‘Who is that?’ Bo calls.
‘Just stay there, Bo,’ Solomon says, annoyed, without turning.
Of course she ignores him and comes closer. The young woman makes a sound again, another unusual, kind of chirping sound, if a chirp could ever seem like a bark. It’s directed at Bo.
Bo is gobsmacked, but a smile crawls to her face with fascination.
‘I think she wants you to back off,’ Solomon says to her.
‘Okay, Doctor Doolittle, but I haven’t done anything wrong,’ she says, annoyed at being told what to do. ‘So I’m not leaving.’
‘Well then just don’t come any closer,’ Solomon says.
‘Sol!’ she says, looking at him with shock.
‘Hey, hey, it’s okay!’ he says to the girl, slowly moving a little closer, getting on his hands and knees to pick up the flowers and herbs from the ground. He places them in her basket and holds it out to her. She stops her chirping but is clearly in distress, looking from Solomon to Bo, eyes wide and fearful.
‘My name is Bo Healy. I’m a filmmaker and we’re here with Joe Toolin’s permission,’ she holds out her hand.
The blonde woman looks at her hand and makes a series of more distressed sounds, none of them words.
‘Oh my God,’ Bo looks at Solomon, wide-eyed, taking out her phone and calling Rachel. ‘Rachel, come up to the clearing, quickly. I need the camera.’ She hangs up. ‘Record this,’ she mouths to Solomon, signalling his equipment with her eyes, afraid to move the rest of her body.
The young woman is firing off one bizarre sound after the next and it is the strangest thing Solomon has ever witnessed. It doesn’t sound like it’s coming from her voice box, it’s like a recording. He’s so stunned and fascinated he can’t stop watching her, he looks for wires and there are none. This is real.
He takes a few steps in the direction of his audio bag.
Rachel appears through the trees, rushing with her camera in her hands, closely followed by Joe.
‘What the hell is going on down there?’ Rachel shouts, coming to an abrupt halt as she sees with her own eyes.
The young woman turns to Rachel and starts making the sound of a car alarm. Solomon looks at what’s happening from her perspective, surrounded by three people, strangers in the forest, she must feel completely trapped. He can’t bring himself to record this. It’s not right.
Bo senses his hesitancy and sighs. ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ she snaps. She does what she should have done at the outset had she thought of it at the time, and films the unfolding scene with her phone.
Joe joins them.
The blonde woman stops making her sounds, for a moment she looks at Joe and she seems relieved.
‘Who are you?’ Joe shouts, half hidden by a tree. The fear is obvious in his voice. ‘What are you doing on my land?’
She panics again, backing away through the trees.
Solomon watches them all. Bo is filming on her phone, Rachel pointing the camera at her, Joe a fierce face on him.
Solomon is exhausted, he needs to eat.
‘Stop!’ he yells and everybody goes silent. ‘You’re frightening her. Everybody step away. Let her go.’
She stares at him.
‘You’re free to go.’
She keeps looking at him. Those green eyes on him.
‘I don’t think she understands,’ Bo says, still filming.
‘Of course she understands,’ Solomon snaps.
‘I don’t think she can speak… words. What’s your name?’ Bo asks.
The young woman ignores the question and continues to look at Solomon.
‘Her name is Laura,’ he says.
Mossie suddenly comes racing from the direction of the bat house, towards the forest, he’s barking manically, protecting his land from the intruder. But instead of stopping by Joe he continues into the forest and heads straight for Laura.
‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, call him off her, Joe,’ Solomon says fearfully, afraid he’ll take a chunk out of her.
But Mossie stops right at her feet, circles her excitedly, jumping up and down for her attention, licking her hand.
She rubs him – clearly the two of them are no strangers – as she nervously keeps her eye on everyone around her. She holds her hand out to Solomon and he looks at her, confused, thinking she wants to hold his hand. He reaches out his hand and then she smiles and looks down at the basket.
‘The basket, Sol,’ Bo says.
Embarrassed, he hands it to her.
Laura sets off with Mossie in tow, trying to avoid everyone. She is tentative at first. As she passes Bo, she growls, a perfect imitation of a dog growl so real it sounds like a recording, or as though it has come from Mossie. Laura examines Joe carefully and as soon as she’s clear of them she runs up through the forest, past the bat house in the direction of the cottage.
‘Did you get that?’ Bo asks Rachel.
‘Yep,’ she removes the camera from her shoulder, and wipes the perspiration from her forehead. ‘I got the blonde woman barking at you.’
‘Where did she go?’ Solomon asks.
‘There’s a cottage around the back of the bat house,’ Rachel explains. Bo is too busy reviewing her video footage to see if she captured the moment.
‘Do you know her?’ Solomon asks Joe, completely confused as to what happened but feeling the adrenaline running through his body and a light tremble within him.
‘She’s trespassing on private property,’ he huffs, the anger steaming off him.
‘Do you think Tom knew about her?’ Bo asks.
That question stumps him. His face goes from certainty, to confusion, to anger, betrayal, to disbelief once again. Then he’s sad. If his brother did know about this young woman living in the cottage on their land, then he was keeping it from him. The brothers with no secrets from each other, it turns out, had one very big one.
4
‘There’s only one way of finding the answers,’ Bo says, rolling up the sleeves of her black blouse to reveal her bronzed skin, as the sun continues to beat down overhead. ‘We have to talk to the girl.’
‘She’s not a girl. She’s a woman, and her name is Laura,’ Solomon says, not sure where the anger is coming from. ‘And I seriously doubt she’ll want to talk to us now after we scared the shit out of her.’
‘I didn’t know she was… that she had a… disability,’ Bo defends herself.
‘Disability?’ Solomon splutters.
‘Oh, come on, what’s the PC term?’ Bo searches. ‘Developmentally delayed, developmentally disabled, unsophisticated. Any of those please you? You know what I mean, I didn’t realise.’
‘Well, she ain’t exactly normal,’ Rachel says, sitting down on a rock, exhausted and sweating.
‘Whatever the word for her, there’s clearly something wrong with her, Solomon,’ Bo says, pushing her hair off her face and redoing the short ponytail in her hair, the excitement bursting from her. ‘If I’d known that, I would have approached her differently. Did you two talk? Apart from her telling you her name. You were there a while.’
‘I think what happens from here is Joe’s decision. It’s his land,’ Solomon says, ignoring Bo’s interview, his stomach grumbling.
Bo throws him an annoyed look.
Joe shuffles around, clearly very uncomfortable with this chain of events. Joe likes routine, for everything to remain the same. Already his day has been very stressful and emotional. ‘I want Mossie back,’ he says finally. ‘And she shouldn’t be living on my land.’
‘Squatters laws are tricky,’ Rachel says. ‘Friend of mine went through it. You have to get a court order to remove them.’
‘Did your friends get rid of the squatter?’ Solomon asks.
‘My friend was the squatter,’ Rachel replies.
Despite his frustration with what’s going on, Solomon smirks.