It was dark when I flew into Sydney. Starless and flawless and dark. I almost missed the overpass driving to Mum and Dad’s from the airport. That bridge hadn’t existed when I’d left for Baltimore; somehow, while I was gone, it had surfaced, sleek and confident and geometrically satisfying, from the sludge of the valley floor. It hung forty metres in the air, connecting our ridge to the rest of the world with a wide inverted grin.
As I checked in the rear-view mirror of the hire car, as I fumbled, one hand on the wheel, the other feeling around for the indicator, the bridge curved on behind me into the distance like the tail of some terrible thing.
We used to joke about tails. And teeth and claws and eyes. Hot breath on the back of your neck. We used to try to scare one another with stories about wild things that lived in the valley. A panther. A python. A river bunyip that pulls people under and disembowels them as easy as peeling prawns. (As if the things we dreamed up in our thin backyard tents could be worse than what lurked down there.)
People saw things too. Every few years the local newspaper would report a big-cat sighting and publish a photo of a polypheme paw print in the dirt with a cigarette lighter next to it for scale. Or there’d be a bull shark scare at the river. Once half a mutilated dog washed up in the mangroves, and the newspaper claimed a shark was responsible. At the time I thought it should have been easy to prove because, whatever it was, it had swallowed the microchipped half of the dog. But Dad had explained: no, microchipping didn’t mean we could track the thing down. Just that if we had the chip, we could learn the name and address of the dog.
Another time the paper ran a series of night-vision photos proving the existence of a panther. Darks smears with pellucid eyes peered out from the front page, but by the time the newspaper had been printed, folded and flopped out of a car window by the Tooleys, who did the paper deliveries each Tuesday after lunch, it was impossible to tell what was a big cat and what was sandwich-grease stain.
When I arrived the house was lit up like a hotel minibar. It looked smaller, flimsier than I remembered. In the driveway the huge angophora overhanging the garage shook its leaves at me. Scent of eucalyptus like a punch in the gut.
‘You’re here!’ Mum threw her arms around me on the doorstep. ‘She’s here, Graham! She’s here – Tikka’s home!’ She slipped the bag off my shoulder and took another out of my hand, and then she hustled me down the hallway with her hip and into the yellow kitchen.
‘How was your flight?’ Mum wanted to know. ‘Have you eaten anything? Sit down and I’ll make you a cup of tea. Dad will get your things out of the car. What, just these bags? Is that all? How long are you staying for?
‘We’ve been at the Heddinglys’ all afternoon,’ she told me. ‘Did you hear Jade Heddingly is getting married? And the Van Apfel house has been sold again. Mrs McCausley can tell you the price.’
She rattled through the list of the things she would have been willing herself not to mention. How long was I staying? Another wedding. The Van Apfels. On the kitchen table an ancient Women’s Weekly cookbook lay dog-eared in anticipation.
Dad wandered in then and wrapped me up in a hug.
‘Good to see you, Tik.’ He ruffled my hair.
The kettle complained on the bench.
‘Flight okay?’ Dad settled himself at the kitchen table, arms crossed, glasses gently cockeyed. ‘I was following it using Flight Tracker.’
Flight Tracker was Dad’s favourite app these days.
‘You took off a bit late,’ he told me, as if I hadn’t been on board, ‘but you made up the time over the Pacific.’
‘That’s when they asked us to lean on the seat in front. To go faster,’ I explained.
‘Cheeky bugger.’
‘It’s a fuel-economy policy.’
‘That why your flight was so cheap?’ he said drolly.
Because it might have been my idea to come home to see Laura, but Mum and Dad had to subsidise my flight.
‘Something like that,’ I said sheepishly.
Mum carried three mugs of tea over to the table and placed them on cork coasters. After they’d retired, Mum and Dad had bought a lightweight caravan, and each coaster on the table had been collected from a different tourist attraction around the state. The Big Banana! The Big Bull! The Big Merino! those coasters shouted.
‘Big tour for a little caravan,’ I noted.
‘Drink that.’ Mum ignored me and nodded towards the hot tea she’d placed in front of me. The mug was heavy and unfashionable. The tea was just how I like it.
‘I’ll make you some toast, Tik,’ she said. ‘You look like you haven’t eaten in months.’
We all stared at my baggy hoodie, my faded black tights, at my feet in mismatched flight socks. I blew steam off the surface of my tea.
‘Where’s Laura?’
‘Asleep,’ Mum said.
‘She gets tired,’ Dad explained.
‘How is she?’ I asked tentatively.
Mum sat down opposite me and drew in a long breath. Dad placed his hand on her knee and then he surprised me by starting to cry.
‘What? Is it worse? It’s worse, isn’t it? Dad? What haven’t you told me?’
‘We’ve told you everything, Tik,’ Mum said. ‘Chemo starts soon and the prognosis is good. Thank God the thing hasn’t spread.’
Dad wiped his eyes with the edge of his hand. Replaced his glasses, lifted his chin from his chest. ‘You expect it at our age,’ he said. ‘You expect your friends to get sick, maybe get crook yourself. But it shouldn’t ever happen to your child —’ He stopped as his voice cracked again.
And Mum swept one arm across the tablecloth, smoothing invisible creases. The back of her hand was marked with age spots.
‘Lovely Laura,’ she sighed.
* * *
Laura had phoned, just over a week ago, to tell me that it was cancer. Nodular sclerosis Hodgkin lymphoma. She’d been clinical, somehow, even when talking about herself, and I’d pictured her wearing her nurse’s scrubs while she spoke to me on the phone.
‘I’m coming home,’ I told her. ‘I’ll book a flight today.’
‘Why?’ she said. ‘There’s nothing you can do.’
‘I’m coming anyway. I want to see you.’
‘I might not look too great,’ she warned.
I was on the train when she phoned. On my way to the lab. Outside the carriage window: red brick buildings as relentless as the rain on the glass. My sister never me phoned at that time of the morning – just past midnight at home – so I knew, even before she spoke, that something was very wrong.
‘My reception might drop out. I’m on the train,’ I explained.
‘My life just dropped out,’ she replied.
* * *
When I saw her for the first time, that night I arrived from the airport, she wandered into the kitchen wearing a tired blue bathrobe and an expression to match. She poked through my bag I’d left lying on the table. ‘Ooh, duty free,’ she said.
I abandoned my tea on the table and threw my arms around her, burying my face in her neck, breathing her in.
‘Oh Lor.’
‘You shouldn’t have come back,’ she said gruffly. ‘You didn’t have to do that.’
‘Yes I did,’ I said, and I smoothed down the part in her hair where it was mussed up from her sleep. In response, she leaned over and tucked in the tag that was poking out from the back of my hoodie.
‘We’re like chimpanzees,’ I said, ‘grooming one another.’
‘You might be,’ she said archly. ‘You’ve got the face for it.’
‘Ape-breath.’
‘Face-ache.’
I grinned and pressed my cheek against hers.
* * *
It would be another week before either of us mentioned the disappearance of the Van Apfel girls, and even then we’d both be cagey.
‘Have you told anyone?’ My sister would say it casually, like she didn’t care about my answer. Like I couldn’t see her holding her breath.
‘Have you?’
‘I asked first,’ she’d insist, becoming fourteen years old again.
Making me forever eleven.