The Secret Keeper (44 page)

The lace curtains fluttered and the sweet rich smell of Out-doors pushed through the open sash window—eucalypt and lemon myrtle and overripe mangoes starting to boil on her father’s prized tree. Vivien folded the papers back into the drawer and jumped to her feet. The sky was cloudless, blue as the ocean and drum-skin tight. Fig leaves glittered in the bright sunlight, frangipanis sparkled pink and yellow, and birds called to one another in the thick rainforest behind the house. It was going to be a stinker, Vivien realised with satisfaction, and later there’d be a storm. She loved storms: the angry clouds and the first fat drops, the rusty smell of thirsty red dirt and the lashing rain against the walls as Dad paced back and forth on the veranda with his pipe in his mouth, and a shimmer in his eyes, trying to keep his thrill in check as the palm trees wailed and flexed.

Vivien turned on her heel. She’d done enough exploring; there was no way she was wasting another precious second Indoors. She stopped in the kitchen long enough only to pack the lunch Mum had left her and forage for an extra couple of Anzac biscuits. A line of ants was marching round the sink and up the wall. They knew the rain was coming too. Without another glance at the unwritten letter of apology, Vivien danced out onto the back veranda. She never walked if she could help it.

It was hot outside, and still, and the air was muggy. Her feet burned instantly on the wooden boards. It was a perfect day for the sea. She wondered where the others were now, whether they’d arrived yet at Southport, whether the mums and dads and kids were swimming and laughing and setting up the lunches, or whether her family had boarded one of the pleasure boats instead. There was a new jetty, according to Robert, who’d been eavesdropping on Dad’s RSL mates, and Vivien had imagined herself dive-bombing off its end, sinking like a macada- mia nut, so fast that her skin tingled and cold seawater filled her nose.

She could always go down to Witches Falls for a swim, but on a day like this the rock pool wasn’t a patch on the salty ocean; besides, she wasn’t supposed to leave the house and one of the tattletales in town was sure to notice. Worse, if Paulie Barker was there, sunning his fat white belly like a big old whale, she didn’t think she’d be able to stop herself. He ought to try calling Pippin ‘simple’ again and see what happened. Vivien dared him to do it. She double-dared him.

unballing her fists, she eyed the shed. Old Mac the swagger was down there working on repairs and was usually worth a visit, but Dad had forbidden Vivien from bothering him with her questions. He’d enough work to do, and Dad wasn’t paying him money he didn’t have to drink billy tea and gasbag with a little girl who had her own chores waiting for her. Old Mac knew she was at home today, he’d keep an ear out for trouble, but unless she was sick or bleeding, the shed was out of bounds.

Which left only one place to go.

Vivien scampered down the wide stairs, crossed the grass, rounded the garden beds, where Mum tried desperately to grow roses and Dad reminded her fondly that this wasn’t England, and then, turning three perfect cartwheels in a row, she headed for the creek.

Vivien had been going there since she learned to walk, weaving between the silver gums, collecting wattle flowers and bottlebrush, careful not to step on jumping ants or spiders as she slipped further and further away from people and buildings and teachers and rules. It was her favourite place in the whole world; it was her own; it belonged to her, and she to it.

Today she was more eager than usual to get to the bottom. Beyond the first rock sheer, where the ground got steep and the ant mounds towered, she clutched her lunch pack and broke into a run, relishing the thump of her heart against her ribcage, the scary thrill of her legs, turning, turning, beneath her, almost tripping, sliding sometimes as she dodged branches, leapt over rocks, skidded down drifts of dried leaves.

Whip birds cheered overhead, insects burred, the waterfall in Dead Man’s Gully chipped and chattered. Fragments of light and colour jittered as she ran, kaleidoscopic. The bush was alive; the trees spoke to one another in parched old voices, thousands of unseen eyes blinked from branches and fallen logs, and Vivien knew if she were to stop and press her ear to the hard ground she’d hear the earth calling to her, singing sounds from ancient times. She didn’t stop, though; she was desperate to reach the creek that snaked through the gorge.

Nobody else knew it, but the creek was magic. There was one bend in particular where the banks widened to form a craggy circle; the bed beneath had been formed millions of years ago when the earth sighed and shifted and great rock slabs were brought together jaggedly, so what was shallow at the rims, deepened and darkened suddenly at its centre. And that’s where Vivien had made her discovery.

She’d been fishing with the glass jars she’d pilfered from Mum’s kitchen and kept now in the rotten log behind the ferns. Vivien stored all her treasures inside that log. There was always something to find within the creek’s waters: eels and tadpoles, drowned cats sometimes, kittens tied in bags and dumped upstream by farmers who didn’t want them, rusted old buckets from the gold-rush days. Once, she’d even found a set of false teeth.

On the day she found the lights, Vivien had been lying on her belly on a rock, arm stretched deep into the pool, trying to catch the biggest tadpole she’d ever seen. She’d swept at it and missed, swept at it and missed, and then she’d reached deeper still so that her face was almost touching the water. And that’s when she’d noticed them, several of them, all orange and twinkly, blinking at her from the very bottom of the pool. She’d thought at first it was the sun and squinted up at the distant scraps of sky to check. But it wasn’t. The sky was reflected on the water surface all right, but this was different. These lights were deep, beyond the slippery reeds and moss that covered the creek bed. They were something else. Somewhere else.

Vivien had given the lights a lot of thought. She wasn’t one for book-learning, that was Gerald’s thing, and Mum’s, but she was good at asking questions. She’d sounded out Old Mac, and then Dad, and finally she’d run into Black Jackie, Dad’s tracker mate, who knew more than anyone else about the bush. He’d stopped what he was doing and planted a hand on the small of his back, arching his wiry frame. ‘Ya seen them little lights down deep in the pool, did ya?’

She’d nodded, and he’d looked at her hard without blinking. Eventually, a slight smile had skimmed his lips. ‘Ever touched the bottom of that pool?’

‘Nah.’ She swatted a fly from her nose. ‘Too deep.’

‘Me neither.’ He scratched beneath the rim of his broad hat, and then he made to start again on his digging. Before he drove the shovel into the ground he turned his head. ‘What makes ya so sure there is one, if ya haven’t seen it fer y’self?’

And that’s when Vivien had realised: there was a hole in her creek that ran all the way to the other side of the world. It was the only explanation. She’d heard Dad talking about digging a hole to China, and now she’d gone and found it. A secret tunnel, a way to the earth’s core—the place from which all magic and life and time had sprung— and beyond that to the shining stars of a distant sky. The question was, what was she going to do with it?

Explore it, that’s what.

Vivien skidded to a halt on the big flat rock slab that formed the bridge between bush and creek. The water was still today, thick and mucky in the shallows round the edges. A film of sludge from further upstream had settled across the surface like a greasy skin.

The sun was directly overhead and the ground was baking. The limbs of the towering gums creaked in the heat.

Vivien tucked her lunch beneath the thick ferns arching over the rock; something in the cool undergrowth slithered away unseen.

The water was cold at first around her bare ankles. She waded through the shallows, feet gripping to the slimy rocks, suddenly sharp in places. Her plan was to catch a glimpse of the lights to begin with, make sure they were still where they ought to be, and then she was going to swim as far down as she could to get a better look. She’d been practising holding her breath for weeks and had brought one of Mum’s wooden clothes pegs for her nose because Gerald reckoned if she could stop the air escaping through her nostrils she’d last for longer.

When she reached the ridge where the rock floor dropped away, Vivien peered into the dark water. It took a few seconds, a bit of squinting and a lot of leaning, but then—there they were!

She grinned and almost lost her footing.

Over the ridge a pair of kookaburras chortled.

Vivien hurried back to the edge of the pool, slipping some-times in her haste. She ran across the flat rock, feet slapping wetly, and dug about in her pack to retrieve the peg.

It was while she was deciding how best to fasten it that she noticed the black thing on her foot.

A leech—a big fat whopper of a thing.

Vivien bent over, gripped it between her thumb and finger, and pulled as hard as she could.

The slippery mongrel wouldn’t come off.

She sat down and had another go, but no matter how she squeezed and tugged, it wouldn’t budge. The body was slimy in her fingers, wet and squishy. She steeled herself, screwed her eyes shut, and gave it one last wrench.

Vivien cursed with every forbidden word (Shit! Bloody! Bugger! Bum!) she’d gleaned in seven years of eavesdropping on Dad’s shed. The leech had come free, but a stream of blood flowed in its place.

Her head spun, all woozy-like, and she was glad she was al-ready sitting. She could watch Old Mac take the heads off chooks, no worries; she’d held her brother Pippin’s severed fingertip all the way to Doc Farrell’s place after it got chopped off by the axe; she gutted fish faster and cleaner than Robert when they camped down by Nerang River. Faced with her own blood, though, she was worse than useless.

She limped back down to the water’s edge and dangled her foot in, swishing it this way and that. Each time she withdrew the limb, blood still streamed. Nothing for it but to wait.

She sat on the rock slab and unpacked her food. Sliced silverside from last night’s roast, gravy glistening cold on its surface; soft potato and yam that she ate with her fingers; a wedge of bread and butter pudding with Mum’s fresh jam smeared on top; three Anzac biscuits and a blood orange, fresh from the tree.

A clutch of crows materialised in the shadows as she ate, staring at her with cold unblinking eyes. When she’d finished, Vivien tossed the last of her crumbs into the bush and a weight of heavy wings beat after them. She dusted off her dress and yawned.

Her foot had stopped bleeding at last. She wanted to explore the hole at the bottom of the pool, but she was suddenly tired; extra tired, like the girl in one of those stories Mum read to them sometimes in a faraway voice that grew less like theirs with every word. It made Vivien feel strange, that voice of their mother’s; it was fancy, and while Vivien admired Mum for it, she was jealous too of this part of their mother they didn’t own.

Vivien yawned again, so wide that her eyes smarted.

Maybe if she lay down, just for a little while?

She crawled over to the edge of the rock and crept beneath the fern leaves, deep enough that when she rolled onto her back and shimmied a little to the left the last patch of sky disappeared. Leaves lay smooth and cool beneath her, crickets ticked in the undergrowth, and a frog somewhere panted the afternoon away.

The day was warm and she was small and it wasn’t surprising that Vivien fell asleep. She dreamed about the lights in the pool, and how long it would take to swim to China, and a long jetty of hot wooden planks, her brothers and sister diving off its end. She dreamed of the storm that was coming and Dad on the veranda, and Mum’s English skin, freckled from a day by the sea, and the dinner table that night with all of them around it.

The beating sun arced over the earth’s surface, light shifted and sifted through the bush, humidity pulled the drum skin tighter and small beads of sweat appeared at the little girl’s hairline. Insects clicked and clacked, the sleeping child stirred when a fern leaf tickled her cheek, and then—

‘Vivien!’

—her name came suddenly, skimming down the hillside, cutting through the undergrowth to reach her.

She woke with a start.

‘Viv-i-en?’

It was Aunt Ada, Daddy’s elder sister.

Vivien sat up, brushing strands of hair across her damp fore-head with the back of her hand. Bush bees hummed nearby. She yawned.

‘Young miss, if you’re out here—for the love of God, show yourself.’

Most times, obedience was of no concern to Vivien, but the voice of her usually unflappable aunt was flapping so hard that curiosity got the better of her and she rolled out from beneath the ferns, snatching up her lunch things. The day had darkened; clouds covered the blue sky and the gorge was now in shadow.