Sliver Moon Bay: The Looking (5 page)

Old Drake mutters something
intelligible. But I have to know.

I get to the front door just as
Chris smacks old Drake in the face with White Sox. The cat is dead
alright. It’s bled out. The front door is stained with its blood
and there’s a puddle of it pooled on the threshold. It’s
confronting. It’s —

Old Drake staggers
backwards.

‘You’re sick, son. You need
help.’ He takes himself off, limping down the path, in the wrong
direction, quite away from his property. He disappears round the
bend and soon the sound of him is gone too.

‘Don’t tell Mum you saw this.’
Chris turns away from me and walks away, White Sox hanging limply
from his hand like a thin piece of string, trailing its tail on the
ground, all the way to the garbage bin.

I couldn’t stand to see any
more. I ran inside and slammed the door but I heard him anyway. He
takes the lid off the bin and throws White Sox in there. The bin is
empty cause White Sox hits the bottom and I can hear it. I hear it.
Kitty dead, Starling will say.

13

‘Are you crazy, Lilian? We
can’t report this!’

She mutters something. I can’t
hear what cause she’s whispering and there’s a whole lot of
elephants between me and their closed bedroom door. But Chris is
shouting.

‘No, Lilian! Don’t interfere!
I’ll deal with it in my own way!’

—

‘You will do no such thing! Do
you understand?’

—

‘I’m telling you I’ll deal with
him! Now leave it alone!’

14

The house goes quiet. The quiet
doesn’t help any; I lie awake half the night, long after they’ve
gone to bed. I’m thinking things are moving now, in the usual
direction, way too fast. But I like it here. Cuckoo Island feels
like home. It isn’t, but if we were to have a home, this would be
it. The town, the harbour, the forest, our beach and us. We fit in
here. I fit in here. As much as I am ever going to fit in anywhere.
I’ve survived 1156 days here so far and that has to mean
something.

I liked Cuckoo Island right
from the beginning. I counted elephants on the first ride through
town and it took only two hundred and two elephants to get from one
end of Main Street to the other; and at two hundred and three the
houses disappeared and we were alone, on the deserted road, just
the four of us in the truck, gliding along like ghosts. Lilian was
very quiet, thoughtful and she kept looking at Chris like she
wasn’t sure what he got us into. It’ll be alright, love, Chris kept
saying, telling her all kinds of stuff, the usual, to keep her calm
and not too anxious but I could tell that she was scared. We did
not see a soul when we passed through town but it was early in the
morning, way too early for anybody to be about, and Lilian
understood this but still, I knew she would have preferred if she
saw somebody, anybody, even just peeking out from behind their
curtains. But the whole town was asleep and we came and went and
nobody knew.

One thousand and forty three
elephants later the road stopped half way up this hill where the
trees and bushes so far quite scattered banded together to make a
forest which lasted for five hundred and twelve more elephants
before the cleared track stopped, right in front of our new house.
Chris parked the truck right there and we all just sat as we were,
for a bit, gathering ourselves. I remember it like it was
yesterday.

So this is where, this is how.
Where we’re going to live and how it’s going to be, I’m thinking.
And it’s up to me to make the best of it.

Chris gets out of the truck,
takes a picture. Of us, sitting inside, looking through the
windows. Lilian pulls a face. Starling breaks into a gummy smile.
She looks adorable in her bunny outfit, strapped into her baby
seat. I do nothing. It’s best if you ignore him; he’ll go away but
he won’t stop. He takes pictures of everything to do with us.
Houses we live in, places we visit, animals, birds, the landscape
and vehicles that pass by, people we see. He’s good at taking
pictures, has an eye for detail, especially when it comes to
people. He snaps them, without them knowing. How’s that for
sneaky?

Chris puts his phone away. He’s
walking up to the front door. So it’s time to go see our new
home.

From the outside, the house is
not much. A barn in the woods. Painted green, with a low sloping
gable roof and a stone porch. It has a chimney. So that’s
something. Lilian’s looking like she’d rather not be here but I’m
keeping an open mind. You never know, do you?

We go inside. Inside’s rigged
up like somebody’s houseboat. It’s dark and there’s scarred,
chipped wood everywhere making up the floor, the walls, the
furniture. The windows are small and have shutters. The ceiling is
low, with exposed beams. The place feels claustrophobic. But. The
living room has a fireplace. Full of soot so it probably works. The
kitchen’s tiny, with a tiny window and a door facing the back yard.
Somewhere behind those trees is the beach, Lilian tells me, trying
to put a positive spin on this. Poor Lil’. Starting over, once
again. And in a place like this. So I get into the spirit of the
thing. It’s gonna be great here, Mum, I tell her. She nods, looking
like she’s going to cry. Ah, well, you can only try your best,
can’t you?

We go see the three pokey
bedrooms together. I get to pick one and I chose the room opposite
Starling’s. It’s been our little nest, separated from Lilian and
Chris’s by the kitchen and the bathroom on the one side and the
living room on the other. There are twenty elephants between us so
if we’re quiet, they won’t hear a thing. Course, I will be able to
hear them cause they’re always loud, doing stuff in their bedroom,
and arguing and talking, sometimes, like normal people do.

We went to the kitchen to
regroup. Chris made a pot of tea and we sat around the kitchen
table drinking it out of these brand new mugs that we found in the
cupboard, and Lilian began to thaw when she saw that everything she
could possibly want in a house was already there and the kitchen
had a new fridge and a new oven and even a set of brand new pans
hanging off the range. She told Chris that he’d come good on his
promise and the two of them kissed in front of me like they were
still on their honeymoon. Course, they’d been married for a long
time so you would think this sort of behaviour was past them but
no. These two, when they were in the mood, could be embarrassing.
So anyway, after they were done kissing we all went outside through
the kitchen, to see the back yard, this patch of ground cleared of
bushes and with no good grass, but I loved it straightaway cause
behind the clearing everything looked pretty wild and definitely
untamed, and you could hear the ocean quite clearly from our back
steps. Even Lilian got excited, hearing the waves crashing below
us. Of course, we were all set to go see the beach when Starling
cut her knee crawling about on twigs and had a fit, and Lilian and
Chris got busy with the situation. Ah, just as well.

I set out on my own, down the
narrow path, along the bushes, under the trees, counting. Two
hundred elephants get me to the cliff hanging over Sliver Moon Bay.
Underneath, the beach is lovely, curved like a sliver moon hemmed
in by steep sand dunes at either end. It’s quiet here. There’s
nobody around, just crabs and birds, and things floating about, in
the grey, which shimmers like silk in the sunshine. Beyond the
dunes, the ocean goes on forever. The beach smells good. It’s a
glorious morning.

I stood there watching the
ocean, thinking it would always be that colour, but the truth is
the ocean changes colours all the time, like a kaleidoscope. I
know; I stood in that same spot every day for many years, and every
day the ocean was different. But it always smelled the same.

I went down the dune to the
beach and walked the length of it in the wet sand. The birds didn’t
seem to mind me. They went about their own business, without a care
in the world. I sat down and watched them. Eventually it started to
rain and I knew I had to get back to the house cause Lilian would
worry about me getting a cold. The first climb up the dune was hard
work. There’s a way to do it but this was my first time so it was
hard going. I had to rest. That’s when I saw him. He appeared at
the edge of the cliff above me, looked down, straight at me. I
waved hello. He turned and disappeared up the path.

That was 1156 days ago. We’re
settled here now. Despite all that’s happened, despite Assassin,
despite White Sox whom I’m really going to miss, this is where
we’re staying.

15

In the morning, we go about our
usual. Chris goes out fishing and Lilian does a spot of housework.
She folds laundry in the living room, watching morning television.
It’s Sunday so it’s just me and Starling for the day. I take
Starling out in the front yard to pick up some pebbles. She likes
to count them. I notice the front door has been cleaned. It’s so
clean it shines, especially around the spot where the arrow went
into the wood. It’s been filled in and sanded to blend in with the
grain so you don’t see where it went in. But I know it was there.
Holding up White Sox by the throat. Poor kitty. It feels nothing
now, at the bottom of the garbage bin.

‘Sarah? Sarah-honey, have you
seen Starling’s pink dress?’ Lilian pokes her head out of the
window.

I haven’t. I shake my head,
shrug. Then Starling looks up from her pebbles.

‘Pink. I want pink dress.’

But she’s talking to herself.
Lilian’s gone. She made her puzzled grimace and pulled her head
back in. She’ll go look in the laundry basket again. I know she
will. She’s been doing that all week, we all have. Looked in all
the usual nooks and crannies but the dress is nowhere to be found.
Maybe it’s time to give up and get a new one, I tell Lilian but
she’s determined to get to the bottom of this mystery. She’s joking
about it but I can see she’s holding out hope the thing will
surface, somehow. And perhaps it will. In its own good time.

Later, Starling falls asleep in
the tent we made in the back yard. I draped a blanket over the
picnic table and Starling dragged couch cushions under it. Now
she’s sleeping in her nest, with a thumb in her mouth, clutching
Sleepy Bear swaddled like a baby, in her sleeping bag. I lie next
to her, thinking, about my dream. Fairy came to see me last night.
She put her little girl down on the floor next to a big box full of
beautiful glass things. She took one out.
Look,
Emily-darling, this one’s yours.
It was a bird. Made of
sugar. Emily was excited; she clapped her hands. She wanted to hold
the bird but Fairy hung it on the fir tree. It looked lovely. It
came to life and made a noise. It stepped on a twig and broke
it.

I woke up to see the back of
Lilian disappearing down the path. I knew immediately that
something wasn’t right. She never goes to the beach. So she’s going
over to see old Drake. This can’t be a good thing. Lilian’s upset.
And she’s not strong. So I’m gonna have to get involved.

At old Drake’s, everything’s
quiet. It’s easy to sneak up to the house without Assassin there.
Physically, that is. He’s definitely here in spirit. In his grave,
rising from the puckered ground under the weeping willow like a
great big pustule. RIP Assassin. It was a good idea to honour him
with a resting place. Respectful. And that’s what we should have
done with White Sox. We should have put White Sox in a box in the
ground under a tree. RIP White Sox. But that sort of thinking takes
imagination and Chris is not a chip off the old block at all. No
respect for the dead, has he?

The front door squeaked. I dove
into the tall grass where she wouldn’t see me. Turned out I didn’t
have to worry. She wouldn’t have seen me if I had stood in the
doorway. She flew out of the cabin like Fairy, clutching a bunch of
photographs close to her chest, and she ran down the path towards
the beach. Oh, Lilian. What are you going to do about anything?

Well, of course, she’ll tell me
later. I really should have just gone home right then but it wasn’t
meant to be. She had dropped a picture and I picked it up. It was a
picture of me. On the beach, flying, flapping my imaginary wings.
So now she knows what he’s been up to.

The door is ajar and the house
is quiet. The room looks exactly like the last time I was here.
Pristine. Not a thing out of place. The crossbow hangs from a hook
on the wall above the fireplace. The owl cookie jar sits on the
mantelpiece. Really, he should be more careful about such things.
But I’m going to take a look, now that I’m here. I lift the top of
the owl’s head and look inside the jar. Yes, there are photographs
at the bottom. It’s the same stuff, except we’re older. I flip
through some, just randomly, winter, spring— how the time flies.
Ah, here’s summer. Hey, I never realized how deep my tan was last
summer; no wonder I peeled a couple of times. Starling looks so
cute in this one, nudie on the beach, with her bucket and spade.
She’s grown since then. Not much, but she’s definitely longer.
Well, that’s good news. Here’s a real nice one of me, in my white
bikini, wading in. Starling’s in up to her thighs but she won’t go
in any further. The surf is up. She’s such a cautious little
birdie. She’ll just dip her beak in every now and then, but she
won’t go under. He should know this by now but he’s not learning.
He’s got stacks here, of her, same pose, same situation. Such
waste. He should know better, seriously; God knows he watches us
often enough.

Footsteps outside, on the back
porch. I put the pictures back and close the lid. The back door
handle rattles. I tiptoe across to the bedroom, over to the bed,
and slide under it. The back door squeaks open. I see his boots
shuffle over the faded tiles; come to a standstill in the middle of
the kitchen. Another pair of boots enters. Now they’re both in
here. And I’m gonna learn something new.