Promise (27 page)

Anna had always felt an inordinate, almost primal pleasure being cosy and dry during a storm. And now she let herself imagine that the rain made them safe too. No one, not Macky, surely not even the police, would be out in this weather. Their little home was safe, for now.

They lay on the mattress, and Anna read to Charlie from the stack of kids’ books she’d found in the store room. Some of them she remembered from her childhood, some were nearly new.

She had to raise her voice over the rain drumming on the tin roof. Charlie wanted Anna to read
Possum Magic
over and over again.

‘I wish I was invisible sometimes,’ said Charlie, and twirled a finger in her damp hair.

‘Like the possum in the story?’

‘Mmm.’

‘I feel like we’re almost invisible up here,’ said Anna. She looked outside. The bricked area was one big puddle now, bouncing with raindrops, and she could hardly see the trees for the white rain. Could she really make a new life here?

Charlie tapped Anna’s cheek. ‘I don’t want you to be invisible.’

‘Okay.’ She smiled. ‘I won’t be invisible.’

Charlie reached for the book on top of the stack. ‘Let’s read them all again.’

•

The conversation with Beatie was awkward.

Anna and Charlie found her weeding her veggie garden, still wearing her pyjamas.

As soon as Charlie wandered over the lawn to the chook house, Anna came straight out with it. ‘I need to tell you something. I’m not Charlie’s mum.’

‘I know.’ Beatie’s voice was flat and hard to read. She tossed a weed onto the grass. ‘Macky told me.’

‘Right.’ So Charlie had told Macky. And probably Claudy and Zeb.

‘I took her from her mother because she was being beaten.’

Beatie’s face dropped. ‘Macky didn’t tell me that. Who beat her?’ She turned to look at Charlie, who was picking flowers from the salvia bush and sucking out the nectar.

Beatie asked Anna question after question about what happened to Charlie. Anna made herself go into the details, which was the best way she knew to convince Beatie not to tell anyone. She paused after describing the cigarette burn scar on Charlie’s stomach. ‘The mother doesn’t want her anymore. She told the cops she’s over being a mother.’

Beatie widened her eyes. ‘She’s relinquished her?’

‘Yes.’

‘How do you know this?’

‘My dad phoned me at Pat’s.’

Beatie looked off to the forest. ‘Bloody hell.’

Anna wondered if one day Gabby would wake up and realise what she’d thrown away. ‘Can you please keep it quiet that I’m not her mum?’

‘I won’t tell anyone. There’s no one to tell anyway.’

Only Jo
, thought Anna. ‘Is it too much to ask that you don’t mention to Pat that you know we’re at the cottage? I think it will freak him out. And he might . . . want us to leave right away.’

‘Really?’ said Beatie. ‘Why would he want you to leave if I know? That doesn’t make sense.’

‘Well, just . . . the cops, I guess.’ She couldn’t mention Sabine’s visa issue. ‘The more people that know, the more likely it is that word will get out.’

Beatie gave a small smile and shook her head. ‘I can’t lie to Pat. He’s my oldest friend in the world.’ She wiped her hands on her shorts. ‘Anyway the kids might have already mentioned it to him. When I told them not to tell people, they wouldn’t imagine that to include Pat.’

‘Sure.’ Anna swallowed. She felt ashamed. She shouldn’t be lying to Pat either. Pat, who’d gone out on a limb to help them.

‘I’m sorry I didn’t tell you the truth, Beatie. I really am.’

Beatie nodded.

‘It’s just that keeping her safe is . . .’

‘I know.’ Beatie waved her hand in the air. ‘I get it, Anna. Really. I’m a mother.’

If Pat asked Anna and Charlie to leave, then they’d just have to leave. There was nothing more Anna could do.

A
nna poked at the last of the red coals and contemplated boiling another billy of tea. The air was still, and smoke hung in the trees and over the big pool.

Nearby, Charlie and Claudy gathered armfuls of leaves and made a nest in the space between two big roots of a fig tree. Serious-faced, they worked side by side, then took turns to lie in the nest. The girl in the nest curled up, eyes closed, while the other sprinkled crushed-up leaves as if they were confetti.

While Anna and Charlie were at Beatie’s place, Will and the kids came home from town, rushing in with a new soccer ball, and Anna let herself be carried along with the kids’ plans to go down to the creek. The creek was the one place Anna could relax. She carried three lengths of timber for Macky; he planned to build a li-lo launching pad on the bridge. The two girls skipped ahead, Charlie wearing Claudy’s tutu.

While the girls added more leaves to their nest, Anna knelt on the bridge and held a piece of timber steady for Macky as he hammered in a nail. Zeb stood to one side with the bag of nails. He was eight, Anna’s age when her mum died. His hands gripping the paper bag still had a babyish lack of definition.

How did Anna’s mother bear it? Touching Anna’s hand for the last time. Did she know it was the last time? Anna’s father had gripped little Anna’s arm and steered her out into the hospital corridor. Anna had wanted to sleep there like he did, so she could wake in the night and hear her mother breathing. Was he really as angry as she remembered? What had she done wrong?

So she’d slept at home, in her own bed, her aunt on the foldout bed in the sunroom, Luke in his own room, all the doors shut. And in the night, Anna got up and slipped down the dark hall to her parents’ bedroom, the big bed frighteningly flat and empty, and she brushed her face against her mother’s dresses where they hung in the wardrobe. She breathed in the smell of her mother, but it was not comforting like she’d hoped; it only made the longing erupt more painfully in her chest.

One of the kids screamed. Over by the fig tree, Charlie had hold of Claudy’s hair and was pulling hard. Claudy’s hands flailed about and she screamed again, ‘Stop, stop, stop, stop!’

Anna ran towards them as Charlie dragged Claudy down to the ground by her hair and shoved her hard, then ran off into the trees. Claudy curled on the ground at Anna’s feet, weeping, her hands pressed on either side of her head.

Anna knelt. ‘Claudy.’

The girl looked up at Anna, a line of blood on her cheek. Macky put his thin brown arms around his sister and she burst into fresh sobs.

‘I didn’t do anything,’ she said. Macky whispered something into her hair.

Anna hurried after Charlie, who sat on a fallen tree fifty metres away.

‘What happened?’ said Anna as she approached.

‘It was my turn.’ Charlie’s voice was hard and she breathed shakily.

‘You hurt her.’ Anna tried to dampen the anger in her voice. ‘You really hurt her. What were you thinking?’

From the corner of her eye, she saw Macky help Claudy up and walk her towards the creek. Anna should go and comfort them, apologise. She was meant to be the adult.

Charlie exploded. ‘Fuck off!’

Anna felt a rush of fury to her head. She shouted, ‘Don’t you
dare
talk to me like that! Don’t talk to me like that and don’t ever hurt Claudy again. She’s not going to want to play with you now.’

Charlie glared back at her, her face red. ‘It was
my
turn.’

‘But you don’t hit, Charlie! You just don’t!’

She was overreacting.
Stop, Anna.
She lowered her voice but it was still sharp. ‘You never hurt someone.’

Charlie said, very softly, ‘Fuck off.’

Anna spun around and walked away from the girl. She wanted to scream,
How dare you? How dare you, after all I’ve done for you?!

She heard a small noise behind her and turned to see Charlie weeping. Anna sighed and crossed to sit beside her. She put her arm around the girl but Charlie shuffled out of reach. Anna didn’t know if she should try to comfort her or leave her alone. She had absolutely no idea what a girl like this needed. And there was no one to ask. She shouldn’t have yelled. She was barely better than Gabby and Harlan.

Over at the creek, Claudy was involved in some game with the others, but Anna sensed a cold shoulder from them. Charlie had unreasonably wounded one of their own. After a few minutes, they drifted downstream, out of sight. Anna could barely hear their voices over the burble of the water.

Anna shouldn’t be surprised that Charlie would be so savage with Claudy. Someone had likely done the same thing to Charlie before. Would she always carry the neglect and violence in her? If it was impossible to scrub away altogether, was it also too late to be layered over with good experiences? What a fantasy to think that a bit of time away from the violence would heal years of trauma.

Anna knew she was out of her depth. All she could do was love Charlie and help her feel safe. For now.

‘I’m sorry for shouting, Charlie.’

The girl gave a small shrug. Anna retrieved a towel from near the fire and draped it around Charlie’s shoulders. Anna wondered if Charlie was also listening to the kids going further away.

‘Let’s go back to the fire,’ she said. Charlie walked behind her and sat on the log that Macky had used at lunchtime.

Anna added a couple of sticks to the fire. ‘Do you want some of Beatie’s lemon cake?’

Charlie nodded. Anna cut her a slice; the cake was moist and flecked with poppyseeds.

The tea had been stewing away in the billy and would be bitter but Anna needed caffeine.

‘I’m just going to get the milk from the creek,’ she said. She retrieved the small jar of milk wedged between two roots, and glanced downstream. The big pool was empty. The kids were gone. They’d left a few of pieces of crumpled clothing on the sandy bank.

Back at the fire, Charlie sat with the towel around her shoulders, eating another slice of cake.

‘Would you like a game of noughts and crosses?’ Anna asked. They played it at the cottage in the evenings. Charlie shrugged, but picked up a stick and drew a grid in the sand, and shoved the last of the cake into her mouth.

They played game after game in silence. The sun slanted through the trees, turning the light hazy. Anna felt another wave of remorse for shouting at the girl. In the moment, standing over Charlie, she’d felt so righteous in her anger, so justified in yelling. The imbalance in any adult–child relationship was impossible to ignore. As a child, Anna had been powerless to question her father’s refusal to talk about her mother. She was in no position to challenge him. He was all she had. Anna was all Charlie had.

It was time to head back up the hill but Anna waited a bit longer, hoping the kids would return.

Finally, she tipped the dregs of her tea onto the sand.

‘Let’s go.’

Charlie used her foot to rub out their last game of noughts and crosses while Anna knelt by the fire and spread out the coals. She filled the billy with creek water and stood for a moment, watching the water sliding over the rocks, the silent eddies in the big pool. In the waning light, the smoky haze over the waterhole looked especially ghostly.

She poured the billy of water over the fire, releasing clouds of steam.

‘Alright. Let’s go home and make some dinner.’

Charlie stood up and said, ‘It’s not home.’

O
n Christmas Day they went to Pat and Sabine’s for lunch. Pat gave Charlie two more wooden dolls and she dressed them in the tiny clothes Anna had sewn by candlelight. They played quoits on the lawn, and Anna drank Sabine’s beer and carved the roast chicken. She tried not to think of her dad and aunty and cousins who’d all be sitting around the long table on Lorraine’s back porch. She knew Dave was going to his ex-wife’s house for lunch. She wondered if he’d thought of Anna on Christmas Day, or had she already drifted to the back of his mind? She’d been gone half as long as they’d been together.

They played quoits, with Sabine keeping score from her chair in the shade. She drank iced water and every so often put her hand on her belly and said that she was convinced the baby would come early.

Pat hadn’t mentioned Beatie knowing, so either she hadn’t told him yet or he’d decided to ride it out. He agreed to lend Anna money for a laptop and said he knew someone who sold second-hand Apple Macintoshes. Anna had begun to imagine living there long term. It would be a strange life but better than the alternative: leaving Charlie at the mercy of a system that had failed to protect her.

Just as they were leaving Pat’s, the phone rang. It was Anna’s dad. He was ringing from Lorraine’s – Anna could hear her family’s chatter in the background – and only spoke for a minute. ‘Happy Christmas, darling. I love you.’

•

They continued spending every day down at the creek. The kids had appeared the day after the hair-pulling incident as if nothing had happened. Macky finished the li-lo launch pad and for a few weeks, the kids rode the rapids every day, timing themselves with an old stopwatch. Ralph the dog started turning up every few mornings and hanging around, lolling by the creek and letting the kids scratch her belly. Then the dog would just disappear, suddenly trotting off, ears pricked, as if she’d heard Michael calling her.

When the rains came in February, and the creek breached its banks, Anna stopped the kids going in. They stood under the trees and watched the water surging around the boulders. Then the rain set in. ‘It’s the wet!’ grinned Macky.

Anna and Charlie stayed at the cottage, reading books, playing with the dolls and waiting for the rain to stop. Beatie’s kids visited every few days and brought Monopoly with them. Anna spent the evenings planning the portfolio she’d put together once she got the laptop.

•

The first sunny morning, Anna sat Charlie on the front doorstep and slowly detangled her hair. Anna used her fingers, extricating a few fine hairs at a time from each spectacular knot. She discovered that every knot had formed itself around a fragment of leaf or fluff. She passed the tiny mementos to Charlie, who lined them up on the door sill beside her.

The last knot was impossible to untangle. Anna would ask Beatie for some conditioner. She’d taken to going over to Beatie’s a couple of afternoons a week and having a glass of wine with Beatie and Will on the verandah while the kids played. Anna had dropped the idea of finding a home in another valley. She couldn’t take Charlie away from the kids, who had become so central to her world. Charlie talked about them all the time, recounting their games in blow-by-blow detail. Quite often, Anna and Charlie had an early dinner at Beatie’s, then wandered home through the forest twilight.