Page 16 of The Sirens

15

LUCY

THURSDAY, 14 FEbrUARY 2019

The night air is a cold hand on her face.

At first, she thinks she’s still there. Submerged in darkness, the pound and crash of the sea all around. But where there had been women’s voices, their warmth wrapping around her like cloth, now there is silence. Only the lonely tick of her own pulse.

She opens her eyes and her heart stills in her chest. She is staring into a dizzying drop.

In the moonlight the rocks below glimmer like teeth. The sea shreds itself over them, dark waves foaming white.

Her blood pounds. She forces herself to stay calm.

She is not falling. She can feel the creak of wood beneath her feet. She reaches out her hands and finds the roughhewn barrier. At last she places herself: she is on the deck of Cliff House.

Her wristwatch reads 3.20 a.m. How long has she been standing here? Her bare feet feel numb, frozen. Her mind stutters with panic.

What if she’d fallen?

Inside, Lucy switches on the light and is startled anew by the chaos of the living room. The tarp covering the hole in the floor balloons with wind, as if huge fingers are trying to push their way inside. The walls, with their blistered orange wallpaper, seem to close in on her. Avoiding the gaze of the women in the paintings – those wide, milk white eyes – she heads to the kitchen. She forces herself to catalogue her senses – the rumble of the kettle, the blinking neon of the microwave clock, the hot scald of tea on her tongue. But still it takes a few moments for her to accept that she has stepped out of that dream world and back into this one.

She remembers something she read as a child, in a Lonely Planet book, about sunken cities. Homes and churches drowned by governments to create reservoirs. Whole villages beneath murky water, chimneys and spires shadowing the surface.

That’s what the dreams are like. Unseen, but always there. Waiting.

It frightens her, how much more she remembers with each one. How vivid they are, how real . She can still feel the phantom brush of matted hair against her face, can still hear the murmurs in her ear.

Her scalp prickles as she sits at the kitchen table. What if she hadn’t woken when she did? She closes her eyes, sees herself plummeting over the edge of the cliff. A small figure in the darkness, her scream buried by the ocean’s fury. The shatter of bone on rock.

She opens her eyes, shakes the image away. Stares into the mug of tea, watches the steam curling into the air. Her neck and shoulder ache, and she realises that she has no memory of going up to bed, no memory of locking the window, of barricading the bedroom door. She must have fallen asleep here, at the kitchen table. Papers are strewn everywhere, along with empty wrappers of chocolate, the packaging from the fish and chips she’d bought yesterday evening.

She had been going through the file that Ryan Smith gave to Jess – the one that his father had collated on the Naiad. It had taken her hours to find it in the squalor, hidden in a stack of papers she’d moved when clearing the kitchen table. An ancient manila folder, held together with a bulldog clip, Bernard Smith written in faded pencil on the cover.

She’d read the bulk of the file before falling asleep, including letters to the local council about funding for the memorial to the wreck, the response from the council giving the go-ahead.

There are also articles from a local paper, the South Coast Examiner , including letters to the editor from 1981. I have lived in Comber Bay my whole life, one reads, and am devastated at the thought of our beautiful town gaining notoriety for its part in distant historical events.

Another claims that it is offensive to erect a monument to drowned convicts – whores and thieves – when no such memorial stands for the men who have disappeared … Where is their monument?

She pulls out a newspaper interview with Bernard Smith, dated November 1981, after the monument’s erection. There’s a photograph accompanying the article, and the face staring out at her in grainy pixels isn’t at all what she’d expected from the chair of the Comber Bay Historical Society. She’d imagined someone thin and owlish, but Smith has the burly presence of a sailor. The age of the photograph doesn’t hide the wrinkles around his eyes, the sun-spots on the hands knotted at his desk.

There’s a strange expression on his face, written into the set of his jaw, the lines on his forehead. An odd mix of defiance and regret.

One might wonder whether the project has been a welcome distraction for Smith, whose son Daniel vanished earlier this year, the latest in a line of disappearances off Comber Bay’s shores, including William Goldhill, Bob Ruddock, Pete Lawson and Samuel Hall.

She thinks of the melancholy set of Ryan’s body as he watched the waves knowing his brother Daniel went to that beach and never returned. And then, only a year later, he witnessed the rescue of Baby Hope. He has been touched by two of Comber Bay’s mysteries.

When asked why he campaigned so passionately to commemorate the victims of the shipwreck, Smith looks away. ‘I’m not a churchgoing man,’ he says finally. ‘But I believe in God, and doing what’s right. Over a hundred lives were lost that day. Every soul deserves a proper resting place. A marker.’ An admirable sentiment. One can only hope that Smith’s missing son will one day be afforded the same dignity.

That’s the last newspaper clipping in the file.

The remaining papers are just yellowed scraps; their edges are ragged, as if they’ve been torn from a notebook. Their contents seem irrelevant to the memorial, and Lucy wonders whether they’ve ended up in the file by mistake.

She holds one of the scraps up to the light so that she can more easily read the scrawled handwriting. The paper is delicate with age, translucent as onion skin.

1960 1966 1973 1977 1981

The years that the first five of The Eight went missing.

Another piece of paper is covered with a messy diagram, arrows snaking between the names of the men; on the reverse is a list of professions; the names of schools and churches. One list divides the missing men into ‘tourists’ and ‘locals’. It’s obvious what this means, and the realisation chills her. Bernard Smith was looking for connections between the vanished men, like a detective building a victim profile.

The final scrap of paper has just one, haunting, scrawled line.

Make it stop.

None of it makes sense to her.

Why, if Smith thought his son had been murdered, did he devote so much time – so much of his own money – into a memorial for a long-ago shipwreck, rather than to finding justice?

She looks at her watch again: 3.33 a.m. She doesn’t want to go up to bed, to risk slipping back below the surface and returning to that dank world of tangled limbs and gnawing thirst.

Panic needles her. For a moment the blackness of the ship returns, threatening to swallow her up. Her fingers tremble as she takes another sip of tea, willing the dream away.

Being in Cliff House has left Lucy with more questions than answers about who her sister is. About her connection to this place, to the Naiad . To Mary and Eliza. And until she returns, Jess’s diary is the only window into the mystery of why she is here, in Comber Bay.

Legs trembling, Lucy makes her way slowly up the stairs. After locking the window and wedging the chair under the door, she sinks into Jess’s bed, grateful for the warm curve of Dora Maar atop the covers. Just as she picks up the diary from the bedside table, she hears a sound.

Singing. For a moment, she’s sure of it.

But then it fades, and when she strains to catch it again, there’s only the whoosh and suck of the sea on the rocks.