Moon Island (40 page)

‘Nowhere near,’ the paramedic said, ‘You’re a tough one, aren’t you?’

‘I’m glad I didn’t die.’

Beyond the tinted windows of the ambulance there were trees and rocks, and the striations of light and shadow, the real world. She had climbed up out of a dark place because she wanted to be back here again. The memory of the effort it had cost told her how much she had wanted it. She was not Doone, she was nothing like poor Doone or her melancholy predecessor. She felt a lightness, not just in her knocked head but all through herself, as if she had discarded a weight she had dragged about with her for much too long. She could see her sister’s chipped nail polish and the worn denim of her father’s Levis with intense clarity. The simplicity of it all was more precious than anything she had ever known.

They were all looking at her, the woman police officer and the paramedics, and John and Ivy. It dawned on her that she was more hurt than she realised. ‘I am all right,’ she said clearly. ‘I am quite all right. I didn’t want to be dead, like the others.’

The other world was there, but it was fading from her sight. The bigger and much darker mysteries were all about this one. She thought about Ali and Jack O’Donnell, and Marty, and Leonie, and Lucas, and the stories Elizabeth had told her. What people did and hid from one another and wished for in their hearts. Love and sex, longing and disappointment, those were the real secrets.

John stroked her hair. ‘Of course not,’ he soothed her. ‘Of course you didn’t.’

He thought,
Oh God, if only Ali were here
. He couldn’t be a mother to May, or to Ivy, and they needed her now. Ivy’s face was puckered with warring emotions, made almost ugly for once by the force of them. And the loneliness of the days and nights he had just endured suddenly unleashed itself. He found himself belatedly crying for his wife. Ivy saw it and shifted herself closer to him, and the three of them hung on to each other’s hands like an everlasting knot.

The ambulance turned on to the freeway and towards the hospital.

Marty and Judith reached the security of their house. For once Judith didn’t get busy immediately with Justine’s needs. Instead she challenged her husband. ‘You look terrible. What’s wrong?’

He shook his head, his mouth making a tremulous line.

‘I want to know,’ she insisted.

She planted her hands on his arms, shaking him. She was big and solid, and as seemingly imperturbable as one of her own sculptures, and the impulse grew within him to crack open and expose his failings to the solace of her massive calm. He could smell her familiar scent overlaid with the sour-sweet odour of baby. His mouth opened, choked with words.

‘Yes?’ Judith said. Her hair was slicked close to her skull, making her head and shoulders look like one rock balanced on another.

‘I did it,’ he said.

Her eyes widened a fraction, made blank with surprise.

‘I killed her.’

‘She isn’t dead, Marty. We just saw her off to hospital.’

‘Not her.’

‘Who, then?’

He could see the surprise overwhelmed by a leap of fear and apprehension. But the longing to tell, to relieve himself of the guilt by sharing it, had grown too strong to contain. ‘Doone. I killed her.’

Judith half turned to look at the baby in her chair, searching for reassurance in the sight. But then her gaze dragged back to Marty. The words couldn’t be unsaid, although she did her best to deflect them. ‘She drowned. It was an accident. I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Because of me. It happened because of me. She said she wanted to die and she did. She was in love with me, more than just a kid’s crush. I let her, then I stopped her and she drowned.’

‘Wait.’

She came closer, so their faces were almost touching. A monumental composure overlaid the depth of her shocked reaction. ‘Are you sure you want me to hear this, whatever it is?’

Desperately he whispered, ‘Yes. Oh yes, please let me tell you. I can’t keep it in any longer.’ He tried to rest his head against her but she wouldn’t yield. He was like a child handing over his confession, waiting for the damage to be made better.

‘Go ahead then,’ Judith said.

Her expression never changed while he told the story and the words poured violently out of him. Spittle gathered at the corners of his mouth; he made little gestures of entrapment with his hands to catch and hold her, although she made no move away from him. Just once she turned her gaze to make sure that Justine was still happy in her chair, with her fat fists waving at a mobile suspended in front of her.

At the end he buried his face in his hands.

‘Is that it?’ Judith delivered the words coldly, wanting to empty her mouth of them.

‘Yes. I don’t know how I can expect you to understand, let alone forgive me. But I did put a stop to it, you know. I told her that there would be no more sailing together. There were going to be no more times alone with her. I … wanted to put things right, Judith. They’d gone wrong, yes. But I did what I could, at the end.’

‘Wait a minute.’ Her voice grew colder still. ‘Are you saying you interfered with her?’

‘No, Jesus, it wasn’t like that. I didn’t make love to her or anywhere near it, what do you think I am? She came on to me. But yeah, I did things I shouldn’t have done. It’s the age, Jude, that just on the brink between girl and woman time, neither one nor the other. It’s …
intense
.’ He looked wildly around, at the pleasant room and the doors still standing open to the view of silvery sea. ‘But I love you, for Chrissake. We were waiting for our baby to be born. I told her.’

At last Judith shook her head. ‘And so you think she killed herself for unrequited love of
you
?’

He hesitated now. A trap opened at his feet. ‘She was unbalanced. I think maybe she didn’t try to live. I think maybe that was it.’

‘You didn’t kill her.’ It was a flat statement. There was a reprieve in sight.

Even more hurriedly he said, ‘No, I think I see that now. Only the whole thing has been driven inside me. Yesterday and today there was the other girl, and we were out looking for her and all the horror of it came rushing back. I was out one day taking some photographs of Doone, quite innocently, and Spencer Newton saw me. He put a wrong construct on it, of course. But I think he and Alexander believed I might have had something to do with May’s disappearance. Which I didn’t, of course.’

‘Poor Doone,’ Judith said with sudden softness. ‘Poor little girl.’

‘Yes.’

‘Who else knows about this, Marty? Apart from Spencer and Alexander? People at the gallery, maybe? Up here at the beach?’

‘No one. I swear to God. Except for May herself. She found a diary, in Doone’s bedroom. And I was the only person she told about that.’

‘A diary. I see.’

Now Judith went to the window and looked out at the island. He followed her and rested his hands experimentally on her shoulders, feeling the reassuring pad of flesh on her back.

‘Don’t do that,’ Judith said in a clear voice.

‘Do what?’

‘Touch me.’

‘What do you mean? Judith, listen baby, I told you because I couldn’t bear to keep it from you any longer, because you deserve better than …’

‘Don’t try to justify it to me. Don’t ask me to share the responsibility for what you did.’ She had already moved away. With shaking hands she was putting notebooks and work materials into her black holdall, moving quickly and distractedly, betraying her feelings at last.

‘What are you doing?’ he demanded in disbelief.

‘What do you think? You don’t expect me to stay, do you? I’m taking Justine in the car. We’re going back to the apartment. I’ll take advice, you must make your own arrangements. Don’t stand there, blocking my way.’

He was amazed. ‘You’re just shocked, I’m not surprised, but you mustn’t be so harsh. You can’t walk out on me. I’m not Tom Beam.’

‘You’re right. You are much worse than Tom Beam.’

‘Wait. What about Justine?’

‘I have to think of
her
.’ Judith’s eyes were hard and burning as she nodded towards the baby. ‘I’m going now,’ she said. ‘I’m going to pack my things and go back to New York.’

He tried to stop her, pulling her back and attempting to snatch the bag out of her hands. ‘I’ll come with you.’

‘I don’t want you with me.’

‘Just wait, stay till the morning at least, we need to talk this thing out. You can’t take Justine away from me.’

Judith squared up to him. Her bulk became threatening. ‘Yes, I can. Whose case would anyone listen to? To yours? A child molester?’

Marty recoiled. ‘You wouldn’t. Don’t call me that. This is
me
.’ He beat his chest with his fists and Judith’s mouth hardened at the theatricality of him. ‘I’m her father. Your husband, did you forget that?’

‘I can’t change one of those. The other I can do something about.’

‘
Judith
.’ His voice rose in a howl. Justine started in fright and her face puckered. Before she could begin to cry Judith gathered her out of her chair and swept her out of his reach. She ran up the stairs with her hand cupped around the baby’s head and the door of the bedroom snapped shut behind them.

An hour later, Judith and Justine were gone.

May had slight concussion, a bruised collar-bone and severe dehydration. After a day in the hospital she was fit enough to get up and sit in a chair, and to plead to be allowed home. John and Ivy sat with her, sometimes together and sometimes separately. For the first time since Alison’s death the girls were content just to be together. Ivy lounged in a visitor’s chair and flipped through magazines or jabbed at the television remote, but she showed none of the usual signs of wishing to be somewhere else. And sporadically at first, then compulsively as the old crust of antipathy began to break up, they talked.

‘After Mom died I think I just went about being more myself than I’d been before. I wanted to be more popular, more hip, more in with everything. Kind of,
fuck you, world
. It gave me something to concentrate on, like non-stop performance art, maybe. It seemed the only way to deal with everything being so shitty, you know?’

May said wonderingly, ‘Was that what you were doing? You seemed like you didn’t care about anyone. But how can you
deal
with someone dying just like that? Walking out and never coming back, without a footprint or a message or anything left behind?’

‘She didn’t know she was going to die, did she? So how could she have left us a message?’

‘I was the opposite to you.’

‘… Naturally,’ Ivy shrugged. ‘Didn’t Dr Metz take you through all that sibling rivalry shit?’

‘I wasn’t trying to be different. I’d have pulled out my teeth to be like you, but I was so scared of everything. That John would die, that you would die, that somebody would notice me or that I’d be ignored.’

‘You were awful. Always ill, always clinging on, then going crazy and chopping her things up. Or going out to commune with some
tree
. I didn’t know why you just couldn’t say, this has happened, right. Nothing will bring her back, so the rest of us have got to get on with it.’

‘Nobody talked about her. Nobody
talked
.’

Ivy gave a harsh hoot of laughter. ‘We didn’t want to set you off. Sniffing or cutting.’

‘You really are a heartless bitch, aren’t you?’

Ivy stopped laughing. ‘That was a statement, not a taunt. You’ve changed. Must be the concussion.’

‘What do you expect? And
why
didn’t anyone talk about what was happening to us?’

‘Partly because of history, because of Jack O’Donnell, I guess. I knew that Dad and Ali weren’t that happy, that she might well have gone anyway. She left in a big way, though.’

May thought about the image she had crumpled up and stuffed away in her unconscious. When she unfolded it she saw it was only two people on a sofa. Having sex, Ivy said, having sex, that was what people did. As she considered the scene now, chips of disgust flaked away from it, diminishing its lurid brilliance and leaving a blurred image that seemed more striking for its banality than for anything else. Men and women, husbands and wives, were unfaithful to each other. It was sad. But it wasn’t grotesque, loomingly fearful or threatening. It was just people.

‘And partly Dad himself,’ Ivy added. She spoke quietly, without emphasis.

‘What did he do?’

‘Nothing. That’s just it. He’s not like Ali.’

They contemplated the vividness of her, or the flashes and reflections and dressings-up of it that were left in their memories. They would not say it aloud but they acknowledged that John was passive by comparison, a done-to man rather than a doer.

‘There’s nothing wrong with that,’ May defended him, out of love.

‘Of course there isn’t.’

They were quiet for a moment. Absently Ivy reached for May’s Walkman but she set the earpieces swinging in little opposing arcs instead of putting them in her ears.

May felt grateful for this indication that the conversation wasn’t over. ‘Do you think he’ll, you know, get someone else in the end?’ she asked.

Ivy sighed. ‘I suppose. I don’t know why he should be lonely, living with us, but he seems to be.’ Her face was so ironically expressive that May laughed out of pure affection.

‘I’m sorry I punched you.’

‘If we’re in apology mode I’m sorry I said what I did about Mom and Jack O’Donnell. I’m sorry I wasn’t on the island when you came looking, I’m sorry you fell into an old cellar and hit your head and hurt your shoulder, and we didn’t find you until you climbed out on your own. I’m sorry I haven’t been there for you all along, like I should have been, poor motherless girls that we are. Um, is there anything else?’

‘That seems pretty much to cover it. Don’t break my Walkman.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Mom won’t come back, will she?’ May said. The observation was important because it was final, at last. ‘Nothing any of us does will mean anything different.’

She remembered climbing out of the pit and the determination that she would do it because she wanted to go on with her life. Not like Doone. Not like Sarah.