Page 33 of The Sirens
32
LUCY
SUNDAY, 17 FEbrUARY 2019
Her voice carries on the dawn air, echoing against the rocks.
Lucy lifts her fingers to her mouth as if to grasp hold of the song and examine it in her hand. But there is nothing – only the hush of the waves on the shore, the thrum of her own blood.
She does not scream or flinch this time.
It feels almost inevitable to be standing halfway down the cliff’s sandstone staircase, body tilted like a diver’s. Dawn bloodies the horizon, and in its pink light Lucy sees the plunge of the cliff below.
Her pulse rises. Her toes cling to the edge of the roughhewn step; one wrong move and she will fall.
Breathe. She has to breathe.
In. Out.
But the breaths come quick and ragged, her heart begins to pound in her chest. Her voice finds the song as if she has only just set it down, and her lungs and diaphragm expand and contract.
‘Well, I’ll sing you a song,’ the fair maiden did cry,
And the captain was weeping for joy o.
She sang it so sweetly, so soft, so completely,
She sang captain and sailors to sleep o,
She sang captain and sailors to sleep o.
She knows the lyrics from deep within her bones. It’s the same song that Jess used to sing to her when she was a little girl.
It’s like her sister is there with her.
Her heart slows. She can feel the sweet rush of oxygen to her brain, her thoughts sharpening into sense.
It’s then that she remembers the rope she saw on her first day here, flapping limp in the wind against the staircase. If she can find it, she can use it as a guide and pull herself back up the steps. She reaches to her right, and her fingers brush something coarse and wiry. She leans further, groping over grass and jagged rock. A cloud passes over the moon, leaving her in darkness.
She curls her toes around the step, gripping tight, calves burning with the effort. She can hear the rope moving in the wind, she realises: can hear the gentle thwack of it knocking against the cliff.
When she finds the rope at last, she breathes hard, every muscle screaming as she pulls herself upward. She climbs, each step sending pebbles raining below. Her breath comes hard and fast as she wonders how on earth she made it down so far, how her unconscious body navigated this terrain.
The house comes into view, jutting out from the rock like a tongue. Her eyes burn with tears of gratitude and exhaustion. She is gripping the veranda’s edge when she feels something hard digging into the sole of her foot. A shell, she thinks at first, but it is smooth rather than jagged. One hand gripping the balcony rail, she reaches to retrieve it.
It is a gold ring, cold and heavy in her palm.
Under the weak kitchen light, she can see it is a man’s wedding ring. The gold is a little scratched, but it looks relatively new. She doesn’t like the way it feels in her hand. The significance of it. She puts it down on the table and unlocks her laptop, the webpage she’d been reading earlier still open on the screen.
Cameron Hennessey’s LinkedIn profile.
The most recent position – one he’s held since 2012 – is head of the art department at a Sydney private school, Marsden College. Googling the school, she sees that there’s an article in the Sydney Morning Herald from 11 February. Monday. The day before a flustered Jess knocked on Melody’s door to say she was going away for a while.
Protests Rock School After Allegations reads the headline. Police have confirmed they are investigating an allegation of sexual assault after claims circulated online about a teacher at a presti- gious Sydney private school.
On Friday, pupils at $30,000-a-year Marsden College – an independent, co-educational school in Sydney’s leafy North Shore – staged a mass walkout and protest over the claims.
Now, NSW Police have told the Herald they are investigating ‘a number of allegations of sexual offences’ from between 2012 and 2019.
The Herald understands these accusations relate to one teacher, whom the paper is not identifying for legal reasons, but who has been named in a Google document cataloguing female students’ experience of sexual harassment and assault. It is understood that the teacher has not been seen in school since the protest.
School principal Dr Matthew Turner declined to comment. But shortly after the protest, alumna Emma Caulfield, the youth activist who created the online document detailing the accusations, posted to Instagram: ‘I stand in solidarity with the brave students who have come forward, and call on Marsden and the police to take immediate action. It’s bad enough that girls face sexual harassment and abuse from their male peers. For someone in a position of authority to do this is unthinkable. Enough is enough.’
Many comments on this post named the accused teacher, prompting a police warning that doing so could result in criminal charges.
Lucy easily finds the activist’s Instagram account and the relevant post. There are over 9,000 likes, 700 comments. She scrolls through them, hands trembling.
I went to Marsden, reads one. He was always a fkn creep.
Hennessey taught my sister. He asked her if she’d model for a life drawing …ugh. So sad for the victims [broken heart emoji].
Say his name. Cameron Hennessey. He doesn’t deserve anonymity.
Of course the cops want to protect an abuser. Prob too busy hiding their own to investigate. ACAB.
I personally witnessed him ask a girl if the ladder in her tights was a ‘stairway to heaven’ [vomit emoji].
Shock drops like a stone into Lucy’s stomach.
She thinks of the things Jess wrote about Hennessey in her journal: the way he’d stroked the skin on the underside of her wrist, the way he’d placed his hand over hers.
I don’t want to write about what happened next. I don’t think I could do justice to any of it.
She picks up the ring from the table, looks at the dull metal shining in her palm.
On the inside of the band is an inscription. C & N, 8.11.15.
She types Cameron Hennessey Sydney marriage into Google, and on the second page of results, she finds what she’s looking for. An old post on a wedding photographer’s website, titled Cameron and Nicola, 8 November 2015 .
Cameron and Nicola.
She’s holding Hennessey’s wedding ring.
The police were right. He was here, at Cliff House.
The photographs on the website fade in and out of focus. She finds she cannot bear to look at him – his fair hair, the face that might once have been handsome, now blurred with age and fat. He embraces his bride, a slim redhead in an ivory gown, the sun falling across her cheek. They gaze at each other lovingly.
You would never know, she thinks, to look at him.
Had there been signs, she wonders now? Evenings where he came back late from school, furtive glances at his phone? Had this woman – Nicola, with her pale eyes and freckled nose – lain in bed beside her husband, unease ticking in her gut? Or had she lived in blissful ignorance?
Lucy is seared by a new, awful clarity.
Because an unspeakable possibility is unfurling in her mind. She cannot name it, not even to herself. Not until she knows for sure.
She remembers her mother’s voice on the phone, frightened and pleading.
Lucy. Don’t read any more of that diary.
She leans forward, deposits the ring on the coffee table in front of her with a dull clink. She wipes the palm of her hand on her trousers, as if to remove any trace of him. For a time, she sits, staring at the diary, its pages bloated with damp and age, the stupid pink swirls of its cover. As if nothing a teenage girl might write could be of any importance.
Her phone chirps with a message.
Mum: Any word from J? Have driven through night – should be there 10ish.
It’s 6 a.m. now.
She could wait for them to arrive, for them to try and explain.
A sudden image of herself, the younger Lucy. The sandy bowl-cut, the skin pale with creams and bandages. Notebook in hand, writing her little lists. Her facts. Even then, she’d felt it. That yearning for truth, for something solid she could hold on to.
Lucy picks up the diary, swallowing as she skims the final lines of the last entry she’d read.
I don’t want to write about what happened next. I don’t think I could do justice to any of it.
She considers again the timing of it all. January 1999.
She turns the page to read the next entry and finds not words but a drawing: ink cross-hatched violently so that it is darkest in the centre, like a cave. The next page contains a similar drawing, and the next, but still there are no words and soon there is nothing, only blank pages under her fingers.
Her skin prickles with panic. Could an entry have been ripped out?
She closes the journal, runs her finger across the inside edges of the pages, searching for a gap, the tatter of torn paper. Then she notices a thickness, a bulge.
A folded photograph, wedged tight into the journal’s spine. She retrieves it with shaking fingers. The weightiness of the paper, the lamination of it. She knows. Already, she knows.
It’s her mother’s face that comes to her. The bright hazel eyes, the easy smile. The crooked incisor.
The folded paper trembles in her hands. She opens it.
The image is murky, as if it’s been taken underwater. She supposes, in a way, that it has been. In the darkness, a pale form. The globe of the head, the amphibian curve of a spine.
An ultrasound.
The column of text on the left-hand side reads:
20 April 1999
Martin, Jessica