Bel’s shadow appeared behind the screen door, face pressed against the flyscreen, ‘I wasn’t expecting anyone.’ There was a crackle in the shrillness of her voice.
Mikey wanted her voice to be as it was – he wanted everything about Bel to be as though time had stood still. He counted three pock marked boards on the verandah floor and moved forward. Though still angular and lean he knew he’d changed. ‘It’s Mikey,’ he said, his voice now strong with maturity.
She stepped back from the screen, sucked in her breath. ‘Jack’s dead’ she said, words bloated with accusation.
Three more boards forward and he stood beside the squatter’s chair, fingers tracing the name he’d carved into the cedar arm. Daisy, the baby girl he’d loved.
‘I know.’ A breeze brought the scent of wild jasmine from the forest. The jasmine he wove in wreaths for Daisy.
‘You killed them both.’ Bel’s eyes narrowed.
He turned, moved to the edge of the veranda to gaze at the creek beyond
‘Now it’s just you and I left to make it right.’ His voice cut through Bel’s outrage.
His back to the door Mikey focused on sound. Metallic click of the catch on fly screen. Swish as the door opened. Pad of her step. When he turned, she was close enough to feel her breath. His hand caught her wrist and shook the knife from her grip. She began to scream, trembling uncontrollably.
‘Shhhh Bel, we can’t bring Jack back but you and I know what happened to Daisy. We can put it right.’ He turned her like a feather. Holding her steady in his arms they walked the length of the veranda, past the squatters’ chair with Daisy’s name and down the steps that led to the grassy bank of the creek.
She fought, clawing him, then calmed. Mikey guided her steps with the reassuring pressure of his arms, just as he had comforted her as a boy, when she struggled to cope with Daisy. ‘Do you remember this, Bel? Do you remember coming down the lawn with Daisy? Was she running Bel? Were you dragging her?’ He took his arms away and Bel fell to the ground. Leaning over he caught her by the wrist and dragged her along the grass.
‘I think this is how it was Bel. I was on my way back from school, but I was here by the time you got to the creek, wasn’t I Bel?’
He heaved Bel from the bank and lowered her into a deep pool below a ripple of rocks and held her head under the water. ‘Yes, this is how it was Bel – you were holding Daisy under the water when I found you. I thought she had fallen in and you were trying to save her… then I saw it in your eyes Bel.’
He lifted her head from the water to breathe. ‘Jack came back in time to see me lifting Daisy from the water and you were screaming at me. He thought I’d drowned her, everyone did, and you just kept screaming, didn’t you. All these years locked up; I never forgot the feel of Daisy’s wet little body. Her life washed away.’
Without any resistance he gently nudged Bel’s head under, one last time.
Back on the veranda Mikey retrieved the knife, pushed the screen open and stood in the only home he’d known. A sanctuary offered by Jack and Bel when Mikey was a troubled child. It’d been a kind, ordered home once. Before Daisy. Before Bel stopped being Bel.
The sink was piled with unwashed dishes and decomposing food. It’d been a long time since anyone had checked on Bel. He dropped the knife amongst the detritus.
The stench and chaos of Bel’s slow descent lay around him as he moved through the house. The door to Daisy’s room was locked but it yielded to pressure from Mikey’s shoulder. It was bare.
He lay on the floor watching dust dance in a shard of sunlight from the window. He followed its trajectory to a corner of the room where a scrap of paper curled in the skirting. He crawled to where the photograph of Daisy whispered, ‘Where you bin ‘ikey?’. She was dressed in blue with a tumble of titian curls. Sobbing, he pressed her image to his heart.
He made his way back to the kitchen. A table lay strewn with unopened mail, backs of envelopes scrawled with grocery lists and random notes. Bel’s erratic handwriting hadn’t changed – he’d often forged her hand to deliver notes to teachers, hiding Bel’s inability to cope.
He scrawled on the back of an envelope, in Bel’s hand, ‘I can’t take anymore’.
He left the envelope carelessly tossed on top of the jumbled paperwork.
© Tropical Writers Inc 2026