Page 29 of The Sirens

28

LUCY

SATURDAY, 16 FEbrUARY 2019

Lucy is standing alone in the kitchen, the house trembling around her.

The storm still rages: lightning comes blue through the blinds, patterning her body, the thunder as regular as a heartbeat.

She looks down at the alien spread of her hands. The nails clean and pink rather than torn and black. She is holding Dora Maar’s ceramic bowl, and her wrists ache with the weight of it. Dora Maar winds herself around Lucy’s calves and she yelps in surprise, the cat skittering away in fright.

There is the smell of cooking flesh in her nostrils, oily and sweet. She feels off kilter, off balance, as if missing the rocking motion of the ship. The room presses in on her, then recedes. She is here, but not here. It feels as if she’s been hallucinating. How much time has she lost?

Shaking, she crouches to the floor, opening the tin of cat food and spooning it, fishy and gelatinous, into the bowl. The smell makes her want to gag.

She squeezes her eyes shut, tries to remember, to draw the lost minutes towards her like a skein of thread. The police had been here. The police. The police are looking for Jess. For her sister who is not her sister.

Names and images blur across her mind. Her mother’s face in the newspaper, the delicate, futile lift of her hand. The shock hits all over again, like cold water in her lungs.

Cameron Hennessey.

Cameron Hennessey is missing. Jess is missing.

And Lucy is losing her grip on time, on herself. On reality. What had she done, after the police came? She remembers tearing through Jess’s room – upending drawers, sending showers of loose coins and hair pins and pens clattering to the floor, pulling her sister’s clothes from the wardrobe – for some clue as to where she has gone. But she found nothing.

She’d sat for a while on her sister’s bed, watching the lightning vein the clouds until the sky turned black. She remembers picking up her phone, her fingers hovering over her parents’ number. She remembers that voice in her head saying: Make the call. End this.

But what would she say?

That she finally knows the truth, that their family is as imagined as a fairy story? That she, Lucy, keeps slipping into another world entirely, a world of chained women and sea and song? That Jess is missing? That the police are looking for her, along with the man who was once her teacher, then her lover?

The cat had come to her rescue, mewling for food. Lucy had gone downstairs and into the kitchen and picked the ceramic bowl up in her hands and—

Everything had fallen away.

She looks down at her legs, bare in her old pyjama shorts. The rash on her legs is peeling, coming off her in great, pale strips, like the discarded skin of a snake. Below it, the flesh isn’t pink and raw, or dotted with blood. Instead it glimmers, changing colour with the light of the storm. Green then blue, then the pinkish white of mother of pearl. Iridescent as scales.

Lucy is in Jess’s bathroom, rubbing her medicated cream into her shins, her pulse a sickly thud. But even through the greasy layer of ointment she can see the new strangeness, the wrongness of herself.

Her mind clings to facts and logic, to the solutions offered up by her frenzied internet searches. Plaque psoriasis; some kind of fungal infection. But none of the images match the new bluish sheen of her skin. The strange beauty of it.

Instead, her mind returns to the dream. To Mary. Her skin seemed to shimmer, as if covered with tiny scales. She remembers a detail from one of Jess’s paintings.

Walking down the stairs, her hand grips the banister, and her legs shake so much she fears they’ll give way. The storm has died down, now, the wind a ghostly song on the waves, and in the silence she can hear her own panicked breath in her ears.

In the living room, she stares at the painting on the easel. Two women holding hands as they face the sea . The storm has stolen the sun from the sky, and even with all the lights on, the house is too dim for her to make out the painting’s finer details. She switches on the torch of her phone and shines it over the women’s legs. She reaches out her trembling fingers, touching the paint that is somehow both coarse and fine as silk.

A flash of childhood memory. Her parents had once forbidden her from playing outside after they’d seen a brown snake under the azalea bush, but Lucy had disobeyed them, fingers combing the undergrowth until she’d found her prize. She’d held it in her hands, light and sheer as gossamer, watching it catch the sun, trying to understand why something so beautiful might be unwanted. She’d kept it, in the secret place beneath her mattress, saving it until her sister’s visit. She had given it to Jess and not thought of it again until now, as she feels its texture under her fingers, embedded in the canvas of the painting.

A snakeskin.

When she again hears knocking at the door, Lucy’s pulse hammers.

Can the police be back already? She doesn’t want to let them in, doesn’t want to hear whatever new discovery they’ve made. There’s a numbness to her thoughts, a slowness. An unwillingness to accept what is happening.

She won’t answer the door, she decides. She will stand here, her hands on Jess’s artwork, as if she can soak up her sister’s thoughts.

More knocking, and then: ‘Lucy? It’s Melody.’

‘One sec,’ Lucy calls, turning from the painting. She’s about to unlock the door when she looks down at her legs, at the shimmering surface of her skin, the crusting flesh between the toes.

Fuck.

‘Sorry, just getting dressed!’

In Jess’s bedroom, she tugs on an old pair of leggings and thick socks. The soft fabric grates on her skin, her body resisting constraint.

Only when she’s raced back downstairs again, taking the stairs two at a time, does she realise that the socks are mismatched.

You look mad , she thinks to herself. But she doesn’t care. She is mad. ‘Hi, love,’ says Melody when Lucy finally opens the door. ‘Think I’d better come in.’ The hood of her jacket glitters with rain, her eyes are narrowed with concern. She steps inside without waiting for an answer, smelling of laundry powder and a medicinal hint of eucalypt. The smell of her house. Suddenly, Lucy longs to be tucked up on Melody’s sofa under one of her soft crocheted rugs, listening to the windchimes tinkle in the breeze. For a time before the arrival of the police, before the arrival of this new knowledge: that Jess really is in danger.

She trembles, watching as Melody wipes her shoes on the mat and hangs her raincoat on the hook next to the door with practised ease.

‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ Melody says, clattering mugs onto the counter and rooting around in the pantry for teabags. ‘You sit down, try to relax.’ She gestures to the sofa as if she is the host and Lucy is the guest.

The bustle of activity in the kitchen and the hum of the boiling kettle drift over her in a comforting fog. For a moment, she forgets where she is, feeling nothing but the exhaustion that threads itself through her bones.

Her eyelids droop, and that other world – the one that waits below the surface – beckons, banished only when Melody places a cup of tea in front of her.

‘So,’ she says as she sits down, dark eyes scanning Lucy’s face. ‘The police came round, asking when I last saw Jess.’

When she speaks again, her voice is softer, as if she’s addressing a child.

‘I know you must be very worried about her, sweetheart.’

Lucy nods as she takes a sip of the tea, the liquid scalding her tongue. She takes a breath.

‘Did you know about him, Cameron Hennessey? Did Jess tell you about – about what happened between them?’

For a moment Melody’s expression is unreadable, and then she nods, once.

‘Yeah. Yes. She did.’

‘You know they found his car nearby? I don’t know why they’re looking for him, or what he’s done. But now he’s gone, and she’s gone, and—’

And I’m scared that she’s in danger. That he’s hurt her.

The sob bursts from her throat, and she buries her head in her hands.

But then Melody is moving closer to her, fingers lightly stroking Lucy’s back.

‘I’m going to tell you something,’ she says. ‘And you’re going to sit and drink your tea, and you’re going to listen.’

‘I should have told you this before,’ Melody continues. ‘I did think about it. But I didn’t know how to say it in a way that would make sense. That you’d believe.’

She sighs.

‘I still don’t know how, to be honest. But Jess is the only other person I’ve ever told. And I think she’d want me to tell you, now that this has happened.

‘When we spoke earlier, you mentioned Daniel Smith. The man – well, I suppose he was more of a boy – who went missing in 1981. Ryan’s older brother.’

‘Yes,’ Lucy says slowly. She remembers how Melody’s face had shuttered at his name, as if she was fighting to keep something locked away inside her. Now, as she talks, Melody stares into the middle distance, or at her hands that work and worry in her lap – anywhere but at Lucy’s face.

‘I knew him, when I was a teenager. I mean, I knew everyone around here, coming as I did every summer. But he and I, we were close. I was seventeen,’ she smiles sadly. ‘I thought we were in love. God knows what he thought. Not that.

‘He was older. He’d left school already; there was a glamour to that. He used to take me out in this little dinghy. We’d scare ourselves, listen out for the shipwrecked women singing, but we only ever heard the waves, the gulls. Mostly we’d just lie in his boat and kiss.

‘He wanted to go all the way. I wanted it, too, but there

was something in me, something that felt … uncertain. Unsafe, maybe, looking back on it. So, he’d put his hands on the button of my jeans, and kiss my neck and beg for more, and I’d say no, even though sometimes I felt like it’d be easier to say yes. Just give in, I’d think. Get it over with. It can’t be that bad. But still, there was that little seed of fear.’

Lucy nods, too scared to speak in case Melody stops talking.

‘The cave in Devil’s Lookout, the cave where they found Baby Hope,’ Melody continues, and Lucy suppresses a flinch at the name, at the tangled thoughts of her parents and Jess. ‘Bloody dangerous to get to. But it was another thing kids did back then, part of the local lore. Like a dare. Who was willing to go to the beach in the middle of the night, to listen for the voices? Who was brave enough to go and drink in the cave?

‘It was January: we’d come up after New Year’s. I was so excited to see Danny again, and when he asked me to go to the cave with him, I agreed. We waited until my parents were asleep, and then I snuck out to meet him. I remember he was carrying a backpack, clinking with beers.

‘I was nervous – sweating. The tide was coming in, and we argued about whether it was safe. But Danny grabbed my hand and pulled me along. We inched around the headland, trying not to slip on the wet rocks. When we got to the cave, I was so exhausted, so afraid of how we’d manage to get back, that I almost forgot what we were there to do.

‘It smelled like rotten seaweed and it was dark. He kissed me, pushed me to the ground, and I remember thinking gross at the slimy feel of the rocks, when I should have been thinking about how to get him off me, how to get away. His hands moved to my waistband and then inside my trousers. It hurt and I told him to stop, to get off me.

‘He did stop, but I don’t think it was because of what I said. I don’t think he even heard me. He said: “What’s that sound?” At first I didn’t know what he meant, but then I could hear it, too.’

‘Hear what?’

When Melody speaks again, Lucy thinks the note in her voice is pain, or fear. But then she looks at her, at the brightness of her eyes, the softness around her mouth. No, not pain nor fear, Lucy realises. Wonder.

‘Voices. Women’s voices, like in the old ghost stories. But they weren’t screaming, crying as they drowned – they were singing . This beautiful, lilting music – I couldn’t make out the words but I remember it sounded almost like a folk song. It comforted me, made me feel safe, somehow.

‘It was different for Danny. His whole body froze. I could smell the fear coming off him. But there was something else, too. A kind of … desire.’

Lucy thinks, but doesn’t say, how intertwined those things are. Fear and desire. How one can become the other so easily. All it takes is the tightening of a hand on your wrist, your throat. ‘He sat up. I kept saying his name – Danny , Daniel – but my voice was soon drowned out by the singing; it was growing louder and louder. It seemed to be alive, somehow – an organism that had wrapped tentacles around him.

‘Danny started moving towards the mouth of the cave, as if something was drawing him closer. It was a bright night, a lot of moonlight. He was almost silhouetted. I remember his whole body hunching forward as he crawled to the edge. And then …’ Melody looks off to the side before meeting Lucy’s gaze. ‘And then, he was gone.’

‘Gone?’

‘He fell. Or jumped. I remember thinking,’ Melody’s tongue darts out to lick her lips, and her hands in her lap look rigid, but her eyes still have a faraway sheen, ‘that it was odd that he didn’t scream. It was one of those slowmotion thoughts, the type you get when you’re in shock.’

‘What did you do?’ Lucy breathes. She can picture Melody as she would have been at seventeen: her dark eyes even larger in her face, her legs long and slim in denim shorts. Just a kid, all alone in a dank cave, watching a man fall to his death.

‘I couldn’t move. Not at first. My breathing was so loud – that’s what made me notice that it had stopped. The singing. And then I immediately felt calm. Decisive. I knew I had to get home, that I couldn’t tell anyone I’d been with Danny. I threw his backpack into the sea. It was funny – I’d been so frightened, on the way there. But on the way back, it was like my feet knew exactly where to go.

‘When I got back to the beach, I put Danny’s towel there, on the sand. To make it look like he’d just gone for a midnight swim and drowned.’

‘How come you didn’t tell anyone what had happened?’

Melody sighs. ‘Well, they’d have blamed me, of course. They’d have said I led him to the cave, that I pushed him. I mean, everyone knew Danny had his issues. But he was a local.’ Her hands clench into fists. ‘And I was an outsider. Which is fucked up, when you think about it. They were the outsiders, not me. What’s two hundred fucking years to more than sixty thousand?’

It’s the first time Lucy has heard Melody swear. She doesn’t know what to say: nothing feels adequate. All she can do is listen.

‘They never found his body,’ Melody continues. ‘What happened to Danny spooked my parents. They knew we used to spend time together – not that they approved of him, Dad said he didn’t trust him as far as he could throw him – but I guess it felt too close to home. Sometimes I wonder if Mum sensed it, that I was involved somehow. That she worried I’d be blamed. Anyway, we never came back again.’

‘But you did,’ Lucy says, trying to read the expression on Melody’s face. The twist at the corner of her mouth, the flickering muscle of her eyebrow. ‘You came back.’

‘Yes, eventually.’ ‘Why?’

Melody reaches for her own cup of tea, takes a long sip, her eyes trained on Jess’s painting.

‘Like I told you before – it was a special place for us, as a family. After Mum and Dad died, there was no one else to remember the time we spent here together. Coming back – it made me feel closer to them, kept them alive, somehow. But there was another reason, too.’

Lucy waits.

‘I came back,’ Melody continues, ‘because I felt safe here. I feel safe here. I know that doesn’t make sense. I should be traumatised by what Danny almost did to me, by what happened to him. But something protected me that day, Lucy. Something – someone – kept me safe.’

‘You mean whoever – or what ever – was singing?’

‘Maybe.’ Melody pauses. ‘I’ve thought about it a lot over the years. Maybe it was the ghosts of the drowned women, like in the stories. I guess if I were Christian, I might call it God, only it didn’t feel like any God I’d ever been taught about. I’m only sure of two things. One, it was of the sea – not the land, my land. And two, it felt … female.’

Lucy doesn’t know what to say. The two of them sit in silence for a while, listening to the rain gently falling on the roof. She thinks of the men who’ve disappeared from Comber Bay over the years. David Watts, who’d been suspected of his girlfriend’s death, but had never faced justice. Malcolm Biddy, whose disappearance had led to the discovery of a nationwide paedophile ring.

And Danny Smith.

She remembers what Ryan said about his father. About how he’d become obsessed with the Naiad after Danny’s disappearance, how people had called him mad. It did seem mad – devoting all that time, all that money, to erecting a memorial for the Naiad ’s victims, when your son was still missing.

She thinks of the paper with its desperate scrawl, of dates and names and possible connections. The sentence written on the back.

Make it stop.

What if Bernard Smith had known what his son was really like, had guessed what he’d done? What if he hadn’t been trying to commemorate the Naiad ’s victims, but to appease them?

Melody puts her mug of tea on the coffee table, places her hand on Lucy’s knee. Lucy tries hard not to flinch at the contact, at the press of the fabric of her leggings on the raw layer of skin beneath.

‘What I’m trying to say,’ Melody murmurs, dark eyes staring into Lucy’s, ‘is that we don’t need to worry about your sister. There’s something about this place, something different. It keeps its women safe.’