Darkwater (4 page)

‘No one's accusing anyone.' It was Kate again, head held high. She was surrounded by the others, all but Lyndon clustered close in that early afternoon sun, the rocks white hot beneath their feet.

I had seen them, there on that ledge, so often, always with Amanda in their midst. As I stood at the edge of the grassy reserve trying to catch a few last words before I really did have to run back up the stairs to avoid being caught, I was aware of how strange it was to see them without her. Amanda Clarke had died, and the reality of her absence was right there in front of me. When something like that happens, it's a deep shock sent up from the depths, the force building, knocking everything off tilt.

Fact: Amanda Clarke had a secret.

I wrote those words the day after we learnt Amanda had died, aware that there was something wrong with the sentence. I had heard Kate say Amanda wasn't telling her something, but was that enough to make the secret a fact? There was so little that could be held up as the complete and irrefutable truth. I had to be more precise.

Fact: Kate said she thought Amanda had a secret.

That was better.

When I left the waterfront that afternoon, I rode to our gate and then changed my mind. I still didn't want to be home alone. I saw Mrs Scott in her garden and asked her if she needed anything from the chemist.

‘No,' she smiled. ‘But some company would be lovely.'

There was a book on her kitchen table that she said had taken the world by storm. It was called
The Female Eunuch
and I picked it up to look at the cover. It was an image of a headless, limbless woman's body hanging in black space. There was something shocking to it, a brutality that made me put it down again quickly.

‘I only read stories,' I explained, when she offered to lend it to me.

She said that surprised her. ‘A young woman with an enquiring mind such as yours? You miss out on so much if you limit yourself.' She turned the book over. ‘It's by a feminist called Germaine Greer. It talks about a need for change. Women have been treated as second-class citizens for too long, never accorded the same rights as men.'

I told her it sounded like a book Dee would have.

‘It's not only interesting,' Mrs Scott smiled. ‘It's an entertaining and stirring read. Puts the fire in your belly.'

I asked her if she had heard about Amanda and she shook her head.

‘Tell me.'

I tried, but there was so little I could say with any certainty. Amanda was dead. That was a core truth, everything else around it was just tales.

Mrs Scott listened without saying a word. When I finished, she showed me a picture of her and her husband sitting on a picnic rug with another couple. The waterfront was more overgrown then, the grass long and dry, and the bank opposite covered with scrub, no sign of the houses that were yet to be developed. They used to paddle down the river in a dinghy and catch fish. Sometimes Mr Scott would chip the oysters off the rocks, the shell tough and brittle, the flesh slimy and salty, feeding them to his wife on the tip of the blade.

‘I loved them,' Mrs Scott said. ‘Absolutely delicious.'

They also swam then, although they were wary of sharks.

‘On a hot summer's day, the river would be thrillingly cold, worth risking life and limb for.' She smiled. ‘Although we never went far out from the shore and I was always nervous. It was so dark, deep and green, you could never see what was lurking underneath.'

She tapped the photograph, her long, white finger touching the other man's face, as she told me he had drowned. I couldn't see him clearly, he had turned away from the camera and he was in the shade of a large desert oak, the light dappled and dancing across his features. He had a hat pulled to one side and he appeared to be laughing. The woman opposite him was leaning in close, her eyes bright in the direct light.

She was his wife.

He had gone down there late one night, diving off the rocks into the deep rush of inky water, black under the heavy night sky. He may have been drunk and in high spirits. Or perhaps he had been troubled, battling a problem alone. No one knew why. Darting down into the darkness, his foot was caught by a reed, snagged, twisted and trapped. He would have struggled to free himself, body flicking in a panic like a fish on a line, turning and tugging as he tried to disentangle the slippery knot around his pale flesh, more desperate as he ran short of breath, until the air in his lungs emptied and the bubbles stopped rising to the surface and he collapsed, limp and lifeless, eventually floating, pale to the surface.

They had found him the next day.

It was a terrible thing, Mrs Scott said. She had looked away for a moment before putting the photograph back on the shelf. ‘His wife desperately wanted an answer,' she continued, ‘a truth to hang onto.'

She paused.

‘You're quite right to question everything that is being said. It's essential.' As she held up the teapot, I looked at the liver-brown spots on her hands and the plain gold band around her wedding finger. ‘Who says this is tea? I've told you that's what it is, but how can you be sure? All you can do is look at the evidence.' She took a sip. ‘It tastes like tea. It certainly smells like tea, and it looks like tea.'

She offered me another biscuit, and I took one, biting into the crisp sugary coating, and letting it dissolve in my mouth.

‘So, I think we're pretty safe in calling this tea.' She smiled again, and I thought she had finished. But then she leant across the table and took my hand, her skin cool and dry. ‘Or are we? What if Mr Scott walked in the door now and told you this was something quite different?' She looked towards the back of the cool kitchen, where the screen door opened onto the garden where Mr Scott was mowing the lawn, the smell of clippings sweet and summery.

‘Would you listen to him?' The whites of her eyes had yellowed, the blue irises were faded and watery, but you could still see how piercing they would have been.

I nodded although I wasn't entirely sure I would have taken the time to continue discussing tea with her husband.

‘He might have his own evidence.' She stood up now and opened the back door, letting in a little more light as she called out to her husband that his cup was getting cold.

I thanked her, pushing back my chair.

‘That's what you need,' she continued, as she rinsed our cups under the tap. ‘The capacity to retain an open mind, a willingness to re-examine the evidence if it's called for. And–' she turned towards me, and pressed the copy of
The Female Eunuch
into my hand – ‘the strength to be able to admit when you are wrong.'

Dee was home. Before I'd even opened the door, I heard her in the kitchen and I could tell she was furious.

‘They should never have let the police talk to them without their parents.' Her university notes were spread across the table, the phone was pressed to her ear, and she was throwing meat and roughly chopped vegetables into a pot. Stew, I realised, not looking forward to the prospect.

‘We need to both go there tomorrow and talk to that idiot of a principal.'

Tom must have been on the other end.

‘Both of us,' she insisted.

Upstairs Joe had his door shut. Pink Floyd was playing loudly. I knocked and when he didn't hear me, turned the handle slowly. He was lying on his bed, drawing. The fine smudge of red around his eyes showed he'd been crying. He sat up, the paper slipping to the floor to reveal a rough line sketch of Amanda. He didn't bother to pick it up. He just stayed on the edge of his bed, knees drawn to his chest and, as he started crying again, I sat with him, not sure how to help him because the role of comforter was not one I was frequently called upon to play.

‘You know how they found her?' He looked down at the holes in his jeans, revealing the fine bones of his knees.

I shook my head.

‘She was facedown in the water, lying there, her foot stuck in a gap between the rocks. Her head was bleeding. They reckon she'd cut it.'

‘Was it an accident?' I hardly dared ask the question.

‘I don't know.'

The record came to an end, the needle stuck in the groove, clicking monotonously as it went round and round the turntable. I lifted the stylus and put it back on its rest. The window was wide open and there was, for the first time that day, a slight shift in the breeze, a hint of cool to relieve the unrelenting burning heat, as the evening slowly began to colour the sky with a softness that would deepen into night.

Downstairs, Dee had put on a Joan Baez record, folk songs that Joe and I hated. We both rolled our eyes.

‘How's Kate?' I asked, remembering her fainting that morning and then the way she'd stared Lyndon down that afternoon, shoulders square as she'd faced him on the rock ledge.

But Joe didn't want to talk any more. The moments in which he let me into his life were rare and they were always brief.

‘Upset,' he replied and it was all he was going to say. He put Led Zeppelin's
Stairway to Heaven
on, the build of the music competing with the whining of Joan Baez downstairs, until eventually I couldn't stand it any more and I put on my own record in my room – Cat Stevens singing
Sad Lisa
– as loud as everyone else in the house.

Later that evening, when Tom came home, Dee sat us all down and said we needed to talk about Amanda.

She took Joe's hand in her own and surprisingly he didn't try to pull away. ‘What has happened is terrible, and if there is anything – anything at all – that you know, you should tell us. We won't be angry.'

With his eyes fixed on the table, my brother kept jiggling his leg up and down, up and down.

‘Roxie and Max must be a mess.' Dee turned to Tom. ‘I don't know what we should do – whether we should go round there, or call, or drop in a card, or flowers?' She ran her hand through her hair.

Tom told her flowers sounded like the best idea and then he too turned to Joe.

‘It's important. You, too.'

He looked at me and I shook my head and shrugged my shoulders, then, unable to stop myself, I started to cry, an image of Amanda facedown in that river seeping like a darkness through me.

‘I'm all right,' I pushed Dee away, but she didn't remove her arm.

I picked Sammy up and held her tight, her soft brown hair knotted between my fingers, and her body warm in my lap. ‘Was she murdered?' And then I finally managed to ask the question I'd been wanting to ask, although I wasn't sure if I wanted to know the answer. ‘Was it one of you guys?'

Joe looked horrified. He pushed his chair back, the legs scraping against the slate floor. ‘How could you think that?'

I told him I was sorry. I didn't really think that, but there were so many rumours.

‘Like what?' he demanded.

‘Nothing.' I knew I was turning all that I had heard into one big ugly accusation. ‘It was just when the police called you all in...'

Tom told us to both calm down. ‘No one thinks you or any of your friends did anything. And what happened with the police was wrong. They shouldn't have talked to you without a parent or lawyer present.'

‘Lyndon wanted a lawyer.' I spoke softly, aware that Joe was still glaring at me.

‘How do you know?' he asked.

‘Sonia said that Sal had said.'

‘If he did want a lawyer, he was quite within his rights,' Tom intervened. ‘Don't go jumping to conclusions.' He began to clear the dinner plates, stacking them in an ordered pile next to the morning's dirty plates and bowls, still waiting to be washed. ‘Whose turn?'

Both Joe and I pointed at each other.

Tom threw the tea towel at me and the rubber gloves at Joe.

‘How come you don't do anything?' I asked. ‘Why is it always the women and the children?'

Tom folded his arms. ‘I've been working all day.'

‘So have we.' I could see his scepticism. ‘At school.' And I nodded at Dee. ‘At university.'

Dee smiled. ‘She's got a point.'

Tom shook his head. ‘Dee cooked. I was at work until six. You two are doing the dishes.'

I was about to insist, to tell him that he never did anything around the house. We were the only ones who had picked up the slack since Dee started studying, but I could tell he was on the verge of losing it, and although it was rare for Tom to shout, it wasn't good when he did.

Later that night, when I'd finished my homework, I showed Dee the book that Mrs Scott had lent me.

She told me she'd read it. ‘There's a copy upstairs.'

I said I'd flicked through it, but it looked a little boring to me, although I did agree with what she was saying – ‘Germaine, that is.'

‘Tom doesn't do anything around the house,' I insisted.

Dee agreed he didn't do much. ‘He's better than a lot of men though.' She was sitting at the kitchen table trying to finish an essay, and she looked tired. ‘But when you talk about equality between men and women, it's more than just housework. It's being able to do the same jobs that men do. If you want to be a builder like your father, why not? If you want to go into politics, or run a company, or drive a truck – your gender shouldn't matter. There's been a division between what's regarded as women's work – usually the caring professions like teaching and nursing that are always chronically underpaid – and men's work, which usually has a higher status in society. I can give you some other books to read.'

I shook my head. She was boring me now, and I wished I'd never opened up the conversation. ‘I just think things need to change around here.' I waved my hand towards the sink.

‘They are changing,' Dee told me, and she nodded at her books. ‘More than you realise.'

She turned back to her papers and then looked up at me one more time.

‘Keep an eye out for your brother.' She had pushed her glasses down to the end of her nose and was looking straight at me. ‘This has been upsetting for everyone – but very much so for him.'