Page 25 of The Sirens

24

JESS’S DIARY

1999

3 January

I’ve imagined so many times how it’d feel to lose my virginity. I used to think of it like a snakeskin that I could slip off, revealing a shiny new layer beneath. Strong and beautiful and … adult, I guess. I didn’t know quite how exposing it would feel. How terrifying.

When I woke up this morning, I thought for a moment that I was still there, in Max’s bed. The sheets smelling of chlorine, his hair bright in the soft lamplight. Outside the window, the night fading, taking with it the old year. People in town – in towns and cities all over the world – were still partying, throwing back vodka shots and toasting the new year.

It would have been perfect. The whirr of the cicadas outside, the soft lamplight falling across my body, making me beautiful. My heart was still trembling in my throat after waking up in the pool, my nostrils stinging from where the water had forced its way into my sinuses. But I also felt something else. The tingling on my skin – harbinger of the Flakes – felt different, this time.

Like I said. It would have been perfect.

He traced his fingertips lightly on my stomach. I gasped from the thrill of it, but then he stopped, as if afraid to touch the thickened white landscape of the rash. There was a hitch in his breath, and his fingers hovered above my skin. A coldness spread through me. He was reluctant, I realised. Repulsed.

‘Um,’ he whispered, ‘do you want the light off?’

Such a simple question: just six words. But they said so much.

For a moment I couldn’t speak, the pain of it lodging in my chest.

Then I said, ‘Sure,’ reaching out to flick the switch, leaving us in darkness. It stung, when he was inside me, and the tingling feeling on my skin went away, leaving me cold and shivering.

How could I have thought he would find me beautiful, once he saw me as I really am?

But I don’t want to think about Max. Not now.

At last, Mum and Dad are out. Mum’s driven to see a friend, and Dad’s out putting fence posts up in one of the paddocks.

It’s been a week since Christmas lunch, since they flinched when I said the word adopt. I feel like I’m holding the truth in my hands – I just have to bring it to the light, to look at it. To see.

Ten paces to their bedroom. To the filing cabinet. I’ll open it, I’ll find my birth certificate. And then I’ll know.

Later

Dad got home twenty minutes ago, the whine of the screen door interrupting me. I was sitting on the floor of their bedroom, the file spread out around me. All the names and places – they don’t make sense.

‘Jess, are you here? Jessica?’

Dad’s voice boomed through the house. The familiar mix of weariness and love brought a lump to my throat, the prick of tears to my eyes. The floorboards began to creak under his step, and I heard the kitchen tap, then the click of the kettle.

I had to get out of there. I couldn’t let him know what I’d found. Not yet.

Still, I felt like Pandora in the John William Waterhouse painting, peering into the box that once opened could never be closed. The strange phrases and fragments churned inside me. I pressed my hand to my mouth as if to swallow them down, but there was no going back.

I needed to take the file.

I shoved it down the inside of my shirt and ran back to my room, crouching to hide it under the bed. I’d just stood up again when there was a knock at the bedroom door. Without waiting for an answer, Dad pushed the door open with his foot, bearing two cups of tea.

‘If it isn’t God’s gift,’ he said, a slow grin spreading over his face. God’s gift – one of his nicknames for me. Apparently, it’s what Jessica means, why they picked the name.

‘I thought you didn’t believe in God?’ I used to say, a joke between us. ‘I do when I look at you,’ he’d reply, with a big cheesy Dad wink.

Now I could hardly bear to look at him.

‘Hey,’ I said. He needed a shave, and there was a smear of dirt on one of his cheeks. He was wearing his favourite T-shirt, the one Mum keeps threatening to throw in the bin because there’s a hole in one sleeve and an old curry stain down the front. It says Dragon in big stupid 70s letters.

Dad.

But he’s not my dad.

He’s Robert Wilson, a stranger. And I’m …

Name at birth: Unknown

‘How about a chat?’ Dad said, taking a noisy slurp of tea. ‘We could watch some TV together, until your mum gets home. Or we could sit and draw, like we used to? I could get a head start on next year’s drawing. I’m thinking: currawong.’

If things were normal, I’d have said, ‘Don’t be an idiot, Dad, you did that three years ago. It’s hanging on the wall outside the laundry.’

But things weren’t normal. Nothing would ever be normal again.

‘Sorry,’ I said, finally. ‘Headache.’

Before he could respond, I shut the door in his face. There was a pause, and then, after a time, the slow, defeated thud of his footsteps retreating down the corridor.

I sank to my knees in front of the bed, my hands shaking. I didn’t want to look, I didn’t want to know. But I had to.

I pulled the file out from under the bed with shaking fingers. There were three certificates in the file and a thick wad of legal papers. Two were deed poll certificates, changes of name.

Once, my parents were other people. They weren’t Mike and Maggie Martin, but Robert and Judith Wilson.

But the third certificate was the worst.

‘Certificate of Adoption’, read the fancy scroll of script on the top.

Adoptive parents: Michael and Margaret Martin Child’s name after adoption: Jessica Judith Martin Child’s name at birth: Unknown

Child’s date of birth: Unknown Parents at birth: Unknown

The only detail was a place. Comber Bay, NSW. It was on their certificates, too. Place of residence: Comber Bay.

I’ve never even heard of it. Mum and Dad never mentioned it. Mum and Dad.

Now I know why they never talk about their lives before Dawes Plain. Because the legal papers were even worse.

There was a letter from a firm of solicitors, addressed to Mr and Mrs Robert Wilson of Cliff House, 1 Malua Street, Comber Bay NSW, dated 1 August 1982.

Dear Sir and Madam, it read. Please see final copy of the agreement with Yes! Magazine enclosed, together with our invoice for your kind attention …

I flipped the yellowed page over to find a deed. And there it was, wrapped up in legalese, like the last layer in a game of pass the parcel. The truth.

Settlement agreement between Wilson and Yes! Magazine, it read. 29 July 1982.

My parents had sued a tabloid magazine for publishing an article about them. It alleged that my father’s rescue of a new-born baby from a seaside cave – a baby my parents later adopted – had been staged, to conceal a crime. That my mother, ill with post-natal depression, had given birth there in secret. That she’d tried to abandon the child.

That she’d tried to abandon me.

Everything around me – the green glow of my lava lamp, the hum of the cicadas outside, the rumble of the pipes as someone runs a tap – has melted away. As if none of it was ever real in the first place.

Nothing exists now, except for that word, the fattening horror of it in my heart.

Abandon.

Really, it doesn’t matter who put me in that cave. Whether it was Mum or some stranger.

Either way, I was unwanted.

4 January

My hand holding the pen looks wrong, foreign somehow. The split nails. The new, thickening flesh between my fingers.

It’s like some cord has been severed between my brain and my body. I’m watching my hand move across the page, watching the words spill out, but none of it – not my hand, not even my life – belongs to me.

I had one of the dreams last night. I felt the press of dank wood against my nose and mouth, saltwater soaking into my skin. The rhythmic pounding of the waves in my skull.

It makes a strange sort of sense now, doesn’t it? The water holds some part of me still.

I drew a self-portrait earlier. My eyes wide and dark as a seal’s, the unruly tumble of my hair. I even drew the Flakes, the creep of them from underneath my shirt collar. Delicate as scales.

I asked Dad if I could use the phone. I said I was going to call Max.

‘Sure,’ he said. He was sitting on the couch, the TV flickering bright but with the sound turned so low he can’t have been watching it.

I never noticed it before, how haunted he looks. How lost.

For a moment I felt guilty, and wondered if I should get out our sketchbooks and pencils and Birds of Australia, like the father and daughter we used to be.

But then the guilt shifted inside me, turning to fury.

You lied.

Instead, I took the portable phone from its cradle and went to my room and shut the door. I’d written down the number from the list Mum keeps pinned to the fridge. They’re all on it – Mrs Clarke, my English teacher, Mr Webb, my Maths teacher. And, of course, Mr Hennessey. Cameron.

My palms began to sweat as I dialled, as the phone rang and rang. I almost hung up – I wasn’t even sure what I wanted to say to him; all I knew was that there was no one else I wanted to tell – but then there was the mechanic click of someone picking up the receiver.

‘Hello?’

My tongue swelled in my mouth at the sound of his voice. For a moment, I couldn’t speak.

‘Hello?’ he said again, impatient now.

‘Mr Hennessey?’ I wanted to use his first name, but somehow couldn’t bring myself to.

‘Jessica! This is a surprise.’

He recognised my voice. My body thrummed, a plucked string.

Everything bubbled up to the surface. The certificates. The legal papers. That awful word: abandon.

A sob caught in my throat.

‘Jessica? Is everything all right? Has something happened?’ ‘I—’ Another great, shuddering sob.

‘It sounds like you need someone to talk to,’ he said. ‘Yes,’ I said, the word trembling out of me.

‘Look, I’m a little tied up today, but are you free tomorrow? Do you want to meet at school, at the art studio? You can tell me what’s been going on. How does that sound?’

‘OK,’ I whispered, relief flooding through me. I’d lost my parents, I’d lost Max. But I still had him. ‘Thanks, Mr Hennessey.’

‘Please,’ he said. ‘Call me Cameron.’

I thought, then, of the way that he’d touched my skin.

The inside of a shell.

He sees something in me, I know he does. He’s different to everyone else, to Mum and Dad and Max. He sees my flaws and thinks they’re beautiful. A warmth unfurls inside me, and it’s like I’m already there, looking into his green eyes, soft and bright with understanding.

I feel like I’ve been given a life raft. A tiny chink of hope.

Somehow, I know that he will make everything OK.