Rachael's Gift (9 page)

Cam laughed. ‘You know, sometimes you can be a real prude. They’re just some of her art pictures. I’ve seen them.’ She unravelled a wet sheet and dropped it into the laundry basket at her feet. Sometimes you had to skirt around the issue.

‘I think she’s still running those messaging internet websites.’

Cam stood up. ‘I told her to shut them down and she agreed.’

‘I’m sure you can tell her till you’re blue in the face . . .’

Cam dumped the rest of the washing in the basket. ‘Okay, I’ll have another word to her,’ she said, as I hotfooted it out of the laundry.

In the garage, the burn-off smell lingered, trapped inside. People had a real cheek, burning off in this heat. I took out the refill pads I’d bought for my sander. I was working on a new board. She was a shooter, short and super-fast – a tri-fin thruster that all the kids were going for these days. I turned the radio up loud, put on my goggles and face mask, set the sander on low and ran it along her sides, losing myself in her fibreglass curves. She was coming up a treat, but that feeling, that little beauty that came with a job well done, just wasn’t coming. In the past, I’d let Camille handle most things, but this time, I just couldn’t take a back seat. I felt a buzzing in my shorts; I switched the sander off. It was Anne Fellows.

‘Anne?’ I yelled over the radio.

‘I’ve got you in for Tuesday morning at nine a.m.’

Just before the interview at the school. That could work. ‘Okay. We’ll see you at the station then.’ I chucked my phone on the bench, looked up and saw Rachael standing at the garage door. I didn’t recognise this animal. Hands on hips, breastbone stuck out, cheeks sucked in.

‘You promised,’ she spat.

‘Rach . . .’

‘I won’t do it, Wolfe – you can’t make me.’ She stormed out of the garage.

I went after her.

Camille was now hanging the sheets in the garden. That’s it, I thought, run to your mother, but she can’t protect you all the time.

‘Dad’s gonna make me go to the cops.’

The sheets parted in the wind, and through the gap Camille’s gaze rose to meet mine. ‘Anne’s going to help us – she’s a child psychologist for the cops. It’s not the cops exactly.’

‘I asked you to wait,’ Camille said.

‘You knew about this?’ said Rach, her chest heaving up and down. Camille and I didn’t answer; Rachael’s face grew hot with anger. She thrashed her arms and growled, ‘I don’t fucking want to do this! He never fucking touched me, okay? It never happened. I fucking lied. You happy now?’ She ran into the house and slammed the door behind her.

Camille put her hand on her hip, her face smug. ‘Look what you’ve made her do. She’s so scared of what will happen and what this teacher might do to her – you’ve forced her to lie to us. She’s so terrified that she’d rather be known as a liar!’

Rage furled out of my nostrils. ‘
I
made
her
lie! Oh, that takes the cake. As far as I know, this is the first time she’s actually told the truth!’

Cam’s eyes dilated in shock and then anger. I felt a hot spear of guilt, buried it and said again, ‘We’re going to Anne and that’s final.’

She inhaled sharply and then reached out, touching my arm. ‘Wolfey,’ she said, her voice softer. ‘Honey, please. Please. There’s something else . . .’

I looked away. Another bloody excuse. I was not budging. Not this time. I shook her hand off me. ‘I’m scared there’s something wrong with her, Cam, and I’m sick of dicking around.’

She shook her head in disbelief. ‘You’re going to ruin her. Don’t you realise? I can’t let you do it.’ Her chest heaved and then some kind of realisation dawned in her face. ‘Oh my god, you don’t love her. You wouldn’t do this if you did.’

It felt as if my veins were bursting. ‘Of course I love her,’ I shouted. ‘It’s
because
I love her!’

‘This is not love.’

I stabbed my finger in her face. ‘You love her too much.’

Her expression transformed, a light went on in her eyes and her breath evened out. ‘You’re a fucking traitor,’ she hissed. ‘I won’t let you do that to her.’

We’ll see about that, I thought as I walked away from her.

*

Later, she came to me in the dark, my head cloggy with sleep and whisky and dreams that made me sweat. Had I felt her breath on my skin?

I reached out for her and cupped the back of her head in my hand, her hair falling over my arm. ‘I’m sorry,’ I whispered. Feeling dizzy on her smell. Tasting her skin. ‘But don’t you have any doubts?’

Had I heard her voice? A murmur. A sigh. A shiver. Lips on my cheek.

I stirred. The light seeped through the blinds, the bed next to me was empty.

The ocean left a crust on my skin, grafting patterns on my shins. It had been a thrilling set, topped only by the awesome fireball that roared over the rooftops and made everything glow. I’d gone in hard, my muscles burning with the effort and now my limbs sang, high on oxygen and endorphins and adrenalin, warmth spreading from my belly right to the hardened calluses on the ends of my fingers. Somehow the colours seemed brighter, the world sharper and I felt as if I could eat for ten: tonight was a fish and chips kind of night.

I put the Ford into gear, turned the radio up and banged my thumbs against the steering wheel to Billy Joel’s ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’. I called Camille and left a message:
Picking up fish and chips – any requests?
Travelling slowly around the bends, the Volvo estate driver got frustrated and rammed his foot on the accelerator, flipping me the bird. I waved back. The big blue grew darker towards the horizon, the sun travelled in the opposite direction, Mr Brown hung his head out the window, his tongue loose and white with drool: it was a beautiful evening.

The old fish-and-chip shop was on the corner where the suburban road met the main one. Cam still hadn’t called. I ordered anyway – potato scallops, battered cod, fresh-cut chips, and just because I felt we needed something special, I got a kilo of cooked prawns and a dozen Sydney rock oysters. I ran across the road to the bottle-o for Cam’s favourite sauvignon blanc and then I waited in a no-parking zone while the fish and chips sizzled in the deep fry. I saw us all sitting on the deck watching the sky grow pink and then purple and fading to black. Perhaps just for this one night we could forget about stuff and enjoy ourselves again.

Down the side of the house, I called out but there was no answer. I dumped my board on the grass and the food on the deck; the back doors were closed. Mr Brown ran through the garden, raised his back leg and took a piss by the lone palm tree. The garden hose fizzed and spurted a stream of hot water, eventually running cold as I dunked my head under and then washed my feet.

The house was silent. Dark. Curtains were drawn. I laid the dinner on the kitchen bench, put the wine in the fridge, hung up my towel, took a proper shower and threw on the shorts and tee I’d rescued from the washing line. My heart felt big and rushed with blood. Now that I thought about it, I was prepared to see things in a new light – let them handle it their way for now, give them some time and space. That was all they needed. I’d be more . . . what was the word? . . . understanding.

Dinner was going cold. I took out a piece of cod and the tray of chips and went out into the still, hot evening and sank into the old man’s chair on the deck. Mr Brown danced on his paws and I threw him some fish.

Crickets were out in full song. The night was a stinker; the heat had locked in, the promised southerly hadn’t arrived. After finishing my fourth beer, I started in on the wine; a few bones and cold chips were all that remained in the paper wrapping. I relit an old bunger and tried Cam and Rach’s phones again but both went straight to voicemail. A fat-bellied Mr Brown sprawled on his back, his grandpa eyes drooped, mirroring my own. ‘Where are they, mate?’ I asked him. It was late now. I stubbed the bunger out on the wooden rail, flicked it into the garden and went inside.

A blade of light caught the silver photo frames and our three mugs smiled back. Years ago, Cam and I’d done some renos and totally gutted the place. Opened it right out as was the neighbourhood trend – open-plan living, dining, kitchen. Odd to think this had been my only home; I’d been glad to rid the place of my parents, but somehow they were still here – just dust in the woodwork.

I stumbled through the house, searching the corners, looking for what I wasn’t sure. Where would they have gone? Her mate Sally’s? But why would both their phones be off? They couldn’t both have run out of battery, and if they had been going to Sally’s surely Cam would have told me. I checked my texts but there was nothing. I lurched from the dirty kitchen bench to the fridge, where alphabet magnets holding old invitations hit the floor like bullets. Rach’s room was a mess; clothes dumped on the floor, cupboards and drawers left open, the radio clock flashing the wrong time. A balding teddy bear lay on her bed, its one button eye staring back. All pretty standard.

The harsh light of our bedroom made me blink. The built-in cupboard doors hung ajar, a pair of Camille’s undies was snagged on the edge of a drawer, and I caught my big toe on a discarded coathanger. Our room had been spotless when I’d left it earlier today. Looking up, I saw a gaping hole on the top shelf of the cupboard where we normally kept two big suitcases. Had we been robbed? But then nothing else in the house was gone. The wine made me feel dizzy. I sank onto our unmade bed. Shit.

Had they really gone somewhere?

Should I call Sally? Or Barry? One of the Rutherford mothers? I didn’t know.

Was I just being paranoid? Maybe they’d just gone away for the night. But I sat there with my heart pounding in alarm. Would they take the big suitcases for one night? Seemed unlikely. There was one place I hadn’t checked yet.

I twisted the key in the filing cabinet and slid open the drawer. I pulled out a folder and emptied its contents onto the desk. One small blue book fell out. I opened it and saw my ugly head scowling back. The other two passports were gone.

Again the silence. The kind of broad silence that said nothing and too much. The kind when you’re out at sea, alone, waiting for that set to come rolling in and you’re staring at the blank orange line of the horizon so long that you start dreaming the ‘one’, but it’s just a desert out there – until something else moves, a dark shadow beneath, all quiet and stealth: the man in the grey suit. You think your brain is as soggy as your daks but your heart beats loud in your chest and your blood fizzes in your ears. You’re not quite sure what that sound is, but I say it’s the sound of fear and it makes you feel sick. Sick in the gut.

This time I lit a reefer and sucked on it like it was a lifeline. Be calm, I told myself over and over. There’s an explanation for this. A good one. She wouldn’t have left you high and dry. Not with all this hanging over our heads. I thought over the events of the day, but there’d been no clue. Life had gone on in its usual banal way: I’d gone for my morning surf, Cam had gone in to catch up on some work, Rach had sulked in her room, drawing. I’d come back and spent the day in my workshop, until it was time for my evening ride. We’d spoken at lunch and even talked about the weather!

I switched the computer on and checked the browser history and there it was: flights booked. They’d taken off at seven p.m., while the fish were mid-fry. What a mug. They were halfway to Bangkok by now and then it was on to Paris. Of course. Rach’s dream.

She had gall; I’d give her that. Was there a law against leaving? I didn’t know. What more could I have done? Handcuffed them to their beds? Short of physically restraining them, how did you stop two people from leaving? How did you stop them when you didn’t even know they were going? I’d put my foot down and it was about as good an obstruction as a pothole. No one was under arrest. The school had not specifically said to ‘stay put’. Sure, that was what you did when the shit hit the fan, deal with the issue, but here I was, left to pick up the pieces.

I could run too, I thought. There were places I wanted to go: fast green walls and glassy-barrelled old mates, eight-foot left peelers and epic right-breakers, bum-fluff blond sandbanks and hard-packed barnacle-lined reefs, hairy jump-off spots from craggy cliffs shaped like an old man’s face. Places of solitude where you could hear the sound of the wind and forget things. Places I’d not been for some time. But it just wasn’t in me.

The house was full of track marks; memories punctured into the fibres. I heard their voices and saw shadows in the heat their bodies had made. The old man used to say, ‘We’re all headed to the same place, just get there differently, that’s all.’

I crashed out. The night unfolded, a resounding silent black that seemed to stretch on forever. My skull pressed in on my brain. The bed smelt of her. Lilacs or lilies or lavender or just her. My chest cramped. I felt the imaginary weight of her thigh slung over mine and wondered if it was all a big mistake. If I’d made the whole thing up – it was the drink and the weed, that was all. Tomorrow everything would be better – clearer. She’d phone and explain things and I would call myself an idiot and the nightmare would go up in a puff of smoke. There would be a logical answer. She’d never do this to me. Not Camille. Not my wife.

The flight bumped its way across the world, moving with the moon across the Middle East on our way to Paris. André Philippe’s
Memoirs of an Antiques Dealer
sat open on my lap.

It was midnight at home and Wolfe would have realised by now that we’d gone. My stomach felt weightless with the shock and guilt of what I’d done. It was cruel and hard, but necessary. His betrayal of Rachael made me seethe. I had to hold firm – what was the alternative? It didn’t bear thinking about. I would call him soon. When things had blown over. I exhaled and looked up at the overhead compartment where my mother’s ashes, which we’d placed in an old Arnott’s biscuit tin for ease of transport, were stored with Rachael’s art portfolio. Would her work be good enough for the Beaux-Arts? I’d dashed off a quick email at the airport explaining we were going to be in the country, having travelled all the way from Australia – would they agree to an interview? I could only hope.