The Gaps by Leanne Hall (classic literature list .TXT) 📕

‘Where are you going?’

‘Chloe’s house.’ The lie comes as quick and easy as snapping my fingers. I know I’m not invited to Chloe’s house despite all my gentle hints. I’m still surprised she met up with me on the holidays—she’s so hell-bent on remaining mysterious at all times. Would it hurt her to invite me over?

‘But—I thought we could have lunch together. I was going to suggest we go down to Sushi Nara.’

Sushi Nara is my favourite and very chi-chi and expensive and Mum knows all of these things, so it says a lot about her need to keep me within her sight, but we can’t have everything we want in life, can we mother.

‘I’d love to Mum, but Chloe is spinning out about her project. She desperately needs my creative guidance.’

Mum’s eyes narrow so maybe I overdid that a little bit.

‘But…’ she says and no one can put so much expression into one word and on one face than her, except maybe Liv. ‘I thought we could spend some time together.’

She’s terrible when she works from home, always procrastinating in the most blatant ways. I simply must not enable her and I have to make these bad bugs go away, somehow. ‘I’m sorry, Mum, I’ll try not to be too long. Maybe we can do girls’ night tonight?’

She nods and I try not to seem too much like a bird flying out of the cage and I open the back door and I’m free.

Of course I have nowhere to go at all because South River is an inherently boring place, that’s why people pay so much to live here, so that their boredom is assured for the rest of their lives and also so they don’t have to see nasty poor people in non-designer clothing.

I traipse to the reserve under skies that threaten rain and the playground is deserted and the oval is fenced off to coax the grass back so that as soon as summer hits the sun can fry it all back to dry husks.

I run on the cross trainer, I do crunches on the tilted bench, I dip on the bars and thank the lord that no one is here to see me use the public exercise equipment. All of that takes up around five minutes and then I’m alone with the bugs and my bad thoughts and the memory of my dream.

I sit in the big whirly teacup and tilt back to look at the clouds. I’ve even done all the homework I was assigned for the holidays instead of saving it for the last minute so it turns out Mum is probably right, I’m not myself right now.

The glum grey sky whirls into a spiral as I turn the teacup steering wheel faster and faster and my thoughts wander off into the washing machine spin cycle distance and then Yin is there again. She’s on the other end of the phone and she’s saying:

‘I can see if Milla can get a spare ticket?’

She’s off to see some amateur symphony orchestra at the university recital hall with her classmate Milla, who plays the French horn and is also in the junior wind ensemble. They are friends who hang out on a Saturday even though it’s only four weeks into Year Seven and Yin says nothing about the fact that we were supposed to go to the mall to buy me new swimming goggles and as much makeup as Mum will let me wear because she’s already forgotten that we always hang on the Saturdays that our families aren’t dragging us off to do something else.

I blink blink blink my way back into the cold metal present and my fingers itch and twitch to go back to the Cold Crimes website and my phone is out of my pocket before I even know what I’m doing. I scroll through some of the same stuff I read at home, then I click through to the Doctor Calm forum, that black internet spiderweb that infiltrates my brain like a weed.

The top thread is about a tabloid article published in the last few days: ‘Secret Suspect Tops the List’. It’s behind a paywall but someone has copied and pasted the full text of the article into a comment.

The journalist has read a confidential police document, the ‘Echo Files’, that names the top twelve suspects in Yin’s abduction. Strangely, one of the suspects agreed to be interviewed anonymously by the journalist.

‘Steve’ was jailed for eleven years in the 1990s after pleading guilty to eight violent attacks on young girls and women during an eighteen-month period. The former gymnastics coach and father was convicted on aggravated rape and sexual assault charges after holding the victims at knifepoint in their own homes.

Steve admits that he is a key suspect in the hunt for Doctor Calm, but claims that police have wrongly accused him. He says that he was grilled by police for ten hours the day after the abduction of Yin Mitchell, and that his home in the Melbourne suburb of Stockton was searched.

‘Whenever there’s one of these types of crimes, the police come calling,’ says Steve. ‘They search my house and I answer their questions. But I did my time. I was completely rehabilitated after I was in jail, I raised a new family. I started my own business, I made something of myself.’

Good for you, Steve, I think. What a fucking great member of society you are. Congratulations on making something of yourself after you ruined eight people’s lives. The report goes on to say that he remarried and had more children, but what would you even do if he was your dad? Could you still love him after you found out about his past?

I’m so disgusted I have to lean over the edge of the teacup and spit onto the tanbark.

My heart starts thumpety-thumping all over again.

There are pages and pages of comments after the article, and people are still