Shortly before Jamie’s second birthday, Dorrie and Lukas took the boy and went to camp for the summer in the Dandenong Ranges. The forest drowsed in the warm sunlight but at night the bush pressed close around the tent, a circle of darkness.
Two days after their arrival Dorrie was working in the tent. A mile away Lukas was painting. The boy was outside the tent. Afterwards they thought that something — a leaf, a flicker of sunlight through branches — must have caught his attention. He made his way across to the circle of bush and disappeared into it.
Some minutes later Dorrie came out of the tent with a couple of towels that she draped across the bushes to dry in the sun. She glanced around, saw no sign of Jamie, thought nothing of it. He would be around somewhere. For all his adventurousness, he never went far. She went back into the tent. Five minutes later she came back outside. Still no sign of him. Frowning, she looked about her.
‘James …?’
Nothing.
She walked a few paces. ‘Jamie?’
Insects buzzed peacefully, otherwise the bush was still. The bland leaves closed their ranks against her. Her call disappeared, absorbed by the dead wall of silence.
He is two years old, she told herself. Not even. He cannot have gone far. It is a question of finding him, that is all.
She walked forward. When she reached the edge of the bush she parted the branches and stepped inside.
There were bushes, trees, a confusion of leaves and branches interlaced into a wall of silence. Panic touched her.
‘Jamie!’
The leaves cast the scream back at her. It was impossible to know where to look. She forced her way between bushes, around bushes, under bushes. She parted leaves, slipped and stumbled in ten thousand years of leaf mould.
‘Jamie! Jamie!’
She might have been the first person to have penetrated these intricate thickets.
Her mind envisaged Jamie’s tiny figure walking between the great trees. To which I dedicated him, she remembered.
The trees have taken him. The thought, once rooted, would not go away. I shall never see him again.