The Golden Day (9 page)

Annual

Cardigan

Eight

Fever

The little girls pulled out their spelling books and began to copy down the words. The chalk squeaked, the pages flapped.

‘These words are too hard,’ complained Martine.

Miss Summers paid no attention. She kept on writing. They watched her back, and her hand moving across the board.

Mixed

Orphan

Socks

Unless

‘I hate spelling,’ said Martine, and put her pencil down.

Silence.

There was a moan, and then a sob. It was Bethany. But she was not sobbing about the spelling words. Miss Summers stopped writing, put down the chalk and turned around to face them.

‘Bethany, come here,’ said Miss Summers. Her voice was not cross, but it was determined.

Woeful and weeping, Bethany struggled out of her chair and made her way up to the front of the room.

‘Bethany,’ said Miss Summers, patting her arm, ‘I think you should go and see Mr Dern.’

Ten heads shot up in alarm, as though they were one child, with one face. No, Bethany, no!

Mr Dern was the school counsellor. He had a moustache and very short grey hair. He came to the school once a week and saw girls who had what were known as problems, in a small, cell-like square room near the chapel. Girls talked while he listened and he smoked. Girls with problems returned from these sessions stinking of nicotine and looking rather faint.

‘I don’t want to,’ spluttered Bethany through her tears. She put one of her plaits in her mouth and her right foot turned on its side.

‘Nonetheless, I think you must go,’ said Miss Summers, tightening her grip on the little arm. ‘It will be good for you to have someone to talk to.’

Don’t go, Bethany! they screamed silently. Don’t go!

‘I’m all right now,’ said Bethany in a louder voice, ‘I won’t cry any more,’ but the tears kept coming.

‘I think I’d better take you round there myself,’ said Miss Summers. ‘Things can’t go on like this.’

No, things couldn’t go on like this. Bethany’s shoulders slumped. Defeat was near.

‘You girls sit quietly and get on with the spelling list.’ Miss Summers did not look at them, she kept her eyes fixed on Bethany. ‘I won’t be long.’

She half-pushed, half-pulled the whimpering Bethany out the door, then closed it crisply behind them.

‘She’s going to tell,’ said Georgina, jumping out of her chair as soon as they had gone. ‘She’s going to tell – everything!’

‘We’re in big trouble,’ said the shortest Elizabeth.

Cubby trembled. Silent Deirdre put her head down on the desk. Icara got up and went over to the open window, and stared out.

‘Maybe it’s good,’ said Cynthia, trying to look on the bright side, as Miss Renshaw had so often advised them. ‘Maybe if she tells, they’ll go and find her.You know, in the cave.’

They thought of the windy journey along the rocky beachfront, the waves, the naked man, the piles of rocks and shells.

‘If she’s still in that cave,’ said Icara from the window, ‘she must be pretty hungry by now.’

Nobody spoke.

‘Remember those rock paintings?’ said Martine, breaking the silence.

They thought of the gloom of the wet, low-roofed cave, the firefly of Morgan’s torchlight hovering about the walls.

‘They were amazing,’ said Georgina.

Icara came away from the window and stood at the front where Miss Summers had just been.

‘I don’t believe they were real rock paintings, anyway,’ she said.

The little girls stared. What did she mean?

‘I think Morgan painted them himself,’ said Icara.

Now they were shocked.

‘Why?’ asked Cynthia, mystified.

‘I don’t know,’ said Icara with a shrug. ‘To show off, maybe.’

‘Seeing is believing,’ said Elizabeth with the plaits, firmly.

Icara was unimpressed.

‘Depends on what you see,’ she said. ‘What did you see?’

What did they see? Cubby remembered with secret shame that she saw nothing, nothing at all in the flickering dark.

‘It was hands,’ said Georgina at last. ‘There were hands, lots of them. Hands on the rock.’

Hands, hands on the rock. A man’s hand, reaching upwards.

Like in the Bible verse the Reverend Broome had made them learn by heart in Scripture:

Behold, there ariseth a little cloud out of the sea, like a man’s
hand.

Bethany did not come back to class that day. She didn’t dare. She went straight home after seeing Mr Dern, without even coming back to get her bag. They knew why. Bethany was afraid. She was afraid of what they would say when they found out that she had told.

But in fact none of the little girls blamed her. Really they were glad. The secret was over and the truth was out.

The truth?

TWELVE
Fallen Schoolgirl

B
ETHANY TOLD
M
R
D
ERN
, the counsellor, everything. After all, Mr Dern could make people tell him whatever he wanted, especially secrets. He listened and waited and smiled and waited and put his head on one side and waited and dragged on his cigarette and waited and it all spilled out, like egg from a cracked eggshell.

Everything.

Another letter arrived at the homes of the eleven little girls, on another small sheet of white paper with the school crest embossed in navy blue.

Dear parents,

You may have heard from your daughter that further information has come to light regarding Miss Renshaw’s recent absence from school. You may rest assured that the matter is being thoroughly investigated.

Yours sincerely,

(Miss) Emily Baskerville
Headmistress

Words, words, words.

Bethany told Mr Dern about Morgan and Miss Renshaw and the caves and the Aboriginal paintings and losing Martine’s hat and getting it back again and falling over and hurting her knee and there was blood everywhere and look there’s still a scab under my sock and Morgan carried me piggyback and there was a man swimming with no clothes on and it was so black in there and they were hungry and I didn’t like it and Martine kept giggling and once Georgina saw Miss Renshaw and Morgan kissing.

Bethany told Mr Dern and Mr Dern told Miss Baskerville, and then everybody knew.

‘I need not tell you, girls, I am very disappointed.’

Oh but they were used to that.

‘Very disappointed in you girls.’

Weren’t they always causing disappointment?

‘This is not what I expect from you girls.’

Letting the school down, upsetting their teachers, letting themselves down.

‘Do you understand how wrong it was?’

‘You have created a lot of unnecessary trouble.’

‘You have not been a good friend to Miss Renshaw.’

‘Very disappointed indeed.’

Oh but it was useless to talk to the little girls about disappointment, they knew they were disappointing, they were born to disappoint.

The police came.

‘Look!’ cried Cynthia in excitement, peering out the window from high up in their nest of a classroom. ‘It’s the police!’

The police! They all ran to the window, squeezed together and watched the big blue car come right into the playground and stop outside the steps that led to Miss Baskerville’s office. The car doors opened and out came two uniformed policemen and a man in a suit and a grey hat. Up the stairs they went, just like detectives on the television.

‘Maybe they’ve found Miss Renshaw!’

‘Maybe she’s been arrested!’

‘Sit down, girls, sit down. Arrested, for heavens sake,’ said Miss Summers, dragging herself with difficulty away from the window. ‘Goodness me, what a lot of carry-on.’

‘They’ll probably want to interview me,’ said Bethany importantly.

But they didn’t. The police spoke to Mr Dern, but they didn’t ask for Bethany.

‘He told them what I told him,’ Bethany explained when she found out. ‘So I wouldn’t have to. Mr Dern said it might tip me over the edge if I had to talk to the police.’

The other little girls did not comment. Perhaps they felt that Bethany had thrown herself over the edge years ago.

‘Miss Baskerville doesn’t want any of us to talk to the police,’ said Bethany. ‘It would be too upsetting.’

The police drove their car down to the Ena Thompson Memorial Gardens. They took a map with them, drawn by Mr Dern with the help of Bethany, to show where the cave was.

‘Are you sure you got it right?’ said the tall Elizabeth. ‘The cave, I mean. There must be lots of caves.’

Bethany looked anxious.

‘I did my best!’ she began to wail. ‘Mr Dern said I could only do my best.’

The police searched, but they found nothing. They were baffled. That’s what Mrs Arnold, the deputy headmistress, told any of the parents who rang up. The police were completely baffled.

‘They’re not the only ones,’ remarked Cubby’s mother.

Nobody knew where Miss Renshaw had gone. Her family, who all lived in Victoria, had not seen her, not for months. None of her friends had seen her. Nobody in the Ena Thompson Memorial Gardens had seen anything the day she disappeared, or since. Nobody in the surrounding streets or the little corner shops had seen anything either. Miss Renshaw had vanished.

‘Gone is gone,’ said Cubby’s mother. ‘But she must have gone somewhere.’

The police were not only looking for Miss Renshaw. They were also looking for Morgan. Because Morgan, too, was missing. Mr Dern told Bethany and Bethany told them.

‘Morgan hasn’t gone back to work,’ said Bethany. ‘Nobody knows where he is.’

‘What about his family?’ wondered Georgina.

Did Morgan have a family? A wife, children? A mother and a father? It was hard to imagine.

‘He never said anything about his family,’ said Martine, struggling to remember. ‘Did he?’

‘He said he grew up in the desert,’ said Icara, balancing on one leg of her chair. ‘With a tribe of Aborigines. Ha ha.’

‘The army might be looking for him, as well as the police,’ said Elizabeth with the plaits. ‘Remember how Miss Renshaw said he refused to join the army? But they come and get you, don’t they?’

But these things were too deep and difficult for the little girls. After all, they knew nothing of wives or armies or desert tribes. At night on the television news they heard gunfire and the sound of helicopter blades and bombs falling. Soldiers were dying in flames far away in a black-and-white land where people wore triangular hats and worked in rice fields and everyone, everyone was always running away in terror. That was all they knew, all they could know. The little girls hung onto the brink of a hugeness that they knew was there but had no way of discovering.

They were sad, so very sad. Miss Summers tried hard. She thought of lots of interesting things to teach them. They learned about the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert and the invention of Hindu–Arabic numerals and the life cycle of the garden snail. They made Indonesian shadow puppets and towers out of empty cans and coconut ice in pink and green. But still they were so sad. Miss Summers paced the classroom floor and kept trying, but her smile grew thinner.

‘I wouldn’t be surprised if that Miss Summers of yours goes off with her highest qualifications to find a job in another school,’ said Cubby’s mother.

In the corner of the classroom, up high near the ceiling, was a small grey box. This was a loudspeaker that had a connection to a microphone in an office downstairs. Usually the voice that came out of the box was friendly and familiar – an announcement about sport, or tuckshop specials, or a reminder to bring money for an excursion or cans for the Harvest Festival.

But every now and then, only when something really bad had happened, the voice of Miss Baskerville herself would come crackling out of the grey box and fill the room and everyone in it with fear.

That’s what they were waiting for. Their eyes wandered up to the grey box a hundred times a day. Any moment now, they thought, looking up with respect and dread, the voice would come. Miss Baskerville would speak and then they would know what had really happened.

Any moment now.