The Vanishing Moment Read online

  ‘Young people are faced with ethical decisions every day,’ he says. ‘It’s important to discuss different situations with them from a very young age. This way they have a basis for making their own, sometimes very tricky, decisions. It’s not always clear-cut. There aren’t always right or wrong answers.’

  He gives some examples:

  ‘What would you do if you know your friend is taking drugs? Should you tell his or her parents? Or would that be disloyal?

  ‘What would you do if a fellow student is cheating in tests? Do you try talking to the student? Do you tell the teacher? Do you mind your own business?

  ‘What would you do if a friend or stranger was in danger? Would you try to help, or would you not get involved?’

  Arrow doesn’t fall asleep.

  After the talk, Tom’s swamped with fans wanting books signed. Arrow’s father waves goodbye to him, and they leave, a book tucked under her dad’s arm.

  As they’re crossing the road to a coffee shop, a dishevelled woman accosts them. Her breath stinks of booze. ‘I need money for the train,’ she explains, her voice slurred. ‘My daughter’s very sick. She lives in Dubbo. I haven’t seen her for months.’

  Arrow dithers. If she gives the woman money and she spends it on grog and is so drunk that she gets knocked over by a car, would that be her fault? But what if she is telling the truth and really needs to see her daughter and her daughter dies before she can get there?

  Her father pulls out his wallet and gives the woman a twenty dollar note.

  ‘Good luck.’

  She thanks him profusely, her eyes flicking over Arrow.

  In the café, Arrow explains that she wasn’t being tight-fisted. ‘I was just weighing up the ethical thing to do, as Tom Joy would say.’

  As she demolishes a slab of ricotta cheesecake, she pauses and says, ‘Do you believe that revenge is ethical?’ She’s thinking of the man with blood on his face – maybe she really did break his nose…

  ‘A Chinese philosopher – Confucius, I think – once said, “Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.” In other words, a desire for revenge may end up hurting both the victim and the perpetrator.’

  He looks at her closely. ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘Dunno. Just wondered.’ She hopes that Mr Watts is right and that the muggers have been scared off by the non-existent Killer. Should she tell her mum and dad about them? Warn them? But the house is a fortress with its security doors and deadlocks. No one can break in.

  12. MARIKA

  Marika is going into exile. She’s being banished to the family holiday house: a weatherboard cottage in a seaside village called Shelley Beach. She used to choose to go there – to escape from the stresses of uni essays, the traffic snarls, phone calls, emails, trivia evenings at the pub. She could sculpt uninterrupted, wake up to the glorious lunacy of currawongs and kookaburras cackling, fall asleep to the singing of frogs, the squealing of bats and the dull roar of the sea.

  Now she has no choice. Mum has made a new friend, a clairvoyant called Dolores, who insists that Marika’s presence in the house is malign. She must leave, or Jasper will never come back.

  ‘It’s bullshit, of course,’ Steve says. ‘I’m very sorry, Marika, but your mother believes this stupid woman. Can you stay at the holiday house for a while, until things get better? It’ll mean missing out on some lectures and tutorials.’

  Marika nods, unable to speak. Now she knows why her mother has been avoiding her for days, why she has shrunk from a hug, a touch.

  Feeling numb, she packs a bag while her mother’s at work, catches a bus to Central Railway, and gets on the slow train to the coast.

  The carriage is packed. Everyone’s on their mobile phones, either playing games or talking loudly. Marika opens a book, tries to immerse herself in it, but other people’s conversations keep intruding. She gives up, peers out of the window at the countryside. But the glass is so grimy she can’t see a thing.

  She becomes aware that the small girl sitting opposite is staring at her. At the tears trickling down her cheeks, of course. Marika smiles reassuringly. The girl buries her face in her mother’s coat sleeve, just an eye peeping out.

  Marika is tempted to pull faces, to make the child giggle, as she’d often done with Jasper. But the mother is looking uncomfortable as well. So Marika leans against the window and shuts her eyes. Shuts out the world, until she has to enter it again.

  She thinks of Picasso’s portrait, Weeping Woman, of the sharp, jagged shapes like splintered glass; of the colours – green and yellow – suggesting the fading bruises of a damaged soul. It is pain and suffering unmasked. Terrible. It is how she feels. It’s not surprising the child doesn’t want to look at her.

  The house hasn’t been used for months. It smells stale and dusty. Marika opens all the windows, lets the breeze flow from the front door to the back.

  She knocks down cobwebs, sweeps the floor, scoops a dead frog out of the toilet, collects logs of wood from the garage, crumples newspaper, ignites a fire in the combustion stove, makes up a bed with fresh sheets, and falls asleep, exhausted.

  She wakes in the middle of the night, disoriented. Her cheeks are wet. God, she’s even crying in her sleep. No wonder her eyes are inflamed and sore.

  She shifts from side to side, trying to get back to sleep. But her mind is feverish.

  There are famous exiles, worthy men and women who have left their countries to escape persecution. She is an ignoble exile. Despicable. Contemptible. Blameworthy.

  Outcast.

  She weeps. She weeps as she shops for milk and bread. She weeps in the café, in the newsagent’s, as she walks down the street. She goes to sleep weeping, and she wakes up weeping. Sometimes passers-by stop, ask if they can help. She thanks them for their concern, says it’s nothing, just some mysterious medical condition. That’s not true, of course. There’s nothing wrong with her lachrymal system. Her tear ducts are in perfect working order.

  She weeps because she is wicked. Because she has done something unforgivable. Unforgettable. Irredeemable.

  Tears are running down her face now as she walks along the beach, soaking into the scarf pulled up to her chin. It is winter, late afternoon. The most beautiful time of day, with the sunset streaking above and in the water. But already the sky is darkening.

  A couple of children, tough, bare-legged little things, are fishing. She turns her face away. She doesn’t want to scare them with her tears.

  In Mexico, she has read, there is a folktale about La Llorona, whose name means ‘weeping woman’. She haunts the woods and other dark places, snatching children. Marika is in that dark place now. She didn’t snatch a child, but she let it happen. She is responsible, culpable, and like La Llorona, condemned to weep for ever.

  Not knowing.

  Is he alive, or dead? Is he being cosseted and loved, or maltreated and tortured?

  Who took him? Was it some lonely, loveless woman, beguiled by his sunny smile? And he was very sunny that day at the aquarium. But what might have happened when he sulked, screamed, kicked? Would she still have found him beguiling? Please let her give him back, give him back, give him back.

  Who stole him? Was it some deranged creature, hungry for soft, innocent flesh? Please, then, let him die quickly, quickly, quickly.

  When she gets back to the house, she takes out coloured pencils and paper. She draws Jasper from memory, picture after picture, trying to find the right green for his eyes, his characteristic expression, the cheeky tuft of hair.

  He grins up at her, but she’s dissatisfied with the way she’s drawn his eyes.

  That night, and every night, she watches TV. For company and anaesthesia.

  Game shows are the best – all that mindless activity, mindless screeching happiness. Spin the wheel, win a spa bath; list the barbecue, fridge, microwave, golf clubs in order of value and win a car; answer questions aimed at the lowest IQ, win an overseas holiday, and so on and so on and so on.
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  Once, by mistake, she encounters a documentary about the genocide in Rwanda. Yellowy bone shanks, red scraps of clothing, walls of skulls as smooth and shiny as ostrich eggs. Chastising herself for her cowardice, she switches it off, fast.

  But she’s compelled to watch, with dreadful fascination, an American cop show about a kidnapped child. The mother is distraught, but coherent. The police are resourceful, smart, with spooky intuition. The child is found, unharmed, still pink-cheeked and unperturbed, delivered into her mother’s thankful embrace. Another happy Hollywood ending. That’s the stuff to watch.

  Marika lies alone and sleepless in the quiet country dark, knees scrunched up to her chin. She misses the city in winter. She misses the university, the bookshops, the galleries, the delicatessens, the outdoor cafés redolent with coffee, the huge gas heaters blazing like small suns. She misses her friends, her shed, her work. She misses the sunlight streaming into her bedroom. She misses her mum. She misses the warm chunkiness of Jasper on her lap. She even misses Steve.

  She gets up, fills a hot water bottle. It’s a poor substitute, but it’ll have to do.

  In the morning, she trudges down to the garage and pulls out an old bucket of clay, stands at the workbench, starts to work – pounding the clay, pushing, rolling, squeezing. Clay is so sensual that usually her whole body is flooded with pleasure, but now she feels cold, vacant.

  She thinks of the Swiss sculptor, Alberto Giacometti, and of those nine terrifying years when every sculpture he made became smaller and smaller: small and thin as a pin, so small that if he touched them with a knife they turned to dust, so small he kept them in matchboxes.

  She packs away the clay, scrubs her hands, and retreats to her matchbox of a bed, though it is midday and the sun is shining.

  Hours later the phone wakes her up. Her mother sounds normal, friendly even, but she doesn’t ask Marika to come back home. She says, ‘Your father rang. He wants some work done on the house. Can you get in a handyman, and fix up the place a bit? Send the bills to me.’

  ‘All right,’ Marika says. She wants to ask her mother how she is, but her mother rattles off a list of things to do. Marika reaches for a pen and paper, makes notes.

  ‘Anything else?’ she asks. ‘How’s Steve?’

  ‘He’s fine. Take care.’ Her mother rings off. Marika stares at the phone dangling in her hand. She feels depressed and empty. It’s as if she’s just talked to a polite, efficient stranger.

  In the next few days, Marika makes a friend. Andy the Handyman. He’s known locally as one of the ‘black beanie boys’, because they all wear black woollen caps, work cheaply for cash, and can tackle most jobs, except wiring and plumbing.

  He removes rubbish, saws off some dangerous branches, repairs the side gate, replaces four rotten floorboards, tiles the laundry, tells Marika his life story, and is now trying to talk her into painting the house, inside and out.

  ‘I have a wife and two babies to support,’ he says, his eyes sly.

  ‘I know,’ Marika says. ‘You’ve told me that often enough.’

  He grins. ‘So what about it?’

  The house badly needs painting. She should talk to Mum and Steve about it, but she’s not sure she’s got the energy to handle the whole messy, exhausting business.

  She passes him a tuna sandwich and a bottle of beer. ‘Eat, drink.’

  His hands are a mess, worse than hers – cut, blistered, the skin as rough as sandpaper.

  ‘You should wear gloves.’

  He devours the sandwich in two bites. ‘Keep losing them. By the way, Emily says to ask you over for dinner. One night next week?’

  She’s touched. She doesn’t think he’s inviting her just to get more work.

  ‘I can’t.’ She indicates her face. But it’s not only the tears. It’s the children. She doesn’t want to get to know them. She doesn’t want them to like her. She doesn’t want Andy and Emily to ask her to babysit one of these days.

  They don’t know she is not to be trusted.

  Andy shrugs. ‘Doesn’t bother me. And it won’t bother Emily and the kids.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ she says. But she knows she won’t go.

  As he’s leaving, she presents him with a bottle of Sorbolene cream. ‘Rub it on your hands twice a day,’ she instructs. ‘It really will help.’

  ‘Will do, Boss,’ he says.

  She smiles, thinking of his wife’s surprise and delight when one of these days he touches her with silken fingers.

  13. BOB

  This he remembers:

  Winter, freezing. They were in the garage, he and Dean. Cold concrete floor, stained and slippery from spilled oil. Windows so dirty you couldn’t see out or in. His mother and Ellie were in the kitchen. Not far, but it seemed like a million miles away.

  Dean was repairing the leg of a coffee table. He was helping.

  Dean was wearing heavy black boots. He was barefoot. He was anxious about his toes. They’d been crushed before.

  He was also anxious about his fingers. It was his job to hold the nail while Dean hammered it in.

  Shivering, he waited for the hammer to fall.

  14. ARROW

  On Arrow’s last night at home, her mother makes her favourite dinner: chicken curry with sticky rice. Arrow has been on edge all day. She forces herself to be calm. She wants to choose her moment.

  Her mother picks at her food. She always loses her appetite when she’s worried. And, of course, right now she’s worried about Arrow. Arrow pretends not to notice. Her mother is not going to stop her from travelling south.

  Dad, on the other hand, is trying to treat her like a responsible adult.

  ‘So what are your plans? Have you looked into finding somewhere to stay?’

  ‘I googled Shelley Beach. It’s changed a lot in eight years. The bowling club and some of the caravan parks still exist, but there’s also a motel, a delicatessen, a second-hand bookshop, a video store, a real estate agency, a restaurant and three cafés!’

  ‘You might be able to get a decent coffee at last. When we lived there they only served instant.’

  ‘Of course,’ Arrow says, her voice becoming harsh, ‘that’s not all I googled.’

  She looks intently at them. Waits. One beat. Two beats. Three. Her mother has given up all pretence at eating and is plucking the tablecloth, her eyes apprehensive.

  Arrow stabs a piece of chicken. ‘Why did you tell me the police caught Mrs Jackson and that she was in gaol for the rest of her life?’ She glares at her father. ‘Is it ethical to lie to children?’

  Her parents glance at each other. Her father leans over and takes her mother’s hand.

  ‘I’m sorry, Arrow,’ he says, ‘but you were only ten. We wanted you to feel safe.’

  ‘You’d started sleepwalking,’ her mother says, her voice faint. ‘We thought you’d be even more disturbed if you knew Mrs Jackson had vanished without a trace. It’s such a frightening thing to know a mother could kill her own children.’

  ‘So when were you going to tell me the truth? Ever? Never?’

  Her father shakes his head, looking helpless.

  ‘So,’ Arrow says to him, ‘you’re not worried about me going to Shelley Beach when a murderer’s still on the loose?’

  ‘Mrs Jackson’s not stupid,’ her father says. ‘She’ll be hiding in a city among millions of people.’

  That’s what Arrow thinks, too. She scowls at her father. She can’t believe he’s left a lie between them for all these years.

  ‘But what will you do at Shelley Beach?’ her mother asks. ‘It’s so windy and cold this time of year.’

  ‘Don’t really know. Walk on the beach, explore the bush.’

  ‘But why there? I simply don’t understand. You’re just being contrary.’

  Her voice has developed a whine. It drives Arrow crazy.

  ‘Perhaps I’ll visit the Haunted House.’

  That’s what the local kids started calling the house after the murders.
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  Her mother makes a choked noise. She flings down her serviette, and runs out of the room.

  ‘Arrow! That was cruel of you.’

  Her father slumps in his chair, rubbing his eyes. Arrow knows he’s weary of the bickering between them. But if she’s not vigilant, her mother will be worrying about her, checking up on her, watching her like a hawk for the rest of her life.

  I’ll be twenty, thirty, forty years old, thinks Arrow, and she’ll still be phoning every night to make sure I’m safely tucked up in bed. I might not have a clue what I want to do with my life, but I know that I don’t want to end up as fearful and scuttling as her.

  Arrow gets up from the table, stacks the plates, scrapes them, starts the dishwasher.

  She hears her mother creeping up behind her. ‘Sorry. I know you don’t like me to fuss,’ her mother says.

  Arrow turns, forces herself to be pleasant. ‘I’m sorry, too, Mum. I will look after myself, I promise.’

  ‘Well, that’s all right, then.’ Her mother gives a bright, tinkling laugh.

  Arrow stomps out of the room before her mother can ask whether she’s packed her medication. She has, but she hasn’t taken any pills for three weeks, and she’s been fine. No side effects. No sleepwalking.

  While she’s reading in bed, there’s a tentative knock on her door. Mum, of course. Arrow grits her teeth, grunts, ‘Come in.’

  Her mother perches on the edge of her bed. Stripped of make-up, her face looks soft and defenceless.

  Arrow raises an eyebrow. ‘Yes?’

  ‘I loved them, too, you know,’ her mother says. ‘Especially Rose. She was so sweet and affectionate.’

  ‘Mum, I really don’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘I failed you,’ her mother goes on. ‘If I’d taken better care of you, you wouldn’t have been exposed to such horrors.’

  ‘It wasn’t your fault.’

  ‘When tragedies occur in small towns, everyone’s affected,’ her mother says quietly. ‘Everyone feels betrayed, bewildered and afraid. If this could happen to a family in the next street, it could happen to your family, too. I vowed that nothing bad would ever happen to you again. And it hasn’t, has it?’