Cara is Missing Read online

  One of the problems was the aggressive weeds that grew in the river valley. They spread like wildfire but Emily refused to use chemicals to check their growth, and so she and Karl – and me, when she badgered me into submission – would spend hours on hands and knees pulling dockweed and the local cobweed until our hands were cut and chafed. I tried to convince her to enlist more weed-pullers but on the few occasions when she did get a legion of schoolkids in to help, she spent more time shouting at them to stop them from doing damage than she did working. It was clear that blending into our new community wasn’t going to go any easier if she alienated every teenager in the county and so it came down to Emily and Karl to control the weeds.

  That was until she read a story about a vineyard in South Africa that had a flock of miniature sheep to graze the weeds in the drills between the vines. The babydolls were only a foot and a half tall, so the producer had cut away the low-hanging branches of the vines and the little sheep munched away happily at the lush weeds but couldn’t reach the vines to eat the grapes. Emily must have called nearly every sheep farmer in the state to see if they had bred or could breed the babydolls and finally, after weeks of searching, she found a farmer two hundred kilometres north of Perth who had exactly what she was looking for. She wanted to buy a whole flock, of course, but I convinced her eventually that her modest acreage probably needed no more than three or four and, sure, couldn’t we always come back for more if we needed them?

  Nathan, the handyman from town who seemed able to fix every problem that we had with the house, was commissioned to put up the fencing that would keep the sheep from straying and keep wild dogs at bay. Nathan had been the go-to man for every little drama that befell us in those early days, from leaking pipes and creaking shutters to full-blown electrical meltdowns. Estelle, it turned out, had been less than generous with the truth and Nathan knew his way around the place like a man who’d been there too often before. I grew to recognise the wry smile where he uncovered a problem that he’d only been allowed to patch in the past and the old lady’s parsimony – or, more to the point, her son’s unwillingness to pay for any proper repairs to her house – came back to bite us more than once. But there was little to do except chalk it all down to the perils that go with buying an old place. Nathan put up fencing that would corral and protect the sheep without blocking our view, and we waited for the babydolls to arrive.

  Emily had made each of them a collar with a little bell – pink for the girls and blue for the boys – and once the driver had led them from the truck and down to the vineyard, she ceremonially fitted the collars and welcomed them home. The little sheep were surprisingly tolerant of the attention; they seemed to quite enjoy it and appeared to warm to Emily straight away. But it wasn’t all plain sailing – those first couple of nights were the worst. The sheep’s incessant bleating sounded so like a baby’s cry that Emily got up every hour on the hour to go outside and check them, until eventually she just got dressed and sat on the stoop singing them a lullaby. I’m not kidding – she actually sang them a lullaby until the four little sheep wandered over cautiously to the fence and stood, staring at her, in silence.

  “I thought you could maybe use one of these,” I said, stepping out onto the stoop with two steaming mugs of tea.

  She hadn’t heard me coming and she jumped at the sound of my voice. I handed her a mug and sat down beside her on the banquette.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Wilde!” she said, taking the mug and huddling her hands round it against the early morning chill. “I tried to sneak out without waking you. What time is it?”

  “Just gone four.”

  She grimaced.

  “Sorry! But thanks for the tea, I was getting cold!”

  She pulled her feet up under her on the bench and burrowed in under my arm. The sheep stood still by the fence, staring at us.

  “Do you think they are lonely?” said Emily. “All alone in a new place, a different place?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, kissing the top of her head. “Maybe. There was probably a lot more going on where they used to be, this might be a bit quiet for them. They’ll just have to get used to it, won’t they?”

  “I guess so.”

  “What about you?”

  She turned her head to look up at me.

  “What about me?”

  “Are you lonely in a new place? In a different place?”

  We were just over six months into the adventure, six months since we’d left Dublin. It was a sudden, almost childishly impulsive move that took us thousands of miles and more than half a dozen time zones away from everything and everybody and everywhere we knew. It had probably been more Emily’s idea than mine and yet, while I was excited every minute of those early days, I sensed that she was struggling a little bit to find herself and her place in this new place.

  “No,” she said, after a moment, “not lonely. You?”

  “No. There are things I miss, for sure, but there’s nothing I miss so much that I’d go back for it.”

  “Good.” She was quiet again for a few moments. “What things?”

  “Well, people, I suppose. The lads, going to the pub or to play football. Brendan, a little bit, maybe, but don’t ever tell him I said that! How about you?”

  “I don’t know, nothing really. Just… I don’t know… Maybe I miss knowing where everything is, you know? How it all works? But that will just take time. It’s all so different, I suppose. But that’s what we wanted so it’s all good.”

  “Promise?”

  “I promise!”

  There were a few more nights like that, the two of us curled up against the chill on the early morning stoop, the sheep staring at us from the pen. Eventually, they seemed to settle and the plaintive bleating stopped and we all got on with getting used to living in our new home.

  3

  The lighthouse was perched on a clifftop on Cape Moonlight, almost a hundred metres above the ocean. It was decommissioned years ago, along with the other lights on this part of the coast when new automated lights replaced the old lighthouses and the keepers who manned them. It was accessible only by a rutted trail that leads off the main coast road, and only safely by jeep or four-by-four. I took Emily out there shortly after we moved into the house to see the famous Strawberry Moon that gave the cape its name. Once a year, it rises above the headland to the south and arcs over the sea, casting a moonbeam to the horizon that lights the ocean and the sky. We’d had no idea how to get there or what the drive was like and we all but smashed our new car’s suspension bouncing along the potholed track. But, sitting on the cliff edge with a beer, my arms wrapped around my knees and Emily’s head on my shoulder, I wondered what I’d done to deserve all of this and revelled in the sheer bliss of it all.

  I was sitting in The Pantry when I saw the article in the local paper. A year or so before, the local municipality had voted to knock down some of the decommissioned lighthouses, five or six of them up and down the coast. They’d put them up for sale but there had been little interest in renovating or preserving them and, since nobody had made a serious offer, they had little choice but to knock them down to avoid them falling into further disrepair and blotting the coastal landscape. On one of our trips to Dublin, my uncle Eoin had taken me out to Howth Head and we sat eating ice cream and looking out over the Baily lighthouse to the Irish Sea beyond. The proud, robust isolation of the building captured my young imagination and I’d always had a romantic dream that some day I’d own a lighthouse. Not to live in, maybe, but a place where I could go to escape the world and write and drink wine and watch the ocean. Like a modern-day Irish Dylan Thomas.

  When I’d first seen that they were to be sold, there were too many other things going on in our lives and I hadn’t given it a second thought. But things had changed and maybe it was time to live yet another part of the dream. When I took my proposal to the council, they were sceptical. They
saw me, I think, as a blow-in with a bit of cash and a whim and they took a lot of convincing that I was in it for the long haul. I made so many trips to meetings in the council offices in Bunbury that my jeep could almost get there on its own. I was close to giving up a few times, but something about owning my very own bit of coast kept me in the game.

  Emily didn’t share and didn’t really understand the fixation, but she rolled her eyes and smiled and drank with me to my new project. Of course, I hopelessly underestimated the amount of work that would be required just to stop the old place from falling down and sliding into the sea below, but that somehow only made the whole thing more exciting. In fact, I had gotten way ahead of myself. From a solitary refuge where I would spend quiet days writing and thinking, I had new plans for Cape Moonlight. It would be a clifftop café… no, it would be a gourmet picnic and wine bar… a place where people would come to eat local produce and drink wines from Emily’s estate while the ocean roared and fizzed and the wind gently blew their city stresses away. I even had notions of adding guest rooms and opening a restaurant. I might buy up the other lighthouses and start my own chain of luxury gastronomic havens by the sea…

  The lighthouse was in fact made up of two buildings joined together by a short umbilical corridor. The light itself sat in what was left of its glass case on top of a thirty-five-metre tower of whitewashed limestone, broken by two deep, black hoops. Beside it were the keeper’s quarters, a squat, square single-storey house with small windows that seemed to squint out at the weather from under the eaves. The small porch that used to protect the front door from the wind had collapsed and hung on to the front of the house like a man thrown overboard hanging on to the ship’s rail.

  Nathan just shook his head when I asked him to come out with me one day to have a look and to talk about what work would be required to at least stop the decay that threatened to rot the old place away.

  “Shit, Wilde,” he said, scratching his head. “You have to promise them you’ll keep this lot from falling down? You’ll be bloody lucky, mate.”

  With the lack of maintenance, along with the damp winter winds, fiery summer heat and salty air, rot had set in. Nathan showed me how some of the supporting beams were simply flaking away, chipping at them with his car key until I stopped him, afraid that the whole place might collapse around us. Most of the slates were missing from the roof of the house and only one of the panes of glass in the light casing was intact. Window frames were rotten, weeds sprouted from every crack and the whole place carried the sad, hopeless air of the condemned. It would, perhaps, have been in an even worse state but that it was too far from town for the local kids to bother coming out to daub graffiti on the walls and smash what was left of the windows. But I loved the place. I spent hours out there, walking around it, taking photographs, or just sitting under the tower, drawing in a sketchbook my amateur’s plans for what I thought it could be. I loved it and yet I grew to almost hate it. The lighthouse never changed, it was just that everything else did.

  4

  If the Dublin days before we left had clattered and crashed with new dramas and disasters, those early days in Clovelly hummed with the warm, lazy drone of nothing to worry about. Aside from the conspicuous awkwardness of being the pasty new faces in town, we settled slowly but steadily into a very different life. The house needed work but we were happy to live through it while Nathan rewired the electrics, knocked out the walls we didn’t want and ripped out the old flooring to lay the stone and the parquet that Emily wanted underfoot. Emily, for her part, set about the old vines and prepared the land for her own vineyard and I just pottered about, getting in the way and getting used to a home far from home.

  I suppose that’s not all I did, to be fair. For the first time in a long time, I was writing and every evening when I sat back with that day’s words, I found that I was liking what I read. That too was a first in a long time, that I could read my own work and see something in it rather than wonder why anybody would agree to publish it. I only got a publishing deal with Round Tower thanks to Brendan’s status as one of Dublin’s most respected literary agents and, I suspect, because he called in a few favours. Given the missed deadlines and given how far behind I was with a draft manuscript for my second book, they had taken the news of our move as an opportunity to “revisit” our agreement. Brendan went with me to meet with them and we all agreed that, in light of my new circumstances and impending move, it might be better to set the contract to one side and perhaps have another look when I’d got some more words on the page and it was starting to take shape. Without having to worry about paying the rent, I was actually relieved that the pressure was off and, in many ways, grateful to them for just letting me go.

  When it was done and we’d been shown out, Brendan turned to me on the street outside their offices. He’s a huge man – I mean it, he’s a freak, stooped over at the waist from a life spent bending down to the rest of us. He wears his success uncomfortably, like the glasses perched precariously on the end of his nose and the custom-tailored suits that he manages to make shapeless as soon as he puts them on.

  “So, I suppose that’s it then,” he said, nodding to himself and looking at something somewhere over my head. “You’re off next week?”

  “I am. Listen, Brendan, I’m…”

  “I know, Wilde. I know. Just try to go back to it, when you’ve got yourselves sorted, eh? Just give it another go. I know you’ve got it in you, I know you do. You just haven’t been able to get at it. But it’s there. It’ll still be there. So give it another chance and maybe we’ll talk again, then?”

  “Thanks, Brendan,” I said. “For everything.”

  He nodded and turned up the collar of his coat against the sharp wind. He started to say something but stopped himself and just nodded again. Then he shook my hand and walked away.

  And here I was, giving it another go, and finally getting at what had been eluding me for so long. I was missing Brendan more than I would have liked to admit and I wanted to have something to go back to him with, something that I hoped might win the old curmudgeon’s approval.

  Our new life was settling into a comfortable routine without losing its exotic edge, but the lazy drone of nothing to worry about was about to be interrupted.

  Emily and I had, from the very start, been an unlikely couple. I suppose I always knew that but never wanted to think about it in case I jinxed it or something. Whereas Emily had carefully crafted her dreams and chased those dreams with a single-minded passion, I was happy to let life flow over me and to pluck the best bits from it as it passed. But I loved her with every bit of me and, apart from the odd fight and the usual lovers’ quarrels, we seemed to work and seemed to make each other happy. Without ever really having any kind of detailed conversations about the future, we seemed also to have broadly the same ideas about what that future might bring and about what we wanted to take from it.

  That unspoken plan was first challenged one evening in April. We had just taken a few days away in a hotel on the south coast for Easter and, when we got back in the late afternoon, I went into town to get a few things in the shop for that evening. Emily had been quiet all weekend. I suspected that she’d been missing home a little bit and the end of summer had brought shorter days and longer nights that gave her more time to think about it all, about being far away. The initial whirlwind of a thousand things to do had abated and that, too, gave her more time to think. I’d never considered the fact that she might get homesick, never really considered the fact that she had had much of a home to leave behind. But I could see now that it wasn’t just a case of missing people or places or things, it was a sense of conspicuous vulnerability in a place where everything was so different. I knew how she felt. I felt it too, a bit.

  When I got back from the shops, she was sitting out on the stoop, watching the sheep and listening to the cicadas.

  “Hey, gorgeous,” I said, kissing her forehead. “I g
ot stuff for dinner. I’m cooking so I hope you’re not hungry!”

  She smiled but weakly.

  “Listen, Wilde,” she said, so quietly I could hardly hear her, “I have to tell you something.”

  “Sounds serious,” I tried to sound light but couldn’t quite pull it off. I put down the bags and sat beside her. “What’s up?”

  She looked at me and took a deep breath.

  “I think I’m pregnant.”

  The babydoll sheep stopped still and stared, the cicadas stopped chirruping and the breeze stopped playing on the wind chimes. Everything stopped.

  “OK,” I managed at last, taking her hand in mine. “How… I mean, is it… I mean, how likely? Do you think?”

  “I’m pretty sure,” she nodded, slowly. “No, I’m sure. I’m pregnant.”

  ***

  Cara was born in the middle of the night. Emily was more nervous than I had ever seen her and decided that she would go to the private hospital in the city for the birth. To be honest, I was relieved. I couldn’t see myself bringing hot towels to the local midwife and listening to Emily’s high-pitched screams from the bedroom. The local hospital was fine when I fell off the roof of the machinery shed and needed stitches in my head, fine too for vaccines and shots before we travelled and fine when Emily went over on her ankle and needed crutches for a couple of weeks. But for the birth of our first baby, Emily demanded somewhere that felt more like the real world. So we packed up the car and drove up to the city, leaving Karl to look after the place for a few days.

  My memories of that night are a lumpy mixture of wonder and worry. Although Cara took her time appearing, the delivery was as smooth as anyone could have hoped and she came into the world calm and unfussy. It might have been the distance from everything and everybody she knew or the fact that strange surroundings seem more alien in times of stress but, whatever it was, Emily was unsettled and upset after the birth. She didn’t want to see her baby that night, let alone hold her or feed her, and so I carried Cara up and down the corridor outside and then just sat beside her cot for hours talking softly to her and trying to figure out just what it was I was feeling. I hadn’t planned on parenthood any more than Emily had and yet the strength of emotion I felt for this tiny, fragile little thing was more powerful than I could ever have imagined. She just stared back into my eyes and looked inside me the way only a baby can, pulling faces and trying out her voice with little noises that seemed to startle her.