CHAPTER 11

The package arrived the next morning. She went out to get it, casting furtive glances towards Torrens’ shed as she slunk back to the shanty.

He hadn’t surfaced; or maybe he had and was avoiding her. He had a camp stove in there and a tap just outside the shed. She’d put a loaf of bread and some leftover sausages in his esky yesterday evening after she ushered him into bed. Thought he would want something to soak up the alcohol.

Jesus, he was a wreck.

She had made him a wreck.

The charges were enough to send him back inside, given his record. His whole body crumpled when the cops read them out to him as he sat there, on the bench in the cell, mountainous shoulders shuddering. Then he cried, in his drunkenness and his regret, saliva and tears in his beard, sobs interspersed with great gulps of shame.

She wanted to give him a hug, take him home, tuck him into bed. A big-sister kind of feeling, side by side with the sense that it was all, quite clearly, her fault. She stayed away, giving him space as she signed a form and got him bailed. They drove back to the shanty in silence, his gaze averted, watching out the window or eyes closed, head resting on the door frame.

He was close to going back to prison. Very close. Hanging by a thread. With the grinding monotony of his job at the abattoir, football had held him together, solidified his desire to go straight, given him joy and victory and friendship and respect and hope that this new kind of life might just work out.

She had brought all of that crashing down with her despicable lie.

Rowan rang again. He’d been doing some reading about the turtle.

‘Smaller than I thought,’ he said. ‘And the breathing thing—it sucks water up its bum, draws the oxygen out through blood vessels.’ He was excited about the discovery and clearly had planned to tell Clem all about it. ‘They can stay under for days, foraging. Apparently they eat algae and decaying stuff—keeps the river clean for all the other critters.’

He was making an effort, acquainting himself with the turtle, attempting to understand more of her world. It confirmed for her the sense that this was more than a game for Rowan—there was an intention underneath, modest in ambition, unforced, yet serious.

She had to tell him the truth. Secrets, half-truths, dissembling… none of it was fair, all of it was harmful.

So she told him all of it—the Melbourne job, her desire to take up her professional career again, her lie to Torrens, his response when he found out, how close he was to going back to jail.

He said nothing, the wind taken completely from his sails.

‘I just…I thought you should know,’ she said, forlorn, expecting the worst.

‘Yeah.’

There was a long pause and it was loaded with his disappointment, with his shock. She waited for him to echo Torrens: tell her why she must move back to Katinga, fulfil her coaching duties…come back to him, for Christ’s sake. She prepared herself.

Nothing. After a silence, she said, ‘So, what do you think?’

Rowan let out a long exhale. ‘Not gonna lie, I want you back’—so gentle, an ache inside her chest—‘The whole town wants you back.’

He sighed and she recognised, in the sound, the memory of his own sorrow—his late wife Kate, weakening, slipping, thinning to nothing. The light in his life dimming with her.

‘But I dunno what you should do. I dunno what the hell anyone should or shouldn’t do. I mean…’

Another long pause.

‘I’ve known times…times when there’s nothing else you can do but go…anywhere, somewhere. Just go.’

It was harder to take than if he’d come right out and told her to come home to Katinga. She could operate in contrarian mode, pushing back, pushing away, rejecting advice, objecting to suggestions—such a familiar pattern, like the ticking of a clock.

But this? She was upended, torn by his selflessness. It was too much.

A raw cord of longing wound tight through the length of her body—longing to know what to do, which way to jump. Longing for Rowan’s comfort and longing to avoid him.

They didn’t say much after that and the call fizzled out. As for Katinga, she didn’t want to think about it. Melbourne was an anonymous substitute, a blanket she could throw over her future and shunt it from her mind.

Clem sat down, aimlessly cruising the internet, an assault of targeted ads for new cars and Melbourne apartment rentals flashing on the screen. She shut the lid and stared at the kitchen table in front of her, getting lost in the scatter of white flecks on the worn-out red laminate.

Rowan was not going to fight her. He could see the similarities—sorrow that you couldn’t shake, that simply refused to allow you to just return to normal life.

Clem wanted Helen’s killer exposed, wanted to paint his name in blood across the sky, that was number one. And combat on that battleground was about to step up. Before her on the table was the cardboard box. She’d opened it earlier. The two waterproof devices hadn’t arrived—delayed until Monday. But the five replacements she’d checked and tested, ready for tonight.