I don’t know how long we sat there.
I remember asking Mum where Letty was and she held me close to her and said, ‘They’ll be back soon,’ but I wasn’t sure if she believed it. I was afraid because I guessed that when Steven came back he was going to be really angry.
I think it was a few hours later that the phone rang. Mum was sitting, shaking, on the floor, and her head still had blood on it and I picked up the phone and it was Granny Villiers and her voice sounded strange. And she said, ‘Put your mother on, please,’ like I was a stranger. And then she started shouting at Mum because I could hear her voice down the phone and Mum went all grey and moaned and I held on to her legs to try to stop them shaking. And she kept saying, ‘What have I done? What have I done?’ That was the longest night I remember. When it started to get light, I remember Mum waking me up. I’d fallen asleep on the floor and I was cold and stiff. She said, in a weird voice, that we had to go now. I said, ‘What about Letty?’ and she said there had been an accident, that Steven had had a car crash and Letty was dead in the hospital, and it was all her fault, and her teeth chattered like she was swimming in a pool with the water too cold. I can’t remember much after that – just being in a taxi, and then an aeroplane, and when I cried and said I didn’t want to go, Mum said it was the only way she could protect me. I remember crying every time my mum went to the loo because I was frightened she would disappear, too, and I’d be left by myself. And then I remember Aunt Kathleen standing at the airport barrier and hugging me like she knew me, and telling me that everything was going to be all right, even though everything definitely wasn’t. And all the time I wanted to say to Mum, ‘But how can we leave Letty?’ What if she wasn’t dead, and was in the hospital waiting for us? And even if she was dead we should have brought her with us, not left her all those miles away so that we couldn’t put flowers on her grave and let her know we still loved her. But I didn’t say anything. Because for a long, long time, my mum couldn’t say anything at all.
This was what I told Mike, on the morning I caught him holding Mum’s hands in his bedroom. This was what I told him, after she’d gone, even though I’ve never been able to tell that story to anyone, not even Auntie K, not with everything in it. But I told him, because I got the feeling that somehow things had changed, and that Mum would think it was okay if Mike knew.
I have never seen a man cry before.
Twenty-one
Mike
As the rest of Silver Bay slept late the following day, and the waters stilled under a clear blue sky, several miles away, in a gently humming room at the Port Summer Hospital, Nino Gaines woke up.
Kathleen had been sitting at the end of his bed, leaning heavily on the arm of a blue padded chair. She had gone straight there from tucking everyone in, explaining afterwards that she had wanted to tell her oldest friend a little of what had happened that momentous night. As dawn broke, exhaustion caught up with her and she had dozed for a while, then sat reading the previous day’s newspaper, occasionally aloud when she found something that might interest him. In this case, it was a report about a man they both knew who had set up a restaurant. ‘Be a bloody disaster,’ he croaked. So weary was she from the fright of Hannah’s disappearance and the horror of the ghost nets that Kathleen Whittier Mostyn read on another two sentences before she realised what she’d heard.
He was frail, and a little disorientated, but underneath the white hospital gown and the myriad tubes and wires he was indubitably Nino Gaines, and for that, it seemed, the whole Silver Bay community was grateful. The doctors gave him a raft of examinations, most of which he complained were a ‘bloody waste of time’, did brain scans and cardiograms, consulted their textbooks and finally pronounced him surprisingly well for a man of his age who had been unconscious for so many days. He was allowed to sit up, lost a few of the tubes that had punctured his arms, and the trickle of visitors swiftly turned into a torrent. Kathleen was allowed to sit at the end of his bed throughout, a privilege usually accorded only to a wife, as long as she didn’t raise his blood pressure.
‘Been raising my bloody blood pressure for more than fifty years,’ he told the nurses, in front of her. ‘Fat lot of good it’s done me.’ And Kathleen beamed. She had not stopped beaming since.
A lucky few know their purpose in life from an early age. They recognise in themselves a vocation, whether it be religion, art, storytelling or the spearing of sacred cows. I finally learnt my purpose in life on a clear dawn at the start of an Australian spring, when an eleven-year-old girl took my hand and trusted me with a secret. From that moment, I understood that every bit of my energy would be given to her protection and that of her mother.
When I think back to those few days after the ghost nets, I realise my feelings were almost schizophrenic. I was euphoric in that I was in love with Liza – in love for perhaps the first time – and finally able to express it freely. And she seemed to love me too. After they had told me about Letty, she had feared I would see her differently – as cavalier, deceitful or, at worst, as a murderer. I had found her in her room, sitting by the window, her face a mask of misery. And when I had managed to compose myself (Hannah had put her arms round me when I cried, a gesture I found almost unbearably moving) I went in, closed the door behind me, knelt down and put my arms round her, saying nothing, trusting in my presence to say it for me. A long time later, I understood why she had told me. ‘I don’t think you should do it,’ I said.
She had lifted her head from my shoulder. ‘I’ve got to, Mike.’
‘You’re punishing yourself for something that wasn’t your fault. How could you know he’d react like that? How could you know he’d crash the car? You were a battered woman, for God’s sake. You could say you were . . .’ I struggled with the words ‘. . . temporarily insane. That’s what they say in these cases. I’ve seen the news reports.’
‘I’ve got to do it.’ Her eyes, although swollen with tears, were clear with determination. ‘I as good as killed my own daughter. I may have killed her father too. I’ll give myself up, and use the publicity to tell them what’s going on out here.’
‘It might be a wasted gesture. A disastrous wasted gesture.’
‘So let me talk to this media person of yours. She’ll know if it’ll help.’
‘You don’t understand, Liza. If all this is . . . as you say, you’ll go to jail.’