Stephen Irwin: The Darkening

‘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.

We’re getting old.

‘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.

Who died.

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 win the state championship ribbon this year, GO TERRACE! — caught sight of Dylan’s red tracksuit pants bobbing in the shoreline shadows. A police spokesman said the boy’s throat had been cut. There were no clear signs of sexual assault; however, time in the water made that difficult to confirm. They wished to question a man of Middle Eastern appearance seen in the vicinity of a nearby bus station three nights ago.

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.

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 — stinking hot , his mum would describe it — and in this limbo between school finishing and knock-off time, it seemed no one but Nicholas was on Tallong’s streets. No cars broke the snaky heat haze wriggling above the black tar. Weatherboard and fibro houses shrugged against the bashing sunlight under red or green corrugated iron. Opposite them, to his right, were the woods.

The woods. Hectares so thick with rainforest scrub and scribbly gums and trumpet vine and lantana that, from here on Carmichael Road, he couldn’t see more than ten metres into their interior. Certainly on some council map they must have a proper name, but he called them ‘the woods’ because his mother called them that, and so did Tristram’s parents and Tristram’s older brother, Gavin, and Mrs Ferguson the fruit lady. Nicholas knew, from looking at his father’s old street directory, that the woods stretched all the way from here on Carmichael Road back to the looping brown river — maybe a kilometre and a half, though he’d never gone in even a third of that. They were simply too scary, though he could never admit that to Tris. Even now, outside them, Nicholas felt how deep they were, as if he were walking past a bottomless lake of shadowy water rather than a forest. Last week he’d found a book in the school library called Space with a chapter about main sequence stars and dying supergiants and fading white dwarfs. . and black holes. Things so dense and with so much gravity that they drew light even from far away, and anything too close to them was trapped by their gravity and sucked into oblivion.

He found he was staring at the dark trunks, and pulled his eyes away and concentrated on the baked gravel at his feet.

He always slowed here, about halfway along his three-kilometre walk home from school. People dropped things on the path, and he was good at finding them. Lesser finds included a marble, tweezers, half a yo-yo, the ripcord from an SSP racer, a torn two-dollar note, and a pencil with its red paint shaved off just below the rubber and the name ‘Hill’ written there in ballpoint pen. Once, he picked up a pair of rusted pliers — snubby, alligator-nosed things that he took into the garage and cleaned carefully with machine oil he found in a white can under Dad’s old bench. When the jaws opened and closed easily, he hung them on a nail next to Dad’s other tools. It made him happy and sad at the same time, so he left them there.

Nicholas knew his mother preferred that he and Suzette walk the long way home through the prim, geranium-gardened backstreets rather than past the woods. ‘Why?’ he’d ask. ‘Don’t be difficult,’ she’d reply, and a crisp silence would hang there like uncollected washing. On most days, he respected her wishes. But on days like today, when Suzette wasn’t with him, he’d come home along Carmichael Road. The lure of strange jetsam was too strong.