Trusthouse

By Garry Disher

There’s a book about the case, and it mentions me, mentions the Parr children, but treats us as if our importance was marginal. In fact, I was infected with a drowsy kind of badness, that final summer at The Trusthouse, and the Parr children were so heavy, uninventive and susceptible that I baited their hooks for them. You could say I was innocent, but lost it, bored by their greater innocence, and our parents, diverted by the sun, the abductions, the claims of the clairvoyants, had no idea of what was happening to us.

This story is posed in oppositions. One, above all, accounts for what happened: we were rich and the Parrs were not. In those days of inland families coming south to make The Trusthouse their home for six weeks of the summer, the Parrs could only afford ten days. Where we made the hotel crackle with life, the Parrs were like shadows on the walls. Even the manner of our advance on The Trusthouse revealed the disparity between us.

It was a Saturday just before New Year. We sealed the house at 5 a.m. and set out through the station country, pushing south in our dusty car, a barrelling Customline expressly washed but dusty before we reached the first cattle grid. My father drove. He’d say, every December, ‘Just point her south and plant your foot.’ He was a big, vigorous man. The world to him was ordained, agreeable, completely understood, and when he powdered us across the saltbush flats, breaking the backs of black snakes, our place in it seemed secure. We had the confidence of our isolation, our landing strip and radio call-sign, our fifty miles in from the highway. While we swayed against each other, still half-asleep, the dawn kangaroos stiffened in the cropped grass or slipped away into the scrub. My father cursed them, but it was affectionate cursing, background noise, no more than a ritual marking of our boundary before we ventured beyond it.

At the turn-off he braked, did not look, and then we were emerging from the chasing dust, nose-up on the bitumen for Adelaide. Twelve hours—that was our record. There are no towns out there, only nude stone chimneys, mirages, birds stupefied on the wires. We might have been the last, ransacking inhabitants: a mother, a father, a boy and his sisters. I leaned into my open window and watched our shadow on the road’s edge. It ran with and nudged us, yet it was a distortion, the tarpaulin wind-plumped on the roofrack, lumpish on our potent lines. The big engine rumbled. Then the sun climbed and I was lost to dreams.

It was very hot. My mother reached around often and touched Jess’s knee. ‘All right, sweetie?’Jess was five, our afterthought, a receptacle of love. She sat low between Diana and me, her small face sulky and fatigued. ‘Take off her frock, one of you,’ my mother said, ‘and lay her along the seat. Cool her down with this.’ She passed us a damp washcloth.

Diana put her hand behind Jess’s back and pushed her forward. Jess protested, jerking her shoulders and mumbling, inarticulate but persistent in her misery. ‘Lean forward,’ we said. I undid the four buttons down her spine, loosened the bow around her waist, lifted off the dress. For a moment her tiny back was revealed to me, hot and damp, the bones close to the surface, her shoulder-blades like wing buds. I saw that Diana was watching me. Then Jess flopped back against Diana and kicked out at my legs. ‘Shh,’ Diana said, applying the washcloth to the cross cheeks. Jess relaxed and lay back along the seat, her head in Diana’s lap, her feet in mine. Once or twice I drew my hands along her instep, as you might stroke the forefoot of a sleeping cat, but she tossed and fretted. ‘Don’t,’ Diana warned me. The day passed. Jess slept on her stomach, her back, her side. Once I caught her staring at me in mild, hypnotic-languor; I winked, but she grew alert immediately, stiffening her legs ready to strike out.

At the border we reset our watches, which refreshed us in unnameable ways. We rode high, down into a region of silos, sidings and sharefarms, the country of small towns, where the railway children would stare after us. Otherwise there was only the wheat, in populations of leaning bags ranged along the stubble lines or spilled in crescents at the paddock gates where the galahs scratched. Jess, reviving, stood upright, her chin on the seat in front of us. My mother smiled around at her. ‘Better, sweetie?’

We began to sing scraps of songs from Jess’s school-of-the-air broadcasts. Diana and I had grown up with these songs, over countless mornings in a shaded room, supervised by our mother. She was an unlikely advisor and tutor. She would listen with relish to the crackling voices, alert for the agonies, bewilderment and wispiness of the children, the sweetness of the teachers, then nail them to the wall. She wanted us to be sharp and self-respecting, sly and durable. She was preparing us for leaving home, I think. Diana was sixteen that year: she would soon be gone. I was only twelve.

My father swore suddenly. We had swept over a crest and come upon a small, overloaded sedan advancing with threadbare decency along the Adelaide road. He throttled back; we seemed to crawl along. Then the road was clear and he accelerated. We all looked—the Parrs! A man, a woman, and two children of about my age, staring forward, intact, patterned and cautious. We passed, in all our swagger and glory, and it seemed to me that their little sedan faltered and there was estrangement on their faces.

Eleven hours. There were more cars now and bigger towns. Our first traffic light. A paperboy cried out: Second child missing! We subsided, a hard, angular, sun-bleached family in a long, low, muttering American car.

The Gawler bypass, Gepps Cross, Henley Beach Road. ‘Who will be the first to see the sea?’ my mother said, her voice sweet, a sing-song, a sign that she was dangerously bored. ‘Not far now,’ my father said. His hand left the wheel and I heard it on her thigh, a reassurance, maybe a warning.

I saw a seagull on a bus shelter, the summer shops where proprietors took brooms to the tracked-in beach sand, then the clock tower, palm trees, the sea at the end of the tunnelling street. We left it to Jess. She pointed suddenly, darting her arm between my parents. ‘There!’ my mother agreed.

We angled like a feeding beast into the kerb outside The Trusthouse, inches from a blistered, salt-scummed verandah post. An airliner banked above the sea. The wind gusted, throwing grit into our eyes. We stripped the car and swept into The Trusthouse foyer. There were gleeful shouts; we had that effect.

I remember that I idled in the doorway. Men and women were streaming up from the beach, sour and exhausted, holding tight to children who couldn’t see the need for it. This was the fag-end of a Saturday afternoon, when inlanders would arrive in triumph and strange men begin to prowl. A small car crept into the square. I watched it nose fearfully at a space next to the Customline, back away again, try elsewhere.

Satisfied, I went upstairs to my room.

* * * *

The Parr children waited for me. They waited every year. I’d descend the broad staircase, sandals upon my feet, comb tracks in my water-darkened hair, and find them in the evening gloom, prepared to smile or flee. They never did anything, just sat mute and diminished on a massive dimpled sofa, waiting for me to appear. Trevor’s tidy teeth rested on his bottom lip. Lorraine was round-faced, her knees forever opening and closing like bellows, denying the pressure in her bladder. The Parr children wore socks and shiny shoes and an air of longing and helplessness.

Then Lorraine said brightly, ‘Hello, Nick.’

I turned away. ‘Come into the lounge.’

Their shoes clomped behind me across the foyer. As I paused in the cavernous doorway, the Parrs huddled at my heels, stricken by the vast room. They stayed with me, past the armchairs clustered like islands on the limitless floorboards, over the Persian rugs, to the seaward windows. There was a tossing buoy out there, the lights of a liner.

We perched on the windowseat. Before long the country families began to drift into the room. The men and the women stretched their legs and sighed, marking time until the dinner gong sounded. Their voices never quite reached the chandeliers but seemed to hover above the armchairs: Girton, PLC, fifty thousand for the wool clip, what sort of monster would do that? Some children gathered at the baby grand, where Jess and Diana pounded out Chopsticks’ so vigorously the roses trembled in the vases and petals fell, seeking their likenesses in the polished lid.

I said, ‘I’ll order drinks.’

Waitresses were emerging from the wall panels. I liked to watch them lean into the rich air, slapping silver trays against their thighs. ‘Something to drink?’ they’d ask. I liked the way their uniforms frothed black and starchy white about their knees.

Meanwhile Trevor and Lorraine struggled with my suggestion. They looked to their parents, but their parents, smiling tormentedly at mine on the far side of the room, were no help. I could hear my father’s shouting laugh. It seemed to ring the hotel, and it affected my mother, for I saw her tip back her throat and blow a narrow stream of smoke into the air above their heads.

I said to the Parr children: ‘One with all the colours.’

Greed seeped into their faces. They remembered the tall, frost beaded glasses, layered red, yellow and green, topped with crushed ice, a straw buried deep in the oily fluids

‘I’ll pay,’ I said.

I had a pound note in my pocket. There always was money when I needed it, in those days, in that place. Money released me, it released my parents. ‘Don’t wander, and mind who you talk to,’ they’d say absently, poking cash into my pocket, and for six weeks I’d roam the stairs, the endless corridors, the beach, discovering unexpected corners, bathrooms, servants’ quarters, courtyards, hollows in the dunes. It was a world inhabited by children. No-one bothered us. No-one noticed us. No-one wanted us.

I signalled to a waitress, endured My, haven’t you grown! and gave our order.

Then I began to spin stories for the Parr children. That was the beginning of everything. I did it for their greed, their avid faces, their squirming, slack-jawed torment. I could see their awful need. They had been good all year, dreaming of badness, and now I was making it real and possible for them.

* * * *

‘Flip it,’ I said.

Lorraine was breathing audibly. Heat rose from her body. Her eyes were fevered, her face provoked and insatiate, drawn to the aching stalk between her brother’s legs.

I crouched with her. ‘Flip it.’

As though testing for a current, she reached out her plump arm, touched, snatched her arm back into the comfort of her bare stomach again. But she’d scarcely made contact. In Trevor there was only the pump pump of the blood in him. Frustrated, he tapped down hard on himself. ‘Like this.’ He seemed to snap back in the space of an eye blink. ‘See?’

Then in a puddle of clothing in a forgotten room on the third floor, Lorraine would pose for us. She bowed her knees, bent her head forward to look, as we squatted shoulder to shoulder at her feet. She was rounded, creased. In the skin around her waist and thighs I could see the cruel red impression of her pants elastic.

We did that. I sensed that there was more. I don’t know what the Parrs thought. They were intoxicated and it seemed to be enough for them.

When I grew bored of them I’d slip away. They’d find me again, inevitably, expressing dependence, submission, emotional captivity, but not before I’d had time to scout about and see the things I wanted to see.

I saw my parents hold court on the street-level balcony. They seemed to fill the space, to command the attention of the brown-skinned husbands and wives who drowsed around wrought-iron tables crammed with iced drinks, lipsticked cigarettes, magazines fingerprinted with tanning oils. My parents were risky, arbitrary, careless, a little callous. They made people laugh. They made people want them. The adult Parrs were there somewhere, in a paralysis of gentility.

Once I followed them all to the beach. If the balcony was full of promise, here was a chance to express it. They were very brown and agile in the water. The water frothed and seethed around them. They were a different race from the shoulder-strapped and jacketed people who sawed with steak knives in The Trusthouse dining loom I saw my mother and Mrs Parr relieve Mr Parr of his bathing suit in the shallows.

I saw Diana. She took Jess to swimming lessons, pushed Jess on the swings, turned Jess’s sandy feet under the tap on the seawall. She liked to stretch out on a red towel, cocking her hip to get comfortable, hooking a linger inside some chafing strap or band, while Jess dug moats in the tidal sand nearby and youths paraded. She was aware of their smiles, their supple blood. Or back in The Trusthouse she’d straddle the edge of the bed and paint her toenails while Jess slept on the next bed and I watched quietly in the shuttered light. She would murmur to me from behind a blinding curtain of corn-gold hair, her mouth muffled against her long, drawn-up bare leg.

* * * *

It was at about this time that I first saw the stranger.

My memory of seeing him has the hazy configuration of a dream. I am alone. Bored with the limited needs and wants of the Parrs, I have escaped The Trusthouse and ventured into the backstreets. The sun is high, silent, burning from windshields, from chrome, beating off brick walls, melting the tarry streets. Nothing can be seen clearly in air as hot as that. The man on the corner seems to be smouldering at the edges. I don’t know if he has a sad or a hateful face, only that he doesn’t smile, is still and watchful, watching me pass by on the other side. He starts after me. I turn around twice to confirm that. This is a power better than any power I have over the Parrs. I can scarcely breathe. Then when I turn two more corners and stop, watching for him down a long, heat-blurred street, and he doesn’t come, I retrace my steps, my heart hammering at each corner and recessed doorway, back to where he had first materialised—but the streets are silent and empty.

I went back the next day. He was there. He followed me. He disappeared again.

The power I felt didn’t last. I went back twice more at the same time, knowing he’d be waiting for me—but then, he knew I’d come. I deliberately didn’t speak, didn’t pass on his side of the street—but he didn’t encourage it. Also, the sun was always blinding; I couldn’t read him. And I couldn’t help but turn to see that he was following me. I had to know. To that extent he controlled me. He always was there behind me, and his pace was unhurried, controlled, incurious.

So, next time I went early, to catch him unprepared. He wasn’t there. I tried again later. He merely watched me pass, then started after me. He hadn’t been anxious at all. If there was an expression on his face, it was knowing and elusive. And he always vanished in some alley or through some door.

I wanted a miserable declaration from him. I wanted to see guilt, misgiving, desire. Anything, even the Sunday papers’ brand of child-snatching evil, would have been better than this remoteness and inaccessibility.

I wanted him to crack.

* * * *

The next day, Diana handed Jess into my care. It was the day the authorities drained the boat basin.

She was there with Jess, I with the Parrs, and we were among the hundreds gathered at the rail to watch a line of policemen sweep up and back, treading high in the muddy residue. We waited, scarcely moving. I remember the absolute silence. Now and then a young cadet stopped, bent down, tugged something free, but it was always an inner tube, a fruit tin. Then one man brought up a beer bottle, someone called from the seawall: ‘No drinking on the job,’ and the spell was broken.

I turned away. They wouldn’t find anything. It was a page one story, they’d been digging and combing the seafront for days, but they hadn’t found even a sandshoe or a cotton singlet.

Besides, I was more interested in Diana. Someone was with her and I could sense her heartbeat. He lived at The Trusthouse, the son of the Italian owner, dark and always smiling. I wanted to see what would develop. I wanted to watch the change in her, and so I said yes when she started to push Jess on to me each morning, saying she had things to do.

* * * *

Not that the Parrs noticed anything. One night Diana and her fellow took us to a western double at a drive-in. We went in the glossy Jaguar that always stood in The Trusthouse’s private courtyard, the Parrs and I in the back seat, Jess in front with Robert and Diana. After he had parked the car, Robert hooked the tinny speaker to his window, where it crackled like a badly tuned radio, and we settled back to watch. The screen glowed dully. Slides flipped by, advertising local funeral parlours and grocers. No-one looked twice at the two likenesses up there, the words Have you seen these children? Blazing beneath them. Everyone knew those faces from the newspapers, the bus-shelter posters.

Then the features started and a queer kind of darkness settled over everything. Now and then a nearby car heaved once on its springs or I heard sudden, cut-short cries. A bottle rolled slowly and stopped. There were the red eyes of cigarettes all around me. I took all of this in. The Parrs sat open-mouthed before the images on the screen, Jess fell asleep, but I took in the night sounds and the soft, minute, almost soundless motions of Diana in thrall on the front seat.

* * * *

The days passed. Soon the Parrs would be gone. I was pleased; they’d grown tiresome.

‘What if she tel’s on us?’

I looked at Jess. ‘She won’t tell.’

This time we were in my room. Jess and I had already stripped the clothes from our bodies, Jess tossing her shorts and shirt away with a kind of victorious expansion. Now she was treating my bed like a trampoline. I laughed. I liked her spirit. It was a family spirit and the leaden Parrs didn’t have it.

Trevor undid a button. Lorraine turned her back. I heard the meek scrape of fabric on skin. I waited patiently. It didn’t take long. The doubts and modesty disappeared and the Parrs were bloated and heavy lidded again.

Jess bounded about on the edge of things, incurious after a few minutes. She sang and talked to herself. But I had sneaked two cigarettes from our mother’s bag and she stood still long enough for me to plug one into her mouth, grin at her and tell her to puff. She was like a little rubbery creature arrested in movement, her eyes wide in concentration, gulping in the smoke.

Trevor snatched it from her mouth. ‘Don’t waste it on a kid.’

I’d been noticing this thuggish kind of confidence in the Parrs. I didn’t like it. It was unappealing and it assumed a levelling. By the time we’d finished and made our way down the staircase for lunch, I knew how I would shake the Parrs again.

* * * *

‘Not allowed.’

This expression sprang automatically from the damp mouths of Trevor and Lorraine Parr. They seemed to say it as one word, a gobbled sound meaning ‘no’, and I believe it was the first expression they had ever learnt.

I pointed out that they’d been doing a number of things that were not allowed. ‘We’ll be three against one,’ I said. We’ll just see what he does.’

I talked long and hard that afternoon. I gave them ten shillings each, I made dizzy promises, until my plan seemed less perilous, assuming a shape that would fit the itch they felt.

‘Just walk past him?’

‘And see what he does,’ I said.

They looked at Jess. ‘What about her?’

‘Wait here.’

I took Jess by the hand and we began the long journey down through the slumbering corridors of The Trusthouse. It was home and we were made to feel welcome in it. The brass and the wood panels gleamed, the air was scented with wax, cables snickered quietly in the liftwell. Mr Delgado bowed to us; wide smiles split open the faces of the maids.

On the balcony they were dozing with trays of drinks, newspapers and oily paperbacks. My father had propped the hotel’s mantel radio on the dining-room windowsill. The Third Test had started; the parents of The Trusthouse children wouldn’t be budging until the last ball of the day. My mother saw us, threw open her arms, clasped Jess to her in an extravagant display of love—extravagant to the glum Parrs at the next table, not to me. ‘I’ll be back soon,’ I said.

Five minutes later I had Trevor and Lorraine with me against a grimy brick backstreet wall. ‘There,’ I said.

They peered around my shoulders at the stranger. They giggled, partly because they were apprehensive, but mostly because the stranger I had planted in their minds was not the stranger who had been playing some elusive game with me. After all, I didn’t want them to be scared before we’d begun. The stranger I had created for them was untidy, a little grubby, a half-mad muttering man who exposed himself and whom they could safely sneer at. I wanted the truth when it hit them to rattle their teeth.

We set out along the footpath, enveloped in heat that had been stored for days in the bricks. Once or twice the Parrs let out a snuffling laugh. We drew adjacent to the man. The sun was in our eyes; all we could see of him was a dark outline on the opposite side of the narrow street. Then we were past him. I could hear our footsteps and the excited breathing of the Parrs, nothing else. I don’t know what we looked like—a round-chinned, red-faced girl, two thin knobbly-kneed boys with short, decent hair?

Anyway, the man began to follow us and I told the Parrs to look. They turned, saw the implacable shape pacing us, and immediately came undone. One of them squealed, infecting the other, and they ran squealing and jingling down the street.

Disgusted, I ran after them.

* * * *

I thought at the time that we must have seemed too stupid to bother with, for the man wasn’t there the next day, or the next. In fact, it was the Parrs’ last day at The Trusthouse before we saw him again.

I remember that we were idling in the dunes near the breakwater. I couldn’t be bothered with the Parrs by that stage but they continued to find me scheming and foreign and they would not give me up. Jess was with me, so I couldn’t slip away from them.

We were in a windless hollow. The sand was gritty, riddled with shell chips and desiccated seaweed, but it was better there than on the shoreline itself where the wind had uprooted umbrellas and driven sand like needles into our eyes and against our arms and legs. Cloud shadows chased over us. Now and then both Parrs looked reproachfully at me, as if waiting for me to say something—that I would miss them, perhaps; that I looked forward to next year. On Lorraine’s face was the awful bloat and pucker of a face close to tears. But I had nothing to say to them; I had stopped taking them to the third floor; I simply wanted them to go home.

The reprieve came when Trevor said, ‘What’s he want?’

He was frowning at the seawall behind my back. Thinking it would be his father, I turned without interest or curiosity and looked straight into the eyes of the man from the backstreets. This time there was no transfiguring sun behind him, no air of reserve and stealth. Instead, he hadn’t shaved, he hadn’t washed, he was missing buttons and half his wits. I could see nicotine on his forefinger when he beckoned to us, and I could see the privation in his eyes. He wanted us badly. He opened and closed his mouth once in a kind of hunger.

The man seemed to restore the Parr children. They grew crafty and aspirant, leaning toward me to whisper, ‘Let’s follow him.’

I remember that my attention was sharp and absolute from that moment. I had made the man crack, now I wanted to see the true shape of his decline, and I was not going to let the Parrs take control. I stood up and I led the way to the seawall steps.

The stranger was half a block ahead of us on the esplanade. We had to hurry. We didn’t want to lose him. The jetty, the kiosks, the beachfront shops were thronging with people who had been driven up from the beach by the wind. We dodged through knots of them, bumping their heavy hips, and we heard their futile shouts, but you could not stop us.

The man was waiting at his corner. Before we quite reached him he was on the move again, leading us into a region of fetid lanes. Drains ran down the centres of them. Thin cats with weeping eyes crouched low to the ground as we passed. A woman slept on a cement step and on the other side of an alley fence I heard the slash of heavy urination in a lavatory bowl.

It was no place for Jess. The man was waiting at a wooden gate, I had him where I wanted him, but this was no place for Jess. I began to look back over my shoulder, searching for her.

Trevor passed me first, exultant, knowing that he would beat me now.

Then Lorraine.

Then I was alone there, and I remained alone, and it made my heart stop.

* * * *

What’s not clear is whether or not the man would have done more than simply show his grubby photographs. Apparently the Parrs got nervous when I failed to appear. At the inquest they said his room smelt. He made their skin crawl. They couldn’t make sense of the photographs.

But it is clear that he didn’t take Jess. We were his alibi. No-one knows who took her. I remember the clamp of fear I felt, my useless, frenzied search of the dazed streets. She was the third. No-one found her, just as no-one found the first two—or the fourth, eighteen months later. All this happened thirty years ago. That there has been no trace is the hard part. There have been other incidents—this wide, slow, principled city has an underbelly—but there was always evidence: the drowned man in the river, a skin-stripped torso, the slit throats of the creatures in the zoo. But we have nothing, which means we can’t put Jess to rest. We tried a Dutch clairvoyant, just as the first family did. He said he could see a garage floor. Once we got a letter, but it was a hoax.