Page 38 of The Sirens

37

JESS

TUESDAY, 12 FEbrUARY 2019

It is 5 a.m. and Jess’s heart pounds in her chest, so loudly that the whole house seems to shudder with it. But no – it is not her heart she hears but something else. Someone is knocking at the door. Jess sits up in bed, groping for the light, before she thinks better of it.

It must be Cameron. Who else could it be?

She sits, barely breathing, hardly daring to move. As though if she stays very, very still, he’ll simply slink away, like a monster in a film.

‘Jess!’ Though his voice is muffled by the wind, she can hear the desperation in it. She imagines the shock of it ringing out into the bush, the leaves of the gum trees bristling, tiny lizards and rodents scuttling away in fright.

Will he have woken Melody, driving down Malua Street? Her bedroom window faces the road; she might have seen the beam of his headlights. Jess knows she often sleeps with her curtains open: she likes to be woken by the sun.

She swallows, her mouth sour. Thinks of the words from the article.

Sexual assault.

She doesn’t want Melody – doesn’t want Comber Bay – mixed up in this.

On her bedside table, her phone bursts into life. He’s calling. He can probably hear the phone ringing from outside the house. There’s no pretending she’s not home, not now.

Jess creeps from her bed, wrapping her long dressing gown tight around her body. She gropes her way down the stairs, not wanting to turn the light on and reveal herself. In the living room, the moon breaks through the curtains, her canvas shimmering with it. She allows herself a burst of pride at the completed painting, as if a part of her already knows it will be a very long time before she holds a brush in her hand again.

Her gaze falls to the sketches she’d made earlier in the evening: Mary and Eliza, their hands webbed and their skin crusted with scales. For some reason, she doesn’t want him to see them.

She folds them up, secretes them inside a kitchen drawer. Then, she takes a deep breath and crosses to the front door, her feet light on the old floorboards. Dora Maar winds around her legs, meowing.

‘Jessie, thank God,’ he murmurs through the door. ‘Please, Jess. Let me in.’

Her fingers on the bolt are damp.

She slides back the lock and opens the door.

The first thing she notices is how small he looks. He’s wearing tracksuit pants and an old T-shirt, stained yellow under the arms. His belly pushes against the fabric. Even in her pyjamas, her hair falling unkempt down her back, she seems to tower over him.

He’s unshaven, and there’s a smear of something – ketchup, maybe – on one cheek. He smells of petrol stations and sweat and unbrushed teeth.

He doesn’t meet her eyes.

She moves some papers and magazines aside on the couch, motions for him to sit.

In the kitchen, she fills the kettle. As it boils, she picks up two dirty mugs from the counter. She washes one but not the other, and when she carries the mugs of tea through, she gives him the one with the crusted rim of dirt in the bottom. ‘Thanks,’ he says, taking a long sip of the tea. ‘I’m sorry, Jess. For showing up like this. I have been wanting to see you – I wasn’t lying about that. But, you should know – Nicola kicked me out.’

She hasn’t sat down. She feels better standing over him, noting the new sparseness of his hair, his raw scalp.

‘I’ve read the article,’ she says simply, ‘in the Herald. About the school.’

She’s setting him a test – something the old Jess would do. He flushes as he gulps his tea, his knuckles whitening around the mug.

He looks up at her, and for the first time their eyes meet. His pupils are dilated.

‘It wasn’t like that, Jessie,’ he says, pleading. He stands up, puts his mug down on the coffee table and takes a step towards her. ‘It wasn’t like with you and me. What we had – that was different. We were both young. Kids. This is just some silly girls with the wrong idea. Teenage hysterics. A witch hunt.’

His breath is rancid in her face. There are tiny burst veins in his eyes. He smells disgusting.

‘ I was a kid,’ she says now. ‘But you weren’t, Cameron. You were twenty-four.’

‘Hey.’ He puts his hand on her wrist. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten what it was like between us? I can still remember the first time I ever saw you.’ He’s panicked now, beseeching, the words tumbling over themselves in their rush to leave his mouth. ‘This scrappy little thing with your black hair and your long-sleeved shirts in that heat. So unsure of yourself, of your talent. But I remember I complimented you on your drawing and you looked up at me with those big eyes of yours, like I had all the answers.’

His voice catches.

‘No one had ever looked at me like that before. You know what my father was like, how he beat me. Called me a faggot because I liked fucking Monet. I left behind everything I knew to go to art school and then the only job I could get was working at some shithole school in some shithole town in the arse end of nowhere. I spent all my life feeling small and then I met you and I felt …’

His hands are digging into the soft flesh of her arms.

‘I felt big.’

Jess wants to take a step back, to turn her head away from the staleness of his breath. Her mind is whirring, picking over the past like the teeth of a loom.

All this time, she had thought he believed she was special. That he saw a young woman with strength and talent and ambition, instead of a little girl with her sleeves pulled down to her knuckles, desperate to cover the mess of her skin, the wrongness she felt inside.

But all he had seen was his own ego reflected back at him. Her admiration made him feel like the man he was desperate to become.

It was never about her at all.

‘Please, Jess,’ he says, fingers gripping tighter now. ‘Tell me you don’t think that I took advantage of you. That I,’ he takes a breath, but the next word still comes out strangled, ‘ assaulted you. Because I couldn’t bear that. I couldn’t.’

The last time their bodies had been this close was at the Sydney hotel, just after Jess had decided to move to Comber Bay. Cameron had accepted she was leaving easily enough, promising he’d visit. But they’d both known he wouldn’t, that Jess was just a distraction to him, a distraction he no longer had time for. He’d been promoted to head of the art department just as his wife had gone back to work after their second child.

But now he has come here, to Comber Bay. The police might follow him here. Someone will have seen his car.

She’s part of this, now.

‘Jess? Please, just say something.’

‘I don’t think that,’ she says. ‘Of course I don’t think that.’ She keeps her voice, her breathing level; lets him hold her. Her mind works furiously. This is Comber Bay. Australia’s Bermuda Triangle, with its own catalogue of mysteries.

A plan begins to form.

‘What am I going to do?’ Cameron moans into her hair. ‘What am I going to do, Jessie?’