He drives toward the long flat stretch of beach, rolling down his window to feel the kick of the southerly wind, and pulls over to watch the surf. It’s slate blue and churny, there’s some swell at the north end and a few board riders braving the dusk for it. There’s the salty seaweed smell he’ll never grow tired of and the stretch of promenade speckled with dogwalkers and teenagers reluctant to go home. The boxy pink North Maroubra surf club building beside the showers and picnic tables, some seagulls still scavenging in ghostly flocks. Beside the curb where they’ve pulled up, someone’s left their Macca’s rubbish, crushed cups and grease-spotted bags. Lined up on the footpath are empty bottles of VB, Tooheys New, silver blue cans of UDL. Marnie ducks her head like she always does these days, he can feel her fear like you feel a dog’s. She takes after her mum, who was never keen on the beach.
“It’s hard for a big lady,” Em used to say, “to feel comfortable parading around in next to nothing in broad daylight.”
Marnie’s built like Em, solid and only more so in the past two years. Her school uniforms they buy at Kmart because the sizes run too small at the school uniform shop. Her other clothes they buy at the Vinnie’s on Anzac Parade, and Marnie won’t even try them on, just finds the biggest-size jeans or jacket, shapeless dress, and passes them to him to take to the white-haired lady with shaky hands at the register.
“Can we have KFC for dinner?” she mumbles now, looking at the phone in her lap. It’s the first sentence she’s spoken all afternoon.
“Alright,” he agrees, on a whim. “Just this once.” It’s worth it for the quick moment she glances at him, the almost smile, before turning back to the shiny surface of her phone.
As he drives away from the beach and the breeze, up Maroubra Road into the tangle of ugly shops around the Junction, he promises himself that tomorrow he’ll start talking to her about eating healthy, about losing some weight. He’ll buy the fruit and veg he keeps meaning to buy from that nice Indian couple at the South Maroubra shops instead of the frozen dinners from Woollies they started buying when Em got sick.
They finish the bucket of lukewarm chicken in front of the six o’clock news. There is a woman in Quaker’s Hill who abandoned her baby the night before in a storm-water drain. The bub was found by a cyclist who heard the cries riding past, and went to investigate. The anchor — serious-faced — says the mother turned herself in and was charged with attempted murder. Marnie’s been looking at the screen in her lap instead of the telly but the taps on her phone slow like the drops at the tail end of a rainstorm.
“What a tragedy,” Alf says, shaking his head. “A horrible thing to do.”
Marnie gets up and leaves, not saying anything, shutting the door to her room. What’s gotten into her? he wonders. Em would have agreed, might even have cried the way she did when they had stuff on the news about abandoned children or babies who’d been hurt. There’s still a row of photographs of the charity kids Em sponsored on the windowsill, dark-skinned children with tangled hair and faded T-shirts, even though they stopped paying the monthly charity bills when he lost his job.
Tomorrow, when Marnie’s at school, he’ll tidy up, throw some of those old faded photos away. Then he’ll scrape back the peeling paint on the doghouse, sand it, and give it a fresh coat. White, maybe. With blue trim. He still has a tin of blue paint which Marnie chose for her room — she must have been nine or ten. It had been pink before that and Marnie decided one day she hated pink. “It’s what they do,” Em had said, smiling as she shook her head. “Turn against their parents.” But it was different, then. Alf knew Em was proud that Marnie was making up her own mind about things. Figuring out what she liked, rather than what was expected of her.
That night he goes to sleep thinking about Marnie when she was born, her new-baby smell, the creases in her legs which Em would powder so they didn’t get red in the heat. Em did everything, nearly everything — that was part of the problem. Maybe if she’d let him help out a little he wouldn’t be so lost now that she’s gone.
It’s odd because he hears the sirens that morning — a week later — but doesn’t think twice about it. He’s been outside working on the starter motor; it’s a still day, hot, and he’s planning a swim in the afternoon, thinking of the surf crashing over him and cooling his skin. The locusts are screeching beyond the fence in the rifle range and the crows are perched on the power lines, their caws punctuating songs from the oldies station on the radio, the distant thrum of the surf. But he ends up getting lost in the work, that feeling when you’re so caught up in what you’re doing that suddenly it’s dark and you don’t know where the day has gone. He’s swum after dark once or twice, but to tell the truth, it scares him. The thought of sharks lurking in the murky dark water, of getting caught in a rip with no one to see you go. Alf loves the beach but he doesn’t know it, he’s come to it late in life and it’s like a language he’ll never be fluent in, no matter how hard he tries. He imagined once that Marnie would know, growing up on the doorstep and all, but he was wrong. Turns out she’s inherited her parents’ fear.
It isn’t until the news that night that he hears what the sirens were all about. They found a newborn buried in the South Maroubra dunes, just fifty meters from the South Maroubra surf club, scrub on both sides. A little corpse in a shallow grave. It’s awful, it is. Some nippers found it during races on the beach. They’d not made the final round and were digging while they waited for the faster kids to finish running. Little fellas, not older than six or seven. Their parents thought it must be something else — a big fish, maybe, an old doll — but the kids were sure of it. Then it was police up and down the beach, the south end taped off, autopsy kits beneath a police tent underneath the beating sun. There’s a press conference with the police superintendent, who tells a pack of journos that homicide detectives are helping local police with their investigations.
Marnie is in her room and he knocks on the door, “C’mere, love, have a look at this,” but he just hears some muffled words and then a sharp — “I’m on the phone!”
She’s been off sick all week, gastro, running back and forth to the loo. The only time she’s been out was to go to the chemist and Alf didn’t realize she was gone until she came home, wearing a big puffer jacket in spite of the heat, a white paper bag clutched under her arm. He got upset, saying she ought to have let him go for her, but she just said, “It’s embarrassing, Dad,” and slammed the door to her room. She hasn’t been eating, so he’s scavenged around: biscuits and cheese, frozen pizza. They’re interviewing the nippers’ parents now on the telly. Parents who during normal Sunday mornings have no greater dilemma than what coffee to order and whether or not they’ll jump in the surf themselves.
“Who could do this?” the mum on telly says, her eyes hidden behind those big round sunglasses all the young women now wear. “What kind of woman would do this to her baby?”
Her voice breaks in the way that reporters love, and they flick back to the studio, where the regular anchor is sitting at the desk with his most serious expression, shaking his head. “And now over to Dan for the weather.”
“Awful,” Alf mutters, “just down the road.” He gets up to grab a beer from the fridge. The fruit and veg he bought at the beginning of the week are wilting in the crisper. There is a dark shape in the doorway at the edge of his vision, gone before he can turn toward it.
“Marnie?” he calls. Now the soft click of her shutting the door to her room. It’s no good. She didn’t used to hide in her room all the time. Even if she is sick, she must need something. He knocks at the door.