Nelly wiped her forehead on her arm. Her T-shirt was navy cotton with a red star on the chest; a red and blue striped football sock with the foot cut off had been sewn onto each sleeve.
One leg of her jeans was filthy. She had stepped knee-deep into the pulpy remains of a log. A thread of sweat made its way down her neck to pool above her collarbone; and Tom saw why the hollows there are known as salt cellars.
They were sitting at the foot of the tall eucalypt eating almonds and dried apricots. Withered branches lay around them like broken limbs. Gum forests so often suggested the aftermath of hostilities, the bark litter of dried bandages, the trees as bony and grey as the remnants of regiments.
Tom’s mind drifted, by related channels, to Nelly’s story of the wallaby; to the amazing teenager with the shotgun and scones.
He was tired. It took him a little while to get there. Then he said, ‘The woman Jimmy Morgan saw on the beach. Denise.’
‘Sure.’
‘No, listen. You said she was tall, even back then. Morgan said he saw a tall woman, remember?’ It was coming together with the thrilling symmetry of an equation. ‘Could Denise have got hold of that dress? The one she made for you?’
‘How come you know about that?’ And before Tom could reply, ‘No, she couldn’t have.’
‘Did the cops ask you about it?’
He thought Nelly was going to ignore the question. But eventually she said,‘That dress never fitted me. Felix got Denise to make it because I wouldn’t wear stuff he bought. And of course he got her a pattern that was way too big. I wore that dress like maybe once, to please her. Then I put it with a whole bunch of stuff to take to the Salvos.’
Tom waited.
‘Look, when the cops started asking, I couldn’t fi nd the dress, OK? So I told them I’d chucked it out in the rubbish weeks before, I didn’t know when exactly. I said they could check with Denise that it hadn’t fi tted me.’
‘So maybe Felix went through your op shop stuff and passed the dress on to Denise.’
‘Why would he do that?’
But the tone wasn’t quite right. Nelly sounded cautious rather than unconvinced.
Tom said, ‘So that people might take her for you? I don’t know. But Morgan said the woman he saw had hitched up her skirt so she could climb the dunes. A dress made for you would be a mini on Denise. And it would be tight. Awkward to get around in. Which would be why Morgan thought there was something weird about her.’
Nelly closed her eyes, then opened them wide. She said, ‘Except none of this fits with Felix and Denise. The way they related to each other.’
‘Denise had a crush on you. And just then she hated you. And being asked to help Felix would’ve flattered her. He’d have put some joky spin on it, and by the time she’d realised what it was all about and that he was going to stay missing, it was too late and she was too scared to say anything.’
‘How would she have got home from the beach?’
‘Maybe he’d rented a car. She could’ve driven his car to the beach and set up the scene with his clothes, and then he dropped her back in the rental before taking off in it.’
‘There was no record of Felix renting a car. The cops checked out all that stuff.’
‘Maybe Denise rented it.’
‘I don’t think she was old enough to have a licence.’
‘Who do you think she was then? The woman on the beach.’
‘I nearly went crazy trying to figure it all out, you know. And in the end-’
‘What?’
‘There’s all these bits and pieces. Little unconnected facts. Smart guesses. What they add up to…’ Nelly said, ‘It’s a puzzle.’
‘Puzzles have solutions.’
‘And which is more intriguing? If we knew what happened to Felix, do you think we’d be talking about him?’ She said, ‘Like I think that’s what he wanted. To create a mystery, something people would remember.’
‘Meaning you think it was all a set-up?’
‘Meaning that if he killed himself, it wasn’t there, not on that beach.’ Nelly got to her feet. ‘Somewhere else, somewhere in bush like this would be my guess, somewhere he knew he’d never be found.’
Then she said a thing that made Tom’s skin crawl. ‘It’s been at the back of my mind all the time we’ve been searching. What we might come across at the bottom of a gully.’
Every Christmas, Iris received a publicity calendar produced by the travel agency where Shona worked. Photographs of unblemished views and merry peasants presided over the feasts that governed her year: birthdays, pension days, medical appointments. Not that Iris, whose memory was excellent, needed to consult this almanac. Its function was purely magical. The shaky inscriptions it displayed were anchored to a submerged set of needs and wishes. One of these was the hope that the future would be like the past. A ringed date warded off ambulances, perverts, glaucoma, the fridge breaking down. It signified life going on as usual.
On Friday, Audrey would be driving Iris to the local health centre. There, on a moulded plastic chair, across from the disgusting poster of a man with his red interior on view, Iris would tell her story, while Doctor fingered the coffee mug stamped with the same name as her anti-infl ammatories.
Iris had decided that she would refer to ‘motions’. She would take her time: delaying the moment of diagnosis, postponing dread. She would speak of blockages, wind, the treacherous packages that slid from her, she would describe what her body withheld and what it yielded.
What survived of the tea-set was a single cup, bold red dragons on a shell-pink ground. Iris kept it wrapped in a nylon head-scarf in the suitcase under her bed. There had been a time, not so many years ago, when she could kneel beside her bed, bend forward and drag the suitcase out. But that was before verticality began its onslaught on her attention. Now it was vital to keep her feet on the ground, and the rest of herself off it.
As she drowsed after lunch in front of the TV, the improbability of having entered her eighties struck Iris anew. She thought of the long, long string of her life, so many afternoons and Easters and Julys, so many Wednesdays. How many times had she woken up to Wednesday?
There were days when being eighty-two was a terrible thing; bad days, when Iris was subject to small jagged outbursts, the remains of her temper, which had worn down like everything else. On bad days, Iris was afraid: not of what was waiting but of what was past, the arrangements that had seemed as fixed as stars and now shuddered with plastic invitation. On bad days she allowed herself to dream. She dreamed of a childhood unclouded by fear, where a raised voice signalled delight, not anger. She dreamed of a girl who dropped to her knees before a Chinaman kneeling in betel-stained dirt.
It was dangerous reverie. Iris could feel its pull. She rationed it, as she rationed the little liqueur-filled chocolate bottles Tommy brought her, measuring out doses of Cointreau and daring. She sculpted the past according to whim, as a child plays with the future; each having an abundance of material.
Iris had arrived in the world when Sebastian de Souza was twenty-seven years old. Twenty-three years earlier, he had asked for a dolls’ tea-set for his birthday. It was yet another improbability: no matter how hard she tried, Iris was unable to construct a story that coupled dainty pink china and the man whose rage had filled her childhood; the bony orb of even his smallest knuckle refused the curve of the teacup’s handle. Nevertheless, these things were true: her father had once been four years old and wanted a miniature tea-set more than anything in the world.
How could you know when something was the last time, wondered Iris. The last time a stranger turned to look at you in the street, the last time you could stand up while putting on your knickers, the last time there was no pain when you tried to turn over in bed, the last time you imagined your life would change for the better. On TV a woman sang about fabric softener, and Iris longed to hold her father’s cup; to gaze, one last time, on fearless red dragons. Her heart stuttered with the marvellous absurdity of it: that blossom-thin porcelain should survive when so much had been smashed or lost or discarded.