The River Child

Chapter 1 The day Elise Boatman disappeared seemed at first to be no different from any other day. Morning came, replete with pink orange hues after days of relentless rain. The air was thickly textured with sounds and smells that signalled the safety of routine: showers steaming, pots banging, and bacon spitting under a not so clean grill. The staff at the guesthouse woke, reluctantly shed their night-time fantasies, and climbed into their dull, daily personalities like small-part actors readying for the stage. It was a Thursday, the fifth week of the long school holidays, 1971. The day my mother blew the perfect smoke ring. Cotton coloured clouds scudded across the sky, the skin of the day stretched over us, and just before eleven-thirty my mother’s screams shattered the stillness. She ran from the garden into the kitchen. She was sweating, shaking, her words tumbling out in short, breathy spurts. ‘Elise is missing,’ she said. She doubled over, panting, as if the effort of getting those three words out had spent her energy. The news spread quickly, hearts banged with panic and heads swam dark with imagination. A delivery truck rumbled down the guesthouse drive into the village and soon everybody knew. Phone lines buzzed. The villagers ran up the hill to the guesthouse. My mother’s screams were contagious; other women and men shouted Elise’s name. The staff abandoned their posts. Walter Heather, the maintenance man, dropped his tools and swore. A sergeant from the village arrived within a short time. An hour later, the police, police rescue, and emergency services arrived on the island. And after a day had passed and there was no sign of the girl, thoughts about finality crept in, hovering like a net ready to fall, menacing, catching everyone, entwining them all—the staff, the guests, the family, and the onlookers. All were bound together by the thoughts that surface when a child goes missing; thoughts about the searing chasm where a life should have been and the gaping hole of missed opportunities. The celebrations, graduations, weddings, and grandchildren that would never be. The room that would be left untouched for years; the teddy bear on the pillow yellowing over time, its remaining marble eye dull with dust. On the other side of the door, on that morning, I heard my grandmother Edwina and my mother Margaret talking in strained voices. My grandmother’s voice was strangled high with panic. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Walter Heather is odd, I grant you. And there were rumours, but none of them were true. If it was anyone, it’d be John Newmark. The children know to keep away from him when he comes to visit Olivia. Perhaps I should have said more. Keep away from Mr Newmark, he’s overly fond of children. I’ve always said it, you know I have, Margaret. Perhaps that simply wasn’t enough. Perhaps I should have explained.’ ‘Yes, perhaps you should have,’ my mother replied. A pause. My mother’s voice again, deliberately slow. ‘Perhaps you should never have employed Olivia in the first place. John comes to see the children here occasionally. Supervised visits, of course. He’s on the island right now.’ My grandmother made a grunting noise. ‘They’ll be looking at anyone who has a record. The police will interview him first, then. Olivia’s a good employee. Not her fault she married a man like that.’ My grandmother opened the door. Startled at seeing me there, she gave me a pointed look. ‘Siobhan, how long have you been standing outside this door?’ ‘I just got here,’ I told her, hoping she wouldn’t notice the redness creeping over my face and feeling relieved that I had practised the art of wide-eyed innocence over a long period. Her face softened momentarily. She believed me, of that much I was sure. It wasn’t the first time I’d lied to her. On that first day, rumours surfaced. Memories sharpened, then blurred, then sharpened again, small details adding layers of importance to the unfolding tension. Those who had only tenuous connections to the child suddenly found themselves talking to police. They were needed. They were contributing. Neighbours vied with each other, swapping small pieces of information to bolster their sense of significance, all too ready to be linked to something so tumultuous. Her favourite colour’s blue. I know, I knitted her a jumper last year. She played with my little one quite a bit. We only live ten houses away. She just loved my strawberry tarts. She ate three last time her mother visited. Bob Patterson, a local councillor, was sure he had seen her with someone in the main street that day. It looked like her, he told us, but the rain made it difficult to see well. He was concerned about the rising water levels from the river that lay just beyond the guesthouse gardens. The police divers were battling poor visibility. It’s stopped for now, but if the rain comes back, the river will flood, he told my grandmother. It will make finding her body difficult. Bloody dangerous, in fact. ‘They’re not looking for a body. They’ll find her,’ my grandmother said. At eleven years of age, I knew about danger. Growing up on a river, I understood flooding and the havoc it could cause. The river was easy to understand; its rhythms informed my life. What I didn’t understand was the conversation I overheard from outside the door. I knew to stay away from John Newmark, who was the estranged husband of Olivia, my great aunt’s carer. John Newmark was overly fond of children. I had always thought that the warnings about John Newmark had meant that children should stay away from him because he loved children so much that he would spend all day in conversation with them and neglect his duties. He had done building work for my grandmother in the past. I didn’t understand what John Newmark had to do with Elise’s disappearance. Did they even know each other? As the day wore on, the police canvassed two possibilities: drowning and abduction. Everyone on the island would be interviewed. It was then that the small community began to turn on itself. A thin membrane of disquiet snaked through the most solid of marriages. Wives scrutinised their husbands. They asked subtle questions that would elicit information about their husbands’ whereabouts on the day the three-year-old disappeared. They checked through pockets and wallets. Then they shook their heads in shame for even thinking that their husbands might prefer a three-year-old and yet they made contingency plans in their heads, did quick mental calculations on how they would live and what they would tell their children if the worst that they imagined happened. Standing in their sons’ bedrooms, they surveyed the tarnished sporting trophies on makeshift shelves and reassured themselves that a normal, healthy teenage boy would have no interest in a girl so young. Despite this, they inspected beds, ripping off sheets and bundling them into washing machines while wincing at the stains that told them of their sons’ retreat into private worlds where mothers were not welcome. Despite the islanders’ speculations, for most of the small population there was the secret relief of knowing that islanders did not turn against each other. If Elise had been abducted, it was not by one of their own. Never. They could be part of the drama without really worrying. It had to be a mainlander. Mainlanders were a breed apart; years of separation from Rachley Main town had resulted in islanders almost believing that mainlanders and islanders had distinctly different gene pools. The behaviour of those who lived on the other side of the river only confirmed what Rachley Islanders suspected. Divorces, affairs, scandals, public displays of drunkenness and immorality did not happen on the island. And then there was the Newmark thing, a mainland family. ‘Mainlanders,’ they said, shaking their heads. Down in the village, circles of furtive whisperers stood on street corners, shackled together in shock. Abduction was the word of the day. They haven’t found a body, have they? Somebody’s taken her. A child. How could they? Dreadful business. It’s positively sick. They should bring back the death penalty. On that first day, the frenzied search for Elise began inside, then outside, spreading to the guesthouse, the part we called Our House, while unbeknown to us all, Elise lay deep in the water, not yet found, not yet mourned, the wheels of grief not yet in full motion. Police, police rescue, and emergency services scoured the island. The rain returned. By the end of the first day, rumours swirled and swelled so much they exploded under the weight of their own absurdity. Children formed search groups and ran furiously around the town. Bob Patterson’s wife ran home and changed before she emerged in a khaki pantsuit and a hat edging dangerously close to a topee, as if she were hunting big game instead of a small, blonde girl. The police asked Walter Heather to present himself at the station. Routine questions, my mother told me. He was away for hours. What could he possibly want to take Elise away for? My grandmother did not join in the search. Her obesity rendered her sedentary most of the time. She had a guesthouse to run. She sat by the phone, running her hand up and down the cord as though it might deliver good news if she rubbed hard enough. At one point, she yelled at the cook and threw her tortoise-shell hairbrush against the wall. My grandmother informed the staff they were not to speak to the guests about the missing girl. The guests were removed from what was happening, still ordering champagne and oysters delivered to their rooms, answering their doors in terry-towelling bathrobes with Gables Guest House monogrammed in bright purple on the pocket. As the news spread, more of them wandered down to reception. ‘Found that girl yet?’ they’d ask. There was talk of the punts being suspended. Crossing was too difficult. The moorings were now underwater. If the rain continued, our lifeline to the mainland would be severed. Rachley Island, an inland island, would be cut adrift to fend for itself. Our island was a strip of land twenty-five kilometres long and eleven kilometres wide. Across the waters on the western side, a distance of a quarter of a mile separated us from the mainland. On the other side, to the east, there was almost a kilometre between us and the coast. There, people ate salty chips and flicked sand from their towels, detached from our despair. They listened with vague interest to news reports about a missing child up north near the border of New South Wales and Queensland and then turned to their lotto results with deep sighs. At four o’clock, there was still no word. No sighting. Nothing from the police. My mother poured herself a straight gin and downed it. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Come with me.’ My mother and I ran down to the river, the sludge squelching under our gumboots. The rain had stopped, but the sky told us there was more rain to come. We could only get so far as the flooding had made it impossible to get near to the bank. We stood, staring out across the swampy picnic ground, at the bins, the swings, the wooden tables lying in a flat, brown stew. The see-saw had come adrift. It floated on the surface, tangled in branches and crayfish nets. In the distance, a police boat disappeared around a bend. My mother and I walked without speaking and then we both stopped. We stopped and stared out over the river. We were in line of sight of Billy’s tree. ‘How much can one family bear?’ my mother asked. I didn’t answer. I didn’t have to. My mother stuck a cigarette between her lips and left it there without lighting it. A sick feeling washed over me. Billy’s tree. It was now part of the river markers, along with Simon’s Boatshed, the flood marker poles, the crayfish nets, the punt wharf. Three years previously, Kerrie-Anne Boatman and I had found her brother Billy hanging from the river red gum. We had gone down to the river and had seen his green boat floating aimlessly in a slow circle. And then we saw him. It didn’t look like Billy at first; his face was puffed and swollen, his arms hung limply, sticking out slightly on both sides as if he were carrying two heavy loads. He hung from a thick rope, a grotesque mannequin in brightly coloured clothing, his slack body shimmering in the wet. His toenails were painted bright red. I remember the sounds of that day: two-way radios crackling; the police helicopter above, dipping and rising, deciding where to land; people running down to the river. Bob Patterson was one of the first on the scene, his breath a rotting compost of morning eggs, bourbon, and stale tobacco. He was wearing the T-shirt he’d been wearing for weeks leading up to the local council elections. Bob for the Job. He gave out his business cards to the police. Campaigning, even here, some of the locals said. Bob turned his florid face away from Billy’s swinging corpse. He lit a cigarette. Jesus, he said, shaking his head. He sidled up to one of the police officers.