The Game You Played (4 page)

DREAMING

IT WAS A STRANGE MIST, FOR summer.

Sydney in December should be smothered in summer humidity, inescapable and suffocating on the hottest of the days.

But the night was cold. The mist curled around the chipped edges of corner buildings and massed in alleyways. My mind was cloudy and confused. I needed to focus.

I caught a blur of Tommy’s T-shirt as he headed into one of those foggy alleys. I didn’t understand why he was out here in the darkness, but I needed to catch him.

He was too fast for me. Even though Tommy was just two, his little legs were quick. He stalled every now and again and peered back at me, making me think I could catch him. But it was just a ploy.

Stopping yet again, he stared at me solemnly from beneath his messy dark-blond mop, knowing he was out of reach.

I ached to touch him, to encircle him in my arms, have him
koala
onto my side like he used to. He’d been gone far, far too long. How long? I couldn’t remember. Had it just been a day? A week?

Tommy shook his head. “You’ll never find me, Mummy, if you don’t know where to look for me.”

Tommy couldn’t speak quite that well before he went away. How did he learn to talk like that?

“But I already found you, Tommy. I can see you. I can hear you.”

He just eyed me blankly.

I clenched my fists as old homeless men stirred in their blankets in the alleyway, like bundles of rags come to life. I hadn’t noticed them before. Every one of them looked the same. Long, greyish hair and tangled beards, like wizards.

They knew everything, saw everything, but told nothing.

I was sure of it.

Tommy seemed to have grown bored of the game because he was already running away. I chased him down street after street. All the way to the playground. The playground in which he went missing. He’d never taken me this far before.

Worry wound around and around me like a rope, tightening and suffocating me. There were too many places in which to lose him again. Even when it was the middle of the night and the playground was empty.

Instinctively, I headed for his favourite part of the water park. Where the water streamed through little canals.

He was there, already huddled over a canal, zooming his plastic sailboat backwards and forwards.

Someone shuffled behind me. A bone-chilling mix of crisp, rattling sounds.

When I edged my head around, I saw one of the homeless wizards gazing at me. I hadn’t heard him coming. He must have descended from the night sky itself. He stretched out his hand towards mine, pressing something into the palm of my hand. At first, I thought it was a coin. As if the old man was a gypsy and he was crossing my palm with a gold coin. For luck. But it wasn’t a coin. I stared down at my palm to find a moth. A fluttering, half-dead moth with ruined wings.

Why would he give me such a thing?

When I turned back to the water canals, Tommy was gone.

Panic squeezed my heart with an iron fist, punching up into my throat.

Tommy wasn’t anywhere. There was just his toy boat lying on its side in the water. But as I ran to it, the boat upended and disappeared completely. Even though the water was only ankle-deep.

I raced back to the wizard man, grabbing his shoulder with my left hand. “Where’s my son? Where is he? Where did he go?” My voice rose to a scream, echoing everywhere.

The man gazed back at me with pale, sagging eyes that were hollow underneath. Moisture appeared in his eyes, the wetness tracking into vertical crevices in his cheeks. I was committing a grave sin, harming one of the wise wizard men. But I couldn’t stop. He needed to tell me what he knew.

I snapped awake.

Fully awake.

My arms dropped to my sides in horror.

I was here.
At the playground.
Panic buzzed through me.

How did I get all the way to the playground?

Oh God. Oh God.
I’d been dreaming.

Sleepwalking.

There was no toy boat.

No moth in my fist.

No Tommy.

It wasn’t summer. It was June. Winter. That was the reason for the fog.

Tommy had been missing for six months. Not a day. Not a week.
Six months.

Jumping back, I held up the palms of my hands in an apologetic gesture. “I’m sorry. So sorry. Please believe me. I didn’t mean—”

But I was waving my arms around so much I was frightening him.

No, not frightening him. Worse. He wore a defeated expression, as if he was used to people yelling at him and shaking him, while all he was trying to do was survive another night.

I backed away completely.

And ran.

Wednesday morning

BY THE GREYISH QUALITY OF THE LIGHT, it had to be close to seven in the morning. A chorus of traffic from the streets rumbled to life, as though a button had been pressed to unmute the noise. As I neared the harbour, the first pale light of dawn washed through the sky. Everywhere, the fog sat heavily, pressing on the city.

People sparsely dotted the streets. Drivers delivering loads and early-bird business owners stared openly at me. I was clothed in pyjamas. Barefooted. My steps clumsy.

I was a strange sight for them. Did I need help? Was I drunk? A drug addict? They didn’t know, their eyes cautious.

The walk back home seemed to stretch out infinitely.

Hell.
I’d come all this way inside a dream.

Anything could have happened to me.

I couldn’t take the sleeping pills again.

They’d become dangerous.

The moist, salty air of the ocean clung to my skin as I finally reached Southern Sails Street. My street ran vertically to the docks, rising crookedly up a hill.

The street didn’t welcome me. The terrace houses stood with dour expressions. All the houses here were the same inside and out. Tall, narrow, and joined together like skeletal ribs. My family had lived on this street for ten generations. But the houses had older, more distant thoughts than those of a little boy lost and a woman on the edge of losing her mind.

Built by the government over a century ago to house its lowly-paid maritime workers, the terrace houses had stayed the same all this time. Back then, fashionable Sydneysiders didn’t want to live in this rat-infested area. No one had cared about the harbour view or the proximity to Circular Quay and the ferries or the history (the first fleet landed here from England in the 1700s). The rats brought the bubonic plague, which swept through Sydney in the two decades from 1900. One of my ancestors had made a fine living as a rat-catcher in those days, until he succumbed to the plague himself. A massive pylon rose behind my street—one end of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The descendants of the maritime workers, squeezed in the middle of a modern, burgeoning city, had been hanging on by their fingernails. None of them owned their houses. But now, investors were circling like sharks, eyeing this street greedily. The government was selling it off, piece by piece, to the rich. The houses on one side of the street (the lower, less moneyed end) had been knocked down months ago—the flattened side of
the street a constant reminder to the residents living on the other side that their time was running out. They’d all soon be gone, too.

My head was woozy. I could still hear the boats knocking against the docks as I headed up the slope of the street. The sounds seemed to scatter and echo everywhere.

Knocking. Knocking. Knocking.

Grabbing a fence, I steadied myself.

I had to get home.

Luke woke at seven every morning, like clockwork. I couldn’t let him know I’d been out wandering the city in a dream. I hoped no one else was awake and peering through their windows.

I passed Nan’s house at number 25. She was an early riser, but she’d be busy with her housework. Next door to Nan’s at number 27 was the Wick house—old Mrs Wick and her thirty-two-year-old daughter Bernice, who rarely left the house. Both of them slept in until way past ten. Next was number 29. The abandoned house. Did a curtain just shift as I passed by? I craned my head to gain a better view. The living room curtain was as it had been for years—hanging on the same crooked slope, undisturbed. Still, I
thought
I’d seen it move. Maybe squatters had moved in. Or maybe it was my memories of that house playing tricks on me. The terrible thing that had happened at that house threatened to push its way into my mind. But I pushed back, as I always did. I’d learned how to shove that memory deep and stop it from surfacing.

I shivered, wishing that of all the houses on this street that were due to be demolished, this one would be next.

Luke’s parents’ house was next, at number 31. At least I knew that they were away at their holiday house and weren’t there to see me walk past in my pyjamas. Their front yard was the most perfect in the street. Tiny, like all the yards—but perfect. They had a gardener looking after it at the moment. Inside and out, their townhouse was pristine. I envied the kind of home life that the Baskos had given Luke when he was growing up. They hadn’t been rich (they’d had more than most on this street), but they’d doted on him. I’d never even heard them argue. Hell, I’d never heard them say an unkind word about anyone. Luke’s mother even found compliments for people behaving badly.

I continued up the steep hill that led to the gate of my house. Number 88. The gate was hanging open when I got there. God, I must have blundered through there an hour or so ago, in a dreaming haze.

A stiff blue envelope stuck out of the mailbox. I pulled it out as I stepped past. There was no name or address on the outside. Probably one of those
To
The Householder
campaigns that promoted sticky labels for little Sally’s school lunchbox and
fat exploder
pills for her mother (because women apparently were in constant need of having their fat exploded). 

A faint coffee scent wafted from the envelope. I imagined the letter deliverer gulping a quick cup of coffee in his or her car before running out to stuff mailboxes. I knew the scent, the exact type of coffee. My eyesight wasn’t the sharpest for someone my age, but I had the keenest sense of smell of anyone I knew. I could tell what someone had last eaten when they walked near me. At school, I’d always won the blindfold contests where you had to name a scent. 

The envelope smelled of the caramel mochaccino that was sold at the Southern Sails Café—the coffee shop down at the harbour end of my street. They roasted their own coffee beans there.

Continuing down the front path, I turned the handle on the front door as slowly and cautiously as if I were trying to crack a safe. Stepping inside, I caught sight of myself in the hall mirror. I could see what everyone had seen on my way here. My hair hung long, dark, and limp around my face and shoulders. A faint dusting of freckles sat on top of chalky skin. My eyes dull and stony. My body clothed in wrinkled pyjamas (I barely ironed anything, let alone pyjamas).

Dropping the envelope on the hall stand, I continued on, stealing up the stairs and along the cushioned hallway that led to the bedroom. With the blinds completely drawn, it was like the world was still in the deep of night.

Luke faced away from me, quietly snoring. I slipped in beside him, taking care that I didn’t disturb him. If he woke, I could say I’d just been to the bathroom. But that wouldn’t explain my cold skin or the smell of the docks in my hair. I should have gone straight into the shower. But I was exhausted.

He had that same spicy scent of perspiration and musky aftershave he always had before his morning shower. Manoeuvring closer, I let his scent become mine. His body against mine felt good. I needed shelter, sanctuary.

He murmured something I couldn’t quite understand. Talking in his sleep was what he did. He talked in his sleep, and I walked in my sleep. Both of us trying to figure things out in our minds during the sleeping hours. The insanity of having a child vanish into thin air never left either of us, night or day.

A minute later, I felt him stirring.

He made grumbling, protesting noises before waking fully and rising. But I knew that once he’d showered, he’d snap fully awake. He’d start mentally planning out his meetings with colleagues and clients. He’d be rehearsing his spiel for later, when he was leading fussy home buyers and Chinese investors through outrageously expensive Sydney real estate. As the man who built one of the top agencies in the city, he knew exactly what to say. He prided himself on being honest, and he was. He often disarmed buyers with a completely unexpected comment about the dated look of a bathroom or the crack in a wall. It made him sound open and gregarious. Then he’d follow up with a burst of positives that made the negatives sound either inconsequential or easily fixable.

Luke picked up his suit from the bedroom chair when he returned from the shower. His eyes looked intensely blue beneath his wet hair. I liked him like that. All his layers peeled off. Once the shirt and jacket went on, it was like he was wearing an armour, and he became
business Luke
.
Business Luke
was someone much more distant.

“I’ll bring home some dinner tonight.” He buttoned his shirt. “That okay?”

“Of course.”

“Feel like anything specific?”

I shook my head. “Anything.”

“Give me a call if there’s anything else you want me to get.” He kissed my forehead, and with a quick
love you
he was out of the room.

The house felt empty even before I heard the slam of the front door downstairs.

I sat on the bed, trying to psych myself to move from the bedroom.

Some days, I didn’t move from here. Each day consisted of dead hours: twenty-four hours with all the minutes ticking too fast and too slow at the same time.

I lived for the nights and my dreams of Tommy. I’d totally lost enthusiasm for everything else. But I couldn’t have the dreams anymore and risk wandering outside at night.

Somehow, Luke had managed to pick himself up and carry on. Less than a month after Tommy went missing, Luke had been back at the office. My career (if you could call it that) had been in acting. My two recent attempts to perform in a local amateur theatre production—just to get myself back on track—had failed miserably. Luke had come along and watched and clapped harder and longer than anyone else, but it’d been obvious to everyone that my acting was as hollow and putrid as an old gym shoe.

An injured moth fluttered in circles inside my head.

Tommy’s voice repeated itself over and over.

You’ll never find me, Mummy, if you don’t know where to look for me.