Nest (2 page)

He didn’t laugh, as grade seven boys mostly did at the mention of backsides, but looked again at the figure. She rifled through her folder, extracted a coloured sheet. ‘Here, this shows every muscle in the human body – you can have that.’ It had
always unnerved her to see the human form represented by the red meat under the skin, but it was necessary to understand the biology of the body in order to draw it.

Henry leaned over, running his finger down the names. ‘This is cool.’ He clenched his fist and watched the flex of his forearm. ‘Huh.’ He returned to his running man with a little more enthusiasm.

‘Maybe a softer pencil now, too. Strengthen some of those lines.’

‘Why don’t you draw people?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘All those drawings in there. There aren’t any people. Just trees and birds.’

She smiled. ‘Well, that says a lot about me, doesn’t it? But I had to learn to draw people first. Spent years on the human figure,’ she said. It had allowed her to see differently, develop an eye for shape and movement. Detail. ‘Wait until you do life drawing.’

He pulled a face, probably aware that the classes featured naked adults and sitting for long periods of time.

She counted eight chirruping white-eyes on the branch shading the birdbaths, each smaller than a baby’s fist, before they were sent packing by a family of Lewin’s honeyeaters with their rattling machine-gun notes. The pecking order – or drinking order – played out right in front of her every day. From now until sunset it would be nonstop action. It just went to show, all you had to do was put out water and the birds would come. Sometimes, it reminded her of the classroom.

Maybe she should have kept Henry talking about the girl, but he would dwell on it enough in coming weeks. The whole town would be talking about nothing but poor Caitlin Jones.

‘That’s good,’ she said. ‘I can feel his athleticism.’

Henry leaned back to get a better look at his drawing.

‘Is he you when you’re grown-up?’

‘I’m not much good at running,’ he said.

‘Who then?’

‘An Olympian. Australian.’

‘Short distance? Long?’

‘Middle. Four hundred metres.’

‘He has the right build,’ she said. ‘I can see him running the last leg of the relay.’

Henry looked up. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘He needs to be holding that thing.’

‘The baton?’

‘Yeah.’ He worked on the hands now, choosing to put the baton in the Olympian’s rear hand rather than out in front.

Jen closed her eyes to listen to the birds’ chatter. The splashing of water behind her. The afternoon breeze lifting. Things you just couldn’t draw.

She tilted her head. A car had pulled up in the drive.

Henry packed his pencils back in their case, shut his sketchbook. ‘Mum’s going to pick me up from now on,’ he said. ‘Everyone’s going ape.’

Henry lived less than a kilometre away and, until today, had walked home unless it was raining, and sometimes even if it was.

‘I’m not surprised.’

‘It’s stupid.’

‘Things will calm down.’

‘You think?’

‘I’m sure they’ll find her.’ The empty platitudes of adults. She followed him inside, sat the cups in the sink, picked up the
envelope on the bench. ‘This month’s bill for your mum. And some homework for you.’

‘Thanks.’ He slouched his way to the door. Knelt to put on his shoes.

‘Take it easy, Henry.’

She watched him walk up the steps to the driveway and waved at his mother, Kay, whose face she could not see for the late afternoon sun glinting on the windscreen. She should go up and say hello, have the expected discussion about what had happened. Kay would be worried, not so much about Henry as his little sister, Montana. The communal hysteria would have begun, all the parents working themselves up, not knowing what had happened to the girl or who was behind it, a nameless, faceless threat hanging over the town.

With it would come a renewed suspicion of outsiders or newcomers, although it was far more likely someone living among them the whole time would turn out to be the stranger.

She bent to pick up a narrow leaf on the path, from a spotted gum, still tree frog green. It had curled back on itself, forming a circle. There was some sort of reaching back happening out there, too. To a time she thought she had long left behind. She knew what else they would be saying – that it was happening all over again.

There was more than one hazard in returning to the town where you grew up.

O
ne of her father’s most overused pieces of advice had been ‘Don’t look back’. As it turned out, it wasn’t just his usual half-arsed attempt at wisdom, but a way of life.

Her friend Michael had always looked back. From his desk in front of hers, over his shoulder as he was marched off to the principal’s office, or from the rear window of the car when picked up after school; he always dragged out his goodbyes. That afternoon, when they had parted ways at the end of the street running down to the oval, he had given her a salute, like a young soldier off to war. It was just football practice, but he wasn’t the star he wanted to be, limited by his size. Some of the older boys had been picking on him, probably for hanging out with her.

She had kept walking up the road to home, as if it were any other day. The sun hung low, bathing the valley in golden light, and a string of black cockatoos flew overhead, their wings moving in slow time. Their cries had not sounded at all mournful, the way they did to her now. Wood smoke, from
freshly lit fires, was sharp on the air. The whine of chainsaws, her father’s among them, carried from just outside of town.

The hinterland had been different then, their part of it, anyway. Time had moved more slowly. People either lived there all their lives or just passed through on their way further north for their summer holidays. It was the land time forgot. There were no organic cafes, galleries or Asian restaurants. Just caravan parks, and the giant waterslide.

People struggled along, working a few jobs, selling their pineapples, strawberries and macadamias from roadside stalls, with honesty boxes that did not need bolting down. The biggest harvest then was still trees: food for the mills.

As she had learned since, the moments that most change your life, you never see coming. Your position, from deep within the movement – the shift itself – does not permit a clear view. It is just a feeling, a sense of the ground loosening beneath your feet. With hindsight, you see that you did know, somehow, that you had felt a profound unease, but something in your own mind prevented you from piecing it together. Perhaps to protect you for as long as possible.

Jen had dawdled, as usual, dragging a stick along the driveway. The chainsaws had stopped, leaving the valley quiet. She had kicked off her school shoes at the back door and thrown her bag into the laundry, done her chores with the minimum of effort. Lied and said she had no homework. She was supposed to be working on some stupid science project but didn’t know where to start. When her father finally pulled in, she ran to hug him, his jeans pale with sawdust, his plaid shirt sharp with sap and sweat. He lifted her above his head, as if she was still small, although his great arms must have already been tired.

She had swallowed down her mother’s casserole, scraping the sauce off the squares of meat and wrapping each one in mashed potato, so she would be allowed to watch
The Sullivans.
Afterwards, she had read under the covers with a torch long past lights out and fallen asleep with the untroubled mind of a child.

The second day Michael’s wooden seat sat empty, her whole class was sent home from school. The principal edged into the room and made the announcement, his voice calm but sweat rings spreading out from under his arms. Their teacher, Miss Lander, handed out tissues, though she was in greatest need of them herself. Most of them had been together since prep and would have preferred to see out the rest of the day as one, but parents had been called.

Except hers, it seemed. There was no one waiting for her outside the school so she started up the road on foot. Mandy’s mother pulled over and insisted on driving her. She couldn’t remember if they spoke in the car. Sound had been muted out, and most of the colour.

Her father’s red truck wasn’t in the driveway, even though it was his day off. The dogs hadn’t been fed. The breakfast dishes were still on the bench, black with ants. ‘Mum?’

Her mother was sitting at the dining table, amid a strew of bills, crying.

Jen lifted the phone in the hall to find no dial tone.

‘He’s gone,’ her mother said.

Jen blinked. Michael?

‘He’s left us, honey.’

There was a half-empty glass of wine on the table, in a pool of condensation. Her mother had forgotten all about Michael.
Something fell away, inside. Jen tried to catch it and jam it back, to stop the rush of realisation, the terrible clicking into place of all those images and pieces of information – but it was no good. Daddy wasn’t coming home.

Jen knew better than to trust her memories. Not the details, anyway. The kernel of them, though, the emotion, was something to hold on to. Like dreams, they contained important truths.

Her father, teaching her to surf, pushing her out into a set she was not quite ready for. Whooping, for all to hear, when she popped up and cut right, floating along the face of the blue-green wave that spilled out and out in front of her. It was a feeling she carried with her still. As true and clear as a sunny day.

There were others. The last time Michael had stayed over, after they had seen
Rocky
at the drive-in to hype them up for the athletics carnival. Her stomach hurting from calling ‘Rocky’ to his ‘Adrian’ across the back seat on the way home. She had drunk too much Passiona, and had to get up to use the bathroom. On the way back to her room, she had stopped in the hallway, thinking she heard Michael crying.

‘Michael?’

She had replayed it so many times it had become less clear, like an old VHS tape. He didn’t answer. But the crying had stopped. Perhaps he had been asleep, just having a bad dream. She hesitated in the doorway, but didn’t go in. Earlier that year her parents had sat her down for an uncomfortable talk, and made it a condition of Michael staying over that he no longer sleep in her spare bunk, and that they were not to go into each other’s rooms at night or shut the door when playing. She had not quite understood at the time, but knew it was embarrassing.
Michael had rolled his eyes and said he had endured something similar. A conspiracy of parents.

Once back in bed she had tried to stay awake, listening, but there was only silence, and a dog barking far away. And then her father was up with the sun, for work, and whistling in the kitchen.

Something had stopped her asking Michael about it the next day; he had seemed the same as ever, singing ‘Gonna Fly Now’ out of tune, air-boxing like Rocky, wearing all his blue ribbons, and still managing to be encouraging about her third place in high jump. She had been happy to let it go, rolling shot-put balls down the grassy bank of the oval with him and Phil and Glen, until Miss Herford blew her whistle and made them stay back to pack up the whole school’s sporting equipment. Now it was too late to ask.

T
he change of name had thrown people for a while but there was no hiding in a town this size. The woman at the post office was the daughter of an old schoolfriend and eventually a government letter came addressed to the real her – Jennifer Vogel – and they put it all together. It would be nice to think that you could rely on your sending and receiving of mail remaining private, as it was for people in the city – through sheer volume rather than any superior ethics – but it just wasn’t the case. It was friendly, all right, but there was little privacy.

‘Ah, you bought Mal’s place,’ the manager had said, the day she filled out the papers to rent a post office box. People were still saying it, three years on. More often, they’d say she was living in Mal’s place, as if she was a boarder or some kind of squatter. He must have had some wild parties in his time. It seemed that everyone had been there over the years, able to describe exactly how the place was laid out and having some memory of this or that great night, with belly dancers and drums and fireworks – and likely a whole lot of hooch, judging by the smiles and shaking of heads.