* * *
By the time Brian brought the twins home from church the cupcakes were ready. She had decorated them with candy. There were pink spiders and a sticky spiderweb, a prince, a princess, yellow ducks, and green frogs.
She was playing with the cat in the bedroom when she heard her children laughing. Baxter could barely speak he was laughing so hard.
“The wonky princess looks like she swallowed a firecracker,” he said.
“This lumpy green one shot out of a crocodile’s bum,” Emily added.
The cruel words repeated in her mind and she clenched her hands, pressing her fists into the bed. She was fed up and exhausted and so sick of everyone. She ran into the kitchen.
“Why are you being so nasty?” she shouted at her children. “It’s not nice.”
Brian hurried in from the lounge room. He took her flapping hands and held them tightly.
“Deep breath.”
“The green one is a frog. They know that. Anyone can see that. People always tell me how colorful they are. It makes me feel really sad and angry when Emily and Baxter say those things.”
She could barely speak she was crying so hard. Brian hugged her and wouldn’t let go.
“You don’t need to get so upset. We’ve talked about this. They were teasing.”
“It took me two hours to decorate those cupcakes. The entire time you were at church I was working on them.”
“I know.”
“I get sick of it.”
He stroked her hair. “You haven’t got worked up like this for a long time. I’m going to make us a cup of tea. When you’ve calmed down, the kids will come and say sorry. You need to tell them that you accept their apology, okay?”
Later, when the twins apologized, she could see their sorrow in Emily’s downcast eyes and Baxter’s flushed cheeks. That made her feel sadder and she wished for their sake that they had a normal mum, not one who couldn’t count money properly and made wonky cupcakes.
* * *
Jack
Calendar House
Celia ignored him all morning. He found her in the stables, brushing her horse down with long, regular strokes. He asked her if anything was bothering her.
“Bothering me? You bet. You aren’t two schoolboys caught smoking a cigarette behind the bike shed. You could go to jail. I’m horrified by what other parents would think. They wouldn’t let their children come here for a playdate; I can tell you that right now.”
Celia knew how to build him up; she also knew how to tear him down.
“Don’t overreact,” he said.
“You are an idiot.”
“Don’t shout at me.”
“I’m barely raising my voice.”
“It will all blow over,” he said hopefully.
“She’s probably already told the school principal. I would. And if the school knows something illegal happened on their campus, they have an obligation to report it to the police.”
“Do you think she has?”
“How would I know?” Her angry flush made her even more beautiful.
“I’m really sorry, Celia. We made a mistake, a bad choice, and it’s not going to happen again.” He stepped closer, reaching out for her hand.
She moved her hand away from his and gave him a withering look. “You’re as thick as mud if you think there won’t be a consequence for what you and Cliff did.”
She handed him the brush. He watched her walk her horse out of the stables and across to the paddock. The mare tried to toss her head and sidestep at the gate. Celia led her with a firm grip.
* * *
She uttered only necessities to him for the rest of the day. He retreated to the hothouse, where tending to his orchids assuaged him somewhat. A new blue orchid’s tessellated petals reminded him of pieces of sky growing on a mossy trunk in alpine treetops; a brown orchid had an exotic chocolate-and-vanilla scent. Alone with the fragrant, delicate flowers, there was no world outside the hothouse door.
At dinner Celia spoke to the girls only, skillfully excluding him from the conversation in such a subtle way he almost thought he was imagining it. When the meal ended, he told her he needed to visit a client urgently.
“On a Sunday evening?”
“It’s hard for some of my clients to see me during the week, dear.”
He turned on the car radio and drove away from town, past the padlocked gate of the timber mill and the abattoir. Jack felt like he was the only one unsurprised when the government reneged on their promise to subsidize these facilities. He wished he’d been wrong—the closure of the abattoir and the mill had made Vanishing Falls a ripe market for drug dealers. A secret study of sewage, via water samples in wastewater treatment plants, showed the rain forest region was one of the areas with the highest drug use in Tasmania. It wasn’t just methamphetamine. OxyContin, or hillbilly heroin, also presented at high levels. Cliff had mentioned that people from every walk of life were getting hooked, many of them decent, hardworking, good folk. Jack was grateful his daughters were still too young.
It was raining heavily, and he was mindful of the deep ditches either side of the road. This was old farming land and the ditches had been dug when the road was cut for a horse and cart. They saved the crops from ruin when the river flooded, but it was not uncommon to see a vehicle upended in one. If that happened to him, it would be difficult to explain to his wife the reason for his being this far up the valley. No one who lived out here could afford his legal advice.
Twenty kilometers from the town was the Cutting, the one road that linked Vanishing Falls with the outside world. Just before the Cutting was a sign so faded the destination seemed like a whisper: Marsh End.
He turned onto a gravel road. There used to be two farmhouses along here but six months ago one had burned to the ground. There were rumors of an explosion, but the police had never been able to make an arrest. Everyone was glad the man and two children sleeping inside had managed to escape. The man refused the usual offers of help and went away without telling the school that the children had left town for good. Jack was glad that he had not been visiting the second farmhouse when the fire began.
A barbed-wire fence contained a vast paddock of twisted scrap metal. Vehicles were piled two or three high—old cars or those that had jackknifed on the black ice. Concealed by the junk was the farmhouse. As he drove up the lane toward it, he told himself that today was the last time.
* * *
Gatenby’s Poultry Farm
On the way home from the junkyard Jack visited Cliff. He knew Cliff would be in the office, an old timber shed with a rusted red tin roof that once provided accommodations for apple pickers. It was out near the chicken sheds, but Jack stopped by at the back door of the main house to say hello to Kim.
She answered the door wearing two bulky pullovers. In the lounge room, Cliff’s three gangly sons sat watching television, all wrapped in blankets. The fire was not lit.
“How is he?” Jack asked.
“You know.”
She gave a tired smile. Her eyes darted to the outbuilding behind him.
In the house, the boys laughed. You didn’t often hear them laugh like that. Celia had once remarked on how well behaved the Gatenby boys were compared to the Lilys’ chattering, impulsive girls. Jack knew the boys’ subdued behavior indicated something about Cliff’s nature. He pushed the thought out of his head as he crossed the yard toward the office. It was not his business.