Chapter 8   

He woke to the distant clinking of metal spoons in ceramic bowls. He rose and wiped the corners of his eyes. It was just after seven.

Shuffling down the hall, he heard an elephantine rumble coming from behind Suzette’s bedroom door. As he approached the kitchen, the sound of thick bubbling made him wonder whether he’d round the corner and see his mother in a hooded cloak, sprinkling dried dead things into a soot-stained cauldron. The imagining didn’t amuse him; it made him slightly ill. He shook off the thought and entered the kitchen.

Katharine was in her pink nightgown, stirring a pot of porridge. “Good morning,” she said. She didn’t turn around.

He’d intended to tell her what he’d seen on last night’s news: that Elliot Guyatt had died in his cell. But Katharine was stirring the bubbling oatmeal with such stiff briskness, her shoulders set so hard, that he remained silent. She was tense. Or angry. Or … afraid.

No. There’d be no talk about killers of children this morning.

She finally turned, wearing a bright, forced smile. “Tea’s made, and the porridge is nearly done. You look pale.”

“I call it PTSD-chic.” He sat.

“You could have a flu.”

Christ, he thought. If only all I had was a flu. “Paper?”

She shook her head and nodded to the front door.

He stood again, shuffled back up the hall, and opened the door. He yelped in surprise. Gavin stood there, the gun under his chin. A moment later, the gun silently kicked and Gavin’s jaw split open. The ghost smiled at Nicholas, repositioned the gun under his ruined chin, and it jerked again. Gavin’s scalp jumped and he fell to the steps without a sound.

Nicholas stood frozen.

A moment later, Gavin was gone.

“For fuck’s sake,” whispered Nicholas. His voice shook.

“What’s that?” called Katharine.

Gavin was now fifty meters up Lambeth Street, walking toward the front gate. The day was harshly bright.

“Nicholas?”

“Nothing.”

He clenched his teeth and hurried down to the footpath where the rolled newspaper lay in dew. He sidestepped Gavin on the way back in.

Katharine had the porridge dished out. Nicholas stared wearily at his bowl.

“I think you’re sick,” she said.

He shook his head. His stomach felt ready to disgorge, as if he’d swallowed a mugful of old blood. He was cold.

Katharine touched the back of her hand to his forehead. He could feel her thin skin vibrating. She was shaking.

“Bit hot,” she said.

He took a mouthful of tea and left his porridge untouched.

“I’ll be in the garage.”

He felt her eyes on the back of his head as he walked to the back door.

Katharine sat watching a skin harden over the porridge in her bowl. It was, she decided, the exact color of the poo that had come out of her children when they were breastfeeding—a wheaty shit with the sweet smell of just-turning milk. She dropped her spoon with a deliberate clatter.

You bring these creatures into the world. You guide their little, darting dumb heads onto your swollen-then-aching-then-numb nipples, you change ten thousand nappies … but what does that guarantee? That they will love you? That they will talk with you? That they will be good?

No. No. No.

Her anger stayed on a slow simmer and fed itself. Everything had been so normal a few weeks ago. Deliciously boring. A warm, smooth-sided routine. She could step from the shower and loll into every day: breakfast, tidying, check the last firing, discard the breakages, peel the thick plastic off the clay, boil the kettle, wet the wheel … and then it was dinnertime and the possibility of a phone call from Sydney or London. But now … now things had changed very fast. Old things had reappeared; feelings and fears that she’d thought were long disposed of. It was like coming suddenly across the image of the man who’d dumped you in a stack of fading, happy photographs.

But it’s so much more than that. He’d brought death to her doorstep.

She set her jaw and stared at her tea. She didn’t want to think about it and busied herself sprinkling sugar over the gelatinous surface of her cooling porridge.

Things are hot and dangerous for a while, then they cool, and you form a skin that keeps things nice and separate. Like keeping the practicalities of gas bills and leaking toilet cisterns—real-life stuff—from the dreaminess, the otherworldliness, that used to hover around Don like the scents of Arabia around a plodding climbing jasmine. That dreaminess was what had charmed her so many years ago, then alarmed her, then infuriated her. And now she saw it in her children and it infuriated her still.

She was finishing the sweet, milky dregs when Suzette shuffled into the kitchen. Katharine nodded at the saucepan on the stove. Suzette nodded, too, and pulled back her hair. Katharine felt the twin forks of pride and jealousy: pride that she had brought such a confident, good-looking person into the world, and an instinctive, primordial antagonism to another female in her space. A younger one at that.

“Your brother’s sick.”

Suzette yawned and poured tea. “I’m not surprised.”

To take the bait and ask, “What do you mean?” was to give weight to this foolishness, and she would not be party to that. Instead, Katharine pushed her cup towards Suzette’s, and her daughter refreshed it. “Ta,” she said.

For a while, they sat in silence. It was Suzette who broke it.

“Do you remember Mrs. Quill down the road, Mum?”

“Beg pardon?”

“The seamstress at Jay Jay’s? Nicky and I walked by it yesterday.”

Katharine felt her bladder go as loose as a hung bedsheet in the wind. It took all her concentration to clench and hold. Her expression didn’t change.

“Quill? Not really. She must be dead years now. Do you need something mended?”

She saw Suzette’s eyes rise and lock onto hers.

She knows I’m lying.

But still the iron spike inside her refused to bend, and she met her daughter’s stare.

“No,” replied Suzette. “Never mind.”

The painted clapboard sides of the garage were once white but decades of grinding sun and mindless rain had grubbied them to a weary gray that was flaking off dispiritedly, revealing tiny continents of bilious green undercoat. Its single window of four dusty panes stared darkly out at the lush garden that flanked the building. Lush monstera bushes with their broad, perforated leaves squatted around the outside, and Rangoon creeper snaked up the jagged timbers. The unused driveway, twin rails of concrete veined with cracks from which emerged tiny lava flows of moss, ran up to two wooden bifold doors that sagged, their tops meeting in the middle like the leaning foreheads of exhausted, clinching boxers. Nicholas slipped an old nickel-plated key into the lock of the right-hand bifold. It gave a desiccated groan as he drew it open.

He stepped inside and closed the door behind him.

Inside was dark and cold. There was no electric bulb. Thin, milky light trickled through the grime-fogged window.

Something was rattling. No wind shook the gray glass; the dust motes hardly stirred. He realized the sound was his teeth. He bit down hard to stop them.

He inhaled. The taste of the still air was tinted with engine oil, with the scent of earth as fine and barren as desert sand, with dry rot … and underneath it all, as faint as a whisper, the sickly aroma of rum. Katharine had cleaned out the bottles after she kicked her husband out, but the smell of the booze lingered like a slow cancer. He walked across to the bench and pulled open the drawer. It wouldn’t have surprised him to find half a dozen of the two hundred milliliter bottles his father preferred—but the drawer was empty except for dust and cockroach shells. He closed it.

It had been decades since he’d stood in here; yet the sight and smell of it had not changed. Time meant nothing. The thought sank like a slow blade into his gut. Those intervening years had been worthless. Twenty years of heartbeats, of travel, of conversations and work and sleep and wishes and laughter were dust. Cate had lived and died, and now existed only in his mind and in some cruel lantern show in the bathroom of a small flat in Ealing. This building was as much a crypt as any stone chamber in Newham Cemetery. Time was interred here.

He was tempted to step back out, return to bed and pray that his chill was something grave like pneumonia or dengue fever. Yet he knew he had to stay. He had an inkling. Something in here was waiting to be found.

His eyes were adjusting to the gloom. He craned his head back.

Between the trusses overhead were strung side by side two old wood painter’s planks, each thick as his wrist and gray with age, spattered with a muted rainbow of paints that had dried before Nixon resigned. Stacked on the planks were his father’s suitcases.

Suzette had looked through them, but he’d never so much as touched them. To open them would have meant that Donald Close truly was dead, truly was never coming home.

Leaning against the rear wall was a timber stepladder, also speckled with paint. Loops of gritty cobweb hung between the treads like hammocks in a sunken ship. Nicholas drew in a deep breath—the effort set him shaking harder—and blew what dust he could off the ladder and pulled it from the wall. He set it below the planks, and climbed.

His head drew level with the first suitcase; inches from his face, a spider the size of a coaster hung from the plastic handle. He instinctively jumped back, and only stopped himself falling by grabbing the red hardwood truss. A splinter drove deep into the soft web of flesh between his finger and thumb. He steadied himself. The spider bobbed in the disturbed air, light as tissue. It was a carapace, hanging empty by a silk thread. Nicholas felt his heart fluttering like a trapped sparrow; he flicked the spider shell away and started carrying the suitcases down to the earth floor.

On the ground, they seemed smaller. Coated in dust and warped by seasons of damp and dry, they looked lost and vulnerable. Two were a matching herringbone, in beige and black; the third was once a cadaverous green.

He pulled that one toward him. Its plastic corners had cracked with age; its catches were brown and rusted. He pressed hard and something inside the lock snapped and the freed lid rose a fraction. He swung it open; the rusted hinges let out the sigh of a poorly sleeping man.

The clothes inside were badly eaten by moth larvae. When he lifted what he guessed was a cardigan, it fell apart in his fingers. But his eyes lit on something untouched by the vermin: the synthetic label inside the collar. He read the cream rectangle: Size 38. A size smaller than mine, he thought. Before he knew what he was doing, he lifted the rotting fabric to his nostrils and inhaled. An unhappy blend of lanolin and wet soil. Nothing of the man. He dropped the rags.

Inside the upper lid was a sleeve for shoes; its elastic had long lost its pull and it sagged like a slack, dead mouth. Inside were some cardboard train tickets, each punched with a tiny hole, and a few copper coins. Beneath the rotten chaff of eaten wool and grub pellets were some rusted tobacco tins; these last rat-tatted when shaken, and Nicholas guessed they contained fishing hooks, sinkers, spinners. He pushed the suitcase aside, and pulled another toward him.

It, too, resisted opening. He went to the workbench and found a screwdriver—its shaft grainy with rust—and popped open the stubborn latch. Within were books. These, too, had been exposed to insects, but clearly were less palatable fare and were only mildly damaged. They smelled potent: mealy and ripe. Nicholas pulled them out one by one. Some were cheap things, the spines of which lifted away the moment he touched them; others were weighty with dark, glossy covers. Handling them carefully, he read their titles. Master Book of Candle Burning. The Sixth Book of Moses. Beowulf. Coptic Grimoires. A thick book with black-and-white plates showing nineteenth-century spiritualists pulling ectoplasm from noses and ears of men and women who reclined as if dead. Books on clairvoyance, on gods of the pagan world, Irish mythology … an even dozen in all. He pushed them aside and pulled the last suitcase toward him.

This was the smallest and heaviest. It opened without protest and Nicholas felt his stomach tighten. More books: herbs and magic. Druidism. Voodoo. The Apocrypha. His mother, his pragmatic, no-nonsense mother, couldn’t have cohabited with a man who read books like this. But of course, she didn’t. Not for long. Their marriage had lasted just four years.

Nicholas stacked the books to one side as he pulled them out. There were three books left. He lifted aside The Curse of Machu Picchu, and stopped. Beneath was a book unlike all the others. It was a slight staple-bound thing with a thick paper cover in jaundice yellow; in the center of the cover was an etching of the Tallong State School main building. The title read: Tallong State School—75 Years—1889–1964.

Nicholas felt the pulse in his neck beat stronger. He flipped open the book.

The contents were broken into three chapters: the first twenty-five years, then 1914 to 1939 and 1940 to 1964. Within the chapters were sprinkled black-and-white photographs of principals, of buildings being erected, of a governor’s visit, and, of course, photos of classrooms full of students, seated in four rows of eight or so, their teachers smiling dutifully from their midst.

Was his father’s photo in here? Nicholas flipped through to the end of the book. As he did, a page slipped out and slid like a feather to the dark earth. He picked it up. No, not a page. It was a newspaper clipping, yellow and crisp: a truncated advertisement for Hotpoint clothes dryers. He turned the clipping over. As he read the headline of the small article, he felt his face go cold.

“Boy Missing—Police Seek Information.”

It stated that a twelve-year-old boy named Owen Liddy had left his Pelion Street home on a Saturday morning; he was to catch a train into Central Station and visit a model airplane exhibition at the city hall. His mother became worried when he hadn’t returned by four. People attending the exhibition were interviewed; none recalled seeing a boy fitting Liddy’s description. Police were inviting any information from the public.

Nicholas reread the article. Then he noticed the last page of the Tallong schoolbook was dog-eared. He picked it up and opened to the marked page.

It showed a photograph of the 1964 seventh-grade students. A grinning girl in pigtails held a pinboard with the class name: 7C. But it was the face of a short, freckled boy third along in the second to last row that Nicholas stared at. The face was circled in dark lead pencil. He slid his eyes down to read the caption below the photograph: “Left to right: Peter Krause, Rebecca Lowell, Owen Liddy …”

Nicholas stared at the clipping for a long moment. It was unlikely that his father knew the boy—Donald Close would have been in his late teens in 1964.

A boy went missing, and Donald Close thought it was odd enough a disappearance that he kept the article. Kept it for nearly ten years, until he himself had disappeared from his family’s life and broken himself in two when his sliding car was sliced open by a poorly marked concrete road divider. But he left it, thought Nicholas. He left it with his books.

He left it for us.

He folded the clipping and slipped it into his pocket. Outside, the morning had turned gray and the air in the garage was cold.

He hurriedly put the suitcases back on the overhead planks, eager to be out of this room that was as uncomfortably quiet as a grave.

Nicholas let himself back in the house. The hall was quiet, and the air was freezing.

“Suzette?”

He rapped on her bedroom door, opened it. Her bed was made, her suitcase open on a chair under the window. From underneath the house came a low thrumming. His mother’s pottery wheel: the electric hum of industry.

Halfway back down the hall, the walls took on a heavy tilt and Nicholas lurched. As he steadied himself, two large drops of sweat fell on the timber floor. He was feverish.

He fetched a change of clothes and went to the bathroom. In the bottom drawer of the vanity he found a half-empty box of aspirin and popped four in his mouth and felt them fizz on his tongue. Then he stripped off and turned on the shower.

As he showered, he chewed and took a half-mouthful of water, swallowing the bitter soup. His eyes slid down to his right foot and the scar: a faint line of pale skin where his sixth toe had been removed.

From his first job out of college—dish pig at the Kookaburra Grill—he’d saved every spare cent toward the elective surgery, and a lucky commission to design a logo for a new chain of wheel alignment garages brought his war chest to the required three thousand dollars. He booked himself in for outpatient surgery, had the offending appendage removed, spent a week recovering, then went out to the Lord Regent Hotel to find a girl to lose his virginity to, choosing the soon-to-be-unsatisfied Pauline McCleary. But every time he’d showered or bathed in the seventeen years since, his eyes had been drawn to his right foot, just to confirm that the deformity hadn’t grown back.

As he looked at the jagged white line, into his mind sprang the image of pale scars in dark wood: the marking scratched with a blade into the stock of Gavin’s rifle. Why had he hidden it from Suzette? And why hadn’t he told her that same mark on the health food store door had been the very one on the dumb, round woven head of the dead bird? Something had stopped him. Now, under the steaming water with the aspirin starting to work, he realized why. She has children. Telling Suzette might somehow bring the danger latent in the mark closer to Nelson and Quincy.

Nicholas turned off the taps.

Now he had a piece of new information that he’d exhumed from his father’s musty suitcases in the garage. He’d come into the house ready to tell Suzette about the child who went missing in 1964, but now he was glad she was out.

Don’t tell her. Keep her safe and send her home.

As he dried himself, his head began to throb again. Missing children. Dead children. Confessing murderers. Dead murderers. A strange mark.

Tristram touched the bird, but it should have been you.

As he dressed, Nicholas made a decision.

He would go to Gavin Boye’s funeral.

Suzette waved down a young waiter with a very nice bum and ordered her third long black with hot skim milk on the side.

A notepad with a page full of newly written notes was open in front of her, alongside a small pile of stapled cost projection reports, their margins crammed with her comments, all of which were now lined through. With one hand she clicked on icons on the laptop screen, shrinking her address book, restoring her mailbox, opening an accounts summary spreadsheet, highlighting days in her diary. In her other hand was her mobile phone; on the other end was Ola, her PA, a blocky and unattractive girl with a voice that was as lovely as her face was not. It was Ola’s good phone manner and skill at mail merging that got her the job.

Suzette was pleased. In the last hour and a half she’d concluded most of a day’s business, and the strong coffees removed most traces of her mother’s awful porridge from her tongue. She asked Ola to send out a tender to a few architect firms, and confirmed she’d be back in Sydney in a day or two. Then she rang home. Bryan answered.

“Hello?”

“Hello yourself. What happened to ‘Hello beautiful wife, I miss you and can’t bear another hour without you’?”

“Oh, hey gorgeous! Uh, yeah … the caller ID is down.”

Suzette frowned. “Down?”

“Nelson found my screwdriver set and did a bit of exploratory surgery on the handset. This is an old phone I found downstairs. I think it may have been used to convey the terms for the Treaty of Versailles. It’s got a spinny thingy.”

“Rotary dial?”

“I think you’ll find in telecommunications circles it’s called a ‘spinny thingy.’ ”

“Okay, Captain Hilarious. Why isn’t Nelson at school?”

Her husband chuckled. He sounded much more than a thousand kilometers away. “You won’t like this.”

“Try me.”

“He didn’t want to go.”

Suzette took a breath and told herself not to get snarky.

“Didn’t want to go. Did he have a good reason?”

“He said he doesn’t like his teacher because she isn’t nice to her husband.”

“Not nice … to her … what? I don’t get it.”

“Nels said she was married to her husband but kisses another man.”

Suzette’s new coffee arrived, and she tried not to watch the taut young waiter saunter away. “I still don’t understand. Did he see her kissing another teacher?”

“No.”

“Then how—”

She suddenly understood. Nelson just knew.

“Aaah.”

“Yep,” agreed Bryan.

Inklings. Feelings. Nelson had them. Quincy didn’t. She shivered at the prospect that Nelson might turn out like Nicholas.

“He’s napping now,” explained Bryan. “I guess gutting a two-hundred-dollar phone takes it out of a bloke. Maybe call later, explain to him some stuff about women and kissing and misplaced love and all that stuff I don’t understand because I’m married to the woman of my dreams?”

“You’ll go far, charmer. I’ll ring and tell him he’s going to school or going to sea.”

Bryan laughed. “How’s Nicholas?”

“He’s … I honestly don’t know. Sick, Mum said.”

“Hm. And you?”

She could hear the caring gravity in his voice. She knew what he meant. The image of Gavin’s broken teeth in his shattered jaw leapt again into the front of her mind and her stomach tightened.

“I’m okay.”

“Okay. Call later. Come home soon.”

They said their goodbyes, and then Suzette was staring at the cooling coffee with the disconnected phone on her lap. The thought of Gavin Boye crumpled on the porch stole all the joy out of her conversation with Bryan. There were a thousand reasons a man might kill himself, from tax fraud to child porn and everything in between. But this man was no stranger in the papers; this was someone she’d once lived near to. Why had Gavin Boye shot himself in front of her brother?

Tristram. Tristram was the link. She was sure of it.

She sipped her coffee and started to put away her paperwork. At the bottom of the pile was the small notepad she always carried with her. This was the last job she’d left for herself. Two nights ago, she’d been excited about this, but now, for some reason, it was a task she felt like avoiding. She flipped open the pad. Drawn there was the strange mark she’d copied from the doorway of Plow & Vine Health Foods. Quill’s shop, she thought.

She clicked open her Internet browser and started to hunt.