or shouting, she’ll be out in the street in a flash.

&n
bsp; After a few minutes, Mr Watts is back, grinning.

  ‘Got the impression they’re not dog lovers. The bloke with the sticking-plaster on his nose looked very edgy. I don’t think they’ll be back.’

  Arrow lets out a breath. ‘Thanks, Mr Watts. I owe you big-time.’

  ‘Just send me and Lucy a postcard from the south coast. Something with lots of sea and sky.’

  In the afternoon, Arrow’s father wants her to go with him to Gleebooks in the inner-west, where an old friend is launching his new book on ethics. Although he’s an accountant, her dad would have loved to have taught philosophy and still tries to keep up in the field.

  Arrow yawns. ‘Ethics – boring!’

  ‘Not at all. You were reading Crime and Punishment, remember? That’s all about moral dilemmas.’

  She shrugs. ‘Fair enough, I’ll come.’

  The bookshop’s packed with buyers – and browsers. Some people seem to have taken root, book in hand, eyes rapt. The sales assistants don’t seem to mind.

  Arrow dawdles up the narrow wooden stairs. The upstairs room, which is used for book launches and lectures, is already filling up. Along the walls are rows of books on art, architecture, poetry, drama; their covers bright and enticing.

  While her father goes to talk to the author, she slumps in a seat at the back where she can fall asleep unnoticed, if necessary.

  She knows her dad’s friend, Tom Joy, slightly. He’s a professor at the university, and his classes are apparently filled up with girls all madly in love with him. It doesn’t seem to bother them that he’s married with five children.

  Someone introduces Tom, using lots of flattery. Tom looks modestly embarrassed. With his floppy brown hair and blue eyes, he is stereotypically gorgeous.

  This book is a new venture, he says, being a book about ethics for children. He starts off by explaining ethics as a set of moral principles and rules of conduct aimed at preventing harm and wrongdoing to others, to promote the good, to be respectful and to be fair.