Scobie Sutton, his wife Beth and his daughter Roslyn joined the other hundred or so adults and kids in filing out of the school hall at eight o’clock and on to the basketball courts. ‘Just for ten or fifteen minutes,’ the school principal said. ‘It’s not every day the moon turns red.’
They stood there, looking up. Wispy cloud above, atmospheric streaks, and there was a partial moon above them, blurred, a kind of wine colour. Some enterprising types tried to photograph the effect, the kids began to run around and there was an air of giddiness. Roslyn had already played her piano solo and sung ‘Zulu Warrior’ with her little choir, and ‘Smoke on the Water’ had been mangled-twice-so Scobie was feeling pretty good, his wife’s oddness temporarily forgotten. Until he looked down at her and saw that she was bunching the neck of her blouse in one hand and muttering some kind of incantation, as though encouraged in further madness by the moon.
Ellen Destry looked at the moon shadows from Hal’s kitchen window. It was eight-thirty and she was warm and pink from her bath, wrapped up in pyjamas and thick socks. Then a peacock sounded its unearthly cry from the farm on the other side of the hill and the light painting the yard was sufficiently altered to draw her out onto the lawn. She craned her neck, but couldn’t see what the fuss was about, and went back inside to zap a lean beef casserole in the microwave.
She was pouring herself a glass of Elan red when the kitchen phone rang.
‘Destry,’ she said.
‘It’s only me.’
‘I left a message-’
‘I got it. I could be late: a woman’s missing.’
Ellen closed her eyes. ‘Young? I mean, a schoolie?’ She’d have to take charge if it was a schoolie.
‘No.’
Ellen said, ‘Do you want me to come in?’ She did and didn’t want to.
‘No, I’ll be fine. Don’t wait up.’
But she would, and they both knew it. She replaced the handset, removed the casserole and ate it with the wine in front of the TV, some crap on one of the commercial channels. It was during an ad, her attention wandering, that she began to take stock of the sitting room. She switched off the TV and stood on the worn rug between the armchairs and wondered what, exactly, bothered her about it.
The dimensions were pleasing. The room was long, broad, with a high ceiling and a large window looking out onto a few shrubs and a paling fence. Bookshelves took up the end wall, with one shelf for CDs. Then, conscious that she was living a clichй, she began to note the things she itched to change. More colour, for a start: paint the walls, brighter cushions, a new rug. Vases of flowers every day. New curtains. A few-
The phone rang again.
‘Destry.’
A woman chirruped, ‘Is that Mrs Challis?’
Ellen went very still, very tight. ‘No, it is not.’
‘Can I speak to her, please?’
‘What makes you think there’s a Mrs Challis?’
‘Er, this is Mr Challis’s number.’
‘So if a woman answers she must be Mrs Challis?’
There was a long pause, freighted with doubt and confusion. Ellen said sweetly, ‘Now, as you know, we’re almost ten years into the twenty-first century: have you ever heard of a man and a woman with different last names living together, by any faint chance?’
The woman sounded unsure. ‘Ye-es.’
‘All right, how about this: have you ever heard of a woman marrying a man and keeping her own last name? Think carefully, now.’
The voice came in a rush, almost in tears, so that Ellen felt mean. ‘This is a courtesy call from Telstra, asking clients if they’re satisfied with their current plans. If I could speak to the man or the lady of the house…’
Ellen slammed the phone down. Night was settling around the house and the light was very queer. She finished her glass of red and poured another.
Pam Murphy stood on a patch of cropped lawn between the coin barbecues and the foreshore trees, watching the moon turn red in silent stages as the earth glided between it and the sun. She’d been expecting a blood red, but it was no red that she could name. It was a chocolaty red, a rusty red, a bruised red with touches of old blood, rendered mistily by thin, vapoury clouds high in the atmosphere. Like everyone around her, she stood transfixed. All human activity except the need to congregate and worship was suspended for an hour or so. If she’d been expecting the schoolies to hallucinate, turn strange, self-destructive or violent, she was mistaken. The red moon mellowed them. They swayed to inner choruses and seemed inclined to kiss and hug each other.
As she gazed, a little dreamy, hard, slim arms slid around her. A pair of dry lips tugged briefly on her ear lobe. The sensation was there and gone before she’d quite registered it, leaving a tingle somewhere inside her.
She whirled around. ‘That could be considered harassment, constable.’
‘Sorry, got caught up in the moment,’ Andy Cree said.
He gave her a look. She’d seen the same look on the boys who’d snatched a kiss and a feel at high school socials and she’d seen it on young offenders, those who had good looks, nerve and invincibility on their side. She was fighting down a grin, trying to stop her body responding to the force-field of his, when she noticed John Tankard standing nearby, looking daggers at them. She sighed. They had a job to do. ‘Focus, constable,’ she said, stepping back.
Andy snapped a salute at her. ‘Aye, aye, ma’am.’
‘You know the drill: mingle.’
She watched Cree fade into the queer half-light, past the skateboard ramps and the barbecues toward the strip of half-a-dozen motels and bed-and-breakfast joints. Meanwhile Tank had wandered off toward the tents, where some of the kids were clustered around a campfire with blankets and guitars. They flickered in and out of the firelight and snatches of Dylan and Baez drifted toward her. Dylan and Baez. Even I’m too young for Dylan and Baez, she thought.
Otherwise there seemed to be no purposeful movement anywhere, only a sense of dreaminess. Waterloo was spread beneath the gentle moon and so far there hadn’t been a single pub brawl, drag race or outbreak of tears.
Pam took High Street first, going up as far as Blockbuster Video and the Thai restaurant, and back down to the foreshore reserve. She saw schoolies congregating outside the pubs and noodle and pizza outlets, but she also saw plenty of locals and their kids. Everyone was blissed out and so she developed a sense of waiting for things to go wrong. Midnight would come and the booze and drugs would run out and the buzz wear off, and disappointments and grievances would set in. She shouldn’t be alone then. The three of them would need to roam as a unit and watch each other’s backs.
Time drifted and Pam drifted. She wanted to feel alert but the night air was mild, subtly perfumed-the gardens in bloom; the ozone tang of the sea; even the dope the kids were smoking-and full of benign fellow-feeling.
Half hoping that she’d encounter Andy Cree, she drifted to where it was darkest, the rocks and the occasional scoops of sandy beach between the parkland and the mangroves. She picked her way left, toward the refinery, and then right, toward the next town, Penzance Beach, but not intending to walk anywhere near as far as that. Here and there she found lovers embracing, solitary dreamers, small huddles of murmuring schoolies, and all around her there was the suck and surge of the black water, the scrape of fabric against skin and soft moans, sighs and caught breaths. None of it was her business.
Then she clambered over a breakwater, attracted by sounds of distress. In the shredded moonlight she saw the oily mud and spindly lines of a mangrove pocket, and a kid floundering there, sunk to his shins. She saw him retch violently, waver upright, wipe his chin, pitch over at the waist again. He was almost naked, wearing only red scraps over his groin, as though his underpants had become skewed as he struggled against the mud and his impulse to retch.
Pam climbed down the slick rocks and reached the spongy mud. The moon above her was no longer red but a high, misty white orb that slipped in and out of scrappy clouds. Tricky light, but Pam saw, as she got closer, that the boy was naked. It wasn’t cotton fabric on and around his groin but something like paint or lipstick, applied in thick, bold stripes.
‘The bitch poisoned me,’ Josh Brownlee said wretchedly.