I woke up screaming; a dead woman's body was in the water. Her eyes stared vacantly at the sky and her hair floated about her like dark seaweed. All around me other people screamed and my mother turned my face into her belly while the floor rocked under my feet. I switched on the light and lay sweating in bed, waiting for my heart beat to subside. Gradually it slowed, my stomach stopped churning and the terrible image receded, but it was a long time before I slept again.
'Hard night?' Kevin frowned as I entered the office next morning.
I flapped a non committal hand and sat down. There's just the two of us, apart from a woman who comes in part-time to do the social pages, and when there's just the two of you, you have to get on so it was just as well I liked him. He was a local boy and not bad looking in an Irish, slightly-going-to-seed kind of way.
When I began at the Star I half-expected the occasional snide comment or even a casual hand on the bum but he'd been alright. If he knew about my history, he didn't let on. Now he regarded me quizzically and put down the morning's Star.
'That girl who was found washed up at Stanthorpe's Bay the day before yesterday. The police have released her name.'
'Oh, yeah?'
'She's Melissa Dalton, nineteen years old, a kind of freelance pro. She used to advertise in our illustrious journal.' He circled something in the Star's 'Personals' section and pushed it across the desk:
introducing
gorgeous Tiffany
petite busty blonde
for caring and discreet service
There was a mobile number listed underneath. There were a whole column of these kinds of 'leggy brunettes', 'curvaceous redheads', even the occasional 'exotic Asian', all selling the same thing and yesterday I wouldn't have given them a second glance but that was yesterday.
'I've been on the phone to the pathologist,' Kevin said. 'The autopsy's done. Apparently her bloodstream was full of cocaine.'
'Well, drug use isn't unusual in her line of work.'
'No. On the surface it looks as though it was suicide - life getting her down, a drug habit - but I want you to get onto it. See if you can find out a bit of background. Family details, stuff like that.'
I stared at gorgeous Tiffany's advertisement. Another dead woman in the water. It would make a change from reporting the prize-winning dahlias at the local agricultural show or tallying up the footy scores after the weekend.? 'The Sleepy Hollow Times,' I usually told my friends from the city when they asked me the paper's name. I did cover pretty much everything from sheep dog trials to debutante balls, so a dead woman in the water was major news, indeed.
'Start with the family.' Kevin turned back to his computer screen. 'I think they live out in the bush somewhere.'
Out in the bush. It was all 'out in the bush' as far as I was concerned but then, I spent my formative years on the North Richmond Housing Estate. I got out the phone book, rang three Daltons at out-of-town addresses, getting polite denials on each attempt. On my fourth try a woman answered then abruptly hung up when I identified myself. I figured this had to be Melissa Dalton's mother so I set off. As I drove out of town the sun, which had been shining brightly all morning, momentarily went under a cloud, turning the sparkly blue water captured in my rear-vision mirror to a bleak grey. A few fishing boats moved along the horizon. I shivered. Some people love the ocean; I'm not one of them. When I'd got my marching orders from the Big Paper I'd hoped they'd send me somewhere inland but I hadn't had any choice about that.
Thirty kilometers later I turned off the highway then down another road that eventually narrowed to a gravel track. There were only a couple of houses; Melissa Dalton had grown up in the small cream fibro one. Several car bodies in various states of disrepair sat in the front yard and the trailer part of a semi-trailer was parked along one side of the house. I searched my mind for the appropriate piece of Australian lexicon. 'Battlers'. The Daltons were battlers.
The woman who opened the door to my knock looked as though she'd been battling all her life. She had a frazzled perm and the prematurely aged skin I'd seen on so many Australian country women. She looked a bit surprised to see me but I'd got used to that around here.
'I'm Vee Nguyen, from the Star.' I held up my card. The only people who have ever called me Veronica are my parents and the nuns at school.
'Go away.' She started to close the door but I got my foot there first.
'Look Mrs Dalton, I know you're grieving, I know you've suffered a terrible loss...'
'You don't know anything about it!'
'...But don't you really want to know what happened to your daughter? There are rumours of suicide - would Melissa have killed herself?'
She hesitated. Her face was haggard from sleeplessness and she had the look of holding in too much emotion. I assumed my most compassionate expression.
'You better come in,' she said reluctantly.
There was a big old wooden table in the centre of the kitchen, spread with a sheet of flowered plastic.
'D'you want a cup of tea?'
'Thanks Mrs. Dalton.'
'Call me Val.'
She boiled the kettle, set the two mugs on the table and slumped into a chair. Suddenly she started talking in a flat monotone, a far-off expression on her face.
'Melissa was a bright kid but always in trouble, wouldn't listen to anyone. Ivan was always away driving trucks and I was left with the kids...She left school and worked in a supermarket for a while but the money wasn't enough. She started doing telephone sex - just for a joke, really. She said it was safe and clean...' Val Dalton's voice broke; I nodded sympathetically.
'When she started...seeing men... I tried to talk her out of it. I cried, I got angry, but nothing I said would change Melissa's mind. She just laughed and said they were stupid to part with that much money for something that lasted three minutes.'
'Is that when she started doing drugs?'
'No! Melissa didn't take drugs!'
'What about the cocaine?'
'I don't know!' Val Dalton almost shouted. 'But Melissa didn't take drugs - I would have known!
Oh, yeah. If my mother knew everything I'd ever done her hair would be snow white, not its current steel grey.
'She lived in town but she kept some of her things in her old room,' Val said, rising suddenly. 'She wasn't a bad kid, just easily influenced.'
The room was small and painted pink. Stick-on pictures of rabbits covered the cupboard doors.
'She had some nice clothes,' Val said.
She had some very nice clothes, I noted, before the doors were quickly shut. Versace. Armani. Expensive wear for a country call girl.?
'Here's her photo.' A rounded, slightly chubby face stared from a chrome frame. The frame was cheap, the face pretty but unexceptional, with blonde hair smudged dark at the roots. A bluish-green dolphin curved across the swell of her left breast and buried its snout in her cleavage.
'Here's another.' A younger, thinner, dark-haired Melissa stood on a beach with three boys. All four held surfboards and smiled. They looked as though they were enjoying themselves. I repressed a shudder at the thought of all that water around me.
'Very nice.' I gave Val back the photos, asked her a few more general questions, then thanked her and left. On the way to my car two teenage boys, who had been fiddling with one of the old wrecks outside, gaped at me and sniggered. I flicked them the finger and drove off.
That night I dreamed about the woman in the water again. Nothing remarkable about that because I'd been having that dream as long as I could remember. It was something I carried with me - like an ulcer or an ache - but I'd never had it two nights running. The cold sea slapped against her dead flesh and the waves rolled her over and over until she sank from sight. I lay sleepless and sweating at 3 am and thought about Melissa floating in the dark and hostile ocean. Something didn't add up. The autopsy had shown that Melissa hadn't had sex recently, which seemed to rule out a client turning nasty. The cocaine in her bloodstream had been almost pure, which was unusual. On my way to work, irritable and bleary-eyed, I rang Val Dalton.
'The three boys in the photo, the surfies. Who are they?'
She thought for a moment. 'Dazza, Wayne and Chook,' she said finally.
Chook. How I love these charmingly whimsical Aussie nicknames.? I'd never met a Chook although I did know several boys born in the Year of the Tiger.
'Where can I find them?'
'As far as I know they're still surfing,' she said and hung up. Damn! Never mind. Kololoroit only had two beaches - the 'surfie' beach and the 'family' beach. Dazza, Wayne and Chook shouldn't be too hard to track down. All this would have to wait, though, because this morning I had to interview the mayor.
'Nguyen, eh?' said the big, florid-faced man heartily after his secretary ushered me into his office. 'I was in 'Nam myself.'
'So was I,' I replied, smiling. Like it takes a genius to work out that Nguyen is the Vietnamese equivalent of Smith.
He gave a burst of laughter and gestured towards a chair. 'What can I do for you, Vee?'
'I'd like your perspective on this development project the council is proposing, the large scale building of luxury waterfront apartments.'
'Look, it's a fantastic opportunity for Kololoroit, Vee.' He gestured expansively again. I got the feeling Peter McCulloch liked to think of himself as an expansive sort of bloke. I watched him as he sat behind his big, well-ordered desk, with the big wall planner behind him neatly marked. One corner of the desk held a photo of a handsome, slightly hard-faced woman. I noted the absence of children.
'...And, of course, besides creating jobs in the construction sector, it'll bring a lot of tourist dollars into the town.'
'What about the opposition from various community groups? Aren't there concerns about what the development will do to the habitats of various marine life?'
'You mean the greenies who're worried about the porpoises, ratbags led by that stirrer, Rod Shannon?'
'Well, you can understand their concern.'
He looked at me for a moment. 'The council will commission a full environmental impact study when the development project goes ahead.'
By whom, I wondered, but I left it at that for the moment. I asked a few more questions about his hopes for the project then wrapped up the interview. As I stood up to leave I noticed some small, whitish-gold stones sitting on the corner of his desk.
'Hoping to strike it rich?'
He looked at the pieces of quartz and gave a slightly embarrassed laugh. 'I was up north attending an official function last week in the centre of the gold rush district. I used to go fossicking there with my father when I was a kid. Brought those back for old time's sake.'
He escorted me to the door and put his hand on my shoulder. I felt his slight but unmistakable ripple of sexual interest.
'You take it easy now, Vee,' he said.
I was in my car on my way back to the office when my mobile rang. Bloody Kevin, I thought, but it was another male voice.
'Is that Vee?' it asked nervously.
'Yes.'
'Vee the journalist?'
'Yes. Who is this?'
'Dazza. You wanted to talk to me about Lissa.'
'That was quick work, finding me.'
'Yeah, well, word gets 'round.'
Oh, it certainly does. I arranged to meet him on the beach where Melissa's body had been found, swung the car into the opposite direction and contemplated how quickly word can get around. Ten months ago I'd been an A-grade reporter on a major metropolitan daily. I was hot. I was so hot I'd managed to uncover a paedophile ring. I'd watched and followed, researched, then had done some more watching and following. I'd gone close enough to take photos of some of the men I'd believed were involved. One of them was the newspaper owner's son. I'd gone to my editor with the photos. He'd spread them out on his desk then looked at me.
'If you try to make a story out of this, I'll fire you.'
I was stunned. I'd counted on his support.
'You can't do that,' I said at last.
'Yes, I can.'
'No, you can't!'
We stared at each other for a moment and he looked away first.
'This is the wealthiest, most powerful family in the country,' he said.
'Who just happen to own this paper and pay your $100,000 salary and provide your company car and all the other perks that go with your job.'
He picked up a pencil from his desk and turned it over and over in his hands.
'If you don't drop this, I'll drop you.'
'You gutless prick!' I stormed out of his office, so angry that I had to go for a walk to calm down, which was stupid, stupid because by the time I got back my desk had been mysteriously rifled and the photos and the file about the paedophile ring had disappeared. I stormed, I ranted, I accused, but because I'd told no one else about the photos, I couldn't prove I'd ever had them. Anyway, it was too hot for me to stay in the city. Eight weeks later I was working on the Kololoroit Star.
I sat on the beach and waited until the three black specks far out on the ocean paddled in. The bleached blonde from Val Dalton's photo stuck his hand out.
'I'm Dazza.' Chook was short and chunky with a square, acne-scarred face. Wayne was lean, dark and taciturn-looking.
'Good weather for it.' I gestured towards the water. 'Thanks for seeing me.'
Dazza shrugged. 'Val said you were all right. What do you want to know?'
What did I want to know? It suddenly seemed pointless being here. All I had were a couple of half-arsed ideas and a feeling in my gut.
'I don't know...' I floundered about. 'Why did Melissa like surfing?'
'She liked the freedom,' Chook said. 'She used to say that riding a great wave was like flying.'
'She used to go surfing at night,' Wayne said.
'At night!' I remembered my dream - it's always night in the dream - and shuddered. 'Wasn't that dangerous?'
''Lissa was wild.' Dazza glanced across the ocean as though searching for something - or someone. 'She was a wild chick. You couldn't tell her anything. In warm weather she'd go out on her board and sometimes she'd be naked. She used to say it was like being bathed in starlight.'
Shit. It sounded bizarre but then, so does bungy-jumping and plenty of people do that. I pressed on.
'What else did she do?'
'When she wasn't working, you mean?' Wayne glanced at me sharply. 'She liked raging, she liked a few drinks, she liked reading.'
'Reading?' Not an activity I'd envisaged her spending much time on.
'She acted like a bimbo when it suited her, but she wasn't dumb,' said Chook. 'She liked to read poetry and that.'
Oh, yeah, and Elle McPherson's a brain surgeon.
'No, true story.' He caught my expression. 'The last night we saw her we lit a fire on the beach and sat around having a few bongs. Lissa was ravin' on about some old Pommy guy, William Blake, about how important he was...'
'So she did use drugs?'
'Not hard stuff.' Dazza frowned. 'Not cocaine.'
'But someone might have talked her into...'
'I reckon we would have known if she'd started on it.' Wayne voice held a note of finality.
I felt I was getting nowhere. 'You were her friends. Isn't there anyone else she was close to?'
Dazza gave another of his shrugs. 'She used to hang out at PAG.'
We live in a world of acronyms and it's impossible to know them all.
'Porpoise Action Group,' said Chook. 'The people who are against that beach development. Lissa was a bit of a greenie.'
I remembered the tattoo on her breast; not a dolphin, after all.
'Check out Rod Shannon.' Dazza fixed his eyes on the waves again and started moving off. 'Lissa used to talk to him.'
This was the second time Rod Shannon's name had come up today. I thanked them and made my way across the sand, past the place where Melissa Dalton had died. There was a piece of crime scene tape sticking out of the sand, surrounded by some pretty shells and pebbles. I picked a few up and stuffed them in my pocket, as my mobile rang.
'Vee, where are you, for Christ's sake? You were meant to be interviewing Valmai Turner about the CWA embroidery exhibition an hour ago.'
I figured Valmai could wait, gave Kevin some bullshit excuse and followed the directions Dazza had given me. The wind had freshened slightly; out on the water a number of fishing boats plied their trade. The PAG office was located, along with a number of other community groups, in a ramshackle weatherboard building not far from the beach. Rod Shannon was about thirty, with dark hair and a good-looking face marred by a rather sneering expression.
'Yeah, Lissa used to come in here. She made that.' He indicated a silk screen poster of leaping porpoises. The colours were crude but the poster had a certain vitality.
'It's a pity she couldn't have put her talents to better use.'
'Ah, well,' he grinned. 'Things weren't going well on the farm so she came into town to hawk the fork.'
What a charmer. What a prince. I gritted my teeth and persevered but he couldn't tell me much except that Melissa had helped out with some PAG activities. I glanced around the room. Leaflets and posters proclaimed various environmental concerns and there were also a number of organisational charts and diagrams.
'Is that the date the PAG meetings are held?' I asked, pointing.
'What?' He followed my gaze then glanced at me sharply. 'Oh, yeah, yeah...we have them every month.'
'You have them the night of each new moon.? Is that something symbolic?'
'Eh? Oh, yeah, yeah.'
'I see. And you do a bit of surfing?' A sleek, tri-finned board stood propped in a corner.
'Yeah,' he laughed. 'Although it's been gathering dust. Things are so hectic - with everything that arsehole McCulloch's trying to do - I haven't had the time.'
'Did you ever go surfing with Melissa?'
'No.' He gave me another surprised look. 'Did she surf?'
I left his office feeling annoyed and perplexed. Why had he denied knowing about Melissa's favourite pastime? His evasiveness only strengthened my desire to find out about her death. Something stank around here and it wasn't just the seaweed drying in the sun.
That night I had the dream again but, unlike all the other times, the woman held up her arms and seemed to beckon me forward. The wind whipped her long black hair around her but when I got close, her features dissolved and the water pulled her from my grasp. I startled out of my sleep, sweating; the clock read 4.10. I went into the kitchen, made myself a cup of herbal tea and tried to put all the puzzle's pieces together. They all had something to do with the ocean - and with surfing. Perhaps a long walk by the sea was the place to work all this out. I started feeling drowsy; a woman's face appeared briefly behind my eyelids as I dozed off, but I couldn't tell who she was.
The sea was jade-green and flat as a dinner plate. Huge limpid clouds stretched out across the sky, looking like the lost continents on antiquarian maps and, at the horizon, a smudged cobalt line delineated ocean from air. The wind would be at work out there, pushing the water up or flattening it down and, miles below, currents of warm water collided with currents of cold water to create the tension which broke the ocean's skin and came rolling in as tier after tier of white-cresting foam. The waves carried secrets, the unwanted cargo of ships and lives, which were tossed up on the beach or buried beneath the shifting dunes. Years might go past before a heavy storm stripped back the sand to reveal shards of rusted metal or the smooth-polished wood of ships' ribs.
There were stories in the district of women walking on the beach last century, lifting dragging skirts as they waded towards the flotsam and jetsam of wrecks, but today there was only the sun shining benignly and a cormorant dipping its neck for food. It almost looked pleasant. I felt the breeze blow away the tension clustered in my temples and at the base of my skull as I walked but I still couldn't see the answer to the puzzle. A dead prostitute who read William Blake; greenies who held their meetings on the night of the new moon: all these things rolled around my mind like the stones and shells rolling about on the sand. I stood looking out to the ocean's dark secret places and at the boats on the horizon. The boats on the horizon. Suddenly, as I gazed at the boats, all the pieces clicked into place and I knew why Melissa Dalton had died.
I was hungry so I went to the Chinese restaurant, which is Kololoroit's only 'ethnic' eatery. I've nothing against the Chinese although my father always speaks about them guardedly: 'They've been in my country for 1000 years and we've been friends for 100.' Excellent noodles. After I'd eaten I went back to the office, braved Kevin's wrath and made some phone calls. I had a trap to set.
He was waiting for me on the beach that night, with the water still as black ice and the stars gleaming coldly above.
'You dropped this.' I held up the small piece of quartz. 'I found it down here yesterday.'
Peter McCulloch was no longer dressed in a suit or his mayoral robes. He wore jeans, a windcheater and an expression of extreme dislike.
'I used to go with girls like you in 'Nam, you slant-eyed cunt. One of you miserable whores gave me gonorrhea, which I passed onto my wife when I came home. It made her infertile.? We couldn't have kids.'
'You don't like women much, do you?' I said. 'Is that why you killed Melissa?'
'The greedy little bitch wouldn't have kept her mouth shut! She kept asking for more and more money.'
I remembered the Italian designer clothes. 'She found out about the cocaine smuggling, didn't she? She was out surfing one night and she saw Rod Shannon bringing it in. It was very convenient to have the development project acting as a smokescreen so the two of you could carry on your little business undetected.'
He gave a short laugh. 'You're more than a nice pair of tits, Vee. How did you work it out''
'Your wall planners. They had identical dates circled. It was stupid and arrogant of you both to have them displayed. When I asked Rod Shannon about his he got flustered and told me the circled dates were PAG meetings, but when I checked with another member of the group, I was told a different story. And the stuff about the new moon - which I thought was hippie tangential bullshit - made it just that much easier for him to go out on his board and collect the drugs. But he didn't count on Melissa's starlight safari. That's why he told me he didn't know she surfed.'
'You'll never prove it,' Peter McCulloch grinned.
'Oh, I already have. The fixation Melissa had with William Blake - when I checked with the harbour authority I found there's only one boat whose visits coincided with those dates - the Tyger. The captain got taken into custody this afternoon and I believe he's singing like the proverbial canary. You're in deep shit, McCulloch.'
'And you're going to be in deep water, bitch,' he said, advancing across the sand. I hadn't been thinking. I'd let myself get between him and the ocean.
'It's going to be so easy to hold you under for a few minutes.'
'This is stupid!' but I knew whatever I said wouldn't help. I recognised an ego out of control, a maniac whose plans had gone wrong. I screamed as his hands closed around my throat. I struggled but he was stronger. As he pushed me down I had a brief vision of a woman staring lifelessly up at me. I couldn't breathe, things started to go black and I felt the water close over my head.
I couldn't swim, of course. I'd had hysterics when they put me in the pool in primary school, so I was glad I'd strategically posted Kevin - and his best mate, the local copper - behind the dunes. I didn't like relying on men so much but they proved more useful than a pair of water wings. When they pulled me from the sea I was cold and choking. Kevin put his coat around me then took me home while the cop took Peter McCulloch somewhere else.
'You sure you'll be all right?' Kevin asked anxiously.
'Yes,' I replied and, strangely, after I'd eaten and had a shower, I was.
It was as though being forced into the ocean had removed some old and heavy weight. That night I slept deeply and dreamlessly and in the morning I phoned my mother.
'Mum,' I asked, 'what really happened on the boat out to Australia?'
There was a long silence on the other end.
'If you really want to know that,' she said at last, 'you'll have to come home.'
So I drove home through the green rolling plains until I reached that peculiar no-man's land of warehouses and oil refineries outside the western suburbs, where nothing grows, nothing survives, except a few scrubby trees sucking at the grime. When I got to my parents' neat brick bungalow in Footscray, my mother told me.
It had been a long voyage from Vietnam, three nights and two days with no food and very little water. On the morning of the third day the boat had been attacked by Thai pirates. They'd swarmed on board, killing some of the men; then they'd started on the women. My mother had been heavily pregnant with my younger brother. That's why they'd spared her. Others weren't so lucky.
'There was one girl,' my mother said. 'She was only about nineteen. She had a young baby. She was raped three times before she jumped overboard. I tried to stop you watching but that's what you saw, that young girl drowning. You were only three, I hoped you wouldn't remember...' Tears rolled down her face as she spoke, and I knew she'd never talked to anyone about this.
'I tried to stop you watching but...' We held each other and cried.
'Yes,' I said, when I could speak. 'I've always liked to know what's going on.'
Two months later I stood on the sand where I had almost died and watched the big gold disc of the rising sun gild the water. It hadn't yet warmed the air but I had my wetsuit on; I had my almost-new board under my arm. I'd been learning for a month and was already improving. 'You're a natural, girl,' Dazza had said recently. I'm not a very religious person but as I paddled out to meet the first wave I said a prayer for Melissa and hoped she'd be happy to see me there because, when you overcome your deepest fear, a whole new world can open up to you.
I didn't know whether I'd be staying in Kololoroit. I'd already had two job offers from larger papers. Perhaps I'd choose the one that had a beach nearby. Anyway, after all that had happened there didn't seem to be much enthusiasm for the development project going ahead. As I felt the surge of the water beneath me and stood to embrace its power I saw, far across the ocean, the grey arcs of porpoises leaping and rising, leaping and rising, against the waves.