She said, ‘I can see why Felix lied about that money. It just wasn’t real. Even the way he and his mates talked about it. Like they never said a half a million-it was always half a bar.’
Once, early on in the marriage, Nelly had visited him at the bank in Collins Street. She spoke of the modern, luminous beauty of the green figures on the dealing screens; of the telephones ringing non-stop in the trading room, and the clashing screams of ‘Buy!’ and ‘Sell!’ There was a reverent undertone to Nelly’s words. Her eyes were bright as screens in the shadowy kitchen. ‘Loads of zeros. Unreal money.’
Her husband kept returning to the topic of a second child: acquiescing in its deferral but urging it towards reality. A phrase tripped so often from his tongue that she heard it as scarcely more than an arrangement of phonemes. How nice for Rory, he would remark, to have a sister.
That small figure from the future kept them company for a season; was summoned and vanished, and glided again through their desires. It passed through the Nightingale paintings, occasioning unease but withholding clarity; a riddling presence, as apparitions so often are.
Afterwards, she would think, A little girl in that house!
Wednesday
They sat on splintery steps in the sun, the last of the fresh milk in their coffee. An artful spray of white clouds had transformed the sky into a screensaver. The odour of cattle, a sweet country stench, arrived, then faded.
Tom’s face itched with stubble. It was a discomfort intrinsic to the wretchedness of looking for the dog, one of the small miseries that dissolved in the large one and thickened the brew. He sniffed himself discreetly. Everything that leaked from the body’s wrapping, emanations the city defeated in brisk, hygienic routs, was triumphant here.
He drew the back of his hand first one way, then the other, along his jaw. A truck coming down the ridge road changed gear on its way to the trees.
Nelly had been saying something about the apple tree in the cow paddock no longer bearing fruit. Now she scraped her spoon around the remains of her porridge, licked it, set the bowl aside.
The night’s revelations lay untouched between them. It was like opening a locked door and stumbling on a bound, swaddled form, thought Tom: the coverings could be peeled back to make sure but who would want to do it?
Something tugged faintly. Something Nelly had said the previous day. But what intervened was a bright, painted horse with a rolling eye. So that he blurted, ‘Don’t they frighten you?’
There was no context to the question. Nelly didn’t require one. She was fastening up her hair with a plastic comb, and only nodded, without pausing in her task.
In that way, negligently, she made him an enduring gift. It revealed itself by degrees, a slow enlightenment. Slowly Tom realised that Nelly neither shunned nor welcomed the past. She merely allowed it space. It was a question of accommodation. He saw that sometimes she was afraid of the shape it took. Sometimes fear is a necessary response to ghosts; but room must be found for them, nonetheless.
By mid-morning the sun, no longer a novelty, lay across their backs like a load. They were pushing forward through scrub, collecting fresh grazes. The green plant groweth, menacing / Almighty lovers in the spring. Only they were not that, thought Tom.
Birds worked and whistled. He cursed the cunning of blue gums: the rapid growth that produced density without shade. ‘We could pass within feet of him and not see.’
Nelly wiped her forehead on her arm. Her T-shirt was navy cotton with a red star on the chest; a red and blue striped football sock with the foot cut off had been sewn onto each sleeve.
One leg of her jeans was filthy. She had stepped knee-deep into the pulpy remains of a log. A thread of sweat made its way down her neck to pool above her collarbone; and Tom saw why the hollows there are known as salt cellars.
They were sitting at the foot of the tall eucalypt eating almonds and dried apricots. Withered branches lay around them like broken limbs. Gum forests so often suggested the aftermath of hostilities, the bark litter of dried bandages, the trees as bony and grey as the remnants of regiments.
Tom’s mind drifted, by related channels, to Nelly’s story of the wallaby; to the amazing teenager with the shotgun and scones.
He was tired. It took him a little while to get there. Then he said, ‘The woman Jimmy Morgan saw on the beach. Denise.’
‘Sure.’
‘No, listen. You said she was tall, even back then. Morgan said he saw a tall woman, remember?’ It was coming together with the thrilling symmetry of an equation. ‘Could Denise have got hold of that dress? The one she made for you?’
‘How come you know about that?’ And before Tom could reply, ‘No, she couldn’t have.’
‘Did the cops ask you about it?’
He thought Nelly was going to ignore the question. But eventually she said,‘That dress never fitted me. Felix got Denise to make it because I wouldn’t wear stuff he bought. And of course he got her a pattern that was way too big. I wore that dress like maybe once, to please her. Then I put it with a whole bunch of stuff to take to the Salvos.’
Tom waited.
‘Look, when the cops started asking, I couldn’t fi nd the dress, OK? So I told them I’d chucked it out in the rubbish weeks before, I didn’t know when exactly. I said they could check with Denise that it hadn’t fi tted me.’
‘So maybe Felix went through your op shop stuff and passed the dress on to Denise.’
‘Why would he do that?’
But the tone wasn’t quite right. Nelly sounded cautious rather than unconvinced.
Tom said, ‘So that people might take her for you? I don’t know. But Morgan said the woman he saw had hitched up her skirt so she could climb the dunes. A dress made for you would be a mini on Denise. And it would be tight. Awkward to get around in. Which would be why Morgan thought there was something weird about her.’
Nelly closed her eyes, then opened them wide. She said, ‘Except none of this fits with Felix and Denise. The way they related to each other.’
‘Denise had a crush on you. And just then she hated you. And being asked to help Felix would’ve flattered her. He’d have put some joky spin on it, and by the time she’d realised what it was all about and that he was going to stay missing, it was too late and she was too scared to say anything.’
‘How would she have got home from the beach?’
‘Maybe he’d rented a car. She could’ve driven his car to the beach and set up the scene with his clothes, and then he dropped her back in the rental before taking off in it.’
‘There was no record of Felix renting a car. The cops checked out all that stuff.’
‘Maybe Denise rented it.’
‘I don’t think she was old enough to have a licence.’
‘Who do you think she was then? The woman on the beach.’
‘I nearly went crazy trying to figure it all out, you know. And in the end-’
‘What?’
‘There’s all these bits and pieces. Little unconnected facts. Smart guesses. What they add up to…’ Nelly said, ‘It’s a puzzle.’
‘Puzzles have solutions.’
‘And which is more intriguing? If we knew what happened to Felix, do you think we’d be talking about him?’ She said, ‘Like I think that’s what he wanted. To create a mystery, something people would remember.’
‘Meaning you think it was all a set-up?’
‘Meaning that if he killed himself, it wasn’t there, not on that beach.’ Nelly got to her feet. ‘Somewhere else, somewhere in bush like this would be my guess, somewhere he knew he’d never be found.’