Zoe and Lachlan drove east on the highway out of Fremantle, passing the massive road trains rolling down the hills towards Perth, their containers caked with blood-red dust from the desert. Zoe gripped the door handle as the car shook with the roar of a truck that passed too close to them. She swallowed, glanced at Lachlan, then looked forward again. They turned off the highway and soon they were climbing up into the hills, along a winding road surrounded by thick bush. A flock of black Carnaby’s cockatoos flew over them, screeching.
As soon as the court case had ended last month, Nadia and Eddie had packed up and moved back to the hills. Their tenants had moved out and their house was lying empty, so they’d given up their rental in Perth straight away. Zoe had been relieved in a way that there would be some distance between Louise and Nadia, but sad, too, for her sister, that she was retreating back to the country.
‘I wonder why they wanted to meet us at the weir,’ Zoe said. ‘Do you believe that she really wants us to all have an amicable picnic together?’
Lachlan shrugged. ‘They can’t even have unpacked yet; maybe Nadia’s embarrassed about the state of the house. Or maybe she’s honestly trying to make amends, patch things up again between us all. In a way I’m looking forward to it. It’ll be nice for us to see the girls and Harry again too, I’ve missed them.’
‘Yeah, me too, they’re growing so quickly. Although it can’t be good for her kids, all this moving around. I wonder if she’ll move them back to their old school?’
‘Who knows?’ Lachlan said.
Zoe leaned back in her seat, looking out of the window. ‘I was always envious of Nadia living up here. It’s so … peaceful. Imagine if we lived somewhere like this, Lach, with Louise. Far away from everyone, just us …’
‘In the height of summer?’ He looked over at her and smiled.
Zoe frowned, looking at the thick bushland all around them. ‘Bushfires?’
He nodded, slowing down to turn a tight corner. Zoe imagined the crackling and snapping of the dry branches as the fire took hold, the oils from the gum trees hissing and spitting as they started to smoke and then explode. She shuddered. ‘Do you think Louise will have missed us?’
Lachlan reached over and put his hand on her knee. ‘Of course! Zoe, you’ve got to stop thinking of Nadia as a threat; there’s nothing else she can do to us now. We’ll get used to it. It’s just like Louise is going for a sleepover with her cousins, that’s all.’
She sighed, and turned around to look at the empty baby seat. ‘I know.’
They drove for another ten minutes, largely in silence. Zoe looked down at the green fields in the valley below where a few horses grazed, and then she saw the glint of the lake through the trees ahead. Minutes later, they pulled into the car park. They were at the top of the weir, and she gazed down at the water, twenty metres below. The air was still, quiet except for the chirps of cicadas and the occasional call of a duck. There was one other car there, a four-wheel drive with empty bicycle racks on the back. Nadia’s car wasn’t here yet; she was probably savouring every minute she could before she had to hand Louise back. Zoe couldn’t help but feel nervous.
‘The picnic area’s on the other side,’ Zoe said.
Lachlan nodded, and they got out of the car and locked it. They walked in silence up the short flight of steps to a paved lookout. Zoe leaned on the fence and looked down. The water barely moved, except for the odd ruffle when a whisper of a breeze skimmed over the surface and blurred the sharp reflection of the clouds above.
Zoe felt a flutter of anxiety as she slowly followed Lachlan onto the narrow path that formed the top of the concrete dam wall. She looked down on either side of her. The dam level below them was low, with puffs of algae in the milky green water. Zoe staggered, feeling her head swim with vertigo.
She made herself look straight ahead, to the other side of the dam, where blackened wooden railway sleepers twisted their way up the steep grassy slope, the only remnant of the days when people would catch the steam train here from the city to swim on hot summer days. You couldn’t swim here any more; it was drinking water, at the start of its journey through the Golden Pipeline, across the desert to the goldfields.
‘Lachlan, wait for me!’ she shouted, noticing how far ahead he was. Her voice echoed in the still air, and she recalled the childhood stories of the spirits trapped in the shells, chanting. There was something here, a memory in the air, a voice trapped in the valley, echoing between the cliffs. She walked faster, but not so fast that she risked stumbling, catapulting over the wire fence, her limbs flailing, looking up at the clouds and down at the clouds with no sense of whether she was falling or flying.
As expected, there was no sign of Nadia, Eddie or the kids at the picnic area either. Zoe paced around the paving stones below the formal lawns and old rose gardens.
Lachlan took her hand and squeezed it. ‘We’re early, Zoe, don’t worry.’
‘I’m not.’ But she was. What if she doesn’t show up? she thought. What if she’s taken her?
Zoe looked back across the weir, but she couldn’t see the road clearly. She put her bag down at the bottom of the steps and sat down below the handsome bust of C.Y. O’Connor looking out over the lake. Lachlan sat next to her. She knew they were both thinking of the last time they’d seen a statue of this man, that day on the beach when they had watched the dark figure slowly submerging as the tide came in, waves lapping over the body of his horse, moving up towards his face. This was where it had begun, O’Connor’s dream; the beach was where it had ended. They sang, Lachlan had said that day on the beach. The Noongars had sung to make him crazy, to curse him for destroying their sacred waters, the estuary that fed them, when he built Fremantle harbour. She had dismissed it then as just a legend. But here, she could almost believe it.
‘You OK?’ she asked, seeing the haunted look in Lachlan’s eyes.
Lachlan nodded, gazing out. ‘It’s so sad that he spent his life working on such an amazing thing but he never saw it, you know? He never saw that first drop of water drip into the pipe and trickle all the way, through the scorching desert, to pour out into the driest place you can imagine, frontier country. He never lived to see that what he did made such a difference to everyone who lived there, to the entire country. We couldn’t have mined without it, and that’s the money that built this entire state. All he knew was blame, anger.’
Zoe took Lachlan’s hand and stroked it. ‘No one ever knows the effect on the future of the things we do now; we just have to do what we think is right at the time. And that doesn’t get forgotten. And it’s no different to what happens now: people protest about mining in the Kimberley, farmers complain about gas being drilled on their land. There’s always opposition to change.’
‘But the anger wasn’t directed at a company, or at a government, it was all thrown at him. They singled him out.’ Lachlan’s voice broke and he looked at her, his eyes damp. ‘He was trying; he was just doing his job, he did everything he could, and still it wasn’t good enough.’
Zoe saw the tear trickle down his face and knew that, like that first drop of rainwater that had entered the pipeline, it had to roll through the dust, colour to ochre as it washed clean the memories from the desert. She reached up and wiped his cheek gently.
‘You are good enough, Lachlan.’
Nadia stood on the path atop the dam wall, Louise in her arms, and looked down at the lake. The kids had run on ahead, with Eddie hurrying along behind them carrying the esky for the picnic. She wanted everything to slow down. It had been wonderful having Louise stay with them overnight, with the other kids. It really felt as though she was part of their family, back in the house where the kids had grown up. But Louise had been unsettled all night, waking, crying, fussing to be held. Then this morning, when Nadia had explained again to the children that Zoe and Lachlan were meeting them to take Louise back to their house, they had cried. Nadia longed for one more minute with Louise; their time together was so short that it seemed as if all she could do was count it down until the moment when she had to hand her over again. And thinking about that felt as bad at it had on the day when Louise was born.
‘Eddie!’ she shouted. ‘Wait!’ Her cry echoed around her and she gripped Louise a little tighter.
He stopped and looked back. ‘What?’
She beckoned to him. He dropped the esky then walked back towards her. ‘What is it?’ He turned around and shouted, ‘Kids, be careful!’
Nadia reached into her handbag for her camera. ‘Can you take a picture, of Louise and me?’
‘Here?’
She nodded, glancing over her shoulder at the lake behind her, then handed the camera to him before Louise could grab it.
Eddie took a few steps back from her then held the camera to his eye. ‘OK, ready?’
Nadia glanced up at him. She didn’t want to smile at the camera; instead she looked back down at her daughter, into eyes that were her own. I see you, she thought, and I know you know I see you. She began to hum softly to Louise, as they gazed at each other. A tear dripped onto Louise’s face. Nadia wiped it away quickly, then looked up at Eddie. ‘Did you get it?’
‘The photo? Yes.’ He frowned and put his arm around her shoulders, hugging her and Louise. ‘Are you OK?’
She nodded.
‘You sure?’
No! she wanted to scream, loud enough that it would bounce off the walls of the canyon and be screamed here for ever more. No, I’m not sure at all.
But instead she nodded again, knowing that she had to let Louise go.