1
Mim runs hot water in the sink, plunges her hands beneath the suds and gasps at the scald of it. Ben is particular about knives. She has to handwash them, even with the restrictions. She runs the blue cloth up and down each blade, feeling the smooth heat of the steel.
Missing.
He is missing.
Your husband is missing.
‘Mum!’
She turns to her daughter leaning over the kitchen bench, scowling. Still in her soccer gear, she is long-legged and ponytailed. It is untenable how much longer she gets each day.
Essie holds out her screen. ‘The Friendship Project – you haven’t signed the form.’
There is always something else. ‘You sure I didn’t sign it already?’
Essie sighs. ‘No, you didn’t. Everyone else got to start uploading today and I didn’t. ’Cos you haven’t signed the form.’
Mim takes the screen. Apologises. Swipes her finger in a squiggle across the flashing rectangle.
‘Thank you,’ Essie says, taking the screen back and muttering, ‘Wasn’t that hard, was it?’
‘Careful,’ Mim says, trying to keep her tone light. ‘Tell Sammy bath time, can you?’
Since when did eleven-year-olds have so much attitude? Ben will laugh when she tells him.
Mim puts one hand on her sternum, thinks she will vomit.
Keep it together.
She washes each knife. Pulls out a clean tea towel and dries each blade, sliding them one by one into the wooden knife block in the corner.
* * *
‘What do you mean – missing?’ she had said when the phone call had come that afternoon. She had been distracted by the kids tumbling their bags in the door ahead of her, trying to get her earplugs in to hear the call properly.
‘It appears Mr Elliot has disappeared from the mine site at the Golden Arc. GeoTech have confirmed this with us.’
‘But he’s due back in a few days. Couldn’t he just be on his way home?’
‘We don’t believe so.’
Essie called from in front of the open fridge. ‘What is there to eat?’
Mim had frowned, pointed to her earbuds, turned away.
‘Why am I hearing this from you?’ She had tried not to raise her voice. There are ways to speak to the Department.
‘We’re working closely with GeoTech. Protocol, Mrs Elliot, on foreign investment sites, you understand.’
‘But how can he be missing? He’s chipped. Can’t you just geolocate him?’
They had ignored her question. Asked if they could send someone around. She had asked again, but there was nothing they could tell her.
She had pictured the grey SUV parked in the driveway, the white concentric rings of the Department logo, the faces behind the curtains in the street.
‘No, thank you,’ she had said, ‘we’ll be fine.’
‘You’ll let us know if he makes contact?’
As if they wouldn’t already know. ‘Of course,’ she had replied.
* * *
When the kids are in bed, she pours wine. Tries to think. She should call her mother. That’s what you do when you have stressful news. But what can her mother do from up there at the farm? She’d only worry, call Mim back endlessly until there was an answer. And she’s still so tender. Michael, then Dad.
‘Call Ben,’ she tells OMNI, even though she knows what the result will be. OMNI has a woman’s voice, a soft, slightly clipped accent. The feedback from previous operating systems all pointed to people having a higher compliance with female voices. It was traumatic for the kids when they updated. Sam had only ever known SARA. OMNI took some getting used to.
‘Unable to make contact.’
It’s not unusual. She hasn’t been able to call him onsite the entire time he’s been gone. He could make scheduled calls with the rest of the crew from the IT room, hardwired in, so at least they get to see his face. They laughed before he left about what they should and shouldn’t say. It’s a well-known secret what the flagged words under the Department are. They can only imagine how many flagged words there are under China’s security services.
She thinks of the last time they spoke, and realises she can’t remember the specifics.
‘OMNI, call GeoTech.’ It’s the kind of company they would have laughed at together in the past. Big money.
‘Calling GeoTech now.’
It’s after hours so she’s not really expecting anyone to pick up, but what else can she do? She drums her fingers against the stone benchtop.
She leaves a message and rings off. They’ll call. It will all make sense.
She gulps the wine.
What the fuck, Ben? Where are you?
She puts the glass down, and it clinks violently against the hard surface. Maybe he’s just been delayed on the island. Her theories begin reasonably, but as the glass empties, she imagines him with a drink in his hand, then drunk, sitting with his back against a wall in a dark lane. Then in a hotel room, where there is skin, pulled sheets, the heavy groan of illicit sex. A mangled taxi, suitcase thrown against the traffic. A foreign emergency ward.
The glass is empty. Another glass means another bottle. Maybe it will help her sleep.
She scrolls the feeds for news from Indonesia. But there is nothing about a missing Australian engineer. Nothing but apocalypse stories, or that’s how it reads. The equatorial region is beginning to really sweat it, the patterns of climate refugees marking trails like new currents on the maps as they swarm to higher, cooler, ground. Ben was mad to go there, but the money! The fortunes to be made there before the whole region swallows itself. Plus the danger money. Thanks to the ever-increasing frequency of seismic activity. Quakes. Aftershocks. The suck and spill of tidal waves. For people like Ben, like her to a lesser extent, there was a thrill in that. The added frisson of knowing how the earth worked, or thinking they knew, anyway. There was a need for people like Ben to extract the wealth from the fault lines before tectonic movement, the spluttering, violent earth, made it impossible. He had promised it’d only be another couple of years, then they’d be set. He could work less, she could take the helm, if she wanted, and they’d be secure, financially at least.
She missed work. The brain stretch of geology. That’s why she was so keen to take Heidi up on her recent offer. Being out in the field, even being back in the front of a lecture theatre, would be thrilling. She was pretty sure that she was the one who suggested she give over her tenured position. The groundwater project needed someone who could work fulltime and she couldn’t go back with Essie so young, but she wishes she hadn’t. Wishes they had made it easier for her to stay. It’s not just the brain drain heading back to their countries of origin after graduation – it’s the ones who are wiping bums and pureeing organic fucking vegetables, too.
She keeps scrolling. She no longer reacts to the images. They are all the same and she has no feeling left. The stories are the same too. And who knows if what they say is true.
The world shifted slowly, then so fast, while they watched but didn’t see. They weren’t stupid. Or even oppressed in the beginning. Let the record show that. There were no assassinations. No riots. The people invited the new government to take charge at the ballot box. The two parties had consumed themselves. Left the system wide open for a third option. Reasonable, populated by diverse public figures, backed by both big money and big ideology. On a platform of innovative and economically viable responses to the climate emergency, a rehaul of the health, housing and disability schemes that would see the most vulnerable members of the community cared for, and a foreign policy that miraculously spoke to fear of the other and fluid borders ideal for capital in and capital out, the new party was humbly triumphant on election night. Simple, elegant. No need for finite portfolios and the bullshit of bureaucracy (their words, appealing to the everyday Australian). Centralised power was the answer: One Department for One Nation. The Department of Everything. A party who promised a different way, a better way, and a populace who needed to believe them. Like geology, history repeats itself. Sometimes it’s just hard to see.