‘I’ll call him,’ Deborah said. ‘Make sure he’s okay.’
‘Yeah, good. But don’t mention that Ollie said anything, okay?’
‘God, Angus, as if I would!’
Alex sounded perfectly chipper, hearty even, telling her there was nothing like a good day’s work in the garden, can’t beat it. Listening to him, Deborah felt relief wash over her. Her mouth filled with saliva as her throat and jaw relaxed and it startled her to realise how tight they’d been.
God, I’m like this half the bloody time these days
, she thought.
‘That’s beaut, Dad. Listen, I was just ringing to tell you that when I was out walking today I remembered who Jeannie is.’
‘Who?’
‘Jeannie. She was one of the ladies who helped look after us. When we were kids. I think,’ and Deborah gave a quick, light laugh,
no big deal
, ‘I think she might’ve been one of your girlfriends.’
‘Girlfriends? What are you talking about, Deb?’
‘Well, never mind that. But Jeannie, that’s who she is. Was. Mrs Thornbury. No, Thornton. Jean Thornton.’
‘Jean Thornton…’ Her father repeated slowly, but there was no sound of recognition in his voice.
‘You rang me just this morning, Dad. You wanted to know if I knew when her birthday was. Jeannie.’
‘Did I, love? Oh… that’s right. Of course. Jeannie, that’s right.’
‘But I don’t know when her birthday is.’
‘Well, that’s all right, darling. Don’t you worry about it. I’ll… get in touch with her another time.’
They said their goodbyes and Deborah hung up. She stood staring at the phone for some time, her back to Angus, then raised the glass to her mouth and finished off the wine in one big gulp. She keyed in another number. It rang and rang and finally went to message.
‘James, hi, it’s Deb,’ she said. ‘Listen… um, can you call me when you get in, or first thing tomorrow? I’ve just been talking to Dad, and… I dunno, I just think something’s not quite right. Okay, talk soon, Jaffa, see ya.’
‘Deborah?’ said Angus questioningly after a few moments, but she
just shook her head in a preoccupied way as she left the room. He watched her go. If she had glanced back at him even for a moment, she would have seen the look of desolation on his face.
He must have slept for a long time. When he finally woke it was with a start, and a sour cottony taste in his mouth, and a bad feeling that he had mucked things up somehow. There was an appointment, wasn’t there? Someone… Olivia! Alex hurried muzzy-headed from his bedroom to the kitchen but there, propped against the teapot in big clear handwriting was a cheery note from his granddaughter.
Relieved, he wandered out to the backyard. A soft spring twilight was creeping in.
Oh, good work!
The vegetable garden was completely cleared of weeds. They must’ve gone like the clappers. No tools lying around, yet he couldn’t recall putting them away. Maybe Olivia had. He looked in the shed. Yes, and she’d cleaned the fork and the spade first too, what a dependable girl. A born gardener.
Sardines on toast and a nice cup of tea, that would do for dinner. His old favourite. Just as well he had a cupboard full!
‘That’s got to be a good couple of shoals worth of sardines there!’ he said out loud. Suddenly he wished he had a cat; he could just picture a cat, a black one perhaps, licking the oil out of the bottom of a sardine tin. That tabby pair they’d had when the kids were young, what were their names? Ernie and Tiny Tim, that was it, Ernie the big boofhead puss and Tiny Tim his pop-eyed, nervous brother, streaking from the room at any unexpected noise. Lots of unexpected noises with a house full of kids. Or a dog; you can’t beat a dog for company, no question. And maybe he’d get one again, someday, but for the moment he was still not quite over losing Banjo. What a great dog he’d been, that Banjo. As Alex sat at the kitchen table eating, it almost seemed that the dog was there, at his feet. He even glanced under the table to check, and the pang it gave him to see only chair legs was unexpectedly acute.
Just as he finished washing up his plate and cutlery, the phone rang. Debbie, his oldest.
‘Hello, darling,’ he said cheerfully. There was something she wanted to tell him. Alex reached for one of the little notepads as his daughter spoke.
Jean Thornton
, he wrote. And then
Girlfriend!
and then on a third line,
Birthday?
What on earth was she talking about? After they’d finished their conversation he sat down and stared at what he’d written. It didn’t seem to make sense, not to him anyway. But Debbie didn’t get much wrong, heaven knows, sharp as a tack that girl, always had been.
Jean Thornton, Jean Thornton.
Suddenly inspired, he went and got his old address book down from the shelf above the phone.
There it was: Jean Thornton, and an address in Balwyn. And a phone number, in fact a couple of phone numbers, one crossed out. Well, why not? See if he couldn’t solve this mystery.
Girlfriend
, eh?
‘You never know your luck in a big city,’ he said, and carefully dialled the number. A lady answered the phone all right, but she didn’t seem to understand him. Didn’t speak English, that seemed to be the problem. He tried to apologise for the wrong number and hang up but suddenly there was someone else on the line, a teenage boy by the sound of it, with just a bit of an accent.
‘Hello, can I help you, who is calling?’ the youth asked.
‘Oh, good evening. Well, I’m Alex McDonald, and I was hoping to speak to a lady named Jean Thornton.’
‘No, sorry. What number do you call?’
Alex told him the number.
‘No, sorry,’ the boy said again. ‘That is the number here, but no lady by that name. This is the Lim family residence.’
Alex thanked him, and apologised, and said good night. The Lim family residence. Well, well. The mystery remained unsolved. He sat staring at the entry in the address book and then announced decisively, ‘This is pointless!’ and crossed it out, the whole thing, name, address, and phone number. He started going through the address
book, starting from ‘A’, crossing out each entry that he didn’t recognise. But when he got to ‘G’ he stopped, because he had crossed out almost every single entry up to that point, and he didn’t care to go on. He closed the address book and put it back on the shelf.
‘I think I’ll watch a bit of telly,’ he said, and left the room, turning the light off behind him as he went.
CHAPTER 3
From the front deck of Uncle James’s house, Olivia could see a great swathe of Port Phillip Bay, a good part of the beach, and a sliver of the off-leash area.
‘Excellent! There’s heaps of other dogs there already. I’m gonna head down with the girls, Mum, okay?’
‘Okay. Enjoy.’
‘See you soon. See ya, Uncle James.’
‘Be careful crossing the road won’t you, Olivia?’ said James. ‘It’s really busy.’
Olivia didn’t reply, just disappeared into the garden where Mintie and Fly-by were eagerly waiting.
‘You’re okay about her being down there by herself?’
‘Oh, James, this is Olivia we’re talking about! And the dogs are with her.’
‘Yeah, I guess. Anyway… I’m really glad you came over, Deb. I’d just been thinking that I haven’t seen you for a few weeks… and then when I got home last night, there’s your message.’
‘Well, good on you for levering me away from the bloody
computer. I
so
needed a break! And Olivia was mad keen to take the dogs to the beach.’ The sunlight sparkled on the granite benchtop where Deborah sat perched on a handsome leather bar stool. She laid her head down, cheek to the stone, and stretched out her long arms luxuriantly.
‘Like an egg hidden in the nest,’ said James.
‘Huh?’
‘Your head. Hair, rather. The speckled black and grey on the granite.’
‘You calling me an egghead?’ she said. He could see the curve of her face, turned away from him, rise subtly as she smiled. ‘Cheeky bruv!’
‘Yeah,’ he said, with a soft laugh in his voice. He leaned his forearms on the bench. ‘Have to admit, Deb, there’s a reason I wanted you to come over.’
‘Yeah?’ Deborah lifted her head and looked at him alertly.
James led his older sister down the wide, shallow flight of stairs towards his studio. Deborah noticed that the two of them were dressed almost identically, in black T-shirts and blue jeans. These days they looked even more alike, ever since she had taken to wearing her hair cut elegantly close to her head. It looked good, she knew that; her bone structure could handle the severity of it. Even her jawline was still relatively crisp.
At the bottom of the stairs she touched James’s shoulder lightly.
‘It’s a new painting?’ she asked, and he nodded. ‘Oh goodie, I was hoping it would be!’ They exchanged a little grin. ‘It’s gotta be something special. You’re usually so blasé.’
He shrugged. ‘Oh well, you know, it’s not that special.’
She gave his shoulder a small shove, pretending annoyance. ‘Ja-af! Why do you
say
that?’
‘Um, habit? The Aussie self-denigration thing? Maybe because my paintings really aren’t all that special?’
‘Huh!’ Deborah snorted.
‘But anyway, I wanted you to be the first to see this, apart from Silver, of course. I just finished it the night before last.’ James walked his sister to the far end of the studio and made a double-handed gesture of presentation –
tah-dah!
– towards the canvas still stapled to the wall. ‘What d’you reckon? Do you remember?’
‘Oh wow! It’s fantastic! But… remember? What should I be remembering?’
‘Look. Look.’
The painting was almost two metres wide. An underwater scene; in the foreground, the loosely parted hands of the child swimmer whose perspective the viewer of the painting shared. Light came streaked and dappled through the water, forming lovely patterns on the pale sand below, one area of which was cloudy and disturbed. A stingray was rising from the bottom, its graceful winged body emerging from the camouflage of the seabed. Poised above it were the feet and legs and part of the torso of an adult man standing chest-deep in the water, and behind him the shape of an adolescent girl in a dark-red swimsuit, treading water.
‘Hey, those are my old red Speedos! I loved those!’
‘Yep, yep,’ James cried, catching his sister’s excitement now.
‘Oh, I
do
remember!’ Deb grabbed his forearm. ‘It’s Mr Grounds! It’s that day we went to Rosebud and he got stung by the stingray. And I was right there!’
‘That’s right!’
‘I remember him
screaming
, boy, that really scared me. He had to go to hospital, didn’t he? But, James, I don’t remember you being there when it happened. Not right in the water like that. Because in fact I remember the first thing I did was check that you and Robert and Meredith were all safe on the beach, and you were.’
‘But I’d
seen
that stingray just before, when I had the face-mask on. It lifted off like that when I swam over the top of it, and I went straight in to the beach to do a sketch of it.’
‘Oh
yes
, I remember you showing me now. And you didn’t want
me to tell Dad you’d seen it because you thought you might get in trouble for not having warned anyone.’
‘Did I? Gee…You never know what you’re going to get in trouble for as a kid, do you?’
‘That’s true,’ said Deborah, nodding as she continued to gaze at the painting. She shook her head wonderingly. ‘Jesus, that summer. How could so much happen in such a short time?’
‘Yeah, I know,’ said James. ‘It’s weird.’
‘Just that one summer, from Christmas Eve on.’ Deborah’s head dropped for a moment and James felt her mood shift, her excitement suddenly diminished by something else. ‘I feel like no matter how much I think about it, I’ll never really
get it
.’
‘Really?’ asked James, looking surprised. ‘Me too, but… I thought that was just me.’
‘And I think I’ve got it all down and then something new comes up, like you do this painting, and suddenly I’m remembering how all that day down at Rosebud I kept looking over at the beach umbrella to see if Mum had turned up. And the way she used to sit under that red and yellow beach umbrella with just her legs sticking out, because she liked to have brown legs.’
‘You know, Deb, I’ve been really wanting to… It’s kind of strange, I’ve been thinking about what I
don’t
remember. It seems like you can picture Mum perfectly, but I can only remember all this
stuff:
the stingray, the colour of your bathers…’
‘Mr Grounds, he’s not stuff. You can picture him. And me,’ she said, gesturing towards the figures in the painting.
‘Yeah, yeah, but not
Mum
. And I do feel weird about it. Because it’s, because I can remember all sorts of stuff from when I was really, really little, but I can’t actually remember Mum at all.’ He wasn’t looking at Deborah now, he was looking at his work table and the mess of paints and brushes there, and his usual relaxed expression had been replaced by one of troubled puzzlement. ‘I can only see her outline, sometimes, or I get an impression of her moving, like across
a room or something. But if it weren’t for the photographs and you talking about her, I wouldn’t have any real image of her at all.’
‘Well, you were only eight,’ said his sister gently. ‘That’s not very old.’
‘Oh, come on, Deb!’ James looked up with a little incredulous grin. ‘I remember a stingray, but not my mother? I mean, I can remember the exact spacing between the bars of my cot when I was two. But not her? What’s that about?’
‘I don’t think it’s that weird, really,’ said Deborah, crossing her arms thoughtfully and leaning back against the wall. ‘I think it’s… you know, shock. Trauma. That’s what it’s about. Your mother –
our
mother – walks out on you when you’re a little kid without a word of warning and just disappears from your life…What do
you
think? No consequences?’
‘Yeah, I guess that’s right,’ said James. ‘That’s pretty much what Silver reckons, too.’
‘Uh-huh. Did Silver say you should talk to me about this?’