An Isolated Incident (23 page)

Then this rumbling noise started and I about wet myself before I realised it was a car coming. Not a car; a truck. I ran to the window and watched as it stopped out front and the man climbed out of the cabin, moved up my driveway slow and easy. It occurred to me I should drop to the floor, pretend I wasn't there, but I couldn't move.

He knocked on the door and my face got all hot and then the warmth spread down my neck, to my chest and arms and stomach and legs. He kept knocking. I reached for the light and turned it on and it didn't flicker. I opened the door and he walked in, not smiling but not angry or anything, just normal, like he did this every day. He said hello and I said it back.

His touch left me cold, but only metaphorically. And that was better. Or it seemed so at the time.

I woke in the night to the sound of crying. It was soft, like she was trying to muffle it with a pillow. The man beside me snored so loud, too, it made it hard to hear anything else. But I heard and I knew it was her. I told her I was sorry and there was a little pause and then she started up again. I lay awake listening until she cried herself to sleep and then I did the same.

In the morning I gave him back his money. I don't know why.

No, I do.

He shrugged, pocketed the notes, left the way he'd come, few words and no expression.

Monday, 27 April

When May arrived, Chris was waiting on the porch, huge sunglasses covering half her face, her white patent-leather tote bag at her feet.

‘You going out? I thought we were going to talk some more this morning.'

‘Yeah, really need to get out of the house, though. Can we go somewhere?'

‘Of course.'

Chris picked up her bag and started down the driveway. May followed, unlocked the car, watched from the corner of her eye as Chris strapped herself into the passenger seat. The woman's hands seemed electrified. Not shaky. Jolting sharply, without pattern.

‘Everything alright?'

‘Oh, you know. Bad night.'

‘Sorry to hear that. It's a beautiful day, though. We should sit outside somewhere. Is there a nice quiet park nearby or –'

‘I wanna see where she died. Was found. You know the place, right?'

‘Are you sure you're up for it?'

Chris swallowed, pressed a hand to the base of her throat. ‘Feels like something I have to do.'

‘Sure. Of course.' May started the car. This was so fucking perfect she couldn't believe it. ‘Hey, I wanted to tell you,' she said, keeping a calm unexcited tone as she drove towards the edge of town, ‘I've spoken to a couple of editors.
Good Weekend
,
Australian Magazine
and
Women's Weekly
are all interested. Each would want it angled a slightly different way, of course. My preference would be
Women's Weekly
. Circulation's excellent. It's a monthly, so much longer for the physical copy to be hanging around places getting picked up. And they'd be wanting more personal focus, less about the crime itself, more about who Bella was as a person, how her loss has affected you. What do you think?'

‘Yep, sounds okay.'

May glanced across. ‘Did you want to call Nate, see if he wants to come along? Might help to have some support.'

‘Nate's back in Sydney.'

‘For good?'

‘More or less. He'll pass through but . . . They're having a baby. Him and Renee. So he obviously needs to be around a lot more. Around her.'

‘I'm sorry.'

‘Nothing to be sorry for. How far is it?'

They'd passed the Melbourne exit sign a minute ago. Chris had become supernaturally still.

‘Coming up on the left in a sec. But listen, if you change your mind at any point we can leave. Just say the word, right?'

‘Yep.'

May spotted the enshrined tree up ahead, braked too quickly, half skidded to a stop at the verge.

‘So this is it, eh?' Chris didn't wait for an answer, just opened the car door and strode out across the gravel, over the grass. She stopped short about a metre from the tree with the misspelt signs and deflated balloons and dead flowers. When May caught up with her, Chris held out her palm: a warning. Stop here.

‘You okay?'

‘Yeah. Yeah, I just . . .' She shook her head, dropped her hand. ‘I thought I heard something.'

‘Something like . . .'

‘I dunno.' She shuffled forward a few steps, stopped again. ‘There. There. Did you hear that? Like a whooshing sound?'

‘Um, maybe. It's windy.'

Chris laughed, fake, awkward. ‘Yeah, geez, I'm all spooked. Silly.'

‘Spooked how?'

Chris waved her off, stepped closer to the tree, sucked in her breath. ‘It's nice, I guess, that strangers'd do stuff like this. Weird, too, but.' She pressed a finger to a faded photocopy of a newspaper reproduction of Bella's photo.

‘Weird how?'

‘Well, have you ever done it? Read about some terrible crime and then driven out to the shithole where it happened and left a little handmade sign or whatever? Don't get me wrong, I think it's sweet, but I don't get it.' Chris squatted and picked up a long-dead bunch of roses. Once-yellow petals scattered and she brushed them away. ‘Woulda cost a fortune, these ones. My favourites, you know. Wish I'd seen them when they were fresh.'

‘Did Bella like roses?'

‘Fucking hated them.' Chris barked out a laugh, stood, brushed her hands together. ‘Any flowers. She liked them all right in gardens, but bunches, bouquets, all that – bane of her life, she said. People'd send them to the home for birthdays or anniversaries or, I don't know, out of guilt. Staff have to take the deliveries, bring 'em in to the patients, half the time poor old dear doesn't have a clue what she's supposed to be celebrating, so the staff explain. Then they've gotta find a vase if the cheap relos didn't send them in one. Find the vase, arrange the things, get pricked by thorns, bits of leaf everywhere. Put it somewhere it won't get knocked over. Few days later chuck 'em out, rinse the vase, explain to the old dear why her flowers are gone. “Two minutes on the phone for the guilty relo, a whole damn rigmarole for the staff,” Bella used to say. Some of the other aides'd just chuck the flowers soon as they came in or leave them in the reception area, but Bella always made sure the patients got them. Whinged about it after, but always made sure Old Mrs Whatever had the fucking roses the son who's never visited her in a decade sends.' Chris picked a clingy petal off the front of her shirt. ‘See what she meant now. Bloody messy business. Oh, wait!' Chris's hand flew to her throat as she looked up into the skeletal branches overhead. ‘This tree isn't – The police didn't say anything about –'

‘No, no, this isn't the place where – I guess it was just the most convenient place for people to leave . . .'

‘So, where?' She spun on her heels, squinted towards the line of gums. ‘Just, like, in the middle somewhere or . . .?'

May nodded, started walking. Chris strode out in front a little, looking back over her shoulder and adjusting her trajectory as May closed in on the place.

They stood shoulder to shoulder over the patch of dirt. May saw it as in the photos, had to close her eyes to clear Bella away.

‘Here? Yeah, okay, this is more what I .
. .'
Chris squatted, patted the dirt. ‘Yeah, okay.
'
She looked out towards the road with a worried frown and then back over her shoulder to where the bush began. The creases softened. She breathed out and patted the dirt again. ‘It
'
s peaceful in a way, isn
'
t it? Like, listen. Couple of birds, cars, but that
'
s not a bad sound if you know how to think about it. It
'
s a thing she
'
d do when she was little. Her room was at the back of the house, highway behind us, over the fence. She
'
d pretend that whoosh whoosh sound was the ocean. Once I was sitting with her – Mum and the boyfriend were fighting, I suppose – and I was sitting in with Bel while she went to sleep and she was saying how it was nice to hear the ocean and some hell-big truck
'
s gone past just then and blasted its horn and she didn
'
t skip a beat, just went, “Ah, there
'
s the old tugboat coming through.” Funny little
. . .'
Chris wiped her forehead and the back of her neck, seemingly oblivious to the tears streaming down her cheeks, the snot dripping from her nose. ‘Bloody hot out here. She
'
d be red as a lobster in seconds, sun like this. But it was night, wasn
'
t it, so that
'
s all right. Woulda been dark though.
'
She looked up and out, then back at the tear-splotched dirt. ‘No lights for ages, hey? Yeah, dark, no birds, but some cars maybe, she would
'
ve thought of the ocean thing, I bet.
'

May turned away, watched a clump of grass shaking a few metres away. A sound ripped through the day. A banshee wailing with the force to shatter God's skull. Impossible that such a sound could come from a lone woman. But there she was, heaving and wailing spraying snot and tears and sweat.
Like a creature possessed
,
May wrote in her mental notebook. No. Bullshit.
Like any one of us would. Like all of us should when we think about what happened here
.

A
fter I'd been out to see the place it happened I walked into my house and felt like I was still outside. Where I sat at the kitchen table, I was an easy target. Anyone could walk up the driveway and see me through that huge window. Closing the curtain made it worse. The entire outside world became an ever-moving shadow.

I stood against the front door and heard the wind pushing leaves along the road. I pressed the lock button in and out, in and out. What use is a lock if it's installed in a piece of bloody cardboard?

I walked down to the hardware and bought a galvanised steel-core door with a deadlock and chain and paid extra to have it delivered and installed that arvo. I also ordered security roller-blinds for all my windows, which the fella promised would be installed within three days.

By four o'clock the workmen had left and I was sitting alone, looking at my new door, thinking that I better get off my arse and get ready for work. That's when it started. She started.

First was the cold. You'd think I'd have been used to it by now but it's not the kind of thing you can get used to. It's like someone's slit your skin at the top of your spine and poured coldness in. ‘I don't know what to do,' I said aloud and for a moment nothing happened. Then the smell of wet earth filled the kitchen. It was so strong and thick, I started to gag. Just like that it went away and so did the cold.

I ran to my room and started undressing, ready to chuck on my work gear and get out of there, but as soon as I pulled on my shirt the most terrible screaming started in my head. I know it was in my head, because I fell onto the bed and pulled the pillow over my face and stuck my hands over my ears and it just got louder and clearer.

I don't know how long I lay like that, wishing for it to stop, but at some point it got quieter and I could hear the little girl's voice underneath,
I'm cold, Chrissy, I'm cold I'm cold I'm so so cold
,
and the wet earth was in my mouth and throat again. I threw the pillow off my face, overbalanced and crashed to the floor. The voice and the scream stopped instantly.

I crouched there, panting, waiting for something else or for enough nothing to know it was over. A shadow was spreading out on the wall in front of me. Spreading and darkening. I pressed my hand to it and was relieved at the heat, because that was a predictable thing. In the midst of it all here was something familiar. But when I brought my hand away it was covered in blood. I ran to the kitchen and turned on the tap, but my hand was clean and dry. I noticed the house had become quiet and I was warm. I also noticed my work shirt had a big rip along the left seam.

Breathing as calmly and deeply as I could I went back to the bedroom. The wall was normal. I took off my ripped shirt and pulled on another. The world tilted. It wasn't that I fell or got dizzy; it was like the wall and floor switched places and I was suddenly sliding backwards.
I slammed into the dressing table and my little ceramic make-up tray crashed down on me, spilling perfume and eyeshadow all over my clean shirt.

I didn't move for a long time. When I finally did it was only because I was frightened I'd freeze to death if I didn't. Moving felt difficult. I've never felt exhaustion like it. I made it to my phone on the kitchen table and called in sick to work. The second I hung up the exhaustion and the cold were gone, just like that, and I thought, well, okay, Bel, message received.

I put on an old Madonna CD and walked through the house spraying the vanilla deodoriser she loved. I stripped the sex-stained sheets from my bed and took them and the bathroom bin holding the condoms and threw the lot in the outside garbage. I came back in and secured my new locks. I made a stack of toasted cheese sandwiches and smothered them in tomato sauce and then we snuggled under a blanket and watched three Julia Roberts DVDs in a row. Before the end of the third, I felt her head on my shoulder and heard her whispery snore.

I felt okay about having a couple of drinks then. I knew she felt safe and would sleep through the night.

Tuesday, 28 April

May was woken by her phone. She answered blindly, heart hammering. Chris's voice. No ‘hello', just a child's question floating out into the TV-lit room. ‘Do you believe in ghosts?'

‘What?' May fumbled for the remote and muted the news. ‘Chris, it's the middle of the night, why are you –'

‘It's barely past two. But, listen. Listen, I need to know –'

‘You're a bit pissed, hey?' May found the lamp switch; the room turned dusky pink and her heart slowed.

‘Yeah, a bit, but, listen, May, do ya?'

‘Believe in ghosts? Um, not really. I don't think so.'

‘Oh.'

‘Chris, what's wrong? Has something happened?'

‘Yeah, nah. I mean, I thought something did, but it can't have, hey? I just . . . Nate said it's grief. Like I'm seeing her because I need to, because I miss her too much.'

May's heart sped up again. ‘You're seeing Bella?'

‘Yeah. No. I saw her once, at the window. But that was a while back. There's been other stuff happening. I don't know. Sometimes it feels like she's here. Her smell, her hands. But sometimes it's just . . . scary. So it can't be her then, can it? She wouldn't want to scare me.'

‘I don't know, Chris. Look, is Nate with you?'

‘Nah, he never stays with me overnight anymore. As if we can't fuck just as well during the day.'

A vision of Craig slamming into her while the midday sun turned the living room into an oven, the sharp, shocking pain of the memory making her gasp.

‘Don't you act all shocked, not after what you've been getting up to with Chas. Who's no more single than Nate, thank you very much.'

‘I'm not shocked, I was just – How'd you know about that?'

A cackle. ‘It's not exactly a secret. Babin' young reporter from out of town; nice-looking root-rat constantly on the hunt for fresh pussy. It was only a matter of time, hey? Though from what I hear it didn't take much of that. Didn't even buy a beer before – woo – off you went.'

‘Shit.'

‘Ah, don't worry about it. No one cares.'

‘Really?'

‘Oh, they talk. People talk a lot of crap about everyone here. But it doesn't matter. It doesn't change anything. You're still a reporter. People won't tell you any more or less than they want to just because you've joined the sisterhood of Chasfuckers.'

May sipped from the water glass on the bedside table. She was a Chasfucker. Brilliant.

‘Seriously, but. Do you think Nate's right? Is it a grief thing?'

‘Oh, I don't know. I suppose it could be. I mean, it seems more likely than . . .'

‘Yeah. I know it does, but . . .' A swallow, a glass connecting with a tabletop, bottle unscrewed, soft splash. ‘Not doing the job of comforting me right now, you know?'

‘Look, Chris, do you want me to come around?'

‘Nah, it's cool. I shouldna called so late. I'll see ya tomorrow, yeah?'

The line went dead. May switched off the light, lay back down, pressed hard on the bruises inside her thighs, blood surging at the memory of Chas's stabbing hipbones. Fucking whore. Him, her. What was the point? The hunger for flesh, the crazed greed that made everything permissible, and then the shame. Not shame about the fucking, but about the need for it. Shame that in the lead-up moments it felt so important and now, lying alone in her shitty hotel bed, it seemed as exciting and urgent as double-stitching the dropped hem of her suit pants.

It hadn't felt like that with Craig. The urgency never left, the shame never came. Until the end – hell, until right now – having his flesh on hers seemed a necessary thing.

May punched the bed, sat up and drank some more water, punched the bed again. She forced her mind to the phone call. When was the last time she'd heard anyone talk about ghosts? At uni, a story about a woman who'd suicided from a top-floor window and whose ghost would sometimes push books and papers to the floor during exams. Teenage sleepovers, silly, gory stories about axe murderers who wouldn't die and children who refused to leave the place they were killed.

Further back, family stories saved for those nights when a summer storm or forgotten bill had shut the power off. May and her brothers snuggled together in Mum's bed or spread out on the back verandah fanning each other with pieces of stiff card, the wind firing warm water bullets at their feet, and Mum would light a candle or let the darkness be, and she would tell of the old lady at the end of Aunty Kay's bed when she was eight, the teenage murder victim who cried invisibly in the old Parramatta cinema toilets, the spirit who would untuck Grandma's sheets and warm up the bottom of the bed for her and sometimes switch the radio to Classic FM while Grandma was listening to talkback.

A memory long abandoned flooded back: May was sixteen, on a history excursion to Old Government House. A middle-aged volunteer in a flouncy dress and mob cap led the teenagers through the building telling dull stories about early colonial governors and their wives. May was up the front of the group as usual, in an effort to escape the attentions of Vaughan Tanner and his mates up the back. It was the height of summer, and when they stopped in a long stone corridor to hear yet another tale of an old English dude recreating the place he
'
d sailed for two years to get away from, May leant back against the stones and luxuriated in feeling cool for the first time that week. She was wide awake, though bored out of her mind. She closed her eyes for a second, but no more.

When she opened them there was a girl of twelve or thirteen standing behind the guide. She wore a long pale blue dress, a matching bonnet, a white apron and a short white cape over her shoulders. May wondered if she had missed the introduction of a child performer into the tedious colonial pantomime, but even as she thought it she knew it wasn't so. The girl flickered as though she was standing behind a translucent, fluttering curtain. Her arms were wrapped tight around her belly. Tears streamed down her face. The guide kept droning and Mr Wilcox kept nodding enthusiastically and the students kept whispering and jostling all around her. May locked eyes with the girl. She flushed with heat and was told later she made a ‘weird squeaking sound' and then fainted.

She was only out for a second, but the guide uncovered a walkie-talkie from within the folds of her gown and called for first aid. May could only say she was fine so many times before the repeating of it became more embarrassing than the fainting. She was glad to follow the first-aid lady who came out of the hallway. As she passed she heard Vaughan and his cronies saying, ‘I
'
m fine, I
'
m fine, just a little fainting spell, I
'
m fine,
'
in high-pitched voices.

Outside she felt much worse on account of the blazing sun and the increasing understanding of how very, very embarrassing the incident was. She must
'
ve cried a bit because the first-aid lady, who was also the refreshments lady, patted her back and said, ‘Don
'
t feel bad, that passageway often freaks people out. I
'
ve felt queasy walking through there myself.
'

‘I saw a girl crying.'

‘From your school?'

‘No.'

‘Ah.' The woman looked back at the building. ‘I've never met anyone who's seen her. Only heard third or fourth hand.'

‘Who is she?'

‘Can't really say, love, but there are stories. Come back for the night-time ghost tour and you'll hear them all.'

‘Can't you tell me?'

‘Not really meant to tell students that kind of thing. Sorry. Maybe if you ask your teacher he can find out for you?'

May sank into silence. She wondered if you could get heat stroke in less than ten minutes. After a bit the class came trooping out into the gardens and she rejoined them while the first-aid/refreshment lady went off to haul out the juice and biscuits for morning tea. May accepted the class's judgement that she was a frail little fainting princess and after a while began to think of herself that way. She often insisted on sitting near windows and exits, for instance, ‘in case I get faint'.

Sitting up in bed and switching on the light again she grabbed her laptop and looked up Old Government House. There it was, exactly as she remembered it, an off-white Georgian mansion whose shuttered windows stared blindly out over the clipped lawns. She skimmed the historical and ghost tour info and then went back to the search page, added ‘haunted OR ghost' to her search term and started to read through the dozens of pages of results.

Lots of references to the ‘haunted atmosphere' and ‘ghosts of the past', and plenty of bloggers reporting on the ghost tour, some of them with grainy, dark photos claiming to be of spirits. After half an hour she came to the page of a ‘spirit-whisperer' who had visited Old Government House after hearing that ‘there were many tormented spirits in need of a sympathetic ear'. Among them, May read with a rapidly increasing heart rate, was that of fourteen-year-old Maisie Noakes, a maid, who was gang-raped by ‘persons unknown' in the passageway between the main house and the servants' quarters. She died soon after of internal injuries. ‘Poor Maisie seems not to understand that her sad, painful life is over. She haunts the passageway clutching her stomach and crying, waiting, tragically in vain, for help to come.'

‘
Real good move reading that shit in the middle of the night,' May muttered. She got up and went to the bathroom, determinedly ignoring the impulse to check inside the cupboards and out the window. Coincidence coincidence coincidence,
she repeated, until it turned into a mantra that eventually allowed her to fall asleep.

Before heading over to Chris's in the morning, May called Max. ‘Weird question, I know, but . . . ghosts.'

‘Not a question.'

‘Do you believe in them?'

‘Um, no. But only because I'm not six years old or mentally deficient.'

‘Judgy much?'

‘Oh no, May. Is this the next stage of your unravelling? You're being haunted?'

‘I'm not unravelling! Is that what people are saying?'

‘If you consider me people, then yes.'

‘Obviously I don't, so that's fine. And no, I'm not being haunted, but this woman I'm writing about thinks she is and at first I was like,
pfft, she's a drunk, whatever
, but then I had this weird memory.' May told him about the school excursion and then the internet search.

‘Oooooh, spooky.'

‘It is, right?'

He sighed. ‘Seriously? May, ghosts aren't real, but nasty shit that people's brains sometimes can't handle is and so is the power of imagination.'

‘But the thing I read last night described the girl exactly.'

‘As I bet the guide did during your tour. Seems likely you heard the story and all your teen angst emo combined with your excitable imagination and created this image which was not dissimilar to the image other people who have heard the story have imagined.'

‘The guide didn't tell us that story. I'm sure of it.'

‘Well, you heard it on the bus on the way in or from someone whispering up the back. Trust me on this, high schoolers adore local ghost stories. Especially ones involving sex and violence. That's always been true. Stories like that one would've been told and retold by generations of kids.'

‘Yeah. Maybe.'

‘Yeah definitely. Look, when are you coming home? We miss you.'

‘Who's we?'

‘Mum, Jason, me. Probably other people do too, but I don't know them so can't say for sure.'

‘I'll be here a while longer. I'm just starting to build a real rapport with this woman.'

‘And money? Are you building a rapport with some money?'

‘Sorry, Mum, is that you?'

‘We're worried about you. You know, the whole not having a job and therefore not getting paid thing.'

‘I will get paid. I just have to put the work in first. Until then I have some savings. It's fine.'

‘And so you put the work in and get paid for this article and then what? Hope there's an arrest? Hope there's a long drawn-out trial? Hope there's a twist and a new arrest at the last minute so you can get another long drawn-out trial?'

‘Fuck you.'

‘I'm just saying. It's not a life plan.'

‘No, it's not a life plan, but it's not as scatty and nasty as you make it sound either. This is a story I care about. A lot, actually. I'm thinking of turning the article into a book, as a matter of fact.'

He was silent a second. ‘A book. Okay. That's interesting. Means you can apply for some grants, get some funding.'

‘Yes, I know.' She typed ‘book funding grants' into Google. ‘It's in process.'

‘Well . . . okay. I'm glad to hear it.'

‘Good.'

‘You can still come home though. Work on the book in between other work and hanging out with your brother?'

‘I'll try to come and visit soon, okay?'

‘Alright. You take care. And stay away from GhostHunter dot com or whatever the fuck it is. Crazy is catching, you know.'

Interview transcript

28 April 2015

Arthur Tomesberry, Strathdee Historical Society

When we spoke a few weeks ago you said you thought this area was haunted. Can you tell me more about that?

Yeah, well, there's the massacres. I use the plural advisedly. No written records, but the stories have come down and even if they hadn't, it's common sense.

Common sense?

This was no terra nullius. This was inhabited land. Long inhabited. Deeply and well inhabited. And then, within a couple of years, it's like the blacks were never here. You think it's likely every last one of them just shrugged and wandered off, leaving it all to the new arrivals? Pull the other one. Read the official history and between each line of text is a paddock full of bodies.