Anthea knew that if she went to bed she wouldn’t sleep. She wanted to walk, but was wary of the cliff-top, of someone coming up behind her in the darkness. She was afraid of being attacked, yet that night possessed a childish kind of courage, and wondered if it had something to do with having read Bobby’s diary. She was sure Chris had hidden the diary underneath his house where any fool could find it. Instead of feeling angry, the thought made her smile.
She recalled the night Bobby had been killed, an ordinary night that had cried out for vigilance. She had not heard Olly and Bobby leaving the cottage. She had not heard Olly returning on his own. She’d gone to sleep to the soft honking of the swans.
The memory of Olly’s scales followed Anthea as she moved around her flat. She told herself she shouldn’t be able to hear them, yet she did.
She walked out onto her balcony. Lights outlined the barracks where the soldiers slept. Anthea pictured Stellar’s group getting up in the middle of the night, heading for the beach on the far side of the island, fortifying themselves with lines of coke.
What would the collective noun be, for a group of young men in training for combat missions in Afghanistan? No doubt they’d find suppliers once they got there, if they got there. Chris had told her his belief that they’d be court-martialled. Anthea wasn’t sure.
When she finally got to sleep, she dreamt that she was swimming. Soft, silky water carried her to an unknown destination. Anthea studied it through her goggles. The bay’s pursed mouth appeared in view, a great metal wedge of a container ship filling it so that she could not get past. Every time she looked up, the ship sliced through her vision. She heard a noise and there was Olly, swimming alongside her.
‘You’ve been avoiding me,’ he said.
Anthea tried to swim faster, to outpace the ringing in her ears.
Olly stood up perfectly straight in the water, as though every cell in his body had been made for just such an activity.
‘I was thinking I might let the sea take me,’ he said.
Anthea tried to swim out of Olly’s reach, but the container ship was in the way.
Then Bobby was there too, upright in the dappled water. It seemed that the man and boy did not recognise each other, that she was the only link between them.
Anthea woke up sweating. She got out of bed and poured herself a glass of water. It tasted salty and she tipped most of it down the sink.
All very well to speak of duty, she said aloud to the empty space beyond her balcony, thinking, with a great vertiginous bitterness, just how many kinds of betrayal there were.
She pictured turning up at the remand centre and demanding a confession, as Olly had accused her of doing. She imagined Griffin stalking her along the cliff-top like an escapee from a bad cartoon. She was the cartoon character: what had she been thinking of, strutting around Queenscliff, ticking people off because they parked illegally?
Anthea slept and woke again, and this time she felt better.
She lingered over her breakfast, making more cups of coffee and another round of toast. Then she began to search her flat — she’d lost count of how many times she’d already done this — starting with her balcony, where anyone who knew her habits, or had been told about them, would also know she entertained visitors and spent a great deal of her free time.
There was a double power point and a light switch just inside the French doors. That would be a good position. Anthea hesitated before dismantling them. She would not know how to put them back together again.
Defeated, she sat down at her outside table and rested her forehead on the heel of her left hand. This was her favourite place for eating, reading, thinking, day-dreaming. If she could not be herself here, then where could she?
Olly would know how to check for a microphone behind a light switch, or inside a table lamp. Perhaps, having found microphones in his cottage, he’d left them in place, in order to infuriate the listeners on the island with his unremitting scales.
Anthea stretched out her hands, palms downwards. She wondered how she could have been so conceited as to imagine that the scales were aimed at her.
There came into her mind another image from the bay, this time of Bobby by himself, paddling his small red kayak round and round.
Anthea stood up and leant over the balcony so that she could survey the street. No cars were parked there, other than two she recognised as belonging to her neighbours further down. A wind sprang up and the bay looked angry. There were a few early morning joggers on the path. Anthea did not envy them; she felt suddenly pleased to be alone.
She remembered Olly telling her how much life was to be found in the seagrass.
‘Bobby had never netted before. All that time on the water, and he’d never owned a net. We got snails and plenty of ghost prawns and gombies, and a tiny yellow mackerel, all in less than a half a metre. I put them in a container for a short while and we watched them. People are impressed by whales and dolphins, but they wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for this small life in the fish nursery, which we have to protect.’
Olly had paused and looked up at Anthea, wanting her to understand the lesson. She’d nodded to let him know she had.
The atmosphere inside the police station was unnaturally calm.
Though she’d only just arrived, Anthea went outside again and crossed the road, aware of the bulk of the lighthouse and water tower bearing down on her head and shoulders. She felt dizzy and hung onto the seat where she liked to eat her lunch, imagining the massive stones falling from the cliff into the sea. Perhaps if she lay down where she was, curled up with a rug around her? She might sleep the way homeless people did, ignoring, or apparently ignoring, the goings-on around them.
Anthea wondered how many nights Bobby had spent out of doors, making a nest for himself and Max, closing his eyes inside the warmth his dog made for him, after writing in his diary. That’s where he’d been going when he’d been waylaid and killed. Without Max to guide him, and unwilling to risk using a torch, he’d been intending to walk along the railway tracks.