Marika hasn’t been in touch with her father for ages. Before Jasper’s disappearance there had been some talk of her going for a short holiday to New York during the next semester break. Her dad even offered to pay the airfare, which was unusual for the skinflint. But now he’s gone quiet on the offer. Marika thinks she knows why. He, or maybe his wife, the brittle Naomi, doesn’t want her around. She’s a reminder that terrible things can happen to children. Worse, that she let something terrible happen.
Perhaps she’s doing them a disservice?
She sends him a brief email. ‘So should I come over during the break? I’d like to spend some time with you and Naomi and the twins. Love, Marika.’
To her surprise, he responds immediately. Not to her surprise, he writes: ‘Have to take a raincheck, I’m afraid. Naomi is flat-out at work and I’ve got to attend some conferences. The girls are fine – very busy with their music and languages. Dad.’
She stares at the email, dumps it in the recycle bin. He didn’t even bother to ask how she and her mum were doing. Or sign off ‘with love’. But then he hasn’t for a long time.
Instead of getting on with her assignments, she writes a vicious little story, for her eyes only.
He left her alone in the house, he trusted her, he said.
She threw open the windows and doors, welcomed the vandals in.
She smiled at the once-golden walls, now obscenely scribbled and scrawled.
She plugged the sinks, turned on the taps, let the waters run.
She grew herself a crocodile tail – thick, muscular, spine-smashing – and thrashed about in the shallows, relishing her father’s home-coming.
She saves it in her ideas folder. Already she can imagine a sculpture of the girl-crocodile: vulnerable, hurt, revengeful.
She puts her father out of her mind, and turns to her assignments. She’d planned to write an essay on Rosalie Gascoigne’s sculptures – those fine assemblages of ‘found’ materials, such as discarded boxes, iron and road signs.
But now she wants to do something on Rick Amor instead. His mysterious, disquieting paintings of decaying buildings, solitary watchers and shadowy figures have always fascinated her. But it is his less-examined sculptures she wants to write about.
That maimed but valiant dog on the beach has made her think of Amor’s two-metre high, bronze sculpture of a dog that he describes as ‘a made-up dog, a survivor’. And then there is his haunting sculpture, Relic, a strange, disfigured human body without arms and with the head of a dog.
She works steadily for three hours, drafting and redrafting, glad that she’s actually seen Relic at the McClelland sculpture trail, eerily placed among crooked tea-trees.
She finishes the essay and leans back in the chair. It’s the first solid piece of work she’s done for ages.
She makes a tomato and cheese sandwich, and sits in the sun, her head still full of Rick Amor. She’s fascinated by his various portrayals of dogs, sleeping, standing, chasing their tails. And she likes the way Amor left his fingermarks in the clay models – she can almost see him pushing and prodding the sculptures into life.
She’s never tried to do a sculpture of an animal before, and she’s not sure she wants to. But the dog on the beach is still so vivid in her mind that she feels compelled to get out paper and charcoal and do some lightning sketches from memory. She draws the man, too, that attenuated Giacometti figure. He’s like a scarecrow in an ill-fitting coat.
The drawings are not great, but they have vitality. She puts them on the floor of the dining room and walks around them, considering.
She’ll live with the sketches for a while, see if there’s anything she wants to do with them.
In the afternoon, with a small drawing pad and some coloured pencils in her backpack, she goes for a walk in the national park that surrounds the town. The calls of currawongs, honeyeaters and crimson rosellas make her feel as if she’s in a concert hall. She feasts her eyes on gum trees majestic as sailing ships, their branches creaking, bellying with leaves. She revels in the textures and changing colours of bushland – smoky grey, khaki green, patches of yellow.
Marika sketches trees festooned with long, dangling strips of bark slung over branches. She sketches spotted gums, their trunks a patchwork of grey, green and brown, like army camouflage. She fingers the needles of the she-oaks, so silky, soft and fine. The saplings are especially pretty, with zebra-striped trunks.
She climbs up a hillside bulky with overhanging rocks. In one of the caves she sees a dome-shaped bird nest attached to the ceiling, the upper part of the nest formed out of what looks like cobwebs. She jumps onto a rock shelf for a closer look. The nest seems to be made of bark and grasses, coated with moss. It has a hooded side-entrance. It is a perfect little work of art. She longs to handle it, but it belongs to the bird.
She follows a stream for a way. The water is greenish; polluted. A sign warns walkers not to touch it. Yet there are still tadpoles in the water, and small fish.
All around she sees the tenacity of trees, rooted in shallow soil, in cracks; ropes of roots coiling over rocks, travelling great distances to find sustenance. These trees are resilient, enduring, recovering from droughts and bush fires; surviving, healing.
They make her feel humble, hopeful.