Double Exposure (17 page)

A slight splash and the sound of T.J.'s scream.

Rushing to the railing, he looks down, just as the dark water closes over the child's white shirt.

And then he is in the air, plunging towards the dark water.

The shock of impact and the sudden cold threaten to drive the breath from his lungs, but he clamps his jaw and claws at the water in a desperate search for what the darkness hides from him.

The streetlights glow faintly through the water's surface, and in their feeble illumination he catches a slight flash. The smallest reflection from the glass of a child's novelty watch. Just a moment, then it is gone.

Lunging towards it, his fingers touch something soft and they grab hold, drawing the unconscious child towards him with a grip like death.

Above him, the water surface glows green, and he kicks towards it …

*

8 November 1994

Five o'clock.

Cain plays with the window control, slide down, slide up. The wind ruffles his hair, then it is still. Slide down. The rain has eased finally, a single bright shaft of sunlight penetrating the grey clouds, and he likes the damp sensation of the cold air-rush across his skin. He takes his finger from the button and looks forward through the water-spotted windscreen.

His mother is nervous.

‘Abraham,' she says quietly. Almost too softly for the sound of her voice to carry. ‘The road's wet. Can we slow down? Please?'

But his father is not listening.

The clouds are low over the bay, wreathing the Kurnell headland and staining the white-capped surface a dull iron-grey Behind them a jet rises silently into the sky over the water, climbing swiftly until the clouds absorb it, and with a glint of silver it is gone. Ahead of them, the cranes and derricks of Port Botany hang their metal heads like creatures from another age.

‘Steel dinosaurs', Chris calls them on the rare days when they accompany their father to his work in the office beside the dock, where the huge container ships come in.

As they approach the gates, the car suddenly accelerates.

‘Abraham!' There is panic in her voice now. ‘What are you doing?'

‘Fifteen years ,' he replies. But not to her. The words are part of the unconscious commentary that accompanies his disaster of a life. The monologue narrative of a futile existence. ‘Fifteen bloody years, and he thinks he can just … throw me away.'

Her gaze is locked on her husband now, and words have deserted her, but Cain is unaware of the danger. He is staring at her face. At her ear.

The lobe is bare, except for the tiny hole which normally holds her earring.

‘Momma,' he says, but her attention is directed towards his father. ‘Your earring …'

Then a tiny red spark catches his eye – one of the ruby studs that their father bought her not so long ago. When things were happy for a while …

Unclipping the seatbelt, he leans down to reach for it. He picks it up, holding it tightly in his hand, just as the car turns, tyres squealing, towards the entrance gate of Alston Shipping.

The movement throws him sideways, so he doesn't see the entrance approaching at alarming speed. His mother screams and the guards at the boom scatter as the heavy Land Cruiser reduces the pole to splinters.

But Abraham Eveson is oblivious to the effects of his actions.

The car is racing along the wharf, dwarfed by the rusty black bulk of the huge container ship unloading its anonymous cargo.

‘
Downsizing, Bradley? Well, downsize
this!'

He lines up a stack of barrels on the edge of the quay, slamming the side of the speeding car into the face of the stack, smashing the driver's window into a shower of crystal and sending the barrels crashing to the concrete and into the grey water beneath the wharf.

‘Abraham stop!' His mother's terrified scream is echoed by Chris's shout.

‘Dad!' he cries, as the Land Cruiser launches itself into the air at the end of the wharf.

For a moment there is an eerie weightlessness as the car arcs towards the water. The motor, freed suddenly of its load, races and screams, and the wheels spin furiously until they hit the water in an explosion of angry spray.

A tonne of motor and gearbox drags the front of the car down, and the water pours in through the smashed and open windows, soaking Cain as he lies where the impact has thrown him, beneath his brother's feet on the floor behind his mother.

Struggling up, he sees her unconscious face. She is slumped forward against her seatbelt with a huge, ugly red mark on her forehead.

But his father is conscious, his face calm, his eyes strangely lifeless.

He reaches out and grabs his son painfully by the arm.

‘It's for the best, son. It'll be over soon. Don't struggle. It'll all be over soon.'

Pulling away is useless. There is an unnatural strength in his father's grip.

‘Chris!' he screams. ‘Chris, help me!'

Behind him, the seatbelt clicks open and his brother lunges at the imprisoning hand, tearing at it with his thin fingers, but to no avail.

As the car slips slowly beneath the surface, their father reaches out with his free hand and grabs his second son's shoulder. Now only a small pocket of trapped air provides a hope of survival, but it is leaking rapidly away. The water has risen to Cain's chin, where he crouches on the floor, and he takes a huge breath just before it closes over his mouth and nose.

Then, as the car begins its slow-motion death roll, Chris leans forward, fighting the pain of his father's grip, and fastens his teeth viciously on the hand holding his brother's arm. Suddenly, the pressure eases and Cain is able to pull free. His father's scream of pain is drowned by the water that rushes into his mouth as the car completes its roll and the air pocket moves upwards towards the open window.

Helpless against the push of the air, Cain is swept through the open window and away from the sinking car.

And the last thing he sees, the image that burns itself indelibly into his paralysed brain, is Chris struggling in vain against the death-grip of a bitter and broken man.

As the vehicle sinks slowly into shadow, he rolls helpless in the gentle current.

The surface shines pale emerald, its ripples dispersing a single shaft of sunlight into random rainbow patterns …

Somewhere above him, the rescue effort begins and the water surface shatters, as the first brave man dives in from the end of the wharf.

Later, he will describe how the boy was: ‘Just hanging there, turning in the current. Not floating, not sinking. His eyes were open, but he wasn't struggling, wasn't trying to swim. He was just hanging there …'

*

T.J.'s story

When they pulled them from the water, Ty had stopped breathing.

How Cain had found him in the darkness, I'll never know, but he carried him to shore and passed him up to Dusan, who laid him out on the bank and helped as Abby began CPR. I think she could see that I was in no state to help him. I'm sure I was in shock.

Watching him fall from the bridge and disappear, I could feel something tear in my chest – like all the fears I'd held for him for two long years had come true and the realisation was ripping my heart out.

As Cain jumped from the bridge, I knew in my core that there was nothing he could do. At the same time, with some disconnected part of my mind, I was trying to make sense of the scene I'd just witnessed. But there was no emotion – as if the horror of watching my son die had drained the emotion from my soul.

Abby knelt on the grass and breathed into my little boy's mouth, and I stood by and watched, not even praying, knowing it was hopeless.

Until his legs moved and he heaved a lungful of water into her lap.

And I passed out.

I don't suppose I was unconscious for more than a minute or so, but when I came to, the police had arrived and the female constable had taken charge. The ambulance skidded to a halt a few moments later, and from their reactions I knew that Ty was going to be alright. I picked him up and held him to me, until the ambulance guy took him gently away to check him over properly. Abby sat with her head in her hands and Dusan's arm around her.

There was no sign of Ian. Much later that night, the police boat, sweeping the waters of Iron Cove with a giant searchlight, would find his body floating face-down on the tide.

One day I might learn to forgive him, to understand him, to pity him even, but I'm not there yet.

In those first few minutes on the shore of the bay, I didn't spare him a thought.

As soon as I knew that Ty was safe, I looked around for Cain. He was sitting on the bank a short distance away, staring at the water. I moved up behind him and placed my hand on his shoulder.

‘Thank you,' I said. Sometimes, words just don't do it, but I was too drained to know what would. What do you say – or do – when someone has given you back your life?

He didn't respond. I sat down beside him and turned his face towards me, but what I saw froze my heart again.

His eyes were open, but there was no recognition there – no sense that he was aware of anything. Not me, not the activity behind us. Nothing.

He was staring through me like I didn't exist.

‘I need help over here,' I shouted in the direction of the ambulance personnel, who were still tending to Ty. ‘Quickly! Something's wrong …'

Twenty-nine
A day, a year, a lifetime

T.J.'s story

Doctor Allen, the attending psychiatrist, was apologetic – of course. But that was as far as it went. We weren't family, so he couldn't tell us what had happened. He couldn't discuss the case at all, except in the most general way. Doctor-patient confidentiality and all that guff. Abby did her best. She pointed out that we were as near to family as Cain had left, and that if he ever recovered he'd need all the help he could get from people who loved him and who understood what he'd been through. I thought she made a good case, and I swear he almost broke and told us.

Almost, but not quite.

‘Will he come out of it?' Abby asked. ‘Could you at least tell us that?' She was leaning so far forward across the desk that I saw him shift back slightly in his seat. Her eyes never moved from his.

After a few seconds he sighed quietly.

‘There's really no way of knowing how long it will last. A day. A year. A lifetime. Catatonia like this is a response to severe psychiatric trauma, and there's really nothing we can do to speed up the process. He has to find a way out by himself. If he can. I'm sorry.'

He really sounded it. He stood up and the meeting was over.

Outside, he moved down the corridor towards the receptionist's desk without a backward glance. He might have been sorry, but it wasn't going to affect his routine. The waiting room was full of people with their own troubles – and among them, there might be someone he
could
help.

‘Damn!' I'd taken a couple of steps in the direction of the lift, when Abby pulled up suddenly. ‘My phone. I left it on the desk.'

Doctor Allen turned from his discussion with the receptionist and Ab waved to him, miming a phone-call as she opened the door to the office and slipped inside. He returned along the corridor towards the door, but before he could reach it she was out again, brandishing the mobile like a prize.

‘Sorry,' she said, and closed the gap between us, while the doctor stared after her.

As the lift-door slid closed behind us, I stood in front of her.

‘What was that all about?' I asked. ‘Your phone was around your neck.'

She was smiling.

‘November twelfth, nineteen ninety four. He had Cain's file out on the desk. I was going to steal it, but I figured I wouldn't make it out of the building. And I've had enough of jails for now.'

‘So what
did
you do?'

‘November twelfth, nineteen ninety four,' she repeated, looking pretty pleased with herself. ‘I managed a quick glance at the first page. It's the first entry on his record. I didn't have time to decipher the doctor's hieroglyphics, but the date was printed. Teej, he's been here before, and I've got a hunch that if we find out why, we'll know a whole lot more than we do now.'

‘Ty, put that down.'

I issued the order without looking away from the computer screen, so of course he ignored me. Abby relieved him of the TV remote and put it on a shelf out of his reach, then picked him up and swung him around in the air so that he would forget about it before he remembered to cry. She's a natural with kids. I smiled and clicked on the search icon.

‘So what, exactly, are we searching for?' she asked, bringing the tyke in for a soft landing on the lounge.

‘Answers,' I replied. The computer hesitated for a moment as the screen changed, then the page came up. News Store. The
Herald
archive. ‘The doctor said catatonia is a response to severe trauma. Cain was eight years old in 1994. If something happened that was serious enough to send him over the edge and into the psych ward, maybe it made the papers.'

I typed in the name Eveson, and hit enter with crossed fingers.

A couple of minutes later we had the answer. It was frontpage news on November ninth.

‘FATAL PROTEST', the headline screamed. I read the text aloud so that Abby could hear. She was sitting on the seat next to Ty, but stood up when I started reading, staring at the screen over my shoulder.

‘The Alston Shipping dispute took a fatal turn yesterday evening, when one of the workers, who had been retrenched when the company announced its global restructuring plan, crashed through the gates of the company's Botany Bay terminal and drove his entire family off the wharf and into the water. It is believed that three people drowned in the incident, while one child was rescued and is now in a satisfactory condition in hospital …'

One child was rescued …

I continued reading aloud, though I sensed that Abby was already ahead of me. Her hand was resting on my shoulder, and I felt it tighten, her fingernails digging into my skin.

‘The driver, Abraham Eveson, had worked for Alston Shipping for over fifteen years, beginning as a storeman and working his way up into a management position. Union organiser Tas Cincotta, in a statement from the scene of the tragedy, said that there was blood on the hands of the Alston board and that the government was equally culpable for its handling of the dispute. When asked for a comment, the Minister for Industrial Relations refused to comment, saying only that his department was looking into the circumstances of the incident.'

I stopped reading and looked up at Abby. She was staring at the accompanying picture which took up the entire centre of the page: a police boat on the choppy waters of the bay, with the huge container-ship looming in the background, and a caption which read, ‘Police divers search for the death car.'

‘They all died, Ab. Except Cain. His mum and dad, Chris …'

I trailed off as I watched her face and realised my mistake.

‘Ab? I'm sorry. I …'

But she was running from the room with her hand over her mouth to stifle the cry.

In the end, with what we already knew, it proved surprisingly easy to fill the gaps.

Dusan was on pretty good terms with most of the neighbours – in spite of his tendency to start all the dogs within a three-block radius barking whenever he fired up his beloved SX. He introduced me to Mrs Mendel, who had lived next door to the Evesons for over twenty years. Her memory for dates wasn't all that reliable, she said apologetically.

But her memory of the events of that November in 1994 was as sharp as a samurai sword.

‘Three months he was in hospital.' She leaned across and topped up Dusan's cup, then looked at me. I shook my head, and she placed the teapot back onto its stand. ‘A few times I visited him – more to keep Rachel company than anything else. Rachel was his father's sister. She'd lost her husband a few years earlier – cancer of the stomach. He took two years to die. Tragic … Anyway, she came up from Melbourne to look after the boy. There was nothing holding her there, and she had no other family. Good Christian woman, she was.'

I sipped my tea and waited for her to continue.

‘Sometimes, after we'd been to see Cain in hospital, we'd have a cuppa and she'd break down. Right here at the table. Couldn't bear the enormity of it. Her brother, Ruth, little Chris, all gone. And Cain in hospital just sitting there staring at the blank wall like it was a TV or something. Hardly blinking. Never responding. From the moment they pulled him out of the bay and revived him, he was like that. Three long months … Then overnight he came out of it.'

I thought I caught the trace of a tear, but she picked up the teapot and moved across to the sink.

‘I'll just freshen this up,' she said, to no one in particular.

‘Did she … His Aunt Rachel, I mean. Did she ever mention him acting strangely? You know, not like other kids.'

She stood, her brow wrinkling, accessing the files.

‘Not strange. Quiet, perhaps. He never talked much to her, unless they were doing homework or playing a game or something. In the first couple of years she was a bit worried that he didn't seem to have many friends. He never brought anyone home from school and he spent a lot of time alone in his room. And sometimes she thought she could hear him talking to himself. Of course, she'd never had any kids of her own, so she didn't know what was normal anyway -and he'd been through so much. And then there was the staring.'

‘The staring?'

‘Yes. At times, she said, he'd sit and stare at a spot on the wall for minutes at a time. Then he'd snap out of it and be Cain again. But that was in the early times. After a while he seemed to brighten up. He made friends and played sports. Even had a couple of girlfriends. But sometimes …'

‘Yes?' I didn't want her to dry up now.

‘Sometimes he'd disappear. Stay out all night and come home in the morning looking like he hadn't slept. It started when he was about thirteen. They had fights about it, but there was nothing she could do to stop it. She wasn't strong herself. Her heart. She'd had rheumatic fever as a kid. She died a couple of years ago. Cain organised the funeral on his own – a beautiful funeral. But you know, through the whole service he just stared at the coffin. Didn't join in the prayers or hymns. Just focused on the flowers on the lid. I remember it disturbed me a bit, but after everything else he'd lost … Well, who was I to judge what was a normal reaction?'

With the past finally revealed, there was only one person I could think of who might be able to unravel the mystery of the present. And the future.

I made an appointment to see Colin, my old grief-counsellor.

At first he seemed reluctant to make a long-distance diagnosis, based on second- and third-hand information, but in the end all I was asking for was a ballpark assessment. A qualified maybe. At the very least, I needed to have some kind of frame of reference against which I could measure what was happening to Cain. To us all.

He thought for a while, then nodded his head.

‘Okay, I'll do my best. Tell me everything you know.'

Throughout the whole account, he sat across from me in an armchair like the one I was sitting in, watching my face. Maybe he was reading his old patient, trying to see what kind of pieces he might have to pick up again if this whole thing turned bad. Or worse …

When I was finished, he leaned forward in his chair.

‘I'm guessing of course, but it appears that Cain developed what is sometimes called a functional paramnesia.'

‘A functional
what
?'

‘A functional paramnesia, T.J. Paramnesia is a psychiatric term. It means a disorder of the memory, in which dreams or fantasies are confused with reality. A functional paramnesiac manages, somehow, to blend a complex fantasy existence into the reality of his everyday life so thoroughly that the delusion goes unnoticed by even his closest friends and family.'

‘But he was living two completely different lives!' I had to interrupt. The whole thing was bizarre, and I needed to make sense of it somehow. ‘He wasn't just fantasising, Colin. He was living it out.'

He nodded.

‘It's dangerous to throw terms around, but sometimes there's a very fine line between a highly functional paramnesia and MPD … multiple personality disorder. The trauma of losing your whole family – including a twin – under those circumstances … Well, it's impossible to know how any of us might react. But an eight-year-old boy … In all likelihood he would be suffering from what's termed “survivor's remorse” – where the survivor of a major tragedy, one in which a number of significant people have died, somehow blames himself for what happened. For surviving. It seems that, rather than face the truth, Cain's subconscious solution was to keep the family alive, in such a way that the tragedy could never repeat itself.

‘Whatever else was happening during those weeks of catatonia, he seems to have reprogrammed his reality to such an extent that … Well, you know the rest.'

‘I guess so. But two
lives?'
I couldn't help it. It didn't make any sense to me. ‘How could he keep it up so long?'

Colin shook his head.

‘Not two lives. Four lives. For Cain, his parents were real, too. Not in the same way as Chris, perhaps, but they were alive inside his head.'

‘And the art?' This was a question close to my heart. ‘Chris was the prodigy, not Cain.'

‘Yes, that's an interesting one.'

He sat back very deliberately, then he placed his palms together in front of his face as if he was praying.

‘Now, T.J., we're moving way out onto the frontiers of mind-research. Some recent experiments suggest that we all have seeds of genius existing within us; that locked inside our brains are all the talents and skills that we see on rare occasions from the prodigy or the savant. The reason that most people don't demonstrate these talents, the theory goes, is that they are too busy doing all the other things we need to do to survive in a complex world. In other words, we sacrifice specific talents in order to function more efficiently in the general ones. Perhaps in its drive to create the family he'd lost, Cain's subconscious managed to tap into one of those … talent reservoirs, to create what he created as Chris. It's as good an explanation as I can come up with.'

There wasn't much more to say.

As I left he kissed my forehead.

‘We worked very hard to get you where we got you, Tiff. You're not going to let this … undo all that work.
Are
you?'

It wasn't so much a question as an order. I smiled and kissed him on the cheek.

‘This isn't about me, Colin. It's about Cain.'

He smiled back.

‘He's a lucky boy.'

‘I guess that depends on where you're standing.'

I looked back as I reached the gate, and he was still standing there, watching me. I smiled, but he was lost in thought and didn't return the farewell.

Before I went home, I looked in on Cain.

He was sitting where I'd left him a few hours earlier, staring out of the window of the hospital. Was he seeing anything?