All the missing children, p.1
All the Missing Children, page 1
For K, who already knows
Contents
Title Page
Part One: Ilene
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
Nonna Oscura
Part Two: Omar
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
Carl
Part Three: Benji
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
Amma
Part Four: Nera
I
II
III
IV
Sue
Part Five: The Children
I
II
III
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright Page
Part One
Ilene
I
Days before her children went missing, Ilene Gajdos-Little gnawed on the dry skin of her bottom lip and reclined in her low-backed stool and felt, deep in her bones, that she was due a change of fortune. She reached out and pressed the poker machine’s backlit button again. Once more, the machine played its jaunty tune of anticipation. Once more, it scrolled through its motley images—casino cards, jade turtles, gold lions—and once more, it settled on a combination that was literally within an ace of winning.
Ilene threw her head back and groaned. The ceiling was adorned with circular mirrors framed by fluorescents the hue of sundown, and she was down to sixty-seven cents’ credit. When her credit was exhausted, she decided, she’d top it up with the twenty she’d pilfered from the till at work. But she glanced at her Casio watch: soon she’d have to leave the Casus Hill Workers’ Club to pick up Jack and Lonnie from school. She didn’t have time to spin through twenty extra dollars, unless she accepted that she’d be late.
Somewhere to her right, a machine paid out and blared its festive ragtime melody. That machine was called Horseshoe Saloon. She knew it; she’d won and lost on it plenty of times before. Her machine for the day, Jewels of the Orient, was due to pay out any second. If she didn’t stay until she at least broke even, the next punter would reap all the luck she’d sown.
She picked up her schooner and moistened her lips with the tepid froth that remained. Then she knuckled the backlit button. Rapid-fire, the digital reels wound themselves into another losing pattern. Now she had forty-seven cents’ credit left, which was twenty-three-and-a-half for each occasion she’d been late to pick her children up this month.
The previous Tuesday, she’d arrived to find them loitering on the pavement by the school gates. Neither of them approached her battered orange Datsun. Jack, who was eight, watched a magpie wheel low overhead, while six-year-old Lonnie slipped her thumbs beneath the fraying straps of her backpack. Ilene hooted, but they eyed the car as if it were a foreign object. Then the school principal, Ms Subraman, shuffled past the two pine trees and out through the gates with her Peter Pan collar flapping in the breeze.
Ilene played another spin, and this time she came close to the change of fortune she’d anticipated. Pretty close, she corrected herself—a single jade turtle shy of winning twelve free spins. She scratched her crown. It wouldn’t matter to her children if she were late. They’d be safe. They’d probably feel safer with the principal than with her. What she didn’t want to deal with was Ms Subraman’s mouth, which she’d hold on that commiserative angle, as if Ilene wasn’t even worth scolding.
From her right, the ragtime melody blared again, and she scowled at the row of pokies perpendicular to hers. Most of the gaming stools were empty, but a lone woman hunched on the stool in front of Horseshoe Saloon. She sat unnaturally still, and the glow of her machine formed a pale nimbus around her. Her hair was woven into a volute bun that reminded Ilene of a severed ear. She could not look away. The melody slowed its tempo, and the only movement was the plume of light enveloping the woman.
When the melody finished, Ilene dragged her gaze to her knuckles. She whistled cool air onto them and, too afraid to watch, played her final spin. In turn, the machine played its jaunty tune, and she imagined the images on-screen jostling for position. She willed the victory music to follow. But nothing followed. Her credit was down to seven cents, which was not enough for another spin.
She exhaled through her nostrils. Then she dug the fingernails of her right hand into her upper left arm until she made herself wince. There was only one way to break even now. She had to use the stolen twenty. She had to re-disappoint Ms Subraman. She had to make her children wait.
But she may as well make them wait. They didn’t trust her, let alone love her. She could tell this from the way Jack rolled over in the upper bunk when she greeted him in the morning. She could sense it whenever Lonnie hugged her from behind, or the side—never from the front. The reflection of the stars in the bore water tank’s murk glinted in Ilene’s memory, and her pulse crashed above her ears.
She felt as if she were submerged, and only her yearning for another spin brought her back to the surface. Her handbag lay on the bus seat–patterned carpet at her feet. She dragged it onto her lap and guddled through it in pursuit of the twenty-dollar note. When she found it, her pulse eased up, and she peered to her right. The row of pokies there was unoccupied. The woman with the volute bun must have taken her winnings and left.
A cloud drifted across the afternoon sun, and from the corridor of the main school building, Ilene watched its shadow fall upon the classroom in which her children waited. Seated at a wooden desk, Jack scrawled something in a dog-eared exercise book. Lonnie crouched beside a cabinet and poked a short straw through an egg carton. The sun returned and illuminated the stains on the yellow t-shirt of her uniform; it brightened the shade of Jack’s grey hoodie, which Ms Subraman had explained was from lost and found.
In the circumstances, Ilene imagined that other children would’ve glanced around in anticipation of their mother. Hers hadn’t even noticed her belated arrival. She rested her shoulder against the wall of the corridor. Then Ms Subraman re-emerged from her office with Jack’s bloodied shirt in one hand and a form of some sort in the other.
‘He won’t tell me or the counsellor who the fight was with,’ she said. ‘Or what it was over. But it was not trivial.’
She handed the shirt to Ilene, who pinched the yoke either side of the collar and held it up for inspection. The cotton was sheer, and near the hem three tears ran through a blotch of dried blood that looked like a Rorschach test. There was something of the scarecrow about it, Ilene thought. She imagined hay protruding from the rents in the fabric, but that image soon gave way to one of deep talon wounds on Jack’s abdomen.
‘How bad is it?’ she asked.
‘The shirt came off worse than the boy, fortunately.’ Ms Subraman smiled without showing her teeth. ‘We bandaged him in sick bay—he’s all right.’ Her smile faded, and she gripped the form with both hands. ‘You didn’t check on him while I was in my office?’
Ilene draped Jack’s shirt over her arm. She peered into the classroom and almost followed her gaze inside. Lonnie had taken a seat next to Jack and was waving the egg carton under his nose. He ignored her and poured his concentration into the exercise book and raked his angry pencil over the page. Ilene longed to comfort him, to hug both of her children, but she feared that they would stiffen in her embrace—and that Ms Subraman would see.
‘Jack won’t dob in the other kid?’ she asked.
‘Perhaps you can get it out of him.’ Ms Subraman did not seem as if she were being sarcastic. She appeared merely distracted, skim-reading the form in her hands and clearing her throat. ‘My staff attempted to contact you after lunch, after we wrote up the incident report.’
‘That the report?’
Ms Subraman shook her head. ‘When you didn’t answer, we tried your husband. He told us he couldn’t come.’
Ilene caught the upward inflection in Ms Subraman’s voice, and the hallway seemed to tilt. The thought spiralled through her mind that Jack and Lonnie had told the principal about what had happened that night a year earlier, or perhaps Carl had let something slip over the phone.
She blinked hard, and the school corridor righted itself. ‘My husband’s been sick,’ she offered. His sickness, if that was the right word, had actually begun two years earlier, after he’d lost his job as a brink-of-the-city farmhand; he’d been accused of slitting a sheep’s throat when in truth, he’d claimed, all he did was shepherd a couple of workers into a union. ‘He’s not in the kids’ lives for now. We made that call together.’
Ms Subraman folded the form in half. Deliberately, she flattened the crease in the paper between her thumb and forefinger. ‘Here.’ She passed the form to Ilene, who unfolded it and scanned its text. It was an application for after-school care, and a hot flush rose from Ilene’s chest to her neck. ‘I don’t need this. I work shifts at the supermarket, yeah.’
‘Ilene, you’ve been late three times this month. According to the rules—’
‘But I can drop them off, pick them up.’
‘According to the rules, I should’ve sent them already.’
Ilene sighed, and Ms Subraman’s mouth shifted to that commiserative angle. ‘It only costs twenty-five dollars to get on the waitlist, and the council gives special consideration to low-inc ome earners, as you’ll see.’ She pointed at the form. ‘And to sole carers,’ she added.
Ilene stuffed the bloodied shirt and form into her handbag. ‘Anything else?’
She stared at Ms Subraman and tried to force the principal to avert her gaze. But the principal looked resolutely back at her. ‘If Jack tells you who hurt him, please let me know.’
Ilene entered the classroom, and Lonnie ran to her and embraced her—albeit from the side. Ilene stroked her daughter’s matted curls and glared at her son. Jack remained seated and flicked his exercise book shut. On the wall above him were paintings of sunflowers and animals and happy families. She prised the egg carton from Lonnie’s grip.
‘It’s a bus,’ Lonnie said.
‘It’s excellent.’ Ilene glanced at Ms Subraman, who waited in the corridor, and relaxed the muscles of her face. ‘Now go sit next to your brother again. You both look so beautiful.’
Her tone verged on insincerity, and Lonnie withdrew from the embrace. ‘We do?’
‘’Course you do. In fact, let me get a photo of you two before we go.’
‘Oh-kay.’
Lonnie dragged her feet back behind the desk, and Ilene tossed the egg carton aside. It ricocheted off the cabinet and rolled along the floor. She didn’t check Ms Subraman’s reaction. But the hot flush returned to her neck, and she busied herself with her phone. Its camera lens and screen were cracked, although she could see she had a message from Carl and missed calls from the school. She cleared the notifications and raised the phone and lined up a photograph.
‘Ready? Three, two, one—smile.’
Jack and Lonnie did not smile. They sat there with serious expressions and their heads slightly bowed. Ilene tapped the button for the camera anyway, and the flash went off. She checked the photo on her phone. It’d come out grainy, the children’s features partly obscured by shadow. She should take another photo, she thought. Then she looked to the corridor and realised that Ms Subraman had ended her watch.
‘It’s a good one,’ Ilene said.
Lonnie half-rose. ‘Can I see?’
‘Later, maybe. First I need to ask you some stuff.’
Ilene put her phone away and took a few paces forward. Lonnie adjusted herself in her chair, and Ilene couldn’t help feeling that she’d positioned her children for an interrogation. This sense was exacerbated by a thought she rarely had: while she was pale and freckled, her children’s skin tones were closer to Carl’s. She resisted the urge to drop to her haunches.
‘What?’ Jack said. ‘I didn’t do anything.’
Ilene raised her eyebrows. ‘Then who did?’
‘No one.’
‘No one?’
He exchanged a look with Lonnie, who puffed out her cheeks as if to keep the answer from escaping her mouth.
‘You want to tell me something, Lonnie?’ Ilene asked.
Her daughter gave two big shakes of her head. She let air seep out between her lips, and Ilene folded her arms and nodded at Jack’s stomach. ‘Show me.’
He wiped his septum with the heel of his hand. Then he got to his feet and lifted the grey hoodie’s hem to reveal his abdomen. Taped over his kidney area was a napped white bandage, stained with a pink shiver of blood. Above the bandage, his rib cage was that of a prisoner on a hunger strike. Ilene’s arms fell to her side, and she stuttered another step in his direction. She wished she could go to him and hold him. But his mouth was set hard and his eyes narrowed, and he tugged at the hem of his hoodie.
‘You won’t tell me who did that to you?’ Ilene said.
‘I already told you.’
Jack took his seat and rested his forearms on the closed exercise book before him. Lonnie patted his shoulder—an acquired adult gesture, Ilene figured. The sun had started to take on the hue of the gaming room’s fluorescents, and she checked that the corridor remained empty.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘then can I see what you wrote in that book?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘It’s private.’
Lonnie’s eyes were enormous. ‘Some things are private.’
Ilene flinched. She’d said that to her children once, on her haunches, in an anteroom that reeked of disinfectant. They were to be interviewed by a government psychologist at the hospital where Carl was being treated, and she didn’t want them to speak a word about how he’d ended up there.
‘There are no secrets between children and mothers,’ she replied. Then she dropped her voice to a murmur and asked, ‘Did you say something to Ms Subraman? About something private? Or maybe you wrote it down somewhere?’
Lonnie blinked repeatedly; with some effort, Jack kept himself stationary.
‘Lonnie?’ Ilene said.
‘No, Mum.’
‘Jack?’
‘I didn’t say anything.’
He balled his fists over the exercise book. Ilene caught the movement, and her hot flush made its way to her face. Blood sloshed through her temples, and she lunged for the book and grabbed it. Jack shifted his weight. He pushed down. But he didn’t have the heft to stop her, and she wrenched the book out from under his fists.
Ilene turned side-on to her children and flicked through the pages. They were filled with maths homework, notes on the Earth’s crust, a book report. An unfinished short story, without full stops, filled the last page on which Jack had written. The children went into the cave and smashed up some stars, Ilene read. She flipped through the pages a second time. Then she closed the book, and her children’s gazes stung her cheek.
Without meeting their eyes, she laid the exercise book on the desk in front of Jack. It occurred to her to apologise. But a subtle tremor in the shadows of the corridor diverted her attention. Ms Subraman was staring into the classroom, so Ilene helped her children pack their bags and ushered them off the school grounds.
Heat snaked from the electric coil of the stove to the blackened pan, in which eight store-bought meatballs hissed and spat. Ilene raised one and checked the underside. The mince was well done but not as dark as the pan, and she decided to let it crisp up a little more. That was how Jack and Lonnie liked it, and she hoped that her children might accept her burnt offering in lieu of an apology.
When the meatballs were done, she scoffed two down and unglued her feet from the linoleum floor. She arranged the remaining meatballs on dinner plates with Smith’s chips and bread rolls and the last couple of squeezes of tomato sauce. Then she carried the plates past the faded red polo of her cashier’s uniform—which was draped over a chair at the dining table—and into the living room.
On the sofa, her children sat together and watched television at full volume. Lonnie had her legs crossed and her finger on her chin. Jack’s mouth hung open. On TV, women wore gold dresses and gold nail polish and gold lipstick. Muzak blared, and one by one they opened gold briefcases to reveal random words.
‘Who wants meatballs?’ Ilene singsonged.
Jack and Lonnie gave no sign that they’d heard, and Ilene stepped between them and the TV and slid the two plates of meatballs onto the coffee table. It bore water stains from glasses and mugs, circles of different sizes, and her eye settled on a smaller ring within a larger one. This put her in mind of the hunched woman from the gaming room and the plume of light surrounding her; Ilene recalled her own paralysis and withdrew to stand behind the sofa.
‘I burned them just how you like.’
On TV, a woman opened a briefcase with the word ‘blowfly’ in it, and the male game show host shouted the house down to announce that the contestant had won.
Ilene yawned. ‘I’m gonna catch some sleep before work. Don’t stay up too late, okay?’ She leaned over and kissed Lonnie’s head. Lonnie stiffened but did not flee. Her hair smelled of beeswax and wet soil. It wasn’t the fragrance of clean hair, Ilene thought, yet it wasn’t unpleasant. ‘Okay?’ she repeated.
‘Okay, Mum,’ Lonnie replied.
Ilene shuffled across to kiss Jack’s crown. Before she got to him, he scrambled to the floor and knelt in the gap between the sofa and the coffee table. He dunked his bread roll into the tomato sauce and took a great bite. Lonnie slid to the floor beside her brother and stuffed a whole meatball into her mouth.
Ilene yawned again and brought tears to her eyes. ‘Night,’ she said.
