Silver Bay (36 page)

A couple of weeks later, on a Monday evening, after I’d had my tea, we had a service for Letty. Out at sea. Just me, Mum, Aunt Kathleen and Milly. We went out on
Ishmael
to what Aunt Kathleen said was the prettiest spot in the whole of Australia, and while the dolphins bobbed around and the sun shone red and a few clouds drifted high in the sky Aunt Kathleen gave thanks for the life of Letty and said that even though we were on the other side of the world it was perfectly obvious to her where Letty’s spirit was. I kept hoping a dolphin would swim up beside us, maybe poke its head up, as if it were a sign, but although I stared for ages, they didn’t come any closer.

When we unpacked the second holdall, Mum found Letty’s crystal dolphins. She must have packed them really carefully, because not even their little fins were broken. She held one in her hand for a long, long time. Then she took a big breath and handed it to me. ‘You look after these,’ she said. ‘Keep them . . . keep them safe.’

That was one of the last times we ever spoke about Letty.

And now it’s just me, remembering things. Some things, like when me and Letty used to make camps in our bedroom, or when we used to run around in the garden and squirt the hose at each other, I try to keep in my head because I get worried that she’s fading away and soon I won’t remember her. I have two photographs of her in my drawer and if I didn’t look at them every night I wouldn’t remember how her face was, how her missing tooth looked when she smiled, the way she stroked her nose with her finger when she sucked her thumb, how she used to feel when she slept with me. And there are some things I’d like to forget. Like that night when Mum took me and Letty in her arms as soon as Granny Villiers had left and told us things were going to change. I think about the way I had found her packing our bags, and that I’d felt relieved that she’d even remembered my old flannel dog, Spike, which I couldn’t sleep without, and that she had told me we mustn’t say anything to Daddy or Granny because we were going to give them a surprise. And even though she thought I wasn’t looking I saw when she hid the bags in the spare room. I remember the purply bruises I saw on her arms, a bit like the one I had when Steven was cross with me for getting felt-tip on the kitchen table and pulled me so hard off my stool that it hurt.

And I remember feeling so excited – a bit like I did before Christmas – that I had to say something to Letty, even though I told her it was a very important secret.

And then I remember we watched a video –
Pinocchio
– even though it wasn’t a weekend, and that when Steven came home he smelt of drink but she had poured him a big glass of wine anyway and stood there smiling at him until he said she looked like an idiot. When she served up the supper, I could see her looking at him out of the corner of her eye as if she was waiting for something.

And then Letty and I had a stupid fight about crayons, because we both wanted the same green, which was much better than the browny-green, which never came out right on the paper, and I won because I was bigger and Letty started to cry and said she didn’t want to go away, and Steven said, ‘Go where?’ And he looked at Mum and they stared at each other for a few seconds. Then he pushed past her and went upstairs, and I heard him pulling out all the drawers. When he came back his face was so angry that I hid under the table, and pulled Letty with me. I heard him shouting, ‘Where are the passports?’ and his voice had gone all slurry and I shut my eyes really tight and while they were shut there was lots of banging and Mum fell on the floor and hit her head and his hands reached under the table and I heard him pick up Letty, who was screaming and screaming, and he said she’d be going anywhere over his dead body, and his voice sounded like he was under water or something. I tried to grab Letty’s hand but he pushed me really hard and he had her under his arm, like she was a sack of potatoes or something, and she was screaming and screaming. And then, as Mum woke up, I heard the sound of his car going down the drive, all the gravel spraying up, and Mum started crying, ‘Oh, my God, oh, my God,’ and she didn’t even notice that her face was bleeding and I held on to her because I was scared of where he’d taken Letty.

I don’t know how long we sat there.

I remember asking Mum where Letty was and she held me close to her and said, ‘They’ll be back soon,’ but I wasn’t sure if she believed it. I was afraid because I guessed that when Steven came back he was going to be really angry.

I think it was a few hours later that the phone rang. Mum was sitting, shaking, on the floor, and her head still had blood on it and I picked up the phone and it was Granny Villiers and her voice sounded strange. And she said, ‘Put your mother on, please,’ like I was a stranger. And then she started shouting at Mum because I could hear her voice down the phone and Mum went all grey and moaned and I held on to her legs to try to stop them shaking. And she kept saying, ‘What have I done? What have I done?’ That was the longest night I remember. When it started to get light, I remember Mum waking me up. I’d fallen asleep on the floor and I was cold and stiff. She said, in a weird voice, that we had to go now. I said, ‘What about Letty?’ and she said there had been an accident, that Steven had had a car crash and Letty was dead in the hospital, and it was all her fault, and her teeth chattered like she was swimming in a pool with the water too cold. I can’t remember much after that – just being in a taxi, and then an aeroplane, and when I cried and said I didn’t want to go, Mum said it was the only way she could protect me. I remember crying every time my mum went to the loo because I was frightened she would disappear, too, and I’d be left by myself. And then I remember Aunt Kathleen standing at the airport barrier and hugging me like she knew me, and telling me that everything was going to be all right, even though everything definitely wasn’t. And all the time I wanted to say to Mum, ‘But how can we leave Letty?’ What if she wasn’t dead, and was in the hospital waiting for us? And even if she was dead we should have brought her with us, not left her all those miles away so that we couldn’t put flowers on her grave and let her know we still loved her. But I didn’t say anything. Because for a long, long time, my mum couldn’t say anything at all.

This was what I told Mike, on the morning I caught him holding Mum’s hands in his bedroom. This was what I told him, after she’d gone, even though I’ve never been able to tell that story to anyone, not even Auntie K, not with everything in it. But I told him, because I got the feeling that somehow things had changed, and that Mum would think it was okay if Mike knew.

I have never seen a man cry before.

Twenty-one

Mike

As the rest of Silver Bay slept late the following day, and the waters stilled under a clear blue sky, several miles away, in a gently humming room at the Port Summer Hospital, Nino Gaines woke up.

Kathleen had been sitting at the end of his bed, leaning heavily on the arm of a blue padded chair. She had gone straight there from tucking everyone in, explaining afterwards that she had wanted to tell her oldest friend a little of what had happened that momentous night. As dawn broke, exhaustion caught up with her and she had dozed for a while, then sat reading the previous day’s newspaper, occasionally aloud when she found something that might interest him. In this case, it was a report about a man they both knew who had set up a restaurant. ‘Be a bloody disaster,’ he croaked. So weary was she from the fright of Hannah’s disappearance and the horror of the ghost nets that Kathleen Whittier Mostyn read on another two sentences before she realised what she’d heard.

He was frail, and a little disorientated, but underneath the white hospital gown and the myriad tubes and wires he was indubitably Nino Gaines, and for that, it seemed, the whole Silver Bay community was grateful. The doctors gave him a raft of examinations, most of which he complained were a ‘bloody waste of time’, did brain scans and cardiograms, consulted their textbooks and finally pronounced him surprisingly well for a man of his age who had been unconscious for so many days. He was allowed to sit up, lost a few of the tubes that had punctured his arms, and the trickle of visitors swiftly turned into a torrent. Kathleen was allowed to sit at the end of his bed throughout, a privilege usually accorded only to a wife, as long as she didn’t raise his blood pressure.

‘Been raising my bloody blood pressure for more than fifty years,’ he told the nurses, in front of her. ‘Fat lot of good it’s done me.’ And Kathleen beamed. She had not stopped beaming since.

A lucky few know their purpose in life from an early age. They recognise in themselves a vocation, whether it be religion, art, storytelling or the spearing of sacred cows. I finally learnt my purpose in life on a clear dawn at the start of an Australian spring, when an eleven-year-old girl took my hand and trusted me with a secret. From that moment, I understood that every bit of my energy would be given to her protection and that of her mother.

When I think back to those few days after the ghost nets, I realise my feelings were almost schizophrenic. I was euphoric in that I was in love with Liza – in love for perhaps the first time – and finally able to express it freely. And she seemed to love me too. After they had told me about Letty, she had feared I would see her differently – as cavalier, deceitful or, at worst, as a murderer. I had found her in her room, sitting by the window, her face a mask of misery. And when I had managed to compose myself (Hannah had put her arms round me when I cried, a gesture I found almost unbearably moving) I went in, closed the door behind me, knelt down and put my arms round her, saying nothing, trusting in my presence to say it for me. A long time later, I understood why she had told me. ‘I don’t think you should do it,’ I said.

She had lifted her head from my shoulder. ‘I’ve got to, Mike.’

‘You’re punishing yourself for something that wasn’t your fault. How could you know he’d react like that? How could you know he’d crash the car? You were a battered woman, for God’s sake. You could say you were . . .’ I struggled with the words ‘. . . temporarily insane. That’s what they say in these cases. I’ve seen the news reports.’

‘I’ve got to do it.’ Her eyes, although swollen with tears, were clear with determination. ‘I as good as killed my own daughter. I may have killed her father too. I’ll give myself up, and use the publicity to tell them what’s going on out here.’

‘It might be a wasted gesture. A disastrous wasted gesture.’

‘So let me talk to this media person of yours. She’ll know if it’ll help.’

‘You don’t understand, Liza. If all this is . . . as you say, you’ll go to jail.’

‘You think I don’t know that?’

‘How will Hannah cope without you? Hasn’t she lost enough already?’

She blew her nose. ‘Better she loses me for a few years while she’s still got Kathleen. Then we can start again. I can start again. And maybe someone will listen.’

I stood up and began to pace the floor. ‘This is wrong, Liza. What if it doesn’t stop the development? People may sympathise, but it’s far from conclusive that any one person’s going to make a difference to whether this building goes ahead.’

‘What other chance have we got?’

And there she had it.

She held my hands. ‘Mike, for years I’ve lived a half-life. I’ve fooled myself, but it’s been a half-life, full of fear. I don’t want Hannah to grow up like that. I want her to be able to go where she wants, see who she wants to see. I want her to have a happy childhood, surrounded by people who love her. What kind of life is this for her?’

‘A bloody good one,’ I protested, but she shook her head.

‘She can’t leave Australia. The moment they see her passport, they’ll catch up with us. She can’t even leave Silver Bay – it’s the only place I feel sure we’re out of the way.’

She leant forward. Her words came out perfectly formed, as if they had been softened, rounded in the tides of her head, over years and years. ‘It’s like living with ghost nets,’ she said, ‘all that history . . . what I did, Letty, Steven . . . It may be thousands of miles away but it’s all out there, waiting to catch up with me. Waiting to strangle me, to pull me down. Has been for years.’ She pushed her hair behind her ear and I caught sight of the little white scar. ‘If the development goes ahead, we’ll have to move on,’ she said. ‘And wherever we go, it will all be drifting silently behind us.’

I put my face in my hands. ‘This is all my fault. If I’d never come here . . . God, the position I’ve put you in—’

I felt her hand on my hair. ‘You weren’t to know. If it wasn’t you it would have been someone else eventually. I’m not naïve enough to think we could have stayed like this for ever.’

She swallowed. ‘So here it is. I’ve been going over it all night. If I hand myself in, I’ll give Hannah her freedom and bring some attention to the whales. People will have to listen.’ She smiled at me tentatively. ‘And I’ll be free. You’ve got to understand, Mike, that I need to be free of this too. As far as I ever can be.’

I stared at her, feeling her already slipping from my grasp. Yet again, a million miles from me. ‘Do me a favour,’ I said, reaching for her again. ‘Don’t do anything until I’ve spoken to someone.’

The following evening, I called my sister. And forcing her on pain of death not to say anything to anyone, I told her, with as much detail as I could remember, what Liza had told me.

There was a long pause. ‘Jesus Christ, Mike, you do pick ’em,’ she said, her voice awed. Then, as I heard her scribbling: ‘This is legit, right? She’s not making it up?’

I thought of Liza, shaking in my arms. ‘She’s not making it up. Do you think it would be a story?’

‘Are you kidding? The newsdesk would wet themselves.’

‘I need it—’ I tried to get a grip on myself. ‘If we do this, Monica, I need it to be as sympathetic as possible to her case. I need people to understand how she ended up in such a position. If you knew her . . . if you knew what kind of person, what kind of mother she is . . .’

‘You want
me
to write it?’ My sister sounded incredulous.