The Ottoman Motel Read online

  When Ned returned he placed a muddled mass of clothing on the end of the bed. ‘Best I could do at short notice,’ he said. ‘We’ll get you something better in the morning.’

  Simon thanked him, and shuffled his weight on the bed, unsure of how familiar he was allowed to be. His mother’s absence, his father’s, hurt like a headache.

  Ned stood awkwardly. ‘If you need me, I’m just downstairs. I’ll leave the light on outside for you.’ He walked to the door and turned, pushing his hair back from his face. ‘Look, Simon—I—’ His face tensed, then slumped back. ‘Is there anything else you want?’

  Simon wanted to brush his teeth. He wanted his own pyjamas. He wanted his father to walk past the door with a cough and a reassuring shadow. He shook his head.

  ‘Okay, well I’ll wake you in the morning. Try to get some sleep.’

  Ned closed the door quietly, leaving Simon alone, sealed in like an insect.

  Simon reached over to the pile of clothes and pulled out a large purple jumper. He took off his old jumper, his T-shirt, his shorts and sandals, pulled the new jumper over his head. It smelled of must and aftershave and reached to well below his knees. His pyjamas for the night. He switched on the lamp that sat on the edge of the window seat, turned off the overhead light and pushed the pile of clothes onto the floor. He slipped under the sheet that was tucked tightly under the doona. He sank his head into the big pillow, letting its softness envelop his ears.

  He closed his eyes, imagining he was in a cocoon. Imagining daylight was trying to break in, to mark the end of his nightmare. He wanted to wake to real life: in the back seat of his parents’ car, driving home. But the imagined world would not stick. Unfamiliar senses overpowered him. The smell of the quilt, mothball-sharp. The thick salt of swallowed tears. The relentless pounding noise of the rain, impossibly heavier than ever.

  He was still in a strange room in a strange house in a strange town. Lost. He opened his eyes just as the lamp flickered out, leaving behind only a ghastly darkness.

  Madaline blinked her eyes so hard she heard bat’s wings. An empty mug sat before her on the kitchen bench. Her hand had been poised above it for nearly a minute, holding a teaspoon heaped with instant coffee. The decision to overturn it was somehow absurdly hard. The coffee, hauled from the depths of her cupboard, was old and infected by moisture: the odd-shaped granules repulsed her, how they clumped together into moon rocks. Still, she needed it. For the first time in years, the base of her throat sung with a need for nicotine, and she knew coffee was her best chance to calm it.

  It was proper coffee she craved, though, a thick stovetop brew. She almost smelled it on her fingers, the tang of a cigarette and the bitter hit of caffeine. A cruel sense memory: Ned and Stephanie, their smiling faces. A backyard afternoon, brimful of birdscreech. Sweet smoke blown into clear salt air, countless cups of fresh

  hot coffee. All her adult addictions gathered at a table. She added the scene to the collection of ragged thoughts circling inside

  her head.

  The cordless phone lay at the edge of the kitchen counter where she’d placed it half an hour before. Tommy’s number rolled through her head, and a vision of his sleep-scrambled face, a flare of his frequent sore-headed rage. Officer in Charge—that was a laugh. Tommy was hardly able to maintain himself, let alone an entire town. Madaline ground a knuckle against her eye. Was she any better? She’d already failed to do the simple things right. She’d taken almost no information from Simon. Couldn’t bring herself to, the way he was sick all down himself, flinching when she tried to help. All she had was two names. No description of what they looked like. No idea what car they drove. The most likely explanation stared her in the face: that they had simply abandoned their son. Tommy would tear her to pieces for the mistakes she’d already made.

  Reasons, she heard in her head. Everything has a reason. That shaky mirage called Police Training shimmered into view. Those shards of psychology copied eagerly to her notebook, single sentences she would pore over on the evening train, deciphering her own writing, trying to obscure it from the cramped eyes of strangers, as if they would take the wisdom from her. She wondered now—as she had then—whether anything was truly without reason. A senseless killing, as the papers often said, a senseless act.

  She finally turned over the spoon, dropping the coffee into the mug, adding two pellets of sweetener. She flicked on the kettle for the fourth time, blankly watching the orange light that she knew would flick off in a matter of moments. She thought about the power she was sucking from the grid, thought about the rain, heavier than ever, covering everything like a blanket. The kettle boiled, the light switched off and Madaline poured water into her mug. She watched the coffee hurl itself against the side of the cup, abandoned into half-dissolved faecal blobs against the ceramic lip. She pressed the back of her left hand against her mouth, feeling something rise in her throat.

  Through the flywire window, she heard the awning on her back verandah flap despairingly against itself like tired bunting at a country fete. A flash of lightning illuminated, for a moment, the rest of her yard: the blank concrete slab, the lush thicket

  of ferns and fruit trees closing in around it. She swallowed

  whatever sour thing had tried to rise. She had to do something. She pictured the night ahead of her as she continued not to act: hours of self-punishment, worse than anything Tommy could dish out, her eyes becoming iron-chained drawbridges, refusing to yield to a battering of sleep. All night, every mistake she had ever made, replaying in her head. The regrets, the missed chances, catalogued crisply and lined up like tabs in a filing cabinet. A finger running over them, flicking each in turn.

  She seized the phone and brought it up to her face before she could change her mind. She ignored the flashing message light, pushed out the sound of her mother’s voice, her questions, stored, waiting for as long as it would take. She punched in Tommy’s number.

  The tone burred, cracking with the usual static. Five rings.

  ‘What?’

  Madaline knew he had call display. ‘Tommy,’ she said. ‘It’s Madaline.’

  ‘What.’

  ‘There’s been—’ she struggled with the proper way to say it. ‘Something’s happened. A boy…his parents have gone missing.’

  ‘What boy? Madaline, it’s fucken God knows what time. I’m trying to get some well-earned.’

  ‘They arrived in town today. Iris’s family. Her daughter.’

  Tommy cleared his throat in a wet rattle. ‘Iris’s daughter?’ He lowered his voice.

  Madaline pictured Tommy’s wife beside him, sleeping. ‘Apparently, yeah. They went out to the lake, left the boy—Simon—in a room at the Ottoman. Never came back.’

  ‘Whaddya want me to do?’

  ‘I don’t know. I sent Simon to Ned’s place for now. Should I call it in?’

  Tommy sighed. ‘If you want. Parents’ll probably turn up. Probably lost on a side road. Where’re they from?’

  Madaline stirred her oil-slick coffee with the handle of the spoon. ‘Somewhere up the Gold Coast.’

  ‘No doubt about it then. Lost. Fucken hell. You been out to Magpie?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Yeah, well. This weather—it’s your funeral. Roads’ll be shot.’

  Madaline took her mug and went back to the living room. One of Ned’s sandwiches still sat on the couch, the toasted triangles resting side by side, a suspension bridge of cheese linking them together. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘I don’t know.’ She took a quick slug of coffee, wincing. The boiled water burned the top of her mouth, which somehow pleased her.

  ‘They’re probably bogged,’ said Tommy, ‘or the road’s under. They’ll be fine for a night.’

  ‘Should I log it?’

  ‘If you want. Won’t be looked at till tomorrow anyway, if ever. They see a low-priority pop up from our district, they put it straight in a special file called Not a Fucking Chance.’ He yawned. ‘We can chase it up in the morni
ng. If I ever get back to bloody sleep.’

  Madaline slumped into her leather chair, crossing her legs at the ankle, sighing to the ceiling. She caught her free hand plucking at a stack of paper by her chair. How many times had she promised herself she’d clean the room up?

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll be down at the Ottoman first thing so I’ll probably see you there. Sorry to bother—’ He hung up.

  Madaline hauled a handful of paper onto her lap and let the pages flick over. Words jumped out at her—randomly, illogically. They had all begun to look like this. Cases, reports, statements. She leaned over and picked up one half of Ned’s sandwich. She took a bite from one corner, washed it down with another gulp of awful coffee. Why had she brought Ned into this? She knew exactly why.

  There was another itch, another addiction: the bulging ring-binder held together with cracking rubber bands, sitting just under the couch. A schoolgirl’s hiding place. Like a diary with a plastic lock. Madaline got off the chair and slid the folder out. Just the cover—the awful photographer’s-background sponged grey, that was all it took. Her fingers shivered as she rolled off the rubber bands and opened the cover. The first page, pale blue, inside a torn plastic sleeve. She could have sketched it in her sleep. Case File : Disappearance : Stephanie Rhelma Gale. The thick black letters were an open grave. Nothing in the world could have made her feel worse.

  Hand over hand. That’s the way it’d always been. Small, repeated tasks producing the greatest results. Jack Tarden leaned his weight back, feet bracing. He’d discovered a place where his boots could fit, where he could wedge himself into the slimy surface even as the waves slid up over them. The surf roared in around the bend in the cliffs but was quickly diffused by the angle of the rocks, the natural protection of the cove. The tide was rising, though. Tarden’s ankles flooded with ice as the water found its way through the tiny rip in his waders. He grimaced, but would not let himself complain.

  He would never allow himself to sell out like the others. He plied his craft the way others had done for decades, the true pioneers. He knew most of the fishermen would only now be stumbling from their houses, sealing themselves in climate-controlled utes for

  their short trip to the wharf, where all their boats clogged together, identical. He pictured their bulging figures, bodies wrapped in thick layers of artificial fleece, minds streamlined for profit and warmth. Chugging out in their boats to the same overfished sections of the ocean. He was sorry for them, mostly, denying themselves the truest pleasure of what they did for a living.

  Tarden’s view from the cove was pure. No sense of the land, just the water. The sight of an empty ocean always inspired and awed him. The sun cracked at the horizon, and Tarden hauled the first pot up among its long fingers of light. There was nothing—nothing—like the sight of the brass latches drawing towards him, gleaming from just below the water line, then the fizz as the pot broke the surface and the air was filled with the sound of streaming water, the bracing briny smell, the promise of the tell-tale shadows lurking behind the wire.

  This was pure joy, a clean high: the morning’s first catch. The first pot was a fiver, a good weight. Tarden hauled the pot onto its end, unlatched the lid. He threw away some weeds and a handful of nippers clinging, unfathomably and as always, to the outside. He splashed some water back onto the rest—five crabs, healthy morning-first fellows with strong new shells of umber iron. He removed his left boot, placed it behind him, then picked up the top crab with a strong starfish grip, reaching already to his pocket for the gnarl of fishing twine he kept there. The creature fought like a horse’s heart. Tarden felt all of its strength travel up from his fingers, up his arm, through his chest. This one had struggled against life, he thought, and won. They always came to him, the strong ones, the water-spinners, the sand-movers, the underwater poets. No one else knew them but him. He held the crab down with his left foot, wrapping it in the twine, tying back its claws and legs.

  Three more pots came up, and then the sun, a grey egg poaching in the white morning sky. These early winter sunrises were nothing but one blank piece of paper placed before another. Not that he minded: Tarden’s eyes strayed only to the sea, to the lake and the creeks. Less light was all that winter meant: he didn’t mind the cold. Of course, the other fishers started later each day in winter, complaining about the weather, spending more time drinking.

  He collapsed the pots, threw them back into his boat that he’d anchored just before the rocks. The crabs, nineteen in all, went into a plastic tub. He motored slowly out of the cove and around the bend, making sure no other boats could see him. The cove was his place, and his place only. The rocks and the curve of

  its entrance meant it was nearly invisible to someone going past

  it, but still, you couldn’t be too careful. No one could know it

  was there.

  It was a good twenty-minute journey back to the wharf. He pulled a tarpaulin over the pots and his haul, shielding it from the air and from any prying eyes. He sat back and let the current guide the boat while he reached beneath his seat and took out his aluminium water flask. He took a slug of water and squinted out against the growing glare. He rested his free hand back on the tiller and put his feet up against the side of the tub. He felt the vibrations of the crabs testing their new surroundings, their gentle tapping on the plastic. These were the weaker ones, the ones he hadn’t bothered to tie up. The crabs never grew frantic—never—and this was what Tarden liked most about them. Gracious, graceful creatures. He didn’t like to think too far into their future. Luckily, he had always been able to switch off that part of his brain. For better or worse.

  He felt a dull ache in his finger, the one he had bitten the night before. He studied the ragged quick, noticing that one side of it, near the square edge of his fingernail, had stayed white, almost translucent. His skin was covered with many such strange markings. He had lost count of what they all meant. He thought of Robbie’s arms, his shoulders, somehow untouched by the many imperfections of time. He had not been at home when Tarden left that morning. Nothing new there, he supposed.

  The wharf drew into view and Tarden cut the engine, letting the tinnie drift with the current. He liked to watch the trawlers setting out and returning, wondered if he would ever own such a boat. Probably not in this lifetime, not while his craft was ruled by the bottom line, rewarding speed over quality.

  Tarden watched the shimmer-mirror of the water’s surface and thought of the young lad and his parents. They had seemed like nice people. But still.

  The night had come into Simon’s room. Not from the outside, from the black cavity of nature beyond the window, but from within: dark vacant shapes that grew like living things from tiny cracks and overlaps. Dark creatures had crawled, with their rich shadow flesh, along and up the walls. Drawing closer to Simon with each breath he took. They’d entered his eyes—ink stains leaching outwards and in—and when he closed them, they were inside him. His familiar dream demons shrouded themselves in dim cloaks, growing impossibly large, filling every space with fresh edgeless fear.

  Somehow, these shards of sleep propelled Simon into a new day. He cowered in one corner of the enormous bed, sheets and quilt pushed back away from one another. His first moment was a sharp intake of breath. The light coming in the window was wrong: a weak light like a failing afternoon, nothing like what a morning was. Then he remembered the room, the house. His body was itchy without movement. He got off the bed and moved to the seat at the window. He looked out at a beach, sunken down behind sand dunes covered with a spiky grass.

  Tall trees poked up too, stringy eucalypts and whippet-thin firs. Directly below, Simon saw a green splash of garden surrounded by a fence. Spidery salt crystals had hatched in each corner of the window. He felt the wind rattle the frame intermittently. He hugged himself in his strange woollen jumper, bending his knees up to his chin. The window seat was large and surprisingly comfortable, and he settled back in its softness. He sat for some ti
me watching the morning mist shift between the trees, revealing colours and shapes and lines he would not normally have seen.

  There was a sudden clunk, almost as if a rock or something just as heavy had been thrown against his door. He sprang off the seat and walked cautiously across the room. He put his ear to the door but heard nothing. Maybe someone else staying in the house had gone into the wrong room. Maybe someone had found his parents.

  Maybe it was his parents.

  Simon turned the doorknob slowly. It creaked in protest and Simon thought perhaps it was locked. He tried again, harder, and still it resisted. There was no sign of a lock or latch. He put both hands on the doorknob and tugged and the door flew open with sudden ease, sending him staggering back into the room. Before he could regain his balance he felt something hard fly into his stomach, knocking him to the floor, his left leg crumpling under him painfully. He glimpsed a flash of the ceiling as his body was lifted and crashed against the floorboards and a dull wedge jammed itself into his back. His body sang with bone-folding pain.

  ‘Don’t move,’ said a croaky voice near Simon’s ear.

  It was a person, pinning him down, knee in his back. A set of bony brown fingers dug into his right shoulder. A rubber sole squeaked.

  ‘What are you doing in here?’ said the voice. It sounded old, but Simon could tell it belonged to someone young.

  ‘I was…staying the night,’ was all Simon could think to say with his cheek pressed against the floor.

  ‘You can’t stay on this floor,’ said the voice. ‘You can’t stay in this room.’

  ‘But Ned let me stay. He gave me some clothes.’ Simon felt the pressure increase on his back. ‘I’m only staying for…a bit.’

  ‘What?’ said the voice. ‘This is Ned’s jumper.’ Fingers felt at Simon’s sleeves. ‘And those are my trousers.’ The voice’s owner leapt off Simon’s back. Simon unsprung his body and sat up, aching. A thin boy who looked only a few years older than