Thyla - Kate Gordon [6]
And then we came to ‘Salamanca’.
And I did recognise this. Well, some it. The names of the inns and shops and bright signs and banners were all very unfamiliar. But the buildings themselves – again, it was like I had once dreamed some other version of them, but I definitely did recognise them.
‘You like?’ you asked. ‘It’s one of my favourite spots. Vinnie hates it. He reckons it’s really commercialised and snooty. He prefers the Cascade Pub. I leave him to it. It’s a bit rough up there for me. I mean, you see a few unsavoury types down here sometimes as well, but you get them all over, don’t you? I’ll take you here sometime, if you want. The Quarry is my favourite. They do really good chips.’
I just let Connolly talk as I watched the buildings whoosh by, feeling as if I was in a dreamland, partway between memory and the present.
It was the walls around Cascade Falls that I noticed first, before the building itself.
I don’t like walls, I thought to myself.
And these walls were very bad ones.
They were tall – so tall that as we rounded the bend just before my new school, just past the grand stone building and rows of factory sheds that you told me was the brewery you had mentioned earlier, I couldn’t see that it was there at all. All I could see was wall – yards and yards of yellow sandstone wall, like a big cardboard box placed in the middle of the wilderness.
Only this box had spikes – sharp and black – and I wondered, Are they to keep people out? Or keep people in?
I remembered the other building we had passed – the one you called the Female Factory. When you had said those words I felt a tightness in my chest, and my head whipped around, craning for a better glimpse at the square stone shape by the road.
I know that place, I thought. I know that place.
‘It was a jail,’ you explained. ‘For female convicts. I went in there once. Never again. It gave me the shivers. So many ghosts.’
When I first saw the walls of Cascade Falls, I thought it looked more like a prison than the small square that was the Female Factory site. The Female Factory didn’t have spiked walls. Perhaps they had had other methods of keeping their inmates inside.
You must have noticed my expression, because you said, ‘I know, Tess. It looks a bit grim from outside the walls, but inside it’s lovely. Trust me. And everybody is so nice. I wouldn’t have sent Cat here if it wasn’t a great school.’
‘Cat?’ I asked, before I could stop myself. I didn’t want to ask it, but my mouth said the word all on its own, without my bidding.
‘My daughter,’ you said.
‘Your daughter goes here?’ I asked. ‘You never told me that.’
It was meant as an accusation, a chastisement – another example of how nasty you were being to me.
And I’m sorry for that.
I didn’t know.
You shook your head. ‘No, Cat went here. She’s not here now.’
‘Where is she?’
When I look back at it now – at how bluntly I asked those questions, how unthinkingly and uncaringly – I shudder.
But, as I said, I didn’t know.
I saw your eyes brim with tears, and I felt a lump rise in my own throat.
What had I said?
Why were you crying?
You stopped the car in a big open yard outside the walls, in the middle of many other cars. It made a crunching noise on the gravel that scared me a little bit. It sounded like thunder.
You turned to me. ‘Cat’s gone. Missing. That’s why I moved here. I used to live in Campbell Town – I worked at the police station there – but after Cat went, I accepted a job here. I needed to be close to where she had been. She went missing on a bushwalk. It was a school bushwalk, but it wasn’t the school’s fault. Cat was always such a good girl when she lived with me in Campbell Town, but when she got to Cascade Falls … I guess she rebelled. She used to run away a lot. That’s what she did that day. She just wandered off, even though Cynthia – Ms Hindmarsh – told her not to. She just disappeared into the