woods, amazed to see them still as potent and thick as ever. He’d walked halfway to their edge. Had been drawn to them. But why? He couldn’t explain that to himself, let alone the police. Randomly scoping out dark woods in the middle of the rainy night when a boy happens to go missing?
‘No.’
Officer Fossey reached for his notebook. Gorilla-man’s right hand casually slipped down to hang straight beside his leg, closer to his service pistol.
‘What’s your name, sir?’
‘Nicholas Close. Look-’
The officer wrote in his notebook, asked, ‘C–L-O-S-E?’
‘What’s going on, Nicky?’ Katharine arrived silently behind her son, fumbling with her dressing gown’s sash.
The policemen exchanged a glance.
‘A young boy has been reported missing, ma’am.’
Silverback held the picture up for Katharine.
‘Oh dear.’ Nicholas, who knew her voice so well, could just detect a quiver. ‘Local boy?’
‘Yes, ma’am. This gentleman told us he returned from overseas tonight?’
Nicholas saw his mother’s eyes narrow just the slightest margin.
‘My son. That’s right.’
‘What time did he arrive?’
‘Just after eleven thirty. His flight touched down at nine fifty, which means he made excellent time getting through customs, hiring a car and getting home here.’ Her words came clipped and fast, the shake replaced by something harder. ‘We talked in our kitchen till quarter past twelve and both went to bed, and it certainly is tragic that a boy’s got himself lost in this rain but I’m not sure I quite understand where this is going.’
The two big men shifted back an almost imperceptible amount. Nicholas sagged a little. He was in his mid- thirties and still needed his mother to keep him out of trouble.
‘Ma’am, we’re just asking questions,’ said Fossey.
‘I do understand that. Have you got any more?’
The officers exchanged a glance.
‘No, ma’am. Catherine with a C?’
‘With a K and two As. Best of luck, Constables. I hope and pray the young lad turns up safe.’
Fossey led Silverback into the rain.
Katharine shut the door. She wrapped her arms around herself. ‘I just hate the fact that if you’re a man you’re automatically a potential sex fiend. Women do it too, you know.’
Nicholas nodded. He felt awfully tired, but sleep seemed a huge ocean away. As they started back down the hall, he saw veins like purple worms crawling on her ankles.
‘What woke you up, Mum?’
Katharine looked at him, opened her mouth to lie. But she hesitated. And in that moment, Nicholas saw again the tally of years on his mother’s face.
‘I had a bad dream. About you when you were small. You and your friend up the road.’
‘Tristram Boye. Did you see how much that boy. .’
She nodded. ‘Only in the dream, it was you. .’
Her voice trailed off to nothing.
The rumble of the rain was as solid as the darkness outside. He kissed her cheek. It felt dry and thin as paper.
‘I’m sure they’ll find him,’ he said.
They returned to their beds.
The police did find the child, three days later.
During the first two days, they had searched public toilets and overgrown railway sidings and mossy culverts, but the deluge had made the hunt difficult. A team of police divers sat ready to strap themselves to cables and search the river and storm-water drains through which water thundered like rapids, but the task was deemed too dangerous. A group of State Emergency Service volunteers waited in the Tallong High School hall to start their search of the Carmichael Road woods, but the rain kept falling, heavy as theatre curtains, so they stayed indoors drinking instant coffee from Styrofoam cups and playing Trivial Pursuit. The low sea of dark cloud seemed immoveable in the bloated sky.
The boy’s mother was named Mrs Thomas — an ineloquent woman, though by all accounts a gifted tyre-fitter and a regular at the local Uniting Church. She appeared on the evening news, begging through a tight throat for anyone who had seen her boy to help. But in the end, the boy, whose name was Dylan (the press showed unusual good taste in making no sport of the child’s mother unwittingly naming him after that doomed alcoholic), had been beyond help for all of those three days. His body was found hooked in mangrove trees some six kilometres downriver from Tallong. A squad of high school rowers — who trained come rain, hail or shine and would
Nicholas and Katharine muddled around the house, keeping out of each other’s way. When the television news reported the discovery of Dylan’s body, they watched silently from the sofa. Neither needed to remark how eerily like 1982 this was, when Tristram’s body was found three suburbs from Tallong in a cleared housing block, one pale leg poking out from under a pile of demolished timber, tree roots and tin. His throat, like Dylan’s, had been slit wide.
Nicholas switched off the television.
Outside, the rain was finally easing.
‘I’ll make some tea,’ Katharine said quietly.
3
OCTOBER 1982
It was the afternoon of a very bad day.
At ten years, Nicholas was slight, with a hint of the tight wiriness he’d keep as a man. His thin legs swung slow arcs through the dull, hot afternoon air, avoiding carefully the dry, severe edges of the sword grass that tissed discontentedly in the weak breeze. He walked along the narrow, gravel path that divided lengthways the long, grassy strip that sat uneasily beside Carmichael Road. The straps of his school port ate into his shoulders, and the sun dug at his eyes from a sky that was the light, hard blue of Roman glass.
He was sweating lightly, but the sharp sunlight was okay with him. It helped bake away the memories of the day’s shame, allowed room for idle imaginings that he was a Desert Rat of Tobruk, or a skulking Arab — someone brown and fearless who squinted at shimmering dunes for signs of determined but doomed Jerries.
There was no hurry to get home. Suzette was in bed with the mumps so she would be even more of a bore. Mum would be peeling vegetables with sharp strokes or attacking school uniforms with the iron and wondering how a boy could eat so many biscuits and stay so thin. His friend Tristram had remained at school for trumpet practice, so there would be no visiting his place to play Battleship or Demolition Derby. No, there was no hurry.
It was nearing four o’clock and the heat was rotten —
