North of Nowhere, South of Loss (8 page)

Sergeant Layton turned gruff: “Listen,” he said. “Husbands and wives think they know each other, but they don't. Parents think they know kids. Ten to one, she never got on the bus. Or she got off at Tweed Heads and bolted. No.” He held up a hand to ward off her shocked interruption. “I know you
know
she wouldn't do that. But it happens all the time, just the same. Happens in nice middle-class suburbs like The Gap. Have you any idea how many runaways we track down every week? Sometimes they want to give their parents a scare. And sometimes they just want to go off for a while and think, get away from the push and pull. Nine times out of ten, they turn up with their tails between their legs when the money runs out.”

“Please find her,” Laura said.

“We got a full scale search on, Mrs White. But we also got an ex-husband laying charges. And we got another funny little thing here that came up on the computer trace.”

He fumbled in his pocket and handed her a police printout. She read it blankly.

Re: Laurence J Voss. Credit card search indicates that subject is currently living at Settlement Road, The Gap, in Brisbane, under assumed name of Laura White.

“Amazing, those electronic-search brains,” Sergeant Layton said, watching her closely. “Pretty hard to fool them. They're like an octopus, they suck in dental visits, credit card purchases, phone calls, mail-order lists, you can't rent a video without they keep tabs on you and then match things up.”

She couldn't tell if she was being asked to take the printout seriously or not. “So Mr Voss is a woman and I'm him,” she said drily.

“They're not laughing at CIB,” he said. “Sort of link-up that rings bells on a police computer.”

“I can't believe this.” She could feel something indecent, black laughter maybe, gathering like steam about to blow. “I ordered something from one of his mail-order catalogues. I left the order form in his name, and wrote in my credit card number.”

“And why did you use his name?”

“I don't know. No particular reason. It was already set up that way, and the delivery address was the same. It was just less trouble, that's all.”

“Maybe,” he said. “Or maybe you wanted to confuse the issue. Maybe you wanted to draw attention away from yourself. Maybe you want us to think Mr Voss abducted your daughter. You seemed very keen for people to believe he was at your party. I'm just telling you how it looks.”

How it looks, she thought blankly. How does it look? When he left, she went and sat by the pond but she couldn't bear Caliban's smile.
Was
it a smile? What was it? Was anything the way it looked?

Laura had never known time to pass so slowly. She sat on the verandah and stared at the jasmine. Mrs Spicer came with little cakes and pikelets and sympathy. There must have been strong reasons of course, Mrs Spicer said, with a soft click click of her tongue. There must have been strong reasons why Jilly wanted to visit her father, and why her father was so hasty, click click, click click, and why Jilly told that story about the man in the red Toyota. Click click, she said. Click click.

“Yes,” Laura said vaguely.

Mrs Spicer told Milly Layton that you had to wonder about a woman who was so secretive, and who kept to herself so much. “She never pruned a thing in that garden,” Mrs Spicer said. “You have to wonder why.”

“You have to wonder,” her former husband said icily, over the phone from New York. “You have to wonder what goes on in your mind, Laura. Quite frankly, Caroline and I think this is something you've cooked up between the two of you, though I hold Jilly blameless. Brainwashing's a dirty piece of work. I think this Voss is a figment of your imagination, a red herring. I think you wanted to get at me.”

Laura searched her memory to see if he could be right. Had they cooked something up? Hadn't she, secretly, really wanted to keep Jilly from him? How did it look? She couldn't feel confident about any of her motives. Her memory of the sequence of things had gone slack, like butter left out in the Brisbane heat. She felt her cheeks and chin and mouth with her fingertips, in trepidation, for fear Caliban's obscene leer was lurking beneath her skin. She was afraid she might have done fearful things she could not remember.

“But if I'm wrong,” her ex-husband said, “If something's really happened to her, I hold you fully responsible.”

That seemed to Laura fair, and no more than the charge she laid against herself.

Sergeant Layton came back. “Our investigative branch has come up with something on Voss,” he said, “that lends weight to your side of the story.”

Yes, it was Goodna where Voss had been committed, but for quite a short time. In the wake of the murders of his wife and daughter, he'd been suffering from shock. “Post-traumatic stress disorder,” the psychiatrist called it. No history of instability before that. Used to be a horticulturalist of some standing, used to lecture at the Queensland University of Technology. Sedation and counselling till the worst of the shock wore off, that was the treatment. Fairly straightforward really, then he'd been discharged. There'd be long-term effects of grief and anger and disorientation, which would gradually lessen. And possibly there'd be times when a trigger incident would make him re-experience the trauma. This could be intense, as vivid as the actual event.

“Happens to war vets all the time,” Sergeant Layton said. “Shell shock, we used to call it. Now they got this fancy name for it. Basically, though, Voss would be all right. And he was getting regular counselling as an outpatient, no worries there. And here was the crucial thing: he was haunting the scene of the trauma like a ghost, his psychiatrist knew all about that, it was par for the course. He's your man in the red Toyota all right. Takes some of the suspicion off you.”

“Sergeant Layton, it's
Jilly
I'm worried sick about. Would he do anything to Jilly? I mean, when you talk about trigger incidents, what …?”

“Ah, on that score, not a thing to worry about. Stuffing's taken right out of him, poor bugger. Worst he'd do would be cry in Jilly's lap. Great relief, eh?”

“Yes,” Laura said. She told herself she felt relieved.

“Atta girl!” he laughed. “Ten to one she'll turn up of her own accord.”

A police van pulled up outside Laura's house and two constables came to the door.

“Laura White?” one of them asked.

“Yes?”

“We have to ask you to come with us, Mrs White. We have an order for your re-committal.”

“My what?” Wheels spun in Laura's head:
it's to do with Voss, he's flipped again, he's done something.
“I think there's been a mistake,” she said. “Don't you want Mr Laurence Voss?”

The officer looked uncertain. His partner said in a low quick voice: “When you've done this as many times as I have, you'll know. They always claim it's a mistake. Then they get violent.”

“Look,” Laura said, getting angry. “This is a mistake. I've never been committed once, so how could I be
re
-committed? It's the former owner, Mr Voss, you're after. Call your own Sergeant Layton from my phone, and you'll find out.”

“Tell you what, ma'am.” The officers had her arms now, and were treating her with the kind of wary patronising gentleness reserved for the dangerously mad. “We'll call Sergeant Layton after you come with us, how's that?”

Laura sat in the cage in the back of the van and told herself: I must not dissipate my strength in rage. I must stay calm. This will all be sorted out very quickly.

It was sorted out, of course, though not quite as quickly as Laura had hoped. Sergeant Layton himself, wreathed in apologies and shame, came to pick her up at Goodna.

“Thing is,” Sergeant Layton said, “the psychiatrist suddenly realised this was happening a week ago, it's not that uncommon. Well, it
is
uncommon, but not after very severe trauma. The boyfriend that ran off with Voss's wife, see, the boyfriend killer … well, the very thought was unbearable.
Unbearable.
So the mind switches places. Mind's a funny clever bugger in its way. He's, uh, we think he believes he's the killer. He's
become
the boyfriend, you see?”

Laura saw. Abused kids become abusers, there were children in Auschwitz who had worshipped their guards. She'd read about this.

“Psychiatrist signed the forms a week ago.” Sergeant Layton sighed. “Government bureaucracies, damn them. The right-hand memo never knows what the left is doing till it's too bloody late. And then the flaming police computers step in.” He pulled up in front of her house and said gruffly: “The implications aren't good, I'm afraid.”

“No,” she said. “I see that.”

The one thing she had to hold on to was that Jilly would never accept a ride from a stranger in a red Toyota. She was certain of that.

She couldn't sit by the pond. The place seemed to her humid with evil. And she understood, now, the meaning of Caliban's leer. It was the laugh of someone who had looked at horror, because horror was a jokester, no questioning that. And this was the grimmest joke in horror's bag: that the innocent and the damaged were capable of fearful crimes.

The serpent swallows its tail, she thought. The victim eats the man with the knife.

She couldn't bear to stay in the house. She drove about aimlessly, restlessly, in her blue Mazda. She remembered the day she'd bought the house, the day Jilly had sat outside in the street in the same blue car, listening to the radio, while Mr Voss watched them both.

She remembered the day she'd stood with him by the pond and watched his reflection watching hers, just the two of them. Four, counting statues. Eight, if you counted reflections.

What is evil? she wondered. How does it look?

On the seventh day, a baggage loader for the Blue Coach company admitted something under police interrogation. He confessed that on the day Jilly disappeared, a man waiting in a car out the back in the loading bay had given him ten dollars. He was to go inside and tell the young woman with the grey and yellow duffel bag that her mother was waiting in the car with something she'd forgotten.

The baggage loader had been suspicious. “Her
mother?”
he'd said pointedly.

The man had lifted up a parcel. “Yes, her mother. She forgot this. Her mother sent me racing into town with it. Tell her to come out to the loading bay.”

When the girl came out, the baggage loader pointed to the car. No, it wasn't a red Toyota; it was a blue Mazda. He noted that the man was no longer in it, but the parcel was on the seat. “That's it,” he told her. “That's what you forgot.”

He saw the girl open the door on the passenger side and reach for the parcel, but after that he hadn't paid attention. He'd gone back to loading baggage on the bus.

*       *

Laura felt as though she were on a very long journey into nowhere. She had a sense of desert waste and blowing sand and bleached bone. When, as though in a nightmare, Sergeant Layton appeared again at her door, she thought he might have been a mirage.

“I'm sorry,” he said. Pieces of words blew about, scuds of sand,
blue Mazda, Jilly's body, in the boot,
but she couldn't put them together. Sergeant Layton went on talking like a face in a silent film, “Same model as yours, different plates. Not much comfort, but he blew his own brains out afterwards …” Laura couldn't hear a thing. There was such a roaring in her head, such searing pain, it felt as though her skull was blowing out.

UNPERFORMED EXPERIMENTS
HAVE NO RESULTS

You could say it began with the man in the canoe rather than with the dream, though I can no longer be certain of the sequence of events. It is possible, after all, that the letter arrived before either the dream or that frail and curious vessel, though I do not think so. I used to be without doubts on this matter. Chronology used not to be even a question. But since the disappearance, trying to catch hold of any kind of certainty has been like catching hold of water.

Sometimes, when a tradesman or a parcel delivery man comes to the door, I have to restrain myself, by a fierce act of the will, from grabbing him by the lapels or by the denim coverall straps and demanding: “What do accidents mean, do you think? Do you have an opinion? Are you a gambling man? Have you ever been spooked by coincidence?” The truth is, I have become obsessed with the patterns of chance – the neatness of them, the provocation such neatness gives – but chance is a subject that very much resists scrutiny, and the more I ponder random conjunctions of events, the more intensely I try to focus my memory, the hazier things become. You cannot, as the physicists keep telling us, engage in the act of close observation without changing the thing observed. Of course I resort to such analogies because it is Brian who is dying.

Nevertheless, though it may or may not be the first cause, I will start with that afternoon on my dock and with the man in the canoe. It was a late summer afternoon and very humid, and the forecast – for thunder storms – was sufficient to keep most boats in marinas. There were white-caps on the lake and the river. When I looked east, I could see the pines on the tip of Howe Island bending like crippled old men in the wind. Westward, past the Spectacles, past Milton Island, I thought I could just see one of the ferries, veiled in great fans of spray, crossing the neck of the lake. Wolfe Island, directly opposite, was invisible, or almost so, behind a billowing indigo cloud that threw the whole head of the river into twilight, although it was only about four o'clock in the afternoon.

I was right at the end of my dock, and I had a book propped on my knees, but the wind kept buffeting my light aluminium deck chair to such an extent that I began to wonder if it was aerodynamically possible to be lifted up on a gust and dumped into the water. I kept looking up over the page, partly to assess my chances of staying dry, but mostly to enjoy the extravagant theatre of wind and water. And then, startled, I thought I saw a canoe emerging from the bateau channel between Howe Island and the shore.

I'm imagining things, I decided, rubbing my eyes. Who would be so foolhardy on such a day? Or so strong, for that matter. Here, the currents are swift and ruthless. Every summer, bits and pieces of our ageing dock disappear, and end up, no doubt, somewhere around Montreal; every winter the pack ice brings us splintered paddles and fragments of boats bearing registration marks from Toronto, Niagara, and even, once, from Thunder Bay. I shaded my eyes and squinted. Nothing there. Wait … Yes, there it was again, a canoe, definitely, with a solitary paddler, heading upriver against all this mad seaward-running energy.

It is by no means impossible to paddle upriver – I have done it myself – but even without a headwind it is very hard work and is rarely tried solo. Astonished, I kept my eyes on the paddler. He must have muscles like steel ropes, I thought. His chances of capsizing seemed extraordinarily high. Clearly, he was someone who liked danger, someone who was excited by risk, perhaps even someone who got a certain kick out of pain, or at any rate, out of enduring it. But for how long, I wondered, could his arms take so much punishment?

Do not undertake anything unless you desire to continue it; for example, do not begin to paddle unless you are inclined to continue paddling. Take from the start the place in the canoe that you wish to keep.

Old advice, three centuries old, but still sound: that was Jean de Brebeuf, writing home to Paris with tips “for the Fathers of our society who shall be sent to the Hurons”. I always think of them, those French Jesuits,
voyageurs
, when I see a canoe pitching itself against the current. I think of them often, as a matter of fact, since I moved out here onto the river. I frequently browse through their
Relations
, those lively, detailed, sometimes despairing reports to their superiors. Paris, Rome: it must have seemed as uncertain as prayer, dispatching words by ship.

The
Relation for 1649
to the Very Reverend Father Vincent Caraffa, General of the Society of Jesus, at Rome:
I have received, very Reverend Paternity, your letter dated 20 January 1647. If you wrote us last year, 1648, we have not yet received that letter…

The
Relation for 1637: You must be prompt in embarking and disembarking; and tuck up your gowns so that they will not get wet, and so that you will not carry either water or sand into the canoe. To be properly dressed, you must have your feet and legs bare: while crossing the rapids, you can wear your shoes, and, in the long portages, even your leggings.

I imagine them with their blistered European hands and their cassocks hoisted up around their thighs, paddling full pelt up their
Great River St Lawrence
(they wrote of it with such affectionate possessiveness, with such respect for its stern powers), dipping their paddles toward their deaths, skimming past these very rocks that buttress (and will eventually smash) my dock, heading west with their mad cargo of idealism, dedication, and wrongheadedness.

You must try and eat at daybreak unless you can take your meal with you in the canoe; for the day is very long, if you have to pass it without eating. The Barbarians eat only at Sunrise and Sunset, when they are on their journeys.

I could see the flash of the paddle now, knifing into the water, keeping to the right side, pulling closer to shore. His arms are giving out, I thought. He is going to try to beach on this stretch. Now that the canoe was close enough, I could see that it was neither fibreglass nor aluminium, but birchbark. It wasn't until the next day that I was struck by the oddness of this, and by the fact that I had never seen a bark canoe before, except in photographs and museums. At the time it seemed quite unsurprising, or at least, not significant. I merely noted it, wondering exactly where the canoeist would reach shore, and if he would manage this before capsizing.

And then, gradually, it became clear to me that the paddler had no intention of trying to land. He's crazy, I thought. Shoulders hunched forward, head slightly down, eyes on the prow of his craft, he was bent on defying the current and continuing upriver, parallel to shore and now only about thirty feet out. It seemed incredible. He was all manic energy and obstinacy, and I fancied I could hear the pure high humming note of his will above the general bluster of the wind. His strength, which seemed supernatural, was oddly infectious. It was as though infusions of energy were pumping themselves into my body, as though the paddler's adrenalin was an atmosphere that I inhaled. I couldn't take my eyes off him.
Go, go, go,
I urged, weirdly excited.

It is odd how certain body shapes, certain ways of moving the body, are retained like templates on the memory. So we recognise a voice, a face – we take this as unremarkable – but so also a gesture or a way of walking can be recalled. I could still see only the outline of the figure (though I'd assumed from the start the paddler was male), and he was wearing a hooded windbreaker so that he (or even she) could have been anyone. And yet, watching the way the shoulders hunched forward, the way the arms dug into the water, the sharp thought came to me:
This reminds me of someone. Who is it? Who? Who?

It was maddening. It was like meeting someone at a party and knowing you have met that person before somewhere, but being unable to summon up a name or a context. This sort of incomplete recollection can drive you crazy. The canoe was drawing level with my dock now and I wished I'd brought my binoculars down. The plunge and lift and dip of the shoulder blades, oh, it was at the tip of my mind, who did that movement remind me of? Now the canoe was level with the end of my dock, but the hooded head kept its eyes resolutely on the prow and the water, the paddle flashed.

Oh please look up,
I willed.

And he did.

“Good god!” I cried out, thunderstruck.
“Brian!”

Brian – no, of course not Brian, I was aware almost instantaneously that it couldn't possibly be Brian, who was either in Australia or Japan – not Brian, then, but the man in the canoe simply sat there, resting his paddle and staring at me, startled, which naturally meant that he scudded back downstream very swiftly. He dug the paddle furiously into the water, dip, dip, dip, until he drew level again, closer this time. He rested his paddle and stared. I felt, as the current again bucked him backwards, that I had to do something potent and instant to stop time unwinding itself, but I could neither speak nor move, the resemblance to Brian was so eerie. I was experiencing something like vertigo, and a pain like angina in my chest. Shock, I suppose.

I was dimly aware that my book had fallen into the water and that I was on my hands and knees on the dock. I watched the canoe draw level a third time, and the paddler and I stared at each other (he was very pale, and there seemed, now, to be no expression at all on his face), and then he, Brian, I mean the man in the birchbark canoe, turned away and lowered his head, and resumed paddling more fiercely than ever.

I watched until he disappeared from sight, which seemed to take hours. I have no idea how long I stayed on my hands and knees. I know that when I tried to climb the steep steps up our cliff, my legs felt like jelly and kept shaking so badly I had to stop and rest several times.

People climbing mountains and cliffs hyperventilate, this is common knowledge. They see things. Visitations alight on them.

Between the fiftieth step and the fifty-first, the past distended itself like a balloon and I climbed into it. I could feel its soft sealed walls.

Trapped
, I thought. And simultaneously, pleasurably:
home
. I could smell the rainforest, smell Queensland, feel the moist air of the rich subtropics.
I am here again. Home.

Brian is a few feet ahead of me, both of us drenched, both feeling for handholds and footholds, both of us (I realise it now) equally scared, but too proud to admit it.

(This would have been our last year in high school, and this was something we did every year, spend a day in our bit of rainforest – we thought of it that way – on the outskirts of Brisbane, climbing the waterfall. But our last year in high school was the year of the floods. I think we both gulped a little when we saw the falls, but neither would ever have been the first to back out. We were both given to constant high anxiety, and both temperamentally incapable of backing away from our fears.)

So. Every handhold slips, every foothold is algae-slick. My fingers keep giving way. My heart thumps – thud, thud, thud – against its cage. Delirium, the salt flavour of panic: I can taste them. Just inches above my eyes, I see the tendon in Brian's ankle. If I were to touch it, it would snap. I tilt my head back and see his shoulder blades, corded tight, lift like wings, pause, settle, lift again. He reaches and pulls, reaches and pulls, he is a machine of bodily will. The energy field of his determination – pulses of it, like a kind of white light, bouncing off him – brush against me, charging the air. This keeps me going.

At the top of the falls, we collapse. We lie on the flat wet rocks. We do not speak. Our clothes give off curls of steam that drift up into the canopy, and creepers trail down to meet them. We float into sleep, or perhaps it is merely a long sensuous silence that is sweeter than sleep. I dream of flying. I have languid wings. I can feel updrafts of warm air, like pillows, against my breast feathers.

“Mmm,” I murmur drowsily at last, “I love this heat. I could lie here forever. How come the water's so cold, when it's so hot here on the rocks?”

“I'm not even going to answer that, Philippa,” Brian says lazily. “It's such a dumb question.”

“Piss off,” I say. I inch forward on my stomach and peer over the lip of the falls. I can't believe we have climbed them. I watch the solid column of water smash itself on the rocks below. I feel queasy. I can see four years of high school shredding themselves, all the particles parting, nothing ever the same again. “Where do you reckon we'll be five years from now?” I ask him. I have to shout. My voice falls down into the rift and loses itself in spray.

Brian crawls across and joins me. Side by side, we stare down ravines and years, high school, adolescence, childhood, we've climbed out of them all. There is just university ahead, and then the unmapped future.

“Where will we end up, d'you reckon?”

“Not here,” Brian shouts. “We won't be in Brisbane.”

“But even if we aren't, we'll come back. Let's do this every year for the rest of our lives.”

“Not me,” Brian says. “After uni, I'm never coming back.”

The shouting takes too much energy, and we crawl back to the relative hush of the flat rocks ringed with ferns.

“So where will you be?”

“I don't know. Cambridge. Japan, maybe. There's some interesting research going on in Tokyo. Wherever's best for the kind of physics I'm interested in.”

“What if you don't get into Cambridge?” I ask, although I know it's another dumb question. It's like asking: what if you don't get to the top of the falls?

Brian doesn't bother to answer.

“I'll probably still be here,” I say.

“No you won't.”

“You're such a bloody know-it-all, Brian.”

“I know you and me.”

“You think you do.”

“Philippa,” he says irritably, with finality. “I know us well enough to know we won't stay in Brisbane. You'll end up somewhere extreme, Africa, Canada, somewhere crazy.”