I stayed where I was, frozen, and watched as he came to the last rocky step. He didn’t notice me at first but stopped, his eyes searching the water. He looked the definition of exhaustion, his face almost black with it, a ruin of worry and pain. I wondered if he had slept at all in the days since his son had disappeared. I wondered if it was worse not knowing, the dread lurking darkly near your shoulder, as opposed to knowing and being consumed by the darkness.
Suddenly, like a dog that picks up a scent, he turned my way and narrowed his eyes like he was trying to make out who I was.
I drew a quick breath. Like an idiot, I stood immobile, and then in an attempt to communicate, I lifted my hand in a small wave. He ignored it and continued to look across the waterhole.
I was intruding and I needed to get out of there. I rushed past him and ran up the track, my pulse pounding in my sore temple. He didn’t even turn his head.
That night the waterhole flooded my sleep.
In the dream I’m climbing and climbing but as I reach the top of one boulder, another one appears beyond it. I’m trying to get across the creek, but it keeps growing. Water flows between the boulders – clear, cold – and the distance between the rocks grows larger and larger as the water spreads. Matt is calling from somewhere, telling me to watch out for the dead: They’ll grab you, they’ll get you, they’ll pull you under. And, all at once, a hand comes out and latches around my ankle. I’m under the water. The infinite weight of a river lies on me and I can’t breathe. I try to cry out, but there’s no breath, no sound. But I hear the whipbird. Too-whit, too-whit. I’m drowning. I look through the water and I’m staring into the cold, white face of Dylan mouthing a silent plea.
Help me.
There’s an expression: ‘Your blood runs cold’. When I woke, gasping for breath, I was left with a chill as though I had really been submerged in freezing water. In the depths of a warm summer night I shivered to the marrow of my bones. The dream had given me something I couldn’t un-know, an undeniable truth.
Dylan was never going to be found alive. He wasn’t on some highway hitching a ride to the city, or hiding out in a cave somewhere, or camping in the mountains. He was gone.
Poor Dylan.
Poor dead Dylan.
The Dylan dream stayed with me all morning; the cold fingers of it still clutched at my heart even as I walked around the yard in the broad, hot daylight trying to burn it away. On autopilot, I wandered over to the shed checking out Grandma’s old farm equipment. I saw the broken-down Massey Ferguson tractor, the tools hanging on the back wall, the old ride-on mower. But only my eyes were distracted. Every other part of me was still thinking about Dylan.
Of course, in the bright light of day, I could convince myself that it was just a dream. I couldn’t possibly know that Dylan was dead. How could I? I didn’t want him to be dead. I wanted him to be found, alive and well. I wanted him to get into big trouble from his mother for taking off and being so selfish as to not tell her where he was going. I wanted him to be found in a gully somewhere, with a broken leg, where he had survived on a trickle of water and wild berries. Anything but what the dream had told me.
My bike stood against the back wall of the shed, a neglected Christmas present from the year before. I pulled it out and, noticing the tyres were completely flat, found the pump and inflated them. I dusted off the seat and rode over to the garage, the hideout where Kevin spent all his free time. The doors were shut fast, chained and padlocked. I put my eye up to the crack, but couldn’t penetrate the darkness inside.
Mervie trotted up behind me. ‘What do you reckon, Mervie? What’s he got in there?’
I rode my bike in dusty circles around the yard, making lines like kangaroo tails in the dirt. Kevin was at work and I was alone again. There was nothing else to do so I continued through the house gate where Mervie abandoned me, heading back to the cool refuge of the veranda. Wolfie was there too, in his usual spot. He was a permanent fixture of the front veranda, like a big pile of grey rags with eyes. He was one of those wolfhound crosses, those big long-haired things you see in old paintings standing next to Napoléon or someone very important – somehow these dogs make the men in the paintings seem grander.
Wolfie’s owner had to leave him at the shelter because he could no longer afford to feed such a large dog. Mum said she’d never seen a grown man cry like that. But poor Wolfie didn’t understand why his owner had dropped him off and not returned. I wondered what it must have been like for Wolfie, waiting and waiting for his master to come back and get him. Was an hour of waiting the same as a day to him, or a week or a month? Did dogs have a concept of time and of how long someone had been away? Did they think about stuff like that? Sometimes when he lay on the back porch snapping at flies, I thought probably
