Thyla (5 page)

As I lay in my new bed on the first night in my new school, the scars came alive.

It was late – around midnight, but my body felt as though it was midday. My mind was alert and my eyes didn’t want to close. There was too much to think about.

What a big, strange day it had been!

The rest of my classes had been agreeable. Some were even informative and interesting. I had kept quiet and attentive and I believed I had made a good impression on my teachers. I even answered a question or two! School, it seemed, was not so odd and difficult after all. At lunch time, Charlotte and her friends had some sort of rehearsal, so I sat by myself in the sun and watched my schoolmates congregate and cluster and move about like a flock of grey pigeons. I enjoyed watching them, knowing I was one of them too. I liked feeling as though I was part of something. Like I belonged.

The evening had gone quite well also. I sat with Charlotte and her friends at dinner and even made some conversation. I complimented the food (and kept my mouth closed when the others ranted about how ‘greasy’ and fattening it was). I remarked that it was a pretty night outside (and stared at my plate as the others complained about the cold). Though they disagreed with my opinions, the other girls didn’t seem angry at me. In fact, Claudia even squeezed my hand at one point and said, ‘You’re doing well, Tessa.’

That made me feel happy.
Accepted.

When the conversation turned to fashions and ‘celebrities’, the voices of the girls muted somewhat. I did not understand why ‘leggings as trousers – cool or not?’ was an interesting topic, and I was also ignorant as to why the other girls seemed interested in talking about the romances and scandals of people they didn’t even know. I checked that I would not be missed from the conversation and, once I had concluded that they were too enthralled in a discussion on the physique of a renowned male musician (they called him a ‘pop star’), I retreated inside my head.

And in there was Cat. I wondered if she had sat at this same table, having similar conversations. I wondered how many of the girls here knew her. I wondered if I should ask them, or if they might be sensitive about her disappearance. I imagined her, cold and alone, in the wilderness.

I
never
imagined her dead, though I knew it was logically possible. Perhaps it was only hope for you, Connolly. Perhaps I just
wanted
Cat to be alive but … I don’t know how to describe it. It was almost intuition. I sensed that she was out there. Odd and mad and
witching
as it may seem, I somehow
knew.
And I also knew it was up to me to find her. It was like the dreams I had been having since I awoke – the ones that seemed so real and yet so implausible; it was as though my subconscious knew things my consciousness did not. I could not explain it, but I could not argue with it either. The feeling was so strong. Cat
was alive
.

‘Tessa?’ A sharp voice punctured my contemplation. My eyes snapped towards Inga, whose own eyes were boring into me. ‘I asked you a question,’ she said.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I think I am quite tired. What was your question?’

Inga rolled her eyes. ‘I just wanted to know if you have a boyfriend?’

‘A boyfriend?’ I asked. The term was unfamiliar to me. Was Inga asking if I had any male companions? Was she implying I had been improper?

‘Yes, you know,’ she said slowly, as though I was dimwitted. ‘A boyfriend?’

‘You don’t have to answer that, Tessa,’ said Claudia, gently. She turned to Inga. ‘That’s private,’ she said.

‘Aww, but I thought we were friends,’ Inga said, her voice dripping with sarcasm. I really did not like Inga. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll share first. I have a boyfriend. His name is Jakob. He’s completely hot and he kisses like a demon.’

Ah, so Inga was not simply talking about male companions. She was talking about … gentlemen callers. About suitors.

‘I … I don’t really know if I have a boyfriend,’ I replied, truthfully. I had not remembered a boyfriend. I could not remember
any
boys. But, like my
feeling
about Cat, I had a sense that perhaps there had been someone. Dancing around my brain was a hint of a musky smell; the feeling of lips brushing against mine. Maybe this
was
just a dream, though. After all, I had seen myself in the mirror after I was rescued. What boy would have wanted me?

‘Right,’ said Inga, her eyes narrowing. ‘Weird.’

I felt my cheeks colour. It
was
weird to not know if you had a suitor. I chastised myself and vowed to be more mindful in my future conversations.

‘It’s not weird,’ said Claudia, soothingly. ‘There have been heaps of times in my life when I haven’t really known if a boy was my boyfriend. They can be pigs sometimes, can’t they, Tessa?’

I nodded, yawning as I did so and Amy snapped, ‘Sorry for keeping you up, Tessa.’ She flicked her streaky blonde hair over her shoulder and looked at Inga, who rolled her eyes.

‘She’s had a big day,’ Claudia said, touching me gently on the arm.

It was true. I’d had a big day. I was tired. But, later, when I was lying on my side on my new bed, in my new room, in my new school, sleep seemed a million miles away.

My new roommate was not in her bed. She was away on a bushwalking trip. Ms Hindmarsh had told me this when she showed me to my room, earlier in the evening, but still, I was disappointed. I wanted to meet her.

Ms Hindmarsh told me that her name was Rhiannah. This cheered me. I assumed (and secretly hoped), that there was only one Rhiannah, the one Charlotte had introduced me to, the one with the black hair and the pretty bangle. I remembered Charlotte calling her strange, but Rhiannah seemed nice to me. I thought she would make a pleasant roommate.

‘Rhiannah is a bit of a nature nut,’ Ms Hindmarsh had explained. ‘Loves the bush.’

‘Me too,’ I said, again without thinking, and the next words to come into my mind were,
How do you know that, Tessa?

Ms Hindmarsh didn’t ask how I knew that, though. She just squeezed my shoulder and said, ‘Great! Well, you’ll have lots to talk about, won’t you? I really hope you get along. I would, ideally, have liked you to bunk down with one of the prefects, but they all have roommates already, and I wouldn’t like to cause disruptions to their lives and routines. They’re all very conscientious students, and I’m aware that disruption can be detrimental to academic progress.’

‘Rhiannah didn’t mind being disrupted?’ I asked. ‘She didn’t mind her other roommate moving out?’

‘Her other roommate had … already gone,’ said Ms Hindmarsh, and a curious darkness settled on her face. I remembered what you said, Connolly, about Ms Hindmarsh’s husband being ‘gone’. You hadn’t said ‘dead’. Just ‘gone’. There seemed to be so much uncertainty in that word – so much emptiness, as though the word was made of air. Rhiannah’s roommate was ‘gone’. Ms Hindmarsh’s husband was ‘gone’. My parents were ‘gone’. Cat was ‘gone’. They were like leaves, blown quietly away by a summer breeze. I didn’t know what to say to Ms Hindmarsh. I wanted to tell her I would help to find her husband too, but I knew my first priority was to find Cat. Maybe one would lead to the other.

As quickly as the darkness appeared, brightness came again and Ms Hindmarsh smiled. ‘Anyway, Tessa, make yourself at home,’ she said, as she opened the door to room 36. ‘I know you don’t have many things with you but I’m sure you’ll settle in soon and find some way to make it yours.’

I looked around the room. ‘Does Rhiannah not have many “things” either?’ I asked.

The room looked very comfortable, but its furniture and decorations were decidedly minimal. The furniture consisted of two beds with thick charcoal-coloured quilts and dark pillows, two armchairs, a black box which I took to be some sort of electronic equipment (the operation of which I would have to sneakily ascertain at a later time), a deep-red rug on the floor, two small wooden bedside tables, two charcoal reading lamps, a wood-framed mirror on the wall, two tall wooden wardrobes and a strange, misshapen black splodge in the corner.

‘A beanbag,’ Ms Hindmarsh said, as if reading my mind. ‘For your guests to sit on. I’m afraid we couldn’t quite spring for three armchairs per room, and a beanbag is more comfortable than a plastic chair, I suppose. I don’t know; it was the interior decorator’s idea.’

A ‘beanbag’?

The word squeezed into my mind with the other words, but it looked uncomfortable there. As if it wasn’t sure of its place or purpose. As if it
knew
it looked a bit funny and silly.

I wondered whose idea it was that chairs were a less than ideal apparatus for sitting on, and that a wonky, bean-filled splodge might be a more sensible idea. The thought made me smile. I wondered if the gentleman who had created it was now very rich and famous, like the man who invented the refrigerator, or mechanical sheep clippers!

My eyes moved away from the funny beanbag to other features of the room. There was one picture on the wall – a painting of a Tasmanian devil. The image looked as though the creature might be slightly fearsome, but I didn’t feel scared by it. In fact, I thought it was strangely beautiful.

‘Yes, she does love her devils,’ said Ms Hindmarsh when she saw me looking at the picture. ‘But she calls them
purinina
, which is the Aboriginal name for them.’

Purinina.

That was the word that had been trying to squeeze into my head before, when I was talking to Rhiannah.

Strange that the word I had been trying to think of would turn out to be the name of Rhiannah’s favourite thing.

‘She’s always drawing them in art class,’ Ms Hindmarsh went on. ‘And she helps out at the market, selling scarves and badges and things to raise money for them. It’s very important to her. Maybe you can talk to her about it? I’m sure she’d love to tell you. I hope you’ll be happy here with her, Tessa.’

Later, staring through the darkness at Rhiannah’s empty bed, I hoped so too.

And niggling in the back of my mind was another hope.

If Rhiannah liked bushwalking, maybe she knew Cat. Maybe she was there on the bushwalk when Cat went missing. Maybe she knew something about what happened.

I wondered if she might tell me what she knew, and if it might be the first clue to finding Cat.

I also wondered about the pair of shiny brown hiking boots sitting neatly side by side beside Rhiannah’s bed. If Rhiannah was on a bushwalk, why hadn’t she taken her boots with her? I pictured her, running through the trees, barefoot and wild. My stomach pulsed with yearning.

It was too hot in the room. It was like the hospital – heated far too well, though nobody else ever seemed to notice. I was sweating.

I looked over at the window on Rhiannah’s side of the room. The crack in the dark-red curtain gifted me a beguiling glimpse of the cool night sky. I felt the hairs on my back stand up; my pulse quicken. I wanted to jump out. I wanted to run through the playground, through the sporting fields, through the high metal gates and away, into the bush that surrounded Cascade Falls, into the trees and moss and bracken and dirt and rocks and wild water.

I padded across the room and perched on the corner of Rhiannah’s armchair. I pressed my hand against the window. It was cool to my touch.

I opened it just a little bit, and then turned the latch backwards to lock it. I didn’t want my instincts to take over my logic; to allow my body to follow my longing to push the window wide open and leap. I knew my instincts to be powerful. In the days since I had been rescued I had, many times, felt compelled to do things my brain told me were illogical or even dangerous. I remembered biting the nurse. I remembered the fire that sometimes smouldered in my belly, crackling and simmering, making me want to run away from the hospital and into the wilderness. I knew I was capable of madness. I didn’t want it to compel me out of the window.

Despite my initial misgivings, I liked my room, my school, my new life.

I didn’t want to leave.

But the night air was intoxicating.

I breathed it in and it seemed to fill not only my nostrils but my entire body, from my scalp right down to my toes. It smelled of wet grass and bark and dirt and something else. Something without words. Something
wild
.

I wanted to roll in the dirt. I wanted to hurtle through the trees. I wanted to
sniff things.

I wondered if the other girls felt these urges, or if they were unique to me. I could not imagine Charlotte Lord wishing to leap out of a window. I wondered if the old me – the one before my accident – would have just leapt without thinking.

My body pulsed and shuddered and I willed it to still. Something told me I needed to control myself if I was to fit in here at Cascade Falls.

And if I was to find Cat.

A voice whispered inside my mind.
Howl
, it hissed.
Bay. Growl.

‘No,’ I whispered out loud. ‘I am in control.’

The words felt familiar, like a mantra or a hymn. I was certain I had said them before. But what had I needed to control? This same burning, fevered desire to break out? What had I been trapped in before? What was I trapped in
now
?

I stretched out my fingers against the glass and allowed my eyes to blur. It seemed like my hand was part of the sky. Then, as I watched, half-squinting, my fingernails seemed to lengthen, my fingers curled up …

Like paws. I gasped, blinking quickly, and looked closely at my fingers. They were normal. An eerie, unsettled feeling remained.

I looked up at the sky, letting it soothe me. It was beautiful. I couldn’t see much of it above the high stone walls, but it was enough. The stars were like glimmering specks of sand, and the moon was almost full. It looked like an apple that had been peeled on only one side.

‘Hello, moon,’ I whispered, and my words flew out on the night air and up into the sky.