Soon Page 6

  ‘It’s all there is, sorry. I forgot to bring my supplies home. Not going out for them now.’

  At the window fingernails are still scraping, tapping at the glass. I glance at Gina; she’s already asleep, snoring and twitching. Alex sips at her drink gratefully, but with trepidation. It’s clear she’s not usually a drinker. She replaces her glass carefully on the table. Her eyes are striking, an unusual green that speaks of beginnings, of life about to unfold, like the uncurling of new leaves. A colour both pure yet jaded, bathed in the pull of nature’s secrets. Her gaze, even under these disturbed circumstances, is disquieting.

  ‘I believe,’ she says, ‘that I owe you a huge debt.’ She gives an embarrassed smile. ‘You must think me an imbecile.’

  She had told me, as we raced for home with the sky plunging into darkness around us, that her car, parked out at McKenzie’s Ridge, had refused to start. She had heard me drive past and followed me on foot to the cemetery, praying I would stop.

  She lowers her gaze back to her tea, which she grips with both hands. Her hands are slight and bear a single ring, a plain silver band with a small amethyst. Around her neck on a chain is a silver pendant, some symbol I’m not familiar with. Her hair is dark, only loosely secured, and her face bears the lines of character that denote experience. I estimate her to be in her late thirties or early forties, not that much older than Liz. But her eyes, their unnerving gaze, make her seem much, much older. They put you in mind of a conjuror’s hands, or a pickpocket’s movements; the effect is one of being diverted while explored, probed. It is a strangely intimate feeling, although not from anything apparent, more from the sense it leaves you with – like that of a disquieting dream.

  ‘You were very lucky,’ I tell her, and feel a little shamefaced at the number of times I’ve used the same line in my performances out at the cemetery.

  ‘Believe me, after that experience I can appreciate how lucky I am. It was far worse than I’d imagined. Far worse,’ she repeats after a moment of distraction, gazing without focus beyond my shoulder.

  So there we are – a sightseer after all. I should have known. I should have left her there to fight her own way out of the mist, since she was so keen on experiencing it. I could have just gone back to Li’s for my stuff and cooked myself a decent meal, instead of risking my life and my dog for a bloody tourist. I push back my chair. ‘Well, I suppose I’ll have to try to feed you now that you’re here.’

  She is looking at me, anxious. ‘I really am very grateful to you,’ she begins again, ‘I honestly didn’t mean to cause any problems.’

  But I’m pissed off and drained, petulant about my forgotten shopping and my exhausted dog. ‘You do, though,’ I tell her, keeping my back turned, rummaging in the cupboard for food. ‘Whenever someone like you comes here it causes problems.’

  ‘Someone like me?’

  ‘A tourist. Sightseer. Come to see the haunted town, like we’re some kind of sideshow. As if it’s entertainment, then off you go, full of thrills about your daring, and no one ever actually gives a shit about what it’s like for us, having to exist like this.’

  I turn around. She is rigid. ‘That’s not why I’m here.’

  ‘Right, you just thought you’d drop by for the hell of it.’

  ‘No. I came to see the old man.’

  Rolf. After the commotion of the evening I’d forgotten about her visit to Rolf’s.

  ‘You knew Rolf?’

  ‘Is that his name?’ she says. ‘No, I didn’t. It’s hard to explain.’

  I want to know. I put the onion and the can of tuna I’m holding onto the table and sit down. ‘We have time. It’ll be a long night, you can be sure of that.’

  It is Alex who is unnerved now, not quite sure of her ground. I get the impression she’s used to listening to other people, not opening up about herself; she is clearly uncomfortable. After a moment of thought, again those eyes digging into me, assessing, she begins. ‘I am on holiday, I’ll give you that, but this place wasn’t on my itinerary. I was headed to Dongarra to visit someone. An old friend, someone I’ve known since my childhood. He used to live next door to us when I was little, and he was kind of like a surrogate grandpa. He’s in his nineties now and isn’t well, he hasn’t got much longer. I’m going to say goodbye.’

  She stops to take her cup over to the sink and run some water. When she’s had a drink she sits opposite me again. I get the impression that the break was so she could collect her thoughts, rather than from any abiding thirst.

  ‘I live in South Australia now, the Yorke Peninsula. I decided to take some time off and make a holiday of the trip, seeing I was coming so far. So once I crossed the Nullarbor I started making my way round the coast, spending a few days here and there, whatever took my fancy.’ She pauses again.

  ‘About a week ago I was in Bunbury. I was lost, I was looking for the turn-off to Mandurah and I wasn’t watching the traffic and I ran into a woman. Literally.’ She winces. ‘I ran up the back of her. There wasn’t much damage to her car, but her reaction was very strange. She just didn’t want to know. It was as if she just wasn’t there at all.’

  She pauses again, looking into my face as if watching for something. I wait. She nods slightly, as if she’s heard what she needed. ‘I don’t usually announce this to people, especially strangers, but I’m a clairvoyant. Professionally. A reader is what I prefer to call it.’

  I stay immobile, expressionless. She smiles. ‘Sceptical?’

  I reach for Rolf’s now-empty whiskey bottle, twirling it on its rim. ‘We’ve had quite a few turn up claiming to be psychic. To be honest, all full of shit, just looking for easy publicity. But living here you can hardly afford to be close-minded about anything.’

  ‘Good – I only ask a fair hearing.’ Suddenly she looks sheepish. ‘Actually, I’ll also ask for a cigarette, if that’s okay.’

  ‘So you know I’m a smoker?’

  ‘I can see your tobacco. Top left-hand pocket. Hardly psychic.’

  I pull out my pouch – under the circumstances I’m hardly going to enforce the Outside Only law. It seems hours since my last one.

  When we’ve rolled and lit, we settle again, more relaxed this time, some kind of boundary crossed.

  ‘This woman I hit,’ Alex continues, ‘was a real mess, psychically distraught, an absolute shambles. She’d obviously just been through something awful, and the air around her was screaming with it. She couldn’t have given a shit about the damage to her car, it was way beyond her care factor.’ She’s rolled her cigarette too thin and it has already gone out. ‘She’d come from here.’

  Liz. She has my full attention. ‘What did she say?’

  ‘She didn’t say anything. Barely glanced at the car and waved me away. Wouldn’t even take my details. But this place surrounded her, she was drowning in it.’

  She frowns at the extinguished cigarette, reaches for my lighter. ‘A lot of psychic reading is simply down to wavelength, to put it fairly crudely. It’s like radio waves, you have to be tuned in to the right station to pick up anything. Cooperation is a big part of it. Cooperation or shared experience. Professionally, it’s about people’s willingness to be read. Personally, it’s about shared experience. That’s what this was a case of. She was worrying about an old man, someone she had left behind, while I was keen to see Cliff – my friend – another old man in trouble. To put it simply, we connected.’

  ‘She didn’t say where she was going?’

  ‘I don’t think she knew. She was very traumatised. I have to say, it was a highly disturbing encounter. For me, anyway.’

  I didn’t doubt that. Liz had bordered on excess in all her moods, it was just fortunate for everyone around her that she tended towards the joyous side of things.

  ‘Sometimes,’ Alex continues, ‘because of the depth a psychic link taps, it can be very hard to disconnect, to break free. It’s like an entanglement. I found it was very hard for me, once we’d “collided”’ – she waves her f
ingers in the air, to distinguish the word with quotation marks – ‘to let go. Her fears for her old man tangled with mine, and it seemed, if her emotional state was anything to go by, that he was in some kind of danger. I went on to Mandurah for a few days to see a cousin, but I couldn’t relax. I just couldn’t shake myself free.’ Her cigarette is already out again. ‘It was something I just couldn’t ignore. I finally accepted that I needed to try finding her old man.’ Although her expression and her tone of voice haven’t changed, somehow the lines on her face seem to have deepened. ‘But I got cold feet. Or, to put it bluntly, I got scared. I stopped at Dwellingup, hung around there. I know, probably better than most, that there are elements that are dangerous to encounter, and the damage to the woman I’d run into seemed to be pretty severe.’

  As if to punctuate her point there is a howling shriek outside, tapering off into grotesque gurgling. Alex shudders. ‘I’m not going to pretend to be a brave person. I’m not exactly thrilled to be here.’ She smiles wryly. ‘Anyway, I got as close as Satrini, booked into a motel, and changed my mind about the whole thing. What was I doing? Too hard, not my business. That night I was full of relief, but then as I was drifting off to sleep, I found the old man.’

  She breaks off to check my expression, make sure I haven’t moved away from her. She notices her cigarette is out again and crushes it into the ashtray with a gesture of irritation.

  ‘When I say I found him,’ she resumes, ‘I mean I could hear him, so to speak. It was awful. Such dreadful sadness. And so much background interference, which I realise now was …’ She waves her hand towards the kitchen window. ‘It was stifling, such suffering. Like being choked. I knew I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself if I didn’t try to help him.’ She sighs. ‘But I left it too late. I was so sick that night, I could barely breathe. The next morning the constriction was gone, but I was exhausted, completely drained. It was as if I’d returned from the dead. I was physically incapable of travelling anywhere. I decided to stay another night in Satrini. I did try to reconnect with him, but there was nothing. He was gone. When I arrived today it was only to confirm what I already knew.’

  She has spread the fingers of both hands across her forehead, from temple to temple, and is pressing gently, as if to massage – or soothe – the sense that she has been talking of.

  ‘How did you know where he lived?’ It’s a stupid question I immediately regret.

  ‘The same way I knew he existed. But when I got to the house there was nothing there.’ She shrugs.

  ‘He hanged himself the day before yesterday.’

  She nods. ‘I thought it must have been something like that.’

  ‘You’re right, you know. Everything you said. The woman you ran into must have been Liz. She was driven out a week or so back. She was only here at all because she had nowhere else to go.’ I roll her another cigarette. ‘Walking away from her house meant losing everything. She only has a single parent’s benefit, so there’s no way she can afford today’s rents. She doesn’t have any other family, the kids’ father took off when the littlest was still in nappies. Social welfare offers nothing but a waiting list. She’ll have to impose on friends, rely on charity, with three little kids and a dog in tow.’ I light the cigarette for Alex and pass it over. ‘She was a mess when she left – we haven’t heard from her since. And her kids were all Rolf had. They were the first time he’d ever had any kind of family. Up till then he’d always been right enough on his own.’

  Alex is nodding. We are talking as if this is all commonplace. A woman is sitting at my kitchen table telling me she reads people’s minds, and I am chatting with her as if this is nothing out of the ordinary, as everyday as a bowl of cereal, or world events contained in a newspaper rolled in plastic and launched over the front fence. A year ago I would have humoured her and hustled her out the door at the first opportunity. I’m too tired now to give this fact anything more than a sardonic mental wink.

  Alex winks at me. It gives me a start. I have a terrible feeling she knows exactly what I’ve just been thinking.

  I cook a Joyce Special for tea. Joyce was an old friend from many years ago, the wife of a colleague in Mildura I used to go camping with. She was a wizard, this woman – she could look at half a packet of stale Cornflakes and transform it into a feast. My cupboards are pretty bare, but there are the makings of one of her creations: eggs, a can of tuna, half an onion and soy sauce. A Pacific Island omelette, she’d called it, but I reckon that was a bit of a furphy.

  Alex looks dubious when I serve it up, but by now we are both starving, and it tastes much better than it sounds. I’ve managed to unearth an old cask bladder from the back of the sauce cupboard, with a couple of half-glasses of vinegary red left in it. Beggars can’t be choosers.

  To my relief, the smell of cooking rouses Gina, who sits at attention on her blanket, sniffing the air and looking hopeful. I give her a segment of my half, which she gulps before sprawling out again, content. Crisis over.

  We feel better too, once we’ve eaten; we’re smoking again, bugger the smell, I’ll air the place out in the morning. Alex has relaxed a bit, which has softened her face, lessened the etchings scraped at the edges of her eyes and mouth. She’s still not entirely at ease – the nightly symphony isn’t completely drowned out by the blaring TV, and it can be pretty confronting even when you’re used to it.

  She asks for coffee and I have just put a cup in front of her when a banshee wail fills the night. Alex cringes and her coffee slurps onto the table. ‘Spending the night here is not something I would ever have added to my must-do list.’

  I fetch a cloth from the sink and wipe up the spill.

  ‘Why do you stay?’ she asks.

  ‘You’re the mind-reader.’

  ‘There must be somewhere you could go?’

  ‘An invalid pension won’t even cover rent in today’s market.’

  ‘But wouldn’t the government help?’

  ‘They don’t want to know. Way out of their jurisdiction. Exceptional circumstances don’t cover haunting. It’s been made clear that as we don’t fit into any of their categories, we don’t qualify for assistance, case closed.’

  ‘What about family?’

  ‘No.’ I don’t mean it to be so abrupt, but my tone is like a slammed door. She doesn’t pursue it. Outside there is a fresh burst of laughter.

  ‘How long has it been like this?’

  ‘Nine months or so. It started last winter, at solstice.’

  She winces. ‘A powerful time.’

  ‘Yeah. Life-changing.’

  ‘What set it off?’

  ‘Beats me. Beats everyone. I reckon you’d know more about these things than I do.’

  She shakes her head.

  ‘Don’t you communicate with the dead? Pass on messages of condolence and “By the way, where did you hide Granny’s diamonds”?’

  Alex looks peeved. ‘I’m a psychic, not a con woman. There’s no such bloody thing as communicating with the dead, everything comes from the living. All those practitioners pick the information they need from the minds of the people they’re dealing with, then they claim they’ve made contact with “the other side” ’– her fingers again – ‘it’s all crap. Once you’re dead you’re gone. Game Over.’

  I think of Milly’s Gavin. If only that were the case.

  ‘Here the dead aren’t gone. They’re incorporated into the mist, become a part of it. We lost some people when it first started, before we realised how dangerous it was.’ It still makes me angry. ‘The authorities won’t even declare them dead. They’re “missing”. No bodies, no motives, no suspicious circumstances. Too hard. They’re just “gone”.’ Alex’s finger quotation marks are addictive. Or simply appropriate. ‘But they reappear. Every night. In the mist.’

  Alex looks a little ill. ‘So this mist is made up of the “undead”?’

  ‘Oh no, they’re definitely dead.’ Again I push away thoughts of Gavin. ‘I have no idea. It can trans
form itself into living people – visions of them, anyway, like holograms. That’s why we have to keep the curtains closed. It gets at you. Liz, for instance.’ I take the dishes to the sink. ‘We’ve tried to find out what’s going on – one of our number, an ex-schoolteacher, spent a fortnight in Canberra at the National Library. She couldn’t find much at all – any documented “paranormal” experiences are either ancient or they’ve been proved hoaxes, or it was clear that even the authors had no bloody idea. The internet’s too full of bullshit to be any use.’ I remember Milly’s exhaustion and her despair when she came back, after all that work, empty-handed.

  ‘In the first months, when it started up, we had several teams of “experts” roll up, filling people’s houses with all kinds of gadgets and machinery. They measured everything from atmospheric pressure to magnetic fields. Might as well have tested our bloody cholesterol levels, at least then we might have learned something useful. Turned out they knew bugger-all; liked to spout a lot of crap and get juicy grants. Then they’d publish incomprehensible garbage full of meaningless buzzwords, so that no one would cotton on to the fact that they had no idea what they were talking about.’ Again Milly flashes to mind: she’d told the last lot, with wry dignity, where they could file their metabolic disturbance charts.

  ‘But it just suddenly started? Like that?’ Alex clicks her fingers.

  Snap! A tiny movement, the gesture of an instant. But potency distilled needs only an instant. Click! and a bomb goes off: buildings collapse, people lose homes, entire families. Snap! and a bone is broken: a pain-free, physically easy life is over. Click and a door is closed, a blind pulled taut over a window.

  Snap and a border is crossed, a mind shattered.

  I remember when Julie was little, we used to play the card game Snap! You’d remember it – when two cards the same appear at the top of the pile, you slap your hand on them and cry ‘Snap!’

  Snap! I win. Snap! I win. Snap! I win.

  I used to let her win, of course. That’s what being a dad is about. Her eyes would glow and she would giggle herself into a fit of the hiccoughs – so rare as a kid to be able to get the better of an adult.