I slunk around the side of the utility, pausing to observe a plastic bag full of toys, still encased in their retail packaging, lying on the passenger seat alongside a roll of gaudy Christmas wrapping paper. I pictured the following morning’s scene in the diver’s home: his little dressing-gowned poppets, half-crazed on some kind of sugar-coated breakfast cereal, tearing that awful paper off their presents with squeals of glee.
‘Hello,’ I said, presenting my hand to the diver, who was buttoning up a warm-looking shirt.
‘Hello.’
‘I’m Rosie Little. I’m a reporter,’ I apologised.
‘Well, at ease, Ms Little. We’ve been expecting him. Chucked himself in a couple of days ago. So it’s nothing for you to worry about.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Quite.’
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘And Merry Christmas.’
‘You’re working late,’ he said, in a prolongation of the conversation that was most unexpected.
‘Until midnight,’ I replied, cautiously delighted.
‘And what happens then?’
He wrapped a towel around his waist and from beneath it tugged off his wetsuit while I did my best not to watch.
‘Depends which story I’m in, I suppose.’
‘Don’t you know?’
‘No, not anymore.’
‘Well, I hope it’s not the one with the pumpkin.’
‘No, no. Definitely not that one.’
‘Got time for a quick Christmas drink, then?’ he asked, pulling on a pair of jeans and nodding towards the nearby pub, its outside tables packed with drinkers on the verge of a holiday.
He introduced himself as Paddy and bought two beers, and while we drank them we talked about diving for pleasure rather than for dead bodies. I was charmed by the small specks of sea salt that had crystallised in his dark eyelashes and eyebrows.
‘You know,’ I said, ‘I rather had the impression that you had someone to go home to.’
‘Oh?’
‘The Barbie doll and the cricket set in the front of your ute.’
‘Oh?’
‘Trained observer, you see.’
‘Well, Rosie Little, trained observer, you didn’t stop to think perhaps that I might have nieces and nephews?’
‘An uncle? Who doesn’t outsource his present-buying? What’s wrong with your mother?’
‘She’s dead.’
‘Oh God, I’m sorry.’
‘Forget it. No, really, forget it. Have another drink, and tell me …Do you always go to work in outlandish red boots?’
‘I would love to tell you, but I’d better be getting back to the office,’ I said, allowing him a full view of my reluctance.
‘I’d like to see you again,’ he said, and I responded with something part way between a shy smile and a smirk.
He handed me a card inscribed with his full name: PATRICK WOLFE. Which transformed my smile into one of the regretful kind in which the corners of your mouth turn down rather than up.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, as much to myself as to him, for I had been beginning to like him quite a bit.
‘Why? Do
you
have someone to go home to?’
‘No. It’s all to do with nominative determinism I’m afraid, Mr Wolfe,’ I said, still smiling.
He polished off his beer and upended the froth-lined pot on the bar towel.
‘Grrr,’ he said, and I was pleased to see that his face wore a regretful smile of its own.
I slunk back into the office by the side door and slithered in behind the night reporter’s desk. But to no avail. The nerviest of the paper’s photographers was pacing, anxiously, in his too-white sneakers and multi-pocketed vest.
‘The fuck have you been?’ he asked. Not waiting for an answer, he said, ‘You’d better come and have a look at these.’
On a large computer screen, he clicked through a raft of photographs of a suburban house reduced to charcoal. My pulse picked up speed. Where was this? When was this? They were good shots, some of yellow-clad firemen amid smoke and flames, but mostly of shocked family members staring at the charred and dripping-wet framework of a ruined home.
‘When was this?’ I asked.
‘About quarter past eight. I couldn’t find you, so I just went.’
‘I’ve been checking the rounds all night. The bloody fire brigade told me there was nothing on.’
‘Look at this, though.
This
is the shot.
This
is the front page,’ he said, and I had to agree.
It was a wide-angle shot of the scene, and in the foreground was a small golden-haired girl in a polka-dot dress, one angelic cheek lightly touched with soot. In her arms she held the blackened remains of a Christmas wreath that had been hanging on the now-unhinged front door. Her lower eyelids were brimming with tears. Nauseating. Perfect.
‘And I missed it,’ I said mournfully.
‘Yup.’
‘Did you get any words?’
‘I got the kid’s name. Madison Jones. She’s four and a half.’
‘And that’s it? That’s all you know?’
‘Yup.’
‘I’m in Deep Shit.’
‘Yup.’
‘Or not,’ I said. ‘Just the one “d” in Madison?’
‘Yup. Why? What are you going to do?’
‘The same thing I do every day,’ I said grimly.
And at my desk, I began to spin.
An hour and a half later the first edition of the Christmas Day paper rolled off the press and into the hands of the editor. He called me into his office, and as his high-backed chair swung around, he came to face me with an inscrutable look that induced a sharp pang of conscience.
‘Gold,’ he said, his face breaking into a smile. ‘Absolute gold.’
He gestured to the copy of the paper lying on his desk, its front page almost entirely filled with the image of little flaxen-haired Madison before the wreckage of her family home. Beneath her, in six-trillion point Bodoni, was a quote lifted from my story, which appeared in full on page three. It read: ‘But what if Santa doesn’t know where to find me?’
‘Fancy her saying that, hey?’ the editor said, shaking a grandfatherly head, and I saw for the first time how pure was his willingness to believe that I truly could spin straw into just his kind of gold.
‘Fancy,’ I replied softly.
‘Magic,’ the editor said, plonking down on the desk in front of me a bottle of champagne. ‘Looks like it’s about time we started to expect a bit more of you, doesn’t it?’
It was in order to postpone the vision of my daily pile of straw growing to mountainous dimensions that, once I left his office, I popped the champagne cork, downed one cupful, poured myself another and joined the subs in their raucous and tuneless carolling. ‘I saw Mummy blowing Santa Claus, underneath the mistletoe last night,’ we sang, until the tower clock next door chimed in another Christmas Day.
Nightshift over, the office was strewn with plastic cups, vanquished bottles, emptied bags of potato chips, early copies of the first edition and the odd drunken, sleeping subeditor: so much rubbish for the cleaners to deal with in due course. I flopped into Lorna’s chair and lay my head on the paper-thin pillow of a day-bill that declared CHRISTMAS BLAZE TRAGEDY SHOCK. Through the floor I could feel the vibrations of the press, still churning deep in the bowels of the building, still replicating my golden little lies.
In that shallow, woozy sleep, I dreamed that Oscar, with one flex of his serpentine trunk, dislodged the plastic covering of the lighting panel that had teased him for so long. Then, with his upper trunk, he forced the housing of the light fixture up and into the ceiling cavity, revealing a tangle of red and black wiring, as well as the silver lining of the roof itself. He slid one leaf into the overlap between two sheets of insulation, and began to thump with a coiled green fist on the underside of the roofing tiles. Soon, the silver sheeting split wide open, and clumps of terracotta showered the office floor, allowing a refreshing draught of night-cooled air to pour in. Through the hole in the roof could be seen a segment of dark sky, the stars like gleaming sword-points upon which veils of wispy cloud were tearing themselves to shreds. In place of the moon was the illuminated rim of the clock face on the tower next door.
Then someone else stepped into my dream, and up onto the rim of Oscar’s tub. She grasped the plant’s trunk in two hands and there was a slight creaking sound as she placed one foot on the lowest of his branches. Steadily, she began to climb, hand over hand, up through the leaves, around and around as if Oscar’s branches were the steps of a helix-like ladder. She came into view, and went out again, obscured now and then by foliage. In some glimpses, she wore a taupe-coloured suit, thick pantyhose and unflattering heavy-rimmed glasses, and in others, she was a small child with golden curls and a polka-dot dress. Up and up she went, up towards the open, beckoning sky. And when I woke, I knew that it was time for me to follow.
JULIA
A
lthough she had recently attained the age of thirty-five, Julia was determined that she would not panic. No, she would not panic. She would simply continue to water the tomatoes. They were in pots on her balcony, tangling their furry stems around the balustrade. She would continue to coax out their heavy green baubles, and try to keep these to their promises of redness. She would continue, too, to take her vitamin tablets each morning and to drink six glasses of water a day, to have her legs waxed and her hair cut every six weeks. She would continue sweltering in Bikram yoga class on Monday nights, trying to master the half-tortoise, and come to terms with farting in public, which her instructor said was important. She did not want him to think that she was anal — a danger she would know to have been averted when she no longer felt the impulse to clench her buttocks in order to keep the volume down.
And she would continue going to work, although this was no trouble at all. At the leather and pipe-smoke legal practice, she was one of the cleverest in a clever bunch, but less likely than any of the others to accessorise her cleverness with displays of ego. She conducted herself calmly (although she would never acquiesce) and even the senior partners sought her counsel. At work she was
only
thirty-five, and there was certainly no need to panic.
At thirty-five, Julia was well and truly old enough to know that nothing good came from panic, or haste, or recklessness. You could not even buy a good pair of shoes with them. To begin, now, to frequent bars or take tennis lessons would be only to guarantee disappointment. She had observed thirty-five-year-old friends doing precisely these things, and had served well-intended dinners to the human oddments with whom they were now trying to make a life. No. She had drawn the hopscotch squares of her pavement, and she would not put a foot beyond them, even if she was thirty-five. And so in her continuing way she went, on Saturday mornings, to sit in the warm café on her generally cold street. There, she continued to drink mocha that she continued to prefer weighted towards the chocolate rather than the coffee. And she read. Newspapers, or books of serious literary intent, while her hand-knitted scarf purred over the back of her chair.
ERIN
It was too late now. And yet, only a fraction of a second before it had happened, it had been too early. Too early. Too late. Nothing in between. Not even the smallest of windows that she might have picked if she had been especially alert. The edges of too early and too late had fused together and Erin had known herself to be once again excluded; sealed forever beyond and outside the world in which Bella moved with all the bright, swaying confidence of a flame atop a candle.
What had happened was that Bella had given Erin a rock. Bella had been barefoot and up to her knees in the topaz-coloured water of a mountainside lake, grimacing and giggling at the sensation of icy water on feet hot and blistered from three days of boots and constant walking. She had looked down between her pale, suppurating toes and seen something. With one hand capturing her long curly hair in a makeshift ponytail, she had bent down and reached into the lake. Then, yelping and holding her prize high in the air, she had run, splashing through the shallow water, to the shore where Erin lay on the pebbled beach.
Into Erin’s hand she had pressed a small and improbable rock, dark red in colour and in the precise shape of a heart. Not a human heart, blobby and irregular, but a Valentine’s heart of perfect symmetry; the kind of shape that might be stitched in scarlet satin, or cut out of shiny paper.
‘A heart for a dear heart,’ Bella said, as she gave Erin the rock. Then, flopping down on the pebbles and laying her grinning head in Erin’s lap, she said: ‘I do love you, you know.’
She said it like someone who had so much love to sprinkle around that she could afford to be careless with it, like someone dusting a cake with icing sugar and letting drifts of it fall onto the floor. It was a gesture that Erin ought to have been able to accept in the blithe and utterly Bella-like spirit in which it was given, but it only made her feel more a floor and less a cake. And she knew, the second the sweet, meaningless dust of those words settled over her, that it was too late. She thought of, and regretted, all those times — over coffee, tea, or cold creek water — that she had encouraged Bella to keep talking, confiding, about boyfriends past and present, and allowed the sound of Bella’s voice to prevent her own silence from being heard. She felt for the weight of the stone in her hand and it was both heavy and light at once. It meant just too much, and not nearly enough. There was no way that she could tell her now.
On the final day of the trek, Erin walked behind Bella, no longer smiling at the amusing way she paddled with her hands through the air at her sides, but planning out the steps of their friendship’s attrition. They would graduate in just a few weeks in any case, and it was commonplace, surely, for university friends to simply go their separate ways.
In the horizontal light of the early evening, they emerged from the bush to find Derek and his car waiting to collect them. Bella let the weight of her pack fall to the ground and flew towards him, arms outstretched like the wings of a plane.
‘Do I stink?’ she asked, raising her arms high. ‘Do I pong? Do I really, really reek?’
He sniffed one of her armpits deeply and crossed his eyes before pulling her close, one hand travelling, habitually it seemed to Erin, down to squeeze her backside.