Tommy led the way down to the creek from the fence at the back of the Millers’ farm. The four scrawny Miller children were watching from their perch on the roof of the shed, their solemn brown eyes tracking the sudden bustle in the bush beyond their boundary. For the third time, Sergeant Henson followed Tommy along the track. A sniffer dog cavorted at his feet, snapping his jaws at the hovering midges, joyful to be in the dirt and the cool shade of the bush.
On any other day, Tommy would have felt the same.
‘Now, mind you show me exactly the way you came in, son,’ Sergeant Henson said to Tommy, taking off his police hat and wiping the sweat from his face with a hairy forearm. Wet patches bloomed under his arms. Tommy set his jaw, and kept walking. He could not see how this was going to help Sarah. She was not on this track.
Roberts, Henson’s junior officer, crashed through the undergrowth with a roll of police tape and began to secure it to tree trunks and fence posts, delineating a section of land. The crime scene, thought Tommy, and swatted roughly at a hovering mosquito. The careless way Roberts was trampling everything in his path pissed Tommy off. The bush was fragile, his dad had always told him. It might look hardy, with strangler vines and dense canopies of dull green as far as you could see, but it should be handled with care. The bush was here first, so it deserved some respect. Same as the blackfellas. Finders keepers. Tommy carefully released the branch of a young sapling where it was bent into the tape. Under it, he saw the red folds of a Cassia brewsteri bud, and noted the location to come back to later. He kept a record of all the flowers he found, taking cuttings and pressing them, then dissecting the buds and recording what he saw in scaled cross-section perspective drawings. He planned to become a botanist, specialising in the native flowers of this region. Surely there was nowhere else on this continent with specimens so fine.
A siren split the air and Tommy, Sergeant Henson and Roberts all turned to watch as the Sydney police convoy screeched to a halt in the distance, sending a corona of dust up into the sky in their wake. Heat waves shimmered from the bitumen of the road. Sergeant Henson sighed and put his cap back on. He climbed the fence and began to cross the paddock to meet the new arrivals and Roberts buttoned his shirt to the collar and hurriedly ran a comb through his hair before he followed.
Tommy watched uniformed men pour out of the cars and felt a little better. Surely these Sydney officers would do a bit more than walk up and down the track. Surely coppers from Sydney would know how to orchestrate a proper search, leave no stone unturned, leave no corner of Banville overlooked in their quest to find out why Sarah Vale, the smartest and most beautiful, strange and complicated person who had ever come into his orbit was missing.
The last time Tommy had been at the creek with Sarah kept playing on a loop in his mind, over and over again. It had been a day as hot as this one, and after swimming for a bit, Tommy had lain on the bank of the creek and closed his eyes. The compacted dirt was cool under his shoulder blades and too hard in a satisfying way, like it would always be there; always able to hold him up and never giving way, no matter how firmly he curled his spine into it. Sunlight sprinkled over his face and his eyelids flickered as shadows moved across them. He would quite like to stay here forever, he had thought. Alone with Sarah Vale, near the water on a hot day and with the promise of a full belly to come, thanks to three Vegemite sandwiches dampening in their Glad Wrap inside his backpack.
‘Watch,’ Sarah called out to him.
Tommy had pushed himself up onto his elbows and drawn his breath in sharply. Sarah had climbed the biggest eucalypt and was hanging from a limb that arced over the water right across from him. She dangled there looking smug, her wet hair plastered to her neck and her togs clinging to her like snakeskin. Tommy could see her chest move as she breathed.
She was spectacular.
‘Going to make a splash,’ she warned him, and grinned.
Tommy felt himself move inside his board shorts, nudging the fabric. He pulled his knees up and tented the shorts over his crotch.
‘Go on, then,’ he shouted.
She moved a bit further out along the branch, carefully placing one hand over the other to shift along it in small increments. The branch dipped under her weight.
‘What’re you waiting for?’ Tommy yelled.
‘Shut up,’ she called, but her voice was soft. Suddenly she looked very small up there.
Tommy stood up, adjusting his shorts, and walked into the water, testing the depth where she would land. Standing fully, his toes only just grazed the bottom and the water was up to his neck. She would be okay.
Sarah watched him, frowning, and he raised his eyebrows at her and yawned.
‘I’ll be off, then.’
‘No, I’m doing it. I told you I would, didn’t I?’
Tommy shook his head and waded back to the bank. Standing at the edge of the water, he could see the blonde hairs peppered down her brown legs, the buds of her breasts barely visible beneath her togs. A scar curved around her ankle, and though he couldn’t see it, Tommy knew well enough that it ended in an angry welt on the back of her calf.
His chest tightened at the thought of that scar and how Sarah had got it, and he shook his head to clear it. That was no kind of mother. Leaving a little girl alone, unattended. Untended, girl and garden alike. Sarah had been worried about the grass swaying around people’s knees when they tried to cross the footpath in front of the Vale house. The Bell family had recently been evicted from their cul-de-sac council cottage just down from Sarah’s for failing to maintain the property, and they had un-mown grass stretching from the front door to the road, with the rusted fenders of cars sticking up out of it like rocky headlands in the sea.
So Sarah decided to mow the lawn at her house. She didn’t understand then that Susannah owned their house outright. Nobody could make them leave. She was seven years old. If he closed his eyes now, Tommy could still see the red of the blood on the green of the grass, so much blood. Christmas colours. He mowed the Vale lawn himself now, every two weeks.
Tommy looked up at her hands on the eucalypt, the knuckles white now. She swung her legs a bit but he could still tell they were trembling. The movement made her togs ride up a little on her left hip, exposing a new crescent of skin, white and tender like a secret. Tommy thought about how soft her skin would be there, and abruptly sat down. He grabbed a stick and began furiously gouging a line in the dirt next to him.
‘You’re not looking,’ Sarah called.
Oh, but I was, Tommy thought, and blushed. He forced himself to look up at her, and she arched her back and dropped from the branch, knifing into the water with a loud splash. The whole creek shuddered with the force of her entry and Tommy grinned and applauded as she rose, spluttering, out of the water. She pushed her hair out of her eyes and treaded water.
‘Told you I’d do it,’ she called.
‘That you did,’ Tommy acknowledged, nodding.
She nodded back, unsmiling, and began to swim to the bank. He handed her a towel but she waved it away, lying dripping next to him with her eyes closed and her face tilted up to the sun. Tommy tried to think about other things, anything other than this girl and the brave length and breadth of her right there beside him, but he wasn’t made of stone. Although some parts of him felt like they were. Tommy pushed his head down into the gap between his chest and his arms folded over his knees, and looked at the triangle of dirt between his feet. A reddish seam of clay ran through the soil, and he traced it with his finger.
‘What’re you looking at?’ Sarah said. He heard her moving.
‘Nothing,’ he said, and glanced up, and she was right there, leaning over, her face angled to peer between his legs. Then she kissed him.
With her lips on his, Tommy had thought of peeling open a seed pod, being the only person who had ever seen that clean and true green inside it, or gently pulling off the outer petals of a flower to reveal the pure, untarnished and hidden ones underneath. The thrill of it, the privilege. That was how he felt now. Nobody could ever take this from him. She put a hand up, slid it around the back of his neck, and kissed him a little harder. When he opened his eyes for a moment, he could see the darker hollow between her clavicles and the shadow between her breasts disappearing into her togs. Between any parts of Sarah, that was land Tommy wanted to visit. He couldn’t quite believe it. How many times had he imagined this very thing happening? Sarah paused in her kissing for a moment and he moaned accidentally. She laughed, just softly, and he didn’t mind. But then she put her hand on his thigh. Just above his knee, but it was her hand, on his thigh, and Tommy felt it like the iron they used to brand sheep. He closed his eyes, and told himself no.
No.
You cannot. If you keep kissing her now then you will never be able to kiss her again. It would be the beginning of the end. If you keep on kissing her, there will be no containing these things you feel. They would bubble up out of you, this love for her, like lava spewing forth from the mouth of a volcano, and then what? She would disappear. Because that was what happened.
He made everyone he loved disappear.
And so he had pushed Sarah away and got up and ran, and the branches whipped his face and rocks ripped at the fleshiest part of the arch of his foot, and he didn’t stop running.