Christian White - The Nowhere Child

‘Yeah. Shit.’

‘What did this guy say, exactly?’ She was squeezing the phone so hard I thought it might shatter. ‘How did he find you? What evidence does he have?’

‘I don’t know. I didn’t really give him time to tell me. I thought he was a nutter.’

After a string of increasingly exasperated expletives, Amy said, ‘Do you wanna smoke a joint?’

We left Lisa inside watching TV and sat together on the back step. Amy’s yard was small and well-manicured. A blue plastic sandbox had filled with rainwater, turning the sand inside to sludge. The flat grey walls of the houses on either side of Amy’s fence blocked out half the sky.

She lit the joint and took a long, deep drag before handing it to me. ‘It’s a scam. That’s what it is.’

‘How would that work?’ I said. ‘He didn’t ask me for money or personal details or—’

‘Just you wait. He probably stole that photo.’

‘Neither of us has ever seen it before.’

‘So he, I don’t know, took it.’

‘Twenty-eight years ago? When I was two? And he’s just been, what? Biding his time to pull off the longest sting in history?’

‘Is Mum abducting you from a foreign country a more plausible explanation? Something like this, if it was real … Jesus, Kim. It would fuck everything up. We wouldn’t be sisters anymore.’

The joint sent me into a momentary coughing fit, but it helped dull my busy mind. ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘Kim, if we didn’t have blood connecting us I’d never see you. When you dropped around today it nearly gave me a heart attack. I thought something was wrong.’ She took the joint back. ‘And shit, I guess I was right after all. You weren’t just popping in, were you? You were gathering evidence.’

‘Please don’t turn against me,’ I said. ‘Not right now.’

Amy sighed.

Smoke danced and swirled, making my eyes water.

‘Wayne will still be able to smell this, you know,’ I said.

‘If ever I had a good excuse to get stoned, it’s today.’ She wiped her eyes. I couldn’t be sure if it was the smoke that was making her cry, or the situation. She stared off over the back fence. Another townhouse lay beyond it, and another one beyond that.

She shifted her weight and studied her chipped nail polish, looking anywhere but at me.

‘What do you want me to do?’ I asked.

‘Nothing, Kim. I want you to do nothing. Delete that photo off your phone. Delete his number. Forget about the whole thing.’

‘I don’t think I can do that.’

‘I think you have to, Kim. If you follow this thing through, then everything is going to change.’

‘Okay,’ I said.

‘Swear?’

‘Swear.’

After leaving Amy’s house, I pulled the car to the side of the road and found the number James Finn had given me. I quietly hoped he wouldn’t pick up, but he answered on the first ring.

Emma scanned the forest floor for psilocybin mushrooms. Ideally they should be young, with white bulbs turning a pinkish brown on top. In time they would turn black and curl up at the edges. Shelley Falkner’s cousin had told them all about it.

The forest was wet from an early afternoon shower, and smelled of mildew and mountain laurel.

Fifty feet to Emma’s left, Shelley Falkner moved around in the thicket like a sasquatch, kicking up dead leaves and snapping off low-hanging branches.

Emma soon grew bored of the mushroom search, so she sat down on the trunk of a fallen sweetgum and searched her backpack for a cigarette. She had to push aside her algebra textbook to find one, which made her think of Manson High, which in turn flushed her system with a familiar brand of anxiety. She was doubly glad she and Shelley had decided to cut class today.

Emma lit the cigarette and dialled up the volume on her Discman until the deep, mournful sound of Morrissey’s ‘Every Day is Like Sunday’ turned the greens of the forest grey. Morrissey was the perfect soundtrack for a town like Emma’s. When she thought of Manson, she pictured a beetle on its back, kicking its legs helplessly in the air.

To an outside observer, of course, Manson must have seemed like a quaint, friendly community. It was true that the town wasn’t nearly as poverty-stricken as its Appalachian neighbours, and Emma guessed there were slightly fewer hillbillies per capita, but it was a long way from being A Slice of Heaven , as the sign on the water tower boasted. The few tourists that trickled through only saw half the picture. They came for the hiking trails, good ol’ fashioned hospitality, and to bask in the glory of Hunt House, a grand, centuries-old mansion that stood at the top of Main Street.

But Emma knew what visitors didn’t: that locals were only truly friendly to other locals, that if it wasn’t in the Bible then it wasn’t worth knowing, and that Hunt House was built on the backs of slaves (and supposedly haunted by their ghosts).

‘No way,’ Shelley called, loud enough that Emma could hear even with her headphones on. ‘Em, check it out.’

As Emma climbed down from the fallen sweetgum, Shelley came lumbering through the underbrush, both hands cupped before her as if carrying a baby bird.

She extended her arms to show Emma two handfuls of small white bulbs. ‘I hit the mother lode.’

Shelley was a hulk of a girl; not fat exactly, just bulky, with wide, slumped shoulders and a pair of glasses she was forever nudging into place with her index finger. ‘This has gotta be them, right? They’re just like Vince said.’

She handed one of the mushrooms to Emma, who took it and held it up to the light. It was a creamy colour, with a brown ring on top that reminded her of an areola.

‘I guess so,’ Emma said. ‘It’s funny, I always imagined them red with little white spots, like the ones that make Mario super. How do we know for sure they’re magic?’

‘There’s only one way to be sure: we eat ’em. If we start seeing, like, unicorns or something, then we know they’re the real deal and Vince ain’t completely fulla shit. If our throats close over and we go blind, well …’

‘Let’s take them this weekend,’ Emma said, pulling her headphones down. It wasn’t that she was particularly pro-drug – she had tried smoking a bong once at Roland Butcher’s house and nearly coughed up a lung – but she knew she had changed and wanted desperately to change back .

It was only last summer she and Shelley spent swimming in Lake Merri; just last spring they spent hiking through Elkfish canyon; only last fall they spent cruising around Manson on their ten-speeds; only last winter they spent skiing the powdery peaks of the Appalachian Mountains.

Now the world had turned grey. Perhaps Shelley’s mushrooms would bring back some of that colour.

‘Tell your parents you’re staying at my place,’ Emma said. ‘I’ll tell my parents I’m staying at yours. I can sneak my dad’s three-man and we could hike out to the gristmill, brew the mushrooms into a tea and then—’

Shelley popped a mushroom into her mouth, ending the conversation. She chewed for a moment, a sour expression on her face, as if her cheeks and forehead were being drawn together. Then she swallowed loudly and grinned.

Emma’s eyes nearly bugged out of her head. ‘You’re my hero. What did it taste like?’

‘Dirt. Your turn, lady.’

She took one bulb between her thumb and forefinger and moved it toward Emma’s mouth, like a parent trying to convince a kid to eat their greens.

Emma moved Shelley’s hand away. ‘Oh, I think I’ll wait a few minutes to see if, you know, you go blind or something.’