Sunlit Shadow Dance (35 page)

The sky was
just glowing in a clear cold
daylight when she woke again. Her baby was restless, seeking food
and she gave it a breast, watching as he sucked greedily. She
snuggled into Vic, wanting to postpone the telling, it all seemed
too complicated and hard to explain now, plus she could feel his
early morning desire for her and she wanted that too. So they
postponed a little longer with joined pleasure. She dozed again.
Her mind snapped sharp awake. It was time to speak.

So she told him of it as it happened, the
taking of the pictures, those images of another time that kept
coming into her mind, the diary, the man with the crocodile face.
Then she told how she had seen the place where the things were
stored and had known they were there and what the code was, even
though she had no remembrance of leaving them there three of four
years past. Having told up to this part she went and took the book
and the stones from her bag and passed them to him.

“
It is time for you to begin to
tell me who I was before,” she said. “I need to know, I cannot
block it out any more.”

He nodded and looked at the
book with wonder.
“It is hard to believe I am holding it. I have read parts.
Anne read it all, not this book but a copy. You must have copied
it, as you did with my book, and stored the original for safe
keeping with the stones. They belonged to Mark, they are yours
now.

“
The book, this diary, is the
story of Mark. He was your lover before me. He is the father of
Anne and David. He was my best friend and I miss him still. It is a
hard story. It tells of bad things that Mark has done. I can tell
you parts, Anne can tell you more.

“
If you wish I can read this
with you, or I can sit with you while you read for yourself. Only a
small part is a story about you. You came last; his last great
love. When I knew you then I was only a friend, a friend of Mark
who took you both flying for a magic day of scenery and fishing. By
the end of that day you were my friend too. After that you
travelled on further with him but I never saw you together
again.

“
When you left him he was dead.
In that you played a part, but it is not something of blame. Mark
knew there was no other way for him; he could not escape his past.
So he chose to give his body to the crocodiles. That is why you see
a crocodile face. It was as if, when he left, what remained was a
crocodile spirit. Sometimes that spirit has haunted you
too.

“
As to the stones, I knew he
owned some such; he was a rich man. He once told me he an old timer
had shown him a fabulous opal mine, far out in the desert. It gave
him more money than he ever needed. Instead he chose to live and
work in the outback; it was the only place where he felt at
home.

“
As part of this life he bought
and traded gemstones with other miners, always at a fair price. He
would keep the best stones for himself, saying he loved to have
these things of beauty. I think only I and Buck knew of this.
Sometimes he would give them as gifts to friends.

“
Even though he was rich he
lived simply and spent little on himself, his needs were few. So
those stones were his own collection and, when he went, he gave
them to you to do with as you wish.”

Vic picked up the book and
turned t
he
pages until he came to where Susan first appeared. He said, “Here
he tells of when he first saw you.”

He read aloud the words;

“
Beach Girl, beautiful. She stands there with her toes in the
little waves, hair flung back like a Greek goddess, arms stretched
out to the morning sun. She is enchanting and I want to know who
she is. I stand on the shore path, watching her in the bright
light. When she looks my way I move behind trees, now I can only
glimpse her. Then she comes my way, I keep out of sight, it might
look like I am spying.

“
She has stopped at an ice cream stand. Now she walks on,
licking a cone with such pleasure, the ice cream trickles down her
fingers and she licks it off. I wish I was an ice cream
drop.”

Vic finished saying, “I wish I could write
as well as he. In the moment I first saw you I felt something the
same too. Part of me was jealous of Mark in that instant but part
of me was also delighted that my friend had found such a wonderful
person.

“
I could not believe it
when I heard he was gone. Even though I wanted you for myself I
also felt entrusted by him to look after you.”

Mark’s words and Vic’s word both moved her
greatly even though it was only Vic she knew, she remembered Mark
not. The Mark she knew was only flashes of a face at the edge of
the light.

She moved in against Vic and held him
telling him she joyed greatly in being entrusted to him. Then she
joined her body to him again and drifted back to sleep.

It was mid-morning when she woke again,
saying, “Now I must read that letter from Anne, which Cathy, gave
me last night.” She found the letter and opened it, taking the
folded sheet in her hand and speaking the words,

“
Dearest Susan,

I hope this letter finds you
well, and congratulations on the great news about your little
boy
, Vic. I
know I have said it to you on the phone, but I still find I want to
write it too. I am so, soo, sooo excited for you.

I have also read about your heroic husband,
and the stories which are now beginning to be told about his heroic
wife, though last time I talked to Vic he said you had little
interest in reading these stories, they had largely passed you
by.

So
, if you do not now know about your
life or choose not to want to know, please put this letter aside
without reading more. I would not have brought this memory back,
but this story is not only about you.

I started trying to find out
about you, my missing friend, but along the way
I found the stories of others,
those I called the “Lost Girls”. I have told these stories as best
I can, and that would be the end, except that one girl is lost no
longer, that is Cathy, who you have now met.

She has decided her story will
cause much pain and yet it must be spoken. The man who is with her
is the man who wrote awful things about you
. He is the man who Vic punched and
left in the gutter at your wedding. Now he is ashamed of what he
did to you, knowing much he wrote was untrue. He has played no part
in the recent stories about you and Vic, except to write a piece
asking others to respect your privacy.

However
, now, he is helping Cathy tell her
story. Like you she has suffered much, but she wants the truth to
be known. It is a hard story for her family to hear, it will be a
hard story for her to speak of, yet she feels she must.

But
, before she opens her own Pandora’s
Box of secrets, she had set one condition, not to protect her
family but to protect you. If you decide, after having met with
her, that you want this box of secrets closed, nothing further
told. Then she and Jacob will tell of it no further, lest it harm
you.

They say that, after the harm
done to you in what Jacob wrote, their first consideration is to
harm you no more. So Cathy has asked to meet with you, if you are
willing, to tell you the story of her life and what she knows of
Mark.

Then, she can decide if she is brave enough
to tell the story of her own life for others to hear, her parents
first and then the world.

So
, if you are willing to know what
happened from that time lost to your memory, then meet her, listen
to her and hear what she has to say. If this is too hard, no one
will blame you and she will speak of it no more and trouble you no
further.

So I leave it with you to decide whether to
hear her story. I know it and it is a brave story, but it is not
mine to tell.

Please give your baby and your
other delightful children lots of hugs and kisses from me and David
and from all your other Australian friends.

We all miss you and Vic greatly and hope to
see you again soon.

Your closest and ever loving friend

Anne”

Vic and Susan began to
talk
in
earnest as she put the letter aside; it was the narrative of a lost
year of her life that he told her. He did not know of the years
before she came to Australia, but their importance was minor and
others could fill them in.

However he knew the story of
his wife from many sources, from the documentaries on all the lives
of the
‘Lost
Girls’ that Anne had made and which he had forced himself to watch
despite the pain, from reading some bits of Mark’s diary, really
only the parts about himself and Susan.

Due to the sensitivity of parts
the full transcript had not been released, but Anne and the police
had gradually worked through the different parts with the named
parties
,
checking facts and verifying contexts. She and Alan had spent many
hours with Vic going through the parts where he was either
mentioned, where they concerned Susan or where the locations and
other things may be within his knowledge.

At that time all had agreed that, with
Susan gone, the diary was Mark’s bequest to Vic. It was also
Susan’s gift to him in another time. So, although he had never
fully looked at it before, it was agreed he had a right to
it.

W
hile he did not know all its contents and
had largely avoided the parts that told bad things about his
friend, yet in the knowledge sharing as they searched for Susan, he
knew the main facts.

Now,
slowly, over a morning, as their
bodies lay almost together in a bed, he filled in the story. There
were times when it was very hard and tears flowed, for both of
them, at the unfolding tragedy of this man. But Vic knew that now
it was begun it could not be stopped until an end was reached. So
they talked, mostly it was Vic’s words as she had no memory other
than the fragments that came two days before with the taking of the
pictures.

She watched
as he spoke, looking with a
rapt face and intent eyes, occasionally asking him to stop,
occasionally seeking for him to hold and comfort her. It was late
morning when he finished. They knew others of the family had
attended to their children David and Anne, and Susan had stopped
once to feed Vic again. After the telling was done, they lay
together, barely moving for a long time.

Finally she roused herself,
saying.
“Thank you for telling me, perhaps it is good that I don’t
remember, though now I feel a huge void in my life, before it was
just an empty place, like a blank sheet of paper, with nothing
written.

“
I do not know why I can no
longer remember; perhaps it was protection so the awfulness could
not reach me. Now part of me wants to stay in that place of
forgetfulness. Another part wants to know it in my own mind. I fear
that the memory will tear its way through, whether I want it or
not.

“
But I cannot go back to the
place of unknowing, I must go forward. So I must go and meet with
Cathy and hear her story. Before I do I will read what Mark’s diary
say about her so I know at least a part of her story and can spare
her telling that. I will do it this afternoon.

“
Then perhaps I will read more
of what it tells of me. For now I cannot bear to read the middle
part, that which tells the worst of the man Mark. I find that this
part is something I do not want to know.

“
Will you come with me when I
meet Cathy and along with her the man Jacob? If Jacob is helping
her then I must help him. I know you fought with him to protect me
but that is past. I cannot hold anger against him.”

Vic nodded,
“Yes I will come and I will not
fight with him.”

*

Next morning they all met in a café in the
local town, a neutral ground.

Vic opened by shaking hands,
with Jacob, saying,
“My knuckles still hurt for a week after I hit you, I hope
your face did not hurt for too long.”

Jacob answered, “I like people who fight
for what they believe, though it was a month until I could eat
without pain in my mouth. However it is past and I feel no pleasure
in what I did and wrote.”

With that they shook hands and
walked off to look at the country
side for five minutes while the girls
talked alone. It was an intensely private thing, for Susan to tell
Cathy she had read in Mark’s words of her most intimate and private
memories as told to him when he was her lover; her rape as a child
and the death of her sister. It was said in a minute. Then they
just hugged in the way that sisters do. After that they talked for
half an hour.

Cathy and Jacob told how they had met with
Alan and he had told them he had passed over this same information
to Scotland Yard a year and a half ago for its investigation. What
was strange was that they had passed over the information in a case
where the accused was now a missing person. Cathy’s uncle, George,
had disappeared about four years ago now, bare months after Cathy
met Mark and before Susan had first come to Australia.