Loop (8 page)

By half-time, the game
is
over. The Branleigh Tigers, who have lost only one match in three years, are sitting on the field in shock, staring at the scoreboard
–
66:4.

After a few minutes of silent disbelief their coach approaches Mr Greenberg and asks if they can call the whole thing off. Mr Greenberg smiles and agrees and the Branleigh coach walks slowly back to his team.

As he crosses the field, he looks across at the young girl who is standing where she stood after the last kick of the match – ten metres behind the goal line. She caught the ball from a kick, just as the referee blew his whistle for half-time.

Then, while everyone else was watching the Stranglers celebrating, he saw her kick the ball.

A perfect drop-kick that scored a field-goal
–
at the other end of the field
.

‘So what happened?' Mr Greenberg asks, still shocked.

‘It must have been the new tactics,' Chad answers. ‘I always said you were a great coach, Mr G.'

On the sideline the parents are singing ‘We Are the Champions'. Sarah pulls her brother aside. ‘How come you let them score that try?' she whispers. ‘You could have stopped that winger easily.'

But Chad just smiles.

‘Xzaltar's message,' he replies. ‘He said to be kind.'

WNBA

As Chad went to join in with the team, I stood for a moment staring at the goalposts at the other end of the field.

What was it Xzaltar had said?

‘You can hold your head up with pride – in any company.'

Maybe I should take up golf. Or I could become the first female formula one motor racing champion. Or maybe I could take up basketball. The WNBA …

I looked across at my mother. She was frowning, a puzzled look on her face.

‘You've got to stop squinting like that, Mum,' I whispered to myself and smiled. ‘It's totally unladylike.'

JIGSAW

As we acquire more knowledge, things do not become more comprehensible, but more mysterious.

Albert Schweitzer

I have to give it up. I have to.

Each time, the impulse is more urgent, more demanding; and though I fight, and though I tell myself I'm stronger than the urge, somehow I know that the spell it weaves is binding me more tightly to it. Each time. Every time.

It hangs there, blue and limp and lifeless, on the handle of the wardrobe door and I fool myself. I tell myself, out loud, ‘You can still do it. It's mind over matter. It has no control over you …'

But all the time I know I'm lying to myself. Somewhere deep inside, where the truth lives, I know that it's too late. Perhaps it always was. Too late from the moment I saw it. From the moment I reached out and touched it …

‘Nikki, look at this jacket. It'll go perfectly with the skirt you made last term.'

She can hear her mother speaking in her op-shop stage-whisper across the counters of discarded sweaters and ten-years-out-of-fashion slacks, but she doesn't turn around. Someone might see her.

It isn't that you can't pick up good stuff in these places; some of her best gear is ‘pre-loved', and not even ‘hawk-eye' Hayley has picked it. It's just that you'd die if anyone saw you actually trying something on.

It's become a self-preservation ritual. She picks through the stands of crappy, geriatric paperbacks, absorbed, oblivious to her mother's hissing attempts at communication.

‘You can find some really great books in secondhand shops,' she has confided to Wendy once or twice, carefully preparing her alibi against the inevitable day when someone who counts catches her out – or rather in.

Of course, the fact that she never reads a book, except in a particularly woeful non-ratings period, doesn't really enter into it. Somehow, to be caught with someone's cast-off literature is far less damaging socially than to be seen trying on their cast-off jeans – even if they do fit like a glove and draw whistles from the drones at the bus-stop.

But there always comes a point when you have to bow to the unavoidable.

Just before her mother gives up on the semi-public-address mode and actually brings the garment in question over to the book-stand, to hold it up against her, testing its approximate fit and coordinating it out loud with half her existing wardrobe – in full view of the whole Mall – she bites the bullet, closing the gap between them and giving her verdict. She does it as quickly as humanly possible, being sure to carry with her one or two of the paperback alibis, just in case.

The jacket is a fashion disaster – mid-eighties, with wide lapels, shoulder pads and fabric-covered buttons. Its colour is pretty, and it would probably match the skirt she laboured over in Textiles and Design – the one she never wears – but the cut is all wrong. She wrinkles her nose, shakes her head and reaches up to hang it on the nearest rack, in the space between the lime-green parka and the full-skirted blue dress.

The back of her hand brushes the empty sleeve of the dress, and she feels a sudden light-headedness, a yawning emptiness beneath her feet. She hears, or so it seems, the hazy, unintelligible murmuring of voices – or is it her own blood, beating in her ears? It is vaguely and pleasantly dreamlike.

And then the world swims back into focus. Her mother is speaking.

‘Oh, no, Nikki, I don't think so. It's too old for you. And you never look good in blue.'

She looks down and finds that she is holding the dress up against her body. The books lie discarded and forgotten at her feet.

Without trying it on, she knows that it will fit. And the material lends a tingling warmth to her hands as she holds it. She hears her own voice, as if she is standing apart from herself.

‘It's not too old! Mum, I love it. How much is it?'

The tag says seven dollars. She pays from her own purse and watches the grey-haired assistant bundle the dress into a plastic bag, without once glancing out of the store window to see if anyone is watching.

Of course it was raining. Typical. Whenever I plan anything, something has to go wrong. We were all supposed to meet at the beach in the morning and make a day of it. So much for that!

But I really didn't mind. After all, there was so much still to find out, and the urgency had come on strongly again. When I woke up and the rain was streaming down my bedroom window, my first thought wasn't one of disappointment, though it struck me that it should have been.

It was more a feeling of relief. Like the drunk who has just found another excuse for a drink.

From there, it was only a short step to rationalising.

It
is
a perfect dress for an indoors kind of day. After all, no one's going to the beach in this weather …

As soon as she pulls the dress over her head, the feeling sweeps over her. Warmly. Hugely.

It doesn't always happen. Sometimes, she can wear it all day and feel nothing. When it happens, she always suffers a sense of let-down, an anticlimax that leaves her irritable and empty. In part because she has come to depend on the feeling, but more because she wants so desperately to find out. To know all that there is to know.

Because when the feeling comes, so does Rachael.

Because when it happens, in a sense she is Nikki no longer. It is as if she has stepped outside of herself and into another life. Another lifetime.

Rachael's lifetime …

It isn't like watching TV or even standing by as a detached observer.

When the dress is ‘working' – she smiles at the expression, even as her mind frames it – she finds herself inside Rachael's mind, reliving some incident, sharing the emotion, yet still retaining enough of herself to realise what is happening.

Is the dress some kind of ‘channel'? A sort of doorway through which, at times, she is permitted to pass?

In the months since she overrode her mother's objections and paid out her hard-earned dollars to possess it, she has made the journey back more times than she likes to admit to herself. For to admit it is to acknowledge the obsession which has steadily grown inside her and threatens to consume her entirely.

The obsession to
know.

Like memories, the incidents are random, sometimes vague, sometimes as clear as if she is there. But they have all built up a pattern.

Rachael was sixteen. Rachael was pretty but not quite beautiful. She was in love. Hopelessly. Rachael was alive ten years ago.

And Rachael loved the dress.

She wore it practically everywhere. Not just because the vivid blue was an ideal match for her eyes or because her mother had made it such a perfect fit for her. It was more a feeling. It was the fact that whenever she wore it, whenever she felt the tingle of the material against her skin, she felt grown-up. Finally.

People seemed to look at her in a different way, so that she no longer felt like a ‘late bloomer' – her mother's favourite phrase.

Anyway,
he
said he liked it. Marc. Who loved her. Who told her so in private, but said so little in public …

I hate him.

Marc, the manipulator. He's the worst kind of selfish, chauvinistic jerk.

It's funny how I think of him in the present tense. I mean, he must be twenty-six or twenty-seven by now – if some heartbroken ‘ex' hasn't justifiably blown him away with her brother's hunting rifle. But everything about Rachael, including the rotten way he treated her, comes to me as if it's happening now, instead of ten years ago.

I sit there in her mind, listening to his line and watching her, feeling her, willing herself to believe it.

Sometimes I want to scream out, to bring her to her senses, but I can't. It's all ancient history. Whatever she chose to believe, whatever he convinced her to believe – to do – all happened when I was back in first grade, and though I can hate him I can't change a single word, a single emotion. All I can do is look on. Helplessly.

And then, suddenly, she has the key.

Like a jigsaw, all the tiny elements of the life she feels so bound to slot slowly together; clues suddenly interlock to fill the blank and empty spaces in the picture that was Rachael.

The glimpse of her face in a mirror, as she smooths a wrinkle from the dress. Dark-haired, soft-featured, fragile. Yet strong-willed.

The picture of her house. Ordinary, comfortable. Nikki would know it instantly, if ever she passed by it, though she had no idea where it was. Until …

In the end the vital clue, the corner-piece of the whole puzzle, is so mundane.

As she slips the dress over her head, the voices begin inside her mind, even before she is completely ‘there'. It has happened before, and it is a little unbalancing. Caught between the two worlds, in the limbo between the now and the then, she can hear the voice – one forgotten triviality, captured from a whole lifetime of trivialities. Rachael's mother, shouting from an upstairs bedroom.

‘… and would you check the mailbox, love? I'm expecting a cheque.'

There is no cheque, but there is a letter. And an address.

Rachael Conrad
6 Henley Close
Ashmont NSW 2523

Rachael has a penfriend.

With Rachael's eyes, she scans the envelope. And the piece slips silently into place …

I guess it had to be something that simple. I knew so much about her, how she looked, how she spoke, how she loved, how much she hated broccoli. But I didn't know her full name or her address. Most people don't really talk to themselves. I do, but Rachael didn't.

And even I don't go round calling myself by my full name. They only do that in badly written novels.

‘Nicole Garvey, you're acting like an idiot …'
No, normal people don't do it.

So, I didn't know her surname.

But as soon as I saw the letter …

Henley Close. I checked the directory. It was nearer than I expected.

Nikki climbs onto her bike, wondering vaguely if she still remembers how to ride it, and finding that she does.

The house is exactly as she remembers it from her ‘visits'. But the occupants are different.

A middle-aged woman opens the door and speaks from behind the closed security screen.

‘Yes?' She watches Nikki through the net, waiting. There is a blank neutrality in her eyes. No fear, but no openness.

‘Mrs Conrad?' Even to her own ears her voice sounds strained.

The woman shakes her head. ‘Sorry.' She begins to close the door.

‘But they used to live here?' A question and a statement.

‘Not in the last nine years. Goodbye.' And the door clicks shut with a gentle finality.

In the street an old man stands, hose in hand, trickling a thin stream of water over the old black car he appears to be washing. He smiles as she rides past and nods good-naturedly. On impulse, she dismounts and approaches him.

‘Excuse me.'

She pauses.

The old man kinks the hose between finger and thumb, cutting off the meagre stream.

‘You're excused.' His smile is almost toothless, but warm. She presses on.

‘Have you lived here long?'

‘Thirty years long. No one has lived round here anywhere near as long as Emily and me. Emily's my wife. She's sleeping in the house at present. Not well …'

Thirty years
. Her heart leaps.

‘Then you would've known the Conrads.' She tries to sound more positive than she feels. ‘They lived at number six …'

‘Franz and Elsa? Of course I did. But they left eight, maybe nine years ago now. About twelve months after young Rachael disappeared. A tragedy it was.

‘She was their only kid, you know. Disappeared without a trace. It was big news around here for a long while. Even made the national papers. Searched for better than a week, they did. Of course, after a couple of days they were only looking for a body, but … The Conrads moved to Melbourne in the end. I guess they needed a new start. Must've been hard, though. They weren't young.'

The old man trails off into reminiscence, but Nikki barely notices. Her mind is racing, disbelieving.

Disappeared … Only looking for a body.

Rachael?

Dead?

It took a while to accept what I guess at times I'd already suspected. Of course she had to be dead. Why else would she be haunting me?

And it had to be that.

The dress. Her dress. My channel back.

But why so random? If she was trying to lead me to something – somewhere
–
why all the meaningless incidents? Why not just materialise, like the ghost in Hamlet and tell me who did the deed?

Then it struck me.

The dress.

It was the connection. The only moments of her life that I could share, relive, were ones when she was wearing it. And how often, really, do we wear the same dress? Even one we love?

But what does it mean? Is it all some weird accident? A freak time-warp that allows me to ‘see'
–
and nothing more? Or is there some purpose? What am I supposed to do? Find her last resting place? Unmask her killer?

Take her place?

Hell. Sometimes I think I watch too many horror movies …

Even made the national papers …

The old man's words have triggered an idea.

Anyone who watches old detective movies knows how much you can learn from newspaper back-issues. And a careful search yields results.

In the newspaper graveyard, she slowly assembles the missing details. Sitting in front of the screen, watching the ghosts of the decade-forgotten pages pass before her eyes, she fills in the gaps, until she knows as much as ancient newsprint can reveal.