North of Nowhere, South of Loss (7 page)

“It was that man,” Jilly sobbed. “That creepy man was in my room.”

“God, Jilly!” Laura switched on the floodlights for verandah and back porch. She watched the light pick out the curve of lawn that ended in the bamboo. Nothing beyond the bamboo could be seen. “He's gone now,” she said as calmly as she could. “There's no one anywhere near the verandah.” She bolted the French doors and all the windows and pulled down every blind in the house and they huddled together on Laura's bed in the sticky still heat. “It's okay,” she said, stroking her daughter's hair. “It's okay. I'm afraid this is my fault, Jilly. I thought he was Mr Voss, you see. I told him he could come and sit in the garden. It was incredibly stupid.” Jilly was trembling like a live bird held under a cat's tender paw. Laura said, to calm her: “I do think he's probably harmless. I think he's just a very sad man, you know. They say that's all voyeurs do, they just
look
.”

“Call the police,” Jilly begged, still shaking.

“Yes,” Laura said. “Yes, of course.”

Laura called the police. We'll send a squad car, the night dispatcher promised. And in due course – it seemed a very long time to Jilly and Laura – a squad car arrived. There were heavy footfalls on the verandah, and lines of torchlight raking the yard, and then a constable came to the door.

“No sign of an intruder, ma'am,” he said. “Uh, our records indicate you've got peeping Tom worries. Understand this is a second report?”

“It was the same man,” Laura explained. “The one who's been staring at my daughter at the bus stop.”

“Yeah, well, generally harmless, these blokes. Let us know if anything happens.” Then he dropped his voice, confidentially. “Teenage girls, you know, ma'am, very, uh, vivid imaginations.” He dropped his voice still further and whispered: “Hormones” Then he smiled. “Still, keep us informed.”

“Thank you, officer. I will.” Laura kept her anger tamped down. “Thank you for coming so quickly.” The sarcasm was lost on him, however.

“Any time,” he said cheerily. “Give the kid a hot cup of tea and settle her down. She'll be right.”

“Bloody police,” she fumed to Jilly.

“Bloody useless police,” Jilly said.

“Yeah,” Laura grinned, cooling down a little. “Bloody hopeless cops”

They did make tea. It felt good, Laura thought, to have your teenage daughter leaning against your shoulder, cuddling into your arms the way she did when you rocked her through tooth-cutting nights long ago. They sat on the bed with the blinds down, and a candle burning, and talked all night.

“Mum,” Jilly asked somewhere near dawn. “Do you think Dad misses me?”

“Of course he does. How could he not?”

“I mean, really
misses
me? Or, you know, just feels he should? Or just wants to bug you.”

Laura's hand paused for a moment, then resumed its stroking of Jilly's hair. “How do you mean, bug me?”

Jilly sighed. “Well, I phone his office, you know, sometimes, when I'm lonely. Reverse charge, from pay phones. I didn't want to upset you. Do you mind?”

“It's natural, Jilly. He's your dad.”

“His secretary says Dad and Caroline want me to visit them in New York. She says there's a Qantas ticket waiting in Sydney any time I go and pick it up.”

“I see.”

“But how come I only ever get to talk to his secretary? How come he never calls
me
? How come he never writes?”

“I don't know, Jilly.”

“D'you think he
really
wants to see me?”

“I'm sure he does.”

“It's a one-way ticket.” Jilly pleated the sheet between her fingers. “D'you think he'll try to keep me there, Mum?”

“That's a tough one, Jilly.” Laura sighed. “Your father's rather used to getting his own way, and to being able to buy anything he wants. Which isn't to say he doesn't love you. I know he does. You'll have to decide what you want to do.”

“Mum, I hardly have any friends at school. They think I'm weird. And I'm scared of that man in the red Toyota. Why's he following me? Why's he always watching? I'm even scared of the house now. I'm not even gonna feel safe in my own room.” She snuggled into Laura's arms. “If I promise to come back from New York, will you mind if I go?”

It's a steal,
Laura thought. Her whole body felt like lead, but what could she say? The fears you could feel for a child were bottomless. They could fill the world. Suppose Jilly stayed and the man whom nobody knew …? She'd never forgive herself. “I'll miss you horribly” she said. “But maybe it's best for now.” Either way, she didn't think she'd feel any safer.

It was done within days. Laura drove Jilly to the Blue Coach terminal for the deluxe bus to Sydney. Her father's secretary was to meet her at the other end the next morning, take her to a hotel, put her on the plane for New York. It had all been arranged by Jilly's father. “Please don't stay around, Mum,” she said. “We'll just get weepy if you do, and I hate goodbyes. I'll be embarrassed for the whole trip.”

“It's not the kind of thing people mind, Jilly,” Laura said. “Crying at goodbyes” She wanted to say: I don't feel safe when you're out of my sight. I want to drive you to Sydney I want to sit beside you on the bus, see you safely on to the plane. I want to make certain your father meets you at the airport, I don't want any New York taxidrivers whisking you off to God knows where. I want to wrap you up in cotton wool.

“Yuck, I
hate
crying, I hate goodbyes,” Jilly insisted. “I'm nearly
fourteen,
Mum. I can look after myself, you know.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“I'll phone you from New York, I promise.”

“From New York!” Laura cried in alarm. “Phone me from Sydney, okay? Reverse the charges. Phone as often as you like. Phone me when the bus gets in, and phone me from the airport, okay?”

“Mum!”
Jilly protested. Sometimes, she thought, parents needed so much protecting, it was exhausting. But at the sight of her mother's face, she relented. “Yeah, all right.” She gave Laura a quick brusque hug. “But don't make such a big deal of it, okay?”

“Okay.” Laura watched her daughter, with nothing more than a duffel bag slung over one shoulder, wave brightly and disappear into the terminal. She saw the line in her mind's eye.
Laura watched her daughter disappear.

She got into her blue Mazda in the parking lot and sat and listened to the radio for fifteen minutes, then she drove round the block and parked discreetly down the street where she could watch the coach leave the depot. She couldn't see a thing through the darkened windows, but she pictured Jilly sitting halfway back, resolutely not crying.

It was a hot, blindingly bright subtropical day, but it felt bleak and chilly to Laura. She drove home and sat morosely by the pond.

Caliban's grin seemed full of menace to her now. The bamboo sounded like the click of knitting women who gossiped and pointed the finger and counted heads.

*       *

In her dream, Laura was sitting at the back of the bus, and for some reason she couldn't move or make her voice carry. She could see Jilly sitting near a window halfway down, and she could see the back of the head of the man sitting next to her. What really frightened her, however, was the gargoyle driving the bus.

Down the hairpin turns of the Pacific Highway, they hurtled at alarming speeds. Caliban laughed like a maniac. At times, where the scree fell away sharply from road to ocean, the bus lurched on the soft shoulder, and shuddered, and barely righted itself. “Slow down!” Laura screamed, but other passengers turned back and shook their heads at her, annoyed, as though she were a child throwing tantrums. She was weak with relief when the bus stopped at Gosford for petrol – until she saw the man next to Jilly stand up. She recognised him. Jilly stood up too. “Jilly, no!” Laura shouted. But her daughter got off the bus with the man whom nobody knew. They both got into a red Toyota. Laura strained and shouted but could make no headway. It was as though she were buried up to the neck in sand.

She woke with a thudding heart and sodden sheets.

Six in the morning. She made coffee and paced. The bus wasn't due into Sydney till 10 a.m., which was light years off. All those stops: half an hour in Tweed Heads, an hour in Newcastle, half an hour in Gosford. If only she had asked Jilly to call from each stop. The distance to office hours seemed infinite. An image kept coming to her: the intimate way the man at the barbecue had stroked Caliban's head.

On the stroke of nine, Laura telephoned Sergeant Layton.

“When you said Mr Voss was in an asylum,” she asked him, “did you mean Goodna?”

Well, actually, Sergeant Layton explained, he personally had had nothing to do with the loony-bin end of things. It was something he'd heard about from the police psychiatrist's department. He assumed they meant Goodna. He could find out if she wished.

Yes, she wished.

Meanwhile, impatient, Laura telephoned Goodna herself. That was not the kind of information they could give out, the registrar told her. Unless she was a doctor or the police.

Nine-thirty, only half an hour till the bus got in; plus give Jilly time to collect her bag, meet the secretary, make an excuse to go to the restroom, find a phone.

Ten. Soon now, soon.

Eleven. Oh, what could be keeping her? Maybe the bus was late, maybe there'd been a highway crash like that one near Newcastle last year. Laura phoned the bus company. The bus had arrived in Sydney on time at 10 a.m. No ma'am, they didn't give out passenger information over the phone.

Hadn't she told Jilly to phone her immediately? But Jilly had thought that was silly. Jilly would phone from the airport. Laura didn't even know what time the plane left, since she didn't know what the ticket arrangements were. Maybe there wasn't time. Maybe Jilly had had to rush from bus to check-in.

Laura called Qantas. The flight to New York via Los Angeles left at 4 p.m. Jilly would have lots of time then, after check-in, to make a call. Could Qantas confirm that a Ms Jilly White was a passenger? No, Qantas didn't give out that kind of information over the phone.

Midday, Laura couldn't stand it. She felt ill. She'd have to swallow her pride and phone her former husband's secretary. No, wait. If there'd been a problem, the secretary would have phoned. Laura would wait. If she hadn't had a call by 4 p.m.,
then
she'd phone.

At 1.45 p.m. the phone rang and Laura leapt on it. “Jilly?”

“Uh, Sergeant Layton, ma'am.”

“Oh,” she said disoriented. “Oh yes, was it Goodna?”

“What? Oh, you mean about Voss. Uh, well, I've got someone working on that for you, but, um, actually, I'm not calling about that, Mrs White. I'm calling about your daughter.”

Laura went weak at the knees. “Yes?” she said faintly.

“Can you tell me exactly where she is, exactly?”

“She's in Sydney, she'll probably be on her way to the airport by now. I'm terribly worried, as a matter of fact, that she hasn't phoned yet.”

“Mind if I come round, Mrs White? I have to ask a few questions, that's all.”

“Sure,” Laura said faintly. She leaned against the wall and slid down it slowly and sat on the floor till the door bell rang.

“The thing is,” Sergeant Layton said. “Your husband's secretary –”

“Former
husband,” Laura said sharply.

Tell me, tell me,
her nerves screamed.
What's happened to Jilly?

“Yes, excuse me. Your former husband's secretary said your daughter never got off the bus –” Laura heard the rest as from a great distance – “so she called your former husband in New York. Seems like he has a few friends in powerful places. Suddenly I have half the big brass in New South Wales breathing down my neck.” He shook his head as though clearing it of Sydney frenzy. “Never known anything escalate so fast in my life. Probably all a mountain out of a molehill. Hope so, anyway.” In the long run, he implied, easy-going Brisbane common sense could be expected to prevail.

“The thing is, your former husband does have legal access for holidays, and he's, ah, laying charges, it appears. He's accusing you of abduction. Hiding her, so she wouldn't be able –”

“But for God's sake, where
is
she?” Laura cried, surfacing from shock. “If she wasn't on the bus, where
is
she?”

Sergeant Layton sighed deeply. There was nothing so ugly as custody battles, nothing so savage as marital revenge, nothing so skilful as the acting he'd seen on both sides. “Are you countercharging your former husband with kidnapping, Mrs White?”

“What?” For a second, Laura's eyes flashed with hope, but she shook her head dully. “No,” she said. “There'd be no point. She was on her way to him anyway. He knew he could easily keep her there, if that's what he wanted.”

“Let's get back to the bus terminal,” Sergeant Layton said. “You put her on the bus, and you watched it leave. What time was that?”

“I didn't actually put her on the bus,” Laura said wretchedly. “She didn't want me to come inside the terminal. I saw the bus leave at 3 p.m., but I didn't actually put her on it.”

“You cannot swear to the fact that she was on the bus?”

“She was on it, well she
must
have been on it … No, I suppose I can't actually swear …”

Sergeant Layton said sternly: “You drop a thirteen-year-old kid off at a bus terminal full of riffraff and God-knows-who and let her fend for herself? That's not gonna look too good in court, is it?”

“No,” Laura said in a small voice. She could see that it would not. Neurotic and overpossessive, or negligent: those were the choices. It seemed to her that whatever mothers did was wrong. She found herself guilty on every count.