Page 34 of The Sirens

33

JESS

19 SEPTEMBER 1999

Jess unfolded the ultrasound furtively, tilting it away from any curious passengers. She liked the photograph, the way the baby seemed so content there, in the ocean of her womb. The perfect fit of her, a mollusc in its shell.

If only she could stay there. If only Jess did not have to go through with it – the labour that blanked her mind with terror. She refused to imagine it, or to imagine a life afterwards; as if it was not birth that loomed, but death.

Folding the ultrasound up small, she wedged it back inside her diary. She turned the pages to the last entry she’d written in January. The final line glimmered cruelly back at her.

If I sleep with it under my pillow, it’ll be like he’s here.

Something rose inside her, and she uncapped her pen, in case it was a sentence. But the words would not come, just as they had not come for the long swell of time since she had last seen Cameron Hennessey.

Instead, when she put her pen to paper, she drew. The shuddering motion of the bus jolted her hand, so that her pen veered across the page in wild loops. Still, it took form. The lines dark and undulating, a hollow, shadowed space.

It looked like a mouth, or maybe a womb, but Jess knew it was a cave. She had begun to dream of it, ever since she’d felt those first, furtive movements. She knew how the sun crept inside it, glinting off the stalactites that hung like fangs. She knew the texture of the stone, the warmth of it, the wet slick of lichen. She knew the smell of salt and iron and things growing and dying away.

She knew, somehow, that it was safe.

She did not know exactly how she’d find it. But she knew that it must be near the house where her parents had lived, before they became her parents. The address she’d seen on the lawyer’s letter, now committed to memory.

Cliff House, 1 Malua Street, Comber Bay.

This was where she was going. This was where the bus was taking her.

When she had finished drawing, the page swallowed by darkness, she looked out of the greasy window at the passing landscape. It was dull and brown, flecked with the flat silver roofs of houses. Just the sight of it made her thirsty. She ached for a glimpse of the coast, a blue slice of sea, even though they had to be miles and miles away, still.

It was as if someone had cast an invisible wire across the land, had caught her between the ribs and pulled. The sea was in her veins, calling loud as a song.

Jess wondered how long it would take her parents to notice she’d run away. Perhaps two days, when she failed to return from the school trip to Canberra she’d invented, the lie bolstered by a form with the school letterhead, painstakingly constructed on the library photocopier. Perhaps sooner, if Max told them, which she feared he would.

Poor Max. He didn’t deserve any of this.

She’d told him three months ago, no longer able to ignore the notes slipped into her locker, increasingly desperate in tone. He was haunted, he wrote, by the thought that he’d done something wrong on New Year’s Eve. That he’d upset her somehow. He’d been so nervous, he’d explained. So frightened of hurting her, of making her uncomfortable. He’d wanted it to be perfect, like she deserved. She hadn’t known what to say, confronted with how wrong she’d been, how she’d misjudged him.

But even this felt trivial against the silvered swell of her body.

They had met at the greenhouse, and when she told him, the look on his face scooped her out with shame. His gaze was earnest beneath the knot of his forehead, like they were discussing a piece of schoolwork Jess couldn’t quite get the hang of.

‘I’ll help,’ he’d told her. ‘It’s my responsibility, too.’

She’d felt, then, an awful impulse to get away; to cement her ugliness in his heart. To say something that would repel him forever, for his own sake.

‘Actually,’ she’d said, the words ferric on her tongue, ‘it isn’t.’

For years afterwards, she would lie awake at night, seeing the look on his face. The eyes wide and the mouth slack with shock. He’d said nothing for a moment, unable to translate thought into speech, as if she’d damaged some fundamental mechanism inside him.

And then:

‘It’s him, isn’t it? Hennessey.’

She wanted the conversation to be over, she wanted to get away. After all, she was so tired. Tired of the dragging pain in her belly, the new weight to her limbs. The effort of concealment. And so it seemed easiest to say nothing.

* * *

There had been no question of telling Hennessey – or Cameron, as she still thought of him. He was long gone by the time she knew.

‘It’s not safe for me,’ he’d said, one day in late January, just weeks after that sunlit afternoon in the studio. ‘I can’t stay.’

The librarian, he’d told her, had noticed her bike leaning against the art studio block that afternoon, had heard the sounds coming from inside. She had reminded him to keep the studio locked, lest other students ‘rendezvous’ inside.

Jess had scratched at the skin of her wrist, inflamed by worry, and she’d seen him flinch and look away, repulsed. He no longer saw her as beautiful, as precious as the shells on some imagined beach.

Perhaps he never had.

When the announcement of a new art teacher came at assembly, all Jess could do was marvel at the speed with which he’d erased himself so completely from her life.

She hadn’t had the energy to mourn his loss: her days were swallowed up by the work of denial, of concealing the secret that swelled inside her. The lonely effort of it, vomiting quietly into the toilet. Taking the bus to Bourke for a pregnancy test, hoodie pulled down over her face, and later, the ultrasound. Combing charity shops for the loosest, baggiest clothes. The constant fear that the truth was written in the new, sloping lines of her body; in the shadows under her eyes.

For months, she’d sat across the dinner table from her parents, knowing their secret and waiting for them to guess hers.

The easiest way to lie to someone, she learned, is to lie to yourself.

And how she’d lied. She ignored the baby’s twists and turns inside her, avoided mirrors, avoided looking down at the pale moon of her body when she dressed.

Except at night. At night, when there was no sound in the house but the soft tide of her parents’ snores, she had taken to locking the bathroom door and running the bath, the water blue in the moonlight from the window. Robing herself in the cool silk of it. Later, in her bedroom, she would feel her skin burn, watch as the dome of her stomach cracked and hardened like a sea creature’s shell. It was better to do it this way, when she was awake, than let the water draw her in her sleep. This way, she could be careful: to lock the door, to wipe the tub down afterwards, to remove the strands of her hair from the plughole.

It was like a great thirst had overtaken her, had become the ruler of her body. Even as she slept, she was at its mercy.

Sydney. In the dark, the harbour was studded with the lights of small boats, as if the sky had fallen in. The bridge reminded her of a sheep’s carcass she’d seen once with Max, the great arc of it like an exposed ribcage. Her fingers itched to draw it, but there was no longer enough light.

A bus interchange. Cigarette butts on the pavement, the crumpled remnants of a takeaway food container. An addict stared at her with bottomless eyes. The smells of tarmac and fuel and drink and the sharp, metallic scent of the city itself.

Another bus, the seat upholstery worn and tinged with ancient sweat. A beer can rolled around on the floor, clanging every time the bus braked or turned. There were only two other passengers: a teenage boy with glassy eyes, redolent of alcohol, and a woman with a suitcase. Neither took any notice of her.

Jess put her headphones on and leaned against the window, but the battery on her Walkman was dead.

Hours passed, blurring together. The sun came up, gilding the land. Things were greener, here; she opened the window and smelled eucalypt. There was a mineral smell, too; Jess inhaled it deep into her chest. It was the sea. They were close.

The bush crackled around her, leaves and twigs brushing at her skin, urging her onwards. She saw, as the ground sloped, flashes of blue through the trees.

Cliff House rose up ahead – a sunken roof, a veranda thick with debris. One window broken, the other boarded up. She climbed the stairs, stumbling over a beer bottle. The door swung open, the lock smashed and useless. Inside, there was an underwater smell; the walls were bloated with damp. More bottles, an abandoned sleeping bag. In the kitchen, fragments of pottery that she recognised: blue patterned shards in the sink a match to the cereal bowls they used at home. All her life there had been only three. There were a few other signs of her parents: a faded apron on a hook on the kitchen door, old magazines yellowing in the living room.

Clinging to the banister, she hauled herself up the stairs to the bedroom. The floor glittered with condom wrappers and ring-pulls. At one stage the window – now closed – had been left open and rain had soaked through the mattress, so that it now bloomed with mould. But Jess had not slept for twenty-four hours and so she did not care.

She lowered herself onto the bed and closed her eyes. Before sleep hit her – quick and brutal as a punch – there was time only to think of her parents, sleeping on this very bed seventeen years ago. To wonder whether she had been conceived here, before she was abandoned, or in another bed, by another couple entirely.

For the first time in months – years, even – her sleep was black and dreamless. It was night when she woke, the moon painting the ceiling white. The pain had woken her: a bright, clenching pain, radiating from her pelvis in rhythmic waves.

Such pain she’d never felt, such fear that there was no room for anything else in her mind. She watched the shifting of the moonlight and screamed.

At first, she thought she had imagined the sound: women’s voices, singing a song that, somehow, she knew.

I sang you to sleep, and I robbed you of wealth

And again I’m a maid on the shore

She crawled from the bed, and suddenly her thighs were slick, water gushing from between her legs and onto the broken floorboards. The waves of pain came closer together, now. She knew that she had to keep going, that she had to follow the source of the song. That she had to find the women and join them.

She sobbed as she made her way down the stairs, thighs shaking with the effort, and opened the back door onto the veranda. She found the beginning of the staircase, the rope that danced in the wind, waiting for her to take it in her hand. The sea beckoned. The hurl of the white waves, the rippling spread of blue, winking with light. It was so beautiful that it hurt her throat.

The cave held her close. The water lapped its way inside, as if in greeting. She was comforted by the cool lick of it against the burn of her skin, against the pain that coursed through every cell of her. The song swelled on the waves, growing louder and louder as she pushed, an encouragement.

They were waiting, she knew. She had to hurry. She had to join them. It was what all of this had been leading to.

The rocks cut into her hands as she pushed, the smell of blood in the air. She breathed in rich brine, and as the space between her legs opened, so did other parts of her. There no longer seemed a barrier between herself and the sea.

She was part of it, she had become the thing she’d feared. She was the white foam on the waves, she was the pink shell on the seabed. She was the great leathery weed drifting in the current; she was the fleshy bristle of coral.

Pain bloomed between her fingers and her toes, at her neck where her pulse drummed. She brought a hand to her throat; the flesh felt hot and ribboned. When she took her hand away, she saw that it was webbed.

Another wave of pain, now; her body rushing ahead of her, a dance to which she did not know the steps. She ground her palms and the soles of her feet into the jagged floor of the cave and pushed and screamed and pushed one more time and then—

The child.

A miracle formed by her own body. Slick and perfect in her hands, jellied white. The child opened her mouth, a velvet darkness, and Jess wondered if it was not, after all, the cave that she had dreamed but this. The baby cried, a piercing wail that should not have been musical, but was. Jess felt as if there had never been sound before this, as if the world had been dead and quiet before her child had woken it.

She pressed the tiny body to her chest, felt the tide shudder through them both, in harmony with the beat of their hearts. She whispered her name.

She began to crawl towards the lip of the cave, moving towards the women’s voices, towards the water. It was only then that she realised the singing was gone, that it had been replaced by a new sound, a wrong sound. A manmade sound, cutting through the drift of sea and sky. A motor.

She will not remember this part well.

There will be only snippets, only flashes.

Rescue workers, their uniforms so bright they hurt her eyes. Hands, pulling at her. The baby screaming. The blood still seeping from her, dripping into the rockpools of the cave. A stretcher.

A boat, rocking in the shadow of a cliff. And there, bundled in a lifejacket and leaning over the prow, looking so incongruous all these miles from the bare sunburned earth of the farm – her father.

Later. How much later, she could not tell.

The harsh press of neon against her eyeballs and the industrial scratch of a hospital blanket against her skin. A monitor beeped. There was a pulling sensation in her belly and in her breasts, her body aware of the lack before her mind.

Someone was squeezing her hand; she opened her eyes to see her mother’s face, looking strange and tight, the features arranged in a way Jess had not seen before.

‘Hi, sweetheart,’ her mother said, barely breathing the words.

‘Where,’ Jess tried, but her mouth was too dry to speak. She was thirsty, ever so thirsty. She licked her lips and tried again. ‘Where am I? Where is Lucy? Where is the baby?’

Her hand fluttered past her aching breasts to the tender spot beneath her jaw. But it was smooth, the ridges gone. The webbing too was gone from between her fingers, leaving only white, crusted flesh.

She became aware of another person in the room with them, sitting near the door, behind her mother.

‘Dad?’

‘He’s gone for a cup of tea,’ her mother said, squeezing her hand. ‘He’ll be back in a minute.’

But she did not want to see her father. He should not have brought her – should not have brought them – here. She longed for the beat of the tide, for the feel of her baby against her chest.

Panic burst inside her.

Lucy. I need Lucy.

‘This lady needs to talk to you, sweetheart,’ her mother said. A plastic chair creaked and a woman stepped into the light. ‘It won’t take long. You need your rest. And then, I’ll ask the nurse to bring the baby – Lucy – in. All right, sweetheart?’ Jess nodded. She kept her eyes on her mother’s face, as if the woman would disappear if Jess did not look at her. A fairy

story. If only all this were a fairy story. ‘Do you like it?’ she whispered. ‘Lucy.’

‘Yes,’ her mother said, her eyes full and bright with tears. ‘Lucy,’ she said the name again, as if tasting it. ‘It’s beautiful, sweetheart. It’s perfect.’

The woman had a narrow face, the features drawn together in a point like a snout. She clutched a clipboard tight in her hands. A lanyard around her neck read ‘Visitor’, as if Jess had invited her there.

‘Hello, Jessica,’ she said, reading from her clipboard. She did not look Jess in the eye. ‘I’m from the Department of Communities and Justice. I’m here because, owing to the circumstances of the birth of your daughter—’

‘Lucy,’ Jess interrupted. Her heart began to race.

‘Owing to the circumstances of the birth of your daughter, Lucy, the department has concerns about your ability to parent her. The circumstances of her birth being as follows: you told no one you were pregnant. You attended only one scan, failing to provide your contact details so that medical staff were unable to contact you. You ran away from home and, when your labour commenced, you made your way not to a hospital but to a location that was extremely dangerous, owing to its isolation and its exposure to the elements. You did not seek medical attention for your daughter, nor for yourself after the birth. You were discovered, and provided with medical attention, purely because your father – who I understand to be familiar with the area – managed to locate you.

‘If he had not found you before the tide came in, then the consequences for you and your child might have been very severe indeed.

‘As such, your actions placed your child at risk of serious harm. Accordingly, the department intends to file an application for an emergency care and protection order with the Children’s Court of NSW, placing Lucy into emergency foster care for fourteen days, after which time the department will seek to renew the order—’

‘No,’ said Jess, the word swallowed up by the blood roaring in her ears. In the plastic chair next to the bed, her mother lifted her hands to her mouth.

‘You can’t do this,’ her mother said, rising from the chair. ‘Let me get my husband – we’ll help her, we’ll help her. You don’t need to do this!’

The woman from the Department of Communities and Justice turned to address her mother. Jess noticed the fleshy arrows of skin at each eye, the downward turn of her mouth. The woman glanced at her watch, and Jess wondered if she had another appointment to get to, another heart to break open.

‘As the child’s grandparents,’ the woman began, ‘you can apply to be named as carers on the ECPO. This would mean that the child would live with you rather than with emergency foster carers. Is this something you would like to explore? If so, I can arrange for the application to be amended, subject to the necessary checks.’

Her mother swallowed. She took Jess’s hand and squeezed it tight.

‘Jess? Is that what you want us to do?’

Jess felt a cavity open up inside her, a vortex. She was nothing but longing: longing for the tiny, glimmering hands, the wide, dark eyes. The cry that rang like a song in her blood. The words foster care hovered in front of her. She imagined faceless beings lifting her child away, taking her to some distant place she could not follow.

She nodded, tears running into her mouth.

‘I didn’t mean to hurt her, Mum,’ she whispered. ‘I didn’t mean to put her in danger.’

‘I know, sweetheart. I know.’