Page 6 of The Sirens

5

LUCY

TUESDAY, 12 FEbrUARY 2019

The house smells of oil paint and linseed. It’s dark, the curtains and blinds drawn, and strips of pink-green light pattern the floorboards.

‘Jess?’ Lucy calls, mouth dry. There’s no answer – no sound at all, but for the hum of the fridge and the gentle groan of timber in the wind. She shuts her eyes, gut slippery with the thought of the drop outside. She shakes her head, gropes for a light switch. There’s a jangling sound; her fingers have brushed a set of keys that hang on a hook next to the door. Jess’s keys, phone and car are here – why isn’t she?

Lucy surveys the room. The sight of her sister’s belongings – last viewed in the tiny Sydney flat – is jarring. In Marrickville, there’d been a bohemian charm to the old velvet couch, the tendrilled spider plants and half-melted candles. But here, her sister’s shabby furniture adds to the overall sense of dilapidation, of decay. Intricate orange wallpaper, faded to sickly rust, peels from one wall to reveal bubbling damp underneath. Tarp covers what appears to be a hole in the floor, and Lucy wonders if the house was damaged in a storm.

The chaos isn’t helped by the clutter of art and art supplies: Lucy guesses the living room doubles as a studio, another difference from Jess’s life in Sydney, where she’d rented space in a warehouse for creatives. Wooden easels jostle in each corner, canvases line the walls. The scratched dining table, which Lucy doesn’t recognise, is littered with newspapers and dirty crockery. Glass jars glint at her – from the bookshelves, the dining table, one balanced precariously on the arm of the sofa. Some of the jars are filled with muddied-looking water, others bristle with colour-logged paintbrushes, reaching like bruised fingers.

All of it is disconcerting – it’s as if her sister has become so absorbed by her work that she no longer honours the routines of daily life. But it’s the enormous canvas on the easel that pulls Lucy’s heart into her mouth. That actually frightens her.

She’s seen her sister’s artwork before, of course. It lines the walls of their parents’ farmhouse, jostling for space with her father’s sketches of Australian birds. There’s a self-portrait, her sister’s face rendered in aqueous greens and blues. The shimmering surface of a pool, bright turrets of coral visible beneath. So she’s familiar with the lush application of paint, the galaxies of colour.

But this? This is different.

The painting is enormous, almost as big as the wall behind it. Her sister has painted two female figures, their backs turned on the viewer as they wade into a raging sea. The brushstrokes are frenzied, lavish, and Jess has done something to make their skin gleam, as if it’s lifting from the canvas. Lucy feels sure that if she were to reach out and touch the girls’ hair – pale, like her own – she would feel each whorl, each strand under her fingertips.

Both girls are nude, their legs swallowed by furious splatters of paint. Blue-green, purple, black, foamy white.

But it’s what the figures seem to be walking towards that makes Lucy’s heart stall. The proud masts, the winged sails, diaphanous in the light. The figurehead at the bow – wooden curls tumbling over pert breasts, tail curved and glimmering like the body of a snake. A mermaid.

It’s the same ship from her dream.

Lucy’s eyes skitter around the room. To the left of the painting on the easel, another canvas, darker and murkier, is propped against the wall. She makes out the bright gleam of eyes, stark white against a background of deepest blue. Lines of lighter paint slowly come into focus, forming crouched bodies, packed tight together.

She shudders, looks away, her gaze falling on the painting further left.

Here, her sister has painted the inside of a ship. She can see the coil of rope, cracks of light in the ship’s wooden shell. Blue dusk here, pink dawn there. The light falls on female faces, revealing the ghostly outline of a cheek, the limned curve of an ear. Metal glints around wrists and ankles; cheeks are nothing but dark hollows.

In all the paintings, two women are featured, their hands clasped tight together. The face she recognises from her dream, here repeated twice: the same high cheekbones, the same flaxen hair. One pair of eyes blank and unseeing, the other piercing right through Lucy’s chest.

Mo dheirfiúr.

My sister.

She can’t bear to be in the same room as the paintings, looming with their violent colours.

She stumbles through the door into the kitchen, leans against the counter. The giddiness has returned. The kitchen doesn’t help. It reeks of cat food and the peeling cabinets are painted avocado green, clashing luridly with the yellow wallpaper. Here, too, is a feeling of damp, as if the sea weights the very air. She reaches a tentative hand to the wall in front of her and finds that it is moist, almost springy.

This place would have been outdated when her parents were young; she can’t picture her sister living in it now. And yet, the signs of her are everywhere, from the Museum of Contemporary Art calendar pinned to the fridge to the wizened apples in the familiar wooden fruit bowl, a cast-off from their parents.

She opens the pantry to find instant noodles, tinned tuna and Coco Pops. No proper food, her mother would say. Hunger tipping into nausea, Lucy plunges a hand into the near-empty box of cereal, licking crumbs of chocolate from her fingers.

She pours herself a glass of water, then leans her elbows on the sticky counter, massaging her pounding temples.

She had guessed that Jess had also been stalked by something in her sleep, something that dragged her from her bed at night. She’d seen it with her own eyes, as a child. But for her to have painted something that she, Lucy, has dreamt about …

Surely, they can’t have had the same dream?

Lucy thinks of the grisly cave of the ship’s hold, the girls with their frightened eyes. Are these the scenes that await her come nightfall? She thinks of the ship, imagines the darkness of its belly. The press of other bodies against hers.

She runs her fingers through the bristles of her hair, straightens up, then grips the edge of the counter. She’s overreacting. Her sister has merely painted women aboard a ship; Lucy has dreamt about a similar-looking ship. That’s true. But there could be a million explanations for this. Maybe Lucy has seen some of these paintings before, on Jess’s website or online? Or perhaps Jess told Lucy about them, on that last strained Christmas visit?

That has to be it.

If only Jess were here, to reassure her. Tears of frustration burn in Lucy’s eyes. God, where is she? Could she have had some kind of accident?

Lucy thinks of the cliff, that sheer drop. Imagines Jess lying injured on the rocks below, or perhaps swept out to sea …

She tells herself to stop, that she’s jumping to conclusions. Inventing stories where they don’t exist.

She needs to calm down, to think of the facts.

She pulls her phone from her pocket to check the time, swears when she sees it’s dead. She’s hundreds of miles from home, alone on the very lip of the world, with no way of contacting anyone.

Then she recalls the ringtone she heard from outside the house. She needs to find Jess’s phone.

She starts looking in the living room, although the disorder of it frightens her. There’s something too personal about it, crouching on the hard wooden floor and rifling through the crinkling sheaves of paper, like she’s touching her sister’s thoughts. She moves aside books, a manila file, old newspapers, but finds nothing but a scrawled grocery list. Frozen peas, bread, milk, coffee. The ordinariness is such a contrast to the squalor around her, the strangeness of her sister’s art.

She climbs the rickety staircase, planning to continue her search upstairs. She’s also desperate for the toilet, even though her head throbs with dehydration, her mouth furred and stale.

The bathroom is cramped, the tiles cracked. Toothpaste spots the mirror above the basin. There’s a strong smell of urine; an amber pool of it in the toilet bowl.

‘Ugh,’ she says, flushing it away. The seat is up, too – a dark hair curled on the rim. She slams it down and rushes to unbutton her jeans.

It’s only as she flushes again that it occurs to her: the puddle of urine, the seat left up. The hair. The toilet looked as if a man was the last person to use it.

Lucy frowns. Had her parents mentioned that Jess was dating someone? Their contact with her is irregular enough that they probably wouldn’t know either way.

The only man they’d ever mentioned was Max, Jess’s childhood friend. Lucy even met him, once. One Saturday a few years ago in the supermarket at Bourke, where her mother had dragged her on an unsuccessful mission to source cardamom pods for a chicken biryani. Lucy remembers a tall, fair-haired man, shirtsleeves rolled up to reveal tattooed forearms – the grey petals of a rose, stem fanged with thorns.

He’d looked startled, skittish even, when her mother approached. As Maggie peppered him with questions, Lucy saw his gaze flicker to the scabbed skin of her shins, then dart away. Afterwards, on the car journey home, her mother sighed.

‘I don’t know what happened between those two,’ she said. ‘They used to be so close.’

At the time, Lucy wondered if anyone had ever been truly close to Jess, ever truly known her. She’s often felt that an invisible boundary exists between her sister and the rest of their family, like Jess has conjured some protective force field. It seems impossible that anyone might have breached those walls.

Lucy crosses the hallway into the bedroom. It’s large, and, thanks to the lack of 70s décor, the nicest room in the house. An open window overlooks the sea: curtains billow in the wind, the tide pounding so loudly on the rocks that it might be happening inside her head.

She leans over the unmade double bed to close the window, her fingers freezing on the latch. She can see the cliff from here, lit up by the setting sun. It occurs to her that the house is situated just above those sinister caves cut into the cliff face. Devil’s Lookout. Something catches her eye, flickering in the wind. It’s a snake of rope, protruding from the cliff face; running parallel with shallow steps cut into the sandstone. Her stomach flips.

She thinks of the unlocked front door, the ringing phone she’s yet to find. Could Jess have walked down those stairs, could she have fallen?

She slams the window shut and locks it, turns on the light. Lucy can see nothing out of the window now, nothing but the wan stare of her own reflected face.

This room is messy, too. Clothes carpet the wooden floor, many of them old and paint-splattered. A faded dress hangs limp over the back of a cane chair, sand glittering in its folds. There is a plate on the unmade bed, wiry bronze hairs that must belong to the as yet unseen cat.

There’s no phone on the bedside table, and no sign that anyone lives here other than Jess. No boxers in the chest of drawers, no men’s shirts in the wardrobe. Whoever Jess’s boyfriend is – if he exists – he’s made no lasting impression on the place.

There are none of Jess’s paintings here, Lucy notices. Nothing on the walls at all, in fact, other than a small, framed drawing of a fish. It’s neat and scientific, not Jess’s style, and yet there’s something familiar about it. Moving closer, she realises it’s a sketch of her father’s: the same precise, controlled lines he uses to capture the birds that he gives her mother every year for Christmas.

Here, he’s drawn a lionfish, fins fanning out like propellers, banded spikes sprouting from the ridges on its back. It’s beautiful, but somehow eerie. Threatening. There’s something odd about the paper, too. It’s feathered with tiny cracks. Someone must have crumpled it into a ball – as if they intended to throw it away – before smoothing it out again.

She swallows a sudden pang of longing for her parents, turning towards the bed to continue her search for the phone. It’s then that she notices the white cord twisting from behind the bedside table and into the lumpy mess of pillows and duvet. She springs forward, moving one of the pillows and there it is: Jess’s iPhone. Plugged into the wall socket and fully charged.

A rush of relief, tailed by fear. Where would her sister go without taking her phone – or, for that matter, her keys?

She swipes up to make an emergency call, rehearses in her head what she’ll say to the operator.

But no – she’s being ridiculous, surely. Jess has probably just gone for a walk to the local shop. She could be back any moment. Lucy’s been listening to too much true crime, and it’s impairing her judgment. Not to mention the sleep deprivation, the dreams. The shock of seeing the paintings, the mermaid figurehead with her coiled tail.

She removes Jess’s phone from the charger and plugs her own in instead.

Soon it buzzes with notifications – more texts from Em, three missed calls from the student welfare office, two new voicemails. Nothing, of course, from Ben. He might be talking to the university – or the police – even now.

Her heart lurches with fear but her mind feels numb, unable or unwilling to contemplate the thought.

She puts her phone on flight mode, sinking onto Jess’s

bed.

For the first time since Monday morning, she covers her face with her hands and sobs.