Authors: Justin D'Ath
Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Fantasy & Magic, #Health & Daily Living, #General, #Social Issues, #Juvenile Nonfiction
58
Waiting for the Acacia Street lights to change, Wolfgang was puzzled to see only two vehicles – a car and a van – parked at the edge of the roadway outside the pool. Normally on a hot Saturday afternoon the car park was full and there would be cars, vans, utes, four-wheel drives, buses – and sometimes even big interstate trucks – lining the kerb on both sides of Millar Street for half a block in each direction. He glanced at his watch. Five minutes to one. Had he got the wrong day? It was hard to think, he was so tired from lack of sleep. His eyes hurt. Everything looked too bright. I should have called in sick, he thought.
The lights turned green and he set off slowly across the intersection. He had managed to half-straighten the bent pedal using a hammer, but the gear-changing mechanism was still jammed. His bike was a wreck, he was a wreck. It was Audrey’s fault. If she hadn’t run away he might have got a few hours sleep between going to church and coming to work. Instead, he’d wasted the rest of the morning riding round town looking for her.
Where
are
you, Audrey? How could you do this to me?
A group of nine-or ten-year-old boys with backpacks and towels walked up the nature strip from the direction of the pool.
‘He works there,’ one of them said as Wolfgang rode past.
‘Hey, mister!’ called another. ‘When’s the pool going to open?’
Wolfgang braked and squinted back over his shoulder. ‘Isn’t it open?’
‘There’s police there,’ said the first boy. ‘They said we had to go home.’
At the mention of the police, Wolfgang felt a tightening at the back of his neck. He had half-expected there might be further repercussions from last night’s after-hours swimming episode, but closing the pool seemed a bit extreme. If only Merri hadn’t dialled triple zero.
He almost turned his bike around and retreated back home, but he felt the boys’ eyes on his back, felt the weight of their ten-year-olds’ expectations on his shoulders.
Mister,
they’d called him. It was time to act like an adult. In any case, if the police were so serious about their investigation that they had closed the pool on its busiest day of the week, then it was only a matter of time before they traced the break-in back to him. Sooner or later Mrs Lonsdale was going to remember that key. Might as well get it over with, Wolfgang thought.
The boom gate was down but not padlocked, with the big
Pool Closed
sandwich board positioned on the driveway in front of it. Wolfgang dismounted and pushed his bike – click-click-scrape – along the footpath outside the car park. He wanted to see what was happening before he went in. Would they charge him, or simply give him a bit of a telling off? Mrs Lonsdale would fire him, he had no doubt about that. If only Merri hadn’t called for an ambulance. If only Audrey hadn’t given his name to the police – and on the strength of a
dream,
for God’s sake! Father Nguyen was right: there was definitely something wrong with her. Some kind of mental illness. It was hard to accept about someone you love, but he had to face the truth: Audrey wasn’t all there.
Mad as a hatter! he thought, and forced a chuckle. But deep down he wanted to cry.
There was a white van from WIN Television parked at the kerb. A cameraman and a well-dressed woman holding a microphone and a clipboard had set themselves up at the edge of the car park. A policeman stood in the entryway to the pool, watching them. Three cars – a police car and two others – occupied the disabled parking spaces outside the building. Wolfgang recognised Mrs Lonsdale’s grey Mazda. What was going on? All we did was dial triple zero, he thought. It was hardly the crime of the century. Hardly the stuff of television news.
Wolfgang crouched beside his bicycle and jiggled the damaged chain-derailer, pretending he had a legitimate reason to be loitering there. When he raised his eyes, the policeman was looking directly at him. Didn’t he have anything better to do? Wolfgang straightened up. He took a deep breath, then boldly lifted his bike over the chain into the car park and leaned it against one of the trees.
The policeman frowned as Wolfgang walked across the car park towards him. ‘The pool’s closed,’ he said.
‘I know.’ Wolfgang was careful to keep his face turned away from the television camera. ‘I’ve got some information.’
‘What kind of information?’
‘About what happened last night. I’m the one you’re looking for.’
The policeman tilted his head slightly. He was short for a policeman and thick-chested, his muscular arms stretched the fabric of his shirt sleeves. ‘Sorry, mate, you’ll need to explain yourself.’
Wolfgang lowered his voice. This felt like a dream. ‘I was here,’ he said. ‘Last night. I’m the one who called an ambulance.’
The policeman narrowed his eyes. ‘You’d better come with me,’ he said.
59
Detective Appleton was in his fifties, balding and slightly overweight. He had a friendly, almost fatherly smile. It was the kind of face you could trust. ‘So you just thought you’d call an ambulance as a joke?’
‘I’d had a few drinks.’
‘Interesting. Because according to the report I heard, the call was made by a girl.’
Wolfgang shuffled his feet. ‘I pretended to be a girl. Like I said, it was a joke.’
Detective Appleton gave his fatherly smile again. ‘Isn’t it hot?’ he said. ‘Let’s get out of the sun.’
He led Wolfgang into the office. Mrs Lonsdale was sitting behind the counter talking to another man. She gave Wolfgang a strange, sad look as he came in. She knows already, he thought.
Detective Appleton introduced him to the other man, another detective whose name Wolfgang didn’t catch. It was hard to concentrate. What were they all doing here? Why was WIN Television outside?
‘Wolfgang says he was here last night,’ Detective Appleton was telling the others, ‘after the pool closed. He let himself in with his own key and went for a little swim, isn’t that right, Wolfgang?’
He avoided Mrs Lonsdale’s sad eyes. ‘It wathn’t my key exactly. It was a spare one I forgot to give back.’
‘This one?’ asked the second detective, holding up Wolfgang’s key ring with the orange key uppermost.
‘Where did you get that?’ he said, surprised, his right hand moving automatically to his shorts’ pocket where he normally kept them.
‘How old are you, Wolfgang?’
It was pointless lying with Mrs Lonsdale there. ‘Thixteen.’
The two men glanced at each other.
‘Perhaps we should give your parents a call,’ suggested Detective Appleton.
‘I’d rather not bother them.’
‘We shouldn’t really question you without your parents being here.’
‘Why bring Mum and Dad into it?’ Wolfgang asked. ‘All I did was make a prank phone call. I admit it, okay?’
‘The call was made by a girl,’ said the second detective.
‘Not if we are to believe Wolfgang here,’ Detective Appleton told him. ‘Apparently he does a pretty good impersonation of a girl, isn’t that right, Wolfgang? Would you mind giving us a demonstration? We can match it up with the recording they made of you last night.’
Wolfgang wasn’t sure whether to believe him or not. But it was pointless to go on lying. He was finished with lying. He looked out the window at the pool. ‘It wasn’t me that made the call. It was a girl.’
‘And would her name be Audrey Babacan?’
‘No. It was someone else.’
For several seconds no one spoke. Wolfgang continued staring out the window. There was not a ripple on the water. It looked like a huge blue lens beneath the blazing sun.
‘Could you tell us who this girl was?’ Detective Appleton asked finally.
‘Merri Taylor. But it was my fault. She thought I was drowning.’
‘She thought
you
were drowning?’
‘Yes. It was dark and they couldn’t see me.’
‘Where was Audrey while all this was going on?’
‘She wasn’t there,’ Wolfgang said distractedly. Watching the pool was having a hypnotic effect on him. His vision had narrowed and sharpened until he was not only looking into the water, but he seemed able to see the very particles of oxygen and hydrogen that comprised it. ‘Audrey had nothing to do with it,’ he heard himself say. ‘She came down later, after we’d all gone.’
The detective’s voice carried to him from a great distance away. ‘Did you give her the keys?’
Wolfgang turned around, dragging his strange tunnel of focus back into the room. ‘No. I didn’t give anyone the keys. Where did
you
get them?’
One pair at a time, their six eyes struggled to return his searching gaze. Mrs Lonsdale’s, he saw, seemed unusually wet.
‘What?’ he said. ‘Has something happened to Audrey?’
‘She was a friend of yours, wasn’t she?’ Detective Appleton said gently, and through the window Wolfgang saw a policeman unclip the chain to allow a moss-green Mercedes into the car park.
60
‘I don’t think I belong here,’ Audrey said in the cemetery that last night.
He had attempted to make a joke of it. ‘Of course you don’t. Only dead people belong here.’
‘I’m not talking about the cemetery; I mean here!’ She spread her hands, arms outstretched, towards the vast, star-powdered vault of the night sky overhead. ‘I can remember being somewhere else – somewhere
better.
I used to be able to see!’
‘You must have a good memory. You were only a year old, weren’t you?’
‘Thirteen months. But that’s not what I remember,’ Audrey said. She touched him on the wrist. ‘Promise you won’t laugh.’
‘I promise.’
‘I think I’ve lived before – you know, had another life.’
He wasn’t allowed to laugh, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t grimace. ‘Who were you?’ he asked, careful to keep his tone neutral.
‘I don’t know. All I remember is where I was. You know that dream place I was talking about?’
‘Under the pool.’
‘It isn’t
under
the pool,’ Audrey said, sounding exasperated. ‘The pool’s just how you pass through. Have you heard of a portal?’
‘It’s a kind of door, isn’t it?’
‘You go through them and come out somewhere else – in another world, or another dimension.’
Fantasy land, Wolfgang thought. ‘And the pool is one of these portals?’
‘You’re laughing at me.’
‘I’m not.’
Audrey’s fingers found his face and traced the line of his lips to their outer corners. ‘You’re smiling.’
‘Well, it tickles when you do that,’ he said, kissing her fingertips.
She pulled her hand away. ‘Have you ever wondered why the pool’s like it is?’
‘Why it’s a portal?’
‘Don’t make fun of me! Why it tips.’
‘Everyone wonders that,’ said Wolfgang. ‘That’s why they call it the Eighth Wonder of the World.’
‘It started seventeen years and eleven months ago,’ Audrey said.
‘The day you nearly drowned.’
‘You knew that?’ She sounded surprised.
‘I found the old newspaper down at the library. You only made page six,’ he said, ‘but the pool story was headline news.’
‘I think it’s connected,’ said Audrey. ‘When she fell in the pool, she and I kind of swapped places and we weren’t supposed to.’
‘She?’
‘Audrey.’
Wolfgang clicked the torch on and studied her profile. She was serious about this. Seriously nutty. ‘You
aren’t
Audrey?’
‘Not the one who fell in the pool,’ she said without a trace of irony in her voice, nor a flicker of insincerity on her face. ‘She must have died – that’s how she got through the portal – and I somehow took her place.’
‘So ... who are you?’
‘I told you – I don’t remember!’ Audrey snapped, suddenly impatient. ‘All I remember is being in this lovely peaceful place and angels flying all around me.’
Heaven, Wolfgang had thought then. But now, standing in almost exactly the same spot in the cemetery four days later, he was not sure what he thought. All he knew was this: Audrey was gone and he would never see her again.
A tragedy, they were calling it. Shy blind girl drowns while trying to teach herself to swim under the cover of darkness.
Only Wolfgang knew the truth. It wasn’t an accident. She had stolen his keys not to teach herself to swim, but to travel back through her ridiculous portal. Looking down over the heads of the other mourners standing in a ragged semi-circle around the freshly dug hole where her casket lay, he found it difficult not to be angry with her.
Suicide was a mortal sin. Go immediately to hell, do not pass Go.
But Wolfgang wasn’t sure he believed in hell. In any case, it hadn’t been suicide. The real Audrey Babacan was supposed to have died seventeen years and eleven months ago. This one, the one who’d slipped through from
the other side
and inhabited her body, had simply been setting things to rights.
It
was
a tragedy, Wolfgang thought. She’d been out of her mind.
Everyone had been very understanding. After a second question and answer session, this one down at the police station with his mother in attendance, Wolfgang had been cleared of any responsibility for Audrey’s death. He’d received only a mild censure for the triple zero incident. His parents had been fine about it, too – they sensed how much Audrey had meant to him. And rather than firing him, Mrs Lonsdale had generously offered Wolfgang three days off work on full pay.
The Babacans were wonderful, too, even after they discovered he was only sixteen years old. They had been round to visit him twice since Saturday, Mrs Babacan giving him big teary kisses both times, and Mr Babacan – Keith – solemnly shaking his hand and calling him ‘son’. Wolfgang was the last person to see Audrey alive and they had wanted to know how she’d seemed, what she’d said, and every last detail of her final hours with him.
Despite his resolution to stop lying, Wolfgang had felt obliged to fabricate, since he couldn’t tell them about what had happened here in the cemetery. She’d been happy, he told them. She’d laughed a lot, made jokes. He hoped afterwards he hadn’t gone too far, but Bernadette had seemed grateful for what he told her, and he felt justified for having helped her in her grieving. He was grieving, too, but he tried not to show it. Keith had invited him to sit with them at the funeral and be a pallbearer, but Wolfgang had politely declined, saying he wasn’t family and would prefer to sit with his parents. ‘Why don’t you
all
sit with us?’ Keith had pressed, but Wolfgang had told him his father was uncomfortable sitting anywhere but in his usual pew. For once it was useful having a senior-citizen father.
The church had been nearly full, and uncharacteristically there were nearly as many young people as over-thirties. Wolfgang was surprised by how many teenagers filled the pews, particularly weepy-eyed girls. He wondered where they had all been when Audrey was alive.
Four people made eulogies, including Keith and Martine. Rather than make a speech, Martine read a poem by WH Auden that Wolfgang remembered from
Four Weddings and a Funeral,
by the end of which three-quarters of the congregation was busy with tissues. Wolfgang remained dry-eyed throughout. He was determined not to cry. She deceived me, he thought every time he felt the threat of tears. She told me she loved me just so she could get the keys.
But in his heart he knew this wasn’t true.
Sylvia asked him if he wanted to go to the bowling club for the wake, but Wolfgang said no. ‘It’ll be too much for Dad,’ he said.
‘I can drop you there then come back later to collect you,’ Leo said generously.
‘No, Dad. Thanks, but I don’t need to go. Really.’
‘Her parents might like you to be there,’ said Sylvia.
‘I’m sure they won’t notice. I’m not actually feeling too good,’ Wolfgang lied.
As everyone began walking away up the grassy green slope towards their cars, Leo placed an arm across Wolfgang’s shoulders. ‘She’ll be able to hear in heaven.’
‘What will she hear?’
‘Lord only knows,’ the old man said. ‘They were supposed to be Beethoven’s last words. “I’ll be able to hear in heaven”. He was deaf, you see. Like your friend.’
‘She was blind, Dad; she wasn’t deaf.’
‘Ah.’ Leo rubbed his chin. ‘Well, it’s the same thing. She’ll be able to see now.’
Wolfgang hoped it was true. Wherever she was, he hoped Audrey could see.