The River Child

Chapter 1-2

‘He was a fuckin’ poofta, ya know,’ he said.

The officer said nothing.

‘He f****d men, you know,’ he said, slightly louder. ‘Used to do it at the abandoned army barracks over on the east side.’

Still, the officer didn’t react. My brother spat into the wet earth, just missing Bob Patterson’s foot, and then turned his back on all of them. The police rescue climbed the tree, slackened the rope, and the body was lowered slowly to the ground just as Sarah Boatman, her face blanched with shock, swept down the riverbank, her arms flailing, her mangled grief so raw that people turned away. Her screams were drowned out by the helicopter above. My mother arrived and told me to go home, but I didn’t want to go home so I ran, down into the village until I reached the turn-off tree, the place where Boatman and I always parted before taking different routes home. I kept on running until I couldn’t run anymore.

I went to Billy’s funeral with my mother and brother. The village cemetery is tucked into the side of a hill that runs down to the river. You’ll have a spectacular view, Billy, my brother had said as he threw a handful of dirt into the grave. The village children, too young to comprehend, played games amongst the headstones; who could find the oldest person buried there, the youngest baby, the strangest family name. It was the first funeral I ever attended and I remember being shocked when people started throwing dirt into the hole. My brother didn’t throw his dirt in like the others. He stood still, his arm stretched out, his fist closed. He let the dirt trickle out slowly. I held my breath until he’d finished. He said they should have put Billy back in his boat, taken it to the coast, and let him go back to the water.

After the funeral, I went back down to the river. The willows on the bank seemed to bend even lower over the river, as if in deference to what had happened. People still moored their small boats along the river’s edge. A thick patch of oil floated in a near perfect circle. Casuarinas spread out their arms over the ripples. Willow leaves skimmed the surface of the water, small eddies spun and danced in the sunlight. Cords of vines lay in dark green ropes. Mosquitoes hung thick in the air.

On the day we went down to the river to look for Elise, my mother stood still. When she spoke, it was almost a whisper.

‘Not again. It can’t happen again. First Billy and now…’

‘Elise isn’t dead, Mum,’ I said. My voice cracked. My mother took my hand.

‘I know,’ she said.

She screamed out Elise’s name and then she bent down and picked up a piece of cable, grey and speckled with mud. She walked down as far as she could to where the flat sheet of water began. She bent forward and struck out at the river, thrashing the cable cord down on its surface, over and over. Gasping for breath, she kept going, her mouth set in a grim line. I said nothing. Finally, she stood, breathing in short rasps.

‘Xerxes whipped the water,’ she said.

I didn’t reply.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Keep looking.’

In the late afternoon, I was disturbed when I tried to recall Elise’s face and found I was unable to do so. I didn’t understand why the police had asked me what Elise was wearing on the morning she disappeared. They asked me about the colour of her eyes. My mother said children could be unreliable witnesses and therefore the police had to check that my description was credible. I remembered what Elise had been wearing. I recalled the colour of her eyes.

‘Blue,’ I said.

‘Green,’ my mother said.

I looked up at my mother. She saw the torment on my face. I had failed Elise once already that morning and now I was failing her again.

‘Blue-green,’ my mother said and planted a cigarette in her mouth as if it were a full stop. ‘Yes, blue-green.’

Olivia Newmark threw up in the guesthouse garden on the first evening of Elise’s disappearance. It was five o’clock, still light, but rain spattered the windows and dark clouds were forming. Olivia was employed as a private nurse for my grandmother’s sister Esther. Like other wives on the island, she too had questioned her husband as to his whereabouts when the girl went missing. Olivia, however, had a reason. Almost two years before, when Olivia’s family had lived on the mainland, her husband John had been arrested. In the middle of a breakdown and after too many bourbons at a party one night, he was found behind a garden shed with a very young girl. His pants were around his ankles. The child was crying. Olivia’s husband was crying as well. In the days that followed, before he was charged and taken away, the local teenagers threw rocks at the windows of Olivia’s house. They spray-painted Pedo, Rockspider, Kidfucker on the driveway. Underpants Man, they screamed as they cycled away.

‘This is a family neighbourhood,’ the women on the street told Olivia. ‘We won’t tolerate such things, nervous breakdown or not.’

Ronny Boyle from two streets away took the entire contents of his sister’s underwear drawer and threw them over the Newmark’s rose garden. For a whole day, the roses were cocooned in the small domes of pink bra cups. White lace panties hung off thorns. Olivia plucked the undergarments off the rose bushes late at night. She did not leave the house during the day for a week. The next week, the ‘For Sale’ sign stood like a badge of disgrace on Olivia’s lawn. She moved her family, minus her husband, to the island and gained employment as my great Aunt Esther’s carer.

Olivia, like the rest of the staff, joined the search, mumbling frantic prayers as she ran all over the property. Her estranged husband had visited her the day before. Olivia permitted these visits for her children’s sake. She always stayed in the room while John spent time with the children. He’s done his time, she told us. He’s learned his lesson. Please, not again, she prayed. Not Elise. Not anyone.

In the late afternoon, Bob Patterson and his wife arrived and were ushered into the dining room where we had assembled. Bob drew himself up to his full height, ready to speak. A self-styled leader, he felt the need to disseminate information: what the police were doing, when the divers would be given clearance to search the river again, how the Boatmans were holding up, and what we could do in the meantime. He boomed unselfconsciously, flattening anybody else’s attempts at dialogue. His wife interjected on a number of occasions, her voice a respirator rasp of Alpine Menthols and Cedel Fresh Breath. As he talked, the rain fell heavily, the noise rattling the windows, forcing him to increase his volume. Bob filled the room with his voice. His wife winced and hugged her drink; she gave him a look that only another long-suffering wife could understand. A small, brown walnut of a woman, she rolled after her husband in her protective shell, never quite cracking. As the night unfolded, the councillor drank until his voice suddenly became so loud that his wife spilled her cocktail in surprise.

It was during the delivery of Bob Patterson’s speech that everyone’s eyes were drawn to the garden outside, to the sight of Olivia retching hideously, clutching the top of a topiary bush trimmed into the shape of a heart. Olivia seemed to be chanting, and then a yellow-green curtain of vomit fell from her mouth over the small, green bushes. It splashed down onto her white nurse’s shoes. She looked up and saw her captive audience and, too sick to care, she let forth another arc of watery waste and coughed until there was nothing but a long rope of sticky saliva that plopped onto a leaf in a glistening glob. Her hand covered her mouth, and she stumbled into the garden behind, leaving a trail of undigested droppings behind her. My grandmother told my Aunt Sunita to tell Olivia to go home.

My grandmother drew the blinds and motioned for me to bring another tray of drinks. My mother shifted her weight onto one foot, and then curled one knee behind the other, her slimness and boniness making her look for a moment like a water bird about to peck at a morsel in the sand. She dragged on her cigarette, but instead of holding down the smoke for some length, she blew it out quickly, as if she desired to be rid of it. She filled her highball glass, adding the ice-cubes carefully as if they were diamonds.

‘Summer started late,’ my grandmother said. ‘Not good for business. There’s talk of us being cut off and the punts suspended. If the rain doesn’t stop, the river will do its worst. And this Elise thing. It could well ruin us.’

My mother was putting on a brave face. Sarah Boatman, Elise’s mother, had rung. Sarah was my mother’s best friend. Sarah’s other daughter, Kerrie-Anne, whom I called Boatman, was my best friend. My mother cried into the phone. When she had finished her conversation with Sarah, she motioned for me to come into the laundry room. It had always been our routine to do the washing after dinner. Years later, I realised that the simple act of doing the washing, the continuation of a ritual in the middle of devastation, was one of the small acts keeping her sane.

At night, with cigarette firmly clamped in her lips, we’d hang out the washing, pegging my grandmother’s and my aunt’s huge, white bloomers on thin, tight wires in the laundry room as the rain had not abated. On the line outside, I used to see them drying, floating and fluttering like sails against a blue ocean sky, stretched out with the wind behind them, belly full. Stained with cycles of blood, stretched with time and childbirth, they were continually bleached and mended. She’d peg the whites; I’d do the coloureds. There was no integration policy in the Montrell laundry. Strict a*******d made sure the two sides never met. We’d hum Vivaldi or The Messiah as we pegged along the line. My mother wasn’t a churchgoer, but she said Handel never went to church either. Handel and Bach were her staples, and they became mine as well. To me, they were definite; they had patterns that repeated, that commanded you to listen. It was music with authority; it knew where it was going. It made me feel safe.

I liked to press my face into damp, white sheets, squashing them up against my nose, feeling the coolness and breathing in the cleanness. Clean, wet sheets stirred my senses in ways that others might be stirred by the smell of coffee, oranges, or jasmine bushes. Cigarette smoke has the same effect. My mother’s smoking both alarmed and fascinated me. She didn’t smoke like other people who inhaled and exhaled in a matter of seconds. The smoke seemed to stay down there forever before she slowly released it like escaping gas, bits at a time. Just when I thought there was no more to come, a small stream of grey-blue would jettison itself from the thin, coral-coated lips. Her smoking was our barometer to her moods. The way she smoked told us about fear, anger, and reckless happiness. My mother said little and revealed even less. She moved through life with an elegant melancholy, the perpetual cigarette dangling from her mouth, humming the classics and reading women’s magazines in the evenings, her gin and ice-cubes in a highball glass by her side. I once saw a photo of my mother on a carnival ride. Her hair was sticking straight up on end, one dangling earring was flying out like a comet, the other was lost to the wind and wildness of the day, her face was joyful and free. These were my first clues, the first small hints that pointed to the person she used to be.