Page 5 of The Sirens

4

LUCY

TUESDAY, 12 FEbrUARY 2019

Lucy stares at the shimmering road, willing the bright lines on the tarmac to vanquish the ghostly images from her dream. The dock, wreathed in mist and human desperation. The ship with its masts piercing the heavy sky, the proud swell of its bow. The mermaid figurehead with her painted, watching eyes.

The dream had an ugly vividness to it, a corporeality. This, like the sleepwalking, is horribly new.

Though, she recalls now, there had been a time in childhood when she often dreamt of water. She doesn’t remember much. A sun-dappled surface far above her head. A feeling that she was drowning, but somehow safe, that a liquid membrane protected her from the outside world. This was when she started school, when she had first begun to grasp that she was different. A child who couldn’t wash her hands, take a bath, go for a swimming lesson. Was it any wonder she longed to submerge herself in water like other children, to be normal?

Gradually those dreams stopped, replaced by more typical nightmares. Bloodied pearls of teeth in her palm. Trying and failing to outrun something, her legs weighted and stumbling. An exam she hadn’t studied for. The details fading as the day progressed, sleep remaining a place of safety, a refuge.

This is not like that. The remaining fragments seem to burn, splinters in her mind. She can still feel the clammy press of a hand in her own, the unfamiliar words in her mouth.

Muh dri-four.

Waking in the night, the thin motel sheets twisted, she’d breathed the words into her iPhone, watching bleary-eyed as Siri produced a translation.

Mo dheirfiúr

Irish.

My sister.

How could she have dreamt in a foreign language? A language she has never read, never heard?

Willing the dream to fade, she focuses on the road, on the map blinking on her phone screen. Six hours of driving to go. She can do this. She takes a sip of warm service station Coke, turns the podcast up louder, letting the mystery of Comber Bay distract her.

Danny Smith was the quintessential Aussie larrikin. A faded photograph from 1980 shows him at the beach – the same beach from where he’d later vanish – leaning against a surfboard. Stripes of zinc cover his cheekbones like war paint. A mullet brushes his shoulders. He wears budgie smugglers and a necklace made of shells.

His friends described him with the usual phrases. The life and soul of the party. The boy next door. Everyone’s mate. A lady-killer.

He was a surf lifesaver, a strong swimmer who knew the beach like the back of his hand.

But early one morning he took his towel and went down to the water, never to return.

Lucy imagines a wave closing over the man’s body, white jaws snapping tight. She doesn’t think much of the serial killer theory – it seems unlikely that a murderer would operate over three decades. Besides, it’s not as if there’s any proof: no bodies have ever been recovered. Though that in itself is strange, she supposes, if the men did drown. A detail from another true crime case sticks in her mind – as they decompose, human corpses gradually fill with gas, causing them to float and wash ashore. Odd, then, that none of The Eight – as the podcast refers to the missing men – were ever found.

After brief explanations of the circumstances of the other disappearances, from the Vietnam vet who vanished in 1966 to the itinerant surfer last seen in 1997, the host turns to the natural phenomenon theory teased at the beginning of the episode.

But if criminology can’t provide the answer, perhaps science can. Researchers have suggested that the area’s unusual tidal patterns might be to blame for the disappearances. Whirlpools are formed when fast-moving tidal currents, travelling in opposing directions, meet, forming a dangerous vortex that can suck vessels into the deep. A whirlpool or other tidal anomaly might also explain other local events, including a nineteenth-century shipwreck, and, more recently, the discovery of an infant child at a cave in Devil’s Lookout – according to some theories, the sole survivor of another, smaller shipwreck.

Whirlpools. Lucy thinks of The Odyssey – Charybdis, frothy maw stretched wide as she lies in wait for her prey.

As she gets closer to Comber Bay, Lucy pulls over to check her iPhone for directions, noting with a surge of panic that there are more texts from Em, and a couple of missed calls from the university’s administration office. There’s a voicemail, too. She doesn’t listen to it, doesn’t open the texts from Em. Nothing from Ben, she notices. A tiny pulse of disappointment is followed by shame.

During those long, languid weeks of the summer holidays, the chime of her phone – the possibility of another message from him – had been enough to send her heart thudding. But that was before.

She opens their WhatsApp conversation, rereads the message he sent the day before she woke to find herself in his room.

Lucy, I can only apologise for what happened. I never intended for that photograph to be made public in the way that it was. I see now that I should not have shown it to anyone without checking with you first, but because you didn’t explicitly tell me not to, I did not realise that I didn’t have your consent. Obviously, I had no idea that it would end up on social media. I hope you can forgive me for making such a stupid mistake.

Rereading the messages now, she’s struck by his tone, the wheedling self-justification. She wonders if his lawyer father helped him craft it, helped him spin a narrative that he’d done nothing wrong by showing his friends the photo, that he is as much a victim as Lucy. He wasn’t sorry for what he’d done, she realises now, but for the fact that he’d been caught. That, for a brief moment, she’d held his future in her hands.

Except it’s her own future she’s thrown away.

She pulls back onto the road.

She has to focus on getting to Cliff House and Jess, who seems to be ignoring Lucy’s texts and calls. Nerves tick inside her. What will Jess say, when her kid sister turns up on her doorstep without warning?

Again, she thinks back to that Christmas, after Lucy had finished high school. The last time she saw Jess.

She’d got her exam results and they were brilliant: more than enough to get her into the Bachelor of Communications at Hume, the pre-eminent journalism degree in Australia.

She’d expected to feel elation; triumph, even. But her mood had been dulled by hurt as she’d waited and waited for Jess to call. But there’d been nothing – not even a text to say congratulations.

Her parents, at least, had been proud, in spite of their reservations about her career plans. They’d doused the kitchen with the contents of a dusty bottle of champagne unearthed from the garage. For a moment, the old arguments were left aside.

‘Can’t you do something more socially responsible?’ her mother used to ask, when Lucy spoke of her admiration for Nellie Bly and Veronica Guerin, for Christiane Amanpour and Susan Sontag. ‘Something that actually helps people?’

Easy for you to say , Lucy would think, resentment glowing in her chest. Her mother was a therapist: every morning, she got into her rusted blue hatchback and drove 50 kilometres to Bourke, the nearest large town. There, Maggie Martin worked for an outreach centre run by a charity set up to support deprived rural areas. Lucy knew – not because her mother ever told her, but because she’d read her profile on the charity’s website – that her expertise was in substance abuse, depression and self-harm.

In the evenings, her mother came home with her mouth and shoulders sagging, as if her job produced its own kind of gravity. She rarely smiled before starting dinner, normally a meal of an elaborate nature and an obscure provenance, the ingredients for which sorely tested the capabilities of the local supermarket. Coq au vin, homemade gnocchi, lamb tagine. Cooking seemed to loosen something in her, to relax the tendons in her face and smooth the lines from her forehead. But the relief was short-lived: every morning, she would drag herself back to the car and begin the long drive again, martyr-like.

‘Christ, Mum, I’m not going to be the next Rupert Murdoch,’ Lucy would say. ‘I do want to help people. By finding the truth. Getting justice.’

And I want to enjoy my job. Not like you.

‘Sweetheart, the media ruins people’s lives. Especially women’s lives,’ was her mother’s favoured response. ‘Look at Lindy Chamberlain. Monica bloody Lewinsky.’

‘But it’s women I want to help. What about the #MeToo movement? It’s the truth that matters. It’s the only thing that does.’

‘I used to think that too, once,’ her mother would say as she filled the kettle – a signal that the conversation was now over. ‘But then I grew up. And one day so will you, Goose.’

She still isn’t sure what made her mother come around. On her eighteenth birthday, Lucy had come home to find her mother hurriedly hanging up the phone, cheeks flaming. ‘Jess says happy birthday,’ she said. Lucy had swallowed down hurt that her sister hadn’t asked to speak to her, hadn’t wished her a happy birthday herself.

But since that night, Maggie has held her tongue on the subject of Lucy’s career. And perhaps it was wishful thinking, but Lucy wondered if Jess had talked some sense into her mother, persuaded her to support Lucy’s ambitions.

Perhaps she did care, after all.

She’d consoled herself with the thought in the lead-up to Christmas, even began to look forward to her sister’s arrival. Her father strung the deck with fairy lights, and her mother had spent weeks on the Christmas pudding, so that the whole kitchen filled with the treacly aroma of spice and fruit.

Jess had arrived on Christmas Eve. She’d looked good, in a long maxi-dress and fringed shawl, her black hair flowing. It had seemed for a moment, the four of them opening presents to the strains of ‘Last Christmas’, that everything would be OK. Perhaps Jess had just been busy, with a new art project, a new boyfriend? Perhaps she would explain, even apologise?

But when she and Jess had sat side by side at the festive table, their arms brushing as they reached across each other to spoon food onto their plates, Lucy felt it: that chill of distance. Jess asked her no questions, and when Lucy enquired how everything was going back in Sydney – her painting, the flat – she responded in brief, perfunctory sentences.

Lucy wondered if she’d imagined the fun they’d had a few months before, dancing to Nick Cave. Maybe even her treasured childhood memories of her sister were just stories she’d told herself. Had Jess really balanced her on her knee and sung her lullabies ? Had they spread butcher’s paper and crayons all over the kitchen table, drawing otherworldly forests and undersea caves?

It seemed almost impossible to believe. It still does.

The drive into Comber Bay is tinted green by gum trees that swoop low and close over the road. She winds the window down and breathes in the rich air: the tang of eucalypt, the heady sweetness of wattle. Cicadas hum, and she catches the throaty music of a magpie’s call, the familiar sounds reassuring.

She’s almost forgotten she’s near the coast, until the bush falls away on one side and the bay comes into view, stopping Lucy’s heart in her chest. She checks her rear-view mirror before slowing down to get a better look. It’s breathtaking: a green tangle of scrub, brightened by red flashes of banksia, gives way to the sandstone haunch of the cliff. And then the sea, bright and unreal as a painting. She’s never seen so many shades of blue: gleaming turquoise near the breakers; further out, a blue so dark it’s almost black. Lucy shivers, thinking of the world beneath the spangled waves.

The coastline curves around, so that she can see the cliffs on the other side of the bay, honeycombed with caves. Devil’s Lookout. It’s the same view she’s seen already, on Jess’s postcard, but the photographer hadn’t quite captured the eeriness of the cliff face. In person, the caves look deeper and darker; one in particular, closest to the waterline, is large enough that she can almost imagine a demon lurking there, surveying the sea below.

A prickle starts at the base of Lucy’s spine. Maybe it’s the knowledge of what the water would do to her skin. She imagines the waves lapping at her like tongues, stripping her of flesh until she is nothing but bone, gleaming white. Or perhaps it’s the podcast; the thought of all those missing men, presumed drowned. But with the prickling fear there’s a strange pull, too. Lucy struggles to tear her gaze from the bright waves, mesmerised by the way they curl over the shore. A part of her wants to get closer, to feel spindrift on her face; slick rock beneath her palms.

It must be the tiredness, she decides, suddenly giddy. She needs to stop driving, to rest. She checks her phone again: still nothing from Jess. Well. Her sister won’t be able to ignore her for much longer.

The main road overlooks the beach, a boundary between bushland and sea. A car park faces the water, a few sedans with surfboards or fishing rods strapped to their roofs. She’s surprised it isn’t busier; the sky is so bright, a burnished blue dome. But then it’s the school term, and a weekday.

Opposite the car park is a strip of shops with faded awnings – a general store advertising everything from the Sydney Morning Herald to fishing tackle, a post office. There’s an ice cream parlour and a fish and chip shop, both empty. A café, too, its windows dark, a few chairs and tables jumbled outside.

Strange that somewhere so notorious can look so normal. And it seems an odd place for Jess to live – it’s even smaller than their home town, Dawes Plain, and her sister has always seemed such a city person, talking of Sydney pubs, the latest exhibition she’d seen at the Museum of Contemporary Art or the National Gallery. Things Lucy and her parents had never experienced and couldn’t understand. She seemed to make a point of wearing the city like a cloak, preventing them from getting too close.

And yet, Lucy can see the town’s allure. There’s a beauty to it all – the tangled bush, the rolling waves, the endless sky. Like the place wants to swallow you whole, and you want to let it.

Lucy slows down again after she passes the shops, scanning the rest of the town – a couple of homes, a neat redbrick church – for the turnoff to Malua Street. She’s past the beach now, the road taking her through the dark canopy of trees. And then, on the left-hand side, a sign – if it can be called that. The letters etched into the red plank of gum give it a distinctly unofficial feel. The road, too, feels unofficial: more of a dirt track, really. Lucy tightens her jaw as the car shudders over the rocks, branches of the overhanging trees scratching at the windscreen.

She passes a house near the turnoff and the road banks to the left. Lucy squints ahead, seeing the intermittent flash of blue through the gums. The track grows steep, the Honda struggling up the incline, and Lucy catches a whiff of brine through the open window. At last, Cliff House comes into view, flanked by scarred tree trunks.

It’s old, Federation style, the wood weathered pale as bone. Bigger than she’d expected – two storeys. A wrap-around veranda sags in front, thick with gum leaves from the trees that arc above. An old real estate sign wilts near the letterbox, the wood half rotted. The word SOLD emblazoned across it looks fresh and new by contrast, and Lucy wonders whether the house was on the market for a long time before Jess bought it. Perhaps it was uninhabited, even abandoned: one of the windows is covered with plastic, as if it was previously broken. An old bird-feeder swings emptily from a tree, reminding her of her mother. She swallows down a burst of homesickness.

The house is a far cry from Jess’s Sydney terrace. She’d believe she had the wrong address, if it weren’t for the car parked to the left of the house, a teal-coloured Ford that Lucy recognises from Jess’s last Christmas visit.

She wonders now if Jess has had some sort of breakdown – if that had prompted the move to Comber Bay. She tries to remember what her parents told her about this latest development in her sister’s life: it had been late last year, not long before the arrival of the postcard on her birthday.

‘How’s Jess?’ Lucy had asked them during one of their weekly FaceTime calls. ‘Do you think she’ll come home for Christmas this year?’

Her parents had exchanged a glance. Some unspoken understanding seemed to pass between them, and when they turned back to the camera it was her mother who spoke. Her father, meanwhile, looked down at his lap, a new crease forming in his forehead – something Lucy had noticed before, when her older sister was discussed.

‘I don’t think so, sweetheart,’ her mother said. ‘She’s actually – well, she’s moving. She’s managed to buy a little house, down on the South Coast. A place called Comber Bay.’ ‘Comber Bay? What – where all those people have disappeared? Why on earth would she want to live there?’

‘Who knows, but that’s Jess for you, isn’t it? A mystery to us all,’ her mother had sighed before changing the subject.

Lucy unbuckles her seatbelt, exhaustion settling over her like lead. She needs a wash, something to eat. And yet she feels oddly as if she might cry. Her heart constricts. What if Jess is annoyed – unhappy – to see Lucy, angry that she’s disturbed her in her coastal hideout? Part of her wants to reverse the car down the drive and go home, to Dawes Plain.

But then she picks up the postcard from the dashboard, turns it over to read the message again. Let me know if you ever want to come and stay.

Surely she wouldn’t have sent that if she didn’t mean it? The thud of the car door is eerily loud amid the quiet rustling of the bush, and Lucy half expects Jess to appear at the window. But the panes are empty and dark.

Lucy frowns, takes a few steps towards the house. From her vantage point at the house’s left, she can see the whole building. She gasps. Now the name – Cliff House – makes sense.

Where you’d expect a backyard, there’s nothing but lichen-stained rocks tumbling to the sea below. Through the brush, she can make out the white sliver of the beach, the blue gleam of the ocean. Her breath rasps in her ears, impossibly loud, until she realises it’s not her own breathing she can hear, but the sea, thundering against the shore.

Hugging herself, she turns away from the cliff edge, back to the house. The steps leading to the front veranda creak under her weight. There’s a gust of wind, followed by a glassy, almost melancholy sound. A set of windchimes hangs by the door, scattering greenish light across the faded wood.

The handle of the screen door is gritty under her fingers. She opens it and knocks on the wooden front door, tentatively at first, then louder. The house shudders, and she strains for the sound of her sister’s footsteps. But there is nothing, no one.

Could she be out, after all this?

‘Jess?’ she calls, her voice clumsy with disuse after the long drive. ‘It’s me, Lucy. Are you there?’

She pulls her phone from the pocket of her jeans, sees that the battery has run down to 7 per cent. She has a sudden, awful image of her phone charger, still plugged in next to the motel nightstand. Fuck.

She dials Jess’s number yet again.

A dial tone, and then – alien-sounding against the roar of waves and distant calls of gulls – the electronic burst of a ringtone.

It must be Jess’s phone, ringing from inside.

Lucy’s pulse slows a little. She’s home, then. She’ll come to the door, she’ll let Lucy in.

But there’s no answer, no movement from inside the house. Just the insistent, eerie ring of the phone.

‘Jess?’ she calls again, knocking harder on the door this time. She turns the doorknob, expecting to feel resistance, for it to be locked – but to her surprise, it swings open.