Page 9 of The Sirens

8

LUCY

WEDNESDAY, 13 FEbrUARY 2019

‘Who the fuck are you?’

The woman’s voice is as sharp as her body. She’s short but wiry, the sinews on her arms like vines. With her blazing eyes and dark cloud of hair, she makes the kitchen – with its mouldering fruit and dirty plates – feel dead, tomblike.

She holds a tin of cat food in her hand, raising it like a shield. Lucy blinks.

For a wild moment she wonders if she’s seeing things: if her mind is now conjuring full-scale apparitions. But she registers the lines clustered at the woman’s mouth, the chipped red polish on her toenails, the threads of silver in her dark curls. She’s real.

‘I’m Lucy – Jess’s sister. Who are you ?’

The woman hesitates for a moment, then frowns.

‘You do look like her. Sorry – I’m Melody, from number two,’ she says, stooping to spoon cat food into the bowl. ‘You startled me. She, ah, didn’t mention you were coming.’

Lucy could be imagining it, but there’s a hint of confusion in Melody’s voice, of hurt. She has the uncomfortable impression that Melody is as surprised to learn that Jess has a sister as she is to find her at Cliff House.

‘I thought you were one of those sightseeing ghouls,’ Melody continues. ‘There’ve been loads of them since that podcast. Ryan Smith found someone camped out in his garden shed a few weeks back, poor bugger. Gave him the fright of his life.’

Lucy arranges her face into a blank expression, calculating that it might be best to feign ignorance of the podcast.

‘Come on, the Bermuda Triangle thing? Jess must have mentioned it, living here of all places.’

‘Only vaguely,’ Lucy offers. ‘Speaking of Jess,’ she continues, ‘did she say when she’d be back?’

‘Thought she’d have told you that,’ says Melody, rinsing out the tin at the kitchen sink, and there’s the hurt in her voice again. ‘But she did look pretty frazzled yesterday when she came round. It was so early, too.’ She looks as if she’s about to say something else, then seems to think better of it. ‘She asked me to feed Dora Maar. Must have forgotten you were coming.’

Lucy swallows.

‘But she left the door unlocked,’ she says. ‘And her phone in her room.’

‘I wouldn’t worry about the door,’ Melody says. ‘She told me she’d do that, so I could get in to look after Dora. As for the phone, well. Stress does funny things to people, doesn’t it? She’s been working so hard, poor woman. Think she just needed to get away for a bit, before the big day. She didn’t say how long.’

Heat pulses in Lucy’s cheeks. For a sudden, awful moment – remembering the way she’d found the toilet, her suspicion that a man had used it – she thinks her sister is getting married.

‘The big day?’

The frown returns.

‘Well, the exhibition of course. Next Friday. Isn’t that why you’re here?’

She swallows, letting the words sink in. Jess is hosting an art exhibition. A show. And she hadn’t mentioned it to Lucy. Perhaps that makes sense, given last time. Years ago, when Lucy was fourteen, one of Jess’s paintings was being shown at a swanky gallery in Sydney’s inner west and she’d invited Lucy and their parents for the launch. Lucy remembers the long drive, turning her face away from the blue glimmer of the harbour as they drove over the bridge.

The gallery had been crowded, thronged with Jess’s arty friends. Her mother had patted her hair self-consciously as they were greeted by Rebecca, a tall woman with blue cropped hair who would become Jess’s gallerist. Her father, immune to social anxiety, had vigorously shaken hands, kissed cheeks, as though all these people were here not for Jess, but for him. He told anyone who’d listen that he’d been the first to put a pencil in his daughter’s hand, to recognise her talent.

The three of them had been drawn to Jess’s painting at the same time, as if it exerted a magnetic pull. Tomb , read the title card. Oil paints and mixed media.

A glimmering red orb, suspended in darkness. A darkness that was textured and layered, hints of blue and violet revealing themselves the longer you looked. Lucy didn’t really understand what it was meant to be, what the crimson circle signified. Glancing towards her parents to see what they made of it, she saw her mother reach for her father’s hand and squeeze his fingers tight. Looking back at the painting, she noticed for the first time the hieroglyphs of a tiny skeleton inside. Only then did the painting’s title make sense.

There had been plans the following day for brunch, for a trip on the ferry to Manly Beach. Instead her parents bundled her into their car and began the two-day drive home without explanation. Afterwards, there had been fewer phone calls between Jess and her mother. When they did speak, her mother took the phone into the bedroom and shut the door, speaking in an angry whisper that, try as she might, Lucy couldn’t make out. Once, she’d picked up the extension in the living room to hear Jess say, ‘I’m not apologising, and I’m not going to censor my art just because it makes you uncomfortable,’ before her mother realised Lucy was listening.

‘Yes – yes – of course I am,’ she says now, forcing a smile. ‘So excited for her. Can’t wait.’ She doesn’t want Melody to see how little she knows of her sister’s life. ‘Sorry. Still half asleep. Need a coffee.’

‘I’ll get out of your hair.’ Melody wipes the rinsed tin with a tea towel before tossing it in the recycling bin. Lucy notices with discomfort – and a twinge of jealousy – the ease with which she moves around Jess’s kitchen. ‘I get up early, to open the shop. The general store on the corner. Pop in later, if you need anything.’

She picks up her handbag from the counter, then hesitates. ‘Hang on – if you’re here, you can take care of Dora Maar. Cat food’s in that cupboard over there, but I think you’re running low.’

Melody puts the handbag on her shoulder, opens and closes the front door behind her.

Lucy sighs, leans against the kitchen countertop. There’s a scratching at the window over the sink, a tawny flash of fur.

‘Hi,’ she says, leaning over to open the window as a yelloweyed tabby slinks its way inside. ‘You must be Dora Maar. Funny name for a cat, huh?’

Dora Maar ignores Lucy’s outstretched hand, hopping elegantly off the countertop and picking her way over to the bowl of cat food next to the fridge.

As she watches Dora lap at her food bowl, her pink tongue darting in and out of view, Lucy processes her conversation with Melody.

Yesterday morning, Jess had asked Melody to look after her cat. Then she’d gone somewhere to get away, to calm her nerves before her show. Which is next Friday. Nine days away.

Lucy thinks again of the show they’d attended in Sydney. She remembers how nervous Jess had seemed – encased from throat to fingertips in a clinging black dress, sleeves billowing like wings. There’d been a jumpiness to her, as if at any moment she might abandon the whole endeavour, suddenly fly away.

That was years ago; Jess is far more successful now. Lucy’s read the profiles in the art magazines – the full-colour spread of her posed in her old Sydney studio. And this would be a solo show, so there’d be no other artists to compete with, no one else to share the pressure. Would that make her more nervous, or less?

Perhaps that’s why the house is in such a state. Perhaps Jess had felt overwhelmed by the mess, the proximity to her work; perhaps, having finished her paintings, she had to get away from them.

Lucy boils the kettle, taking a pot of instant noodles and a near-empty jar of coffee from the cupboard. An odd breakfast, but better than nothing.

The problem, she thinks as she stirs her noodles, is that she simply doesn’t know Jess well enough to assess if this is unusual, out of character.

She’d wanted to ask Melody so many questions. They’d been there, formed and waiting, on her tongue.

Did Jess say where she was going?

Do you know if she has a boyfriend, a man in her life? Do you know if she still sleepwalks?

But she couldn’t bear to reveal the distance that has grown between them. She thinks back to Melody’s awkward demeanour around her, the way she’d seemed surprised to learn of Lucy’s existence. Had Jess really not mentioned her at all?

She takes a sip of too-hot coffee, swallowing the ache in her throat. The caffeine makes her jittery, and suddenly the chaos of her sister’s house overwhelms her. She needs to do something useful, something to distract herself from the sinking sensation that she has of being abandoned and alone. She had pinned so much hope on Jess. In hindsight it seems irrational that just because her sister sleepwalks, she’d be able to help Lucy pick up the shattered pieces of her life; to undo what happened with Ben.

What had she expected? That her older sister would somehow reach back into the past and stop Lucy from putting her hands around his neck that night; from sending him the picture in the first place?

When Lucy has drained her coffee cup, she rises from the dining-room table, surveying its cluttered surface. She’ll clean the house, she decides, so that it’s perfect for when Jess returns – or at least, she thinks, looking at the tarp that covers the floorboards, the mould-blistered wall, as perfect as it can be.

Before she gets to work, she retrieves her AirPods from the bedroom and presses play on the second episode of the Bermuda Triangle podcast.

Part 2 , the presenter announces as she dons an ancient pair of rubber gloves foraged from under the sink. The Tide .

The morning of Friday, 5 February 1982 began like any other. As the sun rose slowly in the sky, the three fishermen – David Li, Ryan Smith and the skipper, Robert Wilson – launched the fishing trawler Marlin from the Comber Bay Marina.

The sea was flat, the dawn was cool, and the men busied themselves with the tasks they’d performed many times before, that their fathers and grandfathers had performed before them. In the shadow of Devil’s Lookout, they cast their nets in the silver water, trawling for the coppery-scaled flathead that grace the tables of the region’s restaurants. Miles below them lay a rusted shipwreck from two hundred years earlier, as well as the hopes of the families of five men who had so far disappeared from the town.

Perhaps they sometimes wondered if their nets might dredge up the belongings of the missing men, or even their remains. One of the fishermen, Ryan Smith, had lost his brother Daniel to the phenomenon just a year before. No doubt he longed for some evidence, some clue, as to his brother’s fate. For closure.

But the tide had other plans.

Gingerly, Lucy retrieves filthy bowls and mugs from the sink. She sets the dirtiest ones – crusted with food or paint – to soak. She fills the sink with hot, soapy water, relishing the heat as she plunges her gloved hands into the suds.

Soon, she is barely aware of her own actions. Her body works on autopilot: scrubbing, rinsing, drying. There is only the podcast, only this new mystery, unfurling in her brain.

It was the skipper who heard it first: the noise that came from Devil’s Lookout. At first, the men thought it was an injured bird, but gradually they came to recognise the sound. After all, humans are hardwired to respond to the cry of an infant. Deciding to investigate, the men motored as close as possible to the cliff face, as close as the perilous reef would allow.

Later, in newspaper interviews and on radio stations, his colleagues would describe the courage their skipper displayed as he removed his heavy waterproofs and boots and jumped into the sea.

‘He saw it before we did,’ said Ryan Smith, in an interview with the South Coast Examiner the same week. ‘Bobby always had the best eyesight. We were still looking around like a couple of stunned mullets and he was already swimming as fast as he could towards the cave.’

The cave Wilson swam towards, the largest of the cave system in Devil’s Lookout, is a deep recess in the rock. It is so close to the waterline that it can flood during high tide. Accessing it from land is extremely dangerous: adventurers can either scale the steep stone staircase cut into the cliff face, or traverse the slippery, rocky passage from the beach, a rite of passage for local teenagers. Access by sea is also difficult, given the danger posed to marine craft by the reef, and the resultant whirlpool effect some scientists theorise could be responsible for the disappearances. When the events of that day became known, journalists, police and conspiracy theorists alike would puzzle over these details – in particular that the cave was almost inaccessible, other than by sea.

Before Smith and Li knew it, their skipper had disappeared from view, seemingly swallowed by the frothing waves. They began to fear that Comber Bay had claimed its sixth victim.

But to their relief, Wilson reappeared, swimming on his back this time, with a pale bundle clutched to his chest. Li and Smith initiated the man overboard procedure and threw him a life ring, which he fitted around his waist, still holding the pale bundle close.

Only when Wilson was safely back on board did his colleagues realise what he had been carrying, the magnitude of what he had just done.

‘It was a tiny baby,’ said David Li to South Coast Radio. ‘And Bobby had saved [their] life.’

Lucy’s hands still. A bubble of detergent flutters past, catching the early-morning sunlight. All of this happened at Devil’s Lookout, the same cliff face she can see from the kitchen window. The bright day has turned the sandstone a deep gold; the frayed guide rope shivers in the gentle breeze. She cannot see the waves that thunder over the rocks at the cliff’s base, but she can hear them. Being here, so close to where the events took place, sends a thrill across her skin.

A court order prevents the identification of the child’s name or gender. What we do know is that an extensive search for the child’s mother returned no leads. No one came forward to claim the baby, and investigators made little headway in establishing what had brought them to the cave in Devil’s Lookout.

Was the child abandoned after birth? If so, what became of their mother? At the time, due to the child’s age, authorities expressed concerns for the mother’s health. Perhaps she feared coming forward: after all, child abandonment was and remains a criminal offence carrying a significant prison sentence. There was little understanding of maternal mental health in the 1980s, and thus little likelihood of leniency.

Or perhaps, weak and unwell after giving birth, the child’s mother perished: another of Comber Bay’s victims.

Some theorised that the child had somehow survived the shipwreck of a small boat, but this too provided more questions than answers. How did the child end up in the cave? Had someone left them there before they succumbed to drowning? Was the child’s presence in the cave owed not to abandonment, perhaps, but the last sacrifice of parental love?

In the years since, divers have searched the reef below, including the centuries-old shipwreck. No wreckage of another vessel has ever been found.

The newspapers called the child’s discovery a miracle; a bright spot in the town’s catalogue of horror and pain. A local paper dubbed the infant Baby Hope and called for residents to donate nappies and formula.

Mr Wilson and his wife, Judith, volunteered as foster parents, an arrangement made permanent when they later adopted the baby. For a time, the couple were lauded as heroes. Robert and Judith Wilson had lived in Comber Bay all their lives. The pair, both in their mid-twenties, had been married for three years. They had met at a dance put on by the local Baptist church, where Judith’s father Douglas, originally from England, was the minister. After marrying, they moved to a small house not far from Devil’s Lookout. Both regularly attended community events and church services.

It’s hard to know what soured the mood against them – whether it was a neighbour with a grievance, or just the local rumour mill in overdrive. Perhaps it was the misogyny of the era, seen also in the media frenzy around Queensland woman Lindy Chamberlain, who claimed her infant daughter had been taken by a dingo during a camping trip to Uluru. Chamberlain would eventually be convicted of her daughter’s murder: she served three years but was later exonerated.

Whatever the cause, tides have a way of turning. And so, the tide turned against the Wilsons.

In April 1982, the now-defunct tabloid, Yes! Magazine, published an article which claimed that, according to an anonymous source employed at the local doctor’s surgery, Mrs Wilson had been three months pregnant in August 1981. It suggested a new theory for the mystery, one that, in the words of the article, the police had not sufficiently explored: that Mrs Wilson had been the child’s biological mother all along. The tabloid hypothesised that Mrs Wilson might have given birth to the child and then, suffering from post-partum depression, left it in the cave before confessing her actions to her husband. In this version of events, Mr Wilson was not a hero but an accomplice who had sought to cover up his wife’s crime by staging the dramatic rescue from Devil’s Lookout.

Little evidence was presented for the inflammatory claim. But the papers were quick to draw parallels between Judith Wilson and Lindy Chamberlain. An op-ed from the time blamed increasing numbers of women in the workplace for the rise of the ‘callous mother’, despite the fact that Wilson was a home-maker and Chamberlain a clergyman’s wife. The laser eye of the Australian media, until now focused solely on Lindy, turned its gaze on Judith Wilson. Tabloids obtained and published personal photographs of Mrs Wilson – including one depicting her in a revealing black swimsuit, taken on Devil’s Beach, just metres from where the child was found.

Eventually, the police were forced to issue a statement that their inquiries had uncovered no evidence that the Wilsons had any prior connection with the child.

But for the Wilsons, it was too little too late. The fall-out was huge. Mr Wilson lost so many customers that he was forced to close his fishing business. Judith’s parents, the Reverend and Mrs Michaels, returned to their native England.

The couple sold their home and left the area. At the time, locals believed they might have emigrated to England to be with Judith’s parents, or perhaps travelled to New Zealand. Our researchers have been unable to locate them.

It is not known what became of the child rescued from Devil’s Lookout – the infant the media dubbed Baby Hope, the bright spot in the town’s darkness.

One wonders how the townspeople remember Baby Hope now – the victim of parental neglect, or a media hounding? Only one thing seems clear: on 5 February 1982, the tide brought Comber Bay a chance of redemption. Then that chance was lost.

In 1986, with the disappearance of Alex Thorgood, the tide would take its next victim.

The presenter’s voice fades into the eerie theme music. Lucy removes the rubber gloves and wipes her hands on a tea towel to remove any excess moisture. Boiling the kettle again, she makes another coffee in one of the newly pristine mugs.

In the living room, she sits on the sagging sofa, feeling strangely winded; her mind still full of what she’s just heard. Dora Maar slinks inside the room, looking up at her quizzically. Lucy lifts her onto her lap, closing her eyes at the soothing hum of the purring against her chest.

She takes a sip of coffee, but her insides feel cold.

It’s the thought of the caves. Even in the cheery sunset colours of the postcard Jess sent her, there had been something disturbing about those hollows etched into the sandstone. To look at them is to know immediately their darkness, to know the rust smell of water bleeding into rock, to hear the sea sluicing its way inside.

A child – a baby – alone in a cave, for God knows how long. It’s unimaginable. She shudders to think of a small, fragile body at the mercy of the creeping tide. She takes another sip of coffee.

And how sad, that the couple who had adopted the child had come under such horrendous scrutiny.

Typical, of course, that the woman – Judith Wilson – had been the focus.

Does Jess know about this aspect of Comber Bay’s history? Does she know that lives were lost, forever changed, mere metres from where she lays her head at night?

She must, Lucy decides, reappraising her earlier assumption. After all, her sister has always been attracted to the macabre. Lucy read an interview she gave once to an art magazine, where she said that she was drawn to the morbid, to the ‘gristle and viscera’ of the human experience. Even now, in her late thirties, she’s still a Goth.

It’s different for Lucy. She’d go mad living here, she thinks. It’s not so much the darkness of it, but the lack of answers. It’s one thing to immerse herself in true crime, to devour reams and reams of investigative journalism. But living inside a mystery, the way Jess has chosen to do, in this house that crouches on the edge of a cliff?

The not knowing – it would send Lucy mad.

When she’s finished her second cup of coffee, Lucy tackles the mess in the living room. She sorts the books and papers into piles, eventually revealing the scrubbed surface of the dining table, puzzling at her sister’s eclectic reading tastes.

There are glossy tomes on art, as she’d expect; but stranger choices, too. A faded book about surrealism called A Wave of Dreams seems to have originally belonged to a Sydney library – looking at the inside cover, she sees that the last person to check it out was a C. Hennessey in 1997. There’s also a tome on Irish mythology, and a copy of The Odyssey , frilled with Post-it notes. Her attempt to slide one book from underneath the other sends the whole pile crashing to the floor, knocking over mugs with dregs of tea and glasses with sludges of paint in the process.

She swears under her breath as she searches, fruitlessly, for a mop to clean the wet mess of tea and paint; settling in the end for an old flannel.

God knows how her sister can live – let alone work – in these conditions.

She pictures her own room at university with an ache of regret. Her neat stack of notebooks, the corkboard above her desk with the carefully pinned index cards and one of her father’s drawings – a fairywren – for luck. Her mother had taken her stationery shopping before her first term, and she’d felt so hopeful, choosing the perfect shade of highlighter, ballpoint pens that wouldn’t smudge. Hopeful and relieved – at last, her parents had accepted her path of study.

The first year had gone so well. Not just academically – she’d loved immersing herself in the course, in modules on Digital Media and Ethical Communication – but socially, too. She’d made friends: principally Em, who sported a new manicure every week and was unabashed about her ambition to become the Carrie Bradshaw of TikTok.

It was Em who had encouraged her to pursue Ben. She’d caught the way Lucy’s eyes lingered on the dark-haired boy who sat in front of them, who answered the professor’s questions with a confidence Lucy found hopelessly alluring. One day when they were to be sorted into pairs for an assignment, Em had moved seats so that Lucy and Ben were grouped together.

The piece, authored mostly by Lucy, garnered full marks, for its ‘incisive yet sensitive’ study of the forgotten victims of a recently convicted serial killer. The celebratory beers at the university bar were Ben’s idea, ‘his shout’, he’d said. Em had helped Lucy choose her outfit, a black jumpsuit accompanied by a swipe of Em’s bronzer on each cheek.

Over the long December break, she’d lain in bed and revisited her memories of that night, delicately, as though they might dissolve under close inspection. His face, flush against hers. The froth of beer on his cupid’s bow, the wiry perfection of his eyebrows. The heat of him through his shirt. She’d read and reread his texts, imagining him there, lying next to her.

At first, Lucy had kept her body angled slightly away from Ben’s as they leaned against the bar, frightened by her desire for him even then. But as the bar filled with more and more students, as the music thumped louder and louder, their bodies were pushed closer together. When Daryl Braithwaite’s ‘The Horses’ played over the speakers, the place erupted and, like everyone else, they’d flung their arms around each other and sung along.

He’d led her outside, away from the scrum of other students, the pulse of drunken conversation, the sticky floor. No witnesses but the night sky, sugared with stars.

‘You have a pretty voice,’ he’d said, touching the tip of her nose.

Later, in his dorm room, he had opened her slowly and carefully, like she was a gift.

She had given into it, then, the desire that had so frightened her. And how freeing it had felt: like she was fully inhabiting her body for the first time.

But as soon as he’d sent that photograph to his friends, that feeling had gone. He had destroyed it.

Perhaps the sleepwalking was a reaction to that loss, somehow? Desire morphed into rage. Her body acting of its own accord, taking back what was hers, when her mind had exhausted more reasonable options. But she can’t think of it as anything other than a threat – to others, and to herself.

She thinks of Devil’s Lookout, that golden staircase to the waves. She imagines herself, in thrall to some dream world, opening the back door and stepping onto the veranda. Four paces to the railing, maybe five. And then …

Lucy hugs herself.

Even though she’s sitting on the floor, the tide only a murmur through the house, she has a feeling like vertigo. As if she’s on the cliff now, teetering on its very edge.