Page 11 of The Sirens

10

LUCY

WEDNESDAY, 13 FEbrUARY 2019

Her phone rings, cutting through the dream, a rope she grasps to pull herself to wakefulness.

Lucy opens her eyes and sees only darkness so heavy that she thinks that it hasn’t worked, that she’s still there, in the roaring black cave of the ship.

The phone stops ringing, leaving her in silence, but for the pound of the sea.

She imagines this must be how it feels to be in water, fighting a current. Clinging to reality even as the dream world surges around her.

She knows what she dreamed. One of the paintings downstairs – white eyes in the darkness, the tangle of grimy limbs. The blue-black and ochre swirls of paint – the very texture of fear – had come to life in her mind. Pressing against her nose, her eyes.

She can still taste it, that animal tang of terror.

The paintings have fevered her mind. Her thoughts are like fish, flashing bright then darting away from her.

There’s a circle of mist on the windowpane. As if she had stood there, nose pressed against the glass, looking down at the black sea. The pane rattles; she sees now that the catch on the window is loose.

She is sure that she locked it before she went to bed. She had wedged the chair under the door and closed the window, pulling tight to make sure it was secure.

She must have tried to open it in her sleep. Cold fear washes through her. What if she’d succeeded? What if she’d—

Her horror is interrupted by the chirp of a text, a blue square of light. She picks up her phone, her thoughts reeling. Could it be a text from Ben?

A new fear overwhelms her. She imagines cold, distant sentences: I just wanted to let you know that I will be pressing charges against you for assault …

But the phone won’t unlock: there is no response to the pad of her thumb on the home button. And then she realises that it wasn’t her phone ringing that woke her, but Jess’s. Her body thuds with relief.

The screen shows the time: just after 10 p.m. She can see the preview of the text, from someone called Rebecca Waters. The name is familiar: of course, Jess’s gallerist. The tall, blue-haired woman her mother had found so intimidating four years ago.

Hey, sorry to call so late …

But that’s all she can see without unlocking the phone. She sits up in bed, drawing the coverlet tight around her.

Dora Maar, dislodged from her position at Lucy’s side, meows in protest.

‘Sorry, kitty,’ she murmurs, caressing the soft nap of fur between the cat’s ears.

She bites her lip, staring at the phone screen, belly shifting with guilt.

It feels wrong to even consider such a transgression. But despite Melody’s reassurances that Jess had told her she was going away, there’s still a flicker of doubt in her mind. If she can get into Jess’s phone, then she can read Rebecca’s message. Just in case it holds some clue to her sister’s whereabouts.

But if she’s honest, there’s another, darker reason. It stings that Melody, her sister’s neighbour, knows so much more about Jess’s life than Lucy does.

She thinks of the night they spent at Jess’s flat, dancing and singing together; later, the warmth spreading through her belly as they shared hot chocolate and confidences.

‘So,’ Jess had asked, she remembers now, ‘do you have a boyfriend? A girlfriend?’

‘You’re worse than Mum,’ Lucy had said. ‘She keeps asking if I need her to buy me some condoms or dental dams. I think she hopes it is a girlfriend.’

Jess had laughed softly, and the sound had emboldened Lucy. She’d scarcely been able to believe she was there, on her big sister’s squashy velvet couch, surrounded by the charming clutter of plants and canvases and mismatched furniture. How many times had she imagined such a moment? She’d nestled closer to Jess and leaned forward, intending to put her mug down on the mosaic coffee table.

‘What about you? I mean – how old were you, when you first … you know.’

Jess stiffened, the sudden movement causing the mug to tilt in Lucy’s hand, spilling hot chocolate all over the woven rug.

‘Sorry, sorry,’ she’d said, ‘I’ll get a towel.’

‘It’s fine,’ Jess had smiled stiffly. ‘Leave it, I’ll fix it in the morning. Anyway, I should let you get to bed – lots planned tomorrow.’

She stood and switched off the lights, leaving Lucy alone in the quiet dark.

Before they stopped completely, her sister’s subsequent phone calls had been one-sided. Jess had asked so many questions about Lucy’s schoolwork and study plans that there hadn’t been room for her to ask anything in return. Indeed, Jess seemed bent on concealment, from the trick-mirror imagery of her paintings to her uniform of sweeping, shrouding black. Her older sister had drawn a veil down over her life, a veil that Lucy longed to lift.

Lucy sometimes wondered whether something awful – unspeakable – had happened to Jess. Something that she kept buried, locked away inside the fortress she presented to the outside world. She thinks now of Jess’s sleepwalking: could it be the reason for the distance she’s created around herself, her protective force field?

Did Jess hurt someone, like Lucy has? Or did someone hurt her?

The phone feels suddenly white-hot in Lucy’s hands, its temptation so great she might be holding a piece of her sister’s consciousness. Here, she thinks, is a way to lift the veil, to see her sister as she really is. The gristle and viscera of her, to use Jess’s own words.

Lucy holds her breath as her fingers move across the screen. She starts with Jess’s own birthday, even though that feels like a long shot. Surely her sister wouldn’t be that na?ve.

It doesn’t work. She tries her mother’s birthday, then her father’s. Nothing.

‘Fuck,’ she says, voice rising in frustration. Dora Maar leaps off the bed, startled.

She enters her own birthday.

20 09 99

The phone unlocks.

For a moment, all Lucy can do is sit there, throat narrowing with pain. The thought of her sister tapping her birthday into her phone multiple times a day – thinking of her multiple times a day – is too much. The screen in front of her blurs as she opens iMessages and reads the full text from Rebecca, the gallerist.

Hey, sorry to call so late but just checking if you got F’s email? I need your OK re courier. Bec x

Lucy opens Gmail and sees that most of the messages are from Rebecca – and someone who seems to be her assistant, Freya – with the subject line, ‘The Sirens’.

Lucy opens the most recent one, from the day before yesterday.

Hi Jess,

We are so excited for your show!

Rebecca has asked me to touch base re: arranging a courier to collect the works next Wednesday PM, so they can be hung in the space on the Thursday (21st Feb). Just checking that this is all OK with you?

Best,

Freya x

Lucy opens the PDF at the bottom of the email chain.

It’s an invitation, bordered with tendrils of dark green seaweed, the brushstrokes swirling and dancing over the page – designed, Lucy is sure, by Jess herself.

Nesbit maybe that’s the sort of stress she wanted to escape from.

Lucy decides to give it a few more days, until Saturday. If Jess still isn’t back by then – well, then she will let herself worry.

She should put the phone down, she knows. She shouldn’t pry any further.

And yet, the urge to scroll through her sister’s life – to learn something, anything about her – lingers. It wouldn’t hurt to check her call records, would it? Just so she’ll know who to ring, if Saturday comes around and there’s still no sign of Jess.

But the records are sparse. Apart from the calls to and from Rebecca and their parents, the only others are from a private number.

Her finger hovers over the icon for Tinder. A man was definitely the last person to use that toilet before Lucy arrived. What if it wasn’t a boyfriend, but someone Jess has a more casual connection with? A stranger, even?

But to her relief, Jess’s profile still lists her location as Sydney – she hasn’t updated it since she moved to Comber Bay. The bio is spare. Artist , it reads. Carrington, cats, martinis. She pouts in the profile picture, lips painted vivid red, stark against the pallor of her skin and the jet fall of her hair. In all the pictures, Jess wears long sleeves, a high-necked top, so that only the skin on her face and hands is visible.

All the matches are at least six months old – from before Jess moved here. Lucy doesn’t feel right about looking through the conversations. She closes the app.

She scrolls past Google Maps, banking. Another messaging app that Lucy’s only vaguely heard of – she has some notion that people use it for sexting – but when she opens it, it’s blank.

She looks through Jess’s camera roll instead, wanting to get inside her sister’s head, to see the world through her eyes. Loads of Dora Maar. A few photographs of her paintings, in different stages of completion. She recognises a series of the huge canvas downstairs, the two girls holding hands as they walk into the sea.

Further back is a photo of the beach, here in Comber Bay. Jess has captured the sun sparkling on the waves, the great blue sweep of the sky, but these are in the background, out of focus. In the foreground of the picture is a stone cairn with a brass plaque.

This cairn was erected on 20 October 1981 by the Comber Bay Historical Society to commemorate the sinking 180 years ago of the convict ship Naiad, wrecked off the coast of Comber Bay with the loss of approximately 100 lives.

May they rest in peace.

Lucy’s heart jolts. Fragments of the dream return to her. She remembers a ship’s hot belly, the scrape of iron on raw skin, the stench of unwashed flesh.

Convicts . Of course. Moments re-order themselves into a pattern she understands. The terrible splendour of a courtroom. The cold bite of iron on a wrist, the dark womb of the ship. A journey to a foreign, frightening place.

This is what she’s been dreaming about.

A Google image search for naiad convict ship brings up a blurred thumbnail – a lithograph – and her heart beats faster when she zooms in.

The ship’s figurehead.

It’s a mermaid.

Her pulse races.

She can hear a voice – not her own voice, but she somehow knows the shape of the words, as if she’s held them in her mouth.

There is a woman, at the ship’s prow her hair tumbles down her back in carved knots, her eyes are brightest blue. And instead of legs, she has a tail. She has a fish’s tail.

Lucy tries to order events in a way that makes sense, tries to construct a story she can understand.

Six months ago, Jess moved to Comber Bay. She read about the shipwreck and was inspired to paint its victims. When Lucy arrived in search of Jess, her graphic paintings gave her nightmares.

But that’s not what happened. Lucy’s first dream about the Naiad was two nights ago, at the motel – before she’d seen her sister’s painting. How is that possible? Has Jess been dreaming of the Naiad , too? Is that the inspiration for her paintings – even for moving here, to Comber Bay?

She picks up her sister’s iPhone again, opens the Notes app. Perhaps Jess will have recorded the details of her dreams here, as Lucy has started doing in her own Notes app?

But Lucy finds nothing; the contents of the app are entirely mundane. Grocery lists, drafts of emails to her gallerist. ‘Fuck,’ Lucy whispers, the word echoing in the dark cavern of the room, reminding her how alone she is.

Wait.

Jess used to keep a journal. Her parents told her, Lucy remembers, because she asked for one herself, on her ninth birthday.

Her father had caught her mother’s eye over the kitchen table.

‘Just like Jess,’ he’d said, in a sad way that Lucy hadn’t understood.

In the end, Lucy’s efforts at journalling had faltered. She’d gathered that she was supposed to use a diary to record feelings , rather than observations. Facts. (Her mother had laughed when she’d announced one morning that she planned to interview everyone in her grade four class and record whether they preferred The Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter. )

But Jess – she’s the opposite, isn’t she? An artist. It’s no surprise she’d keep a journal.

Lucy checks the bedside-table drawer. Hand cream, tissues, the furred yellow disc of a cough drop. A packet of condoms, unopened. But no journal.

She opens the battered wardrobe in the corner of the room, wrinkling her nose at the musty smell. An old running shoe falls onto the dingy carpet, the sole caked with mud. Jess’s clothes always make Lucy think of great winged bats: black dresses with long, fluted sleeves, the odd pair of navy wide-legged trousers.

She crouches on the floor as she parts the dark skirts. The base of the wardrobe is crowded with more shoes, the abandoned snakes of old tights and socks – a shoebox looks promising, but in the end contains only some yellowed tissue paper.

There is nothing under the bed but furred ropes of dust, a pair of underwear, a chocolate-bar wrapper. Lucy wants to disinfect her hands. She’s amazed that Jess has managed to generate such squalor in the few months she’s lived here. She sits back on her haunches, frustration building in her chest. As she surveys the room, her gaze falls on the one place she hasn’t yet looked.

There is a cupboard built into the eaves, where the ceiling lowers. At first, the door doesn’t budge and she worries that it’s locked, but eventually it swings open, releasing a smell of decay that clings to the roof of her mouth. Lucy’s heart sinks as she coughs from dust: this cupboard probably hasn’t been opened in years; it’s unlikely Jess will have made use of it.

But still, curiosity nags at her. Pulling up her T-shirt to cover her mouth and nose, she shines her phone torch into the dark recess. Gradually, shapes form into stacks of papers, boxes, the rusted spears of fishing rods. Shining the torch beam on the pile closest to her, she discovers old editions of Birdwatch Magazine dating from the early 80s. She can’t help but smile: her mother, a devoted ornithophile, has subscribed for years.

She wonders about the house’s former occupants, wonders why they left this stuff behind. Reaching out a tentative finger, she traces the spines of the magazines: the latest edition is from 1982, the year that Baby Hope was discovered.

That makes sense. Cliff House must be the closest dwelling to Devil’s Lookout. Lucy wouldn’t be surprised if whoever lived here at the time was inundated with media requests, perhaps even interviewed by police investigating the child’s abandonment. Perhaps, like the Wilsons, the former occupants had found the scrutiny too much to bear.

In any case, there’s clearly nothing belonging to Jess in here. Perhaps her sister keeps her diary downstairs, or perhaps she’s taken it with her?

Lucy shines her torch into the shadowy space one more time before closing the door. Something familiar – so familiar it seems utterly out of place – catches her eye. The yellow crest of her old school, Dawes Plain High, peers at her from behind the closest stack of magazines.

Crouching to get a closer look, she sees that it’s a schoolbag. JESSICA MARTIN , announces her mother’s neat, distinctive writing in white permanent marker. Lucy grunts, shifting on her side, groping for the backpack. She drags it out, wincing at the awkward angle of her arm.

It’s half rotted, the navy canvas veined with ancient mould. Lucy wrinkles her nose. It’s such a weird thing for Jess to hold on to for all these years, to bring with her when moving from Sydney to Comber Bay. Lucy only left high school two years ago, and she gladly let her mother donate her own (pristine) backpack to the charity shop the week after her final exams. The zip is rusted, and when at last she opens it, the smell from the inside is even worse – briny and rotten. She pulls out an old plaid shirt – yelping when she sees its fur of mildew – and flings it to the other side of the room. A plastic pencil case, full of coloured markers, a portable CD player with some weird Goth CD inside. And, strangely, a wad of bloated paper that she realises is an old map of NSW, folded many times.

And then there it is. A padlocked journal with a swirly pink cover – Lucy remembers the brand. Groovy something, it was called. The clasp is broken, and Lucy opens the journal to read the first page.