Surface Tension (12 page)

“See?” After the dishes were cleared away, she emptied her work satchel, set her laptop down between us, then laid a sheaf of papers out across the table.
Printing proofs
, she called them. She said she didn’t have a proper copy yet, but nearly everything was here. “I just had to change a few things, fix a couple of typos.” She turned to me. “You should thank me, Cass. They tried to call you Carrie at one point.” She smoothed the pages down with the palms of her hands. “But basically this is it.”

I leaned over as she flicked through the glossy, oversize pages.

It was amazing – almost like a real book. There were headlines and photos and text, all wrapping around each other at odd angles in a way that looked funky and interesting, like it had been carefully designed by someone who knew what she was doing and was on top of everything, and not someone who at any point in her life would have become paralysed, sobbing uncontrollably halfway up a tree.

It looked different from the way it had on the screen, on the computer. It looked polished and finished.

But it looked different for other reasons too.

I turned to Hannah. “What happened to the stuff about the bushfire?” Six years ago a fire had come within a few kilometres of the town. I had seen Hannah working on a page about it. She had laid it out with some photos and an interview with the Clancys, whose farm had been threatened.

Now it was just gone.

Hannah waved a hand. “Oh, I deleted that. I couldn’t get it to fit properly in the end. Nothing really happened, anyway. And we could use the space. Howard wanted to put in more about tourism.”

There were other stories missing, too, when I thought about it. The time the Porters’ sheep got out and stopped traffic on the highway, making the news as far away as Perth. The year Miranda Hopkins made the top 100 of Australian Idol. And the time Sam Farrington got lost in the bush and half the town went out searching … no, that one was still there, but it had been reduced to a tiny square and added to the page about the endangered bilby, in a way that made them seem weirdly connected.

“Can I look on here?” I reached for the laptop.

Hannah nodded. I pulled it over in front of me and snapped it open. It blinked quickly to life and I clicked onto the “Council” folder that was sitting on the desktop. Inside that was another folder called “Centenary”, then another called “Book”, and inside that were row after row of documents.

Draft 1, Draft 2, Update, Revised Version, November 19, November 19.2, New Revision …
the names scrolled on and on.

Hannah was right. She had done a lot of work. She had done all these drafts, all these versions. All of them telling the story of the town. All of them telling the same story, differently. She had deleted some things and added others. She had narrowed things down and now she had these shiny pages which would soon be bound tightly together into a book, solid and final.

My fingers hovered above the keyboard.

It was a funny thing about computers. You could just press the delete button and make things disappear. It wasn’t like a hard copy where if you liquid-papered over something, you could scratch it off later and see what you had written, faint and ghostly but not gone; where even if you used pencil and rubbed something out, you could still see the marks, the thin patch on the paper that told you something different had come before it, that what you could see wasn’t all there had ever been.

Computers were different. You could save the changes and pretend they never existed in the first place. They didn’t leave a trail, but made a smooth, slick surface that told you it was truth, had always been, would always be.

Is that what would happen, I wondered? Now that we had the Centenary Book, the official new story of Lower Grange, would that solidify into its own kind of truth? Would anyone ever bother to go back and see what sat quietly in the margins?

As Hannah talked on about the band and the plinth and the quality of locally made sausages, I clicked back out of the “Centenary” folder and back into “Council”.

Then I noticed something.

There was a document open, sitting there minimised in the corner of the screen. I clicked in the top right hand corner to close it, but a window popped up.

Save changes before closing?

I don’t know, I thought.

They’re not my changes.

It’s not my document.

I clicked
cancel
and the document popped up in front of me.

Meeting, 11 January.

They were notes from a council meeting two days earlier, Hannah’s rapidly typed notes, full of errors she would clean up later.

EL: 12 Barker St resident complains about neighbour dog. Regulations? Get someone out there to check it out. Refer to ranger.

GC: Footpaths on Kitchener St need work. can we sned someone to look asap plz.

AM: shd have gourmet sasuages for shindig NO MSG the health of our children is at stake (steak? hah!) and blahblahblah

HF: east side lake fence needs work, higher, stronger, maybe new fence between east side and Point as well, plus new signs and stuff, do something etc. VERY IMPORTANT to keep people out. VERY IMPORTANT, yes Howard we get it, we do!! maybe electrify fence!!! the safety of our children and all that. mild electric shocks no problem if prevent drowning. Refer: enginnering?

There was lots more – tightly packed lines about rubbish collections and firebreaks and overdue rates – but this was where I stopped.

A new fence? Higher, stronger,
electrified
?

Wow. Finkle really meant it when he said he didn’t want people up there.

I clicked behind the document, into the “Council” folder. There were more documents labelled “Meetings”, going back years. They weren’t all Hannah’s. Most of them were from way before her time. I guess she just had them as a record, so she could look back and go,
HF said this in June 2005
or
12 Barker resident is only complaining about dog because neighbour wouldn’t pay for new fence two years ago
or whatever.

There were two documents for each date – one full of messy notes, like Hannah’s, and one labelled “Minutes”. These were neat and formal. They’d had the mistakes and the
yes, Howard!
comments deleted. Now they looked official and serious.

I scrolled back through the directory, through the documents, through the years. All the way back, twelve years ago, to when the town was drowned.

There was stuff about protests and debates and arguments. There was stuff about levers and bands and sausages. There was stuff about swimming pools and lakes and fences.

Lots of stuff about lakes and fences.

Report suggests east side of lake for swimming area. Close to town, easy access for residents.

HF: concern about snags and danger.

RW: same on other side?

HF: west side better outlook, appeal for tourists

BT: residents should take priority over tourists!

HF: safety of our children. East side not an option.

AM: need to consider the recommendation of the report.

HF: need to consider the opinion of the mayor, who is your boss!

The discussion went on for several pages. No, several meetings. RW, BT, AM, and every other set of initials wanted the swimming area on the east but HF pushed for the west. And kept pushing, until first RW, and then BT, and finally AM and everyone else either agreed or gave in.

And finally, the neat and formal, official and serious version of the minutes read simply:

It was resolved that the new swimming area would be established on the west side of the lake, with ample parking and an access road extending from the highway.

Moved: AM; Seconded: BT; all in favour.

I looked down at the table. Hannah had opened the printing proofs to a double-page spread of the lake. There were people swimming and picnicking and floating around on rubber rings. The walls of the dam rose up in the distance and there was a smaller photograph inset of the viewing platform, where a family stood, pointing out across the water.

The photo didn’t extend east. The edge of the water blurred as it reached the fancy border Hannah had made to look like bubbles flowing around the side of the page. There was no sign of the possibly future-electrified fence, of the padlock and the warning signs, of the uneven edges of what might have once been a road, of the lengths HF would go to, to keep people out.

But why? There weren’t any snags, not really. The water was lower than it had ever been and we’d never run into anything, at least not accidentally. To find anything, we’d had to dive down and down, holding our breath longer than I had thought humanly possible.

Even then, what we’d found wasn’t exactly dangerous – a shed, a car, a weird Finkle-head.

Come to think of it, it was kind of ironic that it was a Finkle-head in the lake, when Finkle was the one who didn’t want anyone swimming there.

“Hey!” Hannah reached across and pulled the laptop towards her. She snapped the screen shut. “I didn’t say you could look at that stuff.”

“There were unsaved changes,” I said. “A window popped up. I was–”

“Oh, dammit,” she said. “I hope I didn’t lose anything. I’ve been so busy I … never mind. I’ll type them up later. I can probably remember everything if it comes to that.” She slid the laptop back into its padded sleeve then leaned out over the table and began rolling up the proofs. “The point is it’s nearly done. I think it’s going to be great!”

Around the table, everyone nodded and I joined in. But it wasn’t so much that I was agreeing. It was more that I was thinking.

I was thinking about Hannah making up her minutes from memory, about what she might forget, or misremember – just slightly, just enough to make it GC who cares about the MSG rather than AM and maybe that doesn’t matter right now but who knows? One day it might. Maybe one day a great wave of MSG-related illness would strike New Lower Grange and AM would say,
well, you know, I was always concerned about this
and use his incredible foresight as a platform to run for mayor and then someone would go back through the records and say
well, actually no, that wasn’t you as it turns out
and before we knew it Gladys Cropp would be leading our town and no one would be quite sure how it happened.

I was thinking about the way something can slide in so easily over the top of something else – a cleaner version, a neater account, a smooth glaze over a maze of hairline fractures, a delete key threading silence across incriminating paragraphs, five thousand swimming pools of water pouring onto an inconvenient town.

And before long no one remembers what was under there to begin with.

Before long, they have a hard time remembering there was ever anything there at all.

That night, I couldn’t sleep

I was dreaming about Atlantis. And puzzles. About pieces of wood and mosaic and my clumsy hands trying to click things together, but it was hard to see through the water and what with Finkle being everywhere – at school and the council and the lake and Dad’s studio. And whenever I found a piece I thought might fit, whenever I was giving it just the exact right jiggle it needed to maybe, possibly slot itself into place, he would jump up, waving his hands, saying,
No, no, that can’t go there. Look!

And I would look down and wonder what I had been thinking because that wasn’t the right piece, maybe not even the right puzzle.

I lay on my back and stared up at the ceiling. Around me, the curtains flapped in the breeze that whispered through the open window. Snatches of moonlight wobbled this way and that, throwing shadows up and down the walls.

I knew it was silly. But I couldn’t help thinking that maybe it was something. Once I’d had the thought I couldn’t seem to let it go. The Finkle-head, underwater. What was it doing in a shed, in the hills? Was it even in the shed? Or was it maybe just down there in the mud somewhere and we disturbed it, with our diving and rattling of doors and breaking of wood.

Even if it was just in the mud, how did it get there, all the way outside of town, near a shed, near a car?

A red car.

Suddenly, a piece clicked. Red plastic flaking off the mirror. Dad waving goodbye to Finkle. Finkle driving off in his little red car. A little red car with his wife’s head right there in the boot, right there just waiting for the metal to rust and crumble so it could bob freakishly up and out of its watery grave and all the long way to the surface.

That was
Finkle’s
car under there?

That made sense, didn’t it? A kind of sense at least. It didn’t explain why it was there but maybe it was like Liam said. Maybe it was just an old bomb by then. Old bombs were hard to sell. That’s why you saw old cars slowly falling apart in people’s front yards, rusted bodies dumped in pockets of bushland. That’s why there was an abandoned car hotline, a number you could call so someone would come with a tow truck and drag the ugly things away, out of sight, out of mind.

Maybe Finkle decided it was easier just to leave it in the shed.

I didn’t ask myself why the head was still there, why he had left it in the boot.

One look at it and that question answered itself.

Why would any man give that to his wife?

That was when it hit me.

His wife. Finkle’s wife.

She left him. Twelve years ago. Moved up to the city.

Dad’s voice was in my head.
Anything could have happened, I suppose.

All of a sudden, I was wide awake.

Finkle’s car – in a locked shed, drowned, with her head inside it.

Finkle’s wife – gone.

I sat bolt upright and snapped on the light.

There was no way I could sleep now. This was like one of those shows on TV where the dead contact the living, unable to rest until someone uncovers the truth about their untimely death.

I had to do something.

But what could I do here, in my room, in the middle of the night?