‘Mum’s from Singapore. She’s here tonight.’ I point her out in the crowd, and Bochen rubbernecks majorly. I don’t mind her curiosity.
‘Chinese?’ she says, after finding her.
‘Yeah, I guess.’ It’s a bit more complicated than that, but it will do. Mum has tried more than once to explain Singaporean race politics to me but I never pay enough attention to fully get it. ‘Dad’s Anglo-Australian. I was born here. Like Yin.’
‘You got a good nose,’ Bochen says. ‘Lucky.’
We’re quiet, because on stage Mrs Christie is running through advice from the police. It’s all very obvious and in no way resembles the advice in the chain email that I haven’t bothered to forward to anyone. Mrs Christie keeps repeating that there’s no reason for the ‘Balmoral community’ to take any greater care than the general public.
I crane my neck and wonder how Mum is going.
The Head of the School Board gets up and starts fielding questions from the parents.
‘Sarah’s father,’ Bochen whispers.
No, he doesn’t know how many calls the police hotline have taken about the case.
No, there hasn’t been a ransom request.
Yes, he has seen the CCTV footage, it would be hard not to have seen it the last few days, but he has nothing more to say.
The rumbling in the audience grows.
Sarah’s dad looks and talks like a bulldog politician, so it’s no wonder Mrs Christie has left question time to him. Not that Mrs Christie is a pushover, but these parents are plain intimidating. They’ve decided that they should stand up to ask their questions, which each of them do in turn.
He has no opinion on whether this is a serial offender. That is a matter for the police.
This causes one dad to yell out, ‘Do you think we’re all fools?’ Bochen raises her eyebrows at me and presses ‘stop’ on her recording.
Yes, it’s true that there are similarities between Karolina and Yin’s abductions, but he’s no expert.
No, there is no truth to the story that school computers have been seized. Cherry clicks her tongue when he says this, so maybe the boarders have seen something the day girls haven’t.
A woman in a patterned shift dress stands up. ‘I would like to know what the school is doing to ensure my child’s emotional and mental health?’ She stabs the air with her finger every couple of words. ‘I’ve got a little girl at home who is scared, and not sleeping. She can’t get offline and she won’t eat. What are you doing for her?’
Mrs Christie steps up to answer this question, trotting out the types of support services offered by the school. The questioning continues, as if this were a political debate for the federal election.
Sarah’s dad can’t comment on whether teachers are being interviewed. That is a matter for the police.
The police will be looking at every angle, including all employees of the school.
Yes, that will include gardeners and grounds staff. Yes, he expects that he himself will be looked at, as one would hope, if the police are doing a thorough job.
Yes, it’s possible that some parents will be contacted by the police taskforce, and yes, we expect you to show them your full cooperation.
It gets so boring and repetitive that we start talking among ourselves.
‘How is your major project going, Chloe?’ Bochen doesn’t need to mention that she’s talking about Art.
‘Stressing me out,’ I admit. I still think my ideas from cross-country yesterday are interesting, but I haven’t had much of a chance yet to think any further. ‘How about you? Have you started?’
She scoots closer, takes out her phone and scrolls. ‘I’m drawing my friend Mercury. In ink, nothing complicated, but very big.’ She stretches her arms out to indicate the scale of her piece. ‘Here.’
I look at her screen. Bochen has drawn a light graphite map of Mercury’s face, but I can already tell she’s playing with perspective and distortion in interesting ways.
‘It looks great,’ I say. ‘What are your themes going to be?’
‘No idea!’ Bochen says. ‘Sometimes a drawing is just a drawing, you know?’
I wait until we’re halfway home before I empty out my spinning brain.
‘Mum?’
Mum turns her head only a fraction. She’s a careful driver. The passing streetlights glance over the planes of her face.
‘Will Dad’s record come up? I mean, will the detectives know about that?’
She flicks the indicator on, shifts lanes to merge onto the freeway. It’s a few seconds before she speaks. The freeway lights give her the pearly complexion of a sixteenth century Flemish painting. I try to mentally record the way she looks, the way the light hits her. Imagine being able to recreate that in paint or on film. She looks as young as me from where I’m sitting. I want to erase every part of Dad and be one hundred per cent like her. I don’t want his nose.
‘It had crossed my mind,’ she admits. ‘But they can’t investigate every man associated with the school. How many girls are there? Two thousand? How many dads, stepdads, boyfriends could that add up to? I don’t think they have the resources.’
Mum has never held anything back about Dad’s past, or hers either, at least as far as I know. I know she was a wild-child in the nineties, first a grunge groupie in her teens, then a raver at university. I know about her fighting with her family and the fallout over Dad.
I know Dad was more enthusiastic about drugs than her, and that his enthusiasm led to two charges of possession. Mum has always said that as soon as she got pregnant Dad cleaned his act up, but I don’t remember what it was like when I was a toddler. I’m not sure if it was that simple. But being into drugs when you were young has nothing to do with abducting teenage girls.
‘Are you glad you went tonight?’ I ask.
‘Those parents
