The Best Australian Stories 2010 (29 page)

At night we can hear a canoe cutting the water near us, wooden paddles stirring the night. The whirr of fishing line is followed by the plonk of a sinker. Stuart and I hold our breath, staring hard at the black, trying to make out the shape of the boat. I rub my calves, using the last of the eucalyptus oil on my shin splints from netball. My muscles are locking up from the wet. Like the worms that showed up at the beginning of the storms, wriggling red all over the footpaths, the veins on my legs are swelling and rising to the surface. The lumpy feel of them makes me sick. Eventually in the black, a fish is jerked out and slaps against the surface of the flood, trying to get back under its wet covers but it is as if the river has hardened, leaving the fish to the metric clicking of a spinning reel.

The storms began a week and a half ago. Stuart kept saying, ‘What's everyone complaining about? We
need
the rain.' But anyone who knows anything about farming knows that a flood after a drought is just as bad as no rain. Stuart is a typical city man like that. Thinks he knows everything. Or at least, that everything that can be seen can be known. There's something about how a flood can change all that. It has cloaked this town like a sheet over the dead. The spill of water as it coagulated around the cattle, muting the bleats of drowning sheep; the branches of ti-tree rubbing against each other sounding like rusty swings until their roots loosen, let go and tip over. And then silence. That's obvious, I suppose, but it's a different kind of silence to the one we had been getting used to.

Stuart emptied out the supermarket after it happened. He did the shopping anyway, all five aisles, including the toiletry aisle – which is a first for him – but at the checkout no one would serve him. They had turned off the lights above their registers and put the folded closed signs on their conveyor belts. Then, so they wouldn't have to look him in the eye, they stood outside on the street smoking. Not even Susie, Beth's best friend, served him. After that, Stuart didn't bother going back to the high school to clear out his desk. Said he didn't need to be told he was fired. When his graduating class got their marks back – the best final-year results in the history of the school – the local newspaper rewrote history by stating the Year 12s were taught by Mr Robbs. Which they are now.

To begin with, people were nice to me. I run – ran – the chemist, so I guess they had to be. It was Stuart who was the outsider, after all; I was born in this town. Fourth generation. Girls I'd babysat, braided their hair and coached at netball came into the chemist with their own children and mentioned in loud voices that their husbands had invested in the new units out next to the fake lake with black swans brought in from Adelaide. ‘We're looking for tenants,' they said, eyebrows raised at me before enquiring if the costs of goods had gone up recently or had my prices gotten a little bold? When I took the week's takings to the bank Sally widened her eyes at my numbers, even though I'd been banking with her for fifteen years. She said a few times, loud enough so everyone could hear, ‘It's not as if you're stuck for choices, Margaret,' banging the notes crisply against her desk, making neat stacks. People call me Margaret now. Sometimes it's Mrs
Cedar
for real emphasis.

I'd always wondered about the wives of men in court over some sex scandal, how they dealt with the newspapers and the television cameras, everyone knowing. I studied their expressions on the six o'clock news. Pointy chins jutted forward as they held their husband's hand. I always thought these women were weak, even when it was all over the news – they still believed their husbands. How could they have not known what these men really were?

When Stuart and I first met, before the children came along, he had wanted to have sex with me there. He tried a few times but I wouldn't let him. I thought –
I think
– it's unhygienic. Why didn't I know then? It's like Janice used to say: if you don't let them do what they want with you, they'll do it with someone else. But Stuart was different. He wasn't from here. He didn't force things like the boys we had grown up with. It's almost like a religion I think now, when I see images of women supporting their husbands. You can't just stop believing in them – especially after twenty-two years and three children. Soon the chain chemist the town had been so against for the past three years opened up in the arcade opposite me and I closed up that same month, arranging a deal with the chain to buy my stock at a loss.

In the evenings, when the rescue boats have left, I paddle out on the kids' old boogie board. I touch the marble heads of angels peering above the water line, the tips of their wings poking up like fins, trying to guess which granite curve is my parents' gravestone. I float under the houses of all the people I knew, their pocked dartboards half-submerged like sinking suns, the basketball hoops where the kids mucked around after dinner when it was daylight savings. In the main street I pull myself along by the parking meters until I reach the chemist. There is graffiti on the shop sign hanging over the footpath. Red paint scribbled over the mortar and pestle my father painted when I was a girl. Faded signs for hay-fever tablets and acne cures are still in the window. Stuart asks me what I do out here on these night paddles; he says it with fear, like I'm meeting with the rest of the town and conspiring against him. I don't say anything; let him think he's going to get tarred and hung from a tree. Dipping my arms into the water, I feel the odd flank of fish.

I used to tell the kids a great big carp lived in the river and it was his whiskers, not reeds, that lassoed their legs when they went swimming. This carp lived on children whose siblings had not kept an eye on them, because that was all it took, I told the boys, reminding them that Beth was the youngest. A glance at the sky or the small study of an insect, and the carp would rise up, gills full of mud, smacking its Botox lips, wet and hungry. All of our children managed to avoid the carp. They managed to avoid this small town altogether, escaping to the city as soon as they got their P-plates, except for Beth, who was so impatient she left on her learner's licence. The Felthams' little girl wasn't so lucky. Or Mrs Shaw's husband, who got drunk on a forty-degree day and drowned. There was Lucy Stone, who went to school with me. And now Jason. I never thought to tell Stuart about the river and its silent takings. It was just a silly story I told the kids to make sure they looked after each other. ‘We had been drinking rum and coke but we weren't drunk,' Stuart had first insisted to me. ‘The others had gone on to the pub to keep celebrating but I didn't join them. I was coming home. You
know
that – I
texted
you.'

He had texted me. At the station Stuart made me show the police the message, demanding they read it. Even the woman at the front desk had to read it.
Still celebrating w students be home in
half hour
, it said. When the main sergeant shrugged and handed the phone back to me, Stuart went crazy. ‘This is evidence – shouldn't this be filed somewhere?' In the end one of the policemen put it in a plastic bag and dropped it in a filing cabinet to shut him up. I hated Stuart for that. It was my phone.

‘What if the kids are trying to call me?' I asked Stuart after we left the station.

‘The kids don't call you. You call them,' he spat back at me.

The night it happened Geoff phoned me, telling me to bring some of Stuart's clothes down to Townsend Road, at the bridge. Geoff had been an outsider like Stuart – they bonded over it, Geoff the policeman and Stuart the teacher from the city. But this evening Geoff sounded different: not cold, but distant. I know now that, like everybody else, he was probably weighing up his loyalties. When I asked him what happened, if Stuart was okay, he said, ‘He's okay … Look, you better get down here,' and hung up. The whole road was lit up when I got there, with searchlights and dogs, and I forgot to slow down, still doing eighty kilometres until a man I'd never seen before waved me down furiously.

‘Can't you see we've a situation here?' he yelled when I wound down the window. ‘If I had any time I'd fine you on the spot. Jesus.' He stormed off and I pulled the car over slowly onto the gravel. There were small groups of police I didn't recognise. The Townsends' house in the far corner of the paddock was lit up, and I could see the kids' faces pressed up against their windows. John was out the front, talking to a policewoman – I started to walk over but then he saw me and scowled. He said something to the woman and disappeared inside.

The policewoman came over to me, holding her hand out formally. ‘Mrs Cedar?'

I was holding Stuart's clothes and by the time I had swapped hands to return the handshake, her arm was back by her side, hitched on her holster.

‘What's happened?' I asked her. ‘I've Stuart's clothes. Where is he?'

The policewoman gently tried to take the clothes from me. ‘I'll make sure he gets them. We need to take him back to the station.'

I wouldn't let go. We both held on to the bundle until a T-shirt fell out of the pile onto the ground. I let go and picked it up, handing it over. ‘What's happened? Where's Stuart? Can I see him?'

‘We're not at a stage to know. A young man has disappeared and we need to talk to your husband about it.'

‘Who – which young man? One of his students?' I looked around. ‘Who?'

Torchlight was panning the gum trees; the trunks were like white spindly ghosts. Men in black wetsuits slipped in and out of the river, their headlights glowing under the water. Police wearing rubber gloves were picking things up with tongs and putting them into plastic bags, clothes I recognised as Stuart's. ‘I'm sorry, we can't say who …' the policewoman started – but then I saw Marie Strand kneeling on the muddy banks, her mouth gulping silently. Two policemen were hovering around her, their hands splayed out as if spotting her.

‘Jason? Is it Jason?'

Marie's head jerked up and stared at us. The policewoman noticed and tried to pull me away. ‘Like I said, I can't say anything at this point.'

‘But maybe he's at the pub? Has anyone checked the pub?' I was getting panicky. ‘Didn't they all go to the pub?'

A slow howl rose up out of Marie, a guttural sound as she sprung from her haunches towards me. The police grabbed her, held her down. I stared at them. She was screaming. Quiet, meek Marie, who worked everyday at the canning factory, was screaming and swearing at me. The policewoman took my elbow and pulled me away. ‘A police car will drop him home,' she was saying. ‘Go home – get some rest. Things will be clearer in the morning.'

She left me at my car, satisfied after I pulled the car keys out of my handbag and put them in the door. It was then that I saw Stuart. He was in the back of the ambulance, the doors wide open – he was wrapped in brown blanket. He looked up and caught my eye. Without thinking my arm shot up and I waved. He stared at me and then looked away. I stood there for a long time, hand in the air.

Two weeks later Marie Strand went through Jason's English essays and photocopied Stuart's comments. Phrases like
You have
such a beautiful way with words
and
This is penetrating stuff, Jason
and
Jason, I think you have real talent – I think if we work together we
can get some of your writing published
. It all sounded so predatory. She ran off about fifty copies of his comments and did a letter drop around town. In thick black Texta she wrote at the top of each page,
Stuart Cedar hunted my son. He is a Killer
.

Things got worse when Jason's VCE external examination results came in. He just scraped a pass in the English exam. Mr Robbs wrote a piece for the local paper after Marie asked him to read Jason's short stories and essays. ‘Nothing within these stories indicated to me that Jason had been an exceptional student, let alone a talented writer,' he stated. ‘How Stuart Cedar had become so enthused over Jason's writing is a mystery to me. It would seem, to me, that he held no
genuine
literary aspirations for this young man, on the cusp of his adult life.'

The evening that was published a rock came through our window. The article was wrapped around the rock. It knocked over a clay vase Beth made in primary school when she was learning how to join coils. Stuart was furious. He went outside onto the veranda and yelled that everything this town did was a cliché, that throwing a goddamn rock through the window was a cliché and no one in this town could think of anything original and a goddamn rock through the window was a cliché. I collected the broken pieces of Beth's vase and carried them to her bedroom as he paced and yelled. I lay on her bed and cried. The next night someone threw a garden gnome through the kitchen window. Miraculously, nothing broke except the window, sending shattered glass all over my clean dishes. The gnome lay on the cork floor, nose chipped, staring at us. Stuart laughed. ‘Well, at least they worked out what a cliché is,' he said proudly, as if he had educated the rock thrower. After that I slept in Beth's old room and Stuart in the boys' bunk bed. Neither of us wanted to sleep in our bed.

On the fifth night of the flooding I tied the boogie board to our stairs. I tested how many steps were underwater, counting four before clambering back up, my legs dripping and muddy. I'd paddled to the edge of town this time, looked up at the green highway sign pointing towards Adelaide. The roadhouse was ruined; through the windows I could see the tables and bar stools covered in a mould, the fridges and food counter ankle-deep. This was where we used to sit, us girls, and watch people leave town. Especially at graduation time, the place would be feverish with plans of escape, dreams of getting a job and a flat in the city. I'd met Stuart there. He was just a boy then. A writer, he said. Hitching his way around Australia. He stayed for a week, camping by the river at a spot I showed him. I went home only once, to pack a bag and leave a note. It was the wildest thing I'd ever done. I honestly thought I was never coming back.