He leans back, frowning.
“Okay, I lied. Itwas‘phone.’ ”
He laughs and I feel like I’ve won something. Satisfied, I rest my elbow on the windowsill. “Chris?”
He gives me a wary look. “Yes?”
“If you wanna hear another fish joke—” I pause for effect. “—just let Minnow.”
He sighs, reaches across for the door handle, pretends to open it. “Get the hell out.”
—
Her name is Kat, andher house is sad as hell. Single-story, crammed into a block so small, its roof nudges the neighbors’. Two concrete pelican statues stand sadly at the front doors like forgottensentries. One is missing half its beak, the other mottled with mold. Their eyes are beady black and desperately sad.
“Ready?” Chris asks, popping a marble-like mint into his mouth before offering one to me. I shake my head. He smooths his brick-colored hair with the flat of his palm. He’s clean-shaven, skin rubbed raw, and despite this three-hour drive to Bendigo, his work shirt looks like it was ironed five minutes ago. When he raises his fist to knock, he rustles like a bag of chips.
I glance down at my navy jeans and the black cotton sleeves loose around my wrists, the angler fish tattoo just peeking through. I pull the cuff down, try to stuff it under, but it makes things worse. Now all you can see are fanglike teeth. Not a good look when you’re interviewing the grieving relative of a shark mauling victim.
I blow-dried my hair before I left. When I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror, Minnow stared back. I flicked the light off, feeling like a big part of me that had been stolen had finally been returned.
The woman who opens the door has thinly plucked eyebrows and a cardigan that smells like wet cat food. She’s mid-seventies with a vacant look on her face, and she holds the screen door open with her shoulder. “Yes?”
Chris inches in front of me. “Hi there, I’m Chris Cooper from theDaily.” She stares blankly, and he adds, “The newspaper. We’re working on a story about Hannah,” he continues calmly. “Are you—”
“Has there been an update?”
I’m wiping the heel of my sneaker on her welcome mat when I realize what an odd question that is.
How could there be an update? Hannah was mauled to death twenty-five years ago. They found chunks of her flesh, her torn wet suit with a tooth stuck in it. Great white shark. Big one, too. Case closed.
Has there been an update?
She glances over her shoulder. “The house is a mess,” she mumbles, shuffling sideways to let us in. I thank her, stepping over thewelcome mat.Dogs Welcome, People Tolerated,paw prints where theO’s should be.
I like her already.
“I need one of those.” I gesture to the mat, and she gives me a distracted smile, flattening herself against the foyer wall to let Chrisin.
It’s dark in here. It also smells. Chris pales at the dishes piled up in the sink and benches, slides his hands into his pockets, rustling as he does it. We step around four dog bowls overflowing with kibble and what looks like vomity water. A slate-gray cat chews silently, ignoring us. Dishcloths hang limply from a clothes drying rack in the corner. Perched atop is a long-haired white cat with magnificent green eyes. It flicks its tail as Chris hurries past.
I nod at it. “What’s its name?”
She gives it an absent glance, shrugs. “Doesn’t have one.”
We vanish down a dark hallway, as if swallowed by a Nothingland. I know houses like this. All Nothinglands are the same. Soulless. Silent. Maddeningly so. Where cats don’t have names and pelican statues are left to rot in the sun. Where the grieved sit limply on their sagging couches, waiting for nothing. I lived here, too, after my mum left. Died.
A sting of sympathy pierces my rib cage.
An elderly Jack Russell snores on an L-shaped couch in the lounge room. Crossword magazines are dumped on the coffee table next to half-empty mugs bubbling with blue mold.
But it’s the knickknacks I can’t stop staring at. There’s a shitload of them. Hundreds even, lining the windowsills, crammed into two display cabinets. They don’t look like collectibles. They look like the kind that cost fifty cents at the op shop. And yet, someone has taken great care to display them.
Kat catches me staring. “Hannah’s,” she mumbles, picking up a royal-blue robin and cradling it gently in her palm. “Never could stand them meself.”
I nod at the windowsill where a pelican sits, mouth open wide like he’s waiting for a fish to be thrown in. “Reminds me of the ones at the door.”
The soulless ones guarding their Nothingland.
