Lost Girls (22 page)

Perhaps they
would have travelled the world together, going to out of the way
places in French Polynesia or French Africa. But it was not to
be.

Where her final
resting place was, the place of the cave of her things, was little
more than guess. Anne had surveyed the vastness of this wild place
on the map, but there were few clues of an exact location in the
diary, it was hundreds of kilometres of possible coast. So perhaps
that part would never be known, or perhaps, with some local
knowledge giving a better guess, a search could be made.

In the meantime
she felt she had closed one more chapter of Mark’s life with a
degree of understanding. She feared to read on in detail, her
previous limited reading gave a sense this story would be much
darker from here. But to do justice to the other lost girls, read
it she must.

Now she must
say goodbye to Belle and her family; travel on.

As she went on
she must try and discover another girl, an unknown emergent from
shadows, she was not a known person, J, perhaps Josie, was her
diary name. She appeared but briefly, like a moth drawn to candle
flame. Like moth it seemed to end badly.

After Belle was
gone and he had got part of his mind back, Mark flew to Thailand
for a couple weeks, spending time with a succession of girls in the
hope that the sex act would fill the emptiness he felt inside. He
tried a lot of varieties over two weeks. Even though his body
performed its part with mechanical precision, no loss of potency
and climactic pleasure, it was as if these joinings were soulless
encounters.

A few of the
pretty girls tried to talk to him, wanting to practice their
English, and he tried to humour them. But he found he did not want
to talk to strangers, what he wanted was friendship and
companionship, a place to unwrap and leave his aching heart. He
wondered if he should travel on to France, he knew he could locate
Belle’s parents from her passport, to tell them the awful story, he
knew they would grieve with her vanishing and that she would have
wished to spare them this.

But he could
not bear the thought of facing them and telling them how he had
failed their daughter, how he had entrusted himself to mind her in
this place of wildness, how he had known he needed to be more
careful after what had happened to his Elfin, and yet how in the
passion of love his caution had got lost. He could not bear to tell
them this, it was not an admission he could bear to make to
himself, the words in the diary which told of it were enough, he
could not bear it be relived in his mind. Yet the pull to see those
who were of her, to see faces of which she had told with affection,
was very strong.

For two days he
sat in Bangkok airport, watching the flights to Paris come and go,
wanting to buy a ticket and with it some closure, but he could not.
Finally, tired of his unusual indecision, he returned to Darwin and
drove on down the highway, passing through Katherine and heading
on, not able to bear the thought of even a night in that empty
place. He had no plan to go anywhere in particular; he would drive
on and allow the empty space of the land open before him.

Mark had known
Vic for a few years and had met his mother, sisters and brothers at
various times when he had worked in the Alice. He would not say the
rest of the family were close, but Vic was like a brother.

He had not seen
Vic for months; he knew only he was working on the Barkly at the
moment as the last of the cattle season was in full swing.

As he came to
the desert he found a small healing in its emptiness. Each day he
would find a place in the afternoon where he could sit on a ridge,
nursing his OP bottle. As the sun fell low he let his spirit travel
to a remembered place with Belle, until his friend, OP, brought
darkness.

A week passed
until one day he found himself sitting on a McDonnell ridge,
looking west from the town of Alice. He was unwashed and unshaven,
but he still had this friend, OP, for company, at least OP did not
answer back when he did not feel like talking.

Into this mist
a voice called his name, “Dat you Mark, what for you sit here, just
with drink. You stink, you need wash, you need proper tucker, you
come with me.”

The face of
Vic’s mother penetrated the mist. She took OP and tipped him neck
down, so OP wet a small patch of baked earth. Then she took Mark by
the hand and led him back to her house where she gave him a towel
and fresh clothes and pushed him into the shower.

For five days
Mark stayed with her, each day she made him get up in the morning,
walk with her to the town to shop, and then help with the
preparation of the day’s meal for the rest of the family. It was
simple mechanical work that he found satisfying. In the spaces
between she talked to him as she would a child, telling stories of
Vic and her other children, their successes and their failures, her
pride and heartbreak.

Slowly he began
to tell her of himself, not of Elfin or Belle, but of the mother he
once had and other small parts of his life. He even told her of
being a mercenary in Africa and of a woman he had loved there. And
he told her of his crocodile totem and his other family like hers,
in Gove, how they too had brought him in.

She also taught
him how to cook, until then his skills was limited to steak and
sausages, but she enjoyed the cooking and creating and made him
learn as she worked. She brought him with her gathering bush tucker
and taught him how to find those things that were good to eat in
this land. It was what she was doing when she found him.

It was a week
of simple companionship. Mark began to get his mind back, to see
the world beyond again and bear to be in it. After a week she said
to him, “I have helped you as much as I can, now you must go and
sit with those old men of your crocodile totem, perhaps they too
can help, it is like there is a bad and unhappy part of your totem,
you must find a special medicine that makes it quiet again, or it
will eat you up.”

So he went to
that place and sat in the dirt with his totem elders. Together they
watched the coming and going of the crocodiles, he held the carved
object of his totem, and brought it away with him. It did not heal
him, but when he held it in his hand, it was as if his spirit and
it were joined, and it gave him a measure of peace.

Anne read of
the barrenness in this man’s soul and the empty land in which he
had travelled and felt a need to see it for herself to help
understand. It was now the start of September and after a month
away discovering two people who lived in Europe and parts of a
third who came from Scotland she felt a need to come home and be
with David again.

In her mind
Australia was now her home as David was there, even though all her
roots and most of her possessions still remained in England. She
needed to both spend time with him to replenish her own emptiness
and also to travel and visit the places of which the diary told,
the places to which Mark had travelled in his empty existences, so
as to try and understand, to allow the telling of his story to
merge with the places.

David had
found the time to take three weeks away from work and so they flew
to Uluru and hired a car from there, retracing in part the journey
that Susan and Mark had made, without trying to find all the back
roads. They spent a night in Kings Canyon then on via Henbury
Meteorite Crater and Chambers Pillar for a night in Arltunga before
heading up to the Gulf via Heartbreak Hotel and Borroloola. They
did not try and relive the trip of Mark and Susan but still seeing
the places brought the words of Susan on tape and Mark in writing
to life.

In Borroloola
Vic met them and took them on a helicopter flight to give them a
sense of the sort of country he had shown to Mark and Susan. From
there the came back across to Top Springs from where after some
hours talking of Mark and Susan with Michael Riley, then continued
on to VRD station where they stayed the night with Buck in a stock
camp and a half day out mustering cattle with the other stockmen.
Anne rode an older quiet horse, she did not have Susan’s riding
flair though David had been instructing her on their farm behind
Sydney. David rode a spirited gelding which he handled with
confidence.

Then it was on
to Timber Creek where a boat owner took them on a night trip
spotlighting crocodiles of the Victoria River giving them a sense
of the silent power of these creatures.

They travelled
on west towards Kununurra, accompanied by the local Timber Creek
policeman. Just before they crossed from the Northern Territory
into Western Australia they stopped and parked on the side of the
highway at a small turnoff heading north. They then travelled in
the police vehicle to the likely campsite of Mark with the shadow
of J.

From here they
walked the return trip from campsite to highway, following the
twists and turns of this road in its winding course through the
valleys and low hills. It was a clear dry September day, hot in the
sun, but with a light breeze in their faces. For a while they
walked side by side down the dusty track. Then Anne said. This does
not feel real. It did not play out like this. She backtracked
walking to the side of the road and retraced her steps trying to
make out the footprints she had left in the dusty soil. She pointed
them out to David and he agreed that it was a similar sign to what
J may have made.

It was
something but not enough reality. Anne said, “I need to imagine I
am her with someone following. I need you stop for half an hour and
then for you to try and follow me from my tracks. So sit still and
wait for thirty minutes and then follow using only my
footprints.

Anne walked
ahead, rounding a curve between hills until she was out of sight. A
hundred yards further on she stepped off the road and walked across
to the side where the hill rose up. She found her way up between
the rocky boulders and found a space between two boulders with a
bush in front where she was hidden from view from the road but
could survey the traffic below. She sat and waited with a nervous
anticipation, wondering whether it was possible to hide from a
follower. At last David came into view, moving slowly, regularly
checking the ground as he came forward. At the point where she had
left the road he went on for a few yards before stopping then
coming back and retracing her last steps. She could see he was
searching for the place where her steps had vanished. He cast
around on both sides of the road in increasingly wider arcs until
he finally found something who prompted him to walk towards her
hillside. She could feel her heart pounding as he approached. He
did not know where to look but she must have left enough clues to
suggest she had come this way. Even though she was not being hunted
she knew a moment of real fear before she stood up, called out and
waved to him.

David had a
look of relief on his face when he saw her and she felt her own
delight in his smile. But now Anne finally had a sense she could
try to tell a real story of the person known only as J, having
lived a part of her last journey as the hunted pursued by the
hunter Mark.

They returned
to their car, thanked the Timber Creek policeman and went on their
way, stopping for a night in Wyndham where they surveyed the
crocodiles, mudflats and vast steamy ocean inlets.

From here the
travelled on towards Derby and Broome, via Halls Creek with a side
trip to Tunnel Creek and Windjana Gorge. Anne said she needed to
travel part of the road of Belle and Mark so as to tell their story
with her own sense of truth.

She and David
had camped next to Tunnel Creek Cave and swam in the pool where
Belle had first shown her body to this man and that night they had
made love under the stars of a Kimberley night sky, and then talked
of how it might have been for this other couple, whose story lived
in their minds from the pages of a diary. It felt much closer to
reality when experienced thus.

One day Mark
was walking down George St in Sydney. Sydney was not his home town,
but of late he came here with increasing frequency, now that money
was no longer an object, as it was an expensive city to visit.

A scrawny
looking girl came up to him and asked his for five dollars. At
first he was inclined to refuse, as one dollar or two was the going
rate. He went to brush her off and walk past. Then, in a way akin
to desperation, she offered to come with him to a room or another
place of his choosing and give him the works for fifty dollars.

Mark looked at
her more closely. It was not clear if she was a druggie, a call
girl down on her luck, or just a street bum. He had first thought
she was fourteen of fifteen, but now, as he looked more closely, he
saw she was older, seventeen or eighteen was more likely. A
malnourished look gave her an apparent frailty and made her look
younger.

So he stopped.
He was not that poor he could not help out someone else who was
down on her luck. He had been in this place in his early life. So
he asked her what she wanted the money for.

She said, “If
you gave me five dollars I could get a cheeseburger from Macca’s. I
was not really trying to get fifty in one go, but it was worth a
try as that would give me food for a few days.

He said. “I am
a bit hungry myself. How about I come with you to Macca’s and buy
us both some lunch. That way you can order as much as you want. Or
we could go somewhere with nicer food if you prefer. What is your
favourite food?