Promise (16 page)

‘Okay. Let’s play it by ear for the next week, then. And keep an eye on the media.’

A week.

•

In the kitchen, Charlie picked up a banana and tried to peel it with her teeth.

‘Do you want me to do that?’ Anna reached for the banana.

Charlie shook her head and stepped away.

Sabine came in and quietly laid a handful of eggs and a plastic bag of guavas on the bench.

‘For the cake we’ll make later, eh?’ she said to Charlie. Her eyes were red as if she’d been crying. She disappeared into the bedroom and shut the door.

Anna found the loaf of bread and cut four slices. The bread was a bit crumbly and one slice fell apart. She shoved a bit into her mouth and chewed.

Pat dropped the car keys onto the table.

‘What do you want in your sandwiches? Cheese and tomato?’

She swallowed. ‘Sounds good.’

Charlie, banana in hand, touched one of the eggs on the bench, the one with a tiny grey feather stuck to it. She said, ‘Can I have an egg for lunch?’

‘A boiled egg?’ asked Anna.

She nodded.

‘I’m not sure we have time to boil it,’ said Anna. ‘I think we need to go for our picnic pretty soon.’

‘Oh.’ Charlie pulled the feather off the egg.

‘Sorry. When we get back, we’ll cook one up, okay?’

Anna heard Sabine’s voice in the bedroom. Perhaps she was on the phone. Anna needed to talk to Pat about how she could telephone her dad, but this was not the moment.

At the kitchen table, Pat cut thin slices of cheese. ‘I’ll finish making the sandwiches. Why don’t you grab towels?’

Anna retrieved their still-damp towels from the bathroom, and when she emerged, Pat handed her a brown paper bag of sandwiches and two apples. ‘Here you are.’

‘Can I borrow your phone?’ she asked. ‘To take a photo of a bruise.’

He grabbed his phone from the table and passed it to her.

‘Charlie, let’s go, sweetie,’ said Anna.

Charlie watched Pat wipe down the timber bench top. She shook her head and poked again at the egg. It wobbled and rolled towards the edge. Pat stopped it before it rolled off.

Anna said, ‘Come on. I’m going to show you the waterhole. We can have a swim. It’s really lovely. The kids might still be down there.’

Charlie looked at her feet and shook her head.

Anna squatted beside her. Was there some magic thing she could say to persuade the girl to come?

‘Pat and Sabine have a visitor coming and we need to give them some privacy.’

The bedroom door opened and Sabine emerged, wearing a long dress and smelling of lavender.

‘I don’t want to. I don’t like cheese sandwiches,’ Charlie whispered. She reached under the t-shirt where she’d tucked the koala.

‘Come on, Charlie.’

Anna felt Pat watching her. Sabine had disappeared outside. The girl sat on the floor, her face stony. Anna reached for her arm but stopped; Charlie’s flesh was so soft, so easily bruised. She straightened up, at a loss.

‘She can stay here,’ Pat said as he put the cheese back in the fridge. ‘You go.’

There was the distant sound of a car driving along Pat’s track, its engine changing tone as it started to climb the hill.

Pat said, ‘It’ll be okay. I’ll hang out with Charlie. You go.’

‘I promised Charlie I’d stay with her.’

Charlie looked up. ‘What’s that sound?’

‘A car . . .’

‘Who is it?’ she asked, wide-eyed. ‘I’m coming!’

She let Anna hurry her down the steps, past the veggie garden and onto the path. As they turned a corner in the track, Anna looked back and saw a white four-wheel drive appear between the clumps of bamboo.

Charlie ran ahead and called back to Anna, ‘Quick! Hurry!’

•

Anna was surprised how well she recalled the track and the way it made an S-curve between two old buttress-rooted trees before meandering down the hill. The path had the same dream-like, enchanted feel, with branches arching overhead and filtering the sunlight, and lichen-mottled palm trunks streaked wet by the night’s rain. Anna tried to breathe it in, the peace and the timelessness.

She helped Charlie down a muddy stretch of path and guessed that the girl had been afraid it was Harlan in the car.

‘You know, the person in that car back there was the woman who will help Sabine when her baby is born.’

Charlie looked at her with a frown.

‘Did you know Sabine is having a baby?’

The burbling, rocky creek was to their left now, down a steep bank.

Charlie shook her head.

‘Well, in a few months, she’ll have a baby. That’s why her tummy is so round.’

‘Oh,’ said Charlie.

‘They just need to be on their own to meet the woman.’

Charlie stopped and looked up at the hillside of palms above them. The dried fronds rattled quietly in the breeze. Anna hoped Charlie found it a reassuring sound. The palms seemed to her like calm sentinels, standing guard, murmuring among themselves. Anna had walked this path the day she realised she was pregnant; she’d gone down to the waterhole to tell Pat, her bare feet taking in the smallest sensations underfoot, her skin detecting every shift in the air’s temperature. Anna felt sad to think of that younger, hopeful self who’d imagined that her life was about to change completely.

They reached the final steep descent down the bank to the waterhole. Anna held Charlie’s good arm and steadied her as they made their way down the slippery bank, tree roots forming occasional uneven steps. She took hold of the rope that someone had tied to a tree root.

The shallow, fast-flowing creek slid over a broad bed of grey rock, then dropped into the waterhole. Big boulders, a couple of them nearly as tall as Anna, were scattered in the rushing water. Trees overhung the creek, their twisted roots forming the bank. Anna helped Charlie over the stepping stones to the big flat section of rock where there were small wet footprints and trails of water. The kids must have just left.

‘It’s a waterfall,’ said Charlie. The creek dropped about a metre into the oval-shaped waterhole, half the size of an Olympic pool.

‘Yes,’ said Anna.

She crouched beside Charlie, to see it from her perspective. She wanted Charlie to feel that same thrill she’d had the first time she saw the waterhole, ringed with ferns and palms and tall trees that grew right to the water’s edge. Maybe this place could give Charlie a sense of entering another world, or being outside time, so she could forget for a while what had happened.

Charlie regarded the scene, but her face was tight. ‘It’s deep,’ she said.

‘Well . . . over the far side it’s deep, but not here. We can stay in the shallow bit. Would you like to have a little paddle?’

Charlie shucked off the pink sneakers and made her way sideways down the sloping rock to the small pebbly beach.

Anna followed her to the water’s edge. ‘You probably shouldn’t get your bandage wet but you could just sit at the edge and cool off.’

‘How deep is it?’ Charlie waded out ankle deep and swished her foot about.

‘Not deep at all just here.’ Anna took off her shorts and t-shirt and stepped into the water. It was blissfully cool and the small stones crunched underfoot. ‘Shall we take off your shorts so you can have a paddle?’

Charlie shook her head and looked over at a sudden flurry of wrens in the bushes on the other side of the waterhole.

‘Okay,’ said Anna. ‘I’m just going to go out a little bit deeper. You stay here.’

She waded out, the cool water inching up her body until finally she let it take her weight. When she closed her eyes, her whole body quaked.

Oh God, what had she done? She was deep in the forest with a child she didn’t know, with half the cops in the state after her, her photo in the news and it was a nightmare that Anna had brought on herself. She turned away from Charlie as loud sobs burst from her, terrible sounds that she couldn’t stop. They would find her in the end, wouldn’t they? She’d be led away by a cop. She’d end up in jail. And there was no turning things around now. She tried to mute the noises coming from her but they just kept coming.

‘Anna?’ Charlie’s voice was thin. She stood at the water’s edge, her shorts dripping. ‘Come back.’

Anna dunked underwater then slowly breaststroked to the girl, trying to bring her face back to some equilibrium. She sat beside Charlie in the shallows but couldn’t speak. She was shaky with disbelief that she’d put herself in this situation. She’d started something she simply didn’t have the capacity to follow through.

Charlie touched Anna’s thigh, and Anna had to stop herself from moving her leg away. ‘Is Mummy with him?’

Anna spoke without looking at Charlie, her voice croaky, ‘Yes. She is. I know you love your mum and really want to see her. I understand that you miss her.’
Because I miss my mum, too.
Tears filled her eyes. Oh shit. She pressed her hand to her mouth in case she started crying again.

Charlie was silent.

Anna cleared her throat. ‘And you will see your mummy again. I’m sure you will.’

‘When?’

‘I don’t know, exactly.’

Charlie swished her hand through the water and spoke very quietly. ‘He’s a bad man.’

‘Yes, he is.’
He’s
the one the cops should be pursuing and locking up.

‘He did the fag to her.’

‘The fag?’

A small blue bird swooped and dipped its beak in the water.

‘He put it on her. The red . . .’

Anna’s scalp tingled. ‘He burnt your mum with a cigarette?’

Charlie nodded. ‘And you came to the door.’

‘I did come to your door.’ Did he do it that night?

Charlie patted the surface of the water. ‘Why didn’t you come in?’

‘I don’t think Harlan would have let us in.’

He’d burnt Gabby with a cigarette. Jesus.

Charlie’s voice was so quiet. ‘I thought you were coming in.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Anna whispered. She remembered the burn mark in the bodice of Charlie’s tutu. She’d have a better look for a mark on the girl’s stomach. ‘Why did you want me to come in?’

‘So I didn’t get in trouble.’

‘I would have come in if I could.’

So Charlie knew now that Anna was afraid of Harlan, too.

‘You know it’s not okay for anyone to push or . . . hold you upside-down. Harlan and Mummy did the wrong thing. Grown-ups are not allowed to hit kids or hurt kids. Never. Okay? I will never hurt you. I promise.’

Charlie shuffled forward on her bum, then lowered herself and lay back until her head rested on the pebbles, her feet pointing into the middle of the pond. Her bandage was soaked, but the cool water probably felt good on the bruise. Charlie’s bottom sank to the rocks and she used her good hand to push herself up again.

‘Would you like me to help you float?’ asked Anna. She couldn’t get out of her mind the image of Harlan holding a burning cigarette to Gabby’s skin.

Charlie gave the faintest nod.

Anna knelt on the rocks and reached her hands under the girl’s narrow back and thighs and lifted her so she floated. Charlie squinted up at Anna. The air around them was thick with sound: whirring cicadas, a crescendo of birdcalls and water falling into the pool.

‘Okay?’ asked Anna. Her dad used to float her around the pool in Orange, even after she was well able to swim, and she could still conjure the sensation of his hands under her, and the caress of the water as he swept her from side to side.

‘Yeah,’ whispered Charlie.

Anna held her just on the surface of the silky cool water, and waded out a little further. She slowly swished Charlie back and forth, and looked up to the trees that circled the waterhole, so quietly steadfast. They were here seventeen years ago and would be here long after this was all over. Anna couldn’t run away now, couldn’t walk down the driveway and hitch into town like she had the day that it ended with Pat. She’d refused his offer of a lift; she couldn’t bear being dependent on him for even one more thing. No, Anna wouldn’t run this time. She would do everything she could to make sure Charlie didn’t go back to her mother and Harlan. If the girl went home, all this would be for nothing.

Charlie closed her eyes and laid her hands on her belly. The bandage had worked loose and trailed in the water.

Anna wondered how long it took stress to leave a body. She’d once read that children who grew up with trauma had stress hardwired into them. She wanted to think that Charlie felt safe with her but why on earth would Charlie feel safe? Anna – a virtual stranger – had plucked her from her home and everything and everyone she knew, and surrounded her with more strangers. Maybe Charlie closing her eyes was not a sign of relaxation but of hopelessness.

Charlie’s eyes were still closed. ‘Where’s Mummy right now?’

‘Well . . . in the same house, I’d say. The house next to mine.’
My house.

Charlie opened her eyes and turned to look in the direction of a dog barking not too far away. ‘I want to go to the caravan with just me and Mummy.’

‘Mummy’s not at the caravan now. She’s at the house with Harlan.’

‘I know that,’ Charlie said quietly.

A shimmer of exhaustion and frustration ran through Anna. She knew that nothing would stop Charlie wanting her mother, even though Gabby had failed her daughter in every way possible.

Charlie tried to sit up, her arms flailing at the water.

‘Hang on.’ Anna floated her back to the water’s edge.

In the shallows, Charlie twisted out of Anna’s grasp and stood, water streaming from her clothes, the soaked bandage hanging down to her knee. She clambered back up to the big flat rock where Anna had left their towels and bag of food.

‘I’m hungry.’

‘Okay.’ Anna followed her. ‘Let’s get your wet clothes off before we eat, eh?’

Charlie let Anna take her shorts down but shook her head when Anna started to take her t-shirt off. As Anna dried herself roughly and dragged her top on over damp skin, there was the sound of something blundering through the underbrush up the hill. A wallaby? The kids?

‘What’s that?’ asked Charlie, her face serious. She wound the loose bandage around her arm.

‘I’m not sure. Maybe an animal.’

The dog barked again, close by this time, and Anna heard a man’s voice. It didn’t sound like Pat.