The Windy Season (2 page)

Paul's grandmother suggested the possibility of an accident, that Elliot might have run off the road somewhere in a place that would conceal the car, hidden behind a wall of trees or deep in desert bush. In the course of the afternoon she became
convinced of the scenario and suggested that she set off and begin a search of the country roads. Paul's mother found the idea simultaneously irritating and overwhelming, and ordered her to stay until the police arrived. She said it was unlikely that Elliot could have left the road without a trace. Paul's grandmother went quiet, as if suddenly realising the practical dilemma posed by the theory. Seven hundred kilometres of looking for brake marks on worn highways, of searching the roadside bush north of the city and the infinite maze of four-wheel-drive trails between Perth and Stark and all those barren stretches of coast and beaches that didn't have names. And Paul suddenly understood the power of losing someone, just how big it made the world seem, so impossibly endless and silent and indifferent, and how small it made you feel.

It was evening when the police car pulled into the driveway, the headlights shining through the living-room windows.

They sat at the kitchen table upstairs. His father opened the balcony doors. The night was hot and still. The dog panted at their feet. Paul's mother sat at the head of the table, opposite his father. Paul sat opposite the officer. He was not much older than Elliot, maybe mid-twenties. He smelt of spray deodorant.

He works on boats, right? the officer said, pen poised above a notepad. Crayfish?

Yes, said Paul's mother.

Stark?

He's been up there the last two seasons.

The officer paused to write notes. Paul watched his mother. Her fingers were curled in Ringo's hair. The fox terrier's panting smile looked ridiculous in the seriousness of the moment. For a second Paul had the terrifying sensation of wanting to laugh out loud.

So he'd be making good money? the officer asked, looking up. Could take off any time he wanted? You said on the phone he travels a lot.

But always comes back, Paul's mother said.

She's right, his father said. Always comes back.

Does he go away for long periods?

He'll be gone for a few weeks, sometimes, his mother said. About this time of year, after the season, in the winter. He'll go up the coast.

Alone?

Sometimes he'd take that girl of his, Tess, she said. But he likes his own company.

So he could just be up the coast somewhere? It's only been a few days.

Not without telling Tess, his mother said. He wouldn't just pack up and take off without telling her where he was going.

The girlfriend, the officer said. Tess. She's been in a little bit of trouble with the local police.

What does that mean? she asked.

Drug use, the officer said. Possession.

Elliot's never said much about her, she said. He wouldn't even bring her down with him to meet us.

He's never got into any kind of trouble? Any disagreements you know of, people who might want to hurt him?

His mother shook her head.

The officer paused. And the cousin, he said. The one he works for on the boat?

Jake? his mother said sharply.

I read his file also, the officer explained.

He wouldn't hurt Elliot.

I have to ask, the officer said, eyes down.

Paul's father peered over as if trying to read the officer's notes.

It was a long time ago, his mother said. What happened with Jake, it was a long time ago.

Okay, the officer replied. But you haven't noticed anything strange or different about your son's behaviour?

Elliot's not the sort to disappear, his mother said, the volume of the statement causing the policeman to lift his eyes from his notepad.

Mrs Darling, I know this is difficult, but we see it every other week. Around forty thousand people go missing around the country every year. Ninety-five per cent of them turn up in a matter of months. I'm guessing Elliot's had a gutful of cray bait and wanted some fresh air. He'll be back.

There was silence. Paul looked at his parents. His father stood up and walked towards the kettle on the kitchen counter. His mother was staring at the tablecloth.

He's just an ordinary kid, she said.

The officer nodded.

On that first night after Elliot's disappearance, Paul found himself on the computer in the study long after midnight, unsure of what he was trying to do, what he was looking for. In the hours before dawn he gorged on the cases of missing people, the search results serving up the usual extremes: people who had returned or been found sometimes decades after they had disappeared.

There was the case of the Croatian woman who had been missing for twenty-five years. It had been big news years ago, when he was in primary school: the girl who had vanished as a ten-year-old only to be found in a makeshift enclosure in an inner-city backyard by fire crews responding to a blaze within a
house, her now-elderly captor having left the kitchen stove on while he was sleeping.

He read dozens of articles. The Brazilian fisherman who had drifted a thousand kilometres to an island in the West Indies and was found by a BBC film crew who had come to do a story on migratory birds. A girl the same age as Paul, seventeen, who awoke with severe retrograde amnesia in a Los Angeles hospital. She had a Yorkshire accent but carried no identification.

There were more of these kinds of stories than were possible to read. The internet was thick with them. And it left his mind feeling choked and heavy, like a greasy washcloth, dense with information that it didn't need, but couldn't easily let go.

Elliot never did social media, thought the whole online thing was bullshit. Paul figured his brother was suspicious of the virtual world, uncomfortable with the performances of people. And how close you get to the shadowy core of them if you wanted to. It was all there online. And Elliot didn't have Paul's appetite for digging around. There was only one mention of his brother that Paul could find, in the result of a cricket match on the North Metropolitan Cricket Association website. Paul remembered the game. Elliot had filled in reluctantly for a team captained by an old high school friend and he had taken a wicket. E. Darling 1/12. And that was it. No video or photographs. In the infinite landscape of the internet, where Paul could find any mad story, where every wild hypothetical had a real-life, human example and every unfathomable, immaterial thing took shape, Elliot could almost have never existed.

The longer Paul stayed on the computer the harder it was to leave it. It was the illusion of doing something. Typing words into the search engine had the feeling of action. He would be better off sleeping. He knew that. But there was an element to it
that he wasn't in command of, hitting search on autopilot, feeling neither fully awake nor tired enough to sleep, feeling nothing much at all. 1994 Pajero Western Australia. Search. Car accident Brand Highway. Search. Young surfer accident Stark. Search. Each failure fuelled the next attempt, and each new search led him deeper. And then he would give in to the undertow of the search engine, its eddying into darkness. He found himself watching Russian dash-cam footage of head-on car accidents, and he saw the grainy CCTV video of a gangland shooting in Portland. He lingered over links to execution videos recorded on mobile phones. Brazilian drug-cartel beheadings. Sniper kills on Middle Eastern battlefields. He didn't click on these but maybe he wanted to. Was it nobility that stopped him or gutlessness? It made him tired of himself, this tiptoeing at the threshold, like a pervert. Or, perhaps worse, a cowardly pervert. It left him feeling like shit and exhausted, but restless too.

He found a satellite image of central Western Australia. Hovered over Stark. Scanned the coast as if he might see a figure walking on some remote beach. Knew it was pointless, but he kept looking anyway.

Out the study window was the fading night. The suburb emerging in colourless, cubist forms. Huge windows opaque in the low light. He heard the flickering of sprinklers, watched them misting over lawns as flat as carpet. At the end of Eileen Street the sea off Cottesloe was still and grey. He saw the weakening flash of the one-mile reef markers. The tourist island beyond them, a thin line on the horizon.

He heard his alarm go down the hallway in his bedroom. Six am. The dairy shift at the supermarket started in an hour. Paul turned back to the screen and the pixelated coast of Stark, the dark ocean to the west and the brownish desert stretching endlessly east and out of view. He switched the computer off.

The President said to me that a man knows most about himself when he's got his eye through the scope of his rifle. Glassing over the torso of another man at nine hundred metres. The world all distant and shimmering and silent. That's when he learns the things about himself that he is connected to. The things he can live with. The President said he learnt all of his lessons through the scope of a Parker-Hale .308 in Vietnam. And I imagine that big sweating face of his against the stock. Sprawled out with his balls steeped in the jungle mud and his cheeks rippling with each gunshot and I see him learning and I often wonder what. But I don't doubt that he did learn something. You don't become the president of anything without some sort of education. The President said it's a fact this country was born in battle and it's not the first time I've heard that, but no one could tell a war story like him. All wide-eyed fishermen and farm fellas stumbling seasick over tidal flats into Turkish rifle fire. Wading through bloodied trenches in French wheat fields. And I wonder what sort of country is born in all that and I wonder the effect it has on fellas. If it explains anything about the way they are. The things they say and the things they don't. The sounds that come out of them when they sleep. Cos I've held a gun in my hands and I've just shot a man dead. I don't know what all of this has done to me or what I have learnt and it's probably for someone else to judge. So I'll tell you all this from the beginning. The way we came through the heart of everything. Tell you how it got here.

Victim or criminal

THE POLICE FILED THE MISSING PERSON'S
report a week after the officer came to the house. It didn't make the television news but Paul found a piece in
The West Australian
, a photo and article taken word for word from the press release. The local newspaper also ran an article, again with the same text but this time with a headline in bold type.
COTTESLOE MAN MISSING
. The word ‘man' felt off. Every time it was used, by the police or in the news, it felt like they were getting something wrong, talking about the wrong person. Paul always saw Elliot as older but ‘man' seemed inaccurate for a twenty-year-old. It was as if they were all missing an important point, getting further from the truth of what might have happened to him, or that they were never close.

A letter arrived to inform them that Elliot's profile had been uploaded on to the national Missing Persons website, and Paul began to visit the site often. He stared at Elliot's face amid the
collection of profile photographs as odd and unrelated as the items that wash up in a storm. Old photographs and new ones. Elderly faces and then younger ones like his brother's. The faces of children. There were photos that had been taken by family or friends, faces smiling warmly back at the camera, children laughing. Others looked like driver's licence photographs, or police mug shots, the expressions in them steely or panicked, as though the person was already lost or in danger, like they could see their future coming.

Elliot's expression in his photograph was typical of him. Smiling politely but as though he was bracing himself, holding out for the camera to leave him. His smile was tight, fading before it had even started. His brow furrowed. Paul knew that the photographer, most likely his mother, would have been laughing while the picture was taken, the laugh of someone revelling in stealing something. Everyone in the room would have enjoyed his discomfort.